Friends Like Us (16 page)

“It’s ten a.m.,” I say, shaking my head in disgust. “Way too early for Twinkies. You should have gotten Ding Dongs.”

She leans against the car, eases one foot out of its flip-flop, and scratches her calf with her toe. “Willa, I need to say … I want to ask you …” She taps the plastic Twinkies package against her bare leg. “Please promise me that you won’t tell Ben what happened last night? With Dougie? Please?” She inches away from the car and rolls her shoulders, straightens her back, revealing the flesh above the low waistband of her shorts. She meets my gaze. For a second Jane looks lost and miserable, her eyes huge and glassy.

I feel the sudden need to protect my friend, to keep her safe from her bad choices and her worst instincts. I grip the handle of the gas pump, sense the vibration under my palm. It’s perverse, really: the hose, the pump, the coursing fluid. I almost laugh. Who is responsible for this? How is it that I’ve never, in all my years of filling cars with gas, realized it before?

The tank is full; the pump clicks off. I replace the gas cap, wipe sweat from my forehead, and reach for the Twinkies, take them from Jane’s thin fingers, her loose grip. We get back into the car, doors slamming shut simultaneously.

Is it as simple as this, then? Is this love? “I won’t tell,” I say to Jane, certain as anything, unwrapping the indestructible yellow pastry and biting off a hunk of it. “Don’t worry.”

Chapter Sixteen

Seth is waiting for me outside our apartment building when we get home from Marcy, lurking in the small lobby like someone you should probably call the police to report.

“Will,” he says, hoisting himself up and nodding hello to Jane. “I need you.” Seth is like the semi-tame deer that hangs around shyly in the backyard, and you want to feed it because you think that without you it will starve, even though it won’t. But still, you approach slowly with your hands full of organic alfalfa sprouts. Even though I’m due at the flower shop in a half hour and all I want is a shower and a bagel, my answer is yes; it’s always yes.

It’s eighty-eight degrees out, and Seth lugs a big cardboard box as we walk, shifting it from arm to arm. His face is dripping, his breathing labored. Nina has asked Seth to meet her at the Bay Bluff School playground, near my apartment. It’s equidistant from her lab and Seth’s new place, and also, I think, she probably wants to see him on neutral territory.

“I can’t do this alone,” he whispers to me as we stand together on the edge of the grass, and I know that this is as close as I’ll get to a thank-you. He cradles the cardboard box and squints, looking around at the throngs of happy, screeching children. “Do you know what all these little kids and babies make me think of?”

A swarm of gnats circles in the air close to my own dripping face; I swat them away, and they return like thugs to harass me. “What do they make you think of?” I ask gently. We wander over to a bench and sit down, and immediately the painted wooden slats adhere to my thighs.

“Sex.”

“Um, Seth, guys who say things like that probably shouldn’t be hanging out at playgrounds.”

“Ha.” He fidgets, moves his hands from the box and clasps them around the back of his neck. Two full moons of sweat darken the armpits of his gray T-shirt. “I just mean, sex. All these women chasing after their kids, they all had sex and made babies and now they’re here, yelling, ‘Good job, Isabella!’ and ‘Aidan, I said no biting!’ ”

I laugh. “You know, that’s just … that’s a weird thing to say.”

“Well, this is a weird place to be.”

“I guess.”

“You have no idea.” He turns to me. The past half year of his life is stamped onto his unshaven face: puffy bags under his eyes, a marshmallow jowliness rounding his jaw, a spray of pimples dotting his shiny forehead, and another small zit nestled at the corner of his mouth. He adjusts his baseball cap, pushes it back past his hairline, then forward again to shade his eyes.

I still don’t know why he and Nina broke up, and Seth is a fortress against questions. Whatever it was, a drunken one-night stand with a waitress at Rags or a drawn-out, angst-ridden tryst with a friend’s almost ex, who knows? But I’m pretty sure Seth sabotaged his own happiness.

A hot, moist breath of wind stirs the trees. It feels like we’re in a sauna. In the sandbox in front of us, without warning, a blond girl in a pink gingham sundress dumps a bucket of sand over a small boy’s head. He presses his fat hands to his face and screams. The boy’s mother, who had been sitting on the edge of the sandbox in a droopy daze, stands, scoops him up, and glares at the little girl. “Where is your mother?” she hisses, then shoots a lightning bolt at me and storms away with the little boy. The girl in gingham immediately starts wailing—loud, wretched moans, the anguished yowls of a dying animal—and then, a few seconds later, just as abruptly, she stops. She surveys the now-empty sandbox as if she has just witnessed a natural disaster, then looks over at Seth and me, eyes wet and blinking, face somber.

I nudge Seth. Am I supposed to do something, to fill in for her absent mother like a substitute teacher? I spot a cluster of women across the park, absorbed in conversation. One of them looks over toward us and waves. “Hi, Caiiiitlinnnn, hi,
sweeeetie
!” she calls.

Well, okay. Caitlin waves back slowly. Then she turns her attention to her bare feet, poking at her toes with a small stick.

I watch her for a little while. She seems to straddle a very fine line between self-sufficient and neglected. Or maybe there is no line, only the long, tricky road to adulthood that starts sooner for some than for others, and way too early for us all. “I like your dress,” I say.

Seth, next to me, startles. He lets out a little whimper, and I follow his gaze: it’s Nina, jogging toward us, impervious to the lethargy that grips everyone else. She’s wearing a green T-shirt, cutoffs, and waders; they thwap against the blacktop as she nears us. She’s carrying a cardboard box, too, and she looks both determined and slightly crazy.

“Hey,” she says. “Oh, hey.”

She drops her box on the bench next to Seth and leans in for quick hugs, one for Seth, not returned, then one for me. She’s bony against my body, slight as a bird. She smells a little swampy, but she looks pretty, her hair pulled away from her face in a messy ponytail, wispy strands softening her features; her skin, which is prone to the blotchiness of the redhead, is perfect. On a good day, Nina looks like sunshine, like dew, like the angels gathered at her conception and danced on her mother’s womb. Too bad for Seth, this is a good day.

“Hey, you,” I say softly, aware that any expression of affection is a betrayal of Seth, but I miss my brother’s ex-girlfriend, not the kind of missing you do late at night, alone in your bed, aching, but the kind you forget about, the kind that only hits you when you see a person you have loved, her physical self a reminder. The way she laughed so hard at your dumb joke about a talking snail that tears streamed down her freckly cheeks; how she once spent a full day without realizing that she had a speck of arugula trapped between her two charmingly crooked front teeth until her boss actually reached over and plucked it out.
Lettuce agree never to speak of this again,
I said that night, over dinner at the apartment, and she nodded solemnly in agreement.

“How are you?” I ask now. I can’t help myself.

“Good, I’m good,” she says briskly. She nods at Seth. “I brought your stuff.” She stands above us in her ridiculous getup. “And you have mine. Obviously.” She crosses her arms over her chest. The sun shines behind her. Even with my sunglasses on, I have to shade my eyes to look at her.

“Hey, Nina,” Seth says, a fake, tense cheeriness knifing through his voice. He’s sitting up very straight. “Look at that. That old beach ball.” He points to a deflated red, green, and yellow plastic ball lying in the box Nina has brought for him. “I didn’t know that was
mine.
I thought that was
ours.
I thought we bought that together, last summer. But hey, hey, Nina, that’s cool, that’s, like, a great metaphor right there.”

“Oh,” Nina says, surprised by Seth’s icy rage, flustered, her face blushing fast and dark. “Okay. I’m sorry.” She looks around, anywhere but at Seth. “Well, I have to go. Back to the river. Back to work.” Her voice catches on “work.”

Seth doesn’t say anything for a minute, and Nina doesn’t move. “Wow, this must be really good frog weather!” I say. I have no idea what I’m talking about. After all this time apart, they are still this raw with each other, unable to act normal together for even three minutes, to pretend that their hearts, their beating frog hearts, haven’t been removed and dissected and left for scraps. I find that I am, perversely, envious. Envious! Of their ungovernable connection.

Seth stares hard at Nina. “This is pretty fucking twisted.”

Nina shakes her head. “I have to go.” She motions toward the box with her chin. “There’s a cactus in there. That one you bought. So be careful. I watered it last week. It should be fine for a while. I have to go.”

But Nina still doesn’t move; silence hovers over us again like a storm cloud about to burst. Am I the only one who can feel the pressure? I extend my arms in front of myself and do jazz hands. “Herpetology waits for no man!” My God, what’s wrong with me?

Nina laughs a little and relaxes her shoulders. She bends to retrieve her things. Seth holds his breath and looks away as she leans over him, her loose shirt exposing the freckles on her chest and a thin slice of white cotton bra. “I really have to go,” she says.

And, finally, she does. We both watch as she walks away, red ponytail swinging slightly. From behind, she could be anyone. Except for the boots.

Seth rifles through his box. “Awesome,” he says. “I wanted that cactus back.”

“Come on,” I say, peeling my thighs from the bench. I take Seth’s hand and pull him up. “We need to leave. This is not a good place for you to be.”

Seth rises, pulls his shirt free from where it was glued with sweat to his back and his stomach. “That is very true. That is a very astute observation.”

“Ass toot,” I say: our favorite, our only, joke left over from our shaky, shared adolescence.

He hoists the cardboard box into his arms and takes a weird, long sniff of it. “Oh, motherfucker,” he says tenderly, as if he were cooing at a baby. “Mother
fuck
.” We begin to make our way to the edge of the playground, toward the street where his car is parked. “I’m sorry to say this to you, because you’re my sister, but I wish I’d been paying better attention the last time Nina and I … you know.”

From nowhere, Ben’s face flashes in my mind, Ben’s face close to mine, its familiar planes and new, rough edges, his breath in the hot car, our one, ill-fated kiss. “I know,” I say. If Seth and I had any precedent for physical affection, for the familial comfort of a hug, I would throw my arms around him now, squeeze him tightly, and rest my head on his wide, damp shoulder. Instead I just keep up my pace next to him, my flawed big brother, brought low by his miasmic regret. If he hadn’t cheated on Nina, none of this would have happened. It seems like his longing should have a gravitational pull or the magnetic power to heal fractures.

“Hang on.” Seth veers suddenly toward a green garbage can near the public bathrooms a few feet away. He sets his box down on the grass next to the bin and shakes out his hands, rolls his head to one side, then the other. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll walk you to the flower shop.” He leaves the box there, by the garbage can, cactus and all, the detritus of his life with Nina, unnecessary now. He walks back toward me, swatting a mosquito away from his face, first with his right hand, then with his left.

Chapter Seventeen

Jane had finally called Ben when we were on our way back from Marcy. I was driving, and she was talking and applying mascara simultaneously. At first I was impressed.

“Hiya,” she said. “I missed you.” Her mouth was turned down in the putting-on-eye-makeup frown. “I said I missed you!” They chatted for a while, and she switched the mascara wand into her left hand and the phone into her right. “Yes,” she said, “tonight,” and “I love you.” I caught a glimpse of how she examined herself in the mirror and then smiled at her own reflection. For the first time I saw what an overabundance of confidence looks like, how it accumulates like snowdrifts over the rocky landscape of complexity, of ambivalence, of guilt.

“When are you two getting together?” I asked her. “I’ll call Declan. Let’s make it a double date.” I’d wanted to prove something. Who knows what? That I could have what Jane had? That I would never do what she had done? That I could if I wanted to?

The sun is setting when Declan meets us on the sidewalk in front of our apartment building; the sky is a nine-year-old girl’s bedroom, decorated with puffy clouds and streaked with dusky pinks and candied purples. The heat has finally broken; the breeze that coughed hot exhaust all over the city for two weeks is cool and dry now. Ben folds his arm around Jane as if he hasn’t seen her in three months instead of three days. Their fight the night before we left is ancient history. Declan stands in front of us, near the street, and rocks on his heels.

Jane bumps Ben with her hip. “Let’s go dancing!”

Declan shakes his head, holds out his hand like a stop sign in front of him. “Irish men don’t dance.”

“Okay, let’s stay home, then,” Ben says. He unwraps his arm from Jane’s waist and looks at her, takes her in. “I’ll cook.”

My breath catches. I glance at Declan, who is still bouncing gently, gazing at passersby. “Irish men don’t stay in!” I say quickly. Maybe they do; maybe they don’t. We’re not staying in tonight.

So we wander over to Blue Roses, the café down the street, and commandeer a table outside. The place is busy, the sidewalks crowded. People have emerged from their air-conditioned caves, giddy and relieved.

Declan orders a bottle of wine for the four of us. I sit next to Ben and notice how Jane rests the back of her hand lightly on his neck, brushing it across his skin. He closes his eyes for a second and then turns to her. She smiles, her chin tipped toward him, her teeth naked and white. I feel like I’m witnessing a precursor to something private and enviable. She laughs delightedly at nothing. Is this all calculated? I’m seeing Jane differently now, after Dougie; I can’t help it.