When We Were Friends (22 page)

“I’m coming home for
you
, Ma.”

“For me!”

“Have you been eating? When’s the last time you took a shower?”

“You getting complaints from the neighbors that I stink?”

I tried to keep my voice steady. “Obviously you’re not doing too good on your own.”

“Obviously you’re forgetting that I’m not eight years old. I’m okay, Lainey.” She paused, then said, “Listen. There I was yesterday in bed, covers up around my ears and sure the world was coming to get me and that I was most probably having a heart attack. Can you imagine how pathetic it made me feel? You come home and I might as well kill myself now, I mean it. If I have to put a baby at risk just because I can’t deal, then I don’t deserve to live.”

“I’m worried as hell about you.”

“Well don’t be. Worrying is my game, remember? And this is my one and only chance to prove to myself I can make it. You’re giving me that chance, and if you screw it up I’ll never forgive you.”

“And if you die of starvation I’ll never forgive
you
. I’m calling Pamela to ask her to stop by and check on you today. If she tells me you’re not up and about and getting stuff done, then you’re not leaving me with much of a choice.”

“Well she was just here last night, and she told me I looked great. Said she didn’t know what you were making such a fuss about.”

“Please, Ma. Do you not realize I’m going to actually talk to her and find out what she really said?”

“Don’t trust her, she’s a liar.”

I steeled my shoulders. “You have to prove to me you’re okay. I mean it. Answer the phone when I call you, answer the door when the bell rings, make yourself meals.” I lay back and closed my eyes. “I wish you were here, I really do.”

“That’s because you’re codependent. Tell me something, okay? Everything that’s going on now, a baby who needs you and a man who offers to help, does it feel like destiny?”

I hesitated, then said, “I don’t know.” But maybe it was like Star said, that there’d be a time in my life when things started coming to me, things that only seemed like luck. So what if this wasn’t wrong, all this lying? What if it was just a way of opening my arms to destiny? I remembered how it felt to hold Molly, and then remembered, of all things, the weight of Alex’s arm around my shoulders. “Maybe,” I said.

“So then don’t worry,” Star said. “This time alone, it feels like destiny to me too.”

It was beautiful out, skyblue and warm. And because it seemed like a thing mothers might be inclined to do on skyblue warm days, while Alex worked on the computer I took Molly out for a walk, carrying her in her sling. We paraded down the street, both admiring the dogwoods and cherry trees, Molly periodically demonstrating her athletic prowess by throwing her binky at my feet.

Every walk I took with Molly, I kept up a running commentary in an attempt to increase her vocabulary, this commentary involving mostly discussions of the scenery and weather. She definitely understood a lot more than was immediately obvious, was able to bring me a ball or a block if I asked for it, to make appropriate sounds when I asked if she wanted a bottle or needed a diaper change. And she recognized her name, the name
I’d
given her, looking up when I called it with a question in her eyes. But I still was waiting to hear her speak her first word, and so along with my commentary I repeated the
ba-ba
’s and
ya-ya-ya
’s she interjected, as encouragement to continue exercising her tongue.

“What did that binky ever do to you?” I said now, wiping it off once again with my shirt. “How can such a sweet thing as you be so cruel to inanimate objects?”

Molly beamed back at me, and promptly threw the binky again. She was studying the effects of gravity, I assumed, so I’d let her study for as long as she wanted. Every day I could teach her something new, a new skill, new game, new force of nature. Even after she had to leave me, those learnings would always be mine, a piece of her I’d always own.

We were rounding the top of a hill when we passed a woman power-walking in the opposite direction, swaying her arms and dipping huge, lunging steps, looking rather like a lumbering steam shovel. She was heavyset, her blond hair frizzing in wild curls
around her shoulders, and she had one of those faces you immediately like, round cheeks complete with dimples and crinkly eyes.

When she saw me she paused mid-lunge, then quickly snapped her legs shut, her face turning pink. “Hamstrings and butt,” she said.

I smiled hesitantly. “What?”

“You were looking at me like I’m insane, but I’m lunging because I have no hamstrings and too much butt. Nobody’s supposed to actually see me doing this, just see the results and be amazed. But now that you have, I hope you’ll immediately erase it from your memory.” She swiped an arm up her forehead, pushing back her sweaty hair and revealing an unshaved underarm. “Who are you anyway? You here visiting somebody?”

I shook my head, then nodded, completely taken aback. With most people you could tell who they were almost immediately, slot them into one of the various prefab personality-containers you’d already fashioned in your brain. But this woman seemed unclassifiable.

“That was rude,” she said, “sorry. It’s just we don’t see too many new faces here, so I’m out of practice.” She held out her hand. “I’m Susie Greer.”

“I’m Leah,” I said, taking her hand, vaguely pleased at how easily the name came this time around. Like I truly was becoming a Leah. Funny how quickly I could strip off the old me, like everything I’d been was just a veneer, a costume. It made me wonder what was underneath, the true me. “And this is Molly,” I said. “We’re staying with Alex Connor.”

“Oh? Oh! You’re his mysterious lady friend!” She grinned. “I have to say, we were wondering if you even existed or if maybe you were … you know, a man.”

I spent a few seconds trying to digest this, then a few more convincing myself it would be wrong to claim that yes indeed, I was his mysterious lady friend. “No,” I said. “Just a friend-friend. He invited me and my daughter here for a while.”

“Aw shoot. And here I was, working the story all out in my head. That he was keeping you a secret because he had this illegitimate
child, which he for some reason thought we’d be offended by.” She smiled at Molly, touched her cheek. “She has very wise eyes. Like a young prophet; the Dalai Molly.”

I smiled back and said, “Doesn’t she?” Feeling pride.

“You staying awhile, then?”

“Just a few days,” I said. “A week at the most.”

“This is good. We should do lunch sometime. I make a mean paella, you should ask Alex.” She cocked her head and gave me a sly smile. “So … do you know Alex’s girlfriend?”

“Um, no.” Molly started to fuss, and I jiggled the sling to calm her. “He never mentioned her, but we haven’t talked much yet about that kind of stuff.”

“You should ask. And let me know if you learn anything, okay? Everybody wonders because he hardly talks about her. We only know there’s someone because Judy Mier tried to set him up with her daughter, and he said he wasn’t available. Which still seems unlikely to me, because where is she? Could be he just doesn’t like the looks of Judy’s daughter. You ask him, okay? And we’ll do lunch and you can tell me everything.”

I thought about the photos on his shelf, the beautiful Erin he hadn’t been willing to talk about, maybe because whatever had happened to their relationship felt too raw. “I’ll see what I can find out,” I said. At least recounting this conversation to him would give me an excuse to ask subtly. I wasn’t asking for
myself;
it was a secondhand question.

“I like you,” Susie said, narrowing her eyes. “You have a very expressive face.” And then she held up her hand, waved goodbye to me and Molly in the finger-flapping goodbye wave of toddlers, then power-walked down the street.

I turned to Molly. “That,” I whispered, “was interesting.”

Alex laughed when I told him about the encounter, overdramatizing Susie’s goggle-eyes and childish excitement. “Out in the middle
of nowhere, people can be a little … different. Not in a bad way, it’s just that only a certain kind of person wants to live this far removed from civilization. Which I don’t know what that says about me.” He shrugged. “But I like Susie. I love how she’s perpetually dressed up as The Seventies, and how you always know what she’s thinking. She has this kind of innocence about her.”

“Don’t let her fool you. She’s not that innocent.” I reached for one of the sandwiches Alex had made, apple and melted brie on pita bread. “She told me to try and wheedle secrets out of you, so I could come back and tell her what you said.”

“What do you mean, secrets?”

“Well apparently there’s a mysterious lady friend everyone wants to know more about. That’s exactly the words she used, ‘mysterious lady friend.’ ”

“Should I feel flattered they care so much about my business, or disturbed?” Alex looked down at his splayed fingers. “It’s funny, you know? Living alone in the city you’re so anonymous, even to the point you sometimes wonder if you’ve turned invisible. There were days I used to go buy food I didn’t need, just so I could talk to the checkout person about the ridiculous price of portobello mushrooms. And now I’d have to taser my neighbors to keep them from peering in my windows.”

“I think it’s sweet, in a semi-annoying way. Isn’t it better than being ignored?” My senior year of high school, after people had grown tired of me and moved on to their next target, the prayer I held in my head every morning while I showered and brushed my teeth was,
Make them see me
. A boy’s elbow would jostle my arm as he closed his locker door; a girl would pass me papers and her hand would brush against my palm, and I’d snap back into myself, feel the spark of it. Reassured that I did have a physical presence after all, that I did exist.

“I wouldn’t say either of them’s better.” Alex rose to fill his water glass, stood at the sink a moment, then turned to face me. “What I really want is a family, you know? Where the people you talk to every day are the people you really want to talk to. The people who want to
know your secrets for the right reasons.” He shrugged, looking embarrassed. “It’s why having you and Molly here is so great, because it shows me a little of how it’s going to be, having a family.”

And there, for maybe the first time in my life, I found myself without words. Oh I knew that wasn’t what he meant; of course I knew it. But my brain was racing, thoughts stuttering, and my throat seemed to be blocked by one of my internal organs. I finally flashed a smile and said, “Me too,” a non sequitur that would haunt me the trillions of times I replayed this conversation.

I was so overwhelmed with my own ridiculousness that I didn’t realize till much later that he’d never answered Susie’s question.

Pamela called that night while I was changing Molly on the bedroom floor. She started in without even saying hello. “Look,” she said, “your mom needs help.”

I leaned back against the bed, staring at the wall. “Tell me.”

“I’ve never seen her like this. I mean, you probably have, and maybe you won’t think it’s so bad, but I’ve always thought of her as this innately happy woman who just happens to have a problem. But I didn’t recognize her today.” She paused, then said, “She has things piled against the door, Lainey. She didn’t want anybody coming in to fix the locks, so she took an armchair and a hope chest and all these boxes of books, pushed them against the door. She had to open a window for me to climb in.”

My eyes filled, and I squeezed them shut.
Mom
, I thought.

“Apparently
she’d
been wedged against the door too, huddled in quilts. There were plates of half-eaten food where she’d been sitting, and the curtains were all drawn like she’s even scared to let the sun in. I think she’s been spending all her time doing readings; she was doing them even when I was there.”

I’d done this to her. Hadn’t I known something like this might happen?

“Apparently the readings made her comfortable with the guy you’re staying with,” Pamela said, “which you’re going to have to
tell me more about, by the way. According to the cards he has issues, whatever that means, but he wants the best for you and he’ll try and keep you and Jacqueline safe, so that’s all good. But she’s also sure you’re in some kind of colossal danger, which maybe you are.”

“Well of course. The thing about card readings is they’re intuitional, which means you can pretty much interpret them any way you want. So of course the cards say I’m in colossal danger because she fully believes I am.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “What do I do? Should I come home?”

“You want me to tell you what to do? I’d say you should turn your dear friend in. The baby’s father’s in jail, if he’s been using drugs and abusing her then there’s no way anybody’s letting him out anytime soon, or letting him get his hands on her whenever he does get out.”

“You don’t know that. Don’t you realize how powerful the McGraths are? What kind of lawyers they must’ve hired? They’ll probably turn it into this big spectacle, televised so everyone can watch Johnnie Cochran and Robert Kardashian make all the evidence look circumstantial, and show what an adoring, devoted father David is.”