When We Were Friends (33 page)

“Have you ever been in love?” he asked suddenly.

I hesitated, then said, “I don’t know. I mean I guess there was my husband. But in retrospect I don’t know if I loved him, not really.” I glanced at him, then said, “Have you?”

He smiled, his eyes seeming distant. “I don’t know either,” he said. “Isn’t that funny? You’d think it should be such an easy question. At least I’ve thought I was in love.”

Which of course filled my mind with impossible questions. I chose the only one that wasn’t completely inappropriate. “How long ago?”

He didn’t answer, and I inwardly cringed. It
had
been inappropriate, and desperate and obvious, and should I apologize or just let
the question hang there? But then he said, “Not that long ago,” an answer that could mean anything; this past year, last month, this morning.

I bit my tongue to keep myself from asking a follow-up, willing him to explain, even knowing it was none of my business. Was that, whatever had happened or was still happening, the reason for his sadness? It must’ve been something awful; Erin had died, which explained why he still kept her picture, or had left him for someone else, or even worse had just told him she’d stopped loving him without explanation. Would he ever tell me? Maybe he still didn’t feel comfortable enough, or healed enough. I’d dropped plenty of opportunities into his lap, but it was obvious he wasn’t ready to take them.

But then he said, “Love’s funny, you know? It does something to you, gets into your veins like a drug so everything looks different and feels different, which makes you do things you never normally would.” He glanced at me, then back at the road, squinting like there was something there he was trying to discern. “But then it changes because regardless of how good the love is, it always has to change. And you look back on what you were thinking and doing when the drug was heavy inside you, all the choices you made and you wonder, Who the hell was that? Which makes you look at the love itself and question whether everything you felt was just this screwed-up hallucination.”

I thought about Sydney, how I’d gone back and replayed every moment of our childhood trying to see the truth behind it, find evidence there’d been some truth. Who had I let myself love since then? “It scares me,” I said.

He looked at me, a question in his eyes, then said, “My mother told me once that love’s like a bullet hole in your heart. Which sounds so cynical, but I know what she meant. She wasn’t even talking about losing my dad, this was probably three or four years before he died, she was talking about the actual pain and danger of loving somebody. She and my dad, they had the kind of love you see in movies, always touching, catching each other’s eye, the way they were with each other always made me feel happy, protected, but in a
way also completely excluded. And after he died, part of her died too; she had a complete breakdown, the hole in her heart bleeding out.”

I touched his hand, thinking about my own father’s death, how thoroughly Star had managed to protect me from it. “I can’t even imagine,” I said softly.

He stopped walking, staring fixedly into the road, then seemed to shake himself off before he said, “Anyway, if I was a therapist I’d say that explains why I’ve built this kind of barrier around my feelings, trying to protect myself from it all. I said love’s like a drug, but so is protecting yourself, you know? Like heroin, the illusion of peace.”

I pressed Molly’s sleeping warmth against me, wondering. How much pain was in him that I could only guess at? What did anybody know of anyone else’s grief when all they could see was the surface of it?

And then suddenly, he reached for my arm. “Look!” he whispered. There right across the road from us was a moose, huge and dark and strangely elegant. We didn’t move, didn’t speak, just stood there watching this imposing but somehow gentle creature as he chewed at the shrubbery at the edge of the woods. As exotic to me as if we’d run into an elephant, or a brontosaurus.

And then, I felt Alex slip an arm around me, resting a hand at my waist.

I couldn’t breathe. Literally couldn’t; something had clamped against my lungs, squeezing. “Alex,” I said hoarsely, dizzy from the lack of oxygen and something darker and heavier, dread and guilt. Panic. Knowing that I had to confess, because of his hand, the majestic power of the animal before us, the remaining glow I felt from the party, all of it. A need to make it all authentic, not founded on a lie.

“Alex,” I said. “I have to tell you.”

His hand tightened at my waist and he pulled me closer to wrap another arm around me, Molly pressed between us. Slowly, he leaned his forehead against mine.

I stiffened, the nerves sparking up and down my spine. “Please,” I whispered.

“I know,” he said. “I realize you’ve been hiding something, but whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. You’re amazing, Leah; I just want you to know that, to know I think that.”

I could smell his breath as he spoke, the dark sweetness of the merlot he’d drunk, the word reverberating.
Amazing
, he’d said, but who did he think was amazing? The Leah who’d run away from her husband to save her child? Or me?

I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my head away, on the verge of either choking or breaking into tears. Because I couldn’t, I couldn’t; it wouldn’t be a real kiss. It’d be exactly as untrue as the fantasies I’d had night after night in Virginia, reading the stories of other people’s love. So even though all of me was aching to tip my face up toward his, instead I pulled away. I pulled away without speaking and strode down the street.

It was only around six when I woke the next morning. And realized (Stomachache?
Check
. Sun stabbing me in the eyeballs?
Check
. Head spinning like a cartoon boxer’s?
Check
.) that I must be hungover. Before my mind kicked into gear I felt a sort of giddy pride at it. I’d always been on the outside of hangovers. In high school it had been a badge of coolness, the girls coming in with rumpled hair and wan faces;
I’m sooo hungover
, they’d say, and then be slapped on the back. Now, I was part of that legacy. With my pounding head, my dry mouth, I belonged.

I lay in bed trying to limit my thoughts to these, only gradually letting in the night before, still images like snapshots: me laughing with Jack as we toasted plastic cups of beer; the glow and sweet scent from Roy’s gnarled pipe; Molly calling me Mama; Alex’s eyes as he watched me across the fire pit.

Then, the walk home. And there it was: the kiss that maybe could have been but wasn’t. What did it mean? And what would happen now? If he’d been planning to kiss me, then he’d think I had rejected him. And if he
hadn’t
planned to kiss me, then he’d see I’d misinterpreted what had only been a simple, kind gesture. I didn’t know which would be more awkward. Either way, how could we ever be comfortable again?

I stood, careful to make sure my head stayed on top of my shoulders,
and leaned to look at Molly asleep in her crib. “I ruined it,” I whispered to her. “Everything we had here.” I tucked my index finger against her loosely curled palm and used my thumb to press her fingers around it. But she only made a small sound of protest and pulled her hand away. Feeling ridiculously hurt, I squeezed a fist and turned back toward my bed.

I needed to talk to Star. I needed to lie with her, my head on her chest, and tell her about last night. “I don’t know what to do!” I’d say, and then I’d burst into tears, let her smooth back my hair and rock me like she used to after nightmares and toddler-sized tragedies. She’d give advice, she always did. She would read my cards and I’d make myself believe them because I had to believe in something. I’d do whatever the cards told me, even if their direction was arbitrary, because it was better than having no direction at all.

I walked to the door, opened it and then felt the crinkle of paper under my bare foot. I bent for it. It was a handwritten note.

I let the note drop from my hands. What was he thinking? What did this mean? Something had come up between midnight last night and six
A.M
.? What could it be besides a wish to get away from me?

I stood there a minute wondering if I was going to be sick, then another minute sure I was going to be sick, and then another actually being sick into the conveniently plastic-insert–lined diaper pail. After which I slid slowly and gracelessly to the floor.

Molly started to bawl, and the door across the hall opened. I moaned and hunched over my knees.

“What’s going on?” Star rushed into the room. “Molly? Molly!” She strode to the crib and lifted Molly, and I felt a ridiculously disgusting spear of jealousy that she’d chosen to comfort Molly over me. Yes, Molly was shrieking and helpless, but I was Star’s daughter! And nauseous! And really, really upset!

“Mom!” I said. “I need help.”

“Are you sick?” She turned toward me, Molly in her arms, wrinkled her nose at the diaper pail and then tested my forehead with her wrist. “I’m not cleaning out your pukey wastebasket, you know. I don’t care if you’re sick; I stopped doing that when you were ten.”

“He tried to kiss me.” I leaned against her leg. “Or at least I think he did, last night, but now he’s gone without telling me he was leaving or saying where he went.” Still leaning against her, I handed her the note.

She scanned it quickly, then stepped away from me. “Okay, you got me. I’ll clean out the pail.”

“Ma …”

“You’ll be okay,” she said, brushing a sweaty lock of hair from my eyes. “You go brush your teeth and I’ll make you some tea, and we’ll figure this all out.”

I spent the rest of the day huddled in blankets with tea and toast and tears. Conversely, Star seemed inappropriately chipper. That afternoon for the first time since arriving, she went downstairs without feeling compelled to draw the curtains. And, tickled to hear Molly had spoken her first word, she spent hours carrying Molly through the house—calling out the names of everything from ants to antiperspirant—rather than turning to her cards. It was like a minor miracle, and even though I was more than a little pissed that she
seemed to be taking something positive from my suffering, I braced myself against her strength as I had as a child, when Star was still all-powerful.

I’d told three people I’d stop by their homes that day—Jack and Susie had sung my praises like I was some kind of undiscovered Renoir and my murals were suddenly in demand—but I wasn’t about to show the
today
me to people who were expecting the
last night
me. It would be a shock to their system. I called to reschedule, and then went back to bed.

But by late afternoon, I was starting to feel a little better. Star had read two Relationship Spreads on me and Alex, and both times she drew the Lovers card. Which, okay, was probably just coincidence and the result of insufficient shuffling, but I leaned on it because I needed something to lean on, and by the end of the day I decided I’d been overreacting, and blamed it on the hangover. What had happened last night? Nothing that couldn’t be explained, and Alex had gone away for some reason completely unrelated to me. When he came back I’d tell him that I’d started to feel sick from all the alcohol and strange food, and had rushed home to lie down for no other reason than to keep myself from puking. That’s all. End of story.

I got out of bed and went to find Molly, who I’d missed, I realized, missed with an intensity that shocked me. How had she become so indispensable to me so quickly? Her milky scent, her gap-toothed smile, the way all her nonsensical phrases turned up at the end so that everything she said sounded like a question. They were like water and air to me. Or at least like my right arm, eyes and tongue, things I could be alive without, but not really
live
without.

I went downstairs and found her in the living room, bouncing in Star’s lap, gnawing on a frozen teething ring. “And this is the most important part,” I heard Star say. I stood outside the doorway, listening. “Life beats down the strong ones like us; it just loves fighting the heavyweight championships. So if you find yourself wondering why some folks seem to get away scot-free, just remember those are the weak-spined ones, the ones who fall apart at the first signs of a
pimple or a boy who doesn’t love them back. Your life might have more ups and downs, but that’s only because you’re strong enough to win regardless.”

I remembered myself on her lap decades ago, being handed the same insights in the same soothing tones, only vaguely understanding their meaning. All my life I’d been the recipient of this kind of “wisdom,” which had probably been passed down from Star’s mother and grandmother, generations of women preparing their daughters for the cruelties of the world. “Appropriate conversation for a one-year-old?” I said.

Star smiled at me. “Yeah, I know. But it’s never too soon to start steeling up against the inevitability of pain.”