When We Were Friends (47 page)

Oh Star
, I thought. How could she have kept this inside so long? I remembered the stories she used to tell about my dad, his laugh, the way we’d both pile on him in bed to watch Saturday cartoons, how he’d try to tickle my belly each time we passed in the hall, how much
he’d loved us. Engraving him in our minds, over and over, to keep him from fading. And then, the stories had stopped. I hadn’t questioned it, but thinking back it seemed so obvious that she’d stopped talking about him around the time all his things had disappeared.

“So there it was,” Star said, “the love I’d been leaning on was yanked away. His death taught me you could never truly predict the future, that anything might happen at any moment, but his journal taught me something you showed us too, in your own way. That you can never really understand what’s happening in the present either, until it’s already passed.”

“It’s like having your chest cave in,” Sydney said, her voice hollow, “finding out somebody didn’t love you.” She paused, then said, “But I thought those cards told you the present and the future. Thought those cards told you about me and Alex.”

“The cards … they’re all I have, but that doesn’t mean they’re ever enough. They try to show me what they can, but because I have a human brain there are limits on what I can interpret. Just sometimes I’m less limited than others.”

“I guess you told Lainey about me and Alex.”

Silence.

“Does she hate me?” Sydney said, then, “No, don’t answer that. Of course she does.”

“Sydney,” Star said. “I’ve been thinking since you came back into our lives about the little girl you used to be. Little Sydney, always testing Lainey’s love for you because you were sure she’d never love you enough, that she’d turn on you like everybody else had. You’d be playing school, you the teacher and Lainey the student, and you’d yell at her, pretend to hit her with a ruler and then look at her with these terrified eyes.
Do you hate me now?
your eyes said. Just waiting for her to prove you right.”

Sydney made a high-pitched scoffing sound, but Star went on. “You needed love, you craved it, just like I needed my memories of Richard and my home and all my things. I know how it feels, like your life could be wrenched out from under you at any moment, and you’d be careening alone into nothingness. Everybody needs something
solid to hold onto, and both of us felt like we had nothing. And I’m sure after David left you, alone with a baby, it was even more terrifying.”

A pause, and then, “Alex told me he was going to leave me too. Last winter he said he didn’t know if he loved me. I’d told him when we first got together how I didn’t think I’d ever loved David, that I’d just been in love with an idea. And that’s the excuse Alex used on me when he tried to end things, that he’d realized he’d been deceiving me because he was more in love with the idea of me, the thoughts he had of me while he was hundreds of miles away, than the truth. He said all the deceit was killing him, and he needed to just start living his own life. Which I couldn’t stand, he was all I had, so that’s when I told him Jacqueline was his.”

“Why hadn’t you told him before that?”

“I don’t know; it was complicated. I didn’t even know for sure if it was true, which I guess he realized since he made me get a paternity test. But also I knew he’d probably try and fight for custody, and I didn’t want David to ever find out he wasn’t the father.”

“You didn’t want to lose David’s money.”

“Oh stop it! The money wasn’t for me, it was for Jacqueline. The child support was the only way to give her the kind of life she should’ve had. But as soon as Alex said he was leaving me, I suddenly realized I didn’t care anymore if David found out. I sent Alex the paternity test results, and he called immediately and of course he said he wanted custody, that he’d move down to Virginia and share custody if I insisted, but he wanted her to grow up with him. He wanted her, he loved her, but he still didn’t want me.”

“And that’s why you told him David had hurt you.”

“Which is what finally made him agree to take care of us, but it was suddenly so screwed up, one lie leading to another.” She gave a strangled laugh, then said, “He never loved me. And I thought all this would be the perfect answer, I’d have Alex and also give Jacqueline a good life. But now what do I have? How can I take care of her by myself?”

Silence, then, “Don’t look at me like that!”

“I’m not,” Star said. “I’m not looking at you, I’m thinking what you have left now is a choice, and a chance to make things right.”

“You think I’m going to turn myself in? I’d kill myself first, put a gun in my mouth. I told Alex I’d deny everything if he went to the cops, and that’s what I’ll do now if you say anything. I’ll tell them Alex stole our baby, I’ll say he broke into David’s house and stole her and then—” She made a choked sound. “Dammit, dammit! I hate this, I hate myself. Do you ever hate yourself?”

“Of course I do,” Star said softly. “I look at what I’ve done to Lainey, how I’ve taken away her life and I despise myself for it. I’ve always thought alcoholics with kids must feel like this, hating themselves but powerless.”

“I
am
powerless,” Sydney said. “It’s like I was telling Lainey about high school, how it all turned out so much more complicated than I ever thought it would, things kept happening and all I could think about was how to deal with those things, without ever really processing what I was doing.” Her voice broke. “What’s wrong with me?”

This time Star didn’t try to comfort her. “It’s not like high school. You were fifteen then, and you wanted to be loved, and you needed whatever self-worth you thought the other kids could give you. But you’re an adult now and you have to realize it doesn’t work like that, that you lose so much more from the narcissism than you gain. So what’re you going to do to make things right?”

“Please,” Sydney said hoarsely. “My nose hurts, I feel sick and I can’t think. I just want … I want …”

“You don’t have to think,” Star said. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen if you take Jacqueline. I don’t know if you have some idea you might start some form of this scheme again with someone new, but if you take her away from Alex, someday she’s going to ask you why her father left. She’ll think he deserted her, just like your parents deserted you, and what do you think that’ll do to her?”

“Star, don’t, please stop.”

“And someday she’s going to ask you about the scars on her back and you’re going to have to lie. But the truth is going to be in your
eyes, Sydney, because when she asks you’ll be remembering. You won’t be able to stop yourself from remembering.”

“Please, oh. Star, I …” Then the patter of feet, a hacking sound. And then the tape cut out.

I stared at the player, then turned it off. Pulled the tape out and squeezed it in my fist. Why had she saved this? On the off chance someone got their hands on the tape, she’d have known it would implicate us in the kidnapping. It must’ve meant something to her, this explanation of herself and what her life had become. Maybe she was keeping it in the hopes that it would help her heal, or at least feel less guilty. Or maybe she’d been planning to show me someday, to help me understand.

When I’d gotten home that night with Alex and Posy, Sydney had already been long gone. Star was in the living room, standing at the window, and she didn’t turn when we entered, just stood there looking out.

Alex and Posy had looked at me and, with Molly in my arms, I’d gone to stand beside Star. After a minute she said, “Sydney’s not coming back.”

“What happened?” I asked softly and she just shook her head.

And that was all she ever said. Maybe at that moment she’d been replaying the last however many years. Maybe she was coming to peace with it all, or maybe she never would.

Of course I’d had no idea then how to react; I’d plied her with questions and she’d turned and kissed my cheek, then walked up to her bedroom. But now, after listening to the tape, I set it back into Star’s drawer and then wrote her a note.
I love you, Mom
, it said and,
You don’t ever have to hate yourself
. So impossibly inadequate, but then everything we try to give the people we love is inadequate. We just have to hope they understand what we really mean.

I tucked the note into her drawer beside the tape, and pulled out all her scarves. Then turned and brought them downstairs to Molly’s party.

•   •   •

What did Sydney do after she’d talked to Star? She disappeared, nothing was heard of her for months and the news stories—which had exploded after her disappearance with blame and speculation and outrage—gradually tapered and then disappeared as well. Until the letter arrived at the police station, postmarked from Sicily.

“Those Italian men,” I remember her saying when we were kids, the word
Italian
like she was making a wish. “They know how to love a woman,” she’d said. Something she must’ve heard from her mother, hilarious in retrospect. Or no, actually, not hilarious. Heartbreaking.

What did she do in Italy? Did she try to find an Italian man? The
Carabinieri
checked for all records of the assumed name from her fake passport, and found only a bank account still holding 65,000 euros, completed forms for the car she’d leased, and the location of the
pensione
where she’d been staying.

I’d tracked down the pensione, called the owner and told her I was an old friend. And she’d believed me, maybe because she would’ve believed anyone, needing so badly to express her mixed feelings about the woman she’d harbored and what she’d learned since. “So quiet,” she’d told me, in broken English, “
suadente
, tell me nothing. She not ever eat the breakfast I giving her, only the
caffè
, and is all the day behind her door or walking by the river. The only time she showing herself is when my
nipoti
visit from Milan. She buy them bags and bags of toys and sit on the floor to play, and I finally see a smile then, a laugh. It show me that this woman, she is broken with the
fantasmi
, the ghosts. But of course I having no idea then the real shape of these ghosts. I leave her alone with the
bambini
, this is what haunts me now.”

She sent me a photo her daughter had taken of the children—toddlers, a girl and a boy. Sydney was there, off to one side; half hidden by an ottoman, but I could see how gaunt she was, her cheeks sunken, the sharp lines of collarbone and jaw, her nose crooked from a badly set break. And her eyes. I could see the past in her eyes, but also a kind of serenity. And I’d like to think that sitting there with the children, she’d actually felt a sense of peace, knowing she’d finally done right.

A week after the photo was taken, she’d sent the letter to the Hampton, Virginia, Police.

And so. The note was read, the
Carabinieri
were called, and the car she’d leased was found stranded in Palermo, by the ocean. In it, her clothes and toiletries, her purse with a wallet and IDs, and Molly’s picture. A pair of women’s shoes was found on the shoreline.

That week, a memorial service was held for the baby. They marked the date of her disappearance on the headstone, since it was
assumed she’d already been dead for a year, that Sydney’s kidnapping attempt had somehow gone horribly, tragically wrong. Sydney was a gifted liar, and nobody questioned whether what she’d said was true. Because she’d known the most effective lies were not lies at all, just truths that could be misread.

There was no service for Sydney, but when I saw the photo of her last days, I spent all that day in the woods with it, thinking about her, mourning I guess. Maybe I should’ve been one of those people wanting vengeance. I know at least I should’ve felt relieved, knowing it was over, that I could stop worrying and regretting.

But in the end all I felt was loss, even knowing the parts of the past I’d lost were not worth mourning, just rungs on a ladder I’d been trying for years to climb free of. I mourned anyway because it was the only past I had. I’d never had a happy childhood, but those rungs had gotten me here. And I needed to be able to look down at them, see where I’d been from enough distance that I’d be able to understand how each had led to the next, and accept them as necessary. And then let go.

“Higher!” Molly said. “Hi-yi-yer!” Soon it would be too cold for swinging, and by next year Molly would be old enough to pump herself. So for this last time I pushed her higher. So symbolic, the act of pushing one’s child on a swing, her illusion of freedom, my willingness to let go only because I knew she’d inevitably return.

“You’ll get dizzy!” I said, fully aware that dizziness was exactly what Molly wanted. She was a daredevil, my girl. Probably the only obvious sign that she didn’t share my genes. All those years I’d resented Star’s terror, the embarrassment of her
You’ll break your neck!
screeches. Replaying those memories later when I wanted someone to blame for my adult fears, my reluctance to try anything new. But now, imagining Molly barreling down a slide or diving into the shallow end of a pool, I knew exactly how Star must’ve felt, how probably every parent feels seeing their child’s littleness against the immensity of the world.