She tells me that after this other man appeared （Leah, in the back of my mind, jokingly referring to The Boss at the going-away party）， everything was easy, that they gave her sister’s effects to her, as though there had never been an issue, that he even passed her a personal number and told her to call him if there was anything else he could do. “It was weird,” she says, “this weird loopy little attitude he had, like it was all fine, like he could make it fine. I didn’t think to try the number until a few weeks afterward, but of course when I rang it there was just a message saying the line was no longer in service. It was meant to be a research trip, you know. Just observing, taking notes. I don’t know what it really was, but I’ve been trying to find out.”
She sits beside me in silence for a while after this, still—as it only occurs to me now—in last night’s pajamas, her skin with out makeup the consistency of something clawed with a fork. I say nothing, only glancing at my sandwich and thinking, in a dull sort of way, that this should all be more interesting to me than it is. “I think,” Juna says, after a pause, “that the thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterward. D’you know what I mean? The endlessness of that.” She looks sideways at me and sniffs. “My friends were sad, people who knew my sister were sad, but everyone moves on after a month. It’s all they can manage. It doesn’t mean they weren’t sad, just that things keep going or something, I don’t know.” She rolls her shoulder, shakes her head. “It’s hard when you look up and realize that everyone’s moved off and left you in that place by yourself. Like they’ve all gone on and you’re there still, holding on to this person you’re supposed to let go of. Let go of them in the water is something I read once. Seems a bit of a joke in the circumstances, but still. Something about how living means relinquishing the dead and letting them drop down or fall or sink. Letting go of them in the water, you know.”
I look at her and I feel a collection of curious things, none of which feel quite correct for the circumstances. I feel the coolness I always feel toward strangers, the gentle yawn of distance I still can’t help but preserve, even despite her sharing all of this with me. I feel, too, the blank exhaustion of everything, the fact that I should not be out here but in the bathroom with Leah, the fact that I need to message Carmen and tell her I hope her eyes are doing better, the fact that I need to call Sam and apologize for dropping off the face of the earth. I lean my head back against the wall for a second and then roll it sideways until it is resting on Juna’s shoulder. She allows me to do this, hunches up a little to prevent me stretching my neck, and for a moment I am able to banish my other thoughts and feel only what I ought to feel, which is grateful.
* * *
Here are some things I didn’t have space for:
Putting on “Alone” by Heart and miming the lyrics in Leah’s face until she started laughing.
Leah’s long hands and her yellow hair and the werewolf quality to her eyebrows. The way she walked around the flat in shorts and a sports bra and told me off for staring. The way she kissed me and then apologized for biting.
The time Leah told me that making me laugh was always an achievement because my face was so typically set against it.
The way I was often bored and Leah never was.
Talking with Leah on early dates about the panic of doing what everyone else was doing and then feeling like a dick about it.
The way Leah was kind by nature, where I always seemed to have to struggle. The way she tipped my face toward hers and told me otherwise—You’re the kindest person I know, and I know six or seven people.
* * *
So here’s what happens, obviously.
Morning again—a rain that persists at first, grows full and hammering in its insistence and then passes away without warning, a white sky, the windows filled with sharp corners of sunlight. I had not intended to take Leah down to the water, but when I wake beside the bath, having apparently fallen asleep with my cheek against the lip of the tub, I catch the direction of her remaining eye beneath the surface, the way it turns toward the window, and I think, Well, yes.
I soak the towels again, wrap her up as before, and maneuver her down the stairs. I find Juna lying awake on one of my mother’s sofas, still in pajamas and with one arm pillowed behind her head. She doesn’t ask me where I’m going or whether she needs me to come with her, only nods her head toward the moleskin coat still hanging from the hook on the door and tells me there is something in the pocket she’d like me to have. “Later on,” she says, “if you like. It was in with Jelka’s things when they gave them to me but it’s actually Leah’s, something she wrote—pages and pages. I brought it to give to you the first time we met, but it didn’t seem like you’d want to take it. It’s how I knew to come and find you. Not,” she adds, with the strange sort of smile I am just about getting used to, “that you ever asked.”