Best Friends (63 page)

“What's this?” she said, holding up a little plastic bag. She glanced at the jeans draped over her left arm. “It's from your pocket.”

I couldn't speak.

“It looks like . . .” She frowned. “What is this, Clare? It looks almost like a tiny piece of cheese, but it's hard.”

I opened and closed my mouth. Finally I got it out. How could I not tell her? “It's Ben's tooth. It was lying in a box on that big chest of drawers at your father's house in Malibu. I found it when I went over there to clean things up, after your dad died.”

She looked at me in astonishment. “And you've had it all this time?”

I nodded.

“How do you know it's Ben's?”

“I'm assuming it is. Your father told me he had a piece of Ben's tooth as a remembrance of him.”

Sally's voice cracked. I couldn't look at her. “Daddy told you?”

“When he and I went out to breakfast, remember? At the Beverly Hills Hilton. After Ezra was born.”

“Daddy told you?”

“He told me he had Ben's tooth. You know”—I searched for an analogy—“like a lock of hair or something.”

Sally's eyes were wide, her body frozen. The tooth lay on her palm. “Oh,” she said, glancing up at me. “A memento.”

“You should keep it,” I said. It wasn't a normal tooth. It wasn't intact. It was a splinter of a tooth, really, but Sally made no mention of this. “I brought it out to give you. I was going to give it to you yesterday, but I forgot. I feel terrible that I left it in my pocket like that. I'm sorry.”

“That's all right. I'm happy to have it.” Sally looked at me with a quick smile, slipped the tooth back in its bag, fingered the bag into the pocket of her shirt. “Did Daddy talk to you about Mexico when you two went out to breakfast?”

“You mean being down there with Ben? No, not really. He was just sorry that he hadn't done more for Ben. He felt guilty he hadn't done everything.”

“That's all he said?” Sally went through more pockets, finding coins, the stick from a lollipop, an eraser shaped like a Jewish star.

“He wasn't very specific. I had a feeling he . . . felt a lot of guilt. That he hadn't done everything to save Ben.” I was going to get through this, I realized. I could survive without telling her what Sid had told me.

“That's all he said?” She nodded at the detergent sitting on a shelf; I scooped out a cupful.

“Basically. He wasn't very specific.”

“Okay. I can live with that.” She touched my arm reprovingly. “You should have given this to me before, Clare. As a memento.” She patted her pocket, right over her heart. Then she bundled all the clothes into the washer and I poured in the detergent. Neither of us said another word about Sid or Ben.

 

 

 

SATURDAY IT RAINED all day. At nightfall, at the end of Shabbos, Sally called the kids for a short ceremony, with prayers and a cup of wine and a braided candle and the passing of a small box—the Havdallah box—filled with aromatic spices. The scent of this, Sally said, was supposed to remind people of the “sweetness of the Shabbos.”

Sally's Havdallah box was the small hinged box I'd noticed years before on top of the Biedermeyer chest at her father's house in Malibu, the box that had contained the tiny plastic bag enclosing Ben's tooth.

“Smells okay,” Ezra said, sniffing perfunctorily.

“Let me smell it!”

“Mommy, Joshua's going to drop it!”

“I will hold it,” Sally said. “No arguments. Now you line up and you can each come sniff it. Gabey, hands off. You don't open it. Come on, Aury. Linnea, did you smell it?”

Satisfied, the children drifted away. Sally doused the candle's flame in the cup of wine, and I walked to the switch by the sink and flicked lights off and on, off and on. Sally laughed.

“Come here,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

The Havdallah box was lying open on the table. Inside it, unsheathed from its tiny plastic bag, nestled among the curls of spices, was Ben's fractured tooth. “Look at that,” I breathed, my voice cracking in wonderment.

“I'm not sure it's kosher,” Sally said, “but it seemed right.”

 

 

 

I WAKE UP in the dark with a lurch, and it comes to me very clearly: Sally knows.

I don't know what she knows, exactly, what Sid told her, but I know she knows the truth. All those months Sid spent in her house, those sweet and terrible months, as Sally called them (and her adjectives are precise): on one of his lucid days, I'm sure, Sid told Sally something true. What he did to Ben, what Ben did to himself—I don't know what he told her, but something.

Secrets and noise.

The darkness in the room lifts slightly, but I don't roll over to check the clock. I lie there and think my thoughts, and it comes to me that ever since her father went into the hospital, maybe even before, Sally has been on a quest. For years now, steadily and not without missteps, Sally has been setting her life right. Having all her children, leaving Los Angeles, writing to the Internet rabbis, counseling me about Ted, extricating herself from Peter, buying this enormous house, koshering her kitchen, celebrating Shabbos, reclaiming Ben's tooth—weren't all these things, in their essence, attempts to make things right? Even taking on her father's business had been done out of a confused sense of duty. An outsider wouldn't understand this, but none of Sally's acts have been acts of whim. They've been calculated, considered, planned as carefully as one of Sally's old cross-examinations. Intentional, she told me: a religious Jew does things with intention. She has set out to remake her life. To call up a response this vigorous, whatever she had learned about her father must have been bad. Not bad; terrible. Her own word.

She made no reference at all to Ben's tooth being broken. As if that chip were all that she expected. As if her mentioning its fractured state might lead me to questions she had no desire for me to ask.

It's getting brighter. I can see on the long chest of drawers my open suitcase, Aury's bookbag, the framed photo of Sally and me in our youth, with our innocent tomato faces.

She grew up to be a hero, my friend Sally. A blooming hero. There's no one else alive who would recognize this. It wasn't what Sid would have dreamed of as Sally's big future, but she, in her own odd way, has created a large life.

I think of my own foolish self. Sid's real business, my father's embezzlement, the identity of Aury's father, the precariousness of my job: I have a long history of realizing things late. I'm not what you'd call a woman quick on the uptake. As Aunt Ruby said, Gullible's Travels. But ultimately (and this may be my strength), I do realize.

A beam of light slips over the hillside and shoots into my room. Bits of dust dance in the air. Soon the children, Aury among them, will stir from their heap in the hallway outside Sally's door.

 

 

 

LATE THAT MORNING we go for a walk; away from the path to Peter and Laurie's, away from the airstrip, the long driveway, the house with its banks of windows. The sky is huge and blindingly blue, the deciduous trees patched yellow and red against the pines. “I love this time of year and the combination of the colored leaves with the green,” Sally says. Shoshana is asleep in the backpack. “And I love the pine needles and the leaves crunching underfoot. Kids! Isn't this a great time of year? Aren't you glad we live in Idaho now?”

They don't answer, tearing off ahead of us, but they all seem happy. Even Aury is almost running, slipping on the path and laughing.

“I'm glad I brought Aury,” I say.

“Are you kidding? It's like she's another sibling. I love to see her with my kids.”

Are you kidding? Sid's phrase.

Joshua runs back to ask for his shoes to be tied, then Gabriel unties his shoes so Sally can retie them, too. Ezra asks if they can turn toward the river when we reach the bottom of the hill, “so we can do some fishing with our hands.” Surrounded by the other children, even silent Linnea seems normal.

“My God!” I say as the children run off again. “Your kids won't leave you alone one minute!” Then it worries me that I've offended Sally by using the Lord's name in vain.

“I guess they love me!” Sally, to my relief, laughs.

I'm not sure many people love me. Ted does, or so he says when he's not wallowing in his ambis, and my daughter does in her precise and carefully calibrated way, and my mother does because she's my mother, and my brothers do, I suppose, although what that means they probably couldn't say. I don't feel like the center of anyone's world. The day I was fired, it crossed my mind that I could load up the car, grab my mother and daughter, and vanish from Ohio and the most this act would invoke in anyone was mild curiosity about what salacious secret had driven me away.

“That's absurd,” Sally says. “That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. What about your patients?”

Well, that's true. My patients would miss me. They whisper to their loved ones and point at me as I walk down the hall. Only a few stayed with the division of infectious diseases. But the thing is, as I point out to Sally, all my patients are going to die.

“Not anymore!” Sally teases, because I've told her about the possibles I'm seeing.

“Mommy,” Ezra whines, dropping back beside us, “Joshua threw a stick at me.”

“Joshua!” Sally snaps. “Put that stick down!”

He gives an elaborately innocent shrug. “But it was an accident!”

“I don't believe in accidents. Put it down. Gabriel! Barbara! Get back on the trail. You want to fall off that rock and get squished like a bug?” She turns to me. “These kids are too intrepid.”

I love your adjectives, I think. Your defining adjectives.

In the meantime, it's struck me that, yes, in the past it was true that all my patients would die, but now who knows? I've seen two of them for eight years.

“You've been a great friend to me,” Sally says, shifting the straps of the baby's pack.

I replay the word in my mind: great.

“Oh,” I say, a trifle belatedly, “You've been a great friend to
me.
”

“I'm an okay friend,” Sally says. “The biggest part of my energy these days goes to the kids.”

And your religion, I think, but I don't say that. “That's how it's supposed to be. I'm different, I'm not a very motherly mother.”

“You don't have to be. It's like Aury popped out fully grown.”

We look at Aury now walking carefully down the path, hands in her pockets, head down. “Amaying,” I say.

“Eyactly,” Sally answers.

“Remember back in college when you met that couple on the plane and you wanted to be part of a unit like that?” I ask, suddenly inspired. Sally nods. “Well,” I point out, “we're the unit.” We are walking into a clearing, and I squint.

Sally looks at me sidelong for a moment. At first she smiles with a trace of sadness, then she winces a little and turns away. “Complicated,” she says.

She doesn't realize that I know. She thinks there's a secret between us, a sort of stain, although I know there's not.

We walk in silence for a few moments.

“Daddy wasn't a good father to Ben. I know that,” Sally says suddenly, talking into the air. The mournfulness of her voice unhinges me. I have one of my flashes of telepathy, I can sense she's ready to make a confession, that she would tell me at this moment what she knows. But I don't want to hear it, I don't need it, I want the field of father-talk between us to be clean, unbesmirched and unbesmirchable, as she must wish her memory of her father were.

“But he was good to you, Sally!” I burst out. “He was good to you!”

She stops and looks at me, her eyes startled and grateful, and I'm wearing an impossible smile, something I'm struggling to keep from a grimace, but some muscle in my face relaxes and I succeed. We both know. We recognize Sid's tragedy, that a person can be possessed of wondrous gifts—verve, imagination, drive, even the ability to love and be loved—and still make a glittering slag heap of his life.

“Remember how you bought him a set of textbooks so he could follow along in your courses?” I say.

Sally smiles back. “He always wanted to learn.”

“Remember how he called Mr. Gifford a ‘poofessor'?”

“Not very politic, Daddy. I hope you don't quote him to Cleve.”

“Cleve would have liked him. He loves his movies.”

Ahead of us, the children are entering the river's grove of trees. “Stay on the path!” Sally bellows. “No climbing on the rocks! No one in the water!”

In response, Barbara's tanned hand shoots into the air and, fingers spread, bobbles back and forth.

“Aury will keep an eye on them,” Sally says, as if to convince herself. “She's responsible.” But I notice her steps speed up.

Our children's voices rise up from the path in front of us. “Was I mad to have all these children?” Sally says. The words might be lighthearted, but in her voice there's a splinter of fear.

“Not yet!” I answer, and we both smile.

But our smiles are masks. Who knows what risk and joy and madness lie ahead, as our children tug us into the inscrutable future?

acknowledgments

Thanks to my teachers, Stuart Friebert and Diane Vreuls; my agent, Harriet Wasserman; and my superb editor, Cindy Spiegel, and her assistant, Erin Bush, all of whom pulled my writing into the light of day and helped me, in ways big and small, to improve it.