I was on the train to the emergency room on a sweltering June morning when my phone lit up with a text from an unfamiliar number: “Hi, this is Billy. I’m a longtime friend of Jeff’s.”
Jeff had been my best friend for many years. He’d been my lover for less than a week. Three days earlier we had been holding hands under a clear Los Angeles sky, jacaranda trees blooming riotously above us. Jeff had just been discharged from Cedars-Sinai hospital, and I had been daydreaming about a new life together.
Now we were in Brooklyn, and Jeff was back in the hospital, struggling to breathe. Why had I left him alone overnight? And who was Billy? I didn’t remember Jeff ever mentioning him.
“I was hoping we can communicate so I can help,” Billy wrote. The gravity of Jeff’s illness, which I had been trying so hard to float above, pulled me toward the ground. I told Billy I would keep him posted.
“Thanks Elizabeth,” he replied. “You’re already my hero for going to California and bringing him home.”
His hero? When Jeff had told me he was sure his cancer had returned, I’d told him to quit being dramatic. I was no one’s hero.
The train lurched forward. One more stop. My phone vibrated. Billy again. “I didn’t realize he wasn’t on the mend. When they released him in L.A., I thought he was getting better.”
I bristled. “He was. He is.”
He wasn’t. Five mornings later, I was the one lighting up Billy’s phone. “He’s gone,” I texted. “Thank you so much for all you’ve done these last few days.”
In the last week of Jeff’s life, Billy had become my lifeline, showing up to give rides, hugs and support after I brought Jeff home for the final time. In a burst of energy the day before he died, Jeff said he wanted to make one more pasta dish, and the three of us shared a last meal, balancing bowls of spaghetti on our laps as if our world wasn’t ending. That night, as I lay next to Jeff, panicked at the thought that he might not wake up, I called Billy. His calm voice soothed me to sleep.
Over the next weeks, Billy and I occasionally emerged from our grief to check on each other. He kept seeing Jeff in people on the street. I couldn’t stop scrolling through photos. “Send me a pic every day until you’ve sent them all,” Billy texted. I had taken more pictures of Jeff, but Billy had known him longer (they’d been work colleagues years before — something Jeff had surely told me, and I’d forgotten).
One lonely day, I asked Billy if he’d like to get coffee or take a walk.
“I’d love to,” he answered. “How about brunch tomorrow?”
Billy lived in Queens, but he traveled to Brooklyn to meet me at a favorite neighborhood haunt of Jeff’s and mine. Billy and I didn’t waste time on pleasantries. I confessed to my icy silence toward Jeff in the months before he died, and how the long-burning ember between us had finally burst into flame (though I used decidedly less poetic language).
“Sorry to be graphic,” I said with a laugh.
“I don’t mind,” Billy said. “I don’t have anyone else to be graphic with. Jeff was that friend for me.”
Jeff had been that friend for both of us, the one we could talk dirty to or go deep with, who kept our secrets and never judged us. He was the only person who knew how troubled Billy’s marriage was, and how hard he’d been trying to keep it together.
“I didn’t talk about that stuff to anyone except Jeff,” he said.
I nodded. The weight of our shared loss was immense.
After that, Billy and I retreated into our separate sorrow. I bought a dress for Jeff’s memorial service, then didn’t go. Ignoring Billy’s calls and messages offering to pick me up, I crawled into bed and slept until the next day.
“I couldn’t stand around and make chitchat with people,” I texted Billy a week later. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.” I had abandoned Brooklyn for a Maryland beach, where I woke before dawn every morning and wept. My anguish would not be outrun.
Our communication cooled with the fall weather. We didn’t see each other again until New Year’s Day, when we headed to Coney Island for the Polar Bear Plunge. Jeff had always lobbied us to do it with him, and we had demurred. Now we ran into the ocean, shouting and laughing, dunking our heads and splashing until hypothermia threatened.
Afterward, Billy accompanied me to my neighbor’s open house, where we ate smoked fish and bagels. At some point, I lost track of him in the crowd, and when I spotted him across the room, chatting easily with my friends, a strange feeling came over me, like déjà vu, except flashing forward to a time when Billy and I would be more than friends.
I pushed the thought away. But when we hugged goodbye, I felt it again.
That winter, I ran away to Los Angeles, where a friend had offered her home in exchange for cat-sitting. Wildfires had ravaged the city since I had been there with Jeff, and the jacarandas were no longer in bloom. I took long walks alone, skirting the edges of places we had been together, when I had believed we had a future.
On Valentine’s Day, Billy texted with news that he and his wife were divorcing, and he was looking at apartments. He wondered how I was doing in Los Angeles. Was I lonely, or did I have friends there? And when was I coming home?
I told him that while I had a couple of good friends nearby, I mostly wanted to be by myself, to write. Neither of us pointed out that I could write from anywhere.
“Miss you!” he wrote. “Genuinely. Hope to hang when you get back!”
Wary of his recently separated status, I didn’t reply.
Once I was home, though, I relented and met him for lunch. As before, our conversation flowed freely, but this time I noticed his broad shoulders and dazzling smile. Standing at the top of the subway stairs, headed in different directions after lunch, I suppressed an impulse to kiss him.
A few days later, Billy asked if I would be up for joining him on a “thrifting tour” of Connecticut in search of stuff for his new place. I said sure, then regretted it. “I hate thrift stores,” I told my Los Angeles bestie, Nicole. “Do you think I can bail?”
Nicole was one of the few people who knew how much I had been secluding myself, brooding about Jeff. “I know you don’t want to hear this,” she said, “but I think you should go.”
And so, grudgingly, I met Billy early on a sunny spring Saturday. We spent the day ducking in and out of thrift shops, lingering over lunch, and feeling, for the first time in months, light and happy.
That night, after Billy was home in Queens, he thanked me for a wonderful day. “I didn’t want it to end,” he texted. “I’d rather be in Brooklyn with you right now.”
“Come back!” I replied impulsively. When Billy got to my apartment just before midnight, we started kissing before the door closed behind him.
In the flush of those first feverish days, when we weren’t kissing, we were discovering all the things we had in common. Not only are we both Scorpios, we’re both Sagittarius rising. (I can hear Jeff, the astrology skeptic, scoffing.) Two theater majors, we have the same blood type and make the same dumb joke about it: A-plus! The best!
As the months passed, Billy and I only fell deeper in love. We spoke of Jeff often, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, often wondering: Had he known?
The last morning of Jeff’s life, he had asked me how I felt about Billy. “It might be good to have him here today,” he said. “What do you think?” We had been going over his will, a task we knew we had little time to complete.
Here’s what I would later learn about Billy. He’s the sort of person you pass babies to and they stop crying. He hates being written about but folds my underwear into tiny, suitcase-ready rectangles the night before I leave for a workshop in Paris, where he knows I’ll write about him. When I lay my head on his chest, I’m home.
“I’d like that,” I said to Jeff before I knew any of that.
He closed his eyes and smiled. Then we turned back to his list of who would get what after he was gone.
Elizabeth Laura Nelson is a writer in Brooklyn. She is at work on a memoir.
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