The Best of Friends

by Berry, Lucinda

  “Oh, honey, that’s not true. You can’t do that to yourself. Who knows what would’ve happened if you’d stayed?”

  She shakes her head, unwilling to be swayed. “I know exactly what would’ve happened. I would’ve gotten all of them to go to bed. That’s what would’ve happened.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do.” She pulls away, and I wipe the smeared mascara from underneath her eyes with my thumbs. “All of us are to blame for this.”

  FIFTY

  LINDSEY

  Dr. Gervais shines her tiny light in Jacob’s eyes a final time before completing her exam. I forgot to breathe during most of it. Feels like I’ve been holding my breath since Sutton slapped Jacob awake. Dr. Gervais turns to face Andrew and me.

  “This is pretty remarkable,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief like she’s been doing since she arrived. It’s strange seeing her outside of the hospital and in regular clothes. I feel the same way my kids do whenever they run into one of their teachers at the grocery store or Target.

  Dr. Merck refused to come to our house when we called him with the news. He cut Andrew off short, barely giving him a chance to explain what happened. Maybe he’s not allowed to speak with us because of all the drama surrounding the case. The hospitals are lawyered up like we’re going to come after them with a lawsuit, but I can’t imagine what we’d sue them for. It’s not their fault our insurance sucks.

  “There isn’t any visual tracking, but his pupils respond to light.” Her fingers fly on her phone while she talks. Is she sending an email? Texting? What’s she saying about us? “I’m excited to monitor his progress over the next few days.”

  “Does this mean you’re going to continue treating Jacob?” I ask. Diana told us that none of the doctors from Jacob’s team would be able to follow his case once we left the hospital because it was against medical advice and there would be too many malpractice issues.

  “My situation is unique because I’m independently contracted by the hospital. Therefore I’m not an actual employee, so some of the rules don’t apply to me. I spoke with my attorney on the way here to make sure I wasn’t breaking any rules.” She tucks her phone away and brings her gaze back to Jacob.

  “What do we do now?” Andrew asks. He was so happy to find Jacob awake when he got home that he picked Sutton up and twirled her around the living room. He hasn’t stopped smiling since, and he’s beaming like a little kid on Christmas morning.

  “We wait,” Dr. Gervais responds.

  Back to that?

  “Tell me exactly what was going on again when he opened his eyes.” She’s obsessed with the story. She was never this interested in him at the hospital.

  Andrew is thrilled for an opportunity to retell it. He goes into dramatic detail about how we hadn’t slept for days and were beyond exhausted. He grows more animated as he describes me falling asleep and waking up to the sound of Sutton slapping Jacob. All I can do while he talks is replay the slap I gave Jacob the night before they pulled him off life support. What if my slap rattled him without me knowing it, in the same way Sutton’s did this afternoon?

  “Could it have made him wake up?” I ask after Andrew finishes.

  “Slapping him?” She laughs. “If that was the case, we’d just hit all our coma patients until they regained consciousness.”

  I laugh, too, like I’d only been kidding when I asked the question, but there’s a small part of me still not convinced. Oh well. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that Jacob’s alive. He’s not just alive—he’s awake.

  FIFTY-ONE

  KENDRA

  I pour myself a glass of wine. Only a small one and just to calm my nerves. Paul didn’t come home from his run until it was time for Reese to leave for school, and he barely spoke to me while he got him ready to go. I’m glad he’s going back to school. Paul sent me a text after he dropped him off that he would be going to the office for the day. There wasn’t an invitation for me to join him.

  He texted me a few minutes ago that he’d pick Reese up from school but that he was stopping by the house beforehand to talk to me. I was disgusting—unshowered and in the same sweatpants I’d been in for three days. I hadn’t bothered to brush my teeth, so they were covered in grime. I rushed into the shower and threw myself together as fast as I could, in and out of the shower within nine minutes. I put on makeup for the first time since Sawyer died. I can’t lose Paul. That’ll be it for me.

  He walks in wearing the workout clothes he put on last night. He smells like sweat and old socks. His hair is disheveled and he’s unshaven. There’s no way he went to the office.

  “Where have you been all day?” I ask.

  “The office. I told you that already.”

  A sigh escapes. “Paul, you didn’t go in there looking like that. I know you.”

  “I sent everyone home.”

  “Seriously? Why did you do that?” We can’t lose an entire day’s work for nothing during the busiest part of the week. Not after we’ve already missed so much. We’ve got great assistants, and our employees are the best in the state, but we’re the face of our company, the ones people trust.

  “I don’t want to talk about work.” His tone is barbed in anger. His eyes are cold when they meet mine. “Stop giving Reese Adderall immediately.”

  I clear my throat nervously. “Okay, I will . . . I’ll just have to talk to his pediatrician about how to do it. You can’t just go off those drugs. There’s a process for weaning off.”

  “See?” he shrieks. “The drugs are perfectly harmless, but he can’t stop taking them without tapering off them like he’s a drug addict? You damaged his brain, Kendra. Irrevocably.” The vein throbs in his forehead while he speaks. “And you did it knowing I was opposed to it. Not just on the fence. Absolutely against it.”

  “I know what I did was wrong. I should’ve told you.”

  “Should’ve told me?” He sounds disgusted. “You never should’ve done it in the first place. He’s been on drugs that have the same exact chemical properties as crystal meth.”

  “Stop being so dramatic.” I can’t help myself. He acts like giving kids prescription drugs is the same as giving them heroin. It’s not. I’ve done my research too.

  “It’s true. None of this is my opinion or about me overreacting. It’s science. Pure neuroscience. Strip down Adderall or any of those other stimulant medications to their basic components, and they’re identical.” He runs his hand through his hair. “And for what? Why’d you give it to him, Kendra?”

  “I . . . uh . . .” I’m too nervous to speak. I’ve never seen him this mad.

  “You messed up his brain to get him into some yuppie private school. That’s it. And then you kept giving it to him even after he got into school because, what? He annoys his teachers? He’s not popular?” He cocks his head to the side. “You couldn’t have a kid who wasn’t as popular as you were in high school, huh?”

  “It’s not about him being popular. He’s barely making it through high school, and he’s been in trouble since preschool, so don’t act like he’s some perfect child whose innocent brain I’m messing with. I mean, he sells drugs, Paul.”

  “That was after you gave him the Adderall. It probably made him do it.”

  “I can’t believe you’re this angry.”

  “Really?” He glares at me. “And I can’t believe you don’t understand why I am.” He steps back like he needs to gain control of himself, clenching and unclenching his fists at his sides. “I’m going to get Reese from school and take him somewhere fun. Maybe to the crack dealer over behind the 7-Eleven on Magnolia.”

  “Now you’re being mean.” I’m doing my best not to cry, but I’m wavering.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he says as he moves toward the door. “Maybe you should just keep sleeping in Sawyer’s room since you like it so much in there.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  DANI

  Kendra sobs on the couch while I wait for
the coffee to finish brewing. I was going to pour us a glass of wine but quickly decided against it when I got a whiff that she’d already been drinking. Her hair is greasy and piled in a messy bun on top of her head. She has a strange, hollowed-out expression on her face. She and Paul had a terrible fight.

  I hug my knees up to my chest on the opposite end of the couch. She went to my house first and texted, where are you? when nobody answered the door. I told her I was at my mom’s. She showed up twenty minutes later and hasn’t stopped talking since. She’s too self-absorbed to notice or wonder why I’m over at Mom’s with my things in the guest bedroom. She can be really annoying and hurtful that way, but it’s a blessing today, because I’m not ready to explain what’s going on to her or anyone else yet, especially after the way things went when I told Mom.

  “My marriage is falling apart. Did you know that most marriages don’t survive a child’s death? You’d think it’d be the opposite. Two people go through this horrible thing together that nobody else can possibly understand, so you assume it’d bring them closer, but that’s not the case. Most of the time it rips them apart. What if we’re one of those couples?”

  “You’re not,” I say. “Paul adores you.” I spent years wishing and waiting for them to break up. There were times when they were fighting and I purposefully gave her advice I knew would upset Paul instead of calm him down, but that was a long time ago, and Paul’s done nothing but remain committed to her since college.

  “He used to, but I don’t know anymore. I don’t know about anything anymore. None of my decisions make sense. They did at the time, but none of them do now. What if all this is somehow my fault?”

  “Hush. None of this is your fault.” I scoot down the couch.

  “It is. You don’t understand. There’s stuff you don’t know. Things I haven’t told you.”

  Is she talking about her marriage with Paul or what happened with our kids? “I’m not following you,” I say.

  She gulps. “The reason Paul left was because he found out I’ve been giving Reese Adderall without telling him.”

  She conveniently left that part out of the story when she described how Paul had stormed out of their house at three in the morning to go running and hadn’t come back until after the sun had come up. She made it sound like he was just upset, and they have plenty to be upset about, so I thought nothing of it.

  She quickly adds, “And he is really against kids being on medication.”

  Of course he is. One of his cousins committed suicide when Paul was twelve after her doctor put her on Prozac for depression. His family swore she had a complete personality change from it and that was what pushed her over the edge. I never met his cousin. She didn’t live around here, but he went to visit them for two weeks every summer up until the end of middle school. It devastated the entire family. His aunt never recovered.

  “How long were you giving it to him?” I ask. It’s difficult to keep the judgment out of my tone.

  “A little over a year.”

  “And you were doing it behind his back the entire time?” This time the judgment creeps in.

  She nods. Her face is broken with guilt, but I can’t tell if she’s sorry because she hurt him or because she got caught. It’s never easy to tell with her.

  I’d be furious if Bryan gave the kids psychiatric medication and I didn’t know about it. I’m not opposed to kids being on it, but I would never want Caleb or Luna to take anything like that without my knowledge.

  “Our boys were taking Adderall too,” she says. “They tried to get it from Reese.”

  “But I thought Reese didn’t know you were giving it to him?”

  “He didn’t. He was getting it from somewhere else.”

  “What makes you so sure our boys were taking it?” Caleb can’t even have caffeine without getting ridiculously amped up. I can’t imagine what Adderall would do to him.

  “The toxicology reports are back. Detective Locke went over them with us yesterday. I’m sure he’ll be calling you today to go over it with you.”

  “So you just saw Sawyer’s report? You didn’t see the reports for the other boys?”

  “No, but Detective Locke was pretty clear that they were all wasted that night. He even admitted that alcohol played a role.”

  That doesn’t mean anything. He could’ve just been saying that to make her feel better about Sawyer being so messed up. Caleb’s report might be different than his.

  “Does Lindsey know?”

  “About the Adderall or what the toxicology report said?”

  “All of it.”

  “I sent her a text that the toxicology report was in, but she never responded. I didn’t tell anyone I was giving Reese Adderall.”

  It’s a pretty big secret to keep for a year, but it’s not surprising. She’s always been good at keeping secrets.

  “It isn’t like I was hiding it from you guys. I just didn’t want Paul to find out, and the only way to do that was to make sure I was the only person who knew about it. I couldn’t risk someone else saying something if I told. I know it probably doesn’t make sense to you.” She turns her head to the side.

  It makes perfect sense to me.

  She’s not the only one with secrets.

  FIFTY-THREE

  LINDSEY

  I step outside onto our back patio to breathe. Being inside is more claustrophobic than being in the hospital. There’s no place in our house to put Jacob except in the living room. All of the bedrooms in our house are upstairs, which is out of the question since we can’t get him up there. The living room is the only space that’s big enough to fit his hospital bed while still giving us enough room to move around. The smell of sickness is slowly seeping into our house. I opened the windows to air things out, but so far it hasn’t done any good.

  People keep stopping by. I swear Andrew texted everyone we know and told them Jacob has opened his eyes. It wasn’t long before they started arriving on our doorsteps with food and random medical supplies that they thought we might need. Three different people showed up with gauze like Jacob has open wounds we have to bandage. Everyone makes their way through the house and peeks at Jacob like he’s one of the displays at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum on Hollywood Boulevard.

  I grip one of the patio chairs and lean forward. “Breathe, Lindsey. Breathe,” I instruct myself, hoping that saying it out loud makes it more effective.

  Jacob’s eyes are open. That’s a good thing. What’s wrong with me? I’ve spent hundreds of hours staring at his closed eyelids and praying to every god and form of divinity I could think of that he’d open them. I just kept thinking if he’d only open his eyes . . .

  And now they’re open. But they roll around like marbles, and I can’t stand to look at them because they’re more disturbing than when they were closed. Andrew holds his face and gazes into his eyes with complete rapture and awe, but I don’t know how he does it. I thought if Jacob opened his eyes, I’d see my son staring back at me. But I can’t see him in there. He’s nowhere to be found.

  Sutton’s shrill voice carries outside into the crisp air. She tells anyone who will listen that she’s responsible for waking him up. People keep feeding into her story, and if they’re not careful, she’s going to end up thinking she has some kind of superpowers. Wyatt asked to go to his best friend’s house for the night, and I agreed. It’ll be easier to figure things out if he’s not here. Lots of friends have offered to take Sutton, too, but she doesn’t sleep other places without us yet. My dad said he’d fly back out if we needed him to, but I hate to make him do that since he’s only just gotten home.

  The sliding glass door opens, and Andrew walks up behind me. His hand on my back makes me cringe and stiffen.

  “Sorry,” he mumbles.

  I can’t help it. I don’t want him to touch me. I keep trying to pretend nothing has changed, but all I can think about whenever he touches me is that he’s in love with another woman.

  “Uncle Ross is t
alking about ordering pizza. How many do you think we should get?” he asks, moving quickly past the awkwardness of the moment.

  “This isn’t a party,” I snap.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” He wears the same cautious expression as he does when I’m in the throes of PMS and waging war with my hormones.

  “I just need everyone to leave and get out of my house.”

  His eyes widen in surprise. “Really?”

  “I’m so tired I can barely stand. It hurts to think, and my eyes are burning, so yes, I’d like everyone to go home and stop wandering around my house like we’re some circus freak show.”

  He instinctively goes to reach for me but quickly pulls back. “Everyone just wants to help. That’s all.” He tucks his hands in the front pockets of his jeans. “Why don’t you go to sleep upstairs in our bedroom once everyone leaves, and I’ll stay up with Jacob?”

  I shake my head. I can’t leave him. I’m his mom. He needs his mom.

  “Maybe you’ll feel differently after a shower. Do you want to do that?” he asks like I’m a feral cat he’s trying to coax inside.

  A shower might feel good. I can’t remember the last time I took one. “I can take a shower,” I say like I’m pumping myself up for a major task.

  He gingerly takes my arm and leads me back inside the house.

  My eyes snap open. Our mahogany dresser slowly takes shape in the dark. The closet door comes into focus next.

  And then I remember.

  It’s like this whenever I wake up. In that instant between sleep and waking, I forget how my life has been destroyed. It’s that brief second that destroys me because it makes me remember how happy I used to be, how perfect things were, everything I had, and the realization is like losing it all over again. I hate waking up now.