I was nursing my three-week-old baby when the phone rang. It was Jim, the husband of my dearest friend Marjy. He called to tell me she was dead. 

Poof. Gone. Just like that. 

“A brain aneurism.” As if the wrenching of my universe could have an explanation. As if knowing the cause could mitigate the horror. I managed a whimper. A guttural expression of the initial pain. Before it reached its crescendo. Before it settled into an everlasting ache. That would come later.

My infant daughter paused for a moment in her sucks, reacting no doubt to the jolting of my chest. I stilled my body as best I could, and her soft gulping sounds resumed. I wanted my baby’s sustaining life murmurs to drown out the story of Marjy’s death. Drown out the image of Marjy collapsing before the bathroom mirror in her large, comfy home in Delaware. 

“She died instantly,” Jim continued, his voice cracking. 

 But I couldn’t offer him any comfort, any condolence. Not then. I had to tend to my own grief. I handed the phone to my husband who lay beside me, then repositioned Emma to my other breast. 

“Marjy’s…not well,” was all I said. Let him hear the news from Jim. I wasn’t able to say “Marjy” and “dead” in the same sentence. 

 ***

A forty-six-year-old woman isn’t supposed to drop dead. And a forty-six-year-old woman isn’t supposed to give birth. I looked down at my daughter, my seven-pound miracle. I named her after another cherished friend who died way too young from cancer earlier that year. 

Was this the deal? In exchange for beating the odds and delivering a healthy baby girl, I had to give up two people I loved? Was a Supreme Being devising and demanding trades, like Monopoly properties? I’ll give you one child for two beloved friends. There must be a sacrifice. Nonsense? Perhaps. But that’ s how it felt, if only for a moment. Sometimes, even now. 

I held Emma close and wept into her warm, fuzzy head.

 ***

I couldn’t attend Marjy’s funeral. A nursing mother doesn’t leave an infant too young to travel by plane halfway across the country. No Face Time or Skype or Zoom in the mid-nineties, but a friend of Marjy’s, whom I knew from my previous visits to Wilmington, described the service over the phone. Step by step. The eulogy. The prayers. The tears. The lowering of the casket. At least the day was warm and sunny. Leaving Marjy out there, in the cold, dark of winter would have been unbearable. 

 I listened. I cried. I rocked my baby. 

***

I’m not sure of the moment Marjy and I became friends. How do I pinpoint the exact origin of a relationship that endured for three decades? We met in tenth grade when two middle schools merged into one large University City High. Maybe it was that very first meeting when I walked into Mrs. Gottfried’s honor’s English, heard the effervescent laughter of a tall girl with dark, short, curly hair. I was an awkward fifteen-year-old burdened with blemishes, bad haircuts, and black and white tie shoes. My feet were too flat for fashionable penny loafers. But Marjy, minding none of that, smiled wide at me. 

Friendships reign supreme during high school. Much later, spouses, children, and careers demand the bulk of our energy. But Marjy and I bestowed our full attention on our nascent relationship as we navigated the good, bad, and ugly of adolescence. We tackled Hamlet. Griped about the boring history teacher. Huddled in the girl’s restroom, applying make-up samples her mom brought home from Saks, Fifth Avenue. Jumped up and down at our homecoming dance invites. 

We squealed in math class when she received the news of her nephew’s birth. Later, in that same classroom, we wept together as the news of JFK’s assassination piped over the school’s loudspeaker. We didn’t know that five years later, on Marjy’s twenty-first birthday, we’d mourn the shooting of Robert Kennedy. We cast celebration plans aside.

We were the school’s “first and second ladies.” She dated the president, and I paired up with the vice president. We doubled to the junior-senior prom, where Marjy was the solo vocalist, belting out “Georgia on my Mind.” I, who had been too shy to even audition for the before-school chorus because it required singing a solo, watched in awe. 

Our relationship deepened in college. We were both part of the “brainy” group. Marjy landed at Vassar, then an elite East coast girl’s school. I accepted a full ride to Washington University, and stayed put in St. Louis. In our weekly letters, we shared not only details of events, but emotions and thoughts more easily expressed on the pages of stationery than in face-to-face conversations. The letters we wrote each other became our diaries, personal journals that captured feelings too embarrassing or intense to speak aloud. I knew of her pain when the Amherst boyfriend dumped her, her thrill of an A in Freshman comp, her devastation when she had to leave Vassar the next year for UCLA when her parents moved to California. She read of the insecurities triggered by my sorority rejections; the comfort I found at the school newspaper office, and the excitement of my first date with a boy I met my freshman year. He became my first husband. 

“Is he smart enough for you, Renee?” Marjy wrote, prophesying the relationship’s demise. In spite of her concerns, she was a smiling bridesmaid in a pale green gown at my wedding that hot and humid August following our college graduation. 

 Marjy’s letters continued from law school the following fall; she was one of two women in the class at Penn. Soon she wrote about a New York classmate, and then, about their plans to marry in December. Now I worried about her choice. So quick. Who was this man, slighter in build and personality than Marjy? My concerns were prophetic too. I wore a long-sleeved, red velvet bridesmaid’s dress, reflecting the winter’s chill. 

We’d stand by the other’s side at our subsequent second weddings. No need for bridesmaids this time, but always a need for a best friend. Marjy signed our Ketuba, the Jewish marriage contract still hanging on my bedroom wall. Sometimes I visit her signature with its same stylish, curved script. 

I regret that the treasure trove of Marjy’s letters did not survive the zigs and zags of my life. I lost them somewhere along the way. Had I known that one day they would be all I had left of her, I would have taken better care. We thought we’d grow old together, joked about sitting side-by-side in rocking chairs on the porch of an “old folks” home. I’d be delighting in Marjy’s effervescent laugh, as I had the day we met.    

Although the family and professional demands of our lives increased, we made time for weekly phone calls and visits. Her Delaware home was sanctuary: a sun-bathed porch filled with white wicker baskets of trailing vines and floor to ceiling windows. We laughed in this warmly lit room. And we cried. After her father’s death, her mother’s, and the death of each of our first marriages. We celebrated our successful second marriages, the birth of her second child, a daughter, and nine years later, the pending birth of mine. 

I visited Marjy earlier in the year she died. Had the killer been there, that tiny, lethal bubble hiding beneath her thick, brown curls? Should I have seen its subtle bulge before it popped, before the sly villain revealed itself only in her death? If my eyes had looked closely, would I have detected what Mayo Clinic describes as “a berry hanging on a stem?” Perhaps there had been clues. A slight twitch of her lip? A blinking of her eye? Maybe the curves of her handwriting had gone amiss. Maybe her voice had flattened. If I had paid better attention, maybe I could have warned her. Saved her. Saved me. 

I’ve been assured the naked eye cannot see a blip on a blood vessel. Only MRIs, CT scans, imaging beyond the power of human sight can detect potential killers. Not the intimacy of friendship. 

This August, Marjy will have been gone twenty-seven years. I can remember the number easily. It’s the age of my youngest daughter.  

-Renee Winter

Renee Winter is a retired attorney who gave up billable hours for more writing time. She has many stories to tell. Her personal essays have appeared in such journals as Catamaran Literary Reader, Qu, Exposition Review, The London Reader, Star 82 Review, 34th Parallel, as well as in the anthology Tales of Our Lives: Reflection Pond (2016) edited by Matilda Butler. She is a volunteer teacher at the Santa Cruz County Jails and has learned that talented writers can be found everywhere. She lives in California with her husband and curly white poodle-mix.