After All I've Done

by Mina Hardy

  The doors open easily enough, although my fingers feel a little numb. Beyond the doors, the lounge is a large space painted in a welcoming, creamy white. Large windows overlook the hospital grounds, although from here all I can see is the tops of the pine trees. There’s a fireplace covered by a metal screen, the bricks painted that same white, but it doesn’t look functional. The flat-screen TV mounted above it is tuned to a daytime talk show, the volume low enough not to be distracting. Some of the patients work on puzzles or color in those elaborate adult coloring books. A few are scribbling in journals. Nobody has a tablet or cellphone.

  Diana is standing along the far wall, her arms crossed over her belly. Her face, turned to the glass, is half-lit in golden light. Her dark, thick hair falls halfway down her back but is pulled back from her face with a wide, thick band. She wears a pair of charcoal-gray yoga pants, a matching, slim-fitted T-shirt, and a navy hoodie, zipped halfway.

  She’s thinner now than she’s ever been. Her cheekbones look sharp, her face shadowed and hollowed. She ought to look like a hag, but when Diana turns to look at me, all I see is a statue, a portrait hung in a museum. She looks like the angel on a mausoleum, but I can’t tell if she’s the weeping or the avenging sort.

  I am instantly, ragingly jealous.

  She was always not just the pretty one, but the beautiful one. Perfect hair, perfect teeth, perfect skin. Never a blemish, never frizzy, and as we got older, the silver that came in at her temples made her look glamorous, not just … old.

  “Hi.” Her flat voice matches her total lack of expression.

  I look around the room and keep my reply pitched low. “Are you allowed to go somewhere else? More private?”

  “No. There is no place to go. They don’t like us having privacy.”

  “Can we sit?” I point at the small, two-person table in the corner farthest away from anyone else in the room.

  She shrugs and moves toward it without saying anything. She takes the seat with her face to the window. I take the one across from her. Diana folds her hands on the table, her fingers linked. She stares out the window over my shoulder, not at me. I wonder what sorts of pills they’re making her take. I wonder if it’s rude to ask.

  “Didn’t expect to see you here,” she says, finally looking at me.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Diana’s brows lift, and I’m petty and jealous enough to notice that she hasn’t had them groomed in a while. Long enough to be a little shaggy. It’s an imperfection I can cling to, even though I’m ashamed I want to.

  “For what?” she asks in a low, pleasant voice tinged with the first hint of emotion she’s shown since I got here. “Fucking my husband?”

  “For showing up here without letting you know in advance” is my answer, spoken through grimly pressed lips and clenched teeth. “I’m not sorry about Jonathan.”

  Diana laughs under her breath and mutters something I don’t catch.

  “What?”

  “I said,” she repeats slowly, her eyes meeting mine without so much as a blink, “you can have him.”

  I sit back a little in my chair. “You already told me that. We’ve had this conversation before.”

  “If we did, I don’t remember it.”

  “I believe that now,” I tell her. “I’m sorry I didn’t before.”

  “Did Jonathan tell you I was here?” Diana’s low laugh sounds sharp and ragged, like rusty barbed wire.

  “Yes. Of course he did. He feels terrible,” I say.

  Diana recoils. Her lips skin back over her teeth. For a moment, a brief and flashing second, she looks skeletal and scary. “I’m sure he does. Not terrible enough to visit me, though. But I’m sure he’s very, very busy at work.”

  He could be. Aside from him calling to tell me what happened to her, I haven’t heard from Jonathan myself. “How long do you have to be in here?”

  “Minimum twenty-four more hours. It was a seventy-two-hour involuntary hold. That’s standard, they said. But they have the right to keep me longer if they determine I’m still a danger to myself. Or others,” Diana adds with a significant look at me and a shuddery chuckle that reminds so much of how we used to laugh that it makes me want to cry.

  “Are you? I never thought of you as the suicidal type.”

  She shakes her head. The laughter fades. She draws in a long, deep breath. “I’m not. My doctor took what I said the wrong way. Now that I’ve been in here, she thinks I’ve got issues from my meds. Wrong dosages, interactions. They’re saying that I’m paranoid. Suffering some kind of breakdown. Anesthesia-induced psychosis in addition to the amnesia, or maybe it’s all the same thing. Did you know that was a thing? I didn’t know that was a thing.”

  “No. I didn’t either.” I give her a second, but she doesn’t add anything. So I do. “Do you think they’ll keep you longer?”

  “Why do you want to know? So you and my husband can canoodle without fear of getting caught?”

  Now she looks ugly. I wish I could take some pleasure in it, but I really can’t. “He’s not going to leave you while you’re in here. I can guarantee it. So, thanks for that.”

  “You think I’m doing this to keep him from leaving me? Oh, Val. Did it ever occur to you that if Jonathan wasn’t leaving me, it was because he didn’t want to? I mean, I couldn’t have kept him if he didn’t want to stay with me. Just like you couldn’t have made him leave me for you if he didn’t want to. People don’t work that way. At least, he doesn’t. You sad, silly bitch.”

  For a moment, she rests her face in her hands. Is she crying? I don’t want her to be crying. I won’t be able to stand it if she is. But when she raises her head again, her eyes are dry. Red-rimmed, but no tears.

  “Do you remember that palm reader we went to in New Orleans?” she asks suddenly.

  I can’t forget it. “Yes.”

  “She said we’d be friends forever,” Diana says with a hitch in her voice. “Maybe I should get my money back.”

  For the first time since I got here, I move close enough to touch her. I close my hand over hers. She looks up.

  “She said we’d be connected forever,” I tell her, “not that we’d be friends forever.”

  She takes her hand from mine.

  “Well, in that case, then, I guess she was right.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Diana

  “I love him,” Val says, as though that’s a good enough reason for what she’s done.

  Hell. Maybe it is. It’s not like she did it all on her own. My husband did more than his share of it, I’m sure. And, even though I can’t remember it, I guess I did too.

  “I wish you didn’t,” I say.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that she showed up, I know, but sitting across from Val right now, I can still hardly believe she’s here. It’s not about having the nerve either. I can tell by the way she’s twisting her hands in her lap, by her shaking voice, and how she can hardly meet my gaze. She had to steel herself to come here to see me. She had to make herself brave, and that’s not something my dear friend Valerie was ever very good at.

  “I never did this to hurt you, Diana.”

  Another slow curl of surprise twists through me. “I never thought you did.”

  Her tears make me uncomfortable, which is stupid because here at Solace Point, you get used to people randomly crying. Sometimes, it’s yourself. Still, watching as she buries her face in her hands and her shoulders shake, I don’t know how to feel or what to do. Once upon a time, I’d have hugged her without a second thought. Now … now all that’s changed. She did that. Not me. Why, then, am I the one feeling so sad?

  “What do you want me to say, Val? That it’s all okay? That I forgive you?”

  “No. I don’t expect that.” She raises a tear-streaked face. “How could you?”

  We’ve forgiven each other a lot over the years, my best friend and I. Gone through a lot together. This is just one more thing, isn’t it? I want to tell her this, but my
mouth is dry, my tongue is thick, and my eyes are heavy. I barely have the energy to talk to her right now.

  “Why are you here, then?” I ask.

  “I wanted to make sure you were—well, I guess to make sure you were going to be all right.”

  I shift in the chair. Everything here in Solace Point is top quality, the finest of everything, but these chairs are hard as rock. Half an hour in one, and your butt starts to go numb. I put my hands flat on the table and lean toward her.

  “I’m in a psych ward, two days in on an involuntary admission. I’m detoxing from drugs that I swear to you and God and anyone else who will listen that I have not been taking, and because it takes a week or some absurdly long time, they don’t have any kind of blood test results back to prove I’m right. They don’t believe me. Why should they? My memory is gone. I’ve given my husband, his mother, and my doctor every reason to believe I am not competent to decide things for myself. Oh, and the nightmares I’ve been having about burying a body in my back yard turned out to be sort of true. I dug up a box full of a bunch of crap I don’t remember, but there it was in full color.” I’m speaking with the voice of a stranger, like that kid in The Exorcist. I can’t recall her name. That’s how I feel, though. Possessed. Ready to spew green puke.

  Val flinches. “What the hell do you mean, you’re detoxing from drugs you weren’t taking? What the hell is going on?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I could even manage to put it into words. Anyway, what makes you think I’d want to tell you?”

  “I guess that’s fair.” She looks stung, though. She cuts her gaze from mine again. “That night you were with Trina at the Blue Dove, I was so sure you were just trying to mess with me. You already knew about us, because I’d told you everything. I knew you’d had the car crash and the surgery, but I thought you were just trying to use that for sympathy, so Jonathan wouldn’t leave you. I couldn’t believe you’d actually lost your memory. It was like something out of one of those bad movies we used to watch on cable.”

  “It’s not a movie. It’s my life.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. God, Diana, I am so, so sorry.” She does have the grace to look shamefaced.

  I look around the lounge. Nobody’s paying attention to us, not that I can notice. Solace Point is swanky enough that the people who become patients here are not the sort to eavesdrop on embarrassing conversations. I look back at Val. “I know how hard it must have been for you to come here. Thanks, I guess.”

  She doesn’t reply but she looks stricken. More tears well in her eyes, and she swipes them away with a fierce gesture. Her mouth works, but I can tell she’s trying so hard to keep from crying that she’s not going to be able to answer me. I don’t really want her to.

  “Remember when your mom was sick,” I ask my friend gently, “and you’d come over to my house after your dad brought you home from the hospital?”

  Val nods. She takes her hands out of her lap and puts them on the table. I take one, both of us leaning in toward each other. Her fingers are cold, or maybe it’s mine that are freezing.

  “And we would make microwave popcorn and fold out the sofa bed in the den. We’d watch those terrible movies on cable all night long and talk about boys. When Joey Lentini stood me up for the prom, who went with me, instead?” I ask, gripping her harder, not to hurt her, but because suddenly I feel as though if I don’t hold on tight to something, anything, my body is simply going to fly away like an unknotted balloon.

  “I did. We already had—” Val chokes to silence, then forces herself to finish. “We already had the matching dresses.”

  “That time in college, I held the cowboy hat for you to puke in when you thought it would be a good idea to see how many shots of tequila it would take before you stopped thinking about the awful things your dad said to you and how he acted when you didn’t quit school to help him do all the things your mom had always done or Peggy had done after her.”

  At the mention of her stepmother, who’d divorced her dad during Val’s freshman year of college, my friend manages a watery, wavy smile. “You said, ‘Your dad’s an adult, and if he can’t figure out how to be one, that’s not your fault.’”

  “All those years, all that stuff. So many secrets we kept for each other. So many truths we shared. We never lied to each other in all that time. So why did you think I would lie to you about anything ever? You thought I was making it all up. To what? Keep him?”

  “Yes.” Her shame comes out in the tremble of her voice.

  “You’ve been my sister-friend since we were in the fourth grade,” I say after what feels like forever. “Damn it, Val. Between the two of you, who do you think I’d rather have kept?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Valerie

  I know Diana and I won’t ever be friends again. I think I knew that the first time I let Jonathan kiss me. I know, too, that it’s selfish of me to mourn for that lost friendship since I’m the one who willingly broke it. But damn it, something has to be said about love, doesn’t it? Something has to be said about sacrifice in the name of it.

  “I knew you were unhappy,” I tell her over cans of soda we got from the vending machine, using the coins I dug up from the bottom of my purse. I also bought a package of snack crackers for me, a candy bar for her. For the first time, I don’t envy her body. As it turns out, there is such a thing as “too thin.”

  Diana opens the package but doesn’t nibble the candy. She sips the cola slowly, with a grimace. “So much fizz. I gave up soda a while ago.”

  “You did?” This sets me back for a second or so. Diana used to drink a six-pack of diet soda every day, easily. “When?”

  “A while ago. After you stopped returning my messages.” Her hard grin isn’t cruel so much as it is resigned. “A lot of things happened after that.”

  “You were miserable with him. You bitched about him all the time,” I remind her. I hate feeling like I have to justify myself.

  Diana nods. Her long, dark lashes cast shadows on her cheeks as she looks down at the chocolate bar on the table. “Yes. I did. I’m sure he did the same about me.”

  “He’s never said a word against you.” This is the truth, even if I wish it weren’t.

  She looks surprised. “No?”

  “No. Never.”

  “I know I wasn’t happy with him, but divorce …” She shivers. “I don’t remember talking about that at all. I really can’t remember anything beyond the drive down to the beach with you. I probably won’t ever be able to. I need you to tell me what happened, Val. I need to hear it from you.”

  So, I tell her. About the Christmas kiss that led to the conversation at the beach house, which turned into her proposition. “If it makes you feel any better, I heard you complain about him a lot, but it was the first time I ever heard you talk about divorcing him. You’re not remembering wrong.”

  Diana voice is low and disbelieving, but when she looks at me, I can tell she knows I’m telling her the truth. “It was supposed to be so simple, right? Dump the dick, keep the beach house and my bestie. Plenty of money. No worries. That was it?”

  “That was it,” I say.

  “And then you fell in love with him.”

  “I know he’s not perfect. Believe me, I do. But with him, I feel more like myself than I ever have in all my life. Can you understand that?” I hate to sound like I’m pleading, but how else can I sound?

  “Is that why we fought in August? I don’t remember it,” she says, like she needs reminding. “But I found an email from you telling me to never contact you again.”

  “You gave him to me, and then it seemed like you were trying to take him back. He and I were supposed to go on a trip—”

  “Punta Cana.” She rubs the spot between her eyes. “You mentioned it at the Blue Dove. I had no idea what you were talking about.”

  “Yes. Punta Cana. But he told me you were insisting he take you instead. I thought you were just being an asshole, like you’d changed your
mind or you were mad. I know,” I add at the look on her face, “I should have known better. Especially when you told me that you hadn’t insisted on anything. You told me, ‘Jonathan lies.’ I know he does, but I didn’t want to believe it, then.”

  “I’m not having a breakdown, Val. You have to believe me. Whatever’s going on, it’s not any kind of psychosis, anesthesia related or otherwise.”

  “I believe you.” I squeeze her hand. She pulls it away after a few seconds. “Do you remember what you were going to tell me about your mother and Harriett?”

  She looks up, eyes narrowing. “What do you mean?”

  “In August, when I confronted you about the trip, you said that you didn’t need to have any kind of proof anymore. You had something else that would nullify the prenup. Something about your mother and Harriett.” I pause to clear my throat and lower my voice, thinking of that night in the motel. What I heard. What I’d suspected. “Did you do something to your mother, Diana?”

  She sits up straight, her shoulders square. Her lips part, but only a hiss escapes. No words, not at first. When she does speak, her voice ripples.

  “What do you think I did to her?”

  “She was found dead in her motel room. I never told you, but I saw her that night. It was right around the time my dad had just started getting sick. I was staying in the same motel. But you didn’t find out for another couple of weeks.”

  “Why do you think I had anything to do with it?”

  I tell her quickly of the shouting and the voices. The car that might have been hers. Diana shakes her head over and over until I stop speaking.

  “That was an entire year before the summer I can’t recall,” she says. “I haven’t forgotten anything about it. I swear to you, I wasn’t there that night. But you think … maybe someone was? That maybe she didn’t die by accident?”

  “I can’t really say for sure.”

  “She was an addict. Nobody blinked twice when it looked like an overdose. But Val … it wasn’t me. When she stopped answering my texts, I assumed she’d left me again. Even though she’d promised she wouldn’t, that she wanted to see if we could repair things.” Diana shivers, pulling her hoodie closed around her throat. The shadows under her eyes look like they’ve gotten deeper since I arrived.