The Best of Friends

by Berry, Lucinda

  There’s only a handful of us in the room—immediate family and close friends only—but we still overcrowd it. Wyatt looks miserable to be stuck in a room with only adults and his little sister. Poor Sutton. They really should just bring her home. We’ve taken turns keeping her occupied, and Lindsey’s mom is walking the halls with her again.

  What are we supposed to do if he’s not gone soon? How do we decide who stays and who goes? It’s almost six, and I arrived at eight. I never expected to be here all day. None of us did.

  I can’t stay any longer, though. I have to talk to Mom about Bryan. She’s been nonstop texting me about him, and I need to get home before she tries to play matchmaker and arrange a secret meeting with the two of us to work things out. She’s pulled that one before, since he’s had her wrapped around his finger from day one and he can do no wrong in her eyes.

  I was never supposed to be an only child. She wanted lots of kids—at least three, she always said—but my emergency cesarean section ended in an emergency hysterectomy for her. She swears my dad was her one true love, and she’s never dated again, even after all this time has passed, so Bryan’s flowering attention won her over immediately. Still does.

  It shouldn’t have been a surprise when I found out Bryan was texting her, but it dropped my stomach to the floor.

  Don’t talk to him!! I texted after she finally admitted they’d been communicating. I had to ask her about it three times before she came clean.

  I got suspicious after she started asking questions about why we left and asking me if I was okay in a way that implied there was something slightly off with me. That was one of Bryan’s favorite tactics—make everyone think I was the crazy one. I tried leaving Bryan shortly after Caleb was born. Bryan had spent an entire weekend drinking in front of the TV and unleashed a verbal assault on me that was as brutal as any punch and left me just as crippled. I showed up on her doorstep with the kids in almost the same way I did two nights ago, except it was the middle of the day, and I never told her I was leaving him. She thought I’d dropped by for an unannounced visit.

  As the day wore on, I started second-guessing myself and wondering how I was going to raise two small children on my own. My doubts only grew as Caleb fussed and Luna refused to cooperate with anything since she was in the throes of her terrible twos. Bryan showed up around dinnertime, and Mom welcomed him in like she’d been expecting him all along. I didn’t act surprised when he arrived that day, and I’ve always wondered what would’ve happened if I hadn’t played along with him.

  But I did, following him out the door when he left and telling Mom goodbye like the day had unfolded according to plan. As soon as we got in the car, I delivered my first ultimatum—“Stop drinking, or I’m gone.” He laughed, and we went home without him ever agreeing to stop drinking. That was when I knew there was something seriously wrong with me, but not in the way he implied to everyone else.

  Mom pestered me for hours because I wouldn’t go into details about what was going on over text message. She kept saying that I didn’t need to tell her everything and all she needed was an idea so she had a better understanding of how to act with him. But that’s not the type of conversation you have over text message.

  He’s completely ignored me. That’s the most unexpected move yet after years of threats about what would happen if I ever left him. Mom sent me screenshots of his texts to her, and they were sweet, filled with nothing but adoration and concern:

  I’m so grateful Dani has a place she can go right now.

  Thank you for taking care of my family during this difficult time. I hope you can help Dani sort through whatever she’s going through.

  Please let me know if I can help or you want to talk. I’m here.

  He makes me furious. How dare he try to turn Mom against me? I need to get home so I can explain everything to her. I glance at the clock, convinced another hour has passed, just to discover it’s only been twelve minutes since the last time I checked. I gather my things and motion for Lindsey’s dad. He’s grateful for the distraction and hurries over to my side of the room.

  “I have to go. I need to take care of some things at home. I’m so sorry,” I whisper. There’s something about a hospital waiting room that makes everyone speak in hushed tones whether it’s necessary or not.

  He gives me a huge hug. “Don’t worry about it. This has been a long day. None of us expected to still be here.”

  I eye the hallway leading to Jacob’s room. Still no sign of activity. The doctors barely go in there. “Will you tell her I love her when she comes out?”

  The cool air blasts me as I step outside the hospital, and I swallow it hungrily. I’m so grateful that I’ve never had to live inside the walls of a hospital. I don’t know how Lindsey does it. She’s a special kind of superwoman. I hurry toward my car, anxious to get home and talk to Mom. I grab my phone to let her know I’m on my way.

  “Hello, Dani.” Bryan steps out from beside the minivan parked next to my car. I freeze as he walks around the front of it and into my space. “How are things going up there?” He points to the hospital.

  Don’t be fooled by his fake concern.

  “What are you doing here?” I furtively scan the parking lot for cameras. I move to my left so I’m standing more directly in the light. He takes another step toward me, and I flinch. He laughs at my response like he’s genuinely amused by it.

  “What are you so jumpy for?”

  “I’m tired. It’s been a long day, and I want to go home.”

  “Well, come on, then. Why don’t you leave your car, since you’ve had such a long day, and I can drive us home?” He tries to put his arm around me, but I step aside.

  “Please, Bryan. I just want to leave.” His body blocks the door. Checkmate.

  The air between us is electric, thick.

  “I’m really worried about you.” His chest bulges with muscles underneath his white T-shirt. “Your friends are worried too.”

  “No, they’re not. My friends have a lot going on. They don’t have time to be worried about me.” Don’t be fooled by his lies.

  “I’m not talking about Lindsey and Dani.”

  Who else has he been talking to? I’m not close to anyone else. Is he talking about Mom?

  I stop myself before I go any further down the rabbit hole of his delusional thinking.

  “I would like you to move away from my door so that I can get in my car and go to my mom’s.” I speak with the same forced calmness and calculation that I used to speak to our kids with when they were toddlers.

  “What do you think it’s going to look like when the police find out you’ve had some kind of breakdown and taken Caleb from the house?” He raises his eyebrows and sneers at me with disgust.

  My stomach heaves into my throat. White-hot fury pulses through me. Breathe. Don’t defend yourself. It doesn’t matter, anyway. He’ll only twist your words until they tell a story you don’t recognize.

  “I’ve asked you to move, and I’m not going to ask you another time,” I say with as much authority as I can muster, trying to keep my voice steady.

  He bursts out laughing. “You’re not going to ask me another time? What are you going to do, Dani?”

  He feeds off your fear. Don’t let him see it.

  “Get away from me, or I’m calling 911.”

  “For what? Standing in a public parking lot?” He grabs my arm, digging his fingers into me. “You make me sick.” He shoves me with his release, making me stumble backward. He turns around and starts walking away from my car.

  I jump inside and slam the door, pressing the lock button as fast as I can. My teeth chatter like I’m cold. The tremors move their way through my entire body. I can’t stop or control them. My leg shakes on the brake as I start the car. I put it in reverse, the rearview camera showing the back of him as he continues walking through the parking lot. I pull out quickly and head toward Mom’s.

  Please don’t let him follow me there.

>   FORTY-ONE

  LINDSEY

  “If he makes it through the night, we’ll want to order another CT scan,” Dr. Merck explains. It’s nine o’clock, and he finally made it in to see us. “We can—”

  I raise my hand to stop him. “Are you saying there’s a chance he could live through the night and pull through this?”

  He shakes his head. “That’s not what I’m saying. The likelihood of Jacob having any brain activity is very minimal.”

  He says the same thing before every scan, and the report is the same each time—pervasive brain damage—but he’s already been wrong once about this. He sees me latching on to the possibility, grasping at it as my mind works backward, wondering, questioning. He loosens his tie.

  “Then why are you bothering to do the scan?” Andrew asks. “What are you looking for?”

  Dr. Merck appears flustered, and he never falters. Is he hiding something? Suddenly, none of this feels right.

  “We want to make sure everything is the same as we move into the next phase.” He clears his throat. “If Jacob continues to sustain his respiratory function, then he could begin experiencing muscle pain due to dehydration. That can be difficult to watch and, as you can imagine, quite difficult to experience as well. It’s a stressful thing for parents and loved ones to go through.”

  What is he talking about? None of this is what we discussed. He’s not supposed to be in pain. This is supposed to be quick, painless. That’s what he said. He promised.

  Andrew’s concerned expression mirrors mine. “Why will he be in pain?”

  “The muscles cramp within a few days of severe dehydration. The legs tend to be the worst, and his legs are quite muscular. The good news is that the cramps pass relatively quickly, and we can give pain medication to help.”

  The world is spinning, moving, and shifting underneath my feet. How does he feel pain if he’s paralyzed? No brain stem activity. That’s what the reports say. Damage to the left cerebral cortex.

  “But he’s breathing.” My heart thumps; my pulse throbs in my ears. “And he’s been breathing for over twelve hours.”

  “Yes, that was unexpected,” he says with detached objectivity.

  “So what can we expect?” Andrew wrings his hands together on his lap, desperate for something to hang on to in all of this.

  “I’m sorry, but there’s no medical certainty in end-of-life care.”

  FORTY-TWO

  DANI

  “I just don’t know how you could be in that kind of a relationship for all these years and never tell me,” Mom says. She was waiting for me with chamomile-and-lavender tea when I got home from the hospital. It took me ten minutes to calm down, but once I did, I started with Bryan confronting me in the parking lot tonight and worked my way backward, spilling all the secrets I’ve kept buried inside for all these years.

  “There wasn’t just one reason. There were so many. Mostly I didn’t want to believe it myself, and telling anyone would make it real. I was so embarrassed and ashamed.” And I loved him. But I don’t say that part out loud because it makes me sound even more pathetic than I already feel. It’s the truth, though. I’ve never fallen for someone the way I fell for Bryan.

  For years, I thought I was supposed to end up with Paul. I harbored a secret crush on him all through high school, even though I never breathed a word about my feelings to anyone, especially not Kendra. She still calls herself the captain of the cheerleading squad whenever she talks about it now, but we were cocaptains. Paul was the star quarterback, so it made sense to set me up with his best friend, Josh, who also happened to be the star running back. Lindsey felt left out and wasn’t thrilled about our pairings. It created all kinds of weird jealousy and tension, but our foursome was such an easy match. Besides, Lindsey could’ve joined, but she never had a steady boyfriend in high school. I didn’t feel bad about it back then, but as I’ve watched Jacob and Sawyer edge Caleb out of the soccer equation over the years, it’s made me realize how painful that must have been for her.

  Being with Josh gave me a chance to be around Paul, and I was always searching for opportunities to be alone with him. He still felt like mine, and I never would’ve given Kendra permission to date him if I’d thought it would grow into anything serious.

  Despite how things started out, Josh and I had an amazing last summer, and we talked about how we’d make things work despite going away to our colleges on separate coasts. I loved him the way you love when you’re that young—wholeheartedly and with abandon. Josh broke up with me the second week of freshman year and proceeded to sleep his way through his freshman class at Tulane. I dated on and off but was never in a serious relationship again until I met Bryan at the end of my junior year. He was getting ready to graduate and nothing like Josh, which was the only relationship I had for comparison.

  Bryan took me out on proper dates, and nobody had ever done that before, so right away it felt like I was stepping into an old romantic movie where men took the time to formally date women. He picked me up in his restored Porsche and brought me to dinner at expensive restaurants with pint-size portions that I’d never have been able to afford on my own. He didn’t play any of the silly mind games that the other college boys did—pretending to like me one day and ignoring me the next. He showered me with attention and praise, and I soaked it up like a water-starved plant. It’s hard to imagine I was ever that naive.

  “Besides, he hit Luna,” I say to Mom, pushing the memories away. “That trumps everything.”

  She surprises me by looking away. “Well, this is a very stressful time, and people can have unusual reactions when things are so chaotic.”

  She’s been texting him back. This is why I told her not to communicate with him—because I knew he’d whittle his way into her brain and twist things around according to his disturbing logic.

  “Hitting Luna wasn’t because he was stressed—it was because he was pissed off.” I try to control the trembling in my voice. “You know the biggest reason that I never told you or anyone else about what was going on in my marriage, Mom?” I glare at her without giving her a chance to respond. “I didn’t tell anyone because I was afraid that they wouldn’t believe me.” I shove my chair back, coming up against the wall behind me.

  “I’m not saying I don’t believe you, honey. I’m just saying I . . . you seemed so happy to me. That’s all.” She takes a sip of her tea.

  She’s wrestling with how the man she’s loved like a son for over twenty years could be the same guy who did all the horrible things I’ve spent the last hour describing. All his name-calling, spying on me, threatening to take the kids if I left, and the holes his fists put in the walls of our house during his rages. For some reason, she was especially horrified by the time I’d caught Bryan in a lie about his drinking back when I’d thought his drinking was responsible for stealing the man I’d married, and I’d spied on his bottle like it was a mistress. He’d gotten so upset, but his focus hadn’t been on atoning for what he’d done or even admitting to the lie; he’d been furious because he hadn’t known how I’d gotten my information and I’d refused to tell him. He had set an alarm and told me if I didn’t tell him my source, then I would have to leave, because he couldn’t live in the same house with someone who didn’t trust him, as if I’d done something wrong by figuring out his lies. He’d circled me while the timer had ticked down, taunting me until I’d broken.

  I don’t expect her to wrap her brain around any of this in one discussion. It’s taken me years to understand that the man I fell in love with was never real. He didn’t exist and was just as much of a fairy tale as the ones I read to Luna when she was little. I’d fallen in love with the image he presented to the rest of the world and carefully used whenever it served him, but the man behind the mask was callous and mean. Accepting that truth didn’t come easy.

  I shift gears. “How’d Caleb do tonight?” I’m exhausted, but I can’t go to bed without knowing how he did. I haven’t spent this much time awa
y from him since it happened.

  “Good.” She looks as relieved as I feel to move past talking about Bryan and into more familiar territory. “We played two games of gin rummy.”

  Flashbacks of sitting around the kitchen table on Friday nights flood my memory. Mom had a thing for family game nights when we were growing up, and she loved playing cards, so most of them were spent sitting right here. She’s taught both my kids how to play gin, hearts, and poker. They played poker for M&M’s when they were little. They’ve always played with her but never with me. I tried setting up family game nights like she did when Luna was in middle school and starting to pull away. Caleb loved the idea, but Bryan was never on board with them, so they never took at our house.

  My house was never like the home where I’d grown up in so many different ways, no matter how hard I tried to re-create it. It didn’t matter how beautiful I made it or how clean I kept it; the love that cocoons me in safety here never filled our home in the same way. Bryan’s darkness grew larger until it eventually overtook the light. Maybe Sawyer died in our house because it was already filled with death.

  FORTY-THREE

  LINDSEY

  My anxiety surges as I pace Jacob’s floor, waiting for him to get back from his CT scan. Andrew went down to the cafeteria to get us coffee. The nurses bring you cups if you ask, but he needed to get away from here—from me, from this room. It’s been twenty-eight hours since we left the room to do anything except use the restroom.

  Every muscle aches from sitting in those uncomfortable chairs all night. We didn’t sleep. We barely spoke. My brain has no battery left. Every time Andrew gets on his phone, I’m convinced he’s messaging May. How many times over the last year have I been in the room while they were communicating? All those times that I thought he was combing through golf scores or reading excerpts from the LA Times could’ve been during one of their trysts.