Friends and Liars

by Kaela Coble

  We’re not paying attention to how loud Danny is being, so we’re all shocked when the back porch light flicks on. My mom is standing in the doorway. “What on earth is going on out here?” she screeches. Murphy and I look at each other again. He shrugs. It’s up to me to decide how this all moves forward.

  “Roger had a heart attack,” I say, looking not at my mom but at Murphy. “Danny’s mom found him, and Danny was upset, so he came here.” I look at Murphy again. I’ve learned from watching Danny make excuses for his cuts and bruises that the trick is to stay as close to the truth as possible, and that’s as much as I can say without cracking.

  Murphy nods and takes over. “Danny’s really worried,” he says. “Can you call Mrs. Deuso and see if he’s okay? They should be at the hospital by now.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  STEPH

  Now

  Well, this is awkward. First time I meet Charlene, I’m sitting here listening to her son’s murder confession. First day meeting Ruby, and she’s reading it. Her words—well, Danny’s—hang in the air like when church bells stop ringing but you swear you can still hear them. The echo survives Ally’s gasp, and Charlene’s, too. I suppress mine, so I won’t get another lecture from Ally about how I can’t possibly understand the pain of losing Danny, like she and the rest of the crew who’ve “been there since the beginning.” Honestly, if she even knew the real reason I lost it at the funeral, I bet she wouldn’t have given me such crap. I won’t have time to bet, though; they’re all about to find out. They have to. It’s the only thing I can say to distract them from what’s really inside Emmett’s envelope.

  Charlene shakes her head, saying, “No” over and over again. Of course she doesn’t want to believe it. That her son killed her husband? That’s like something straight out of a Greek play. And hasn’t Charlene been through enough? She shouldn’t beat herself up. The more I learn about Danny—and I hate to think this about anybody—the more I think maybe he really was beyond help.

  Charlene stands up, and Ruby puts her hands on Charlene’s shoulders, tells her it’s okay, that it’s going to be okay. I’ve only met Ruby today, but already I like her way more than I thought I would. Emmett puts her on such a pedestal, and from what Ally tells me about her, I was expecting Ruby to be a little stuck-up. I mean, she’s lived in New York and London, and God knows where else, and she hasn’t talked to any of them since high school. Imagine my surprise when, at the funeral, Ally introduced me to a pretty, but not overgroomed or overperfumed, average-sized girl in non-labeled clothing, who smiled and hugged me as if I were one of her long-lost friends. She seems . . . down-to-earth. Sweet even. Ruby’s the one from the stories—All. The. Stories.—who is decidedly fearless: the first girl to leap from the fifty-foot jump at the quarry; the girl who stole her parents’ car when she was thirteen; the one who’s traveled and moved to big cities on her own. And yet, when she entered the church, she looked like every step was a calculated decision to move herself toward us. When she got closer, I could see the quiver in her smile, and something told me it wasn’t just the circumstances. She was nervous to be among people she’s known since preschool. And yet now, in the tensest of moments, she is in complete control. Maybe Ally was wrong when she said Ruby thinks she’s better than all of us, but she might have been right in her description of her as an “odd cluck,” if what she really meant was an “odd duck” (Ally has a tendency to mess up all those old sayings; I don’t have the heart to tell her).

  “It ain’t what you think,” Charlene pleads, as if we were walking out the door in disgust. But none of us have moved. We’re frozen to our seats. I look over at Ally. Her face has been white as a sheet ever since the envelopes were handed out, which, of course, makes me wonder what hers says. I know what Emmett’s says. Or, at least, nothing in that envelope could be worse than what I already know.

  Charlene tells the story of the night Danny’s stepfather died. Apparently Roger was abusive, and one night when he was hitting both of them he had a heart attack. Instead of calling an ambulance right away, they waited until . . . well, you know. So Danny didn’t exactly kill Roger, but he didn’t exactly not kill him, either.

  “It sounds like maybe Danny was just scared,” Ally says quietly. “Like he was in shock and didn’t know what to do.”

  Aaron shoots her a look, which makes Ally cry out, “What?” Aaron simply shakes his head, shrugs.

  “Ally, don’t be so simple,” Emmett says. “Danny meant for Roger to die, it’s pretty obvious.” Geez, Em, don’t hold back or anything.

  “Watch how you’re talking to my wife, Emmett,” Aaron says.

  “Well, come on,” Emmett says. “Why confess in a suicide note, if it isn’t true?”

  “Maybe Danny just feels guilty because he couldn’t save him,” Ally says. I notice everyone is still talking about him in the present tense.

  “Stop being such a Pollyanna, Ally. You know that’s not what he means.” Emmett’s ears are getting red now, which always happens when he’s about to blow his top and storm out. This isn’t the place for that, and it’s really important Emmett doesn’t get too stressed, especially now. So I hook my arm through his, our little sign that he needs to calm down. I feel his muscles relax a bit. He nods at Charlene. “Not that I’m saying what happened was right or wrong,” he says to her.

  Charlene dissolves into tears and flees up the stairs. Moments later, we hear the door to her bedroom close.

  “Jesus, Emmett,” Ruby says. “Why don’t you just punch her in the face?”

  Emmett shoots her a look.

  Ally says, “Well, I don’t care what happened that night. If Danny let Roger die, then Roger deserved it. As far as I’m concerned, Danny acted in self-defense. I didn’t want to say it when Charlene was here,” she lowers her voice to a hiss, “but if Roger was hitting them, someone had to stop him, and it obviously wasn’t going to be her.”

  Aaron chimes in, “Now that I think about it, as long as I’ve known him, Danny’s always been pretty protective of the people he cares about. Remember when he got in a fight with that carnival guy at the Maple Festival for grabbing Ally’s ass? I bet the whole thing was more about protecting his mom than himself.” Aaron has hereby redeemed himself to his wife for the skeptical look he gave her earlier, no doubt avoiding a blow-out at home later.

  Meanwhile I’m silent. It’s not my place to speak. Maybe it’s the Catholic in me, but I can’t help but think being responsible for someone’s death, in whatever way and for whatever reason, is still called murder. I didn’t know Roger, and it sounds like he was an awful man, but it wasn’t up to Danny to decide whether he lived or died. Besides, only half of me is keeping up with the conversation. The other half is trying to find my opening.

  I think Emmett is speaking to me when he says, “You’ve been awfully quiet,” but when I look at him, he’s glaring between Ruby and Murphy. “What do you think about all of this?”

  They look at each other, like they’re trying to decide something. Murphy nods, then Ruby says, “We knew.”

  Another round of gasps ensues. “Since when?” Ally says.

  Ruby is quiet; more decisions about how much truth to tell. Her shoulders fall and she says, “Since the night it happened.”

  “You’ve known since we were twelve years old that Roger was beating Danny and his mom, and you didn’t tell anyone?” Ally cries.

  The first crack in Ruby’s poise shows in her voice when she says, “Actually, I’ve known about the abuse pretty much from when it started, and that wasn’t long after Roger and Charlene got married.”

  All eyes grow wide.

  “We were in second grade when they got married!” Ally is all but screeching now. “That’s four years before Roger died!” Aaron folds his hand over hers. Their little sign.

  Ruby looks at each of us; her eyes seem to have gotten bluer. They have the same deep sadness as Charlene’s when she looked at us, pleading for understanding. For forgiveness.


  “Unbelievable,” Emmett says, and I know he’s about to put words to the accusation formulating in all our minds. I squeeze his arm hard now, hoping he will back off. “Ruby, do you realize if someone had stopped Roger, maybe Danny wouldn’t have been put in that situation in the first place? That maybe he wouldn’t have tried to drown his guilt in drugs? That maybe—”

  “Okay, that’s ENOUGH!” Murphy roars as he jumps out of his seat. “I get it, we’re all upset. Keep in mind, when all this started we were EIGHT YEARS OLD. In case you don’t remember, Emmett, when you were eight, you were playing with Hot Wheels and collecting Pogs. Not exactly old enough to know what to do when your friend is getting beaten up by an adult. You do not get to pin this all on Ruby. No. Way.”

  Ruby looks at Murphy with gratitude, and a little hint of something else that piques my interest.

  “Who should I pin it on, then? You? What did you have to do with this?” Emmett and Murphy are now practically toe-to-toe.

  “Sometimes it was bad enough that it wasn’t safe for Danny to go back home right away, so Ruby would call me and tell me Danny was on his way over, because he needed a place to hide out until Roger cooled off. He never wanted to talk about it, but I knew anyway. It doesn’t take a fucking rocket scientist,” he says and looks pointedly at Emmett, then at Ally. “The night Roger died, Ruby told me to come over instead, and Danny told us what happened.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell the rest of us? So we didn’t look so stupid when we were all telling Danny how sorry we were that Roger died?”

  I want to smack my forehead. We’re talking about some of the heaviest stuff you can talk about—child abuse, murder, suicide—and Ally is concerned that she reacted inappropriately to a situation that happened over sixteen years ago.

  Ruby gracefully ignores Ally’s point of focus. “We talked about it afterward and decided the fewer people who knew the truth, the better. We didn’t want Danny getting in trouble, when all he was doing was protecting himself.”

  “You should have gone to the police,” Emmett says. Ally whips her head around, her mouth hanging open.

  “Emmett. Come on,” Ruby says.

  “What? He was a minor! A little boy, for Christ’s sake! They wouldn’t have thrown him in jail. But at least the truth would have been out, and Danny wouldn’t have to live with this giant secret his whole life! He could have gotten help. We could have helped him through it.”

  There it is. My boyfriend’s hypocrisy gives me the perfect opening. “Emmett, calm down,” I say. “You’re not exactly the poster boy for being honest.” Emmett spins around and looks at me, a look of betrayal on his face. I widen my eyes, trying to beam a telepathic message that it’s okay, that I have a plan.

  “Steph, you keep your mouth shut,” he says.

  Clearly he didn’t get the message, but since he said it so nicely, it makes my part all the easier. “Fuck you, Emmett,” I say. “I’ve kept this goddamn secret for you because I love you, and it’s what you wanted. But they should know.” This part is true, at least for what I’m about to tell them. Talk about secrets turning you into something dark; Emmett’s temper has been out of control these last few months, and I’ve had about enough. I snatch the envelope from his hand and stand up, holding it over my head. This next move is risky, but I need to do it in order for them to believe me. I pull out the piece of paper, nod like it’s only confirming what I’m about to say, and slip it back in the envelope before I speak. “Emmett’s got a bum heart.”

  “Steph—” Emmett starts, and then stops, realizing that’s all I said. He’s not happy this is getting out, but this is not what he was expecting me to say.

  “What does that mean?” Ally asks. She stares at me accusingly. I know what the look means. How dare you keep me out of the loop? You’re just the girlfriend, but I’ve been here since the beginning.

  “He’s got a condition called Hypertropic Cardiomyopathy.”

  “Hyper-what?” Ally asks.

  “It’s HCM, for short. It means the walls of his heart are thicker than they should be, which causes problems in the heart’s electrical functions.”

  “That sounds pretty serious, man,” Murphy says.

  “It’s not that big—” Emmett starts.

  “It is serious,” I interrupt. “In most cases, people don’t know they have HCM until their heart stops. Especially in younger people.”

  “So how did you find out?” Ruby asks. Everyone is still directing their questions at Emmett, hoping he will look up from the spot on the floor he’s currently drilling a hole into with his eyes. He is red to the tips of his hair follicles.

  “He was lucky,” I continue. “For him, it started with what’s called A-fib, which is like a rapid fluttering in your chest. About nine months ago he was playing basketball with his work buddies at lunch and had to stop because he couldn’t catch his breath. He started to say something about his heart, before he passed out for a minute. They thought he had a heart attack, but at the hospital they ran all kinds of tests and diagnosed him with HCM.” A chill runs through the group. There’s a lot of heart problems in the air.

  “How do they treat it?” Ruby asks.

  “Well, the danger of HCM is that your heart will stop, so if no one is around to start it again . . . well, you can imagine.” I can’t say the words. “So they . . . installed . . . a defibrillator. You’ve seen doctors on TV rubbing those big paddles together and yelling, ‘Clear!’ until all the nurses get out of the way? It’s a miniature version of that. It will start Emmett’s heart again if it ever stops beating.”

  “So then, you’re fine!” Ally says, brightening. “As long as you have that, you’re fine, right?”

  Emmett nods slowly, not removing his eyes from the spot on the ground.

  “Not really,” I interject. Might as well give them the whole ball of facts, as Ally would say. At least about this part of it. “He has to be on medication that makes him dizzy and sometimes nauseous and drowsy, and he has to be a lot more careful about his heart rate. Which means no strenuous exercise.”

  The crew is silent at this, and I know what they’re thinking. Emmett is as active as they come; even when he’s not playing basketball or hockey, he’s running or swimming, always in motion. Or at least he was. It’s not that he can’t do any of those things anymore, it’s just that he has physical limits that he can no longer push, which is what Emmett has always prided himself on. Getting the defibrillator put in and all that, we thought that would be the worst part, but it wasn’t. The hard part has been the aftermath. The changes in his lifestyle. The struggle to regain a sense of normalcy, the loss of the confidence that made me fall in love with him in the first place.

  “Steph,” Murphy pipes up, “when you say installed, do you mean . . .?”

  I nod. “Surgically.”

  He rounds on Emmett now. “You had your chest cracked open, and you didn’t tell anyone about it?” Murphy asks. I breathe a silent sigh of relief. Just like I had hoped, this part of Emmett’s secret is big enough for them to believe. “How is it even possible to pull something like that off?”

  “I don’t know, Murphy, how is it possible to cover up a murder?” Emmett shoots back. They glare at each other.

  I interject, “He didn’t want anyone to know. Emmett didn’t even let me call his parents until after he was out of the hospital. I was so concentrated on him staying alive I would have done anything he asked me to.”

  “But why?” Ally asks, her voice more full of hurt now than anger. And I understand it. Why wouldn’t he want his friends to be there for him?

  “I didn’t want people treating me differently. Ally, you would make a big fuss and start bossing me around. Don’t—” he holds up one hand as Ally starts to open her mouth to protest, “act like you wouldn’t. We all know you can’t help yourself.” The crew laughs at this, one sweet moment of relief after all this awful news. “And you guys,” he looks at Aaron and Murphy, “you’d start taking
it easy on me on the court, looking at me funny. I just couldn’t take it. I still can’t. That’s why I’m always ‘too busy’ to play.”

  Everyone nods in agreement. They are promising to themselves, to each other, that they won’t treat him any differently. That they won’t pity him. But they will. I know, because I made those promises, too.

  “We thought you were just whipped,” Aaron says, lightening the mood.

  After a moment, Ruby asks, “The thing I don’t understand, if you kept this under such tight wraps, is how did Danny know?”

  Emmett turns to me, trying to hide the panic from his eyes.

  “He didn’t exactly choose Danny,” I pipe up, looking straight at Emmett. “After the diagnosis, Em didn’t have much of an appetite, and I had trouble sleeping. We needed something to . . . ease the anxiety.”

  I watch as they struggle to connect the dots. Then Ruby claps her hand to her mouth, stifling a bark of a laugh. “You went to Dan to get pot?”

  Emmett’s face flushes and he shoots me a glare that says I’m in for it when we get home. But who cares? His reaction still perfectly confirms Ruby’s theory. It’s close enough to the truth that no one will question it, and far enough away to keep us safe.

  The crew howls with laughter.

  “What is so fucking funny about that?” Emmett demands, losing his already minuscule amount of patience.

  “I’m sorry,” Ruby chokes out between giggles. “It’s just . . . the guy who gave us a Nancy Reagan lecture every time we lit up a joint, a pothead at twenty-eight years old!” Fresh waves of laughter ripple through us.

  “‘Just say no,’” Murphy says, imitating Emmett’s serious voice, wagging his finger. More laughter.