Best Friends Forever Page 12

  “Addie.” I jumped, badly startled as I heard my mother’s voice. She was sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. She wore her blue bathrobe, and her hair hung uncombed around her cheeks. Her hands cupped a mug I’d painted for her one of my summers at camp: a red heart with the words I Love You in cursive underneath. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  I took my customary seat at the table. I couldn’t stop looking over to the stove, expecting to see my father there with his frying pan, making his famous pancakes, saying Hey, Pal, did you have sweet dreams?

  “It’s bad news,” my mother began. Across the table, in the dusty shafts of light coming in through the window, she looked old, with veins bulging on the backs of her hands, and her face drawn and haggard. “In May, I found a lump in my breast,” she said. “They did a biopsy and then they scheduled a mastectomy.”

  I sucked in my breath. “Oh, Mom.”

  “I was going to tell you at Thanksgiving when you came home. By Thanksgiving, I’d be through the worst of it—the surgery and then the chemo—but now…”

  “I’ll stay here.” I said it instantly. “I can call the admissions office, I’m sure they’ll let me defer. They’ll probably even refund the tuition.”

  “No, honey. I don’t want that.” But there was no force behind her words, and she was looking down as if afraid to meet my eyes. In the silence, I understood, in a way I never had before, that as much as she’d taken care of my father and helped him navigate the world, he’d helped her do the same thing… and it was my job now.

  I’d called the admissions office and arranged for a deferral. My roommate shipped me the clothes I’d barely unpacked, the brilliantly colored Helen Frankenthaler prints I’d just tacked to our walls. Together, my mother and I found a halfway house for Jon, a homey, well-run place that his disability checks would pay for. “It’s time,” my mother said. “He should live on his own, he should have as much of a life as he can.” Jon settled in, getting used to the social workers, the other men, the job they’d found him at the drugstore. Then it was just the two of us.

  I drove my mother to the hospital for her surgery and then for her chemotherapy and radiation. On the way home I’d grip the wheel, watching for potholes, inching along as carefully as I could as she sat beside me, pale and silent, with Band-Aids in the bends of her elbows and a plastic basin in her lap.

  I’d pick up her prescriptions and cook her meals, soft, bland things that wouldn’t make her nauseous or irritate the sores in her mouth. I’d check books and videos out of the library, buy fancy lotions and skin creams when I found them marked down at Marshalls or T.J. Maxx. I taught myself to knit and made her shawls and hats—a jaunty beret in purple wool, a striped ski cap with a frothy pom-pom on top.

  When she was too tired to work, we’d sit on the porch and she’d tell me stories: an Easter egg hunt where she and her sister had gotten stuck in the chimney, a trip she’d taken to Canada with her college roommates, how she’d met my father (it hadn’t been in the water at all, but at the musical, when her camp had hired him to run the lights for the end-of-summer show).

  On Wednesday nights we’d go to visit Jon. We’d take him to dinner at the Greek diner down the street from the Crossroads, or pick up pierogi, which he loved. If there was something playing he wanted to see, we’d go to the movies, or we’d wander around the bookstore, or the big electronics store where Jon could try out different video games. He had the tastes of the teenager he’d been when the crash had happened, a passion for starchy foods and shoot-’em-ups, comic books, and Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. He would be, in some ways, like a child until he died, and it was tragic, to be sure, but there was also something almost fairy-tale-ish about it. Jon would age, but he’d never grow up, never have to worry about the things grown-ups worried about.

  It was on those Wednesdays, on our way back home, that my mother would try to talk to me about my future. No matter what happened, she instructed, I was to go back to college, and when I was done, I should travel as much as I could. I should spend at least a semester in Europe; I should visit Italy and Spain; I should see the Louvre and the Prado and as many Vermeers as I could. Sitting in the passenger’s seat, she was hardly recognizable—she’d lost so much weight so fast that you could see the outline of her bones underneath her pale, loose sheath of skin. She’d lost her hair, her eyelashes and eyebrows. Okay, Mom, I would say as she instructed me on books to read, on paintings to look at, on the churches and beaches and cities to visit, a list of places I knew for a fact she’d only read about. Okay.

  “Whatever happens to me,” my mother said, her voice soft and sweet and faint as I turned off Hightower and onto Crescent Drive, past the Sheas’ house. After twenty-two years and fifteen children, Mrs. Shea and her husband had gotten divorced the year before. Now Mrs. Shea lived in the house alone, with her silvery hair cut short, and could be seen each weekday morning in spandex pants, with her Bible in her hand and her yoga mat hooked over one shoulder, on her way to early-morning mass at six, then yoga class at seven. “Whatever happens, you’re going to be fine.”

  I told her that I knew I’d be okay, even though I didn’t believe it. While she’d gotten thinner with her illness, and was as flat-chested as a boy after the double mastectomy, I was getting fatter. She would sit in the chemo lounge, with classical music wafting through the air and poison dripping into her veins, and I’d take the elevator three floors up to the hospital cafeteria and gorge myself on plastic-wrapped slices of cake and pie, shoveling tasteless forkfuls of chocolate and custard and crust into my mouth and wondering whether they’d given the food a dose of radiation, too, or shot it full of chemicals that had taken away its taste. I didn’t enjoy it, but I couldn’t stop—not the cake and pie binges, not the cookies and candy I’d eat in my room in secret, after the lights were out and I had to concentrate on pretending not to hear my mother cry.

  In between the hospital visits and the trips to the grocery store and the pharmacy and to visit with my brother, I set up an easel in the dining room, and I’d snatch an hour or two, here and there, to paint. Back in November, my mother had sent a painting I’d done to her editor. It was a watercolor of a Christmas tree with a shining star suspended above it and the words Peace on Earth underneath. Her editor said she loved it, and the next thing I knew I had a check for two hundred dollars and an invitation to submit more work. All through the fall and into the winter I painted, as the leaves fell and the air grew chilly, as the new gourmet grocery store in the center of town changed its display from pumpkin pie and chestnut stuffing to Bûche de Noël and, eventually, diet frozen dinners for the New Year’s resolution crowd. Without any planning, I had found myself with a career. As my mother shrank and dwindled, I painted and ate, painted and ate and dreamed of New York City, which seemed farther and farther away with each day that passed, like a place I’d only dreamed.

  Winter was brutal that year. The temperature rarely rose past freezing in the daytime and plummeted past zero in the night, when the wind howled down the street and battered at the walls. After a dinner of soup and pudding, I’d help my mother into the shower. We’d stand together underneath the water, and she would brace herself against the tiled wall as I washed her, trying not to notice the way her hipbones and the bumps of her spine pushed against her skin, or the bruises that bloomed on the scant, loose flesh of her arms and thighs. Once she was dry and powdered and in a fresh nightgown, I would read to her: Pride and Prejudice, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, her schoolgirl favorites. She was regressing, I would think. Her breasts were gone, her hips and hair were gone, and sometimes at night she would cry softly, the way I imagined a baby would.

  Near the end, when there were no more surgeries or chemo and radiation, when there was only the hospice nurse and the morphine drip, I was sitting by her bed, a book in my lap and my knitting in a bag beside me, when my mother rolled onto her side and took my hand. “Addie, you have to promise me you’
ll go back to school. You can’t just stay here.”

  “I know, Mom.” This was a conversation we’d had many times before.

  “I know you’re afraid,” she said. “But you have to believe me. There are good things out there. There are good people. Good men.” Her bright eyes softened. “You could have a baby.”

  I looked down at myself, breasts spilling onto my belly, belly threatening to erase my lap. The last time I’d stepped on a scale, I’d watched the numbers roll past two hundred, then past two hundred and fifty, and I’d jumped off, shocked, before they could go any farther. Who would want to have a baby with me? “I’ll be okay,” I told my mother, and she sighed and closed her eyes. I thought she was done, but a minute later she said, “Have you talked to Valerie?”

  I didn’t answer. My mother persisted. “You two were such good friends.”

  “She ruined my life,” I said. The words came tumbling out as if they’d been held back, dammed up. “She turned everyone against me…”

  “Don’t be so hard on her,” said my mother.

  “She ruined my life,” I repeated.

  She sighed and shook her head. “High school isn’t life, Addie. Your life is not ruined.” With an effortful grunt, she propped herself up on an elbow. “I think Valerie hasn’t had a very easy time of it.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “I’m sure it was really hard for her.”

  She reached for my hand. “You should call her. Promise me you will.”

  In the too-warm bedroom that smelled like toast and eggs and arnica gel and the lemon-scented lotion I rubbed on my mother’s legs and feet, I told her that I would—another promise I had no intention of keeping.

  “Addie,” said my mother from the depths of her bed. “There’s all kinds of love in the world, and not all of it looks like the stuff in greeting cards.” She lay down, grimacing, and I glanced automatically at the clock, counting backward from her last shot of morphine, then forward to seven a.m., when the hospice nurse would arrive. “I just want you to be happy. Your father and I…” Her voice trailed off and her eyes filled with tears.

  “I’m happy,” I said. I read to her until she fell asleep. Then I sat beside her, picturing that long-ago summer morning, in the canoe with my best friend beside me. We’d paddled past half a dozen little boats riding at anchor in the shallow waters. The sky had been blue, with a few cottony pink-tinged clouds. If I concentrated, I could remember the names of each one of the skiffs: Lovely Lu. Tall Cool One. Evangeline.

  My mother died in the middle of a warm night in September, just over a year after I’d come back from New York, as I lay beside her, listening to the spaces between her breaths grow longer and longer, until finally there was no breath, just silence. “Rest now,” I said. I covered her poor skinny body, her birdy-bones and bald head, with the afghan I’d knitted from ivory-colored chenille, and kissed her cheek. “Rest.” When the sun came up, I called Dr. Shoup, who said she was sorry for my loss, and the hospice nurse, who cried and said how lucky I was to have a mother who’d loved me so much. Jon and I did it all again: the long black limousine, the barely worn black suit, the neighbors over at the house, carrying cold cuts and casseroles and saying how sorry they were, my brother looking at me with muddy confusion in his eyes, tugging my sleeve to ask, “Addie, where’s Mom? Why isn’t Mom here?”

  I was nineteen, almost twenty. I’d inherited the house on Crescent Drive, the life insurance policies my parents had both left, the small trust they’d set up to care for Jon. I could have done what my mother had wanted—sold the house, packed my bags, gone back to school, gone to Europe, gone dancing, gone to the beach—but it was as if every bit of energy and optimism I’d ever possessed had left me, and New York City was a place I’d made up, a fairy tale I’d told myself. Besides, I was so big. The world was not a place where I belonged. It was high school writ large, full of bad things waiting to happen and bad people waiting to do them. Better to stay home, to work at the easel I had set up in the dining room, to make my little circuit from the grocery store to the library, where I knew people and people knew me, where it was at least relatively safe.

  My mother had insisted that I get a degree, and that was one promise I kept. I signed up for art courses at the local community college, where most of my classmates were what were euphemistically called “returning students,” people in their twenties and thirties with day jobs and, in some cases, night jobs, too; with little kids and aging parents and weekend obligations. I got a bachelor’s in fine arts and lived at home, where I worked painting the images I’d eventually become known for: tiny, exquisitely detailed, iconic renderings of a single thing—a heart, a flower, a gull in flight, a spray of fireworks—set against a background of white. No need for an office, no need to ever meet the people who employed me. No need for them to know how I lived or what I looked like. I’d eat oatmeal for breakfast, tuna salad or peanut butter for lunch, cookies and cakes and pudding and pie in private. I worked during the daytime; I ate, and read, at night. I didn’t bother anyone, and for years, nobody bothered me.

  “Addie?”

  From the driver’s seat, Val poked my arm with one bright-red fingertip. “You still with us?” I rubbed my eyes. We’d arrived in Chicago. The sun was up, but the street was in shadows cast by the skyscrapers on either side. I looked up at the high glass-and-concrete tower we’d parked in front of. the moderne, read the marquee above the entryway. “Looks like he’s done pretty well for himself,” I ventured.

  “I bet he’s in an efficiency,” said Val. “And anyhow, karma’s a bitch.” She unbuckled her seat belt, letting it slither over her body and smack against the door. “I’m going to go talk to the doorman. I’ll tell him I gave Dan my car keys ’cause I was drinking, only now I need them back.”

  “And what about this car?” I asked, indicating the keys in the ignition.

  “I’ll tell him it’s yours.”

  “Okay.” This sounded like as good an idea as any, and I had to admit I was amused by the thought of owning a Jaguar.

  “If he’s there, we’re fine.”

  “And if he’s not?”

  She pulled the seat belt back and forth. “Maybe we’ll just go clamming.”

  “Clamming,” I repeated. Val turned to look at me. “Hey,” she said, “are you okay?” I shook my head. “What’s wrong?” Val asked. I couldn’t answer. She looked at me for a moment. “Sit tight, okay? I’ll be right back,” she said, and got out of the car and pulled open the Moderne’s heavy glass doors, moving as if she had nothing more on her mind than what to cook for dinner or whether the shoes she’d seen had gone on sale.

  I sat with my arms wrapped around my knees, watching the clock in the dashboard tick the minutes away. Nine of them had elapsed when Val came loping back to the car. “Not here,” she reported, starting the car. “Also, no regular girlfriends, no regular guy friends, he parties a lot and… oh, and he might be getting fired, but he doesn’t know it yet.”

  “You got all that from the doorman?”

  “He’s a viewer,” she said modestly. She drove a few blocks, then pulled over to the curb.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We need,” she said with her eyes narrowed, “to start thinking like criminals.”

  “What?” I asked. We? I thought. Valerie reached behind her and gathered an armful of men’s clothing. I caught sight of a blue shirt, a pair of pants, a flash of white underwear. Then Val jumped out of the car, looked quickly over her shoulder to make sure we were alone, and shoved the clothes down a sewer grate. A minute later, she was back in the car, breathing hard and looking pleased. “I dumped everything but the wallet and his cell phone. I’m gonna leave them in a trash can. Maybe they’ll think he’s been the victim of identity theft.” She thought as we accelerated toward the highway. “Maybe he actually will be the victim of identity theft.” I didn’t answer. “It’d serve him right.” We drove for a few minutes, the
wheels whispering over the road as, behind us, the city woke up. “Let’s go home. I bet you’re tired,” Val said.

  “Home sounds good,” I answered, and she flicked her turn signal on.

  PART TWO

  Into

  the

  Woods

  FIFTEEN

  Dan Swansea trudged down the road toward the light of the rising sun. His legs were bare above his socks, his skin burning with the cold. The storage shed door had been unlocked, and that was lucky, but he hadn’t found any clothes or blankets there, just a box of contractor-sized trash bags that he’d used to swaddle himself, poking his head and arms through one, wrapping another around his crotch like a diaper. He’d rested for a while, curled up in a drafty corner of the shack, and then he’d started down the road. He swished when he walked, and he didn’t even want to think about how he looked. There was nothing he could do about it. That bitch Valerie Adler—he’d remembered her name—had taken his wallet and his phone.

  There has to be something, he told himself as he walked. A convenience store or a gas station or something. He would walk until he found it. He would go home, get clothes, get warm, and then he’d find the bitch and he’d fix her wagon.

  He was so lost in thought that the van was almost on top of him before he noticed, and it was too late to jump into the ditch on the side of the road, too late to hide himself. The van slowed—Dan braced himself for laughter, a hurled bottle, some kind of joke—“Time to take out the trash!” is what he personally would have gone with—but instead, he heard a woman’s voice calling kindly through the grayish half-light.

  “Dan Swansea? Is that you?”

  Eyes dazzled by the headlights, he squinted at the van, but couldn’t make the face behind the wheel.

  “Are you all right? What happened to your clothes?”