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Kim loves the attention.
It’s what they’ve always said about her, when she bleached her hair and dyed it pink the night before school picture day, when she flashed the boys on the other bus before an away game, when she broke up with her first boyfriend for her first girlfriend, when she got engaged three times but married approximately zero. Well, they say, Kim loves the attention.
So the guy eyeing her through the window of the shop, the way he seems so primed for the slightest flicker of her expression, this wide-eyed Christmas look he gives her every time she starts to turn away —
Kim likes it.
In between leaving Eddie’s house and making that hair appointment, she gets curious about this woman she looks so much like, her same age and size and eyes and voice. Had her dad taken a business trip no one knew about and knocked up some Texan housewife? Was she adopted — a long-held childhood dream — a pair of twins split at birth? Was the world really this random, this bizarre? If only she’d been a summer camp kid, they could’ve swapped.
Kim looks her up, Shannon Diaz, and is surprised by the absolute nothing she finds. A defunct Instagram that’s private, anyway. An obituary that says only survived by husband and son, with her mother now in Heaven, no father or siblings to speak of. Who was she? Did she want anything? What life did she have that was cut short, erased, forgotten, folded in? Was she just a pile of snapshots on a coffee table, beautiful and dead in a frame on the mantle?
If Kim had died before she turned thirty, she’d never have gotten that ill-advised vacation tattoo, or learned Swedish for an overseas love connection that didn’t work out, or finally nailed a crow pose in yoga. No one would ever know that she still wrote poetry in her journal before bed or that she had to say affirmations in the mirror every morning. You’re beautiful, Kim, and you deserve good things. The world is a better place with you in it, Kim.
She wonders how many things people never knew about Shannon Diaz.
So Kim cuts bangs.
“Do you have any of her stuff?”
“What?” Eddie croaks, wet-eyed. In the dim and quiet little house, it must be even more confusing, even easier to let himself drop back a couple years, forget and remember.
“Anything that belonged to her,” Kim specifies. “You know, a book, a bobby pin.” She pauses. “Clothes.”
Kim had a crystals-and-séances phase like any other white woman in Los Angeles in her thirties, and this feels something like that: settling on her knees in front of the box Eddie pulled out of a crawl space, laying her hands on Shannon Diaz’s things. It’s like a horrifying little game of show-and-tell. There’s a plastic bag with clothes inside that she doesn’t open. There’s a notebook with only a few written passages in it, more pages torn out than remaining. Kim loops a fingertip over the handwriting, nothing like hers, and peers at the impressions left behind on blank pages from the pen boring in too hard on the one before.
There’s a ring she slides on her finger that’s a little too big, the chunky amethyst sliding sideways. Eddie’s hand appears over hers in a jealous grasp, tugging it off, holding onto it.
“Sorry,” Kim says gently. “I was just curious.”
Then she pulls out the dress.
It’s a sundress, yellow and purple. She must have liked those colors — the floral fabric in the plastic bag, the amethyst ring. Kim always liked hot pink. She even painted her room that color (without permission, obviously) when she was in high school, so violently bright that people genuinely shielded their eyes when they stepped inside.
“Can I?” Kim asks.
Eddie’s throat works. He nods.
She puts the dress on. She does it in front of him, shirt dropped to the side and dress pulled over her black bralette, his eyes averted, ever the gentleman. She shimmies out of her jeans from underneath it. It feels light and floaty, with the slight smell of having been in a box for too long. When Eddie steps forward to put his hands on her hips, the heat shocks her right through, and he inhales sharply, affected too.
He starts to move back but Kim holds his hands in place. “Was there a perfume she liked?” she presses. “What music did she listen to?” She’s thinking of the blank Instagram, the small smiling icon and nothing in the bio, the obituary that didn’t even have a job listed. “What did she do when you weren’t around?”
“I don’t know,” he says, “I don’t know, I remember — I got her something that smelled like sunflowers and she said she loved it, but when I came back it hadn’t been used at all, it looked like it came right out of the box.” His expression is fraught again, caught up in another year, a different life. “Kim —”
“Who’s Kim,” she reminds him. It’s a question she knows how to answer: Kim has a degree in fashion design she never used, Kim used to cam when she was between jobs, Kim loves those big technicolor old Hollywood movies where Gene Kelly whisks Cyd Charisse around in front of a painted backdrop. Kim loves The Real Housewives and Aperol Spritzes. She’s lived in four different states but always finds herself pulled back to Los Angeles, sucked in by the palm trees on a postcard optimism of it. She means who’s Shannon.
“Honey,” she tries, and at the slight shake of his head, “Eddie,” with a plaintive whine in it, playing the desperate lost love.
“I just want to know why.” His fingers flex on her hips, adjusting, both of them swaying; she wonders if she feels the same, too. “Why she could never — commit all the way. I know why you left but why didn’t you want to come back?”
Kim doesn’t know what Shannon would say so she’s tried to stick to the things Eddie has told her, to let him talk, to circle everything back around to him. Like those basement improv classes that she thought would help her meet people when she first moved out here, yes, and your dead wife loves you. But she gets swept up in the shine of his eyes, the pain on his face; she drags him into her arms and feels him slump against her. She holds him tight. His face is in her hair.
Kim kisses him first, probably, that’s usually what Kim does, she doesn’t waste time. The three date rule is more of a half-date rule for her, which made Eddie feel so different, unusual and fascinating — not the waiting but her wanting to, because there was something in his eyes that unsettled her in a way she found exciting. This, too, is different: it’s the little catch in his throat, the tears that spill over and smear against her cheek. She doesn’t care if she kisses the same. She throws herself against his chest and lets herself be lifted, firm hands under her thighs, until they careen onto the couch.
Kim had an abortion when she was twenty-five. She brought three of her closest friends to the clinic and they had a champagne brunch on their terrace the next day. Kim has dyed her hair every color you can find in a box. Kim has never done anything other than exactly what she wants.
Kim doesn’t know what Shannon would say, and then she does. Sitting in Eddie’s lap with the skirt riding high on her thighs, she cups his face and tells him, “It wasn’t about you. You know that, right? I had to find out who I was. It was about me. I had no fucking clue who I was.”
Eddie’s brow contracts. He doesn’t say anything but pulls her down for another kiss, her strap sliding off her shoulder. Maybe Kim starts to get turned around too, because she’s never been kissed like this, like he can’t get enough. Like she just came back from the dead. She’s dizzy with it, this little tornado they’re both in together of impulsive kissing and grasping hands. It doesn’t matter who she is, or isn’t, not to her, and maybe he doesn’t matter either, maybe it’s just about her heart beating so fast, heat blooming under her skin.
Kim’s never been in love.
Afterwards, Eddie breathes against her collarbone. Kim’s fingers stir his hair. “Tell me about her.”
He’s quiet. “I could have made it up to her, if I had more time.”
“I know, baby,” Kim says, gentle, a little patronizing. What wouldn’t they do with enough time? If the clocks ran out, Kim could be a movie star at last. She could travel the world.
“Maybe I didn’t know her as well as I thought,” Eddie admits.
Kim couldn’t say.
He pulls back, weight sinking into the cushions, his hands still on Kim’s thighs, loose and light. Her fingertips traipse down his chest.
His chin tilts up and he finally looks her full in the face, studying her with that furrowed brow, frowning. He touches her cheek, brushes her hair out of the way. “Your eyes are greener,” Eddie says.
They don’t hear the door.