When We Were Friends (12 page)

“Yeah, but no. You ever try their pasta salad? It’s mayonnaisey paradise, and it’s staying with me. I’m so totally pampered with all this food, all these things to read, it’s like a spa.”

But it was all too easy to hear the truth. And suddenly the homesickness swelled like a water balloon in my chest. “I wish you were here,” I said.

“No.” Her voice was deep and clear. “Listen. Listen, no you don’t, not really. I know how you’re feeling, because for me it’s like that every day, like life’s this huge big ocean that could swallow me and no walls or floor to hold on to. So of course you want to grab hold of whatever you’re used to grabbing, but the thing is, you’re a hell of a lot stronger than me, and a hell of a lot stronger than you think. And you’re the one going to do all the swallowing, remember that.” She paused, gave a little cough, then said, “I mean, not of ocean water, that came out wrong, I was trying to be all poetic. You’ll be swallowing life.”

I nodded quickly, lips pressed between my teeth.

“This is so exciting, Lainey. I mean illegal, sure, but I feel stronger than I’ve felt in a long time because I know you’re out there doing what you’re supposed to be doing.”

“Yeah.” I wrapped my free arm around my waist and whispered, “I love you, Ma.”

“I know. I love you too. And I’m proud as hell at how you’re handling this.”

After hanging up, I knelt beside Molly and pulled off her dress to check the burns on her back and smooth on another dose of
Neosporin. And seeing the angry red against her pale skin I felt, along with the recurrent surge of anger, a tremendous rush of love for her, and the urgency of doing whatever it took to keep her safe.

I pulled a stuffed caterpillar from her diaper bag and walked it up her arm and down her bare belly, her laughs heartbreaking, her squeals of pleasure like a punch to my gut. I made the caterpillar kiss her cheek, then kissed her cheek myself and carefully gathered her onto my lap.

When she finally squirmed away, I sat awhile watching her bend the caterpillar’s legs, comforting myself with the sturdiness of her diapered bottom and the sureness of her grip. Really, Molly was the strongest one of us all.

I let her explore the room while I brought up the rest of our bags, changed her diaper and then strapped her back into her carrier, with a bottle and enough toys to keep her entertained till Christmas, willing her to let me sleep. And then, I fell back onto the bed without even taking off my shoes.

In the middle of the night, the terrors came. There in the drifty, muffled haze of semi-sleep I saw him, the hulking dark figure leaning over Molly in her carrier. His hand was reaching toward her and I tried to scream, tried to save her but I couldn’t move. I was frozen in the dark with my eyes and mouth stretched wide, tears streaming down my face as I watched him light a cigar thick as his arm.
Mollymollymollymolly;
she was looking up at me silently and pleading with terrified, tear-filled eyes, the man twiddling the cigar mockingly between his fingers, grinning at the sizzle as he brought it to her skin.

A scream.

I sat bolt upright in bed, staring out at the dark, listening to Molly’s screaming and under that, the blaring of my phone. I stared frantically around the room, then batted at the bedside light, my
chest tight with panic as I turned the light on and reached for Molly, then grappled in my purse for the phone. I flipped it open and said what was meant to be
hello
, but probably sounded more like I was constipated.

“Lainey, is that you?”

I sat back on the bed and squeezed my eyes shut. It was Sydney.

“Is that Jacqueline?” Sydney said. “Jacqueline!”

Nobody here. No man, no cigar, we were alone and safe. I forced my mind to focus. “She’s fine,” I said. “Dammit, Sydney, what happened yesterday? Why couldn’t you come?”

“Why’s she crying!”

“She just woke up. Believe me, considering her mother deserted her she’s doing great.”

“Where the hell are you, Lainey! How could you leave without telling me first?”

“Are you kidding me? You tell me you’re in trouble, I’m thinking you might be hurt or dead and your husband might show up at our door any minute, so what did you expect me to do?” I wanted to yell at her, throw her my own set of how-could-you’s complete with four-letter words that would probably scar Molly for life. But she sounded so upset, so completely overwhelmed, and I was too exhausted and terrified myself to find the edge of anger. I held Molly against my hip, rocking from foot to foot to stop her crying. “Are you okay?”

“I’m not even close to okay.” Her breath hitched and then she said, “It’s awful, Lainey, the way the cops’re interrogating me and the way David’s been looking at me, with this
intensity
. And he’s having me followed. I’ve seen him everywhere since the last time I called
you, this guy in a black-hooded sweatshirt. Which sounds like such a cliché, doesn’t it? Next he’ll be wearing a ski mask and holding an assault rifle.”

I stared fixedly at the ruffled green window curtains. “Did he see you on the phone with me?”

“I was on a downtown pay phone and I didn’t see him till after I dialed, hiding there in the shadows. That’s why I’m calling in the middle of the night, because I doubt David’s got more than one guy involved and they have to sleep sometime.”

I looked down at Molly. She’d stopped crying but her face was covered in tears and snot, eyelashes stuck together in dark red points, like sun rays. “So what’re we going to do now? Are you coming to get Jacqueline?”

“Well I can’t right now, it’s too dangerous. I think I’ll have to wait until the story dies down a bit, and then I can tell everybody here that I need to get away. There’d be no reason for them not to believe me; I mean anybody would have to get away after all this. And then I can take Jacqueline from you and disappear somewhere they can’t find me.”

“Yeah, that sounds like a real well-thought-out plan.”

“It’ll work, okay? I have this friend, Kemper, who knows what David did to us, and he’s been saying for a long while that he wants to protect us. He lives far enough away that nobody’d be able to recognize who we are, and I’m going to head out there with Jacqueline as soon as our pictures aren’t splashed on every news station. So I guess in the long run it’s good you left. You should find somewhere you can stay for a month or two until I can come get Jacqueline.”

“A month or two!” I meant this to have a
How dare you?
tone rather than a
Yippee!
tone, but instead it came out somewhere in between.

“I know, I know, and I realize this is so impossibly unreasonable to ask. I hate myself for all of it, and if you say no, I’ll completely understand. Do you have a better idea? I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Dammit, Sydney! How the hell do you expect me to trust you?”

“I’m sure you don’t; of course you don’t. I just need you to trust that I love my daughter.”

I looked down at Molly, who had rested her head against my chest and was sleepily playing with one of my buttons. What was to stop me from just disappearing with her myself? Maybe it was Sydney who shouldn’t be trusting me. “Look,” I said. “I know you’re doing this for her, and I guess we don’t have much choice. But if it’s going to be more than a few days I’ll need you to wire me money, because all I have is two hundred bucks. It’s all I could get from the bank.”

“But I don’t have any money! I know I promised you something, but don’t you get it? I had to hire a criminal attorney, Lainey. Me! When he’s the child abuser! So I had to take out a loan at a ridiculous interest rate since I’m apparently high risk, and now I have basically nothing. I’ll have to sell everything nice I own at a freaking consignment shop.”

“Oh poor Sydney! Without her Louis Vuitton!”

“Lainey …” She inhaled a rattling breath. “Okay. Okay just give me a day or two to scrape something together. But I can’t wire it. If anybody ever found out I sent money from my bank to another one they’d get suspicious, so I’ll FedEx cash. Where are you staying?”

“I’m in West Virginia, a bed-and-breakfast in this little town, Mill Creek. It’s called the Bunny Inn, or the Rabbit Inn, or the Bunny Rabbit Inn; I don’t know, you can find it online. And I’m not using my real name, so make the envelope out to ‘Leah.’ ” Had I given Muriel a last name? I had absolutely no idea. “Just Leah,” I said. “She’ll know it’s me.”

“Okay. That’s fine, I’ll send as much as I can, as soon as I’m sure I’m not being followed by the black hoodie. Or the cops either; they’re keeping an eye on me too.”

“Do they suspect anything?”

“Well they always suspect the parents first so yeah, probably. Plus I’m not sure how well I did with the questioning yesterday, I was so exhausted I hardly even remember. They did show me the composite and I might’ve flinched when I saw it. I told them I didn’t recognize you, but the drawing did look like you, or at least close enough that it startled me.”

I felt a hot sweat of fear flush my face. “Crap,” I whispered, then, “Did they notice you flinching?”

“I don’t think so, at least they didn’t question me about it. But then there’s the note you left, which Sara Gristler showed to the police before she told me about it. Why’d you leave me a note?”

“What exactly did you expect me to do? I had to find a way to get in touch with you.” Molly wriggled to get down, so I knelt to set her on the floor and watched her crawl toward the dresser. “What did the cops say about it?”

“Nothing yet, I mean they just got it this afternoon. It sounded kind of like a ransom note, which I guess might be a good thing. They’ll know somebody else is involved.”

I’m going to need money to keep her safe
, I’d written. Of course it must’ve sounded like a ransom note, albeit one written by an eight-year-old.

“But it sounds like it came from somebody who expected me to know who they were, so I’m sure the police’ll be asking me. And I’ve been thinking what I should answer.”

This felt almost like a threat. Could she seriously be threatening me? “So what’re you going to tell them?”

“Look. I’m not going to turn you in.” Her voice broke off, and then in a hoarse whisper she said, “Not unless you give me a reason to.”

I stared out the dark window across from me. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Just … that I’ll do whatever I have to to save Jacqueline. You understand that, right? If I get implicated, I have to make sure I do whatever I can to keep out of jail, because I can’t let David get custody.” She let this hang in the air a moment, then said, “Oh crap, the operator. I have to go, I’m on a pay phone and my time’s about to run out. I really care about you, Lainey; you’re the best friend I ever had. I don’t know how it all got so screwed up, and I don’t know how I’ll ever make this—” The phone cut out.

I stared at my cell phone, then slowly flipped it closed. Molly was
pulling on a lamp cord, so I bent to pry it from her fingers and lifted her onto the bed.

If Sydney turned me in, how could I prove I hadn’t kidnapped Molly? She’d tell them about high school, say I was out for revenge. Or say I’d talked nonstop about wanting my own baby, maybe even repeating my lies about Keith to make me seem unstable and desperate. Say that I’d shown an unnatural interest in Molly ever since we’d been reunited. And the incontrovertible truth was that
I
was the one who’d volunteered to take Molly in the first place.

Sydney against me and Star; her charmed self against our doomed selves, and I wouldn’t have a chance. Me and Star in jail and Molly back with the man who’d burned her skin, and the fate of all of us was up to me.

“That was your mom,” I whispered to Molly, and then I curled myself around her, both of us in the fetal position, and ran my thumb back and forth over her dimpled hand. Back and forth, back and forth, inhaling the scent of her sweat and tears.

I didn’t sleep much the rest of the night. Molly was fussy, her sleep schedule probably disrupted as much as mine, and even as I tried to comfort her I found myself having mini panic attacks, my heart seizing rather than beating, squeezed by a huge fist. Everything’s scarier in the middle of the night, because there’s nothing to distract you from the truth.

I spent the early morning playing with Molly, helping her hammer wood into round holes, play the piano on a faded cloth keyboard. “This is the middle C,” I told her, pressing the labeled key. “And this is D, and this is E.” Molly watched me with her head tilted, as if she was considering everything I said. I could almost imagine her breaking out into the alphabet song.

The piano was from my own babyhood, found in a box Star had brought down from the attic before I’d left. Everything in the box
had been meticulously rewrapped in its original plastic, labeled with little flags that documented ridiculously mundane facts she’d apparently considered important memories.
Dent on handle from L’s new front teeth!
Or,
Torn ear found in L’s diaper!

On the piano she’d written,
R figured out the notes for H B-Day. For me!
I’d heard this story, how Star had come home on her birthday to find my father sitting in the entryway with me on his lap, as he guided my hand to play the notes. How proud we both had been. How he’d taught me to bow with one hand at my waist, the other extended behind me, as if I’d just performed a Prokofiev concerto.