Fumbling Through the Years

Austin Torres was twenty-three years old, and he had been standing by the keg for about forty minutes, which he figured was long enough to count as attending his own family reunion. He held a red cup of beer that had gone warm an hour ago, and he watched his uncles argue about a grill while the fairy lights his mom had strung between the trees blinked on and off in the early dark. There was a time, not that long ago really, when he would have been in the middle of all of it, doing impressions of his Uncle Ray, getting his cousins to play beer pong, being the guy people pointed at and laughed with. In college he had been that guy everywhere, at parties, at the diner at two in the morning, in the back of lecture halls where nobody was supposed to be funny. Somewhere between graduation and his third audition callback that never called back, that guy had gotten quiet. Now he mostly felt like furniture that could order its own drinks.

It was stupid, he knew, to feel washed up at twenty-three. Nobody's life is over at twenty-three, his mother told him about once a month, usually while sliding him a plate of something. But the math felt different when you were the one doing it. He had moved back into his old bedroom in March after his apartment in the city ate all his savings, he drove a Civic with a cracked windshield, and the last date he had been on ended with the woman checking her phone four times and then telling him, honestly, that he seemed sad. He hadn't argued. He had paid for her wine and gone home and watched a documentary about shipwrecks, which felt about right.

The backyard smelled like burgers and somebody's cigarette, and the keg stood under a folding table with a paper tablecloth that kept trying to blow away. His cousin Abby was telling a story about her landlord to a half circle of relatives, and everybody in the circle was doing the laughing thing with their heads tipped back, and Austin thought, there it is, that used to be me, and then he thought, God, what a sad thing to think, and went for a refill.

That was when he saw Elle.

She was across the yard near the buffet table, in a green sundress, holding a seltzer instead of a beer because she had never really been a beer person, and next to her was a tall guy in a linen shirt with one hand on the small of her back, and Austin could see from here the new ring on her finger. Elle Johansen, twenty-six now, laughing at something the tall guy said, doing the thing where she covered her mouth with the back of her hand. Austin had dated her for six months two years ago, when he was twenty-one and she was twenty-four, and it had ended the way people say breakups end in greeting cards, quietly, with a hug in a parking lot and both of them meaning it. He had not seen her since she moved to Hoboken, and seeing her now did something to his chest that he did not enjoy analyzing.

The thing was, his life had felt like it was starting when he was with her. She had come to see him in a play where he had eleven lines, and she cheered like it was Hamlet. She told him once, on her couch, that he was the funniest person she had ever met, and he had walked around for a week afterward as if he had been handed a certificate. That version of himself, the one she had apparently seen, was the one he kept trying to find again in audition waiting rooms and on dating apps and in the mirror over the bathroom sink his dad still hadn't rehung straight.

So when she wandered toward the house alone, probably to use the bathroom or grab a napkin, Austin made a decision that felt brave at the time. He was going to find her. He was going to say something, anything, hey, congratulations, I heard about the engagement, you look great, the usual. Two years of nothing and then a friendly five minutes in a hallway, and maybe afterward he would stop feeling like furniture.

He set his warm beer down next to the keg and followed her in.

* * *

The house was loud in a muffled way, screen door banging behind him, someone's kids watching cartoons in the den with the volume up. Austin got stuck for a minute by a wall of framed photos in the hallway, him at seven with a bad haircut, him at twelve holding a fish, and he had to step around his Aunt Vikki, who grabbed his arm and told him he was too skinny and needed to eat more, which he agreed to, the way you do.

The stairs were dim. His mom had a thing about overhead lights in the evening, claimed they were hard on the eyes, so the upstairs hallway ran on two little lamps that gave off about as much light as a nightlight in a hotel. Austin had drunk one beer over the course of standing near a keg, which is not a lot but is enough, and the hallway stretched out longer than hallways usually do. He saw a door cracked open at the far end, warm light leaking out, and he thought, there it is, bathroom, and he really did need to pee by then, all that beer catching up at once.

He walked down the hall, pushed the door open, and stepped in before his eyes adjusted.

There was a woman in the middle of the room with her arms up and her dress bunched around her shoulders, mid-pull, her back to him, bare except for the dress half off her head and a plain black bra. The lamp on the dresser threw her into silhouette, and Austin, who had followed a green sundress into this house not four minutes ago, did the dumbest thing his brain had ever done, which was really saying something, because his brain had once made him do a monologue at a bus stop.

"Elle," he said.

The woman froze with the dress over her face, which meant she was stuck there for a second, arms up, blind, and Austin kept talking, because apparently God had decided tonight was the night he learned a lesson the hard way.

"I've been wanting to say this for two years, so just, let me get it out, okay? I should have called you. When you moved, I should have called, and I didn't, and it wasn't because I didn't want to, it was because I was embarrassed, honestly, I was twenty-one and I couldn't hold a relationship with the best person I ever met, and I kept telling myself I'd reach out once I booked something, once I had something to show for myself, because you believed in me, you came to that terrible play, and I couldn't stand for you to see me failing at it. That's it, that's the whole thing, I chickened out, and I'm sorry, and you look really happy tonight and I'm glad, I actually am, and I just needed you to hear it once."

The dress came down. The woman turned around.

She was not Elle.

She was a woman he had seen at maybe three block parties over the years, dark hair, dark eyes, older than him by a handful of years, holding her green dress against her chest with one hand and her phone in the other, and her expression went through about four stages in two seconds, shock, confusion, recognition, and then something worse, which was amusement. Austin stood in the doorway of his parents' guest bedroom with his hand still on the knob, and the bathroom door, the identical, traitorous, white door with the same little silver knob, was six feet to his left, exactly where it had been his entire life.

"Oh my God," the woman said, and she laughed, one short bark of it, then pressed her lips together to hold the rest in. "You thought I was Elle."

"I," Austin said.

"You just confessed to Elle. In a guest room your mom sent me to after your cousin Abby dumped sangria down my front. While I was changing." She was twenty-eight years old, Betty Heywood, though he did not know that yet, and she had moved onto the street three years ago and had watched Austin at block parties from a lawn chair, thinking he seemed like the fun one, never once getting around to saying hello. "Wow. That was, that was a lot. There was a whole speech."

"I thought you were," Austin said, and stopped, because there was no version of this that got better. "The light. The dress, it's green, she's wearing a green dress, I just followed the green dress, and the hallway, the doors are the same, I've lived here my whole life and I still can't find the bathroom when the lamps are on."

"So you came in here to tell my green dress about your failures."

"I came in here to pee," Austin said, which was true, and somehow made everything worse, and Betty laughed again, harder this time, and had to sit down on the edge of the guest bed with her dress still clutched to her chest.

"Okay, okay, hold on," she said, wiping at one eye with the hand holding the phone. "You can't leave yet. I need a minute. And you need to close the door, unless the whole reunion wants to hear this too."

* * *

Austin shut the door, and the sounds of the party dropped down to a muffled bass note through the floor, the thump of someone's playlist and Uncle Ray laughing too loud at something Abby said, and now it was just him and this stranger in a lamp-lit guest bedroom, which was somehow the most embarrassing room in New Jersey.

"I should go," he said, hand back on the knob.

"Absolutely not," Betty said. She had pulled the green dress back on over her head at some point, though he could not have said when, and now she sat there on the edge