The Best of Friends

by Berry, Lucinda

  But it’s never stopped.

  I realize my mistake and smile at Ted. “I’m sorry for giving you a nasty look. I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s been a rough day, and I’m exhausted.”

  “Oh, please,” Ted says, waving me off. “Don’t even worry about it.”

  Bryan’s pressure on my skin releases.

  TWELVE

  KENDRA

  I shut the sliding glass door behind Paul and me. Reese is upstairs playing video games again. He’s spent so much time playing them that his brain is going to turn to mush, but I don’t know what else he’s supposed to do. What are any of us supposed to do?

  We haven’t spoken about the interview since Detective Locke and his crew left. Reese stayed by our side the rest of the day, obviously waiting for us to tear into him about the Adderall so he’d find out what type of punishment was coming his way, like he does every time he gets in trouble. This is about so much more than getting into trouble. Why can’t he see that?

  I don’t even know where to begin with the Adderall. My head is spinning with all my questions. Was he really selling drugs at school? Where does he get them? God, I hope he’s not taking them too. But what if he is? What will I do then? I’m going to have to tell Paul what I did. He’s going to be so angry.

  He interrupts my worrying. “God, I need a cigarette,” he says as he paces the concrete patio in front of the pool. He hasn’t smoked since college, and even then, it was only when he was drinking. I always hated the smell and the way it clung to his clothes afterward.

  I’ve never smoked, but I want one too. I can’t take this. “What are we going to do? What happens if Reese gave Sawyer or one of them drugs? What if they were all messed up? Does that make Reese responsible? Will they come after him? Could he end up getting in trouble for this? Why—”

  He presses his fingers up to my lips. “Stop. Just stop.”

  “Stop?” I push his fingers off my face. “I’m not stopping. What if I lose both my boys in a matter of weeks?”

  “You’re not going to lose both the boys.” Paul shakes his head. “You need to calm down.”

  “Really? Our kids are liars, and apparently, Reese is the high school drug dealer. But you want me to calm down?” I glare at him.

  “At least keep your voice down so he doesn’t hear you.” He points to the house like I need to be reminded Reese is inside. He finally told Reese to do something by himself after dinner and said we’d have a discussion about his drug dealing tomorrow.

  “I want him to hear me. Every word of this. What if he gave them drugs that night? That changes everything. Who knows where they get any of it, and they could’ve gotten bad stuff that made them completely lose their minds.”

  He shakes his head. “You can’t put that on Reese.”

  “Who else should I put it on if he’s the one who gave them the drugs?” Kids pop pills all the time, and every high school has its drug dealer. I just never expected him to be my fourteen-year-old kid.

  “First of all, you need to slow your roll because we don’t even know if he gave them anything. That’s what we need to find out before we go any further. If he didn’t, then we’re wasting our time and energy spiraling down this path.” He runs his hands through his hair. “I still can’t believe this is happening.”

  “God, how could he have been such an idiot?” I snap. Paul recoils, and it takes me a minute to realize he thinks I’m talking about Sawyer. “I mean Reese. How could Reese be so stupid?”

  The look of horror doesn’t leave his face. We don’t call our children names. Not even when we’re mad at them. But we did everything right—spoke to them in affirming language, followed the best parenting advice, sent them to the greatest schools, surrounded them with positive things—and look where it got us.

  “He doesn’t need to hear you say that,” Paul says underneath his breath.

  “Obviously.”

  Paul holds up his hands in a peaceful gesture. “I don’t want to fight. Can we just talk about this and figure out what we’re going to do?”

  “I don’t want to fight either.” My voice fills with emotion. The fight in me is gone that quickly and replaced with tears. I step around him and plop into one of the chairs lining the outdoor dining table, wrapping one of the blankets around my knees. Paul hesitates for a moment before walking over to the bar and opening the wine fridge underneath. He pulls out the bottle of cabernet we opened last night and takes a huge pull like he’s drinking hard liquor before pouring it into one of the dirty glasses on the table. He hands it to me, and I take it, grateful to have something to hold in my trembling hands.

  “What are we going to do if it turns out Reese gave them drugs?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer before continuing. “I feel like such a hypocrite because of how I went after Bryan about getting a lawyer, but I don’t think it’s smart to go any further with this on our own. I mean, we’re talking about our kid’s life here, and we’re in way over our heads.”

  “Do you think they’re looking at Reese like he’s some kind of suspect?”

  He shrugs and takes another drink. “They’re obviously looking at him as more than just a source of information. Today went nothing like Detective Locke presented it as yesterday—that was clearly a police interview, and he knew way more than he let on. Detective Locke isn’t as naive as he comes across. He knew exactly what he was trying to get at in that room today . . .” He pauses a moment and stares up at the sky. The moon’s half-hidden behind the clouds.

  “What do you mean?” Thoughts are getting fuzzy and starting to blur around the edges like they do after I take my pill at night. I hate those pills, but I hate the attacks more.

  Paul narrows his eyes. “Detective Locke’s keeping secrets and knows way more than he’s telling us.”

  “You sound paranoid,” I mumble.

  “Maybe we should be paranoid.”

  THIRTEEN

  DANI

  I shift in my seat. Bryan places his hand on me like he’s done every time I’ve moved an inch or done anything hinting at wanting to leave the restaurant. I gave up on getting home early an hour ago. At least my phone’s been silent. Luna would’ve texted me if she needed my help with Caleb. The minutes are crawling. We’ve eaten our way through every painful course, and the men have mostly ignored me. Suits me fine. It’s easier to stay out of trouble that way.

  “What did you think about the interview today, Dani?” Ted asks halfway through his huge piece of chocolate cake. It hasn’t occurred to him to ask if I might like a bite. Not that I would take one, but most men would offer.

  I wouldn’t describe what happened between Caleb and Detective Locke as an interview. Ted had insisted we do it at the police station, so we all traipsed into the interview room that grows more familiar each day. We never got to the part where we each take our seats, because as soon as Detective Locke said hello to Caleb, he collapsed into hysterics, and it wasn’t long before he moved into one of his episodes. Nothing we did brought him back. Ted didn’t even need to step in and make Detective Locke stop his questioning like I’d spent all last night worrying about, because seeing Caleb’s wrecked state was enough to get him to reschedule Luna’s interview too.

  “I just wish someone could help Caleb talk.” He holds the key to what happened, but it’s buried within, and Gillian says he might not ever unlock the memories even if he starts speaking. Bryan thinks Gillian is too soft and full of crap, even though she’s got a doctorate in psychology, but he says the same thing about our therapist. He just doesn’t like therapists.

  “Did you get him to settle down once you were home?” Ted asks.

  I nod. I’ve never seen Ted shaken up before, but Caleb disturbed him today. I had a similar reaction when I saw Caleb in the emergency room after the incident. He sat on the edge of the hospital bed wearing the same ripped jeans he’d had on when he’d left for school that morning. His legs hung over the bed, dangling above the dirty linoleum floor, while his arms
hugged his stomach like he was in pain. Bryan and I stalled in the doorway. Everything moved in slow motion.

  “Caleb?” I whispered. I hadn’t meant to speak so low or move so slowly, but something about the way he held himself sent a wave of fear down my spine. He turned toward us and cocked his head to the side. Blood painted his face in freckles.

  But it was his eyes that stopped us in our tracks. They were wide open, frozen in a moment of terror, but there was nothing behind them. It was like looking into a hollowed-out tunnel. Gillian and his team of mental health professionals diagnosed him with acute stress disorder and assured us that it would go away over time, but it’s been nineteen days, and it hasn’t gone anywhere.

  His eyes are still too glassy and wide. They look right through us without seeing or connecting, like he’s run away somewhere outside himself and we have to find him and bring him back. But how do we do that when we can’t even get him to come out of his room?

  He stays in the same position when he’s in there—curled into a ball with his red comforter pulled over his head. The food I bring him on breakfast trays sits untouched on the floor next to his bed. Bryan and I take turns coaxing him out, but our efforts are useless. He refuses to move. Won’t speak.

  “I’ve never seen someone that scared.” Ted interrupts my thoughts. “What do you think he’s so afraid of?”

  His question catches me off guard. Isn’t it obvious? He saw two of his best friends get shot. He was probably involved in whatever they were doing with the gun beforehand. One bled to death in front of him, and the other probably won’t ever wake up. But I can’t say any of that without angering Bryan. “Their goofing around killed someone,” I say evenly, making sure the sarcastic tone in my head doesn’t bleed into my words.

  “You’re convinced it was goofing around?” he asks.

  Bryan’s grip tightens on my knee.

  “Of course.” I nod my head and force myself to maintain eye contact with him. “It was just boys being boys.” Disgust churns my insides at what I’ve said. It’s no wonder Luna hates me.

  “Let’s say you’re right and Caleb’s too freaked out by what he saw to speak. But here’s the deal.” He pauses to shovel another bite of cake into his mouth. “Your kid didn’t look traumatized in there. He looked terrified. Why’s he still so afraid?”

  Bryan leans forward in his chair. “What are you getting at?”

  “I mean, nobody else was in that house.” He shrugs like what he’s implying isn’t a big deal. “That’s the one thing we know for sure.”

  The police reviewed all the video footage from the security cameras at our front door and around the exterior of our house. Bryan built our home security system himself with one of the local alarm companies, and the police were impressed by the level of sophistication. After the boys had stumbled in the door at shortly after ten, nobody had entered or exited until Caleb had fled out the back-patio door at 11:37.

  Ted continues. “And the boys’ fingerprints were the only ones on the gun besides Bryan’s.”

  “Of course my fingerprints were on the gun,” Bryan interrupts like he’s insulted his name has been brought into the equation. “It’s my gun. I take it out to the range all the time.”

  The police have a training camp nestled between two of the mountain ridges behind our house, and one of his favorite Saturday activities is to go out there and shoot a couple of clips. I figured the police made similar assumptions.

  “It’s too bad you didn’t call me immediately for advice, because I would’ve told you not to admit anything about the gun, but it’s too late now.” Ted shoots me an icy glare because I was the one who originally told Detective Locke that it was our gun.

  It’s not like they wouldn’t have found out anyway. The gun is registered to Bryan, and they found it on the rug in our family room. I grip the edge of the table to keep myself in check and the unwanted images at bay.

  Ted pushes his plate aside and lays his hands out on the table like he’s spreading out his poker hand. “Listen, I don’t want to have to do this to the two of you, but I’m just going to come right out and ask—is there any chance that Caleb’s afraid of himself?”

  Is there any chance my son is a murderer? That’s what he’s really asking us.

  Bryan leans across the table at eye level and peers into his face. “There’s no way Caleb did this.”

  FOURTEEN

  LINDSEY

  Andrew rubs his face like he does when he has a sinus infection—starts at the nose, works all the way up the forehead and back down, and then starts the process all over again. He doesn’t handle stress well. Never has. His skin has been red and inflamed with stress-induced psoriasis since the night at the hospital. This is more than he’s ever had to deal with. Who am I kidding? It’s more than any one of us has dealt with. Things like this don’t happen in Norchester.

  He leans against the wall on the other side of the hallway in front of Jacob’s room. We stepped outside so Sutton could have some alone time with him and we could talk privately. She’s reading him the children’s version of the second Harry Potter book. She loves anything related to Harry Potter, but Jacob has no interest in any of it unless it’s one of the rides at Universal Studios. We’ve been listening to her read for almost twenty minutes in the same bubbly voice she uses when she reads to her stuffed animals.

  “This is awful. What was I thinking? How could I have been so stupid? I lost all my credibility today.” He works his jaw while he speaks. “Detective Locke is going to look at me totally different now—”

  I cut him off. “No, he’s not.”

  “C’mon, Lindsey. You know it’s true no matter what he says. That’s how it goes when somebody lies to you. You never look at them in the same way again.” He’s on the verge of panicking like he did when we came out of the police station this afternoon. It took me over ten minutes to calm him down. I’ve never seen him get so worked up.

  I walk over to his side of the hallway and pull him off the wall. “Come on; let’s walk.”

  He reluctantly follows me down the empty corridor. The other patients are tucked in for the night, and the nurses have dimmed the hallway lights. They never did that in the ICU, but I like it. Makes me feel like there’s a difference between day and night rather than all of them blending into one continuous blur.

  “You didn’t screw anything up. We’re not criminals. Neither is Jacob. Nobody’s done anything wrong here,” I say with more confidence than I feel.

  “Really?” he scoffs, raising his eyebrows at me. “That might work with the kids, but it doesn’t work with me. Maybe you should’ve listened to me the first time I said we should get a lawyer,” he snaps before quickly changing his tone. “Sorry.”

  A frustrated sigh escapes me. “Don’t be sorry. You should be pissed.” I crave a good fight. Nobody understands that. My girlfriends rave about his kindheartedness. His patients at the rheumatology practice love him. They constantly gush about his listening skills and how he must be such a wonderful husband since he’s always so kind and thoughtful during their appointments. But I want him to yell and scream at me. His emotional control infuriates me. “I totally screwed up. We should’ve called a lawyer as soon as we found out.”

  I wasn’t thinking straight. None of us were. How could we after our world had just been flipped upside down, and we’d found ourselves thrust into a nightmare without any warning?

  “We’ve gone as far as we can go in this alone. We’re getting a lawyer tonight,” he says and pulls out his phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Finding us a lawyer.”

  There are people who have lawyers at their beck and call, but we’re not those kinds of people. Our lives are entirely too boring for that. “It’s nine o’clock on a Thursday night, so maybe now isn’t the best time to start making calls? Do we really want to put our son’s life in the hands of someone based solely on the criteria that they happened to return our phone call?”
r />   “Good point.” He slides his phone back into his pocket. “I’ll wait until morning.”

  We reach the end of the hallway and circle back toward Jacob’s room instead of making the turn in the other direction. Sutton would stay all night if she could, but Wyatt needs to get home and study for his algebra test tomorrow, and he’s waiting at the coffee shop in the reception area. That’s as far as he’ll step foot in the hospital, and most of the time he waits in the car, but he was starving when we got here, and the coffee shop food is better than the cafeteria’s.

  “How’d you know the boys were fighting? Did Jacob tell you?” We haven’t been alone all day, and it’s been driving me nuts. I work hard at not being jealous when Jacob tells Andrew things and not me, but sometimes I can’t help myself, especially if it’s something important.

  “Remember when he shattered his phone screen last month?”

  I was the one who took him to the mall and got the screen fixed. Two hundred dollars. It was his second one in a month, and it never occurred to me to ask how it had broken. I assumed he’d broken it like he’d broken the last one—stepping on it in his backpack.

  “It broke because he threw it on the kitchen floor after he got a text from Sawyer. He was livid, and when I asked him what it was about, he said, ‘Sawyer is being a stupid fuck.’”

  “Really? He said that?” I’m not ignorant enough to think my kids don’t swear, but they don’t swear like that in front of us. Ever.

  “He did. I asked what they were fighting about, and he gave me one of those you’re-so-stupid-and-you’d-never-understand-anyway looks, so I left it alone.” Sadness clouds his expression. “I shouldn’t have left it alone.”

  “That’s all?” I don’t have time for him to get emotional. I need the full story before we get back to Jacob’s room. We can’t bring any of this negativity in there with us.

  “There was another incident about a week or so later. I scooped the three of them up after practice, and nobody said a word the entire ride home. Again, nothing huge, but I noted it at the time because I couldn’t remember when they’d ever been quiet that long.”