There is a framed photograph on the mantel. In it, Hannah looks different than Eric remembers – healthier, less skinny, and happier. She’s grinning and there are crow’s feet in the corners of her wide-set eyes. She has the kind of wrinkles one only gets when they’re always smiling. Eric remembers her laugh. It was loud and infectious.  

The photograph is framed by lit candles and flowers – cala lilies, white and somber. This is Desmond’s house. It’s hard to believe Desmond could ever buy a house; Eric remembers all the rentals he used to trash. Desmond and his friends would drink and punch holes in the drywall, usually because of some girl, or some other tension between them. They were dramatic and always had an ax to grind. Angry straight men, causing a ruckus. Eric never understood the outward destruction. He had preferred to destruct internally, just like Hannah. 

Desmond is paunchy now, with a large gut and thinning hair. You would never know how gorgeous he used to be. Eric remembers the time they were nineteen, smoking rolled cigarettes. They were out in the snow, flakes falling silently on a bright day, and Desmond’s blue eyes stood out, intense and piercing. “You have a bit of tobacco on your lip,” he’d said to Eric, brushing it off with one of his fingers. A wave of desire pulsed through him. It’s a clear memory, one of the few from those days. Eric almost wants to cry, thinking of how beautiful Desmond used to be. He suddenly feels very conscious of himself. He thinks he’s gotten better-looking since the old days, but he’s not quite sure. 

“It’s so sad,” a voice says from beside him. He starts, turning to see his old friend, Sybil. They weren’t that close back in the day, but ever since the funeral she has latched on to him. “She was really starting to get her life together.” Sybil has a glass of wine in her hand. Eric notices her chewed up fingernails. She wears a loose, linen black romper. Her face has thinned out since they were in college. Sybil takes Eric’s arm and lowers her voice. “How do you think it happened?” 

Eric raises his eyebrows and guides Sybil over to a corner of the house, hoping no one is listening to him. “How does it ever happen to one of us?” he says. “We know it wasn’t some illness, or they would have talked about it. Car accident or drugs, has to be.” 

Sybil nods, taking a sip of wine. “All my memories of her are so tainted,” she says. “We enabled each other all the time.” 

“Everyone was an alcoholic back then,” says Eric, only half-believing what he’s saying. He wants to make Sybil feel better. He remembers kissing her at a party. She laughed and said, “aren’t you gay?” He told her sexuality was a spectrum, really, and who cares? And doesn’t this feel nice? It never went further. At least, he doesn’t think it did.  

Desmond does that annoying thing that people do at get-togethers when they want to make a speech – he takes a spoon and taps a glass with it. The murmuring goes down a bit. He goes into a soliloquy about Hannah. Eric half-listens, because he keeps remembering things, and Desmond is talking about Hannah’s life before and after he knew her. From what he can gather, it seems like she really did get her life together. She was working as a teacher at the middle school, and volunteering at the local animal shelter. It’s hard to imagine the same girl he remembers pissing in a wastebasket because she was too drunk to find a toilet in a leadership role of any capacity. But maybe everyone goes through that phase. 

After the speech, Eric goes out to the porch and smokes a cigarette. He feels like he’s part of an older generation every time he smokes. All the kids are vaping these days. Sybil finds him and asks for a drag off his cigarette. 

“I really shouldn’t do this,” she says as she takes a puff. She coughs lightly into her hand and passes it back to him. “You know, I don’t even drink anymore. It’s just that being here makes me want to. Back in California I do yoga, and drink kale smoothies, that sort of thing.” 

“You look fantastic,” he says, “so it seems to be working for you.” 

Sybil gives him a playful punch in the shoulder. “You’re still the world’s best hype-man, I see,” she says. “How’s New York?” 

“It’s great,” he tells her. “I have a husband and two cats. We live in a tiny apartment but we’re making it work.”  

She lowers her voice again, conspiratorially. “I found out how she died,” she says. Her eyes dart around the yard, but there’s no one else outside. “She was completely sober but decided to do coke on her thirty-fifth birthday. I guess it was laced with fentanyl and she OD’d.”  

An unbidden memory pops up in Eric’s mind again. This one is in New York, in a dingy bathroom at a house party. There are people crowded around him. He can’t keep his eyes open. Someone is slapping his face, but he can hardly feel it. 

“Did you hear me?” asks Sybil. She squeezes his arm. “Hey, are you okay?” 

Eric shakes his head. “It’s just awful.” What else is there to say? 

“I know,” says Sybil. “I could have died so many times. I should have. Do you know how often I used to drive across this town drunk? Not even tipsy. I mean I was blacked out, off my ass, with no memory whatsoever of driving. It’s a miracle I never killed anyone.” She takes a large gulp of wine, her eyes gazing off into the middle distance. “She became a real adult, and decided to treat herself one time, and now she’s dead.” 

Eric remembers sitting with Hannah one night. She was on the floor, her back leaning against her bed. There was a party in the living area, but a few of them snuck into her room to smoke weed and listen to music. Hannah was crying to a Sufjan Stephens song. He doesn’t remember which one. He asked why she was crying, and she just shrugged and said, “It’s a sad song.” They didn’t speak again about it. He held her hand and she laid her head on his shoulder. He used to love the back rooms in parties – a secret party within a party, where people could speak and smoke, and it felt exclusive.  

Hannah was a stoner – he remembers that now, her perpetually red eyes, the slow way she would speak. It had always been awkward to see his friends in the harsh light of day, without the aid of alcohol. They didn’t know how to relate to one another if they weren’t wasted. But Hannah had found a solution to that by being high most of the time.  

He feels so sad for his friends – the ones who stayed, and the ones who left. The ones who got sober and the ones that couldn’t. The ones who died and the ones who survived. He remembers his years in Ohio like a story, a movie he saw when he was young and distracted, so the plot points get mushed together and you can’t quite remember the point of it, but there is a vague sense of nostalgia.  

“I have a theory about death,” he says to Sybil. “I almost died once, and ever since then I keep going back to it.” She gestures for him to go on. “I think every time you die, you move on to a timeline where you survived.  So there is a world where I died in a bathroom at a party, and there’s another world where maybe you died driving drunk in college. Maybe in those worlds, Hannah didn’t die. Maybe she is alive and mourning us. To her, she just kept going. And she’ll keep going until the oldest version of her dies.” 

“I think I follow you,” says Sybil. 

“Sometimes I feel like I’m still in that bathroom,” says Eric. He shivers. “That was it. The end of everything. But instead, I went to a new timeline and survived, and got to get sober.” 

Sybil nods. She has tears in her eyes and she’s starting to stumble. She pours the rest of her wine in the grass. “What do you think she’s saying about us in the timeline where we died?” she asks.  

Eric thinks of his life – it is not perfect, far from it. He loves his husband, but they have had their troubles. There are still mornings when he wakes up and thinks he can’t get out of bed that day, as depression rears its ugly head. But it is a life he could not imagine back when he was new to the city and coping in the only ways he knew how. 

“She’s probably saying we had so much potential,” he says. Sybil wraps her arms around him. She is sobbing now, her body shaking violently against him. He rests his chin on the top of her head and cries with her. They hold each other as the sun dips into the horizon.  

Gaby Harnish received her BFA in Screenwriting at EICAR - The International Film School of Paris. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in HASH Journal, On the Run, Landing Zone Magazine, and BarBar. She works as a veterinary receptionist and lives in Sacramento with her husband and her little black dog, Britta. Find her on Twitter @GabyHarnish