Friends Like Us (29 page)

We take our ice cream (adult flavors now—one scoop of coffee fudge for me, vanilla almond and rum raisin for him) to a small orange Formica table. Seth hunches over his cone and opens his mouth onto it, sucks down a third of the top scoop with one enormous, loud slurp. He licks the corner of his mouth and juts his chin at my ice cream, which is starting to melt a little bit, a drop of beige dribbling down the side of the cone. “I’ll have yours if you don’t want it,” he says, smiling, and I realize how much I’ve missed him.

“Sorry I’ve been so out of touch,” I say, as if that’s all it is:
I’ve been crazy busy!

A very tall man and an extremely short woman step into Lakeside Licks, the heavy glass door whooshing behind them.

“That’s okay,” Seth says. “I’ve been really
swamped
at work.” He winks. I think that this bodes well for us and points toward reconciliation. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, then licks the back of his hand. “Plus I’ve been playing a lot of high-stakes Internet poker.”

Uh-oh. “Really?”

“No.” He vacuums up another half scoop of ice cream and swallows it without any evidence of enjoyment. He looks at me again, his brown eyes tired and slightly unfocused.

“So, guess what?”

He raises an eyebrow, waits.

“I’m with Ben now.”

The tall man at the counter peers down at the top of his tiny girlfriend’s head. “I know what I saw,” the man says, under his breath.

“But I told you already,” she says, her voice a girlish whisper, “he’s just a friend.”

“Oh, fuck you,” the man says, still quiet but suddenly ugly and threatening, like a thundercloud rolling in.

“Fuck me?” the girlfriend says softly, quizzically, without rancor, as if she’s contemplating which ice cream flavor to order. “Oh, no … fuck
you.
”

Seth glances at the couple, who is about to plunk down at the table adjacent to ours. “Huh?” he says, distracted. “Ben’s with what, now?”

“Jane moved out. Back in August. Ben and I are together!” The story spills out of me. I’ve been waiting almost three months to tell him. For eleven weeks it’s been just Ben and me and our swirling fog of guilt, and I’ve been living the strangely lonely life of the girl who got what she wanted. “So we, you know, we got together,” I tell Seth as ice cream drips down my hand, “a few days before their wedding, or, I mean, a few days before they were supposed to get married. But they didn’t.” My heart is pounding. Out it comes, all of it—the surreal mix of pleasure and shame of being with Ben, the way I’ve begun to suspect that the shame might be part of the pleasure; the terrible emptiness of the apartment without Jane; how I never thought I’d do what I did; how easy it was, in the end, to do it. If anyone will understand this, the ugly underbelly of friendship, the way the worst of a person sometimes just wins, it’s Seth. “So we told her. We sat down at the kitchen table and we told her, and it was awful,” I say, “for everybody.”

Seth is quiet. I sit back and perform triage on my collapsed scoop as it melts down the soggy cone. “Really awful,” I say again, and I wait with relief for my brother’s reaction, for support from the one person I know whose path is littered with the detritus of the relationships he himself has ruined.

He tips back in his chair, as Fuck-me and Fuck-you decide at the last minute to take it outside. The door jingles as they leave. “Fuck me?” the woman whispers. “I don’t think so.”

Seth watches the door shut behind them and then swivels back to me. “Wow,” he says finally, and I think he’s referring to the unhappy couple, and I nod. “This must be really, really hard for you and Ben. Really tough.”

I look up at him, my coffee-fudge-flavored lips stuck in a hopeful smile. “What?”

“Oh, I mean, just, it must suck for you that you
destroyed your best friend’s life.
” Seth’s voice is a taut whisper now, and he’s breathing hard, almost panting. “Damn, Willa, you make it sound like you were in the path of a natural disaster. I’m so sorry about it, this you-sleeping-with-Ben-behind-Jane’s-back thing, this thing that just
happened to you.
”

“What?” I say again, my mouth slackening out of its frozen grin. This is not what I expected. I swallow, try to regain composure. “How can you be judgmental about this? You of all people?”
Nora,
I think.
Libby. Shelly. Nina.

He leans in and slaps his right hand onto the Formica, his left hand gripping his ice cream cone so tightly it cracks. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

I tilt my head at him, narrow my eyes. “You, you’re like the, the president of two-timing. The emperor of infidelity!”

Seth exhales and relaxes just a little. “The chairman of cheating?” he says.

“The … sultan of straying?” I’ll always, always follow his lead.

He examines his broken ice cream cone and then looks around the empty shop. “Trust me, Will, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I get up and walk over to the counter for napkins and notice that the ice cream-scoop guy has been listening intently to our discussion. He’s leaning on his arms on the glass counter, staring at us, his paper cap riding high on his head, his mouth slightly open. I eye him, decide I don’t care.

“Enlighten me,” I say to my brother, sliding back into my seat. “Please.”

“I don’t know that I need to fill you in on the details of my personal life, but I will tell you that I didn’t cheat on Nina. I did not ruin my relationship with her by cheating.”

I swipe at a blob of melted ice cream on the table between us. “Oh.”

“Yeah,
oh.
It wasn’t like that.” He cracks his neck, tipping his head to the left, then to the right. “Nina got pregnant.”

“Seth. God.”

“And believe it or not, your asshole brother wanted to marry her.” He takes a napkin and wraps bits of his broken cone in it. “But she didn’t want to marry me, and she didn’t want the baby.” A ceiling fan clatters above us, and in the back room, tinny music from the oldies station starts playing, Elton John.
Good-byyyye Yellow Brick Roooaaadd.
“She, um …”

He blinks, and I finally see what the last ten months have done to my brother, how they’ve altered him, how his newly discovered penchants for self-help books and sugary indulgence have been not the desperate pursuits of a man sunk in his own useless remorse, nor even the wild graspings of an aching soul trying to conquer its pain, but Seth’s futile, his utterly futile, attempts to defeat the bitterness. To not let it win. “So she got rid of the pregnancy, and then she got rid of me,” he says, shrugging. “And I really, really hate her.”

There have been times that I have thought,
I do not love my brother.
There have been times that I’ve longed so hard for his absent approval, his distant, wavering affection, that my longing hardened into dislike, into a solid mass of ill will, and I have thought,
I don’t care if I never see him again.

Only now, I realize that all of that was nothing, my disappointment just a drizzle, my anger a cloudburst compared with this, this cyclone of sympathy, this hurricane of love for Seth that knocks me down, leaves me breathless and soaked and clinging to a branch: this knife-pain I feel is his own heart, beating inside mine.

“I didn’t know that,” I say. My voice is thick and clogged. I reach for his hand even though we don’t, as part of our unwritten sibling contract, touch each other. “I hate her, too,” I say, my eyes filling, and Seth nods and lets me rest my hand on his for a moment before moving it away, and yes, I understand what it means, to feel the pain she caused, to hate Nina: the woman who did what she thought she had to do.

I saw it yesterday, when I came home from the store. I set my bag of groceries down on the counter. Ben was at work. His computer was open on the coffee table, the screen blank. I wanted to look up pictures of sea cucumbers. Are they fish? Are they vegetables? I didn’t think twice about turning the computer on. I thought twice about opening the document on his desktop labeled “Letter to Jane—draft,” but then I did it anyway.

Dear Jane,

If you’re reading this, then you’ve seen my name in your in-box and you haven’t hit “delete.” For that alone I’m grateful.

I know I have no right to say this, after everything I’ve done, but I miss you. And I’m so, so sorry.

I thought I’d have a million things to say to you, but I find myself at a loss. I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing—which I know is a little bit beside the point. Jane, I don’t know how to tell you how sorry I am for hurting you. If I could somehow change the way it all happened … well, that’s beside the point, too, isn’t it?

I heard from Amy that you got accepted into all of the law schools you applied to. That’s great news. I’m a little surprised you’ve decided on Marquette, especially since that wasn’t on the original list. But things change. Obviously. So you’re staying in Milwaukee, close to your family. They must be pleased.

Write to me, if you want to. I’ll understand if you don’t.

Ben

I shut the computer down, tiptoed away from it as if it were a sleeping skunk. I went to the bag of groceries on the counter and unpacked slowly: four bags of pasta, four jars of sauce. Some oranges. An onion. A tub of strawberry yogurt. I waited for the squeeze in my gut, the twitch of jealousy or anger that never came. There was only a jolt of eager anticipation: could we somehow be friends again, the three of us?

I figured Ben would come home and tell me. I was sure he would.

But when he walked in the door he had other stories to recount: about the woman on the bus who’d grabbed his hand as he walked by; about Spencer, his coworker at the library who got high during his lunch break and then ate an entire birthday cake meant for Margo, the children’s librarian. “It said
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO A SPECIAL LADY
on it,” Ben said, “in pink frosting. And Spence downed the whole thing. He said he thought it was, like, public property.” He peeled an orange and imitated Margo’s reaction: “ ‘Goddammit, I’m seventy-two years old today. I thought I might have a piece of my own goddamn birthday cake.’ ”

I laughed and said, “I didn’t know children’s librarians were allowed to talk like that,” and Ben smiled at me. And then he noticed that his computer was sitting there, on the table, and he picked it up to move it, carefully clicking it shut.

Ben peers over my shoulder, munching on a waffle. “I like the way your mermaid is wearing a business suit,” he says. “You don’t usually see that.”

“Mermaids have a reputation for being slutty. But this one is a corporate executive.” I’m drawing a template for a mural that we’re going to paint in Jane’s old room: her final, colorful exorcism. In three months we’ve done our best to erase her physical presence from our lives. We’ve moved furniture, painted the walls, bought a replacement lamp and armchair from a cheap secondhand store. We still don’t have a blender. But we can live without one. Some absences are easier to abide than others.

Ben watches now as I sketch the mermaid’s jellyfish cell phone and clamshell briefcase. “She’s in trouble,” I say.

“Huh?”

“Her company’s underwater.”

With little fanfare, Ben moved into the apartment as planned: but into my room, my bed. Jane’s old room is empty except for a few boxes. The door mostly stays closed.

“I like her chest,” he says. He raises his eyebrows and points to the sunken treasure chest I’ve drawn in the background. “But what the hell is that?” He crooks his finger toward the menacing gray creature swimming near the mermaid, dorsal fin slicing the water, a thick wad of money clamped between its sharp teeth.

“A loan shark,” I say. A few waffle crumbs sprinkle down onto the table, onto my drawing. I brush them away.

“You are a very strange person, Willa,” he says. “Very.” There’s the slightest key change in his voice, a sharp note, a barely discernible shift, and I hear, in that one sentence, how things can swerve off course without warning: not that they have, but that they could.

“Yes,” I say, “well, you have to respect the artistic vision, even if you don’t understand it.”

He’s silent for a long minute.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He runs a hand from the top of my head lightly down the length of my hair; it makes me shiver.

“You can tell me.”

“I’m thinking how Jane would like this. Your weird drawing. A mural in her room.” He leans down close, his chin on my shoulder, breath on my neck; I can smell it: warm and sweet, like bread. He watches as I put the finishing touches on the spiny ray of a starfish, then begin to sketch the wriggling arms of a sea anemone.

“With friends like us,” he says.

I stop drawing for a minute and lean into him. “Yep,” I say.

The mural template is not quite finished. I grip my pen and hold it over the paper, arcing a few small circles in the air. Ben is still next to me, still breathing in my ear.

I love you,
I think.
I can’t believe how much I love you.
I lower the pen and begin to ink the fleshy, intestinal curves of a shrimp, its long, groping antennae and stumpy tail. I draw another one, as veiny and disgusting as I can make it.

Ben straightens and moves away.

“Not a big fan of the shrimp?” I say.

“Ugh,” he says and laughs. He turns and heads out of the room. “Did you not know that about me?”

What do you want for your birthday?
I type.

A robot guinea pig,
Ben writes back.

Oh, but all the kids want a robot guinea pig. What if they’re sold out?

I don’t care. Find one! It’s my birthday and I WANT A GO-GO GUINEA PIG.

Ben will turn twenty-seven in two weeks, just before Thanksgiving. After everything that’s happened, it feels momentous, an occasion we need to mark, if only because: here we are.

Do you want a party?

Yes. I do. A princess Barbie dress-up party.

We’re sitting next to each other in bed, blankets scrunched down at our feet, laptops resting on pillows. A tree branch bangs against the bedroom window. There’s the low howling sound of wind outside and, inside, the tapping of our fingers on the keyboards. I press my thigh against Ben’s.
You can have a princess party,
I write,
or a Barbie party, or a dress-up party. Not all three.
The familiar little note dings on his computer.