When We Were Friends (43 page)

“The worst part of it all was knowing Jacqueline was spending every weekend with that son of a bitch, and not being able to tell him that she wasn’t his. Sydney was so terrified of what he’d do if he found out, to both of them. So we were stuck in this logjam, and this was the only way Sydney could see to get out of it. Please, Lainey, I need you to understand what happened, how this got so screwed up.”

“Understand what?” I said slowly, the nausea that had been swirling behind my ribs growing claws. “That you’ve been lying to me for the past two months? You expect me to understand that?”

He watched me, unspeaking. Was he trying to make me think about the hypocrisy of my words? But this was different. It was completely different because he’d known I was lying, was only pretending to believe me, and that changed everything. Because he’d brought me here not to protect me, but because Sydney had asked him to. And because he’d loved Sydney, that was the most unforgivable thing of all. “How could you lie to me! Who the hell are you?”

“It wasn’t a lie. I mean I wasn’t telling you the truth, but most of the time I completely forgot it wasn’t true. I was just enjoying being with you and Jacqueline, and trying to forget what was going on behind it. All my life I wanted my own family, and that’s what this felt like. It was so much better in every single way than the family I grew up in.”

I needed to throw something at him, but the only things within reach were the sneakers by his closet door. I reached for them and flung them both, but he didn’t flinch away, just let them hit his chest, still watching me. “How can you even say that?” I said. “You think that’ll keep me from going to the police? Well screw that! I’m not that naïve, not anymore.”

“Lainey, please … Maybe you
should
go to the police, I almost wish you would, but this is the one thing I need you to believe: that having you here, these’ve been some of the best weeks of my life.”

“But why! You could’ve taken Jacqueline yourself, hidden her here and had Sydney join you when she thought it was safe to leave Virginia. I just don’t get it; why’d you even get me involved at all? Hell, if you knew the baby was yours, you could’ve gotten custody legally!”

“I know.” His face seemed sunken, like somebody had hollowed out the flesh from his cheeks. He gave a furious kick to the sneakers I’d thrown. “I know, it’s just that the situation got so desperate so quickly that I didn’t have time to think. It all started in the beginning of June. I was scared for Jacqueline’s life and I told Sydney I was going to the police. She was crying and pleading with me not to, said she’d think of something, and a few days later she called back and told me she had a plan. Which is when she told me about a friend who’d agreed to take Jacqueline. About you.”

She must’ve come up with the idea after she’d seen me in Six of Swords. Here I was, the perfect answer dropped in her lap. She’d invited me to Chelsea’s Café, pretending nostalgia and a yearning for reconciliation and then, later that week, had left Molly with me.

“First she told me she’d given you the baby because David had threatened her that morning, that she brought Jacqueline to you to protect her. And that after you had the baby she’d realized how David would react, then freaked out and made up the kidnapping story. And once I’d agreed to intercept you it all happened so fast, it felt like I didn’t have a choice. Like we were both just acting out of fear, one decision leading to another. I didn’t start really questioning it till after you were up here, and when I asked Sydney she said of
course I was right, we shouldn’t have gotten you involved but that she hadn’t been thinking straight and now it was too late to take it back.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said hoarsely. “That’s pretty much exactly what she told me after she went on TV to say Molly was kidnapped. That she’d been desperate and she wasn’t thinking straight.”

“I realize it didn’t make sense, and I guess part of me realized it then too, but she’s so … persuasive. Hypnotic, almost, it’s how she swept me off my feet in the first place. All the stories she told me of how she was raised, she was all needy but strong at the same time. I wanted to take care of her, and when you feel like that about somebody, you tend to believe everything they say.”

Swept me off my feet
, I thought. I wondered if I was going to throw up. “It was for the reward money.” My voice was cold. “For finding Molly. She was going to have you turn me in to the cops, tell them you’d taken us in and trusted me, and that I’d finally admitted the truth. And then I’d get arrested so you guys could collect the reward.”

His face was pale, watching me. “I didn’t know,” he said.

“A perfect plan really, because the two of you could pretend to meet when she came to thank you for finding Molly, and then you’d pretend to fall in love for the first time so that the three of you could live happily ever after on the McGraths’ money.”

“I didn’t know! Not until I went down to Virginia last month, the week I disappeared, after I realized I couldn’t keep lying to you, it was killing me. So I went down to tell her I was going to confess to you about who I was and what was going on, and she told me everything.”

The night of Susie’s barbecue, the night I’d thought he was going to kiss me … Had he gone down to confront Sydney because he felt sorry for me getting so caught up in this sham fantasy life? To plead with her to let me go back to Virginia?

“She told me the McGraths had been steadily raising the size of the reward, and she needed you involved for at least another few weeks. Said I didn’t have to ever turn you in if I wasn’t willing to, that we could find some way to convince you and Star to go off somewhere
for a few days, and leave Molly with me. I could go to the cops and tell them a woman had left the baby, give your name as Leah Monroe. She said you’d realize you couldn’t come back, and they’d never be able to find Leah Monroe so you’d be safe.”

“And you
agreed
to that?”

“No, no of course not! When I found out what she’d been planning, how could I trust her? I yelled at her, Lainey. I seriously almost hit her; I’ve never gotten so angry at another person. I didn’t talk to her for two days after, but I couldn’t come back home because I had no idea how I was going to tell you the truth.”

“So you just decided not to tell me. You came home and you kept up this whole charade? Why, because you were waiting for the reward to go up even further?”

“I didn’t want the money! I didn’t know what else to do, Lainey. When I finally did talk to Sydney she was in hysterics. She said if I went to the cops we’d all be arrested, including you, and Jacqueline would go into foster care, which I knew was probably true. So I told her I wouldn’t go to the cops, but that I also wasn’t ever going to turn you in. That I was keeping Molly here with me, and if she ever tried to take her back then I
would
go to the police.”

Sydney’s phone call the week Alex had disappeared, gone down to see her.
I thought he loved me
, she’d told me when I asked her about Kemper,
which I know now he doesn’t, probably never did
. And then she’d urged me to go to Montana, leave here. Was it because she’d realized she couldn’t trust Alex?

“I wanted to tell you more than anything, Lainey, but I had no idea how you’d react. I thought you might be angry enough to go tell the police and I couldn’t risk it. I wasn’t just scared of being arrested, I was scared what David might do when the truth came out, to Sydney, to you. But I swear I was going to tell you, especially after I started to wonder if David was even dangerous at all, or at least not as dangerous as she told me.”

I shook my head slightly. “But I saw Sydney beat up. And the burn marks.” I stopped short, staring at him, all the skin on my body stinging, scraped raw. “No,” I said hoarsely. “You think—”

“Sydney burned Jacqueline herself?” Alex wrapped his arms around his waist and hunched forward like he’d been punched. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to think anymore.”

I remembered the raw sores on Molly’s skin when I’d first met her, the pink marks that would scar her for the rest of her life. My throat closed and I made a high-pitched, hiccuping sound that felt like it was coming from somewhere above me.

“I know she beat up her own face the day she first dropped Jacqueline off with you, because she knew it’d help convince you to take her. And when I was down there last month, I found out she wrote a journal talking about the abuse, in the hopes the cops would seize it as evidence and arrest David.”

I couldn’t breathe, my stomach on fire, my brain on fire. Everything I’d believed, everything I’d tried to save Molly from was a lie?

“So maybe none of it was true, I’ve been thinking and thinking about it and I don’t know. In the beginning she’d really sounded like she was joking when she said David would kill her, and would she seriously have let me tease her about it if he’d really been abusing her? She likes being taken care of, that’s how she … I don’t know, I guess assures herself of her own worth, so why wouldn’t she have asked me to take care of her right away? And last year she told me David had broken her arm, but then she slipped up when I saw her this summer and said something that implied she’d actually broken it in a fall.”

My fists clenched. How had it been for Molly to have the one woman she trusted, the woman who was supposed to love her most, grab her to keep her from squirming away as she seared circles of pain onto her skin?

“Maybe she didn’t make up the story of the abuse until after she realized she wanted to be with me more than she wanted to be with David. She must’ve already been trying for months to find a way to get the best of both worlds, me and the money. And I know she loves Jacqueline, and I never would’ve imagined she was capable of doing anything to hurt her, but what if she thought …” His face flushed
pink and his eyes suddenly filled. “What if she thought the ends were worth the means? Christ, Lainey, I don’t know what to believe.”

I imagined the lit cigarette between Sydney’s French-manicured nails, and Molly’s scream, and suddenly the rage slashed through me. “For the money?” I hurled a fist at him blindly, hitting his chest, but he just sat there, his jaw set and face slick with tears, letting me. I punched him again, so hard he huffed with pain. “All this for goddamned money? You son of a bitch!”

I had to get out of here. I’d grab Molly and run, drive a hundred miles an hour north through the mountains, car windows open wide, hair flying in my eyes, radio blaring so loud I couldn’t think. Leaving my life behind, my two ridiculous, broken selves, both the person I really was and the person I’d pretended to be.

“You son of a bitch!” I said again, my voice breaking, and then I spun around and threw open the door. I raced downstairs like something was after me, crammed my shoes on my feet and slung our last bags over my shoulder, then pulled Molly from her crib. She was wailing as I ran out to the car and strapped her into her car seat, but I couldn’t stop to comfort her. I got into the car and slammed the door behind me.

Down the driveway, past the garden we’d planted and into the street, the sun rising and staining it all a dusky blue, Molly howling and me crying in bizarre, two-part harmony. Downtown past the church, and all of me wanted to just stop the car and bring Molly inside so we could huddle together on one of the hard, wooden pews. I imagined it could keep me from exploding, its heavy stone silence holding me down.

But instead, I floored the accelerator and drove us into the hills, and away.

My phone was ringing. “Shut up,” I whispered, my eyes blurring with tears. “Shut up, shut up!” If it was Sydney calling, what would I say? I didn’t have the energy to yell at her; the anger in me was beyond anger and the despair in me was beyond despair, and every ounce of strength I had was centered in the foot flooring the accelerator. “Shut up!” The ringing stopped, but then started again a minute later. I scrambled inside my purse for the phone, meaning to hurl it out the window, but then I saw the number. The call was coming from Alex’s home, and I suddenly thought,
Star
.

I imagined her waking, noticing the strained silence of the house and slowly realizing that I’d left her. Her crushing panic (and I’d taken her pills!) as Alex tried to explain, to take care of her when he had no idea how. I slammed on the brakes and answered.

“Leah … Lainey, it’s me.” It was Posy. I hung up.

The phone rang again and I sat in the center of the road gripping the steering wheel. One ring before it would’ve gone to voice mail, I answered. “Don’t hang up,” she said.

“Is my mom awake?”

She hesitated, then said, “No, not yet.”

“Good. Okay, that’s good. If she wakes up, just tell her I’m coming to get her, okay? That I’ll either take her with me or I’ll get my friend
Pamela to bring her home, her choice. But if she doesn’t wake up just let her sleep until I get there. It should be about an hour.”

“Lainey, wait. Just let me talk to you before you do anything stupid.”

“See,” I said, “the thing is I’m not stupid, despite all appearances. And I deeply apologize, but I don’t want to talk.”