Rosebush

by Michele Jaffe

  This was horrible. I was losing my mind. I couldn’t remember, but I knew, knew, I wouldn’t have drugged Nicky. Would I? I felt battered, exhausted, like I could no longer separate truth from illusion. I had to get a grip. Find the facts.

  “What else did people tell you?” I asked, forcing myself to refocus on the harsh fluorescent lighting of the hospital room. But the nausea in the pit of my stomach, the growing sense of dread, of being about to drown in my own self-doubt, didn’t leave me.

  “That you weren’t alone when you left the party, although no one seems to have observed who you were with. Do you remember that?”

  “No.”

  “You’re certain?”

  I was crying now. “I don’t know what you want from me. I’ve told you everything I can.”

  “You didn’t tell me about the cup with the drugged drink in it until now.”

  “I only remembered it a little while ago.” Please, I wanted to beg. Please believe me.

  “Right.” She nodded once, desultorily.

  “I had no reason to drug Nicky.” A thought dawned on me like sunlight slicing through storm clouds. “If you believe her, that I put something in the cup, that means I drugged myself. Why would I do that?”

  She gazed at me as though I’d just walked into a trap. “Why would you kneel in front of a speeding car?”

  “What if I didn’t see the car? What if I didn’t know it was there?”

  “An invisible car?” Given her tone, I was surprised she didn’t snort.

  The storm clouds closed up over me again and I felt like I was being sucked into darkness. Everything Officer Rowley said made me more confused, more unsure of what really happened. My memory felt like the gap-toothed smile of a creepy crone from a fairy tale, where the spaces between her teeth give you glimpses of a scary dark place that wants to eat you up alive.

  Officer Rowley kept talking, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Because I knew what was bothering me now. I was back at the party, thinking about the plastic cup.

  I get up from David’s lap to find Kate and Langley. I kiss him and pick up the red plastic cup and carry it across the room toward the stairs.

  I turn to give him a cute wave, and I see Elsa talking to him. He’s in good hands, I tell myself.

  I turn back and crash into something—the balustrade of the staircase?—dropping my purse. It’s open, so everything scatters all over the floor and I put the drink down to pick it all up.

  I put the drink down and left it there.

  Which meant I didn’t drink any. So it didn’t matter what was in it.

  But this discovery did nothing to help my case at all. Because it didn’t answer the question of how the drug did get into my system. And it only made it look more likely that I knew there was something wrong with the cup and purposely avoided it.

  It only made me look more guilty.

  “That’s all for right now, Miss Freeman,” Officer Rowley wrapped up. “Do you have anything to add?”

  I was trapped. The truth wasn’t what was going to help me.

  “No.”

  Chapter 16

  “A dollar seventy-nine for your thoughts,” Langley’s voice said from the door of my room. I must have been really distracted because I hadn’t heard her approach. I looked at the clock and saw that it was a little past noon. “Not that they’re not worth more, it’s just that’s all the cash I have on me.”

  As she walked into my room, she slid her phone into the outside pocket of her Miu Miu purse, which was weird, because she always kept her phone inside. She’d only put on mascara and lip gloss, and she was wearing a T-shirt and cardi with baggy jeans, leopard flats, and a newsboy cap over her hair but no other accessories, which made her much less put together than usual, like maybe she rushed here.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She looked aghast. “Am I okay? You’re the one we’re supposed to be worrying about. That is so you, jelly bean. I’m fine, don’t think about me.”

  “You’re lying. What’s going on?”

  Her face fell apart in an instant. “It’s Popo. He’s—there’s been a bit of a setback.”

  “Oh, Langley, I’m so sorry.”

  She wiped her eyes, pulled a hair off her sweater. Swallowed. He and her grandmother had raised Langley together since she came to live with them, but Popo and Langley had a special bond.

  He was the one who started her car every morning in the winter to make sure the heater would be putting out warm air by the time she got in. He was the one who attended all her dressage competitions, always with some little piece of jewelry or object that she’d been secretly coveting as a present. He was the one who snuck her wads of hundred-dollar bills “in case she needed a soda” at the mall. He wrote the letters to her when she was away for the summer school session at Gordonstoun in Scotland, and he was the one who sat by her bedside reading Little Women when she had a cold, even now.

  Or he had until recently. Although the name Lawrence Archibald Winterman, former president of New Jersey Gas and Electric and chair of a dozen boards, still commanded towering admiration, the man himself was in decline. Six months ago, he’d fallen down the back stairs of the house and broken his hip and it wasn’t healing as well as it should. Since then, despite the care of a full-time nurse, he’d had infection after infection, each one taking a toll on the whole family.

  “What is it this time?”

  “He’s having chest pains. The doctor is running some tests, but we won’t get the results until Tuesday. I think it’s because of my grandmother.”

  Langley’s grandmother was convinced that the nurses they had to care for Popo were stealing from her, so she was constantly trying to sneak up on them and installing surveillance devices to catch them in the act. All her precautions had really achieved was to create an atmosphere of tension and a rotating string of nurses who quit because they found the conditions intolerable.

  “She’s just looking for something to control,” Langley explained with a resigned smile. “She’s like my mother that way. When disruptive things happened in one part of her life, things she couldn’t stop like the air-conditioning in the trailer breaking, she’d become extra rigid in another part and put us on some crazy diet or become obsessed with my posture.”

  It was hard to imagine Langley as anything other than a pampered East Coast girl living in a palace, but she’d actually spent the first eleven years of her life living in a trailer outside of Tucson, Arizona.

  Once, when I asked Langley what it was like, she’d said, “The trailer was so snug with the two of us in it, it was like living inside a doll’s house.”

  “Maman practically bought out the entire stuffed-animal selection at FAO Schwartz when we found out Langley was coming to us,” her grandfather told me one day when the three of us were having tea in his study. “And that first night Langley took them all, the giant deer, the giraffe, the lion, and used them to drape a sheet and make a tent so she could feel cozy because her new room was too big. That’s my girl.” He’d squeezed her hand and looked at her with such pride that I was jealous. “That’s my resourceful, smart girl.”

  I hadn’t learned why Langley went to live with her grandparents until the class ski trip to Killington my first year in Livingston. Everyone else was excited to go in the Jacuzzi after skiing, but Langley and I had both said we’d rather stay on the mountain longer. In my case, anyway, it was a lie—it was a dreary, freezing day—and I’d changed into jeans and a big nubby fisherman’s sweater and gone and hidden myself in the snack bar. It was a cavernous octagonal space with a wooden-beam ceiling and huge windows looking out at the mountains. Because everyone else was on the slopes, the wood-plank tables arrayed around the octagon were nearly all empty.

  Until five minutes after I sat down, when Langley slid in next to me. She was wearing jeans, camel-colored Louis Vuitton snow boots, and a light-blue parka with white fur trim around the hood that perfectly framed her face.

&
nbsp; “Okay, jelly bean. What’s your excuse? Why aren’t you going to the Jacuzzi party?”

  I felt my breath catch. Her directness caught me off guard. “It’s a long story.”

  She looked at her watch. “I’m guessing that we have a couple hours before everyone gets bored and wrinkled and forgets we weren’t there so we won’t have to answer any questions about why. If it’s longer than that, I might need popcorn.”

  “Why don’t you want to go in?” I asked as she slid out of the parka and pulled the sleeves of her white thermal shirt up over her knuckles.

  “You tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.”

  She and Kate and I had been nearly inseparable for two-and-a-half months, but this was the first time I had really been alone with Langley. I don’t know if it was that I wanted her to like me or if it was just that I really needed to tell someone. Without thinking, I blurted, “Last November, back in Chicago, my best friend, Bonnie, died in a Jacuzzi.” The words sounded strange—like a character in a movie was saying them, not me.

  Langley’s light-blue eyes got huge. “My God. I’m so sorry. What happened?”

  “I don’t know, really.” I watched the steam come off my hot chocolate, letting it pull me into the memory. I was afraid, but also slightly exhilarated. I’d never discussed this with anyone before. “It was at a party,” I said finally.

  When I’d told Bonnie about the party, her reaction had been, “No and also Way.”

  “You can try all your mind tricks on me, Jedi,” she’d said, “and I shall not waver. Why would you want to go to that? I don’t even know any of those people and neither do you. Plus your mother is never going to let you go to a party thrown by a junior.”

  Bonnie had a brother who was a few years older than her, which meant her parents had gotten being protective out of their system, but my mother hadn’t and was worse ever since my dad had died earlier that year.

  “I’ll sneak out,” I’d said. “And not knowing them is why we should go. To meet new people. Do you want to die without being kissed?” I pulled out my best Jedi mind trick. “I heard Mark Ellis was going.”

  It had been a little crooked to name her senior crush, but it had worked.

  “Fine. I’ll go as your chaperone,” she’d agreed at last. “But for the record, this is a seriously bad idea. I’m packing my paperback Harry Potter in my bag so at least I have something to do while you’re making a fool of yourself.”

  Langley’s voice came to me then, across the scarred wooden table of the ski-lodge snack bar, saying, “Did she hit her head? How did she die?”

  “I—I don’t really know. I was off with someone else. By the time I saw her, she was just lying there in the Jacuzzi, with her head lolling back and her dark hair floating all around her, gazing up at the sky like she was looking for the Big Dipper. She looked beautiful, peaceful. Like Ophelia from Hamlet, you know?” Langley nodded. “Her face was such a perfect pale oval in the moonlight and her eyes glittered. At first I couldn’t believe she was dead. And then—” I stopped. Hot tears came running unexpectedly down my cheeks and fell into my hot chocolate.

  Langley put an arm on my back. “Then what happened?”

  I met her eyes. “Then all I could think was, God, she needed her eyebrows plucked.” I started to sob then for real, huge shaking sobs that racked my entire body. “Can you believe that? She was dead and that was all I could think of. Her eyebrows.” I pressed the palms of my hands to my eyes, jamming the tears back in. I didn’t deserve to cry about this, didn’t deserve any sympathy.

  “That happens a lot,” Langley said, rubbing my back. Her voice was soothing, kind. Maternal. “That you fixate on one weird detail. It’s normal.”

  I kept my head in my hands. “They said she OD’d. That she committed suicide.”

  “Did she?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  There was a beat of silence. Langley broke it saying in the kindest, sweetest voice, “That must have been awful for you, jelly bean. Just awful.”

  I lowered my head to the table, cradling it in my arms. “I made her go to the party,” I said, just loud enough to be heard. It was another confession I’d never made to anyone. “She didn’t want to go and I made her go. If I hadn’t convinced her to go, it wouldn’t have happened. If only I had—”

  “No,” Langley said. “Stop that right now. Your making her go did not make her take her life.”

  “You don’t know.”

  Langley put her hands on my shoulders and pulled me back up, but I didn’t dare to meet her eyes. “People don’t kill themselves because they’re not having fun at a party. If they do something like that, it has much deeper and older roots.” She reached a finger under my chin and lifted my face. “Look at me, Jane Freeman.”

  I did. There were tears in her eyes too. Their expression said that she understood, understood what I’d said, and maybe even what I didn’t. She gave me a small, sad smile completely unlike the one she usually had. It was tender, loving.

  “You were not responsible for what happened to your friend. You did not make her overdose.”

  I hadn’t realized what a burden carrying all those secrets had been. Sharing them now, sharing them with Langley, felt like someone had lifted a lead blanket off of me. I was filled with a sense of gratitude that was almost euphoric. “Thank you,” I said. “You—you’re amazing.”

  She shook her head and this time she gave me her characteristic Langley grin. “Don’t thank me, thank Dr. Phil. I learned everything I know about psychology from him.”

  I laughed, my face still wet and stinging with tears.

  “It must have been hard losing your best friend like that,” she said.

  “It was.” But not just in the way you know, I thought. Because there was still one secret I was keeping. I stared down at the table, tracing the place where someone had carved B. G. + A. F. 4-EVER into its surface with my pinkie as I wondered if I should tell her the rest. Make a clean break of it. Finally, at last, tell someone the whole truth.

  I looked up at her, her face expectant, her blue eyes sparkling like the icicles that hung outside the window, and I just couldn’t. I was too afraid of what would happen if I did. Too afraid that she’d see me for the coward, the loser I was and decide I was unworthy of her friendship.

  Instead I said, “What about you? What’s your Jacuzzi trauma?”

  Whatever I was expecting wasn’t what happened.

  Langley pulled up her thermal shirt and I saw a long puckered scar that disappeared into the waistband of her jeans and crossed her pale white torso. “It goes all the way down my thigh.”

  “How did you get it?”

  She looked away. She was quiet for a long, long time and I thought she might have changed her mind. Then abruptly she said, “My mom grew up in Livingston, in the same house my grandparents live in now, you know.” I had no idea where this was going. Was this about their pool?

  She went on. “When my mom was eighteen, she got pregnant. Her parents, well, Maman, really, gave her an ultimatum. Either tell who the father of the baby was or move out. My mother and Maman are a lot alike, both stubborn, and neither of them would budge. So when she was six months pregnant, my mother moved to Lynx Arches, Arizona.”

  “Sounds exotic.”

  “The natural part of it is really beautiful. Big blue sky, red mountains. Most people live in trailers, so architecturally it leaves something to be desired.”

  “Why did your mother choose Arizona?”

  “I think because it was as different as possible from Livingston. Plus she didn’t want her parents to be able to find her, so she used a fake name, which means she didn’t have a diploma to show, so the jobs she could get weren’t great. Waitressing. Secretarial work. Small-appliance repair shop. ” She stared out the panoramic window at the mountain, glowing pinky orange in the sunset. “For a while she was the assistant to a locksmith and she’d bring locks home at night and practice opening them. The best wa
s when she worked at the bakery.” Her gaze moved to me and she smiled ruefully. “That’s how I learned to frost cakes. You didn’t know I could do that, did you? I’m actually an ace froster.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind for my next birthday.”

  “You should. My mother believed you had to make your own luck, and in order to do that, you had to have skills. She taught me to sew and shoot and fix almost anything. And then the spring when I was eleven, she was teaching me to swim.”

  She poked at one of the mini-marshmallows in her hot chocolate until it dissolved. “Every Tuesday and Thursday after school we’d meet at the trailer and go to the community pool. It was our ritual, to make up for the fact she had to go to work before I got up because bakeries open so early. I always pedaled my bike home extra fast those days because I loved swimming lessons with her.”

  She was sitting more still than I’d ever seen her, but with the setting sun lighting up her corn silk hair she seemed to shimmer. “One Tuesday, I got a flat tire so I had to walk my bike halfway and I was a little later than usual. I was just locking it up in the back when I smelled something weird. I looked up and I saw smoke coming from under the front door.

  “The trailer was on fire.” Her fingers worked their way around the rim of her paper cup, unrolling it. “I used my sweater to pull open the door and flames exploded in my face. I called to my mom, but she didn’t answer. So I ran through the flames into the house. That’s how I got the scars.”

  She kept her gaze very level. “I was too late. The—the fire had already spread and my mother was—they said she died of smoke inhalation, so the burns on her body, she never felt—never had a chance—never—”

  She breathed in sharply and tightened her jaw. Her eyes were fixed on the wood-beam ceiling of the ski lodge, her hands clenched into fists, knuckles white with the effort not to cry.