When We Were Friends (19 page)

After fourteen hours on the road we reached Mendham, a small town centered on a steep hill. Or maybe “town” was overstating
things; it was more of a village really, with a gray stone church, a corner grocery and a theater playing only one movie, and several houses labeled with handcrafted signs, all with names like “Country Quilts,” “Country Curtains,” and “Old Country Clocks.” I followed Alex down a tree-lined street that opened into a small cul-de-sac, expansive lawns backed by woods, and small cape homes with tidy flower gardens. He signaled and turned into the driveway of an L-shaped white cape with pale green shutters and a wide front porch. The sloping lawn was bordered by a low stone fence and overrun with purple and white wildflowers; a curving flagstone path led up to the front door. I pulled behind Alex’s car and stared, almost expecting Disney creatures to emerge from the woods, bluebirds and brown-spotted horses with long eyelashes.

He stepped out and stretched, hands at the small of his back, then approached my car. “That drive was about three hours too long,” he said.

“This is …” I started, then shook my head.
Beautiful
and
lovely
would sound stupid,
cozy
would sound like an insult. But it was all those things, what a person might imagine when she said the word “home.” “… totally nice,” I finished stupidly.

He smiled. “It is, isn’t it? When I bought it, I felt like it was a place I could grow old in. I didn’t realize how lonely it can be, how there’s no single women and absolutely nowhere to go on a Friday night. I mean dinner out’s a major expedition.” He shrugged. “But I kind of like solitude.”

He was looking for single women, which meant he must be single himself, and straight. Which of course was none of my business, but an interesting piece of information nonetheless. “I didn’t realize places like this existed anymore,” I said, opening the car door. “I thought developers chomped up land like this and spit out condos and strip malls.”

“Welcome to New Hampshire. Our shopping options are limited, but it doesn’t matter because all you need is flannel shirts and Timberlands. You want to pop the trunk? I’ll get your bags.”

I opened the trunk, then lifted Molly from her car seat, and she
looked around her, wide-eyed, trying to absorb her fourth home in six days. We ducked under a strand of the wisteria climbing the front porch and followed Alex into an entryway with wide-planked pine floors and white wainscoting, a narrow staircase, and a small wooden table holding a silver-framed photo. I picked up the photo as he plunked the bags on the floor. “Posy,” he said. “My big sister.”

The woman in the photo looked like a female version of him, slightly thinner, her face more pinched, but with the same thick dark hair and slim nose and sculpted jawline. “She looks like you,” I said.

“You think? I keep that there to remind myself she’s a grown-up now, because in my mind whenever I think of her, she’s sixteen or seventeen at the most. She lives in North Jersey, near Manhattan. Got an MBA last year and she’s a … I don’t even know exactly what she is. A financial something or other. Completely different world from me.” He pointed at the three adjoining doorways. “As evidenced by my tiny den, kitchen, and dining room, which would all fit into her master bathroom. Come into the kitchen and I’ll make us something to eat. You hungry?”

“Sure, thanks,” I said, although really I wasn’t hungry at all. I hadn’t eaten anything but salad and a stale rest-stop bagel for the past twenty hours, but I didn’t feel the slightest need for food. Maybe my stomach was shrinking.

The kitchen was small: honey-stained cabinets with crookedly hung doors, black-and-white checkerboard tiles, a bright green stove that seemed like something from the twenties, and a butcher-block countertop. In my arms Molly started to protest, squirming free, and I set her down to let her crawl across the floor as Alex opened the refrigerator. “I need to shop,” he said, rummaging through the shelves. “Been gone awhile, and it looks like everything here is in the process of developing new parasitic life-forms. But no fear, I’ll find something.”

He pulled out a carton of milk, sniffed at it and made a face. Molly crawled toward him, scooting fast across the floor, but caught the
side of her head against the corner of a cupboard. She stared at it as if trying to understand why it had attacked, and then her face turned red and she screamed. “Uh-oh, we have an injury,” I said, lifting her, inspecting her forehead.

Alex spun around, alarmed, the look on his face so pained I felt a pinch of affection for him. “Looks like she’s fine, just scared herself.” I touched the small welt on her head. “Crawling’s tough, hunh? Hard to see where you’re going. Hopefully you’ll learn soon that it’s not the most practical mode of transportation.”

He smiled at this as he brought the milk to the sink and poured it down the drain. “Why don’t you take a look around? Hang out in the den and I’ll whip something up.”

“Can I help? Although I guess I should tell you, I’m not that good a cook.”

“Well I am, so don’t worry about it.” He flicked the back of his hand at me. “Go on, it’ll just be a few minutes.”

I walked with Molly to the den. It was a cozy room, painted pale yellow with two worn couches, a stone fireplace and a bay window looking out into the garden. I gazed out the window at the pines swaying their layered skirts, the weed-strewn path and flower beds. Maybe this was something I could do to thank him for his hospitality, fix up the flower beds, pull the weeds, maybe even make him a vegetable garden. Our yard back home was puny, more the size of a lawn troll than an actual lawn, but here I could create a masterpiece. “I always wanted to learn how to grow flowers,” I told Molly. “Gardens are another form of art, really, don’t you think?” I imagined crawling across the grass with Molly, making wishes on dandelion clouds. The two of us, nature girls.

I looked around the room, scanning the book spines on the floor-to-ceiling shelves as I juggled Molly on my hip to stop her crying. Mostly fiction, the type that won awards, but also books on science and philosophy, and I tried to guess what that said about his personality, other than that he was smart. Maybe he was the kind of person who spent all his time thinking, trying to figure out the meaning of
life. How else could someone live alone in the middle of nowhere unless his thoughts were so interesting he didn’t need anything else?

There were four photographs on the shelves, one of a young couple, a woman with Alex’s hair and a man with his strong chin; a family photo of the same couple with a baby boy and two little girls—one brunette and one blonde—and the other two of a woman with long, sandy brown hair. She was young, in her early twenties, and absolutely stunning, one of those women so beautiful they both prove there must be a God, and make you hate Him. Was she a girlfriend?

On another of the shelves was a dull bronze trophy with an engraved plaque, and I lifted it. A name.
Lakewood, NC Championships—1989, MVP Alex Connor
. Alex Connor. A kind of waspy name. The name you might imagine for the captain of a crew team.

“For hockey,” he said from behind me. “My proudest moment and I was sure when I got MVP that I’d go pro, but in the end I guess I valued my teeth too much. More than twenty years ago, and sad as it is, I still keep the trophy in the middle of my bookcase.”

I grinned and turned to face him. “Oooh-aaah, very impressive, Mr. Connor,” I said, trying the name on my tongue, trying to associate it with his face.

“Okay, let’s not tease me.”

“Sorry.” I nodded at one of the photos. “Who’s the woman?”

“Oh …” His face looked suddenly distant. “Just somebody I used to know.” He shrugged, then flicked a teasing smile that didn’t look even remotely genuine. “Nosy, aren’t you. Why don’t you come and eat?”

Somebody he
used
to know? Was he displaying two photos of her because her face made for beautiful artwork? An ex-girlfriend; she must be. A former girlfriend who still haunted him.

I followed him to the dining room, a small room with a distressed green-painted farmer’s table, mismatched chairs and a white pie cupboard with punched-tin doors. I sat at the table, Molly in my lap. “You like sandwiches?” I whispered, and reached for one, broke off a piece. It was peanut butter, on partially frozen wheat bread.

Alex laughed at my expression and I quickly tried to hide it. After all, I liked peanut butter, loved it even. There were times I’d been tempted to pay homage to the peanut butter inventors. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just when you said you were a great cook and used the words ‘whip something up,’ I started expecting something like watercress and whitefish. So thank God, really.” I took a huge bite and chewed heartily. “This is perfect.”

“Then you won’t mind Yodels for dessert.”

“Yodels are God’s gift to mankind.”

“Aren’t they?” He reached for a sandwich and leaned back in his chair. “So I was avoiding personal questions back in West Virginia, but since we’re now temporary housemates, maybe you could tell me more about yourself. Like what do you do for fun? For work? To keep yourself sane?”

“Art, art and art,” I said. “I’m a very boring person. Next question.”

“You’re an artist?” His eyes lit up, and I was so tempted to make more out of my painting than it actually was, tell him I was in museums, books, Europe. But I’d stopped calling myself an artist a long time ago. It was a description that when I was younger I’d fixed onto myself, like one of those fake tattoos, to make myself seem more interesting. But once I’d needed to support myself and Star (and it became clear canvases weren’t a realistic vehicle for supporting anything more than a chewing gum habit), it started fraying and coming loose and I couldn’t justify sticking it back on again.

“Just wall murals,” I said. Molly covered my mouth with her hand and I pretended to eat it, growling Cookie Monster noises, making her shriek with laughter. Until I pictured myself through Alex’s eyes, got embarrassed and pulled her hand away. “I’ve done some canvases too, and I’ve sold a few of them, but they’re mostly just for personal amusement.”

“Don’t downplay it! This is a definite personality flaw I’m seeing about you, Leah. You’re like the most self-deprecating person I’ve ever met. I think artists are fascinating, being able to take whatever’s in your head and make other people see it.”

“I’m most definitely not fascinating. And I’m not being self-deprecating, just truthful. Generally, my life’s been mind-numbingly dull.”

“You’ve gotten married, had a baby. That’s a lot.”

Oops, right. I’d forgotten. “Yeah, true,” I said quickly. “But I wouldn’t call that fascinating.”

He gave a sympathetic smile. “How’d you wind up with your husband, anyway? You seem like way too strong a person to have ended up with somebody who’d mess with you.”

I set down my sandwich and pushed my plate away, my mind racing uselessly. “Ex-husband,” I said.

“Sorry, that’s way too personal, isn’t it. Hell, I’m too tired to be thinking of appropriate conversation topics.”

“No, it’s okay.” I stood. “I’m going to get Molly some food. Just a sec.”

Alex held out his arms and I handed her to him, then rushed out to the entryway where he’d set our bags. I grabbed the diaper bag and stood a minute, staring at the door. Then brought it to the dining room where Alex had Molly on his lap, talking softly to her and letting her explore his fingers.

I pulled out a jar of strained spinach and a spoon, then scooted my chair close enough to feed her. “So,” I said. “David.” I couldn’t look at him. Instead I kept my eyes focused on Molly as I unscrewed the jar cap. “That’s his name, and we were in high school together. Not dating or anything, just part of the same crowd. And then we met up again ten years later at a reunion.”

I filled the spoon and held it to Molly’s mouth, but she batted it away. I set the spoon back in the jar and, needing something to fiddle with, I picked up a sandwich and started tearing at the crusts. “We got married within five months and he left me pretty soon after Molly was born. He was the biggest mistake of my life.”

Alex took my hand but didn’t speak. We sat there a minute, my hand in his, and finally I continued in a whisper. “I can’t let him ever get custody. And now I’ve run away, I’m so scared of what he could do to us if he ever found out where we are.”

Alex watched me, his face flushed with an expression I couldn’t read. After a minute he rose and hoisted Molly against his hip. He stood behind my chair and wrapped one arm around me, his chin resting on my head. “It’s okay,” he said finally. “If he’s looking for you, I’ll make sure you don’t get found.”

I sat there feeling the weight of his chin and arm and the catch of his stubble in my hair, wondering at the irony. How despite having kidnapped a baby and driven hundreds of miles from the only home I’d known, this was the first time maybe ever that I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I had no idea what would happen next, but I had this sense like I was on the edge of something huge. I saw it written in bright yellow print like on the West Virginia border sign.
WELCOME TO THE WORLD, LAINEY
, it said.

“So you have a choice which bedroom you want,” Alex said, leading me upstairs. “Although I have to say, it’s not much of a choice. The smaller room’s my office. It has a bed already, the one I grew up with actually, but we could move it to the other room if you’d rather.”

The room’s walls were papered in faded purple stripes, gauzy drapes on the large window. It held a twin bed with a white bedspread, a yellow armchair and a desk with a laptop and piles of papers. “If you want to sleep here, I’ll move the desk downstairs so I don’t intrude on you when I work. Or there’s the other room.” He gestured across the hall.

The room was crammed with folded blankets and piles of clothes, file cabinets, beat-up furniture, and an old computer dangling a tangle of colored wires. “The room’s bigger,” he said, “but it’ll obviously take more work to make it habitable. This house has a storage problem, in that it seems to eventually disgorge everything I try and pack neatly away in the attic.”