“Close?” What does that even mean? We’re supposed to be close. I’m his wife. He doesn’t need to be close with other women. There’s only one reason men want to be intimate with women, even the best ones. “What’s her name?”
“I don’t know her name.”
“Come on, Andrew. For this to work, you have to be honest.”
“No, I’m serious. That’s the point. You don’t know any of the real details about each other’s lives unless you choose to disclose them, and we never did. Neither of us wanted that. I only know her as MayDay39. I call her May.” There’s a hint of affection in his tone when he says her name.
“What does she call you?”
“L.”
“She called you L? A letter? Why’d she call you that?”
“Lindsey, please, don’t. Some of this you shouldn’t hear. It will only hurt you more.” His eyes plead with mine.
“Now you’re worried about my feelings?” Anger floods my body. “Why did she call you L?”
He drops his head and his voice. “Because my profile name is LonelyInLondon.”
“You don’t live in London.” I state the obvious before letting his response register. He gives me time to remember when we were in London. “Oh my God. Then?” I grab the railing and steady myself as I slide down to the step, taking a seat on the wood. It was our first international trip. I thought it was magical, but apparently he was so lonely while we were there that he went lurking on websites for female friends.
He takes a seat on the stair below me and places his hand on my knee. I watch him do it, but my legs don’t feel connected to me. “I’m so sorry about all of this.” He struggles not to cry.
“When did it get sexual?”
He balks and moves against the stairway wall. “I told you. It wasn’t about that. Trust me, it wasn’t. We never even exchanged pictures. I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup if I tried.”
“But earlier today you said you were going to tell me about her and that you were just working up the nerve to do it. Why would you be so worried about it if she was only a good friend? That doesn’t make any sense.”
He shrugs. None of this makes sense. I’m not an idiot.
“What’s your log-in?” I ask, bringing up the box on the site.
“Um . . . it’s . . . I mean, do we need to log on to my profile? It’s kind of embarrassing. I can tell you everything that’s on there. What do you want to know?”
I narrow my eyes, daring him to challenge me. “I want to see for myself.” I hand the phone to him so he can enter the information. He takes it reluctantly and makes no move to enter digits. “Andrew, let me see your profile.”
He shakes his head like an animal caught in a trap, except he set this one for himself. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Why would it hurt me? You said it wasn’t sex.” His eyes fill with fear and foreboding. What could hurt more than sex? And then it hits me like I’ve been punched in the gut.
“Did you have feelings for her, Andrew?”
THIRTY-ONE
DANI
I tiptoe into Caleb’s room so I don’t wake him up in case he’s asleep. His eyes spring open before I reach his bed. I put my finger to my lips so he doesn’t move around and make too much noise. Bryan’s only a short distance down the hall, and I still hear his TV on, so I’m not sure whether he’s sleeping or not. The last thing I want is for him to get up and start storming around the house.
I crawl into bed next to Caleb and wrap my arms around him. The front of his shirt sticks to his chest, dampened with sweat. “Did you have one of your nightmares?” He nods against my chest. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you woke up. I met Lindsey and Kendra at Denny’s in Chatsfield, and there was a huge accident on my way home. How bad was it?” He holds up eight fingers. We’ve developed a rating system with Gillian for his attacks. It has something to do with creating his anxiety hierarchy. I hug him tightly and try to send every ounce of my love into his body. “Well, I’m here now, and I’ll sleep right next to you for the rest of the night if you want. Will that help?”
He nods and forces a half smile. His collarbone pokes through his athletic frame. The weight has fallen off him in these past weeks. Getting him to eat is impossible, and I’ve resorted to making him huge protein drinks like the wrestlers use when they’re trying to bulk up. I force him to suck down at least two a day. I’ve tried cooking all his favorite foods, but nothing brings back his appetite.
I rub circles on his back, and his body slowly melts into mine. It’s still early enough that he might be able to fall back to sleep and get a few decent hours of rest before the sun comes up. When his nightmares wake him after three, he almost never falls back to sleep, and those end up being horrible days for him because he can’t keep it together at all. All his doctors agree that sleep is the most important thing for him, but it’s also the most elusive. I’d be scared to sleep too. The sounds he makes during his dreams don’t sound human.
Sometimes when I’m lying in the darkness next to him, I wonder if Sawyer’s ghost haunts our house. He took his last breath lying on our family room floor. Where did his spirit go? What if he’s still here?
Caleb shifts position against me. What is being in this house like for him?
Cruel.
That’s the word that immediately pops into my mind.
Is that what Luna’s letter will say if I read it? She came close to saying as much when she found out we were coming back home after the accident. Pretty sure that’s why she came home with us—so that she could be there to buffer Caleb against the memories. I hate that I went along with Bryan and didn’t fight more, but I didn’t know what else to do. It was an awful decision, and look what happened. I might not love myself enough to demand to be treated better, but I love my kids enough, and they deserve more.
“Caleb?” I whisper. “Are you awake?” He moans like he might’ve just fallen back to sleep. I wiggle his shoulder. “Come on. Get up.”
His face is a mixture of surprise and confusion. He sits up slowly in bed. He raises his arms and puts his palms up as if to ask, What are we doing?
I speak quickly and quietly as I start throwing things he might need into his backpack. “Your dad hit Luna last night when he found out she went over to Kendra’s to talk about the accident.” His eyes widen in horror. “I know. It’s awful. That’s why she left. It’s why we’re leaving too.”
He jumps out of bed and pulls on a pair of jeans crumpled on his floor. He searches the room for his shoes and slips them on after he finds them.
“We’re going to Grandma’s,” I say, the plan coming to me as we move toward the door with his things. I stop him before we get to it and turn around so we’re eye to eye. “And Caleb, honey, I’m so sorry that I ever made you come back into this house.”
THIRTY-TWO
LINDSEY
I’m trying to get Jacob’s arm around me, but it keeps falling off and flopping to his side, lifeless. It only stays if I hold it in place, so I give up and lay my head against his chest instead. The respirator moves his chest up and down in a steady rhythm. It’s hypnotic and unnatural all at the same time.
“I wish you would’ve let me get this close to you,” I say in a voice barely above a whisper. There has been some distance between us these past couple of years as he grew more independent. It’s natural and means I’m doing my job right, since the point of parenting is to raise your children into healthy individuals, and pulling away is part of that, but it doesn’t make the process any less painful.
I didn’t plan on coming back to the hospital this late. I was going to grab a few hours of sleep and leave at five before everyone else was up, but I couldn’t stay at home with Andrew after our conversation. There was no end or resolution to it. We just stopped talking.
“Your dad fell for somebody else. Can you believe that?” I let out a laugh. There’s no mistaking the hysteria filling it. That only makes me let out another one. “Your dad.
Of all people,” I snort. Because that was his secret. He fell in love with an anonymous woman online. “He says there was nothing sexual about it and all they did was talk. They never exchanged pictures. Only words. And you know what? I believe him.” This time it’s a sob that escapes instead of my manic giggle. He was going to leave me. He wouldn’t admit it. Not my Good Andrew, because good husbands don’t leave their wives and families. “If any man could have an emotional affair, it’s your dad. He said she made him feel things he’s never felt before. What does that even mean? And who says that? It sounds like a cheesy romance novel.” Tears stream unbidden down both cheeks.
I’m coming apart at the seams. My emotions are shredded. There’s no resistance left. It’s all gone. I’m destroyed.
“He was working out a way to tell me before you got hurt.” Good Andrew couldn’t live with what Bad Andrew had done. He would’ve left if this hadn’t happened. That much I’m sure of, because if he fell that hard for somebody else, then he couldn’t be in love with me, and he wouldn’t think that was fair to either of us. He’s so good even when he’s bad. It makes me hate him more. “He kept saying that he was committed to me—to our family. He wants to stay.” My Good Andrew. Of course he’ll stay, because he couldn’t live with himself if he left now. “What do you think?”
I strain my ears for any sound of life escaping from him. He was inside me for nine months. At some primal level he has to know I need him to give me a sign that he’s still in there somewhere. That all of this isn’t for nothing. That we didn’t try our best to do everything right just to end up annihilated beyond recognition. The psst-tffff . . . pssst-tffff of his respirator, coupled with a few other beeps from the room across the hall, is all that answers back.
“You can’t hear any of this, can you?” Anguished sobs work their way up my throat. I force them back down. “Can you hear me, Jacob? Answer me,” I hiss in his ear.
Nothing.
I slap him, hard—harder than I meant to. I quickly scan the room, like someone might’ve walked in without me noticing and seen me hurt him. We’re alone.
I take one last look around and then pull his hospital gown up until it exposes his pale thigh. I smack the meat of his thigh like it’s a punching bag at the gym. My hand leaves a red mark. There will be a bruise tomorrow.
I jump off the bed and put my face within inches of his. “Did you feel that? Did you? Do something! Anything!” I backhand his cheek.
The same lifeless expression. His eyes are closed like he’s in a deep sleep.
I stumble backward.
I just hit my son.
My back hits the bathroom door, and I slide down it until I reach the floor. I bite my cheek to keep from crying, but the sobs won’t be ignored. They hit me like a violent ocean wave, and I tumble into them.
THIRTY-THREE
KENDRA
I hand Lindsey my phone. The video of Sawyer and Jacob that I found last night is already queued up and ready to go. “I’m telling you—Jacob and Sawyer were in a relationship.”
“And you know that because of a video?” Lindsey asks in disbelief. Her eyes flit around the room like they don’t know where to land.
I asked her to meet me in the south hospital cafeteria instead of Jacob’s room. I told her I was hungry for breakfast because I couldn’t handle watching her interact with him and I don’t have the energy to muster up a fake conversation.
“Just watch. You’ll see.” I push around the soggy eggs on my plate and take a small bite of the toast while she watches the video. The more times I watch it, the more I’m convinced that something was going on between them.
She hands Sawyer’s phone back to me with an absentminded shrug. Fatigue engraves her face. “Who knows what they were doing.”
“Are you kidding?” I snatch it from her and point to the stilled video. “Jacob’s trying to look sexy!”
“Maybe they were making it for a girl.” She says it like she doesn’t want it to be about the two of them. She’s never been homophobic before. What’s wrong with her? She glances at it again. “He’d look the same way if they were making a video for a girl. I don’t see what the big deal is either way.”
“It means our kids might have been hooking up.” She has to see the significance that brings to things. It adds a huge piece to the puzzle. I don’t want to come right out and say it, but messy love triangles are the oldest motive in the book.
“Everyone hooks up with everyone else now, Kendra. It’s a completely different world than the one we grew up in.” She says it in that enlightened mom voice that she developed after Sutton.
There’s lots I could tell her about the world our kids lived in that she doesn’t know, but there’s no need to upset her more when it’s obvious that she’s having a rough day. Jacob must’ve kept her up most of the night.
“Okay, so whatever, everyone’s hooking up. You don’t have any reaction to Jacob and Sawyer possibly hooking up?” I can’t imagine how that’s possible. I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve been going back through all the pictures, and you can feel the connection between the two of them. How’d we miss that? Were they having sex when he was sleeping over? How long was it going on?
And what about the girls? They’ve been over at the house too. I’ve caught them in Sawyer’s bed on more than one occasion. Was it a sexual free-for-all at my house? It couldn’t have been, could it? The idea makes me nauseous.
I was always on Sawyer about using protection. Lindsey’s super paranoid about Jacob getting a girl pregnant because it will ruin his college scholarship, but I’m the one who needed to worry. Jacob is as smart as he is athletic, so he’d figure out another opportunity if he screwed things up because of a girl, but Sawyer’s never cared about school. Sports are the only thing that’s ever kept him in school and out of trouble, so we’ve steered him toward them and away from girls. We encouraged him to date a lot of different girls and not settle down with a girlfriend. Maybe we pushed him too far in the other direction.
She gives me another nonchalant shrug. “I do my best not to think about my kids having sex with anyone.”
That’s an outright lie. She’s really getting on my nerves. Her little I’m-not-bothered-with-anything act might work with other people but not me. Why is she even trying?
I set my fork down. “What’s going on?”
“What do you mean?” She blinks twice in rapid succession.
I point to her. “This. You’re acting like a robot. Everything I say, you’re like, Hmm . . . I don’t know. Maybe . . . la-di-da. But that’s not you.” I sweep my hand up and down the length of her body. “And you look awful. Have you been up all night?” Her lower lip quivers, and her eyes fill with tears. I didn’t mean to make her cry. I jump up and rush to her side of the cafeteria table. I slide onto the bench next to her and throw my arm around her shoulders. “Tell me what’s going on.”
Her body is frail next to mine. She never eats when she’s stressed. This better not kick up her eating disorder. She’s a different person when that’s going on. Maybe that’s what all this is about. I’m going to text Dani as soon as I leave and see what she thinks. She’s always so much better than me at spotting the signs. Plus, Lindsey will tell her things that she won’t tell me. She thinks I don’t understand weight issues because I’ve never had to struggle with mine, but whatever. She’s always been skinnier than me.
Lindsey shakes her head. I reach over and tuck some of her unruly hair behind her ears. She furtively wipes at her tears, but they’re coming faster than she can brush them away. “I’m just really tired. It gets overwhelming taking care of Jacob and being in the hospital all the time.”
“You have to let people help you.” She’s been in her own world for nearly a month and has completely shut me out. She acts the same way with Dani. It was only a matter of time before she buckled underneath the pressure. “You’re not alone.”
She reaches over and grabs the napkin sitting beside my unfinished plat
e. She blows her nose and crumples it in her hand. She takes a few gasping breaths, struggling to regain her composure.
“Thanks,” she says when she’s finally in control of herself.
“I’m your best friend. I’m always here for you.” I plant a kiss on her cheek. “No matter what.” Even if Jacob killed Sawyer, because he’s stuck in purgatory, which seems like a fitting punishment for gutting me and destroying my family.
THIRTY-FOUR
DANI
Mom sets a cup of coffee in front of me at the kitchen table. She didn’t ask any questions when Caleb and I showed up on her doorstep at two a.m. this morning. She swooped us inside like she’d been expecting us and immediately went to work setting up the guest bedroom. I pull the creamer of milk toward me and pour in a teaspoon. I couldn’t wait to be old enough to drink coffee so I could use this creamer. I always thought it was so cute and dainty with the small violet daisies printed on the side. Sometimes Mom let me use it to pour milk into my cereal, but it was never the same thing.
I stir my coffee while Mom pours herself a cup. She takes a seat across from me and clasps her hands around her mug the same way I hold mine. Her blood pressure medicine sits next to her allergy pills and a pile of unopened mail in the center of the table. Dad’s letter opener rests beside it. It’s been almost twenty years since cancer stole him from us, but his presence still fills the house like he’s never left, like he might walk back through the door at any moment.
“Well?” Mom asks.
She might have been silent last night, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t expect answers this morning. I wish I had some to give her. I didn’t grow up in a violent home. I never saw my dad hit my mom. He rarely even got mad at her, and when he did, he tried his best not to raise his voice at her, at least in front of us. They loved each other in a mutually respectful way for thirty-seven years. Things like this aren’t supposed to happen to people like me who grow up in good homes with loving parents. I’m not like the statistics. I have no idea how I ended up here.
The Best of Friends Page 14