Best Friends Forever Page 2

  He was nice, I thought, as Matthew expounded enthusiastically on the hike he’d taken just last weekend with the Sierra Club. “I go out with them a few times a month,” he volunteered. “Maybe you could join me?”

  My first thought was that he was kidding—me, hike? Where, from the Cinnabon to the Ben & Jerry’s? I still had to remind myself that I was now more or less normal-sized, and that Matthew had never seen me in my previous incarnation. “Sure. That sounds like fun.” A hike in the woods. I let myself picture it: a red fleece pullover, a hat that matched my mittens, the thermos full of hot coffee that I’d bring. We’d sit side by side on a blanket in the leaves and watch as a stream burbled by.

  Our entrees arrived. My fish was mealy at the edges, translucent in the center, tasting as dead as if it had never been alive. I managed two bites while Matthew told the story of how his colleague, a middle-aged middle manager named Fred, had suddenly taken it into his head to get his eyes done. “He came into the office and he looked—Well, one of the secretaries said he looked like a squirrel with something jammed up his…” He paused. A dimple flashed in his cheek. “Like a startled squirrel. Like his eyes were trying to jump right out of his head, and I heard that when his granddaughter saw him for the first time she started crying.” He chuckled. I smiled. Love me, I thought, and sipped my wine and trailed one manicured thumbnail delicately along the edge of my blouse, beneath which my breasts swelled, clad in itchy lace, helped along by heavy-duty underwire.

  Matthew leaned across the table, with his tie dangling dangerously close to the puddle of beef blood on his plate. “You’re a really unique person,” he said.

  I smiled, shoving my doubts about the syntax of “really unique” to the back of my mind.

  “I feel so comfortable with you. Like I could tell you anything,” he continued.

  I kept smiling as he gazed at me. He had nice eyes behind the glasses. Kind eyes. Maybe I could talk him into shaving the mustache. I could see us together, on a slope covered with fallen leaves, my mittened hands around a cup, the coffee-scented steam curling in the air. Please stop talking, I begged him telepathically. Every time you open your mouth, you are jeopardizing our beautiful life together.

  Sadly, Matthew didn’t get the message. “Six months ago,” he began, with his eyes locked on mine, “I woke up with a bright light shining through my bedroom windows. I looked up and saw an enormous green disc hovering above my home.”

  “Ha!” I laughed. “Ha ha ha!” I laughed until I realized he wasn’t laughing… which meant that he wasn’t kidding.

  “I have reason to believe,” he continued, and then paused, lips parted beneath his mustache, “that I was abducted by aliens that night.” He was so close that I could feel his beefy breath on my face. “That I was probed.”

  “Dessert?” asked the waiter, sliding menus in front of us.

  I managed to shake my head no. I couldn’t speak. I was single, true. I was desperate, also true. I had slept with only one man at the shamefully advanced age of thirty-three. I’d never heard the words “I love you” from someone who wasn’t a parent. But still, I was not going home with a guy who claimed to have been violated by space aliens. A girl has her limits.

  When the check came, Matthew slipped a credit card into the leather folder and looked at me ruefully. “I guess I shouldn’t talk about the alien abduction on first dates.”

  I adjusted my neckline. “Probably not. I usually wait until the third date to talk about my tail.”

  “You have a tail?” Now he was the one who couldn’t tell if I was kidding.

  “A small one.”

  “You’re funny,” he’d said. There was a kind of drowning desperation in his voice, a tone I knew well. Help me, he was saying. Throw me a rope, give me a smile, let me know it’s okay. I got to my feet while Matthew searched his pockets for a few bucks to tip the coat-check girl, then followed him through the restaurant, waiting as he held the door. “You seem like a good person,” Matthew said in the parking lot, reaching for my hand. I moved sideways, just enough so that I was out of his reach. You’re wrong, I thought. I’m not.

  Outside, the predinner mist had thickened into a chilly fog. Streetlamps glowed beneath golden halos of light. Matthew ran his hand through his hair. Even in the cold, he was sweating. I could see droplets glimmering through his mustache. “Can I call you?” he asked.

  “Sure.” Of course, I wouldn’t answer, but that didn’t seem smart to mention. “You’ve still got my number, right?”

  “Still got it.” He smiled, pathetically grateful, and leaned forward. It took me a second to realize that he intended to kiss me, and another second to realize that I was going to let him. His mustache brushed my upper lip and cheek. I felt absolutely nothing. He could have pressed a bottle brush or a Brillo pad against my face; I could have been kissing his lapel or the hood of my Honda.

  By the time I got home, he’d already left a message, long, meandering, and apologetic. He was sorry if he’d freaked me out. He thought that I was great. He was looking forward to seeing me again, maybe on Sunday? There was a movie that had gotten a good write-up in the Trib, or a hot-air-balloon festival. We could drive out, pack a picnic… his voice trailed off hopefully. “Well,” he said. “I’ll talk to you soon.” He recited his telephone number. I thumbed number three for “erase,” kicked off my boots, twisted my bright new hair into a plastic clip, then sat on the edge of my bed with my face in my hands and allowed myself one brief, dry, spinsterish sob. Don’t get your hopes up. The website didn’t say that. It was what I told myself as inoculation against the fantasy, persistent as a weed, that one of these guys could be the one: that I could fall in love, get married, have babies, be normal. Don’t get your hopes up. I’d chant it like a mantra on my drive to the Starbucks or the Applebee’s or, with Date Number Four, the bowling alley, where, it turned out, the fellow had had the ingenious notion of combining a first date with a fifth birthday party for his son (his ex-wife had not been glad to meet me; neither, for that matter, had his five-year-old). Don’t get your hopes up… but every time I did, and every time I got my stupid heart crushed.

  “Oh, well,” I said out loud. Funny. That had been nice to hear. But it was so unfair! To get a date on the Internet, a woman had to be many things, starting with thin and proceeding relentlessly to attractive and pleasant and a good listener and good company. Young, of course. Still fertile, still cute, with a good body and a decent job and a supportive (but not intrusive) family. The men didn’t even have to be sane.

  I looked at the clock, the antique pink-and-green enameled clock on chubby gold legs that I’d bought myself for my birthday. It was just after ten. The reunion would be in full swing. Merry Armbruster had called me that afternoon, making one more last-ditch plea for my attendance. “You look fantastic now! And I’m sure everyone’s forgotten about… well, you know. We’ve all grown up. There’s other things people will want to talk about.”

  Thanks but no thanks. I swallowed my vitamins with a glass of water and chased them with a shot of wheatgrass (I’d been drinking the stuff for two years, and it still tasted exactly like pureed lawnmower clippings). I hung up my date uniform, replaced the lace bra with a comfortable cotton one, pulled on my favorite flannel pajamas and a pair of socks, then sat back down on the edge of my bed, suddenly exhausted. Just lately, I’d been thinking a lot about the girl I’d been, and what she would have made of the woman I’d become. I imagined the little me standing at the doorway of my bedroom, once my parents’, in a neat cotton sweater and a pleated skirt, dark-brown hair caught in a ponytail and tied with a ribbon that matched her kneesocks. At first she’d be pleased by the rich color of the paint on the bedroom walls, the oil painting that I’d done of a lighthouse casting its beam of gold over the water, hanging above the window. She would like the enameled vase on the bedside table, the crisp linen bedskirt and the trellised iron headboard, but then she’d realize that it was my parents’ bedroom. Still here? she’d
think, and I’d have to explain how I hadn’t meant to stay, how I’d tried to go away to college, how I’d planned to live in a big city, to have boyfriends and an interesting job, to make friends and take trips and have an apartment that I’d decorate with souvenirs and statues and photographs I’d have taken on my travels around the world, how I’d planned on all of that, but somehow…

  I rolled onto my side. My blood buzzed, and my thoughts were darting wildly, jumping from my date who’d looked so promising, to the website where I’d found him, to my ex-boyfriend Vijay, who’d been “ex” for four months, and who’d never exactly been a boyfriend. You couldn’t call him a boyfriend, I guess, if we’d been out together in public only once, but I’d loved him with an intensity that I thought—or at least hoped—was reserved for the first man you’d wanted who’d broken your heart.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and let my hand rest briefly on my belly, holding my breath as I pressed. Still there. The lump—it was actually more of a stiffness than a lump—was still there, between the ridge of my pubic bone and my belly button. I pushed at it, prodding with my fingertips. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it didn’t feel normal, either. I didn’t know how long it had been there—for years I’d been so fat I could have been gestating twins and probably not noticed—but I was sure that I knew what it was. Hadn’t I watched my own mother die of the same thing? First her breasts, then her liver, then her lungs and her bones, then everything, everywhere.

  I’d scheduled an appointment with my doctor for next week, the soonest they could take me. The receptionist’s chirpy voice had cooled noticeably at my name, and I knew why. Last year I’d called in a panic after my fingers had found an odd-shaped protuberance on the side of my abdomen… which had turned out to be my hipbone. Well, how was I supposed to know? I thought, as sullen as I’d been when the nurse delivered the verdict, then stepped outside the exam room to laugh her stupid highlighted head off. You spend ten years in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds and see how well you recognize your own bones when you find them again.

  Besides, this time it felt different. Big, strangely stiff, growing each day. I knew what it was, and deep down, I’d known that it was coming. Bad luck always found me. I was a bad-luck kind of girl. The cancer had eaten my mother and found her sweet, and now it had returned to Crescent Drive, hoping I’d taste the same. And maybe that wouldn’t be so awful, I thought, as I lay on my fancy bedding, staring up at the crown moldings I’d hot-glued in place with my birthday clock ticking quietly beside me. I could just give up on everything, starting with Internet dating. No more freaks and geeks and unexpected mustaches; no more regular-looking guys who turned out to be from the Twilight Zone. I could just read, stay in bed eating shortbread cookies and gelato, and wait for the end… and with that, I heard the knock at the door, and I went downstairs to find my best friend standing there, just like old times.

  FOUR

  By the time Jordan Novick, Pleasant Ridge police chief, arrived at the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour drugstore, the woman was almost in tears. “I can’t figure out what’s wrong,” she said, brandishing her key fob and raising her voice as the infant in her arms howled. “It’s a brand-new car. You’re just supposed to walk up to it with your key fob, you don’t even have to press anything, and I keep trying, but the door still won’t open.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, giving the woman a fast (and, he told himself, completely professional) once-over. Five-five, one-forty, Caucasian, brown and brown. Sweatpants, ponytail, crusted patch of either vomit or dried applesauce on her shirt, diaper bag on her shoulder, recycled-plastic shopping bag in her hand, panicked look in her eyes and dark circles underneath them. “Why don’t you and the little one sit in the cruiser and stay warm?”

  She nodded gratefully, babbling thank-yous as he walked her to his car and got her settled in the backseat. He took the woman’s key fob, which held no actual keys, just a plastic rectangle, shut his car door, and stood for a moment, surveying the parking lot. The drugstore anchored one end of Pleasant Ridge’s two-block downtown, which, Patti used to joke, had been zoned “cute.” Next to the parking lot was the town hall, a stately brick building with Doric columns and a marble memorial to the World War II dead out front. Next to that was the organic grocery store, a coffee shop where you could obtain a four-dollar scone or a five-dollar cappuccino, the post office, a bookstore, and a handful of boutiques that sold things like potpourri and pottery. He scratched his stubble, thinking, then waved the key fob next to the driver’s-side door of the Prius the lady had indicated. Nothing happened. He scanned the rows of cars and located three other Priuses (Prii? he wondered). The second one had an infant seat in the back, and its locks popped open obligingly when he approached. “Close the books on that one,” Jordan said, then looked around to make sure no one had heard.

  Back in the cruiser, the woman had pulled up her shirt, and the baby had stopped squealing and started nursing. Jordan caught a glimpse of the woman’s bare white belly and the curve of her breast before hastily averting his eyes.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, sounding wretched. “We ran out of Tylenol, and my husband’s out of town, and I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “It’s fine,” Jordan said. “I believe I’ve solved the mystery.” He explained, without looking at her, that she’d been aiming her key fob at the wrong car.

  The woman slumped back against the seat and pounded at her forehead with the heel of her free hand. “You must think I’m the biggest idiot in the world.”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, and meant it. The biggest idiot in the world is the guy—the detective—whose wife is having an affair with her dentist and who fails to notice the new lingerie, or the gym membership, or that she’s suddenly walking around with a mouthful of blinding-white teeth. “These things happen.”

  He waited until she’d burped the baby (its name was Spencer, and Jordan wasn’t sure if that made it a boy or a girl), then walked her back to her car. “Drive safe,” he said as she strapped Spencer into the seat, fastened her own seat belt, and gave Jordan a weary wave.

  He shoved his hands into the pockets of his parka and considered the night sky. Something is coming, he thought… but he couldn’t say why he was thinking it, or what he imagined was approaching. Snow, probably—snow was usually coming toward the end of November in Chicago… but maybe something else was on its way, something better. Jordan took a deep breath, then climbed into his cruiser to head back to the station and type out a report on the Case of the Locked Prius, by far the biggest event of his shift. Something was coming, and he’d just have to hope that he was ready when it came.

  FIVE

  Valerie Adler’s family moved into the green-and-tan ranch house across the street in June of 1983, when I was nine years old. They arrived on a Saturday morning. My brother and mother and I were sitting at the kitchen table as the moving van roared around the corner. Attracted by the noise, we went to the living room to look. I could hear the grumble of a lawnmower from the house next door (Mr. Bass would be pushing it, wearing a sleeveless undershirt and leather sandals that exposed his thick yellow toenails, while his wife watched from their screened-in porch, reading a paperback and pointing out the spots he’d missed).

  “New neighbors,” Jon called to my father, who was at his station at the stove, making his famous pancakes.

  “Really?” My mother put her hands on Jon’s shoulders, standing on her tiptoes to peek over his head. She watched the truck for a minute, then went back to the kitchen. That morning she was dressed in her blue cotton bathrobe, with her hair in a thick braid over one shoulder. Her breasts swung above the belt that barely made it around her midsection, and her broad feet pushed at the seams of her slippers.

  This was the year I had begun to understand that most mothers weren’t like my mother, that my family was different from other families in Pleasant Ridge. Some of my classmates’ moms were skinny and some of them were plump, but none of t
he plump ones were near the size of my mom, who had to work hard every time she got up from a chair or out of our station wagon, who had to stand through my parent-teacher conferences because she couldn’t fit behind the desks.

  “Wow, look at her,” I’d heard Lauren Felsey whisper to Kara Tait when my mom had come to school on Career Day. I’d felt furious at Lauren, but furious at my mother, too, for failing to be a normal mom, in jeans or khakis, with a neat haircut and a brisk manner. My mom was big, and soft, and dreamy, and until then I’d always thought she was beautiful. She had pale skin and rosy cheeks, like a painted doll, round blue eyes and light-brown hair that fell to the small of her back. At night, I loved to lie on her bed and watch her brush her hair, as light and fluffy as the stuff you’d pull out of milkweed pods. She had a beautiful voice, and even though she moved slowly, she was graceful and light on her feet, as if she were being moved by invisible gusts of wind. When I was in nursery school, I’d drawn pictures of her with a body made of clouds, outlined in blue crayon, big and puffy and insubstantial as air. I’d drawn myself on the ground, a squat flesh-colored stump with a scribble of brown loops for hair, holding on to her shoelace as a string, keeping her tethered to the world.

  My parents had met in summer camp when they were seventeen. My mom had been in charge of the chorus and of writing the end-of-summer musical at Camp Wa-Na-Kee-Tah, and my father, tanned and broad-shouldered, had taught archery at the boys’ camp across the lake. They’d never told me how they’d met. Sometimes I’d imagined that it had been in the water: that my mom had been swimming across the lake one bright summer afternoon with the shaft of a misfired arrow in her hand, and my father had swum out to meet her.

  They’d both gone off to college, and then my dad had gone to Vietnam, and they’d met again at a camp reunion the summer they were both twenty-five. My dad was doing odd jobs—he’d driven school buses for a while, and washed dishes in a restaurant. My mom was working at Marshall Field’s, writing copy for the newspaper ads for hats and suits and dresses, and singing in community theater productions at night. She lived in an apartment downtown, with two roommates. “I walked right up to her and said, ‘How’s the prettiest girl in bunk eight?’” was how my father told it. “Oh, Ron,” my mom would say, and swat at him with her hand or a dishtowel, but you could tell the story pleased her. They’d gotten married eight months after the reunion. My mother’s roommates had been her bridesmaids.