When We Were Friends (46 page)

A lifetime of rage was searing through me, tearing her hair from its roots: the smug smile when she passed me in the hall; the time I’d wasted praying our friendship could still be resurrected; the whispers in English class to the girl next to her, their eyes on me, the laughter that had made me stare for an hour at my reflection in the girls’ room mirror, thinking desperately,
What? What?
missing the rest of my classes because I was scared to go back out there again. The years that had destroyed my insides as surely as I was now destroying Sydney’s face, wrenching my spirit from me, every hope I’d ever had. My future.

“To your own daughter!” I kneed her stomach, punched her nose and heard a distinct
crack
, behind it Molly screaming, a panicked wailing. And Molly’s panic, that’s what made me pull away, probably the only thing that could have.

I rocked backward, and her breath quickened. “Don’t stop, Lainey.” Her eyes swept wildly left, then right. “You want to kill me, don’t you? So just do it, just make it be over. However you want, your fists, a knife—” She swiped at her face, tears mixing with blood. “It’ll be better for all of us, you know that. I’ve always wished I was strong enough to do it myself, since we were kids, since before I even knew you. Like the day we cut our palms?” She held up her hand, and I flinched back. “Just that morning I’d put that same knife against my own wrist. And if you hadn’t agreed to become blood sisters, I’m pretty sure I would’ve carried through with it.”

I made a sobbing sound as I looked down at my blood-spattered sleeves and torn nails. She grabbed my wrist, and I gave a huffing yelp.

“Two days ago? In Long Island? I swam … it must’ve been a mile offshore, hoping for riptides. For an hour I was just floating there, waiting to be pulled under, but in the end I was too gutless not to
swim back. I can’t take this anymore, Lainey, nobody cares, nobody’s going to give a damn. Just do it!”

“Lainey.” It was Star, standing at the door, her face red.

I struggled to my feet and turned to Sydney, my legs shaking so hard it was all I could do to stand upright. “Get out,” I said. “Get the hell out of here.”

“Lainey, go, okay? Let me take care of this.” Star didn’t seem shocked at all by the scene before her. Just determined, her jaw set, separating children at a playground fight. She yanked a wad of paper towels from the roll, wet them in the sink and knelt by Sydney’s side. She wiped carefully at the blood pouring from Sydney’s nose, oozing from the scratches on her cheeks, and Sydney looked up at her, still crying silently. Looking up at Star with pleading, little girl eyes as Star cleaned her face and whispered soothing words I couldn’t hear under Molly’s screams.

My breath was heavy, rasping. I looked down at my bloody hands, at Star hovering over Sydney’s bruised and swelling face, and just like that the rage was gone. Inside me only numb. I lifted Molly, and backed from the room.

It was a two-mile walk to the park, and I don’t remember any of it. At some point Molly must’ve stopped crying. At some point she must’ve begged to be let down because she always did when we walked, wanting to inspect the grass, dried leaves, the wild aster. But I remember none of it, nothing until we reached the park and I saw Alex and Posy perched on a bench, him with a book and her with a magazine, both looking tense. Molly cried out to them, wrestling to get down, and Alex raised his head and saw me.

He tapped Posy’s hand and they rose and approached me, their faces alarmed. I set Molly onto the ground and dropped to my knees beside her, letting Alex take my hands to try and find the source of the bleeding. “I’m okay,” I whispered hoarsely. “I’m okay; we’re okay.” Alex searched my face questioningly and I gripped his hands tighter, then brought them to my face and started to cry.

I didn’t find out the rest of what happened that afternoon until much later. Not till the morning of Molly’s second birthday party, after we’d decorated and realized the living room was lacking a certain
oomph
, and Alex suggested we drape some of Star’s scarves, to give the party a bohemian air. And there under the scarves in Star’s top dresser drawer I found it, the tape pulled from the recorder she’d hidden that day in her skirt pocket. Star had never told me what she’d said to Sydney, and I realized she didn’t want me to know, but I couldn’t stop myself from listening. It was only a week after the police had received Sydney’s suicide note, and I needed to understand.

I pulled the player from the hall closet, sat on our bed, and slipped in the tape.

The beginning held the tail end of our fight and I covered my ears, unable to listen to my insane rage. It felt like another lifetime, a different Lainey clawing and kicking not just in fury at Sydney but at the world, and at herself. A toddler’s fury at having no control, being pulled involuntarily through the procession of every part of every day of her life. The fear of it.

After a minute huddled on the bed, I pulled my hands from my ears in time to hear Star’s comforting voice, and a good five minutes of Sydney’s tears. Sobbing over and over, “What do I do? I don’t know what to do!” as Star made shushing sounds. I imagined her
tending to Sydney the way she’d tended to my torn palms or scraped knees, kneeling beside her and stroking her hair, Sydney’s tearstained, bloodstained face looking up at her pleadingly.

And then finally, Star said, “Sydney, sweetheart, listen to me. I know how hard this all has been, but it’s over now. You don’t have to hide anymore; we know everything.”

“No, no you don’t.” Sydney’s voice was clogged, her nose stuffed:
Do you dote
. “You don’t know anything.”

“I’m telling you, I do know. About you and Alex, what the two of you planned.”

Stunned silence and then, “What’re you talking about? I didn’t plan anything!”

“
Ssshhh
, it’s all right, Sydney. I know and I understand what you were trying to do, and it’ll be okay. We can make it okay.”

“It’s not okay! Alex told you? Was it Alex? Why, why would he tell you!”

In the pause before Star answered, I could sense her struggling with whether to give Sydney the truth, knowing how it would hurt her. And then, deciding to lie. “Actually,” she said, “it was my cards. The cards told me.”

“Your cards.” Sydney’s voice was blank.

“Yes that’s right, my tarot cards told me, or at least they gave me enough information that I was able to figure out the rest. And they helped me understand you, Sydney, that’s the important thing. I have to say it took me a while, and I was
this
close to turning you in, to hurt you if nothing else. But I guess I’m starting to realize why this happened, and the cards are helping me figure out how to make things right again.”

“Your cards,” Sydney said again. A choked laugh and then overlapping voices I couldn’t make out until Star said, “I know, and it doesn’t matter what you believe. Just shush now, okay? Sit here by me and let me tell you a story, and maybe you’ll learn something. The best stories always teach us about ourselves, and if you let me tell my story I think it might help you see things differently.”

I imagined Star still tending to her face, maybe working the blood
out of her hair with careful fingers, the way she’d once worked out my tangles. Sydney looking down at the blood on her shirt and jeans, wondering whether she should run. Thinking she already knew more about herself than she’d ever wanted to, but so wanting to see things differently, to believe there’s some explanation for what she’s become.

“So this is a love story,” Star said, “about me and Richard, Lainey’s dad. I met him when I was young, just eighteen, and the kind of love you feel at that age … it’s just overwhelming. We devoured each other; he read me poems, sang me songs, he was the first thing I thought of in the morning and I’d count down the minutes till he came home at night. He was my everything, Sydney, and I’d always assumed he felt the same way about me. And for the first time in a life of constant travel with my mother, I felt like I had a home. But then, of course, he died.”

“I don’t know why you’re telling me this,” Sydney said. “I swallowed blood, I think Lainey broke my nose, and where’d she take Jacqueline?”

“I’m telling you because I was you, Sydney. Don’t you see it? You grew up feeling ungrounded from the world, and so did I. You were grabbing at whatever you could to hold you down and so was I. All my life I’d felt pieces of me falling off, I was never solid enough. And after Richard died, all I had to grab onto was my memories of how much he’d loved me; I was just barely holding on. But at least I could live in the past, hold myself there and keep from thinking about anything else. I even kept all Richard’s stuff in his bedroom, clothes in his closet and the book he’d been reading on his nightstand so I could pretend to myself he’d just been traveling. Like heaven was a place he could sightsee and then return from. And then one day, I came into the bedroom and found Lainey sitting on the floor, with her face buried in one of his sweaters.”

I remembered that day. I’d been fifteen, it was soon after Sydney started snubbing me but before I’d realized what my life would soon become, and I’d gone into the bedroom to be with my dad as I had many, many times before. I’d known how unstable Star was; she
hadn’t yet disintegrated into complete agoraphobia, but all my life I’d sensed my responsibility for her, for keeping her together. So instead of showing her how close I was to the brink myself, I’d leaned on what was left of my father.

The sweater I used to sit with was the one he’d worn in my favorite photo of the two of us together, taken when I was two. He’d been reading a book to me—I was tucked on his lap—and the look on his face was so joyful, so adoring, my own look so trusting of the world. And this is what I’d do: I’d spray a dash of his cologne on the sweater and hold it to my face, trying to remember how it had been to sit on his lap, my littleness and his bigness. Not really remembering but pretending I did, his thick arms and the scratch of his whiskers, and I’d tell him everything: my triumphs, my fears, my problems with Star. My loneliness. I filled myself with his scent and the rough weave of wool, and imagined the agony in his eyes as he reached down from the clouds to set a hand on my shoulder.

But then, Star found me. And the next day all his things were gone. I’d never truly mourned his death, I’d been too young when it happened. But losing all his things was like having all the insides pulled from my chest. Standing inside the emptiness his closet had become, turning in circles and circles and trying to understand, I’d never felt so alone.

“It was heartbreaking,” Star said, “and I knew then I’d been living in the past too long. How could I expect Lainey to ever grow away from it if I couldn’t? So that day I started sorting through his stuff, putting most of it into bags for Goodwill and the rest, the things I thought Lainey might want later, into boxes. Which is when I found his journal, buried in his underwear drawer.”

She paused, then said, “I shouldn’t have read it, I realize that. He never would’ve wanted me to read it, but it was the last piece of him I had left to unlock and I needed as much of him as I could get, enough to feed me for the rest of my life. So I read it, and I found out everything I’d been leaning on had been a lie.”

I wrapped my arms around myself, clutching at the fabric of my shirt. The day my father’s clothes had disappeared, was that when
things had gotten worse for Star? She’d still left the house, but it had gotten harder and harder and she seemed to have lost the will to fight. I’d return from school to find her staring at the wall, would sit beside her on the couch and ask her to tell me what was going on. “I’m really trying,” was all she’d say and then her eyes would fill. I’d reach for her hand and we’d sit there, unspeaking, both of us terrified.

“It turned out Richard had known,” Star said. “About the problems with his heart. His doctor had sent him to a cardiologist the year before, who’d told him he had cardiomyopathy, and Richard wrote all this, the details of his condition, the pills he was taking, and then he didn’t write again for almost a month. And the next thing he wrote was about me, saying he wasn’t going to tell me.
Star’s too weak
, he said. Weak. He thought the worry would destroy me which … he was probably right, and he didn’t see any point in making me obsess over his death until I had to. But under all that, you could tell he was furious at me for not being there for him.”

Star’s voice wavered and then she gave a strangled cough and said, “See, see he hated me; there’s no nice way of putting it. ‘Star’s a child inside a woman’s body,’ he wrote. ‘How’s she going to possibly take care of Lainey?’ Should he call his family? Child Protective Services? He didn’t know if he’d live months or years, but he talked about all the things he’d have done with the rest of his life, if it weren’t for me. Stuff he’d always dreamed of doing, like skydiving of all things, and rock climbing, and all the places he wanted to bring Lainey to see. Can you imagine him bringing a three-year-old to Bali or Istanbul? But that’s what he wanted to do, like he could teach her a lifetime’s worth of lessons by showing her the back corners of the world. He said I was like a lead weight he couldn’t shake off his foot, keeping him rooted in a place he’d never wanted to be. How our marriage was stopping him from living his true life.”