When We Were Friends (25 page)

“You want to invite her here?” His voice was so soft when he said this, no wariness or sign of disapproval, and I felt my eyes fill. I’d told him the most horrible, unforgivable lies. Taking advantage of his generosity, what kind of person did that make me?

He was watching my face questioningly but I couldn’t answer, was too ashamed of my own audacity, listening to the argument in my head:

I turned away. “It’d just be till I get the rest of our plans settled. But feel free to say no. You’ve already done way too much and I’d almost feel better if you admitted you were on your last nerve.”

“Stop, okay? I have room for her, Leah. We’d just need to clean out the junk room, and I have an old futon that’s actually pretty comfortable.”

I smiled grimly. “She probably won’t even make it up here anyway. It’s pretty unlikely, really. I mean, I used to try just making her walk down to the used-book store on the corner, and she’d take a few steps and hyperventilate and pass out. And now Pamela’s going to get her into a car? Drive her hundreds of miles? The odds are a bazillion to one. And then what? Get her into a car again in a week and drive
her somewhere else? Twenty bazillion to one. I’m just so worried about her.”

“Try not to be. Getting your mom out in the middle of nowhere might actually be good for her. Less here for her to be scared of, you know? You’ve already been through so much, and I want to do whatever I can to make things easier.”

Yes!
thought Bad Lainey.
Don’t feel bad about letting him help, you deserve this! You totally
have
been through so much!
And behind it all, hearing the kindness in his voice:
We love you too
.

And so, Star came to New Hampshire.

Of course it wasn’t anywhere near that simple. Three hours after they’d left I got a panicked call from Pamela asking if it would be okay to give her another Xanax so soon after the double dose she’d taken at home. In the background I heard my mother’s strained breathing and I told Pamela yes, give her another, probably healthier for her to be knocked out by medication than lack of oxygen. Two hours later she’d called to say Star was being sick at the side of the road, and after estimating the proportion of Xanax that might have remained undigested, I told Pamela to go ahead and dose her again.

By the time they arrived that night, they were both pale and shaken. I’d asked Alex to hide out in his bedroom with Molly till the morning, realizing it’d be best not to introduce Star to him until she recovered a bit. My thought was that not only might an unfamiliar face set her off again, but more important her mind was in too many places to remember how my name, and relationship to Molly, had changed.

Star walked on trembling legs, propped between me and Pamela, sobbing with her eyes closed as we guided her through the door and up the stairs. “I have to pee!” she said, in a tight wail exactly reminiscent of a toddler fearful of accidents, and so we helped her to the bathroom. Then brought her into the bedroom we’d cleared out that morning, removing junk, tacking worn posters on the wall, laying
the top of an old coffee table on two filing cabinets to form a primitive desk. We set her on the futon, pulled off her shoes and pants and stretched the covers up tight around her.

“I’ll sleep here with her,” I said. “In case she needs something in the middle of the night. Let me show you the other bedroom.”

I walked with Pamela into the hall, and found Alex peeking out from behind his bedroom door, Molly in his arms. “Everything okay?” he asked softly.

Molly cried out and reached her arms toward me and I took her from Alex. “She’s alive, she’s kicking. We’ll get through this. This is Pamela, by the way.”

“Hi,” Pamela said, then turned to me. “He’s cute!”

Alex’s face flushed as he extended his hand. “Can I get you anything? A drink maybe?”

“And charming!” Pamela took his hand. “But no, thanks, I’m beat so all I want to do is crash. I’ve just spent the past twelve hours trying to convince Star that her leg falling asleep wasn’t necessarily a sign of stroke.”

“Why don’t I keep Molly tonight?” Alex asked me. “She’s in that woozy pre-sleep stage, and we don’t want her snapping out of it. I’ll probably be up first anyway.”

“Now you’re just showing off for Pamela,” I said, then smiled and rested my cheek against Molly’s downy head. “Thanks, Alex. I mean I don’t know how to thank you, really, but thanks.”

In the bedroom, I turned to Pamela. “Have you heard anything new? I haven’t been able to check the news.”

“Well I’ve been on the road since this morning, and I wasn’t about to turn on the radio with Star in the car, but the last I heard David’s still their prime suspect. They’ve called Sydney in for questioning several times, though.”

“You think that’s a bad sign?”

“Well I don’t really know, it’s not like the FBI consults with me, but I’d say it’s not a good sign.”

“Oh crap.” I sank onto the bed and pulled the covers over me. “Oh crap, oh crap, what am I going to do? I haven’t talked to Sydney in
days, and she left a message saying things were getting complicated. What the hell does that mean?”

“Lainey.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Stop, okay? Not tonight. I spent all day dealing with your mom’s hysteria so I don’t need you going there too.”

I suddenly noticed the hollowness of Pamela’s face, eyes sunken and bruised with fatigue. “I’m sorry,” I said. “For everything I’m putting you through. There’s obviously no way I can ever repay you for this.”

“Very true.” She sat on the bed beside me, reached for my hand and squeezed it. “Listen, don’t worry about it. Take a look at my life. The most thrilling thing I ever get to do is chauffeur my kids to gymnastics and watch them fall off balance beams, so being your partner in crime is the most excitement I’ve had in years. Besides, sometimes people do things without expecting to be repaid.”

I thought about this, then said, “I need to talk to you about Alex. Because it’s driving me a little crazy. I can’t stand that our whole relationship, everything he’s doing for me, is all based on a lie. What am I going to do when I leave here next week? Will I tell him the truth and then, I don’t know, fork over cash to pay for room and board? Or do I just write him a thank-you note and disappear? He’s going to hate me when he finds out I’ve been lying.”

Pamela studied my face. “Do you have a crush on him?”

“A crush. What does that even mean? It’s something you do with insects and wads of Kleenex.”

She kept her eyes on my face, unsmiling, so I said, “Wait’ll you get to know him, Pamela.”

“Oh no,” Pamela said softly. “Oh you poor, poor thing.”

I felt a crimp of anger. “Just forget it.”

“Don’t get embarrassed. I’m just thinking …” She shook her head. “Okay, this is going to sound patronizing, so I apologize in advance. But of course you’re falling for the first person who’s showing you this kind of compassion, thinking about you over himself, because all your life you’ve been deprived of it.”

“What’re you talking about? You’re making me sound so pathetic and desperate. I have a good life.”

“You know what I mean. I’m not blaming you, and I’m not saying whatever you’re feeling is pathetic, I’m just saying you should maybe look a little closer at it. Because you know you can’t build a relationship based on lies, right? It’s like trying to build a house without a foundation. It’s never going to hold.”

“I’m not trying to build anything!” I said. “Just stop, okay? You’re treating me like I’m thirteen and considering having sex.”

“Okay, okay. Look how fast you go from being eternally grateful to yelling.” She glanced at me. “How’s Jacqueline holding up?”

I squared my shoulders. “Molly,” I said.

“Right.” Pamela’s mouth twitched. “Molly.”

“Stop it, you know I had to change her name. And she’s doing great, actually,
so
great. It’s amazing taking care of her, a real honor being part of her life. For the first time I feel like my life really means something, you know? Like I have a higher purpose.”

Pamela didn’t answer, just watched my face with her brow furrowed. But I didn’t care. Pamela could believe whatever she wanted, that I was being foolish, living out an unrealistic fantasy, but I knew what I was doing. “And she hasn’t cried at all for Sydney,” I said. “Isn’t that weird? I mean you have kids, so you’d know; when they were that age they had a hard time being away from you, right? But Molly doesn’t seem to miss Sydney at all.”

Yes
, I wanted Pamela to say.
That is truly weird. It must mean Molly likes you better
. Instead she said, “We need to talk about Sydney at some point. I went to see her yesterday, and there’s a few things she said that’ve been worrying me.”

I watched Pamela through the fringe of my bangs, feeling suddenly apprehensive. “Did you kick her ass?”

“Almost.” She held my eyes a moment before saying, “Tomorrow, okay? Right now I’m so tired my eyeballs feel like they’ve been run over by a Hummer. I just want you to be prepared. Most of what she told me makes absolutely no sense.”

“Why am I not surprised? I doubt she thought any of this through.”

“Yeah, I’d agree with you there. It made me feel almost sorry for her until I remembered what she was doing to you.” Pamela smiled grimly. “You know, I thought the fact we’re best friends meant you had good taste, but obviously not. It made me feel insulted.” She wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “It’s the only thing about all this that I don’t forgive you for.”

Back in the other bedroom Star was hunched under the covers, in the fetal position. I sat on the futon to rest my hand on her back.

“I’m so embarrassed,” she said hoarsely.

“Don’t be. Everybody understands.”

“No they don’t. How can they possibly? Pamela spent the whole drive whispering
Stop, stop, stop
under her breath, I heard her. She thinks I’m a fruitcake.”

“Well you
are
a fruitcake.” I lay facing her, and took her hand. “I missed you.”

“That’s because you’re a fruitcake too. But in a week you’ll probably look back on this conversation and think, What was I thinking?” She brought a fist up to her mouth and said, “I don’t know if I can do this, Lainey.”

“You can,” I said. “You are.” I kissed the top of her head, suddenly remembering a night when I’d been eight or nine. It was the night before my stage debut, playing Mr. Smee in the third-grade production of
Peter Pan
, and I was ridiculously nervous, especially considering the minimalism of my lines, various combinations of “Ahoy!” and “Aye-aye!” and “Yonder Peter lies!” But the
whole school
would be there including all my teachers since kindergarten, and lying in bed, trying to run through my choreography, I’d been almost in tears. So Star had sat with me and talked about fear, how you could make it into something physical. A spring like a Slinky
you could compress and then shove down from your chest into a foot. Hold it there so it couldn’t escape into the rest of you.

That day onstage, I’d looked out from behind our cardboard pirate ship and seen her in the audience, beaming in her best dress and newly highlighted hair, and pointing at her right foot. And I’d smiled back and pointed at my own foot, then made it through the play without tripping over lines or shoelaces. Because my mother had been powerful, and she’d known how to handle fear. How had we both gone from that to this?

I kicked off my shoes and slipped under the covers, curling tight against Star to keep from falling off the edge of the small bed. She wasn’t the same person of course, and I’d realized that even as a kid. She started to change and I’d gone from calling her Mommy to thinking of her as
Star
, the adult-child inhabiting my mother’s body. Even my love for her was different, tinged with betrayal, and something that wasn’t contempt, but also wasn’t quite uncontemptuous either.

Lying there, I wished it was Molly in my arms instead. My love for Molly was so simple, so much the opposite of my love for Star, and it had made me realize I was capable of unconditional adoration. Love should have an undercurrent of joy, not pain, and it was ridiculous that I’d been deprived of it so long. Ridiculous that underneath the wonder of loving Molly, I was still so afraid of what it would take from me.

And as I lay there, I realized that part of me hated this hunched shell of a woman who’d stolen my chances at a real life, my desire to look for more. But then she started to shake against me and I felt an immediate twist of guilt. I brushed a tear off her cheek with my thumb, then closed my eyes. “I love you Ma,” I whispered, and she patted my hand in the way one might when accepting an apology.

Sometime later I drifted awake, and lay there without moving or speaking, without opening my eyes. Listening to the
snap-snap-snap
of Star laying out her tarot cards.

By the next morning, Star seemed somewhat better. But she refused to come downstairs, huddling in her room like a cat will huddle in a closet after a move to a new home, pretending the world outside her safe corner does not exist.