When We Were Friends (23 page)

“Um, Cochran and Kardashian are dead.”

“You know what I mean. People like that can have their blood and skin and seminal fluid all over a body and still get away on a technicality. I feel like I have to choose between my mother and my daughter, and it’s not a fair choice.”

“Your daughter?” Pamela said, then let the words hang in the air before she said, “Look, Star can’t stay there alone, we both know that, so what’re the alternatives?”

“I have to come home.” I reached for Molly’s bare foot, gripped it as if it could keep me steady. I shouldn’t have left. It was stupid to think I could ever be free of my old life, and now I was right back where I’d started. “I can leave tomorrow morning. If I leave early, I can be there by dinner.” I heard the abject resignation in my voice. I’d had less than six days of freedom, and what did it say that this terrifying week had been among the best in my life?

“You’re scared to come back,” Pamela said. “I can hear it.”

“No, I’m not scared.” I smiled, hoping the smile would come across in my voice. “Just a little pissed and not looking forward to another twelve hours of driving.”

“Okay, wait. What if I have another idea? I’ll bring Star out to you if that’s what you want.”

“You’re kidding, right? She hasn’t left the house in two decades; it’s all she can do to poke her arm out for the mail. You think she’d get in a car and drive five hundred miles?”

“Be driven. Or we’ll fly, whatever. I’ve filled a prescription for Lexapro, so maybe that’ll help. Give her a double dose of Xanax, knock her out and by the time she wakes up, she’ll be having her panic attacks in another state. She might feel better anyway, being farther from the center of the news coverage.”

I tried to imagine getting my mother onto a plane, a piece of thousand-ton machinery that hurtled tens of thousands of feet above the ground. It would’ve been easier imagining her sprouting a pair of gills and singing opera underwater. And once she got here, then what? Tote her off in another few days to some random destination in Montana? Drag her, heaving and panting, across the country?

“Just let me ask her,” Pamela said. “I can make all the arrangements, pick up your mail while you’re away, clear out enough money from your bank account to last till you get settled, forward your bills, arrange to get utilities turned off if you want. I’ll tell Star you’ll come home if you have to, that you’re absolutely not going to leave her alone in this kind of state, but I’ll also say something about how dangerous that would be. She loves you too much to let you get into trouble because of her.”

I thought of the Star I used to know, the woman who’d raised me without a husband, without letting me see her grief. That woman had been possessed and subsumed by her illness, but the fact she’d told me to leave her, and now insisted she was okay despite being anything but, showed she was still there somewhere, behind the misfiring neurons.

I hesitated, then said, “Tell her I’m happy. Tell her when you talked to me, I sounded happier than you’d ever heard me. And tell her I said I finally feel like my life is starting.”

“Do you?” Pamela said. “Are you happy?”

“Yeah, I really think I am.” I looked down at Molly, who had gripped onto one of her bare feet as it waved by, and was studying it like it was some sort of strange wild bird she’d caught. I tucked the phone under my chin so I could reach for her, pulled her onto my lap and tickled my nose against her ear. People searched all their lives for things that might make them happy. Here I was, a fugitive running scared, nearly out of money, and I’d managed to find happiness. Maybe I was lucky, or maybe I was just easy. Maybe the secret was as simple as that, to have low expectations. “I really think I am,” I said again.

I lay flat on my back playing one of my and Molly’s favorite games, a leg exercise where I lay with my knees tucked to my chest, Molly resting on my shins. She looked into my face, bright-eyed and expectant, knowing what was coming. And then, the second she seemed to let her guard down I lifted my legs, tipping her toward me almost upside down so I could kiss her head. Each time she erupted into peals of laughter, which of course made me laugh too, and there we were, both laughing our heads off in this ridiculous Kama Sutraesque position. Fully absorbed in each other, the pull of my muscles, the feel of her hair on my lips, her sounds of utter joy.

The thought fleetingly crossed my mind that maybe I should teach Sydney this game, because I had a feeling Molly would miss it after she left me. But I pushed the thought away immediately, thinking instead of how it might be if Star did manage to join us, sharing this bliss with my mother who’d known so little bliss herself. I wondered if Star had played this game with me, if that’s where I’d gotten the idea. All the lap games and hand-clap games, the songs she’d sung to
me that I now sang to Molly, handed down mother to daughter. To daughter.

This was how I’d try to live my life now, worrying about the future only when I was alone. Each minute, each second I spent with Molly I’d be fully with her. It was the only way I could go on looking into her face, without breaking my heart.

My cell phone started to ring and I lowered Molly slowly before rooting through my bag, sure it must be my mother. I hadn’t told Alex anything yet about my conversation with Pamela.
If
Star agreed, and on the off-chance she managed to get herself out of the house and
if
she actually made it into a car, then I’d bring up the subject. But until then there were so many very iffy ifs that there was no reason to test the breadth of Alex’s hospitality.

But the call wasn’t from my home number but from a Warwick County, Virginia, area code, which could only mean Sydney. Or the police. And by the time I’d mentally adjusted my mind-set from anticipatory to panicky, the ringing had stopped. I set the phone on the bed, stared at it as if it were a dead bug that might or might not sting, then picked it up again in time to see the voice mail alert appear on the screen. I held my breath as I checked the message.

“Lainey? Look, it’s me.” It was Sydney, her voice a hoarse, frantic whisper. “I don’t know if you’ve been watching the news, but I’m calling to warn you that things’ve gotten kind of screwed up, even more than they’re showing. The cops—or the FBI, it’s the FBI now—well I can’t really talk about it all, but it’s becoming really complicated. I don’t know, I don’t know, I just want you to stay put while I figure things out. Star said you’re staying with someone you think you can trust, so hold tight for a few more days and try not to worry. I’m going to do whatever it takes to prove what David did to us. I promise nobody’s going to get in trouble except him, and nobody’s going to have any idea you were involved. But there’s some issues I have to deal with and I might not be able to call again for a while. Please give my love to Jacqueline, okay? And tell her how much I miss her.”

The phone clicked to silence and I stared at it blankly. Then redialed the number she’d called from, knowing it was a pay phone but praying that Sydney hadn’t yet left it.
Answer
, I thought,
Answer!
What did she mean things had gotten screwed up? How could she not have told me more?

After ten rings I snapped the phone shut. What should I do? Should we leave now? How long could we possibly be safe here? I’d printed out maps today, directions to central Montana, and I’d looked up the addresses of motels along the way. I could call a realtor in the area, see if there were any homes available for short-term lease and then escape with Molly. Except, oh God, I’d have to somehow take Star too. How could this possibly work?

I replayed Sydney’s message trying to read between the lines, but they were so widely spaced they could’ve fit pretty much anything. Was she scared just for herself or for me and Molly as well? When she’d said things were becoming “complicated,” did she really just mean
complicated
or in fact mean
about to fall apart
? I had to find out what was going on.

I hadn’t read a newspaper since I’d arrived. Alex seemed completely uninterested in regular news coverage, said he found out about the world only through blogs because he liked in-depth discussions of main events, and couldn’t care less about whatever sensationalized scandal was currently holding the nation’s interest. The good thing about the lack of a TV or newspaper was that Alex couldn’t see the headlines of my own personal scandal. The bad thing, of course, was that I couldn’t see them either, and with no information from the outside world, anything could be happening without me having a clue.

So that night, after Alex had gone to bed, I snuck downstairs to check the Internet. And found that the story was everywhere.

Gossip forums speculating on what else had been found in David McGrath’s bedroom, from child porn to animal porn to man-sized lingerie. Psychological commentary spouting hypotheses on the tie between sociopathy and a life of privilege. Stories from people
claiming to have been David and Sydney’s friends, tales of their wild parties and weird cultish rituals. And then, I saw the news story.

So they’d analyzed my handwriting.
My
handwriting. If they ever found out I’d seen Sydney last week, how hard would it be for them to find a sample to compare it to? Hell, I’d scrawled my signature in the corner of tens of murals throughout the state.

I’d written that I’d taken Molly, so if Sydney ever turned me in I’d be the one they held responsible; there was no reason for them to believe, reading my note, that I wasn’t acting on my own. Sydney’s voice mail message had suggested there was even more going on than was being shown to the public, which might mean anything.
Like, for example, that they had another suspect they weren’t ready to reveal. Like, for example, that this suspect was me.

I suddenly thought of the photos Sydney had shown me of the laughing, hugging girls we’d been. I was pretty sure she didn’t give a damn about me now, and I wasn’t going to just let her lead me around by the tail, but I also knew there were two sides to Sydney. Who the hell was she? This was the question I kept asking myself, hoping that with the wisdom of age and distance I’d be able to understand it. A mix of selfishness and wantonness and neediness, that’s who she’d been even in childhood. But there was also kindness and loyalty—or at least there had been before things went bad—traits I’d tried to discount, as if that would make her betrayal less painful. And as I read through the damning interviews given by her so-called “friends,” searching for clues on who she’d become and how safe it might be to trust her, this is the memory that came to me suddenly, digging like a knuckle of homesickness in my belly. The memory of the night she’d saved me.

Our life of crime began the summer before eighth grade, a sweaty night when I invited Sydney for a sleepover and—after hearing her complain for the trillionth time about our lack of both central air and chocolate ice cream—I suggested we break into the local swim club. We had come to the conclusion that pretty much everything in the world was
dumb
including, in no particular order: our mothers, our glasses, my one-piece bathing suit, gym class, most boys, and any drink that wasn’t Diet Coke. But the idea of breaking into a swim club was decidedly un-dumb, and we started doing it almost nightly.

Sydney was a member of said swim club, so perhaps that made it a not-so-heinous crime, but the club did not let one in after 9
P.M.
, member or not, and certainly would not have approved of us raiding their ice cream freezer. So we were criminals, and the excellence of eating free Klondike bars in the dark, jumping off the high dive in the dark and practicing underwater somersaults in the dark, was
made more excellent by the thought that we might be thrown in jail for it.

Breaking in involved a two-mile walk for each of us to the spot we met each night, followed by a quarter-mile trek through the woods and the scaling of an eight-foot wire fence. So it was not an easy crime to commit, but the difficulty of it added a sense of danger that heightened everything. Until the fence did me in.

I would later blame my sneakers. I’d been wearing them for much longer than was ever advisable, knowing shiny new sneakers were the height of dumbness, and the laces were torn and the soles had started to flap loose. Sydney had already jumped down the other side, and I’d thrown over our towels. She was slinging these over her shoulders when I reached the top of the fence and something caught in the wire rungs. Not realizing, I tried to swing my leg to the other side, lost my grip and fell.