When We Were Friends (26 page)

After my shower I went downstairs to sit with Alex as he fixed breakfast, and found Pamela already in the kitchen with Molly on her lap, trying to keep her from grabbing her mug of coffee.

“It’s all related, I guess,” she said. “I don’t read because it’s easier to flop somewhere mindlessly and be fed crap. And you read because you don’t have a TV, which is something I’d aspire to except I know I can’t live without
The Bachelor.
”

“The bachelor?”

Pamela waved her hand dismissively. “You don’t want to know. Women love it because we can look at these girls with their Stepford Wifey hair and saline chests, and feel smugly superior. Hi Lainey.”

I widened my eyes at her, and she widened her eyes back. “
Leah!
Hi Leah!”

But Alex didn’t seem to have noticed. He just waved his spatula at Pamela. “You’re vastly superior to anyone with a saline chest. Why would anybody want boobs shaped like volleyballs? Unless they’re meant to protect a woman’s organs in frontal impact car crashes.”

“I love this man!” Pamela said. “Of course he doesn’t realize I have to roll my boobs up into my bra these days, like tube socks.”

“I’ve seen it,” I said. “She does. It’s quite impressive.”

Molly squirmed in Pamela’s arms to get down, then crawled to me and pulled at my pant leg. “Da!” she said, and I pointed to my chest. “Ma,” I said. “Ma, ma, ma.”

Pamela raised her eyebrows but I ignored her, swinging Molly up into my arms. “I missed you!” I said, then, “That looks incredible, Alex.”

“Cream cheese French toast. I figured this was an occasion that called for many calories. How’s your mom doing?”

“Okay, I guess. As okay as could be expected.”

“We were just saying maybe Pamela should stay till tomorrow, make sure your mom can handle this. If she needs to go back, you want to find that out now.”

“Plus, this is a mini-adventure for me,” Pamela said. “It feels like prehistoric times. I mean no CNN! No mini marts! I want to take advantage, maybe fish and carve arrowheads and try hunting for fur.”

“You’re scared to squash bugs, so I don’t see you hunting game,” I said, then, “Would you mind staying today? I wouldn’t want you driving Star home again because then we’d be right back where we started. But I think it might be kind of a relief for her if she feels like the option’s open, even if it’s just a sham.”

“I honestly don’t mind. Let Craig change diapers one more night. I’m eating cream cheese French toast and lounging.” She smiled. “So is Star coming down?”

“I was thinking I might bring up her breakfast and eat with her. Which I realize is incredibly antisocial, but it looks like she’s not quite ready to leave the bedroom.”

“Why don’t we all eat with her?” Alex said. “Make it like a picnic and eat on the floor. You think she’ll be up to meeting me yet?”

“I think so. She’s actually okay with new people, it’s just that two things at once, new person, new house, might’ve been too much last night. Plus, I don’t think she would’ve wanted you to see the state she
was in.” I shrugged. “But she seems a little better now. I’ll go up to make sure she’s presentable.”

I brought Molly upstairs and pushed open Star’s door. “Hey, look who’s here to see you.”

Star had drawn the blinds I’d opened earlier, and was sitting cross-legged in the dim room, hands in her lap. She smiled weakly. “You come bearing gifts.”

“You want to hold her?” I set Molly on Star’s lap and sat beside them, my head on Star’s shoulder.

Molly grabbed at Star’s nose and Star laughed, twisting away to kiss at Molly’s palm. “You trying to suffocate me?” she said. “Or just give me a nose job?”

In response, Molly gave a short, barking laugh as if she got the joke, and Star blew into her face, making her squeal. I smiled at them.
See?
I wanted to say.
She’s worth it. Isn’t she worth it? The hell you went through, the hell you might still go through, this is why
.

“Listen,” she said, “could you take the money out of my purse? And put it somewhere safe. Pamela emptied most of our bank account yesterday and it’s got to be more than ten thousand dollars. It’s freaking me out knowing I’m in charge of it.”

I opened her purse, a huge turquoise cloth number she’d bought in the eighties, and pulled out three stacks of bills. And there it was, our net worth in my hands, the result of over a decade of mural painting. My palms immediately started to sweat. If I went momentarily insane and, say, lit a match to it, the only steadfast thing left in our world would be instantly gone. I stuffed the money back into the purse. “I’ll take care of it,” I said, having no idea how I could possibly keep it safe. “You up for company? Alex is making breakfast, and he was thinking we could all eat in here with you.”

Her face slackened, a sudden look of blank despair, but then she said, “That’s nice of him. Sure, I’ll be fine.”

“That was unconvincing. Where’s your brush?” I rose to root through her carryall, pulled out her boar’s-hair brush and sat on the bed beside her to brush through her sleep-mussed hair. “We’ll make you pretty,” I said, tugging gently at a tangle.

“It’ll take a lot more than a brush to make me pretty. I’d need scalpels and skin staples and fat vacuums.” She bounced Molly on her knees and Molly glanced at me, then gave a tentative smile and reached to pull off one of her own socks.

“So, do you have the story straight?” I said, arranging Star’s hair at her shoulders. “Who am I? What’s my name?”

“You’re Leah,” she said. “And what’s our last name?”

“Honestly? It somehow never came up. We could make something up now, if you want.”

“Seriously?” She thought a minute. “How about Rockefeller? Or Kennedy? Since we get to choose anything, we might as well go big.”

“Come on, Ma, do we look like Kennedys? The Kennedy men’s bastard daughters, maybe.”

“Speak for yourself. I’d have impeccable taste if I didn’t rely on you to do my shopping.” She gave a half-smile. “Okay … how ’bout Monroe? On good days we both have a certain resemblance to Marilyn, that same cherubic sexiness.”

I blinked. Cherubic sexiness? I found myself wanting to look in a mirror. “Okay, we’re the Monroes. And where are we from?”

“Originally,” Star said, “originally we’re from Austin.”

“Atlanta,” I said.

Star looked momentarily startled. “I don’t know anything about Atlanta,” she said. “I was looking forward to being a Texas gal. I was going to do an accent and everything.”

“Well that would’ve been a disaster, so let’s thank God we’re not from Texas. And where do we live now?”

“After
Atlanta
, you moved up to Chicago and I started having my problems.” She smiled into the mirror as she swept blusher over her cheeks. “So I came up to stay with you and your husband. What’s his name?”

“David,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow. “Right. Well that makes it easy to remember.”

“Just don’t say more than you have to about the past, okay? That’s what I’ve been doing and it’s working fine. And if you do end up revealing
any new details about us when I’m not there, just tell me about it after so we can get our story straight.”

Her face tightened. “I hate this, Lainey. I’m not good at this.”

“You
have
to be good at it. Don’t worry, it gets easier. You’ll see.”

I went back downstairs, and Pamela and Alex returned with me, carrying trays piled high with French toast, melon and sausage and two carafes. We knocked on the door and entered, and Alex approached Star with his hand outstretched. “It’s so nice to finally meet you.”

“Yes!” Star said, taking his hand, pumping it and beaming at me. “It is!”

I gave her a look.

“So welcome. I hope the bed was okay. It’s left over from my days of poverty after college, and I think my back’s never been the same since.”

“The bed was lovely,” she said, then glanced worriedly at me as if looking for confirmation, afraid she’d said something wrong. Oh, this was going to be hard. I should’ve realized Star had a tendency to overthink everything. Now that she actually had a reason to think before she spoke, of course her brain was clogged with the vast number of possibilities.

We started serving the food onto plates, and Alex lifted the carafes toward her. “Regular or chicory?”

“Chicory!” Star said. “I grew up on chicory, when my mother couldn’t afford coffee. I haven’t had it since I was a teenager …” She grinned at me. “In Atlanta!”

Alex smiled, filling her mug. “I can already tell I’m going to like you. Now see if you can convince Leah of what she’s missing.”

Star kept beaming. “Ha! Not likely. Because she … 
Leah
is stubborn and picky. You should see how she freaked out when I tried to get her to try lox. I mean, lox! She said it tasted like a tongue!”

And watching them together, her giddy smile, the kind respect in Alex’s voice despite Star’s rumpled clothes and the obvious fact she hadn’t showered, and her blatant—as Sydney had put it—weirdness, I thought how everything might, after all, turn out okay.

•   •   •

What finally got Star downstairs that day was her desire to use the Internet, to write up a chart for Alex based on the date, time and place of his birth. She’d drawn all the curtains in the living room and closed all the doors, and there was an edginess to her that worried me. But here she was, in a new room! Of a new house! In a new state! The biggest step she’d taken in years.

Heartened by this, I started calling the numbers I’d found on the Internet of realtors in Montana, asking them for information on short-term rentals. I jotted down the information they gave me so I could look up listings later. We’d leave in a week, no more, as soon as Star settled down a bit. And I tried not to think how I’d tell her we were leaving, get her back into the car. Had only some vague thought that I’d spring it on her moments before we left. Perhaps after getting her drunk.

We’d stay in Montana two weeks, maybe a bit more, and then be on the move again, moving every couple weeks until Sydney could leave Virginia safely. It wasn’t much of a plan, but there was no way to plan further until I found out more about what was going on, the imminence of the danger we were in.

I pictured a woman standing in an open field, surveying the wilderness, her baby on her back wrapped like a papoose. She contemplated what lay ahead and then steeled her shoulders and walked into the barren terrain. And watching her I felt an unexpected tenderness, and pride.

No way to know how long her life would last; much as I despised Sydney for what she was doing to me now and everything that had happened in the past, I knew I couldn’t justify taking her daughter away forever. But for now I’d play this out the way every human played out his life. Assuming it would last forever. Forgetting the inevitable end.

As Star worked on the computer, I went outside with Alex to finish the garden, while Pamela played with Molly on the front porch. I
hadn’t had a chance yet to talk to her about her conversation with Sydney, had actually been avoiding time alone with her. At least for the next few hours, I wanted to pretend Sydney didn’t exist.

I set all the flowerpots in the places I thought would work best, the rosebushes and broad-leafed hosta against the house, the smaller flower bunches, phlox, marigolds and bluebells, framing the stone path, and a large bed set aside for vegetables and herbs. I arranged them by color and height, stepped back and made a few adjustments, and then Alex and I started to dig.

Or rather, Alex dug and I watched while trying not to look like I was watching. The muscles working in his back, the sweat flushing his face, kneeling beside him with our hands in the rich earth to set the flowers in place, it was all … okay, let’s not mince words here … it was pure sexy.

And even sexier? When we were almost done Alex excused himself and went inside, appearing a minute later at the bay window with Star, gesturing to the roses. She still looked grim, but she did stretch a smile as she surveyed the garden, and again when she saw Molly on the porch. She said something to him and he nodded and said something back, then squeezed her shoulder and came back outside.

“I think your mom’s going to be okay,” he said, kneeling next to me. “Hard right now but I think she’ll settle down when things feel a little less unpredictable.”

“Yeah, and when’s that going to be exactly? I have to make her leave again as soon as I can get her back into the car.”

Alex watched my face a moment before saying, “You know you can stay as long as you like. I don’t know why you feel like you have to run off so fast. Isn’t this as safe a place as anywhere else?”

“Alex … God, you’re an amazing person. Has anybody ever told you you’re amazing? But I don’t think I’m safe staying anywhere for too long.”

I saw a fleeting sadness cross his face before he turned back to break up the root ball of the peony we were planting. “That really
sucks, you know? Last night when I couldn’t sleep, I was imagining what might’ve happened if you weren’t in trouble, if we just happened to meet on the road and you happened to need a place to stay for whatever reason, and we could just hang out until we got sick of each other.”

I turned to glance at him, then quickly away, my heart stuttering with a little hiccup of pleasure. I bit back my smile and said, “I’ve actually started understanding what it’s like to be Star. Not having a real home anymore, it feels like I’ve completely lost control so absolutely anything could happen. Like … the universe could just open up and suck me away into the vacuum, and there I’d be flying alone through space.”

Alex turned back to the garden, filling the hole around the peony. “Did I ever tell you about my transcontinental adventure?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, “no.”

“It was the most important thing I ever did, and the hardest. I left home, ran away basically, when I was eighteen, a week before I was supposed to graduate high school. I was having problems with my mom, and graduating just seemed so banal; so, I don’t know, conformist, and being the rebel that I was, I just took off. With the clothes on my back, a travel-sized toothbrush and an autographed Polaroid of Demi Moore.”