My teenage self wouldn’t believe it, but I don’t own a car. Back then, I was determined to have my own set of wheels so I could head north every weekend possible. These days, my life is confined to a leafy area in Toronto’s west end, where I live, and the city’s downtown core, where I work. I can get to the office, the gym, and my parents’ condo by either walking or public transit.
I have friends who haven’t ever bothered getting their license; they’re the kind of people who brag about never going north of Bloor Street. Their whole world is confined to a stylish little urban bubble, and they’re proud of it. Mine is, too, but sometimes I feel like I’m suffocating.
The truth is, the city hasn’t really felt like home since I was thirteen and fell in love with the lake and the cottage and the bush. Most of the time, though, I don’t let myself think about that. I don’t have time to. The world I’ve built for myself bursts with the trappings of urban busyness—the late hours at the office, the spin classes, and the many brunches. It’s how I like it. An overstuffed calendar brings me joy. But every so often I catch myself fantasizing about leaving the city—finding a small place on the water to write, working at a restaurant on the side to pay the bills—and my skin starts feeling too tight, like my life doesn’t fit.
This would surprise pretty much everyone I know. I’m a thirty-year-old woman who mostly has her shit together. My apartment is the top floor of a big house in Roncesvalles, a Polish neighborhood where you can still find a decent enough pierogi. The space is striking, with exposed beams and slanting ceilings, and, sure, it’s tiny, but a full one-bedroom in this part of the city doesn’t come cheap, and my salary at Shelter magazine is . . . modest. Okay, it’s crap. But that’s typical of media jobs, and while my pay may be small, my job is a big one.
I’ve worked at Shelter for four years, climbing steadily up the ranks from lowly editorial assistant to senior editor. That puts me in a position of power, assigning stories and overseeing photo shoots at the country’s biggest decor magazine. Thanks in large part to my efforts, we have amassed a dedicated following on social media and a huge online audience. It’s work that I love and that I’m good at, and at Shelter’s fortieth-anniversary bash, the magazine’s editor in chief, Brenda, credited me with bringing the publication into the digital era. It was a career highlight.
Being an editor is the kind of job that people think is extremely glamorous. It looks fast and flashy, though if I’m being honest, it mostly involves sitting in a cubicle all day, googling synonyms for minimalist. But there are product launches to attend and lunches to be shared with up-and-coming designers. It’s also the kind of job that hotshot corporate lawyers and social-climbing bankers swipe right on, which has proved useful in finding dates to join me on the cocktail party circuit. And there are perks, like press trips and open champagne bars, and an obscene amount of free stuff. There’s also an endless flow of industry gossip for Chantal and me to chew over, our favorite way to pass a Thursday evening. (And my mom never tires of seeing Persephone Fraser in print on the magazine’s masthead.)
Charlie’s phone call is an ax through my bubble, and I’m so anxious to get north that as soon as I hang up, I book a car and a motel room for tomorrow, even though the funeral is a few days from now. It’s like I’ve woken from a twelve-year coma, and my head throbs in anticipation and terror.
I’m going to see Sam.
I SIT DOWN to write an email to my parents to tell them about Sue. They haven’t been regularly checking their messages on this European vacation of theirs, so I don’t know when they’ll get it. I also don’t know whether they were still in contact with Sue. Mom kept in touch with her for at least a few years after Sam and I “broke up,” but each time she’d mention any one of the Floreks, my eyes would well up. Eventually she stopped giving me updates.
I keep the note short and when I’m done, I throw some clothes into the Rimowa suitcase I couldn’t afford but bought anyway. It’s now well after midnight, and I have an interview for work in the morning and then a long drive, so I change into pj’s, lie down, and shut my eyes. But I’m too wired to sleep.
There are these moments I come back to when I’m at my most nostalgic, when all I want to do is curl up in the past with Sam. I can play them in my mind as if they’re old home videos. I used to watch them all the time in university, a bedtime routine as familiar as the pilled Hudson’s Bay blanket I’d taken from the cottage. But the memories and the regrets they carried with them chafed like the blanket’s wool, and I would lose nights imagining where Sam was at that precise moment, wondering if there’s a chance he might be thinking of me. Sometimes I felt sure he was—like there was an invisible, unbreakable string that ran between us, stretching vast distances and keeping us joined. Other times, I dozed off in the midst of a movie only to wake in the middle of the night, my lungs feeling like they were on the verge of collapse, and I’d have to breathe my way through the panic attack.
Eventually, by the end of school, I’d managed to shut off the nightly broadcasts, filling my brain instead with looming exams and article deadlines and internship applications, and the panic attacks began to subside.
Tonight I have no such restraint. I cue up our firsts—the first time we met, our first kiss, the first time Sam told me he loved me—until the reality of seeing him starts to sink in, and my thoughts become a swirl of questions I don’t have answers for. How will he react to my showing up? How much has he changed? Is he single? Or, fuck, is he married?
My therapist, Jennifer—not Jen, never Jen—I made the mistake once and was sharply corrected. The woman has framed quotes on the wall (“Life begins after coffee,” and “I’m not weird I’m limited edition”), so I’m not sure what kind of gravitas she thinks her full name adds. Anyway, Jennifer has tricks for coping with this kind of anxious spiraling, but deep belly breaths and mantras don’t stand a chance tonight. I started seeing Jennifer a few years ago, shortly after the Thanksgiving I spent puking up rosé and spilling my guts to Chantal. I didn’t want to talk to a therapist; I thought that panic attack had just been a blip on an otherwise (fairly successful!) path to pushing Sam Florek out of my heart and mind, but Chantal was insistent. “This shit is above my pay grade, P,” she’d told me with trademark blunt force.
Chantal and I met as interns at the city magazine where she is now the entertainment editor. We bonded over the peculiar business of fact-checking restaurant reviews (So the halibut is coated in a pine nut dust, not a pistachio crust?) and the editor in chief’s farcical obsession with tennis. The moment that solidified our friendship was during a story meeting that the editor literally began with the words, “I’ve been thinking a lot about tennis,” and then turned to Chantal, who was the only Black person in the entire office, and said, “You must be great at tennis.” Her face remained perfectly composed when she replied that she did not play, while at the same time I blurted, “Are you kidding?”
Chantal is my closest girlfriend, not that there’s much competition. My reluctance to share embarrassing or intimate parts of myself with other women makes them suspicious of me. For instance: Chantal knew I grew up with a cottage and that I hung around with the boys next door, but she had no idea about the extent of my relationship with Sam—or how it ended in a messy explosion that left no survivors. I think the fact that I’d kept such a fundamental piece of my history from her was more shocking than the story of what happened all those years ago.
“You do understand what it means to have friends, right?” she’d asked me after I told her the horrible truth. Considering that my two closest friends no longer speak to me, the answer probably should have been Not really.
But I have been a good friend to Chantal. I’m the person she calls to bitch about work or her future mother-in-law, who is continually suggesting Chantal relax her hair for the wedding. Chantal has no interest in wedding-y things, except for having a big dance party, an open bar, and a killer dress, which, fair, but since the event needs to come together somehow, I’ve become the default planner, putting together Pinterest boards with decor inspo. I’m reliable. I’m a good listener. I’m the one who knows what cool new restaurant has the hottest chef. I make excellent Manhattans. I am fun! I just don’t want to talk about what keeps me awake at night. I don’t want to reveal how I’m beginning to question whether climbing the ladder has made me happy, how sometimes I long to write but can’t seem to find the courage, or how lonely I sometimes feel. Chantal is the only person who can pull it out of me.
Of course, my reluctance to discuss Sam with Chantal has nothing to do with whether or not I think about him. Of course I do. But I try not to, and I don’t stumble very often. I haven’t had a panic attack since I started seeing Jennifer. I like to think I’ve grown over the last decade. I like to think I’ve moved on. Still, every once in a while, the sun will shimmer off Lake Ontario in a way that reminds me of the cottage, and I’m right back on the raft with him.
MY HANDS ARE shaking so badly when I fill out the forms at the rental car counter that I’m surprised the clerk hands over the keys. Brenda was understanding when I called to ask for the rest of the week off—I told her there had been a death in the family, and while it was technically a lie, Sue was like family. At least she had been at one time.
I probably hadn’t needed to stretch the truth, though. I have taken precisely one day off this year for an extended Valentine’s spa weekend with Chantal—we have marked the holiday together since we were both single, and no boyfriend or fiancé will put an end to the tradition.
I briefly consider not telling Chantal where I’m going, but then I have visions of getting in an accident and no one knowing why I was on the highway far from the city. So I write a quick text from the rental car lot, adding a few I’m totally fine exclamation points before I hit send: Your party was so much fun!!! (Too much fun! Shouldn’t have had that last spritz!) Heading out of town for a few days for a funeral. Sam’s mom.
Her text buzzes seconds later: THE Sam??? Are you OK?
The answer is no.
I’ll be fine, I write back.
My phone starts vibrating as soon as I hit send, but I let Chantal’s call go to voicemail. I’m so low on sleep, I’m running purely on adrenaline and the two vats of coffee I drank at this morning’s interview with a full-of-himself wallpaper designer. I really don’t want to talk.
In the time it takes me to navigate through the city streets and onto the 401, my bowels are in such tight knots that I need to pull into a Tim Hortons off the highway for an emergency bathroom break.
I’m still shaky when I get back in the car, bottle of water and raisin-bran muffin in hand, but a surreal kind of calm comes over me as I drive further north. Eventually, rocky outcrops of Canadian Shield granite erupt from the land, and roadside signs for live bait and chip trucks emerge from the scrub. It’s been so long since I’ve traveled this route, yet it’s all so familiar—like I’m driving back into another part of my life.
The last time I made this trip was Thanksgiving weekend. I was alone then, too, racing up in the used Toyota I’d bought with my tip money. I didn’t stop the entire four-hour drive. It had been three agonizing months since I’d seen Sam, and I was desperate for him to wrap his arms around me, to feel enveloped by his body, to tell him the truth.
Could I have known how that weekend would give me both the greatest and most terrible moments of my life? How rapidly things would go very, very badly? That I would never see Sam again? My mistake had come months earlier, but could I have prevented the aftershocks that caused the most severe destruction?
My stomach takes a roller-coaster ride as soon as I spot a glimpse of the lake’s southern end, and I take deep breaths iiiiiin one, two, three, four and ooouuuut one, two, three, four all the way to the Cedar Grove Motel on the outskirts of town.
It’s late afternoon by the time I check in. I buy a copy of the local paper from the elderly man at the lobby desk and move the car in front of room 106. It’s clean and nondescript. A generic print of a deer in a forest hanging over the bed and a frayed polyester quilt that was probably burgundy at the beginning of its long life are the only doses of color.
I hang up the black sheath dress I’ve brought for the funeral and sit on the edge of the bed, tapping my fingers on my thighs and looking out the window. The north end of the lake, town dock, and public beach are just visible. I feel itchy. It seems wrong to be so close to the water but not go to the cottage. I’ve packed my bathing suit and towel so I could walk over to the beach, but all I want to do is dive off the end of my dock. There’s just one problem: It’s not my dock anymore.
