When We Were Friends (42 page)

It was one
A.M
.; shocking to see that so little time had passed since I’d decided we had to leave, and here we were already almost out the door. I was reasonably sure Star was sufficiently drugged by now that I’d be able to pack all her things before having to wake her, then pull her to the car without her ever registering what was happening. By the time she woke enough to understand the passing scenery was more than just a dream, we’d already be miles away. Nobody would hear her screams.

I started up the stairs in my socked feet, and was about to turn down the hallway when Alex’s door opened. I froze as he emerged in boxer shorts and a blue T-shirt, his hair sleep-rumpled. “Thought I heard footsteps,” he said.

I shook my head.

“There was this banging downstairs; it woke me up. Everything okay?”

And just like that, I felt my eyes fill, my entire face flushing with tears. “Just tired,” I tried to say, but the words came out in a high-pitched garble.

“Leah?”

My knees crumpled, and before I knew what was happening I was on the ground. “Tired,” I tried again, and he stared at me a moment in shock, then knelt by me. “Leah, are you sick? What’s going on? I’m going to pick you up, okay?” And then he lifted me as effortlessly as one might lift a limp blanket and carried me to his bedroom. He set me on his bed and closed the door, then sat beside me looking startled. “Okay,” he said, “tell me.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I don’t—” My voice broke, all of it hitting me at once: the knowledge that this was the last time I’d sit with Alex, the last night before he realized what I’d done; the idea of driving hundreds of miles to the accompaniment of Star’s hyperventilating gasps knowing there was nothing I could give her to tame them, no sense of stability, no promise of a resting place. And the idea of heading off into some unknown barren, snowy tundra I imagined as a moonscape with nothing between us and the bleak universe.

And most of all Alex there on the bed beside me, the concern in
his eyes. I wanted to crawl inside him, be enveloped by that concern, the only person in the world who could take care of me. Without thinking what I was doing I circled my hand round his arm to feel the solidity of him, and with the other I reached for the front of his T-shirt, looking up into his face.

His cheeks flushed. “Leah?”

“I need,” I said. “I need …”

His face questioning, he used his thumb to brush a strand of hair off my forehead. Held my eyes a moment before he leaned forward, hesitated again and then kissed me, his lips against my lips for fractions of a second before he startled away.

I stared at him, unblinking. His face was a pale moon in the darkness, almost featureless through the blur of my tears. We sat there a moment, unmoving, and then he intertwined his fingers in my hair and smoothed a thumb over my cheek.

“Please,” I said hoarsely, and then I reached to pull him back against the bed.

And suddenly everything else was gone, the fear, the guilt, all of it evaporating so there was only the feel of him, the scent of him. I wrenched off his shirt so I could feel the tensed muscles of his back and he slipped a hand inside my blouse. Skin against skin, my tears wetting his cheeks and his breath filling my lungs; I yanked at the button on my jeans, tore them off and then pulled down his boxers. He pulled away, hesitating, but when I arched up against him he looked into my eyes, his breath unsteady. Then gave a choking moan and pressed against me.

I love you
, he whispered, and once he’d said the words there was nothing else but the immensity of them as he rocked against me, the words expanding like a balloon, filling me until they were all I could hear or feel or taste. And the taste of the words was tears.

I woke while it was still dark, and lay there without moving. Trying to absorb what had happened, the ache between my legs, the feel of
him sleeping beside me. I’d fallen asleep with my head on his chest, and his arms were still tight around me. So I closed my eyes, trying to fill myself with the feel of this, knowing that as soon as I left him it would start slipping away.

Remember this
, the cushioning muscles of his chest, the softness of his skin, every dark hair on his tanned forearm, the feel of him holding me and how it had been to hear him say he loved me. I squeezed my eyes shut as if that could secure it all inside me, then braced myself to pull away, but as I started to rise I felt him reach for my bare arm. “Don’t get up,” he whispered.

I looked down at his hand, feeling the tickle of it against my arm, stroking me in almost the same way Molly stroked my arm while she was being fed. “Alex—”

“I don’t care if Star and Posy see us. This’d actually be the easy way of letting them know.”

Part of me had thought, seeing the pain in his face last night, that he’d somehow magically sensed I was leaving. But of course he had no idea, and I should never have made love to him. In this one night I’d taken the knot of my betrayal and pulled it a million times tighter.

“Alex,” I said again and then, before I could stop myself, “I have to tell you something.”

His hand stopped moving against my arm. He didn’t speak, and I huddled inside the silence of that moment, the knowledge that within seconds nothing would be the same. And I couldn’t say it, had no idea how to even start, so instead I pulled away and rose, grabbed my shirt and slipped it on as I ran downstairs, feeling his chest sweat or my cheek sweat, or maybe last night’s tears, chilling one side of my face. I reached for the note I’d started to Alex, not even knowing what I’d do with it—slip it under his door and run, throw it at him and run, or just run.

But I owed him more, so in the end I went back into his bedroom, closing the door behind me. He was standing now, his shirt and boxers back on, looking strangely terrified.

Why was he terrified?

My breath hitched and I handed the note to him, and he took it, warily, watching my face. I backed against the door.

“You were going to leave,” he said, without even reading it. “That’s what all the banging was downstairs, and why you were dressed at one in the morning.”

I shook my head slowly, watching his face. “I … had to. I still have to.” My legs were bare, my shirt barely long enough to cover me so I reached for the underwear and jeans I’d thrown by the foot of the bed, and hugged them to my chest as I said, “Alex, I did something wrong, really wrong. I’m not who you think I am.”

For a full minute he didn’t move, his face flushed and bewildered. And I almost turned away right then, slammed the door open and ran down to grab Molly and race out the door. But then he sank onto the bed, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and the note clutched in his fist. And he looked up at me with his eyes pleading. “Neither am I,” he said.

Alex pulled the photo from his nightstand drawer. It was smudged at the edges, one corner bent, obviously handled many times: a newborn with a fringe of carroty hair, swaddled in a blue blanket. I studied it, confused, remembering the story Susie had told me about the photo he’d once kept in the living room, her speculation that he’d had a brother who’d died. “Who is this?” I said.

He didn’t answer, just looked into my eyes, his face drawn and shadowed. I looked back at the photo, the baby’s full lips and orange hair. “It’s Molly,” I said slowly. “Where did you get a newborn photo of Molly?”

“Leah.” He squared his shoulders, still watching me. “I know who you are. Who Molly is.”

I stepped back against the door.

“I’ve always known,” he said. “I knew when we first met at the bed-and-breakfast. I told you I’d been driving up from my grandmother’s funeral in Miami, but there wasn’t a funeral, I’d actually come straight from Virginia. I came out there to meet you.”

I stared at him, feeling suddenly completely disoriented, like I’d been spun round and round and folded inside out, then had the ground pulled from under my feet. All the pieces rearranging and snapping into place: the adoration in Alex’s eyes when he held Molly; their likeness, the full lips and heavy-lidded eyes that had
tugged at the edges of my consciousness without ever quite taking hold. Sydney had taken a paternity test, but you didn’t need to compare DNA to tell whose daughter she was.

“You and Sydney,” I said. My voice sounded strangely flat, detached. “I told her where I was staying in West Virginia so she could send money, and instead she sent you. I really should’ve realized.”

“I got into town earlier that day, followed you from the inn. I spent all morning trying to figure out how to introduce myself, but seeing you in the playground with Jacqueline, how happy you were, it broke me. I don’t pray anymore, I told you that, but standing there I was praying for some sign, someone to tell me what the hell to do. And I almost called Sydney to tell her I couldn’t follow through with this, but then? I was following you back to the inn when your car broke down. And … it felt like fate.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, feeling a rising wave of nausea, trying to steady the room, solidify the floor under my bare feet.

“I’d met Sydney in Virginia four years ago. I know I told you I was catering in New York, but it was actually Norfolk. She was hosting David’s parents’ anniversary party, and she hired me.”

My mind swirled back to the conversation we’d had after he’d disappeared. “Erin,” I whispered, then looked up at him. “Erin?”

“I guess you could say it was a pet name. Years ago, after the first time we made love, she’d warned me what would happen if David ever found out about us. She sounded like she was kidding, it became almost a running joke, her saying how he’d twist her head off her neck or cut her limbs off with a chain saw.”

Made love
, I thought.

“And I teased her about it, started calling him Leatherface and calling her Erin, after the
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
characters, which it turned out wasn’t funny at all, but she didn’t tell me that till much later. Miss Melodrama Erin, and she called me Kemper, Erin’s dumb-ass boyfriend. We laughed about it all; she kept pretending like she got a kick out of it. Even after I found out last year how much truth there was behind her warnings, realized how twisted the joke was, she still wanted to keep using the names. As a sort of code, in
case David ever got his hands on one of the letters I sent her, so she could convince him they were meant for someone else.

Kemper
, the man who’d written the letters the FBI had found. And
Erin
, the name on the note he’d written,
The Girlfriend’s
name. The notes rewritten and reworded umpteen times, the desperation to bring her back into his life. “Who’s the woman on your bookshelf downstairs?” I said. “The woman in your photos?”

He gazed at me blankly. “The woman? Oh … I guess you mean Camelia.”

“That’s your
sister
?” The photos were of his dead sister and
The Girlfriend
, “Erin,” was Sydney. I couldn’t let myself picture the two of them together,
making love
. But that was exactly what I was picturing, him kissing her the way he’d kissed me, whispering in her ear.

“You have to believe I never wanted to hurt you. My plan was always to tell you after I brought you here, as soon as you got to know me and realized I wasn’t a bad guy. Especially after I met you and realized what an amazing person you are, I thought—and I realize I was being naïve—I thought we’d go into this together, keeping Jacqueline safe from David.”

An amazing person. Lies; the past two months all built on my lies and his. Last night, he’d said he loved me.

“I felt like we were both working together for some higher cause, and I wanted to tell you all of it. I wanted to tell you so much, but Sydney kept saying what a huge mistake it would be to trust you not to turn me in. She told these stories about things you did to her in high school—”

“She told stories about what
I
did to her?” Had she told all our stories in reverse? She must’ve realized Alex would relish the idea of helping the underdog avenge the oppressor. Vigilante justice.

“And I realized that was probably bull after I met you, but I couldn’t risk it. I was so scared for both of them. Sydney told me about the burn marks, and said how if she went to Child Protective Services she knew the McGraths’ lawyers would find a way to pin the burns on her and take the baby away. I was starting to have doubts about Sydney, but the idea of somebody pressing a lit cigarette to
Jacqueline’s skin …” He gripped the quilt, his eyes pleading. “It was unbearable. Plus I wanted to be with Jacqueline, which I know isn’t a good reason but I can’t pretend it wasn’t a factor. I only got to meet her once, last spring. So the two hours I got to hold her, and that photo there which Sydney sent along with the paternity test results, they were all I had, Leah. They were the only things I could hold on to.” He shook his head quickly. “
Lainey
, I mean Lainey.”

So bizarre to hear him use my real name. I remembered the nights I’d lain in bed imagining how it would be to confess to him. Dreaming he might understand, accept the truth unflinching and maybe even call me brave. And then the anguish I’d gone through imagining the more likely scenario, that he’d kick me out or call the police, hate me.