One Good Friend Deserves Another (23 page)

“Hey, Wendy…Are you sick?”

At heart, yes.
“No, I’m not sick, just light headed.”

“You should stop dieting. You look great.”

“Thanks. But that’s not the problem.” She ducked her head as if she could dodge that arrow of kindness. “I can’t sail with you today, Parker.”

“Yes, you can. You’re here now.” Parker glanced around, waving to a friend passing by on the boards. “To hell with whatever other plans you have.”

“I’ve already canceled all my other appointments today.” She tapped the cigarette on her knee, turning it over and over in her hand. “All that’s really left is to talk to you.”

Squinting against the sun, she looked up into Parker’s face and saw his expression shift.

“Listen,” he said, “you already backed out on me once this week. Sail with me today and tell me what the hell’s going on.”

“Can’t sail.”

“I’ll
listen.
I promise.”

“I know you will, Park—”

“We’re just going out on the Sound. It’s a calm day. I won’t be distracted.”

“Here’s the problem: I’m not a good swimmer.”

Parker’s brow rippled. “I know you’re not. Two years in a row you flaked out on lessons with Jessica. But what does that have to do with us?”

“After I finish saying what I’ve got to say, we’ll be in deep water.”

“So?”

“You’re likely to throw me off the boat.”

Parker went very still. With shaky hands, she pulled out an old lighter and flicked it a few times, trying to ignite the spark. For the past week she had mulled this very moment over and over, searching for the words that would hurt this good man the least. She certainly couldn’t tell him that only now did she realize that she’d spent the last seven years trying to be the woman the world expected her to be, rather than the woman she really was. Nor could she tell Parker that she didn’t love him anymore. That was simply not true.

What she dreaded most was the chance that Parker would behave like Trey had yesterday, on the boat with Kelly. Audrey had given her the blow-by-blow. If Parker flew into as fierce a passion as Trey had, Wendy knew she would lose the Zen-like calm that had descended upon her. She would lose the crystal clarity of her thoughts. She would lose her sureness of heart.

Then the words tumbled out of her, loose from where her guilt festered. “I’m so sorry, Parker. I’m calling it off.”

His face shuttered. He backed up a step, and then another, finally stumbling back against the opposite gunwale. She watched him as he braced himself against the far side of the boat, his shoulders slumping, his polo shirt clinging to his chest. A thought passed fleetingly through her mind: what a terribly malicious thing love was, to bring to her attention the startling beauty of the man she was giving up.

Then he crossed his arms, flexing his fingers over his biceps. “I don’t want to know about it.”

She stilled, tilting her head.

“I get it, Wendy.” The wind picked up from the west and began to weave in his fair hair as he shifted the crossing of his arms. “I’m not an idiot. I know you had a last sowing of the oats.”

Her heart made a full stop. He couldn’t know.
Nobody
knew. She hadn’t even divulged that secret to Marta, Kelly, or Dhara.

It wasn’t possible.

“You don’t think I’ve noticed? This crazy decision to keep me hands-off three full months before the wedding? How distant you’ve been?”

“Parker—”

“You’re not the only one nervous about the wedding. You’re not the only one wondering if you’re ready for this.” Parker pushed away from the gunwale to move around the boat, shifting bags, pulling out the white wine and shoving it into the ice bucket. “My father has been talking to me about life insurance, annuities. Screws with my head.”

“Parker—”

“Not a word. I don’t want to know anything.” His arms bulged as he stowed the last of the bags into storage. “If I find out who this guy is, I’ll floor him.”

Her breathing hitched. Wendy weighed her next words, watching an ant work its way across the thin fissures on the weathered boards, trying so very hard not to get mired in the cracks. It was one of life’s strange ironies that it might have been better if she admitted the affair with Gabriel. Then he’d have a source to blame, a solid reason for her decision.

“There’s no other man, Parker.”

In truth, Gabriel wasn’t the real cause of this separation. Gabriel had been the catalyst, the man who showed her how foolish she’d been, trying to become her mother’s version of a good Wainwright girl. Her doubts about Parker had always been there. Even when Parker had dropped to one knee on this very dock, her lips had said yes to his proposal but a little voice in her heart had whispered
no.

Parker would never have reason to suspect otherwise. She’d ended it with Gabriel almost as soon as it began. She’d burned into her memory the sensation of his hand cradling her head. She’d preserved it like a crocus plucked from the snow and pressed between the pages of an old book. It hurt to hear Gabriel’s pained voice on her voice mail, still urging her to reconsider. But she’d cheated on her fiancé. If she became Gabriel’s lover, she would destroy Parker. If she became Gabriel’s lover, guilt would destroy that relationship too. Infidelity was a poison that seeped both ways. No matter how long she tried to think this all through, it always ended with three broken hearts.

The least she could do was protect Parker by letting Gabriel go.

“Then it’s over,” Parker said. “Good.” He nodded once and then held out his hand. “Now let’s go sailing.”

She felt a chill in her blood. She searched his face, waiting for his expression to betray some suppressed fury. He deserved to yell. He’d certainly earned the right to be incensed, just with suspicion. She told herself it must be a coping mechanism. Later, she thought, he’d go out and get drunk with Trey.

Wendy put the cigarette in her mouth. She bent her head and flicked the lighter once, twice, until it finally caught flame. She sucked the smoke in through the filter, felt the hit in her lungs. She held the smoke for a moment and closed her eyes as her senses spun with the rush of nicotine.

“It’s the sailing.” He yanked on one of the ropes, setting it loose from the cleat. “It’s a jealous mistress.”

“It’s not the sailing.” Though, Wendy thought, it probably helped that his attention wasn’t always laser-focused on her these past years. “You never made me feel second place, Parker.”

“Have you told your mother?”

“No. Not yet.”

She wished she could see his eyes. She wished she could read his mind. But he was absorbed in the new knot he was winding around the cleat, pulling on it with far more force than was necessary, in a sailor’s knot she didn’t recognize—much more complicated than a simple clove hitch.

“Good.” He pulled the knot secure and then checked the tension. “I admire your mother. But I’d rather we decided how to handle this ourselves.”

“Handle this.”

“There are going to be a lot of questions. It’s going to be the talk of the season. Everyone is going to want to know why the wedding is off.”

Wendy was very glad she was sitting down. Hearing those words out of his mouth was like a scythe to the back of her knees. Had she been standing, she would have collapsed in a heap on the dock. As it was, she felt as if the boards had just given way beneath her and sent her through the pilings to the water gurgling below.

“Blame me.” Her voice was hoarse. “Just blame me.”

“I’d rather blame it on the sailing.”

“That would work, too.”

She looked up at him, hoping that he would see in her eyes how sorry she was, how much her heart ached. She looked up at him, knowing that his expression would gut her.

Yet his face was lifted to the elements. He was searching the sky, taking note of the scuttling clouds, probing their depth for any hint of rain. He turned his face this way and that, using it as a compass to determine the direction of the wind. He looked unnervingly careless, though an engagement of nearly two years had just collapsed between them.

Then in a moment of crystalline clarity, she saw in her mind’s eye a whole new view of their relationship, peppered with moments like this, passed over with unnerving detachment, ending in calm, rigid silences. The chill that had blown through her heart moments ago dropped a few thousand degrees, threatening to freeze the very marrow of her bones.

“Tell them anything,” she said. “Tell them that I caught you in bed with a naked supermodel.”

“I won’t do that.”

“It’ll shut everyone up.”

“Better if we keep this cordial.”

“You don’t have to avoid unpleasantness, not this time. You can tell any story you want. I’m beyond the pale now. I’ll back you up.”

“You really don’t care, do you?”

“I do care. I care about
you.
”

Just a flicker, a little light, in those dear blue eyes. “I mean you don’t care about what people think. About Birdie, about your choice of lifestyle, your choice of friends.”

“No, I don’t care. Never really have. I’ll tell them any story you like.”

“How about the truth?” He shoved his fists in his pockets. “I’ll tell them you never loved me.”

“No.” She hauled herself off the boards. She flicked the cigarette onto the dock. She crushed it under a foot as she swept up her purse. “That’s the one thing I won’t say.”

“It’s the truth.”

“The truth is,” she said, slipping the topaz ring off her finger, “this hurts all the more because I really do love you.”

“Not enough to marry me.”

The ring gleamed in the sunlight. She took the two steps that brought her to the edge of the dock. She held it out to him. She looked deep into his searching blue eyes as he took it into his palm. The wind played in his hair. The sun lay bright on his broad shoulders.

She searched for an answer that didn’t come.

Sometimes, there were no words.

As softly as she could, she turned away from Parker Pryce-Weston and headed home.

that weekend

I
t was the longest walk Marta had ever made.

She stood up from the couch and climbed across Wendy’s feet, and then sidled past the broken chair. The carpet was knobby and thin beneath her feet. She felt her friends’ gazes like warm breath on the back of her neck. She trailed her fingernails along the wall as she approached the bathroom door.

In her mind came the image of Esperanza, her first babysitter. Marta had idolized the fifteen-year-old with her press-on nails and dangling gold earrings and rhinestone-studded jeans. Esperanza was full of life, always laughing on the phone. When Esperanza stopped babysitting, Marta’s mother wouldn’t tell her why. A year later, Marta glimpsed the sixteen-year-old in front of a five-floor walk-up not far from the school, struggling to carry an infant as she folded the stroller with one hand already laden with groceries.

Marta had always hoped she’d be smarter than this.

Just before she turned into the bathroom, she closed her eyes and tugged on the gold cross around her neck, the one she’d received on her first communion, and whispered a prayer for a single blue line.

On the edge of the sink lay the white stick.

She saw it, and the breath rushed out of her, and with it came a strange strangled sound, and then her knees hit the cool tiles of the bathroom at bruising velocity. Spots swam before her eyes.

Then they were all there, clutching at her, Dhara’s hair sweeping across her face, Kelly pulling her upright. Wendy picked up the stick and the box and compared the two, the little furrow between her eyebrows deepening as she announced the news.

Marta’s heart pounded as they pulled her off the bathroom floor and led her back to the living room. Her legs weren’t her own, and the vaulted ceiling danced before her. They eased her onto the couch, murmuring words she could hear but didn’t understand. All she could think of was that she was pregnant.

Oh, God, she was pregnant.

Kelly offered her a cup of steaming tea. Marta hesitated. “Is there caffeine in this?”

“No,” Kelly said. “Just chamomile.”

“I can’t drink caffeine now. I can’t eat seafood now. I can’t drink whiskey now.” Marta brought the cup to her lips with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking. “I can’t go to law school now.”

Wendy exchanged a glance with Dhara. Marta read the unspoken communication and knew there was no avoiding the conversation.

“Oh, God, I was so stupid.” Marta squeezed her eyes shut and let the tea warm the palms of her hands. “Please, scream at me. Tell me how stupid I was.”

“Marta,” Wendy said gently. “Nobody is going to yell at you.”

“It was a condom fail. I thought the timing was all wrong. I didn’t think…”

“It could have happened to me and Josef,” Wendy said. “It could have happened to Kelly and Trey.”

Marta looked anywhere but in those three pairs of worried eyes. This wasn’t really happening. She was just having a very bad dream. She’d been so stressed, waiting on acceptance letters from law schools, finishing up her senior thesis, trying to keep up with schoolwork and summer job applications, trying to figure out why—despite the fabulous sex—her boyfriend, Chuck, had dumped her two weeks ago for that fawning mousy-haired English major. She wished someone would pinch her. She wished she could wake up and find her life all neatly planned again.

“It’s still early.” Wendy sat close, her bare arm pressing against hers. “Those tests aren’t one hundred percent accurate. It could be a false positive.”

It wasn’t. Marta knew, deep down, as sure as she’d ever been about anything. Her body had already started changing in small but perceptible ways. Her breasts were tender, and there was an odd fullness across her lower abdomen. She was pregnant, and if nature followed its course, in eight months she would give birth to a daughter or son.

Oh, God.

Marta rattled the teacup onto the coffee table and stared at her shaking hands as if they didn’t belong to her, as if her whole body didn’t belong to her. This couldn’t possibly be happening to her. It was happening to that other girl, the one with the dark tangled hair quivering in her place on the sofa.

In the tense silence, she sensed another unspoken communication passing between Wendy and Dhara. She knew they were weighing how to broach a subject they knew Marta did not want to hear. The subject was complicated by the fact that Kelly was here—adopted Kelly, the abandoned Gloucester baby—rocking on the other side of the coffee table, her eyes glazed, her pale face a mask of shock.

Marta knew what Kelly was thinking. She knew it as if Kelly were screaming it from the rafters. Kelly’s biological mother had faced the same choices that Marta faced now. There was one decision that woman did
not
make, a choice that was the reason a full-grown Kelly was now here in this room. Kelly’s mother had instead chosen to leave her two-day-old daughter swaddled tight on the firehouse stairs, giving Kelly life, even as she forever gave up the chance to raise the brilliant, beautiful redhead she’d brought into the world.

Marta already knew what she was going to do. She’d spent the last two and a half weeks pretending she wasn’t thinking about this, every morning, every night, and every moment in between, when in truth she was burning out desk bulbs drafting flowcharts for every possible outcome.

With a sinking heart she thought of her mother’s double shifts, the lack of family vacations, the little economies her parents had practiced in order to pay Marta’s way through college. With her throat tightening, Marta thought of Chuck and the quagmire of issues the two of them would need to work out. And then, for one last time, she thought of her whole Life Plan, going up in a ribbon of smoke.

“This is going to break my mother’s heart,” she said, as she cleared her throat and tried to collect herself, wiping the moisture from the corner of her eyes. “She had such great hopes for me. But she will help me.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I can’t raise a baby alone.”

Without a word, the girls clambered onto the sofa. Dhara slung an arm around Marta’s neck, pulling her close. Wendy’s face dug into her shoulder. And Kelly, climbing barefoot over the coffee table, grasped Marta’s cheeks in both hands as she gave her a long, solemn look. She smothered Marta in her wild hair as she pressed her lips close to her ear.

“Look around you, Marta. You are not doing this alone.”