Braunwyn is taking me to Cape May.

One gift of the past few months is my friendship with the woman I’ll call Braunwyn. Braunwyn is a fiction writer whose work I’ve known and admired a long time. She teaches at the school where I’ve been a visiting writer. She grew up on the Main Line, across the river from Cherry Hill. Her husband’s relatives live in Cherry Hill. Philadelphia, Cape May — that is our glue. It seems almost uncanny that she is the same age as Denise. She’s light, where Denise was dark. She comes from a wealthy family. Like me, she likes to talk and laugh, to analyze people. She values closeness, so that when we spend a day together it feels as if we’ve stepped into a safe tight circle, where everyone outside that circle disappears.

Friendship feels a little light a word for what we are to each other. Brother and sister? That doesn’t seem right, either. Boyfriend and girlfriend? Twins? In truth we are a little in love with each other, and we’re able to talk about what all that might mean. Can there be love without the bodily expression of it? Can one put one’s arm around another without persuasion, expectation? Where does it stop? Where should it stop? These are the kinds of questions I’ve never found language for before, and it is both compelling and unsettling to talk about things that have always batted around the room, never to come out from behind the furniture.

At some points I imagine Denise watching Braunwyn and me. There she is, across the room from us, in a chair, invisible, purified of envy.

At other points I wonder if she is fuming mad, kicking over the armchairs in the room next door, smashing the good lamps.

Braunwyn and I are heading down the Garden State Parkway, through the marsh of Leonardo Harbor. It is the first outpost of green, active and glistening, past the hard, chemical strip between Newark and Woodbridge. We are going to Cape May overnight because I cannot bear any more thoughts of home right now. Or more accurately, I can’t bear the thought of S being in the apartment with M while I’m by myself in Springs. One of the beauties of Springs is the deep night, the spray of stars over the trees. No streetlights, few houselights, the sound of ocean carried across farmland and forest.

The quiet can calm you when your nerves are jangled from too much city, all the worries about money, all the fears that you’re using movement and overwork to run away from your life. But that quiet can also kill you if you let your mind wander offinto it. That might have happened to the woman who killed herself in the house behind ours last Christmas Eve. Sleeping pills, a plastic bag over her head. A cop next morning comes to the front door to ask if we “saw anything.” Why? we say. There was an “incident” out back last night. And that’s where the cop stops.

I believe Braunwyn and I present a curious picture to the women behind the registration desk. Two rooms, two people, a man and a woman who like each other, but two rooms. Perhaps we seem very quaint and old school, asking for separate rooms. Perhaps that is why the ladies are extra nice to us. They appear to make mistakes with the billing just so they’ll get to hang out with us a little while longer. I don’t think they are used to people being nice to them, and we enjoy being nice, spreading it back and forth until it feels like the four of us have eaten too much candy.

We walk the boardwalk. We stop for ice cream, which drips down the side of the cones before they’re even in our hands. The summer is as hot as it’s been in eleven years, and even though we’re two hundred feet from the sea, we need air- conditioning. The paleyellow Congress Hall is up ahead, and we cross Beach Drive, walk past the hydrangeas and the lavender, underneath the portico. I decide to show Braunwyn the old photograph I’d seen with M earlier this winter. It is still in the same place, along the darkish passageway between a sitting room and the main hall. If anything, the passageway looks even darker in summer than it did in winter, what with all the brilliant sun outside.

My guess is that no one has looked at this picture since M and I looked at it six months back. We point out the various characters, their postures toward one another, whether they’re alone or in a group. Point out the people we’re drawn to, those who might be a little full of themselves. We wonder how the picture was taken — how could any lens be so wide? Maybe it was done over time, which would explain the bleached- out strip at the center. To me it is a picture about death, about people presenting themselves in the face of death. Not that they were necessarily thinking about any of that, but the participants know this is serious business, despite the casual air. They can already imagine the faces looking back at them, interpreting them.

After some time on the porch with coffee (sex, sex: do we ever not talk about the mysteries of sex?) we’re on the way back to our hotel. Just as we cross Pittsburgh Avenue, Braunwyn’s shoe catches on a buckle in the pavement. Her fall happens in slow motion. It looks as if she will catch herself, and she clearly thinks she will, too, but then she hears herself say, oh no. She bangs the pavement. My initial impulse, before I give her my arm, is to radiate supreme calm, not just for the others around us, but for Braunwyn, who must feel vulnerable and embarrassed. As if the worst thing in the world were to be embarrassed, on an early summer night, in Cape May.

I can’t say what my outward actions are, but there are people around, and I know I must build a protective bubble around us to keep those people away. Braunwyn is standing, and we are looking at her hand, which looks craped and torn, but isn’t swollen — at least not yet.

We take our first tentative steps to the motel when a woman calls out behind us. The voice has an intensity that you don’t hear much of in public anymore. “Sir, sir!” the voice cries.

I turn. It is me who is being summoned. “She hit her head,” she says. “Do you know that?”

I turn to Braunwyn. “Did you hit your head?”

That woman — the certainty of her — unmoors us. “I don’t think so,” Braunwyn says.

The woman frowns. “If she behaves strangely in the middle of the night,” she says, “you get her to an emergency room.”

“Of course,” I say, and then we walk on.

But what if we’re not sleeping in the same room? I want to say.

We look at each other, worried, as if Braunwyn might fall again at any time, if not now, then sometime in the middle of the night when she’s by herself. Might she just go to bed, look at the clock on the nightstand, and that could be the last thing she’d see?

The heat has dulled my good sense. One minute I think we should drive up to the emergency room in Cape May Court House and then I think not. I keep glancing at Braunwyn, checking for the half- closed eyes, the open mouth, the confused expression. I keep wondering whether my lack of decisiveness about this matter tells me what I’d rather not know about myself: if I act as if there is no problem, the problem, if there is a problem, will simply go away.

Are you okay? This becomes my refrain for the rest of the night. “I think so,” Braunwyn says, tensing up her face every time she answers. I don’t like this tensing up of her face, but I can’t tell her that. I say good night to her in the elevator and try to hold back the suspicion that I am doing the wrong thing. I stand outside the closed doors of the elevator, stare down at a wine stain in the carpet, before I go on to my own room, which happens to be right beneath hers.

I wake up in the middle of the night. I think I hear water running upstairs, and I breathe in and out through my nose. Not dead yet, I say to myself.

I’m up at six the next morning, maybe even a little earlier. It is already light outside. I’m too bewildered to turn on my laptop, so I grab for my phone to see several texts showing up in its window. Four from Braunwyn, one from M.

From Braunwyn: Porpoises.

Dozens of them, playing, breaching.

Honey, come down to the beach and see.

From M? A chipper hello, and a note to let me know that he and S are headed out to the Springs. And when do I plan to get in? To the city, he means. Which must mean they want to be out of there before I arrive.

The public bathrooms are out by the beach. I’m standing beside the building waiting for Braunwyn to walk up. And then she’s walking toward me, her face transformed. She is not just the one self in front of me, but all of her selves, simultaneously. Her face shines, her green eyes suffused with light. Everything that’s unique about her is shining in those eyes: humor, wryness, intelligence, vulnerability. Those eyes say we will be all right, all of us.

“You look like you’re in a state of shock,” she says. Her voice suggests that she’s in a state of shock, too, but maybe this morning shock is not such a bad place to be.

I look back with a shrug. “Can we still see the porpoises?” I look past her toward the dune grass, the beach, the water. The sky overhead is already matted with hot- weather clouds.

“We missed them,” Braunwyn says. “They’re already headed up toward Wildwood.”

I nod. That’s okay, honestly. It’s enough to know that she saw them, enough to be swept by the story. I hold on to the image of them breaching and playing as they look back to shore.

◆

Excerpted from The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship (Graywolf Press) by Paul Lisicky. Copyright © Paul Lisicky, 2016. All rights reserved.