Best Friends Forever Read online

  “Ma’am, there was a belt and some blood in the country club parking lot. Someone might have been hurt.”

  “Not Pete,” she said instantly. “I didn’t do anything to him.” She smiled slyly. “At least nothing he didn’t want me to do.”

  “Listen,” Jordan said through the thunderclouds of an incipient headache, “do you have a list of the walk-ins from last night?”

  She shook her head. “But I think I remember them. I could write them down.” She produced a pen and a piece of monogrammed stationery from a drawer, and after several lengthy pauses, a refill on her beverage, and a lot of tuneless humming of what Jordan eventually recognized as Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal,” she wrote down thirteen names.

  “Were there any classmates you can think of who might cause trouble?” Jordan asked as she sat back down at the table and picked up her mug.

  Judy thought for a minute before lifting her drink and sloshing mimosa onto her sleeve. “There was this one guy who graduated with us. Jonathan Downs. He had…” She paused, searching for the politically correct term. “He was in a bad accident, and he was always a little bit off after that. I’m not exactly sure what was wrong with him. But he was strange for sure. And he used to take things from other kids’ lockers.”

  “Things?”

  “Oh, just any little thing. Jackets. Notebooks. Somebody’s lunch.” She hiccuped against the back of her hand. “I remember once he took all the badminton shuttlecocks from the gym. It was more annoying than anything else.”

  Jordan wrote down Jonathan Downs. “Was he there last night?”

  “I don’t think so. If he was, I didn’t see him. I kind of doubt that he’d want to come.”

  Jordan pulled out the class directory Christie had given him and found an entry that read Jonathan Downs/Adelaide Downs/14 Crescent Drive. “This him?”

  “That’s the last address we had for him. It’s where he lived in high school. I’m not sure if it’s current. He didn’t RSVP one way or another.”

  Jordan tapped the name Adelaide. “His wife?”

  Judy shook her head, her small face crinkling as she frowned. “Sister.”

  “Are they twins?”

  “No, Jon was older, but he got left back after his accident.”

  “Was Adelaide there last night?”

  Judy shook her head again.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Believe me, I’d have remembered if Addie Downs had been there. You couldn’t miss her.” She gestured with her mug. This time, mimosa spilled on the tiled floor. “She was huge.”

  Two kids in the same class, in the same house; one fat, one brain-damaged. Interesting. “Did Addie take things out of people’s lockers?”

  Judy stared at the floor. “Nah. She just… you know… moped around.” She looked down into her NUMBER ONE mug and seemed surprised to find it empty, then looked up, blinking at him. “Hey, you want a drink?”

  “No thank you,” said Jordan.

  “Wanna fool around?”

  He cleared his throat. “Ma’am, I’m on duty.”

  “I’m kidding.” Red lipstick had come off her upper lip and stained the skin beneath her nose crimson. “Unless you want to. I mean, if this were a porno, we’d have to, right?”

  “We’ll be in touch,” Jordan managed, getting to his feet.

  “It’d be my tax dollars at work!” Judy said.

  “Take care,” he said stiffly, seeing her face crumple before he turned toward the door.

  “Cute guys,” she said. “Screw ’em.” And she slammed the door hard enough to make it rattle in its frame.

  NINETEEN

  Jordan Novick could read people—at least that’s what they told him at work, where he’d become, at thirty-five, the youngest chief of police that his hometown had ever employed. But he’d failed to read his own wife, failed to notice the array of textbook signs: the new hairstyle, the gym membership that she was actually using instead of just paying for, the new underwear (scraps of black and nylon embellished with lace and embroidered rosebuds, items so intricate and tiny that when they’d shown up in the laundry basket, he hadn’t even known at first that they were underwear). He hadn’t registered any of it until Patti sat him down one Sunday night two years ago and told him that she thought they were drifting apart.

  Yes, he’d said, pathetically eager. He had noticed the same thing. It wasn’t surprising, after what they’d been through. Maybe they could give counseling another try or plan a trip. He had four weeks of vacation coming. They’d always talked about Paris…

  Patti had cut him off. No Paris, she’d told him. He’d noticed how tired she looked, how, underneath the layers of her chemically brightened hair, the skin of her cheeks was stretched and papery and her lips were pale. I am sorry, she’d said. Jordan, I’m so, so sorry. But I can’t stay here anymore.

  “In the house?” he’d asked stupidly.

  “In this marriage,” she’d said.

  Patti’s mom and sister had come up the next night, and the three of them had moved Patti’s things—which, per Patti and her mother, included most of the furniture and all of the wedding gifts—to Patti’s sister’s house. Jordan had been left with the bookcases and most of the books, the futon he’d had since college, a few IKEA chairs that wobbled if you looked at them too hard. He’d been abandoned in a house where every door-knob had a plastic baby-guard around it, where every outlet was plugged with a safety lock, where there were gates in front of the staircase, top and bottom, and a lock on the toilet tank. Patti had told him she just wanted to “be by herself” to “sort things out” until she could “see things clearly,” but the truth was, not three weeks after she’d left their house and their eleven-year marriage, she’d moved out of the sham condo that she’d rented and in with Rob Fine, their dentist. Their dentist.

  “We just got to talking,” Patti told Jordan three months later in the mediator’s office when, sitting across from his wife at a shiny conference table, in a voice that was too loud for the room, Jordan had recited the demand of cuckolded husbands the world over and asked his wife how all of this had started.

  “Just got to talking?” he’d repeated. “With your mouth full of cotton, and that tube for the spit?”

  “He listens to me,” Patti had said.

  “I listen to you!” said Jordan, jumping to his feet, leaning across the table, speaking right into her face. “I do your temperature charts on PowerPoint! I measure your cervical mucus! I…”

  “Let’s maintain a respectful tone,” said the mediator, a smoothy in a red-and-gold silk tie that he stroked like a pet, a man who had the nerve to charge two hundred bucks an hour for his services. Jordan circled the table, heading toward Patti. The big muscles in his thighs were twitching; he had to move.

  “I measure her cervical mucus,” he said to the mediator, who’d pursed his lips in a prissy little line.

  “I’m not sure this is a productive line of discussion,” he’d said, and put his hand between Jordan’s shoulders, trying to ease him back into his seat.

  Jordan ignored the man. “How long?” he asked Patti.

  She twisted in her chair. “Maybe six months,” she muttered.

  “Six MONTHS?” He leaned across the table, unable to believe what he was hearing.

  “Please,” said the mediator, pushing on Jordan’s shoulder harder. Patti crossed her legs and stared at a spot on the wall just above Jordan’s head, refusing to meet his eyes.

  “Six months?” Jordan repeated. His hands clenched into fists. I’m a detective, he thought. How could I not have seen this?

  “We can discuss this reasonably,” said the mediator.

  “She told me she had bad gums!” He turned on the mediator, who stared back at him, the gold frames of his glasses shining in the lamplight. “Advanced gingivitis!”

  “Please,” the man said, and pointed to the chair. Reluctantly, Jordan sat down. He knew when he was beaten. He scrawled his signature on the
forms they slid in front of him without looking at his wife and without reading a word.

  “Good luck,” he told Patti once it was over. She’d put one soft hand on his arm and said, “Be happy, Jordan. That’s all I want. For both of us.” He’d kissed her cheek numbly. He couldn’t stop looking at her teeth, which glittered like a mouthful of pearls. Ill-gotten gains. Dr. Fine was probably giving her freebies.

  He and Patti had hooked up junior year at a party, when Patti, tipsy on foamy beer pumped from a keg, had tried to climb a tree during a game of Truth or Dare. She’d been doing a pretty fair job of it, too, until someone had howled, “I can see your bush,” and Patti, startled, had groped for her skirt and lost her grip and would have gone tumbling ten feet to the ground if Jordan hadn’t been there to catch her. Later, with the two of them sitting on the lid of the Petrillos’ hot tub, he’d wiped the tears from her face and assured her that nobody had been able to see anything (even though he had been able to make out a faint shadow underneath the taut nylon of her panties, and the sight had excited him wildly).

  They had gone to prom and graduation and Ohio State University together, where he’d studied criminology and she’d majored in early childhood education. He’d wanted to be a policeman since one had come to his sixth-grade class on Career Day. Jordan had been impressed by the man’s uniform, by his gun, certainly, but, more than anything, by his aura of composure, the stillness at his center, the way he’d gotten the whole class to quiet down just by standing in front of them and slowly removing his tinted sunglasses (a feat Mrs. McKenna, their teacher, could manage only sporadically). Jordan craved that kind of authority, the silence that emanated from the man. At his house, his mother screamed at his father, and his father hollered at Jordan and his brother, Sam, and all four of them were given to bawling at the television set when the Bears and the Cubs disappointed.

  So he’d gotten his degree, and three years after graduation, he’d married Patti and moved to a walk-up apartment in a three-story building in a Polish neighborhood in Chicago that had one bedroom, a tiny galley kitchen, and a glassed-in porch that rattled every time the El went by. They’d take long walks on Saturday mornings, go shopping in the afternoon, and spend Sunday cooking elaborate feasts from one of the ethnic cookbooks Patti had bought and invite a bunch of friends over and eat from mismatched bowls on the floor. Patti got a job as a reading specialist in the neighborhood elementary school, and Jordan worked his way up through the ranks of the Chicago police department.

  When they were thirty, they’d decided that small-town life suited them better than Chicago. Jordan had taken the job in Pleasant Ridge, and they’d moved from their apartment in the city back home, into a three-bedroom house in the same neighborhood where Patti had grown up. The house needed some updating—particularly the bathrooms, which boasted foil wallpaper in psychedelic 1970s patterns—but there was a big backyard, and a finished basement, an apple tree growing outside their window, and of course it was baby-proofed, wanting only a baby.

  Patti threw out her birth control pills the month of her thirtieth birthday. At night, Jordan would pause, balanced on his elbows, to look down at his wife, flushed and breathing hard, and he would marvel, We could be making a baby. We could be starting a whole new life. The first month, nothing happened, but neither of them worried. By the third month, they were making anxious jokes about how they’d keep trying until they got it right. After six months with nothing to show but some rug burns from the night when they’d decided to spice things up and do it on the living room floor, Patti called her gynecologist for an appointment, but the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with either one of them. Patti’s eggs were healthy and her uterus was inviting, and Jordan’s sperm were plentiful and perky, but for whatever reason, nothing had taken. “Just keep trying,” the man said, and so they had, every other day, except on days fourteen through eighteen of Patti’s cycle, when they did it every morning, and Jordan showered and shaved while his wife lay in bed with her legs pretzeled and held in the air.

  Patti’s doctor put her on Clomid, which made her moody and gave her backaches and acne and caused her to gain, as she put it, ten pounds in ten minutes. Four months later, Jordan came home to find his wife weeping and waving a pregnancy test over her head like the Olympic torch. “Finally,” she cried, throwing her arms around his neck, “finally!” Jordan hauled the elliptical trainer into the basement and replaced it with the crib that had held Patti’s nieces and nephews. Six weeks later, she’d come out of the bathroom one night after dinner with her eyes wide and her face pale. Jordan had scooped her into his arms, the way he had when he’d carried her over the threshold of their hotel room on their wedding night, and driven her to the emergency room. Too late.

  “The good news is, we know you can get pregnant,” the doctor had told them as Patti lay crying on the hospital bed after the D and C. Good news, thought Jordan, turning away. Yeah, right. More hormones were added to the mix. Patti stopped eating foods that weren’t organic. Then she stopped eating meat and dairy altogether, and added fistfuls of vitamins and supplements—iron and folic acid, flaxseed oil and garlic capsules—to her morning regimen. When she started smelling vaguely like shrimp scampi, Jordan knew better than to mention it. She joined an online support group. Then she joined a real-time support group that met each week at the hospital, and encouraged Jordan to attend with her, but after one night spent listening to a bunch of weepy women and their beaten-down husbands talking on and on about deteriorating follicles and poor motility, “pre-e” and “PCOS,” Jordan had decided he’d had enough. “If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen,” he’d told Patti, parroting a line their doctor had given them. “We have to let nature take its course.” She’d looked at him with big, mistrustful eyes before pointing out that she was thirty-two, almost thirty-three, that she didn’t have forever. Clearly, nature needed some help.

  She got pregnant again that September and miscarried November third. Their doctor told them to wait a few months before trying again, but Patti ignored him. She also neglected to pass this piece of information on to Jordan, who would have been happy to abstain. Sex with Patti had become as routinized, and every bit as pleasant, as emptying the dishwasher or taking out the trash. Instead of looking down at her in ecstasy and thinking We could be making a baby, the only thought going through his head as he pumped and thrust (always in the missionary position, to maximize their chances, Jordan’s body slick with sweat and Patti’s teeth bared in a joyless grin) was Please, please, let it work this time. It was God’s joke on him. When he was fourteen, sex was all he thought about and all he wanted, and even the cleft of a peach in the produce section could get him going. Now that he could have all the sex he wanted—or at least all the sex he wanted during the six days when Patti was most fertile—all he wanted at night was a cold beer and a soft pillow.

  By January, Patti was pregnant again. By the middle of February, they were back in the hospital, Patti crying on the bed, Jordan standing beside her, their doctor at the ultrasound monitor, saying These things happen and Sometimes it’s for the best and You’re young and healthy, you just need to be patient.

  In the car, on the way home, Jordan, stumbling, had suggested that maybe they could adopt or think about a surrogate. He’d read an article somewhere, and there’d been that actress who’d given the interview on TV… Patti had turned on him, eyes blazing, lips drawn into something just short of a snarl. “You want to just give up? After everything I’ve been through, you want to just quit?”

  “No,” he’d said, backing off clumsily. No, of course he didn’t want that. He just thought that maybe they could give themselves a break. Tears spilled from his wife’s eyes. “I don’t want a break,” she’d said, her voice cracking. “I want a baby.”

  They moved from the hormones to in vitro. Instead of having sex, Jordan got to masturbate into a Dixie cup every other month, with a tattered copy of Penthouse in his free hand and a nurse hovering on the other side
of the door. Patti spent two nights a week at her infertility support group, and every spare minute online, researching homeopathic remedies and alternative medicines, or studying first-person accounts from women who’d managed to give birth to healthy babies in spite of a history of miscarriages, in spite of breast cancer or a tipped uterus or a missing fallopian tube, in spite of strokes or lupus or polycystic ovarian syndrome or, in one case Patti had shown him, in spite of having no arms and no legs.

  She was pregnant again by April. She lost that baby (that was how she’d started referring to her miscarriages, as “lost babies”) the third week of June. On the Fourth of July, they were supposed to attend a neighborhood picnic, then drive into Chicago and watch the fireworks over Lake Michigan. At four o’clock, Patti handed Jordan a hollowed-out watermelon filled with fruit salad and told him to have fun. “You’re not coming?” he’d asked.

  “I can’t,” she’d said, and he knew why. Larry and Cindy Bowers, who lived down the street, were hosting the party, and Cindy was pregnant with twins. Sarah and Steve Mullens from the next block, who surely would be invited, had a three-month-old, a little boy named Franklin whom Steve insisted on wearing strapped to his chest like a bomb. Steve had told the rest of the men that he had started a blog that was all about the baby—“about our adventures together,” was how he’d put it—and instead of looking at him like he was crazy, the other men had nodded solemnly, had tapped at their BlackBerries, bookmarking the link.

  Patti got pregnant again in September, and after she’d lost that baby the last week in October, she came home from her support group and announced that she wanted to hold a memorial service.

  Puzzled, Jordan looked up from his magazine. “For what?”

  She’d stared at him as if he’d grown a second head. “For our babies.”

  He’d folded his magazine and set it down on the side table. “Patti,” he’d said. His voice was calm, even though he could feel four years’ worth of frustration and disappointment seething in his veins—the pills and the shots and the IVF cycles (none of them were covered by insurance, and their respective 401(k)s had dwindled from thousands to hundreds of dollars), the nights Patti had spent weeping at her support groups or welded to her laptop, convincing herself that this was going to happen, that she could make it happen by sheer force of will, the way books about pregnancy had crowded every novel and biography from their shelves, how every conversation they had—in bed, in the car, over dinner, on vacation—came back to this: sperm and egg and the empty crib in the third bedroom, so sunny in the mornings, tucked up under the dormer windows. “You can’t have a service for something you flush down the toilet.”