Best Friends Forever (30 page)

“Wow,” I said. “Nice improvement.” In St. Louis she’d been Tinker Bel .

She gave me an indulgent look, carried her bags into the elevator, and hit the button for the sixth floor. On the way down the hal , she swiped a handful of chocolates and two extra bottles of conditioner from the maid’s cart. Once we were inside, she kicked off her shoes, dropped her bags, and flopped down on one of the double beds, closing her eyes and sighing.

We’d driven al the way to St. Louis on Saturday and spent the afternoon at a fancy mal with a fancy name: Plaza Frontenac. Val, who’d elected herself custodian of our cash, had purchased “a few necessities,”

including but not limited to a beaded Tory Burch tunic, a La Perla bra, a pair of twohun-dred-dol ar jeans, and Chanel eye cream that she swore she couldn’t go even a single night without, while I spent thirty dol ars on deodorant and dental floss and a pair of nightshirts from the Gap’s clearance rack.

We’d gone for dinner at a restaurant in the mal , a big, bustling steak place ful of men in suits, with booming voices and, I presumed, expense accounts to cover the forty-dol ar hunks of meat. I’d had my usual salad and gril ed fish, to make up for the early-morning doughnuts. I hadn’t expected much, but the sea bass was delicious, seared crisp on top and tasting of ginger and lemongrass. Val had ordered a thirtysix-ounce Delmonico, bloody rare, with a baked potato and a side of creamed spinach, and then, working steadily with a fork and a heavy German steel knife, proceeded to devour every morsel. I watched in awe and made a mental note to buy Tums as she walked me through her employment history: the smal TV station outside of L.A. where she’d worked right out of col ege as an intern, gofer, girl Friday, and eventual y, substitute weekend anchor; then the medium-sized station in Lexington, Kentucky, where she’d done the weather and, it emerged, her coanchor. She’d made stops in Dal as and Boston before she’d landed back in Chicago.

“How do you eat like this?” I final y asked after she’d pushed her empty plate away and then, unable to decide between the cheesecake and the crème brûlée, ordered both.

“Oh, wel , normal y I don’t.”

“Normal y you don’t eat like this?”

“No, normal y I don’t real y eat. At al ,” she explained. “I have protein shakes, and soup sometimes. Oh, and sushi.”

“That’s it?”

“Oatmeal.” She sighed. “With almond milk and blueberries. And salmon.”

“On the oatmeal?”

“No, no, I have that for lunch. There’s this service I use that delivers my meals…”

“I didn’t hear anything in there that sounds like a meal.”

“This is the life I have chosen,” she said, and looked up, beaming, as the waiter brought her desserts.

“Yeah, about that,” I said. “Weather? I never remember you caring that much.”

“News

flash,”

she

said,

forking

cheesecake into her mouth. “Nobody real y cares that much about the weather. It’s a means to an end. What I care about is the anchor’s job.”

I snagged a spoonful of her crème brûlée.

“You want Austen Severson’s job?”

“Old,” she said, stil eating. “He’s old and in my way.”

I winced. Austen Severson was a Chicago institution, a trim, silver-haired grandfatherly type with twinkly blue eyes and a reassuring manner who’d been reading the news since the 1970s. “Is he going to retire?”

She smiled sweetly, patting her lips with her napkin. “Yes indeed,” she said. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”

Back in the hotel room, I pul ed the nightshirts out of the shopping bag, handed one to Valerie, and went to the bathroom to wash my face, brush my teeth, and change. When I came back she was stil lying on the bed, barefoot in her new jeans and silk halter top, staring at the ceiling.

“Are you al right?” I ventured. She gave a tiny nod. “Want your eye cream?” She shrugged. “Pil ow chocolate?” I threw her one. She batted it away.

“We should get some pot,” she said to the ceiling. “Maybe I’l see if one of the valet guys can hook us up.”

I sat cross-legged on my bed, sinking into the down-fil ed duvet. “I think that we should maybe try not to break any more laws.”

Valerie ignored me. “Did I ever tel you about my mother’s don’t-do-drugs speech?”

I shook my head.

“Naomi sat me down one night—I think we were, like, in seventh grade—and looked at me very seriously and said, and I quote,

‘Valerie, you shouldn’t do drugs. It’s not like it was in my day, when you knew what you were getting. They lace that shit now.’”

“That’s what she told you?”

“Good old Naomi.” Val unwrapped her pil ow chocolate and popped it in her mouth.

“Mother of the year.”

“Where is she these days, anyhow?”

“Remarried. Her current husband is twice my age and exactly half as interesting. She’s stil in Cleveland.” She shook her head in disgust—at Naomi, or at her new stepfather, or at Cleveland, I couldn’t tel —and rol ed onto her side. “This is fun,” she said. “Like a slumber party. Hey, wanna raid the minibar?”

I shook my head. I’d fantasized about going out of town with Vijay—he traveled often, for conferences and drug-companysponsored retreats, usual y held at some fancy golf resort or at a beach. We could go out to dinner, in a town where nobody knew either one of us. We could hold hands at the table and spend a whole night together in some plush hotel room. “I had a boyfriend,” I told Val, who was crouched down in front of the minibar, inspecting the options. She looked up and waved a fistful of miniature bottles at me. “You did?” She sounded so proud. “Ha. I knew that lingerie was for something. Good for you!”

“He was married,” I said.

“Oh.” Val considered this. “Wel , did you have fun?”

“So much fun,” I said. “At first. And then for a while. I liked being with someone. You know. Watching TV. Holding hands.”

“Sweet,” Val said. She patted my arm and poured me a shot.

“I felt sorry for his wife,” I said, and drained my glass.

“Wives,” said Val. “So problematic.” She dumped another tiny bottle of vodka into a cup fil ed with ice and sat on her bed, sipping.

“Hey, Val.” My tongue felt like a sock stuffed ful of quarters. Wine with dinner plus vodka after equaled more than I’d had to drink in a long time. Careful y, I set my glass aside. “What happened that summer you went to California?”

“Ah yes,” she said. She pul ed a mirrored compact out of her purse, dug around for a cotton bal and a bottle of face cream, and started removing her makeup. “Old Naomi had a new boyfriend that spring. He used to hang around the house when I came home from school, and Naomi thought it would be a good idea if I went away for a while.”

I thought this over, not liking the way it sounded. “Did he do something to you? The boyfriend?”

“Not exactly.” Her eyes were trained on the tiny mirror in her hand. “Not real y. He bought me dresses. He wanted me to wear them. Try this one, try that one; try the white, try the pink.

Come sit with me. Pretty girl. You know. That kind of shit.”

“Oh, Val.” I thought that I should try to touch her—her arm, her hand—but she was touch her—her arm, her hand—but she was too far away.

“Anyhow.” She flicked the mirror shut and stuffed her equipment back in her bag. “I don’t think Naomi wanted the in-house competition. So she scored a ticket somehow and put me on a plane, and then she cal ed my dad to tel him I was coming.”

My throat clicked as I swal owed. “Was your father glad to see you?”

“Thril ed,” she said drily. “What forty-yearold down-on-his-luck stuntman turned craft service manager wouldn’t want a sixteenyear-old showing up for the summer? He had a girlfriend, though. Shannon. She was nice. Do you remember how bad my teeth were?”

I spoke careful y. “They were pretty crooked.”

“Oh, it wasn’t just that. I’d never been to a dentist. Not since we left California.”

“Naomi never took you?” I was shocked. Val shrugged. “Shannon fixed me up. I got my teeth cleaned, got my cavities fil ed, got braces, got a haircut, got some new clothes. Shannon ran a tight ship. She had two kids of her own. Little girls. I wanted to stay with them.”

“Why didn’t you?”

She shrugged again. “No room at the inn. They had a two-bedroom apartment, and Shannon’s girls were eight and six. I tried al summer long to be…what’s the word? Indispensable.”

She pronounced it slowly, then said it again, “Indispensable. I’d wake up early, do al the dishes, unload the dishwasher, sweep the floors, get the girls dressed, braid their hair, make their lunches

…everything.” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Turns out I was completely dispensable. They had me on the first plane back home the week the girls started school. Naomi took me to the orthodontist a few times. Then she started dating the orthodontist. Then they broke up, and she got drunk one night and told me she was gonna pul my braces off herself. She had pliers and everything.”

I shuddered, wondering why I’d never known about any of this, why I’d never even guessed. Val reached across the space between the beds and patted my arm. “But never mind. It’s ancient history. Let’s talk about you! I bet your parents would be proud of you. Al responsible, and thin and stuff.”

“Hah.” It was revoltingly superficial, I knew, but it made me sad to think that neither one of my parents had lived long enough to see me thin. Or thin-ish. Neither one of them would know about my career, or how beautiful the house was, neither would ever look at my cards, my mugs, the spoon rest I’d done, and think, Hey, she turned out okay. “We should get some rest,” I said, and got under the covers, pul ing them up to my chin. I rol ed onto my back and shut my eyes. Then I opened them to see Val, stil seated on her bed. Her knees were drawn up to her chest, and her chin rested on top of them as she gazed at the gold-striped wal paper.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Dan.”

Oh. That. “Listen,” I said. “Maybe he’l turn up. You said you didn’t hit him that hard, right?

Maybe he was just stunned.”

“Not what I did to him,” she said impatiently. “What he did. What he did to me.” She yanked back her covers and flicked off the light, plunging the room into darkness.

“Did you ever tel anyone?” I asked after a minute. “Your mom?”

She snorted. “Naomi. Hah. She would have probably been mad that I didn’t get him to buy me dinner afterward.” She sniffled.

“She was dating his father for a while.”

“Your mother was dating Dan Swansea’s father?” Another thing I hadn’t known. I thought back to what my mother had said about Val not having it easy, and wondered what she’d known; if she’d had more of a sense than I did about what kind of mother Naomi Adler had been, if she’d seen behind the beauty and the glamour and the spur-ofthe-moment road trips and been a lot less enamored than I was.

Valerie’s voice was muffled, so faint it could have been coming from the far end of a tun-nel. “The Swanseas split up for a while freshman year. He had car dealerships. Naomi drove me by their house once. This great big place with a three-car garage. I think she’d had her eye on him for a long time.”

“Oh, Val.”

The room was quiet for so long I figured Val had fal en asleep until she said, “I told my dad, though. I cal ed him up. Woke him up. It was the middle of the night. I thought…” I heard her take a wavering breath. “I don’t know what I thought, real y. That he’d get on the next plane and fly to Il inois and beat the shit out of Daniel Swansea. Tel him, ‘That’s what you get for hurting my little girl.’”

“I take it that didn’t happen?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

“He told me he’d cal me in the morning, after I’d had a chance to calm down. I waited by the phone al day. He never cal ed.” She pul ed in a breath, and I heard the sheets rustle. “For the longest time, I just never let myself think about it. It was nothing. That’s what I’d tel myself.

It was nothing. But it wasn’t…” Her voice cracked. I thought that she was crying, and I didn’t know what to do. Should I try to hug her? Say something consoling? It had been so long since someone had told me a secret, so long since someone besides Jon had needed me.

Before I could decide on a course of action, Val got off the bed and padded to the bathroom. There was a brief flash of light as the door opened, then shut. Poor Val. If it had been me, if I’d told my father, I was sure that he would have done exactly what Val had wanted her father to do. He would have found a way to make the boy who’d hurt me sorry.

A few minutes later, Val stepped out of the bathroom and flicked on the light. Her face was scrubbed, her hair pul ed back, and she was wearing her new nightshirt, a longsaid, climbing under the covers, “we’re twins!” She fished a discarded chocolate off the floor and popped it in her mouth, and as she chewed, I thought of what I could tel her; of how I could help.

“I missed you, you know,” I said.

Slowly, she unwrapped another piece of chocolate and spoke without meeting my eyes.

“Even though I was such a bitch? Even though I lied about you?”

“It wasn’t al lies,” I confessed. “I did have a crush on Dan.”

She gave a short, bitter laugh. “Big mistake.”

“And I did think that there’d be consequences. If you wound up accusing Dan, some of the cheerleaders would probably drop you.”

She gave another unhappy snort. “Try al of them.”

My throat tightened. “I thought they’d dump you, and then you’d need me again.”

She was quiet for a minute. When she rol ed over, I thought she was going to turn off the light, but instead, she stretched her hand across the space between the beds.

“I always needed you,” she said, and grabbed my hand. “Friends?” she asked. I felt the warmth of her palm against mine, the comfort of another body in the room, someone to laugh with, to drive with, to be with…until the end, if that was what was coming. “Friends,” I replied.

Best Friends Forever

PART THREE

Best Friends Forever

THIRTY-NINE

“‘He that covereth his sins shal not prosper:

but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them

shal have mercy,’” said Merry. “Proverbs