Best Behavior

by Wendy Francis

  She hefts herself to a standing position again, reaches up to wash her hair, and is shocked by how incredibly heavy her arms feel, as if they’re weighed down by a set of dumbbells. Her head also seems improbably far away from her hands this morning. She opens her mouth wide, letting the warm water stream in, and gargles, which sends a little down her throat by mistake, triggering her gag reflex—but eventually, mercifully, the feeling subsides. Bread, carbs of some kind, will be mandatory if Dawn has any hope of surviving the day.

  It occurs to her that if she’s in this bad of shape, then her brother must be even worse off. When Cody showed up last night with his friends, he was clearly hammered, unsteady on his feet, his eyes rimmed in red. Dawn fought her way over to him through the throng of people crowding the bar.

  “Where have you guys been? I thought you said you were coming to the Burren after the banquet.” She hated the querulous note to her voice, as if she were their mom, but she’d been looking forward to everyone’s hanging out together on their last night as seniors. Plus, a small piece of her had been worrying about where he was, what her brother had been up to. Had they snuck off to smoke some weed, maybe, or something worse? She’d searched his eyes for telltale signs, like enormous dilated pupils. Dawn doesn’t remember much from her antidrug workshops in high school, but the photos of kids high on coke stay with her: pupils so wide it looked like you could almost jump through them.

  “Just hanging. We went back to Casey’s room to have a few. His parents left him all this extra booze.”

  “Lucky you.” She gave him a glass of ice water, which, on reflection, she probably should have kept for herself. “Hey, Melissa was here earlier. Not sure if she’s still around.” It seemed only fair to give her brother a heads-up.

  “Oh, yeah?” Was it alarm that registered on his face? Or heartbreak? It would be just like her brother to break up with Melissa because he’d heard she was about to dump him. But Melissa would never do that to Cody, would she? Melissa loved Cody with a capital L, the kind that inspired her to get a secret tattoo with their initials inked into the yin-yang symbol. Dawn has never seen it, but Cody told her about it. “Fucking beautiful” is how he’d described it.

  Before she could get a read on her brother, though, Brad and Toby were dragging him onto the dance floor. “C’mon, Cody. Dance with us,” they pleaded in their best imitation of fangirl voices. Already a group of seniors from the girls’ lacrosse team—the preppy, popular crowd from whom Dawn had always kept her distance—was circling her brother like hawks.

  “Cody!” Dawn shouted over the din of the music, vying for his attention before she lost him entirely. “I have something to show you!” She’d almost forgotten. She grabbed her cell phone from the table and waved it in the air. Another text had arrived shortly after she’d stepped into the bar. Tell your brother not to party too hard tonight. Like the last one, the sender was blocked. Not a threat exactly, but still, a red flag that Cody’s stalker had no intention of going away anytime soon. Dawn was beginning to suspect it might be love-jilted Melissa, after all. But Cody just shot her his signature grin and shrugged, as if helpless to defend himself against the cohort of young women pulling him onto the dance floor.

  When Matt got back from the bathroom, he asked her if everything was all right.

  “Yeah, sure.” Dawn slipped the phone into her pocketbook. “Seems Cody has a new fan club. Word must have traveled fast that he and Melissa broke up.”

  “Well, if I were Cody, I wouldn’t be too worried.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  Matt nodded in the direction of a shadowy corner of the bar, where some guy was making out with a girl, her long blond hair trailing down her back. Melissa.

  “I passed them on the way to the john. Doesn’t look like she’s taking it too hard.”

  “Wow, I guess not.”

  Dawn finishes rinsing her hair and twists the shower knob off before climbing out and toweling off. Maybe her phone, dead this morning, has recharged by now. What if there’s another text about her brother? She hurries back to her room, doing an awkward kind of crab crawl through the boxes, and grabs the phone off its charging port. Insistently, she taps at the button, trying to coax the screen back to life.

  But when the screen pops up, there’s nothing. Nada. No new texts about anything stupid that Cody might have done in the past twelve hours, like, making out with some random girl or stealing street signs (another offense he never got caught for sophomore year). And now Dawn has to wonder whether the shudder that just climbed through her body was due to relief—or disappointment—that no new text was waiting. She doesn’t want her brother to get in trouble, honestly. But the thought that someone else might see through Cody’s clean-cut exterior is a tiny bit seductive. Maybe not everyone in the world has been hoodwinked by her charming, suave twin.

  The green glow of the time against the backdrop of her phone (a picture of her and Matt) stares back at her. 11:55 a.m. She really needs to get moving. Her mom will kill her with a capital K if she’s late for graduation.

  * * *

  It’s here. Graduation day. Lily wears her Ralph Lauren sundress, the one that’s strapless with big splashes of blue and white and that reminds her of a Kandinsky painting, but prettier. When she’d described it this way to Roger, he’d acted surprised, as if he didn’t think Lily would be familiar with Kandinsky’s work. “I’m sure you’ll look stunning in whatever you wear,” he said.

  “What? You think I don’t know anything about art? You’re not the only one who can read, you know,” she scolded, half teasing. This whole weekend, she decides, is making her crazy defensive. But honestly, why do people with college educations always assume that no one else can possibly learn anything outside the classroom? Lily is a voracious reader, eating up everything from thrillers to self-help to art history. On her bedside table sits a stack of library books waiting to be cracked open: Stephen McCauley’s My Ex-Life, Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, and Tara Westover’s Educated. Lily could be the poster girl for the self-educated American.

  When she was young and the library only a few blocks from her house, she’d plant herself in the beanbag chairs of the children’s section every Saturday, lapping up as many books as she could. It’s where she met some of her best childhood friends, like Laura Ingalls Wilder and Harriet the Spy. Lily felt as if she knew those girls, and they knew her. Her first real mentor, Miss Durgin, used to have a pile waiting for her to sift through each Saturday, as if she could sense the trouble at home and understood books were Lily’s lifeline. Some days Lily thinks about trying to find Miss Durgin again, or at the very least, making a generous donation to the library as a way of signaling her thanks. Were it not for Miss Durgin, she’s fairly certain she would have befriended the bottle, like her mom.

  Lily brushes loose powder across her neck and her freckled upper chest. Yesterday’s sun has turned her skin a shade of honey brown. Her long dark hair is pulled up in a bun atop her head, with a few loose strays wisping at the sides. Dangly silver earrings, tipped with blue topaz gems, sparkle back at her in the mirror. She dabs a touch of Calvin Klein’s Secret Obsession behind her ears and onto the pulse points of her wrists, and smiles into the mirror, double-checking her teeth for lipstick. She doesn’t care what Meredith might think. Lily feels happy to be young and pretty and in shape. If other moms want to snicker at her and call her a trophy wife, so be it.

  Remarkably, her head barely hurts after the copious amounts of alcohol consumed yesterday. Alison stayed over and will probably sleep in until later this afternoon, which is fine. It’s not as if anyone’s planning to return to the house after graduation, and if Alison wants to hang out all day, she’s more than welcome. Lily has left a stack of fresh towels outside the guest room door along with a note encouraging her friend to take advantage of the pool. Since Roger didn’t stumble into bed until almost midnight last night, she didn’t even bo
ther mentioning that Alison was sleeping over. “Did you drive home?” Lily asked him, the smell of booze radiating from his body like sound waves. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m fine.” And he’d patted her leg, muttering something about how proud he was of the kids, before promptly falling asleep. At the time, Lily was too drunk herself to be angry with him, though whether she is upset with him now for getting home so late or for not calling an Uber, she isn’t sure. Probably both.

  All she needs to do is get through today and tomorrow, and her life can return to normal. She opens the medicine cabinet, takes out the bottle, and untwists the lid. A pile of tablets spills out onto the counter. One last check to make sure that she has enough to get her through the weekend. Minus the ones Roger took for his hand, there are thirty-two pills left, which should be plenty. Though the bottle recommends taking no more than six pills in a twenty-four-hour period, Lily has pushed that number to seven, sometimes eight, in the course of a day. Since she started taking them a few weeks ago, just to dull the edges, she finds the amount of time she can go between pills has shrunk to a smaller window. Now by the third hour, the calming effects begin to wear off and she can feel herself tensing up again, her skin beginning to itch. Her body hungers for the instant ease, and she no longer has any desire to plow through that last hour or tough it out.

  Once she is through the weekend, she will stop cold turkey with the painkillers. In the back of her mind lurks the realization that this might not be as easy to pull off as it might have been, say, a few weeks ago or even a few days ago. She has read the literature and understands that the body’s tolerance level for oxycodone increases the more you take, the longer you take it. This only means that stopping it gets increasingly difficult with each passing day. Still, Lily is prepared. In a silly sort of logic, she figures that if she misses that happy-go-lucky feeling too much, she will allow herself to drink a glass of wine every few hours. Swap out one vice for another. Perhaps not the ideal plan, but it’s the only one she’s got at the moment.

  To be fair, also on the edges of her mind is the slip of paper in her top bureau drawer on which a cell phone number is written, a direct dial to someone whom her friend Haley recommended should Lily ever need a refill. When Roger was being a bit of a baby with his broken hand, Lily confided to Haley that she’d snuck a few of his painkillers for herself, which had the happy result of making his injury more tolerable for them both (and it was weeks before she’d thought of the pills again). Haley had laughed in sympathy (her own husband had just weathered back surgery), then pressed the paper into Lily’s hand. When Lily saw what it was, she exclaimed, “As if I’ll ever need this!” But Haley just shrugged and smiled, as if she knew better and could already anticipate the need in Lily’s voice for eventual replenishments. “Don’t worry about it. Everyone does it,” she’d said.

  Lily won’t call, of course. It’s not as if she’s some low-level drug addict desperate for a fix (even though she suspects Haley only deigns to recommend the classiest oxycodone dealers). But it’s nice to know she has a safety net in case it’s not as easy to quit as she hopes. Just in case it turns out she needs a few more pills before she weans herself off. Totally. She pulls a few tablets out for today, slips them into her compact, and pours the rest back into the bottle before replacing it on the shelf. Moses pads in and tilts his head, as if to say, What do you think you’re doing?

  “What? You want one?” she asks. “Sorry, buddy. Not for dogs. Your life is happy enough as it is.” She throws a pill back for herself and swallows. That should keep her calm till they’re through the actual ceremony, she figures. The rest of the day she’ll have to play by ear.

  Moses pads back into the bedroom and circles the rug three times before flopping down. Thanks to her Instagram account, her dog has become somewhat famous. Not many influencers have a hundred-and-fifty pound Saint Bernard to feature in their photo shoots. Which reminds her: before she heads downstairs to find Roger, she should shoot a quick photo for her followers. The dress, the earrings, the whole getup has been comped to her by her generous vendors. Hashtags: #ralphlaurendress; #lizclaiborneearrings; #graduationday; #gobullfrogs! Then she takes a shot of sleeping Moses and posts it with the hashtag: #someoneisexcitedforgraduation. If only she could lay herself down next to him.

  TEN

  Friday afternoon

  Summer is hands down Meredith’s favorite season. If she were asked to name her most-loved holiday, it wouldn’t be Christmas or even Thanksgiving, but the Fourth of July. She enjoys watching all that bold patriotism on display, especially when the Boston Pops pound out the “1812 Overture.” But, really, she loves the holiday most because it encapsulates everything wonderful about the season. The languid sunny days capped by sultry nights, the perpetual scent of sunblock, the shouts from the kids as they dive into the water, the icy nip of cherry Popsicles during the day and the smoky taste of s’mores at night. On the Fourth, everyone converges on Carol’s house on Long Island Sound, better known as “the summer house” for the fireworks. No matter what. Even when the kids worked their summer jobs, they’d shown up for the Fourth, tossing their jumble of bags into the bunk room. And every year, Meredith takes the week off from the hospital, a gap that appears like an open smile in her calendar each July. It’s a time when, as a family, they can allow themselves to relax.

  The last Fourth—when graduation still seemed so far away—Dawn invited Matt out to the summer house, and Meredith was surprised by how much she actually enjoyed Matt’s company. A mellow kid, he’d eased into the rhythm of their days as if he’d been coming every summer. He knew how to grill a steak to a perfect medium rare, hung up his wet towel on the deck railing without reminding, and could easily pitch a tent whenever the house overflowed with guests. Most important, the boy appeared to be completely enchanted with her daughter. Knowing this should somehow ease the way for Meredith when Dawn heads off to Chicago in the fall. And yet.

  “Are you okay with them living together?” her friends have asked, which strikes Meredith as a surprisingly archaic question in this day and age.

  The truth is that the thought of the kids’ living together—and for all intents and purposes, sleeping together—doesn’t bother her nearly as much as the fact that her daughter will be a thousand miles away. A thousand miles! Besides, she’s beyond worrying about Dawn’s getting pregnant. They had “the talk” back in high school when Dawn started seriously dating a guy, who, in Meredith’s humble opinion, was a bit of a slacker. It was right after she’d quit ballet and was casting around for a way to fill all her newly idle hours. As awkward as the conversation had been for them both—Dawn sitting in the passenger seat and Meredith’s eyes trained on the road—Meredith had conveyed in no uncertain terms that getting pregnant as a teenager was not an option.

  “Understood?” she’d asked.

  “Yes, Mom, I got it. You don’t want to be a grandma until I’m like forty.”

  “Not forty, necessarily. Just no babies till you’re done with school, and that includes college.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Beyond that, she’d trusted Dawn to have the conversation with her doctor about what kind of birth control to use. During vacations or over the summer, the compact of tiny pink pills would occasionally get left out on the bathroom counter, and Meredith would check it each time to make sure Dawn was holding up her end of the bargain. Insurance, not snooping, she reasoned. As for Cody, she’d gladly passed the “sex talk” baton to Joel.

  So many memories come flooding back now, insistent little recollections that lap at her mind while they wait for the ceremony to commence. The afternoon air has grown thick with humidity so that it feels like summer, and even in the parcel of shade they’ve co-opted for the ceremony, the heat verges on the oppressive. If it were any other day, Meredith would indulge in a long, lazy nap in the hammock.

  A few rows down someone waves to her, and she realizes that it’s Penelope from last night. Som
ehow, despite the fact that she was slurring her words at the dinner, Penelope looks spectacular today. Her outfit is a halter red-and-white striped jumpsuit that hugs her toned body, leaving very little to the imagination. Meredith smiles and reciprocates with a wave, though she has to laugh. There’s no chance their outfits would overlap today because there’s zero chance Meredith would be caught wearing a jumpsuit. She doubts she could even fit into it. Thank goodness she won’t have to play the comparison game today, she thinks.

  Then she remembers: oh yeah, I have Lily for that.

  A handful of other parents wanders around the courtyard shooting photos with their expensive cameras—Canon Digital SLRs and Nikons with zoom lenses. It is picturesque, pretty enough for a postcard, with giant bins of potted tulips positioned on the lawn and endless rows of white chairs contrasting with the bright green grass. Meredith double-checks her phone to make sure it’s fully charged and gets up to shoot a few photos herself.

  She bumps into Matt’s parents briefly (who reassure her that they’ll keep a close eye on Dawn while she’s in their hometown of Chicago), and then rejoins Joel and Carol. Several rows of chairs up front have been cordoned off for the graduating class. There’s the constant flutter of commencement programs fanning the air, which creates an odd humming sensation, as if hundreds of bees flap their wings in anticipation. A fair number of women in the audience sport summer hats. Had it occurred to her, Meredith would have packed her own straw fedora.

  Just then, her mother reaches over and digs her bony fingers into her knee. “Don’t look now, but if it’s not the Prince of Narnia and his princess,” she whispers. “Along with His and Her Royal Highness.”

  Meredith turns slightly to see Roger and Lily making their way to their seats, a few rows up to the left. Harry and Edith follow behind them and then Georgie, Roger’s brother. Roger caters to enough wealthy clients in Boston to be recognized, but the hushed whispers still unnerve Meredith. No one ever batted an eye when they were married! It seems impossible that in ten short years her ex-husband has built himself into a franchise, a household name representing some of Boston’s favorite sports icons. She wonders how he managed to secure such coveted seats, in the “reserved” section, but then realizes she’s being an idiot—Roger has probably already promised Bolton a new science lab, a spanking new football stadium.