The Best Kind of People (30 page)

“I know, we met here when I was looking to score some weed,” Sadie said.

“No, man. Wow!” Lena rolled her eyes and looked at Jay. “You really don’t remember?”

“From where?”

“I was in your class at Avalon. Like, from kindergarten.”

“No you weren’t. I’d remember a green-haired girl.”

“It was brown before. I got kicked out for writing that story narrated by a school shooter. And I was, like, the only Asian in the school. So, you’re basically racist.”

“What? No, I’m not!”

“Just kidding, man. I was quiet. I get it.”

Jay looked her up and down. Sadie wondered if the blue hair meant he was gay. Maybe they both were. Or a couple. He was shy maybe, not too cool for school. Jay lit a joint and passed it to her. They shared it, talking about a
TV
show, a YouTube celebrity, their parents, normal teenage minutiae. She was happy for it.

“There’s going to be a party next week. You should come. Put your number in my phone.” She handed it to Sadie, who added her name.

Sadie couldn’t remember the last time she’d made a new friend.

IF HER DREAM
of running away with Kevin came to pass, her friends could all be new. A rebirth. “Went for a run, met a new friend,”
she wrote in her journal for Eleanor. “Thoughts about the future.” That looked positive, she reckoned.

She got home and realized she had missed her father’s call. Then she saw her mother sitting in the kitchen with Bennie and Andrew. There were papers between them.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize what time it was,” she said.

“You were jogging at nighttime? I don’t like that. It’s not safe. And it’s cold out.”

“The sun
just
went down,” she said. She touched her eyes. She was sure they were red and that it was obvious she was high. But no one seemed to notice. “Dad called?”

“Yes, he did. You know he always calls at the same time.”

“I’m sorry I missed it,” she said.

“It’s okay, you’re still a kid. It happens.”

Sadie pictured her father — lonely, in a cold cell — and her disregarding his happiness.

“I’m going to go to bed early. I think I’m coming down with something,” she said. No one was listening.

She went upstairs, and read a text from Jimmy as she got into bed.
Come over when you’re back from New York. We’ll wear soft pants and play video games and Mom will make us eat all the cookies. It feels weird not to see you over the holidays. Please?

Sure
,
she texted back.
That sounds sweet.

TWENTY-EIGHT

JOAN AND SADIE
spent the majority of the drive to New York City listening to a radio program about human limits. The limits of the body, the mind, the spirit. Neither was in the mood for the Christmas carols on the other stations. Joan felt relief for the distraction, and was glad to see that Sadie was able to just sit still and listen, something Joan hadn’t seen much evidence of lately. Her moods had been explosive after she’d moved home; one minute she’d be weeping with Payton on her lap, watching television — something she rarely used to do — and the next she was running outside, even though it was freezing, up and down the hill in the backyard. Joan was waking up an hour earlier than usual to prepare healthy meals, line up fish oil capsules and a multivitamin beside scraps of paper that read “I love you! Bean salad and quinoa in the fridge for your lunch! Back at 7 — chicken pot pie for dinner!” Joan used to hate that her mother would channel her concern for her as a child into food, but it was the only thing she could think to do for Sadie. Joan could spend only so many hours on the edge of her bed, asking her how she was feeling, waiting for the inevitable “Just leave me alone
.
”
Joan didn’t blame her. It was a stupid question. How was anyone supposed to feel under the circumstances?

Andrew and Jared lived in the West Village in an apartment above a bookshop. Jared had inherited the lease from his ex-boyfriend, who’d been renting it since the 1970s. It was very small, but inexpensive for the area. Jared’s salon was right around the corner on West Tenth Street. The New York City of Joan’s youth, the one she had visited a few times a year for most of her young adult life until she had children, had disappeared. The Village was quiet and clean, full of designer dress shops, hair salons, juice bars, and coffee shops. Sadie and Joan gripped their matching purple canvas rolling suitcases and carried them up the narrow staircase to the second floor. The hallway smelled like a sweet insecticide that seemed to stick to Joan’s tongue. Sadie bounded up the stairs ahead of her, while Joan paused on the landing to catch her breath, gripping the glossy black railing. She hadn’t been exercising enough. Sadie knocked emphatically on the door.

Jared smelled like a forest when he hugged Joan. She stood back, took in his clean-shaven face, the angle of his jaw. He was almost blindingly handsome, which was matched by the natural kindness that emanated from everything he said and did. “Joan,” he said, squeezing her upper arm warmly, “I’m so glad to see you again.”

She believed him. She could trust him, she realized. She’d developed a new awareness about people and their intentions, something she never used to think about consciously. Her son was lucky to have Jared. She squeezed his sizable bicep and pulled him into another hug, which made him laugh. She hugged Andrew next, whose hugs often felt like handshakes, and she wondered if Andrew even deserved Jared, in some ways. She was unable to stop being critical of her son sometimes, because she saw her worst qualities reflected in his behaviour: his short fuse, his fussiness, the way he worked too hard.

Joan looked around at their home, a cramped space decorated to make it appear bigger. The furniture was mostly black, white, or grey, and in shapes that appeared uncomfortable, at odds with the human body. They had a fake silver Christmas tree, set up on a speaker. Everything was rectangular, there wasn’t a curved angle in sight, only clean lines and lack of colour. Joan thought it was cold and probably impractical to heat. Sadie walked over to a long-haired grey and white cat perched on a diamond-shaped pillow in the large window that overlooked the street.

Jared took Joan’s suitcase and rolled it towards the guest room. “Joan, I am just so pleased to have you in our home. Hotels are so impersonal, and we got this great new Murphy bed behind the bookshelf for guests.” Joan tried to wrap her head around the fact that he was her son’s boyfriend. It was surprising almost every time she met him. It was one thing to know it and to understand it, but to see it and deal with it was quite another thing.

He led her to the guest-room space behind a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. Jared had already pulled the bed down. There was a lilac duvet with bright green throw pillows and a stack of turquoise towels in descending order of size on the edge of the bed. Otherwise the space was completely bare. Jared showed Joan how to open and close the wooden screen that would allow her some privacy. Joan wanted to slip into the bed and just lie there, stop time from moving forward.

Instead, she leaned her overnight suitcase against a side of the bookcase and followed Jared back out into the open area, the kitchen and living room combo.
Fake it till you make it
, she thought, which is exactly what one of the women she disliked in the support group kept saying. She thought it was ridiculous and reductive, until it proved very useful almost every day.

Andrew busied himself around the island in the kitchen area, making a pot of green tea and setting out a basket of Christmas cookies. Sadie sat at the table texting, beside her mother and Jared. Andrew kept putzing around as they small-talked.

“Andrew,” Jared scolded him, “you can actually sit down with us. You don’t have to do the dishes
now
. He’s so obsessed with cleaning, honestly.”

Sadie giggled. Joan didn’t think either of them had ever seen Andrew be put in his place.

“That’s funny. Andrew never lifted a finger at home,” Joan said. She picked up a star-shaped cookie. It was still warm. She wanted to be hungry. She took a bite and made an approving noise.

“Andrew is so into baking lately.”

Sadie broke out in laughter, then paused. “Oh, you’re serious?”

“No, no, he doesn’t have a lot of free time, but baking is very meditative, right?”

“Jared. Enough,”
Andrew said, but he was still smiling, filling up a bulbous glass pitcher of water, throwing in some lemon slices from the fridge. “It’s soothing my nerves. I’ve had a lot of trouble sleeping.”

“Me too,” said Joan and Sadie at the same time. Jared scanned them with a sympathetic look.

“I’ve been teaching Andrew about some basic self-care principles my naturopath is keen on, with some vitamins and supplements for stress, and some mindfulness techniques.”

Jared trailed off as Sadie texted and Joan looked around at the life her son had built. Her once lonely, too-smart, and cynical son who never seemed to have time to visit had created his own home here, in this city she’d always considered cold and uninviting, prohibitively expensive, individualistic, and devoid of comfort. The apartment was filled with plants and other signs of vibrancy. He had been doing well, she realized, before this all happened.

LATER, THEY TOOK
a walk around Lower Manhattan, bundled up in their winter coats, hands clutching phones locked on the camera setting. Shoppers bustled around them with arms full of gift bags, irritated at their slow touristic pace.

In the evening, in lieu of a Christmas Eve feast, they ordered three kinds of mac ’n’ cheese from a specialty restaurant and played Scrabble, approximating a normal family visit. Clara came over for some eggnog and they watched
How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
while Joan finished knitting the last pair of mittens she was making for gifts: a black pair for Andrew, ice-blue and green stripes for Jared, red for Sadie. They’d decided not to exchange purchased gifts, just homemade things, and not to do any of their usual traditions. “The advantage of New York is you can avoid all those expectations,” Andrew said when Joan asked him if he was sad to miss Christmas in Avalon Hills.

ON CHRISTMAS DAY,
Jared opened up the salon just for Sadie; his gift to her was some fun spa treatments. Joan, Andrew, and Clara were going to the movies.

Joan watched Sadie get settled into her chair in the back of the spa space, after they’d received the grand tour and Joan had turned down Jared’s offer of a relaxing lavender oil massage and manicure. The idea of being touched with such care was inviting. How long had it been since she’d actually been touched by another human being for more than two or three seconds? But she felt as though her arms were wooden and splintery, and that she didn’t deserve such luxury. She was afraid that if someone touched the base of her neck, or the swollen muscles in her shoulders, they would unleash some of the emotions she wasn’t even aware were present, loosen the netting of repression that held her body together. So she accepted Jared’s jars of homemade plum jams and red pepper jellies instead.

They waited for Clara outside the salon. Andrew’s phone chirped an electronic sparrow song. He pulled it from his pocket and walked a distance away. Joan took her own phone out and snapped a candid photo of him.

“Hey, Bennie,” he said. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. What? Where is he now?”

He hung up the phone and turned to his mother. She saw that he was crying. It was the first time she’d seen Andrew cry since he was in grade school. He blinked both eyes, then shut them tightly.

“Dad’s in the hospital. Someone tried to kill him.”

TWENTY-NINE

A FINE COATING
of soft chocolatey liquid covered Sadie’s arms and torso, and instead of feeling like a human dipped doughnut, as she had anticipated, the smell dissolved all the tension she was holding in her muscles, and every inhale seemed to bring her closer to herself. “I understand now why rich ladies do this,” she said to her masseuse, a thin brunette with a racing stripe of pink blush across her whitened cheeks. But why did she say that? She was obviously a rich lady’s kid.

Jared poked his head through a long velvet curtain. “How are you, little sis? Did I tell you or what?”

“Jared, I feel amazing.” She felt a swell of affection for him as he smiled wide back at her. Maybe she could move to New York, stay with them. Maybe the problem was the town, the circles she was surrounded by, the excess and wealth.

“Andrew was supposed to come back after he helped your mom with the bags, and now he isn’t answering his phone. Has he texted you?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

The masseuse was massaging her face before applying the final bits of a body wrap to her cheekbones when Sadie’s phone vibrated inside her handbag, slumped under the spa table.

“Maybe that’s him,” she said.

The massage therapist seemed almost hostile when Sadie reached an arm into her purse. “You’re not relaxing!” she commanded. Sadie sat up mid-rub to check her phone.

“No, it’s an email,” she said. Reading Kevin’s name, her face erupted in a grin. Sadie felt that her whole body was probably noticeably throbbing through all the chocolatey product.

“He probably just went back up to the apartment,” he said.

Sadie couldn’t hear him, could only read and reread the email.

Sadie lady, how are you? Merry Christmas! Jimmy says you two broke up. Don’t worry, you’ll work it out. He’s lucky to have a cool chick like you. Or you’ll find someone else who sees how smart and beautiful you are. Just thinking about you today. I’m sitting by the fire in a cabin with my parents, enjoying the fact that I just came up with the perfect ending for my book. My agent loves it! I’ll be back in Avalon Hills tomorrow. I’m looking forward to seeing you.

The masseuse pressed a warm face cloth on her skin, washing away the product with a gentle hose and massaging her head, arms, and legs. Then she washed Sadie’s hair with a shampoo that smelled of fresh fruit and painted her nails a bright pink called New Revelations. “Very grown-up,” said the esthetician. Sadie didn’t tell her that several chemicals in nail polish have been linked to diabetes, and that spa workers have astronomical rates of asthma and respiratory illness. Sadie realized she’d stopped her incessant fact quoting. Tidbits weren’t coming to her the way they used to. She was getting used to silence, to speaking when spoken to.