My Very Best Friend

by Cathy Lamb

  “Will I like being famous?”

  “It will be an annoyance to you.” She stared out the window. “You will hide.”

  “Forever I’ll hide?”

  Her face cleared, and she placed the bread into a cooking pan. “No, sweet love, you won’t hide forever. You’ll come back to this ocean.”

  16

  I put my feet up on my old-fashioned red parlor couch on my deck, the stars a white sweep across the sky, as if billions of white marbles had been thrown about in arcs, swirls, and spirals. Many of those white marbles are now dead, their light still shining. All of the white marbles are larger than our own white marble, the sun. There are about 350 billion white marbles in the Milky Way galaxy, give or take ten billion.

  I thought about space and the infiniteness of the universe for a while to calm my mind.

  I had decided to spend the night at my house to attempt to begin my tenth novel. Two reasons. I didn’t want to invade on Toran and Bridget’s space every day. They are brother and sister, and they need their time. Both said they wanted me there. Toran said he couldn’t sleep anymore if I wasn’t in his arms, “snuggled up,” but I still felt I should go.

  Second, my career is hanging over my head like the blade of a guillotine, and I needed time to think about how I felt about the guillotine.

  My writer’s block is a wood block in my head. I was trying to see around the wood, heavy and immovable, as it sat on my imagination, squashing McKenzie Rae Dean.

  I had tried to write in my Edgar Allan Poe journal but couldn’t get anything down. I had even called out, “Help me, Edgar.”

  I tried to write on a napkin with a purple pen, which for some reason sometimes works for me. No go. I tried writing on the back of a cereal box, which has also produced success in the past, including the ending of Book Four. I tried to write on my wrist, with a pink marker, which launched Book Number Three. Zippo.

  I knew McKenzie Rae Dean inside and out. She was who I wanted to be in so many ways. But I couldn’t be her. She was herself. I wasn’t her. I was me.

  And “me” could not write a thing.

  I wondered, yet again, if my writing career was over.

  Did I want to write anymore?

  After nine novels, was I done? Was I burned out?

  How did I feel about that? How did I feel about being done?

  I didn’t know. I didn’t know much of anything except that my best friend was dying.

  Hard to get around that, yes, it is.

  I looked toward Toran’s house, a speck of light in the distance, and thought of him.

  My writing is, when boiled down to truth, simply a job.

  The pain from my heart, where Toran and Bridget lived, that was life. My life. Our lives.

  I went to bed reading a garden book, memorizing more Latin names for plants. It did not get rid of my insomnia. I finally got up, went outside with a coat and blankets, and stared up at the arcs, swirls, and spirals, and thought about the infiniteness of the galaxy.

  “I have bad news.” Toran and I met halfway between our homes the next morning, fall leaves fluttering between us, a cool wind meandering through. The potato harvest had been massively successful, so he was no longer working twelve-to-sixteen-hour days. I knew he was relieved. More time for Bridget.

  “What is it?”

  “The town meeting that’s coming up is partially dedicated to whether Bridget should be forcibly quarantined, and if she won’t stay quarantined, arrested. The chief would never do that, but that it’s even been suggested . . .”

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Me too.” He ran his hands through his curls, paced back and forth on the road, swore up and down like I hadn’t heard him swear before, then said, “Got your walking shoes on, luv?” We headed out and walked for miles, fast.

  I didn’t say a word. He didn’t, either, but I felt that smoldering anger, that insidious fury, and underneath it all, raw pain.

  Do not interfere on a Scotsman’s anger. Let them quiet down, let them think it out, let them be.

  Let them roar, rage, and rumble until they’re ready to talk. Alliterations again. Always when I’m stressed.

  Bridget and I took a short stroll through the lines of blueberry bushes.

  She stopped at one point and stared upward, toward the cliff.

  I put an arm around her frail shoulders.

  “I feel guilty about it,” she said.

  “You bear no guilt, no fault.”

  “I do.”

  “It is their guilt to bear, Bridget.” All theirs. “You were blameless. They failed you.”

  “If you had read all of my letters, you would know why.”

  I hadn’t read all of them. I would. “I won’t change my mind, no matter what your letters say.”

  “You might.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “There was one last conversation. . . .”

  “And hopefully they finally admitted what they’d done to you, which was so, so wrong, and apologized for it.”

  Her shoulders sagged. I gave her a long hug in the blueberry bushes.

  That woman’s burdens were as heavy as bags of rocks on her skinny shoulders.

  “I’ll open this Gobble and Gabbing Garden meeting by thanking everyone for coming,” I said. We raised our strawberry daiquiris over my parents’ dining room table and clinked them together. “Cheers, gobbling and gabbing ladies!”

  “Cheers to gobbles!” Olive said. “I got a new rooster.”

  “Cheers to gardening,” Kenna said. “Although I’ve decided not to plant red flowers again, because I have had enough blood in my life.”

  “Cheers to being with all of you again,” Bridget said.

  “Cheers to The Slut losing her job at the bar,” Rowena said. She was wearing two of her rock necklaces. I loved both of them, silver wire, purple and black beads, and decided to buy them at the end of our evening. “She was caught snogging with a waiter who is married to the owner’s sister.”

  Oh, we loved that one! Poor Arse.

  “Cheers to spices and dices and rices,” Gitanjali said.

  “Cheers to me, I moved out,” Malvina said. “Here’s to living on my own. Finally. Fat and unhappy and I made my break. Like a break out of prison.” She took another drink of her daiquiri. “Must start over, get away from my mother. Sorry for the problems she caused, and I’ll have another daiquiri.”

  We all cheered and clinked our glasses together. Everyone had given Bridget a hug when they walked in, but Malvina had given her the longest hug, then they’d had a private conversation in the library. I heard Malvina apologize profusely to Bridget for her mother and aunt.

  “Cheers to this Mexican food,” Bridget said.

  It was Mexican night, so we’d all made a Mexican dish. I made paella with garlic, shrimp, and paprika. We also had chalupas, burritos, and enchiladas. Kenna made “homemade” sopapillas with vanilla ice cream, cinnamon, and honey, with help from Sandra’s Scones and Treats Bakery.

  Then we had more daiquiris.

  “Tonight’s topic,” I said, “is creating secret rooms in a garden. I’ll have to say it, remember the book The Secret Garden?”

  They did. We talked about secret rooms, and Bridget started drawing with her colored pencils, in miniature, on long white sheets of art paper Toran had bought her.

  She looked tiny to me, but she was laughing, smiling, calm, Silver Cat sitting right beside her. We knew her immune system was broken, and getting sick could trigger carinii pneumonia, but as she said, “What’s the point of worrying about that now?”

  “If I had a secret garden, I’d do yoga,” Kenna said. “I’d want pink climbing tea roses hanging from a trellis all around me. Then, when I was up to my elbows in blood and squishy body fluids during surgery, I would know I could come home, be zen-like, and hide.”

  I put down my sopapilla as the image of blood and squishy body fluids entered my unsuspecting mind.

  “My
secret garden would have a torture chamber for Ex-Arse-Husband,” Rowena said. “Chains, whips, prison bars.”

  “I would have a secret garden room with a gazebo. The gazebo would have a locked door, then my mother could never get in,” Malvina said. “I would store my weaponry in it.”

  “Your weaponry?” Kenna asked.

  “Yes. My bow and arrows. I used to be an expert archer.”

  “I would have a secret garden for my pigs,” Olive said. “They could go back there and run around. I’d have a mud pond, too. I love my pigs. They taste so good.”

  “My secret garden have swimming pool,” Gitanjali said. “For the naked swimming. That make you free. Free and cool. At night. Sometimes, I still can’t believe. Fresh water everywhere. I have pool and that . . .” She waved a hand. “Paradise. Maybe I put in slide, too. Tall slide. I like to slidey.”

  We talked about how to establish secret gardens, or secret rooms, what vines to use for trellises to give the room privacy, what kinds of patios could be poured, how trees could offer privacy and shelter, rock walls could seclude, fences could protect. Would we have an outside fireplace for those cool Scottish nights? A pond? A fountain?

  Time flew by, the laughter became louder, garden topics petering out as we talked about strange love-making techniques that men had employed with us in the past.

  “I had a stockbroker boyfriend in college who recited the names of stocks when he was trying not to come too soon,” Kenna said.

  Rowena said that Ex-Arse “thumped up and down on me, coming six inches off my chest, then collapsing back down, again and again. It was like being pummeled by a human jackhammer.”

  “I not like that sex at all but I might like it with other man,” Gitanjali said. “The Spice Man, that what I call him.” She blushed. “In my head. Benny. Ben Harris.”

  “Gitanjali,” Kenna said, smiling. “A romance for you!”

  “I think he be better in the bedroom than that other husband I force marry as child for cows.”

  “I think so, too, Gitanjali,” I said.

  “I might like.” She smiled. “I think yes. But he like giant. I think gentle, too. No blood this time. No hand on my neck. No hitting, I no think he do that. No, Spice Man, he buys pounds of spices from me all the days. So much spices.” She seemed confused.

  “Chief Constable Harris is an honorable man,” I said. “I’ve known him my whole life.”

  “I ask about his wife, Lila, poor lady.” Gitanjali’s lips trembled, her dark eyes filled. “Too young. I feel bad for her, nice Lila. I think he good to her, so he be good to me.”

  “I was close to Lila,” Olive said. “He was a perfect husband.”

  “I happy hear that, Olive, thank you to you. So I think I might enjoy him in the bouncy bed.”

  “Menopause has brought my sex drive way down,” Kenna said. “It’s a natural progression. We should not be breeding anymore at this age, so we don’t want it as often. Why do we try to force this as a society? Why put pressure on women my age to want to have more sex? I don’t want more sex. I get plenty of sex. Once a month, good enough, twice a month, okay. More than that? Not so much. I’m tired. When I’m not in the mood and my husband is, I recite to myself the names of the bones in the body until he’s done. I fake an orgasm to get him off me. He can’t stay in very long, either, because it’s too dry down there and it hurts.”

  I crossed my legs. Dry sex didn’t sound pleasant.

  “My sex drive is high!” Olive said. “High. And I insist that my husband meet my needs.”

  “Does he?” Rowena asked.

  “Yes, he does, or he doesn’t get dinner. Sex for food,” Olive said. “That’s how it is at my house.”

  We discussed bribery and sex. Was it fair?

  “I want to have sex,” Malvina said. “But with who, there’s the question. I have to find someone who wants to have sex with me who I want to get naked with. But I’m fat. I don’t want some man to see me naked. And I’m not good in bed.”

  “How do you know you’re not good in bed?” Kenna asked.

  Malvina shrugged. “Not enough experience. I don’t know how to move. I feel awkward.”

  “Nonsense,” Olive said. “You let the passion sweep you away. And don’t give up until you’ve had your orgasm. Sex is not fun without an orgasm.”

  We agreed that that was a true statement. “It’s like having an ice-cream sundae without the ice cream,” I said.

  “I haven’t had a date in years,” Malvina said. “I need a makeover.”

  “Go to Louisa,” I told her.

  She nodded. “I do like your hair, Charlotte. It’s so pretty. Thick and shiny.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I want to have sex, too,” Rowena said. “Hot, rolling, arching, wild sex that gives me a screaming orgasm.”

  We agreed screaming orgasms were the best.

  “What are you drawing?” I asked Bridget. She drew all the time. She’d told me why. “My hands shake, probably from nerves, maybe the disease, but drawing calms them down.”

  “I’m drawing everyone in here their own personal secret garden.”

  “You’re what?” Rowena asked.

  “Oh, my gosh. Me too?” Malvina asked, hope in her voice.

  “Yes, indeedy, Malvina. I’m drawing everyone the secret garden they described.”

  “You drew me a secret garden for my pigs?”

  “Yes, I did.” Bridget handed the drawing to Olive. Silver Cat yawned beside her.

  “Would you take a gander at that?” Olive exclaimed, her face lighting up. “This is genius. Pure pig genius!” She laughed, and we scooted over to see it.

  The drawing was colorful, happy . . . and filled with pigs. Pigs resting on lounge chairs, pigs at a table with pink drinks with umbrellas, pigs swimming in a mud pool, bellies up, pigs planting flowers.

  “This is spectacular. You have captured perfectly my love of pigs.”

  “Oh. My. Spank me with a spoon,” Rowena gasped, as Bridget handed her a drawing. “You drew a torture chamber for me!”

  “Yes, I did.” Bridget laughed. “But see the flowers I added? You said tonight that your favorite flowers were orchids, zinnias, and lilies, so I added them around the handcuffs attached to the brick wall and the chains.”

  “Bridget.” Rowena sighed. “Thank you. It makes the revenge I want to take on The Arse sweet and flowery. I love it.”

  For Kenna she drew her with her legs crossed, palms out, in yoga clothes, pink tea roses pouring through the trellis overhead. “I’m framing this sucker,” Kenna said. “For my office. After moving people’s organs about, or taking them out altogether, I need to see this yoga-peace picture. Thank you, Bridget.”

  For Gitanjali, a pool as she described, only she had a hot tub in the corner and exotic, tropical flowers surrounding the pool and a twisty, tall slide. “Bridget,” Gitanjali said, her face crumpling. “This one of best thingies ever done for me. You gift me. Thank you.”

  For me she drew a desk in the middle of a meadow, with my Einstein journal and a quill in an ink pot. Beyond that was the blue-gray sea, and whales, and a sunset turning the sky into liquid color. It wasn’t a secret garden, but it was pure me. It was where I loved to work, how I loved to work. In nature. I couldn’t even speak. I stood up and hugged her.

  And for Malvina? A white gazebo. A blue table in the center of it with purple and yellow chairs, a huge bouquet of daffodils and narcissi in the center. Three candle lanterns hung from the ceiling. There was a long box with a glass front with Malvina’s bow and arrows inside.

  “Bridget.” Malvina could hardly speak as the tears ran down. “My mother has been so cruel to you. . . .” She choked. “And I did nothing. I was quiet. And in being quiet I let it happen. . . .”

  “Malvina, I’ve known you my whole life. You. Are. Not. Your. Mother.” We were quiet, still. Malvina needed to get this.

  “No. No, I’m not my mother.”

  “You’re Malvina.”


  “Yes.” Malvina wiped her face, both hands. “Right. I am. I am Malvina. I’m trying to figure out who Malvina is.”

  “Malvina is a kick-butt woman.”

  “Thank you, Bridget. I know I’m a woman. I’m trying to do the kick-butt part.”

  When we were younger, Bridget would always know these insightful details about people. Why they acted as they did. What they really meant when they were talking. What they chose not to say. What pained them. What they wanted. She was terribly sensitive, and thoughtful, and she wanted to know people. She listened. She cared.

  Her gifts and love of people were reflected in the secret gardens she had drawn for us.

  “Damn, but I love Gabble and Gobbing Garden group,” Rowena said.

  “I know,” Kenna said. “This is my favorite night.”

  “I love it so much, it’s not even hard to leave my animals,” Olive said.

  “Friends,” Gitanjali said. “I love the serenity friends.”

  “Eating, gardening, and talking,” I said. “What could be better, except for a thorough analysis of nuclear fusion and where the country will head in the future regarding the use of clean nuclear power for energy.”

  They looked at me blankly. Dang.

  “It’s a joke!” I said, and laughed, overly loud.

  “Ah, Charlotte, you are so funny. . . .”

  “I am loving this daiquiri,” Bridget said. “Shall we have another?”

  We should, we decided.

  Later I watched Silver Cat stick her nose in Bridget’s glass and lick up her leftover daiquiri.

  We were pretty well smashed by the end of the night. We went outside to my garden, joined hands on the grass, and ran around in a circle until we all fell down. It was a tad hard for some of the ladies to get up, so we lay there, together. Bridget put her head on my stomach, then everyone put their heads on someone else’s stomach and we laughed and laughed.

  Daiquiris will do that to you.

  The stars were white and pretty, arcs and spirals, the sky so close, you could scoop it up with your hands.