"Ms. Berry?"
The minute I heard Sam's voice on the line, I knew what he had to be calling about.
"Did you find her?" I asked, my voice thick with prescription-induced sleep.
"Why don't you just come down to the bar and we can talk? I can send a cab over to your-"
"I can walk; it's not that far," I reassured him. I knew he was trying to be kind, but the truth was, I needed to walk off the medication to get my head straight for whatever was about to happen, wanted to walk on the off chance that-
If he had spotted her somewhere, maybe I'd catch a glimpse of her, too.
It's not that I still thought about her all that much, but when I did manage to conjure up the memory of Quinn Fabray from time to time, it was just all so damned immediate. Her raspy laugh would suddenly be tickling my ear as if she were right there next to me again.
It was infuriating.
Sam Evans owned a little blink-and-you'd-miss-it bar around the corner from the apartment where I was living back when I knew Quinn. The place was a hole—cheap, dark, and seedy—but it suited our purposes at the time, and he'd always been discreet, for which I was grateful in the years that followed.
I was halfway there that night he called me out of the blue when I realized that he might actually have her there in the bar with him. Quinn. Just sitting there, perhaps in that old threadbare booth seat in the corner, sipping on a glass of scotch with that half-lidded look in her eyes like nothing had ever happened. And there I was in a pair of jeans that were starting to sag at the hips and a ratty old Columbia sweatshirt.
I panicked, briefly, and almost turned back, until I remembered that her giving a damn about what I wore was one of those things I had invented about her.
I smiled then, shrugging. Quinn Fabray was a nothing if not a compilation of all the things other people invented about her, the things she invented about herself. Even her name was an invention, or so I'd been told.
I'd been a fool all those years ago, thinking I knew her, thinking I could save her, when really she was saving me, steeling my stomach against the cruelty to come.
The place was empty when I arrived, save for Sam, who was sitting behind the bar, disinterestedly thumbing through the newspaper. For a moment, I stood in the doorway, rubbing my hand across my forehead and eyeing that back booth like it was one of those Magic Eye puzzles, as if she would appear there if only I could focus on it just right.
There clink of glass-on-glass caused me to flinch, and I looked over to find Sam pouring two shots of whiskey.
"You're going to want that," he said, pushing one of the shot glasses toward my end of the bar.
"Is she dead?" I felt guilty for asking it, and even worse for sort of wanting it to be true. Sometimes, things were just easier to stomach if I thought of her as not existing after our little interlude ended.
"God, no!" he said, jumping up from his stool and guiding me over to a seat. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you think-"
"It's alright, Sam," I said. "Just tell me, whatever it is, please."
He went and got his phone from the bar, pulled something up on it, and passed it to me with a sigh.
There on the screen was a picture of a group of teenaged girls on what appeared to be a bench in Central Park. He'd obviously taken the photo from a distance away, and at first, I didn't understand the point.
"The girl on the end," Sam said then, sensing my confusion, "on the right. Could that be...?"
The girl on the far end of the photograph was neither blonde, nor delicate, but there was a certain smirk on her lips, a quirk in her eyebrow that was uniquely, distinctly Quinn.
"Beth?" I asked, pulling the phone closer to my face as if that would somehow help to solve the mystery.
"I don't know," he said. "That's why I called you. I've seen her in the park a few times now, whenever I go for a run, and something about that face...,"
Hearing his voice trail off like that, I looked up at him and saw that swoony look people seemed to get whenever they talked about Quinn.
"I didn't know you still thought of her," I admitted. I had long since gotten over the romantic notion that I had been the only one in our little circle with cause to remember Quinn fondly, but I had never suspected Sam.
He shook his head, though. "I never...I mean, she didn't...sometimes you just can't help but care about someone, even though you don't really know them."
I snorted at that, smiling at him knowingly.
"I guess I just figured if anyone would know, it would be you," he continued. My heart swelled at the idea that Sam thought that I, in particular, would be privy to any sort of special knowledge about Quinn.
She had told me, of course, that she'd had a baby when she was fifteen. But I hadn't really thought about what that actually meant until now, now that I was looking at this practically grown person who so clearly had to be a genetic mixture of Quinn and—
There she was, laughing in my ear again,
"What's so funny?" I'd asked her.
We were standing in front of my bathroom mirror. I was brushing my teeth and she was behind me with her arms wrapped around my waist. It was one of those rare times when she'd actually agreed to stay the whole night, and the sheer domesticity of seeing her in her pajamas had me feeling giddy and excited.
"It just occurred to me that she probably looks a lot like you, probably more like you than like me," Quinn said casually, before dipping her head down to sink her teeth into the top of my shoulder.
"Who?" I asked pulling away with a closed-mouth smile so I could rinse.
"My little girl," she mused, sliding away into the bedroom.
My stomach lurched. I knew what this meant. The last time she'd brought up her daughter, she'd cut me off and disappeared for two weeks. I padded into the bedroom and slipped in between the sheets next to her, dejected. She was gone before I woke up in the morning.
I had no way of knowing, then, that that would be one of the last times I'd ever see her.
"I think I will take that drink, Sam," I said quietly, handing him back his phone. He nodded, and in short order, he came back with a gin and tonic. I smiled, gratefully.
"If that really is her daughter, do you think she's...?" he asked.
I shook my head. For the last year or so I'd hoped more than suspected that Quinn had stuck around, kept a hand in, for my sake. But if that was really her daughter in the photograph, I knew she had to be long gone. Because of all the demons that chased Quinn Fabray, all the visions that haunted her dreams, I knew this was the one of which she was most afraid.
I had a second drink there in the bar with Sam, and we talked a little about the old days. Not just about Quinn, but about all the people that used to stop by the bar back then, people I'd forgotten about, or at least tried to forget.
Just as the sun was starting to come up, Sam put me in a cab and sent me home. I sank back into bed without even taking my jeans off, and didn't open my eyes again until late that afternoon.