“So, what’s up?” Bobby asked, sliding into the passenger seat. His legs were bent awkwardly in front of him, and I couldn’t help thinking that they looked like the limbs of a daddy longlegs.
“Uh, well, I just wanted to tell you that I’ve been…kind of…looking for answers about what happened to Helen,” I began awkwardly as we pulled out of the parking lot.
I told him what I had learned. About how I had talked to Jake and our theory that Helen had gone somewhere else that night. About the fact that she might have been meeting someone, and that the police had stopped investigating her case. The entire time I was talking, Bobby sat ramrod straight and stared dead ahead. As we cruised down the highway, I began to worry that he was furious at me for treating the death of his cousin like a game of Clue. Maybe he thought I had no right to even mention Helen’s name, much less go pawing through her life.
“So, that’s what I know,” I finished lamely as we pulled into the reserve.
I remembered which house was his and parked the car in front. The place looked rundown in the late afternoon light. The siding was missing sections and the roof had been patched a number of times. But I had to remember that my house was no prize either. Hell, the only reason we even had a house was because of a government subsidy program.
Bobby sighed and examined me, his eyes searching my face. Finally, he reached over and quickly patted my shoulder, his hand depressing the pillowy material of my ski jacket.
“Thanks, Jenny,” he said, avoiding my eyes as he unbuckled his seatbelt. “And look, I didn’t know when you picked me up that you were Chloe Shaughnessy’s best friend. I understand why looking into this is so important to you. The thing is, I don’t know anything that can help you. Helen was pretty private; she was really more of a listener than a talker. But I do know I’m not the one you should be talking to.”
“Who should I be talking to then?” I asked.
“Helen’s mother. I think she works today but she usually has Fridays off, so you could come back tomorrow,” Bobby said, pointing at the house next to his. It was a smaller home with floral curtains closed tightly against the street.
“I don’t know, Bobby. She’s grieving. Why would she want to talk to a total stranger?” I asked.
Bobby shrugged and got out of the car. He leaned over and poked his face back through the open passenger door. He bit his lip, and I was reminded of how young he was, just a few months into high school but somehow already so world-weary.
“I think the worst thing about all of this is that no one seems to care. It would probably comfort her to know that other people are thinking of Helen, and that you lost someone too.”
“Can you warn her first?” I asked. He nodded.
“I’ll tell her tonight, so you’d better come back tomorrow,” Bobby said firmly. I swallowed hard, trying to quell the nausea I could feel rising. I wasn’t sure I was ready to meet a grieving mother, to understand just how real this person had been. I hadn’t known what to say to Chloe’s parents, and I’d known them my whole life. What would I say to a stranger?
But I owed it to them, to Helen’s family. I just had to trust that Bobby was right.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
—
I was almost out of the reserve when I noticed the keys. After braking at a stop sign, I happened to glance over at the passenger seat. There was a set of keys on a red lanyard crammed into the crevice of the seat cushion.
I parked my car back in front of Bobby’s and walked up the drive. The lanyard swung in lazy circles at the end of my fist, the keys moving together as one lump. I knocked on the door, expecting Bobby’s anxious face to turn thankful when he saw me.
Instead, a middle-aged woman opened the door. Her heavy eyebrows pushed down on dark eyes that flashed with suspicion. She was wearing a bright pink sweatshirt that seemed almost comical in contrast to her stormy face.
“Yes?” she asked, her voice hovering dangerously above a snap.
“Oh, hi, my name’s Jenny. Bobby left his keys in my car and I just wanted to return them,” I said.
“Why exactly would my son be in your car?” she asked. I felt my cheeks go red. Did she think I was some older woman, preying on her freshman son?
“Oh, it’s not what you think! We’re just friends. I just gave him a ride home because, you know, it’s so far on the bus…,” I trailed off lamely. The woman’s expression only grew fiercer.
“There’s nothing wrong with the bus. Bobby’s never minded the bus before!” she muttered. At that moment, Bobby appeared at her shoulder.
“Hey, Mom. Look, I can handle this. You go inside,” he said quietly, his hand gently guiding her down the hall. I saw her glance back at me once, but then she disappeared around the corner, still muttering darkly.
“Sorry about that. I didn’t want to cause any trouble. You left your keys in my car,” I said weakly, pressing the lanyard into his hand.
Bobby closed the door behind him, forcing us to stand on his porch. He smiled awkwardly at me.
“Thanks. I appreciate it,” he said.
“I think your mom thinks I’m like, molesting you or something,” I mumbled. Bobby laughed, his white teeth flashing against his tan skin.
“Oh, no, don’t take it personally. My mom just doesn’t like white people,” he said, as simply as if he was announcing his mother’s distaste for seafood.
“Oh, okay…,” I said, momentarily taken aback. “So, she doesn’t know I drove you home the day of the storm?”
Bobby shrugged. “Well, no. It never came up. I’m sorry, I don’t want you to feel bad,” he said. “My mom, she just doesn’t trust whites. I mean, she’s not racist or anything. She just feels like the whites have betrayed a lot of their promises to us.”
I nodded slowly. There was no denying that Natives had plenty of reasons not to trust white people. I had naively assumed that oppressed minorities were somehow above that kind of generalizing. But suffering didn’t sanctify people or raise them above the petty impulse of prejudice. It occurred to me that this was the first time in my life that my race had made someone dislike me. The headline was almost painfully ironic: “White girl experiences discrimination; concludes: ‘Racism hurts.’ ”
“Is this going to be a problem with Helen’s mom too?” I asked. “Bobby, are you trying to get me to talk to someone who’s going to hate me on sight?”
“No, Aunt Pat’s always telling my mom to be more open-minded. You’ll like her, I promise,” Bobby said earnestly. “Honestly, don’t worry about my mom. She just had some bad experiences with whites growing up.”
“I understand,” I said, remembering that Jake had made the exact same apologies for his father. It was strange to think of Helen navigating between all these ingrained prejudices. Why had she bothered hanging out with Jake when he kept her a secret? She must have thought it was worth the trouble to have him as a friend.
“Just a question, in case it comes up tomorrow…uh, what do I call you guys? Like, First Nations or something? I say ‘Native,’ but I don’t know if that’s okay…,” I finished awkwardly. Bobby laughed.
“Native is fine. A lot of my older relatives still say ‘Indian,’ but I don’t think you should; it might sound bad coming from a white person. I mean, ‘First Nations’ is nice and all, but I’ve never heard anyone say it in real life. It’s like what politicians say when they’re trying to convince people they care about reserves. A lot of my friends say ‘Anishinabek,’ or ‘Nish,’ for short,” Bobby said, still smiling.
“Okay, just checking,” I said. I looked at Helen’s house, which was farther down the block. “You know, sometimes I wonder why everyone doesn’t think like your mom. I mean, you guys really do get the shit end of the stick.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Bobby said with a shrug. “Maybe we would have been better off if the people here had just killed the first Europeans instead of trying to cooperate. But I think it’s hard to hate people up close, to hurt
them for no reason.”
I couldn’t stop staring at Helen’s house. My knowledge imbued the house with a certain tragedy, but it was more depressing to acknowledge how ordinary the home looked. Grief was so violent but so utterly intangible. You almost wished it would tear walls and collapse staircases, just so you could see a physical representation of the loss that bloated every cell of your being.
“Some people are better at it than others,” I said.
Chapter Sixteen
December 29, 2005
After that terrible night at the party, the teenage Creekers proclaimed Chloe a whore. Everyone had decided that Chloe had broken the rules and must be punished accordingly. Unfortunately, Chloe seemed to subconsciously accept their verdict. She began to punish herself by giving away what had previously been taken from her.
All winter, Chloe drank as much as she could and hooked up with any boy who asked. It was a strange series of events. No one ever said anything explicitly cruel to her face. On the contrary, they kept inviting her to parties. I would go with her, and even the girls would smile and drunkenly chat with her across crowded kitchen tables. But those smiling faces were connected to watchful eyes, to whispering mouths, to minds that gloried in every failure. It was enough to drive a person insane. Everyone was so superficially nice, but there was a MySpace page and a website, each with hundreds of different comments about how she was a slut. It was written on the bathroom doors. It was in notes that we only half glimpsed as they went tumbling back down a line of desks. Above all, it was in the inalterable archives of teenage cautionary tales. To Chloe, it must have been maddening because it would have seemed like she was imagining everything. How could you reconcile the poison you felt with the familiar kids who waved at you in the hall?
One night, just after Christmas, Chloe called me. I was already in bed, drifting off to sleep, but I still answered. I always answered.
“Hey,” I said, flicking on my lamp and rubbing my face.
“Hey,” Chloe said, her voice bubbling with repressed tears.
“What’s up?” I asked, looking at my watch. It was 1 a.m. The diner was short-staffed, so I’d promised my mom I would take the early-morning shift. My experience during the previous summer had taught me that 5 a.m. came painfully early. Still, I let Chloe talk.
“Oh you know, just bored…,” Chloe said. “God, it seems like we haven’t hung out in ages.”
“Yeah, not since Tuesday!” I said. It was Thursday. A year before, it would have been me badgering a loved-up Chloe to hang out. I had always felt so desperate, thinking of the texts that went unanswered as she and Liam became consumed with each other. Now, Chloe wanted all the time I could give her.
“Do you want to sleep over tomorrow night? We could hang out, get drunk,” Chloe asked hopefully. I rolled my eyes. All Chloe ever wanted to do now was get as drunk as possible as fast as possible.
“Yeah, sounds great!” I said, staring out the window and waiting.
“Jenny?”
“Yeah?”
“I found another one of those websites about me. They, like, Photoshopped my head onto porn stars. What if people think it’s real?” Her voice broke, the tears beginning to flow on her side of the phone. I sighed.
“They won’t. People know you wouldn’t put naked pictures of yourself online.”
Chloe began crying in earnest. She was gasping and heaving into her phone, trying to muffle it with her hands. I recognized all of the sounds; Chloe had called me at night a lot in the last few months.
“When is this going to end?” she asked, her words wet and heavy. “When will things go back to the way they used to be?”
“Soon,” I said soothingly. “People around here just love drama. Look, if you want, I’ll do something to distract them. I could, like, date a teacher or try to assassinate the school president,” I said, trying to get Chloe to laugh.
“You could start cooking meth,” Chloe suggested finally. She was still crying, but I took the joke as a good sign.
“I could, but I should probably pay more attention in chemistry,” I said.
“We’ll come up with some more ideas tomorrow,” Chloe said, her voice growing stronger. “And let’s rent a cheesy romance and make, like, a drinking game out of it.”
“Sounds good,” I said. I would have agreed to anything that made Chloe feel capable of getting from today to tomorrow.
“Well, it was good talking to you,” she said, yawning. “I should probably get to sleep.”
“I’ll just stay on the phone,” I said. “We can, like, fall asleep together.”
“Sounds nice,” Chloe said, her voice already softening. “You’re such a good friend. I love you.”
“Me too,” I whispered, knowing that she was likely already asleep. Chloe had always been able to fall asleep in mere seconds. She would curl up in the back seats of cars or in reclining chairs at parties and sleep deeply.
Conversely, it took ages for my steady heartbeat to overpower the thoughts spinning through my head. At childhood sleepovers I was always the last to drift off, lying in a stuffy room listening to the rhythmic breathing of the other girls.
Now, I waited until I was sure Chloe was truly asleep before I hung up. It comforted me to think of her being momentarily at peace, spirited away from her daytime anxieties. But I knew comforting Chloe before she went to bed wasn’t enough. My best friend was drowning and I didn’t know how to save her.
—
I kept my word that I would hang out with Chloe the next day. In all honesty, after working an early-morning shift and then running errands, I wasn’t particularly excited to spend a late night at Chloe’s. After showering at home, I resisted the urge to lie down in bed because I knew I wouldn’t get up again. Chloe needed me, so I packed a bag, bought a Red Bull, and started the drive to her house.
It was already dark when I left. The week between Christmas and New Year’s had the shortest days and the coldest nights of the year. The radio was playing softly, but it was obscured by the sound of my ski jacket crinkling as I shifted in my seat. That noise was the soundtrack of our movements in the winter months, and it made the unencumbered quietness of a body in summer all the more glorious.
I pulled into Chloe’s driveway and turned the car off. I could see Chloe in her upstairs bedroom, the lamp silhouetting her body. Her shoulders were shuddering and I knew she was crying quietly, her arms pressed across her mouth to muffle the noises. I didn’t know what had set her off, but the truth was my best friend didn’t need a specific reason anymore, not when her life had become so unmanageable. The last few months had made her almost unrecognizable, and I wasn’t looking forward to another night with the new Chloe.
Chapter Seventeen
March 3, 2006
There was no sign of Tom at school on Friday. He might have skipped class, or maybe he was avoiding me. I looked for him in the halls, feeling awkward as I walked between classes alone, trying to ignore the whispers and the stares. It was hard to listen in class, the words sliding out of my head, replaced by thoughts of Chloe and Helen, of meeting a dead girl’s mother after class. How could French verb conjugations compete?
After school, I found myself standing on Helen’s doorstep. I was trying to get my nerve up to knock when the door flew open. A short woman in her early fifties was standing in front of me. She wasn’t large, but she had wide hips and broad shoulders. Her hair was thick and reached her waist, black waves glittering with gray like stars reflected in a lake. Her eyes were a deep mahogany, but I noticed that they were puffy from crying, and dark circles sat like bruised moons beneath the edge of her glasses.
“Are you Jenny?” the woman asked bluntly. I nodded.
“I don’t know why I’m asking,” she said, smiling ruefully. “It’s not like a lot of white girls knock on my door. My name’s Pat.”
I shook her hand and pretended not to notice that it was trembling. Pat led me inside. The narrow hallway was lined with Helen’s school pic
tures, and my heart sunk as I watched her age, the pictures ending abruptly with the one taken last September. There would never be another picture. Helen would never be older than sixteen.
Pat’s kitchen was small. It had a dented stove, cupboards painted to look like wood and a card table lined with placemats. She opened the fridge and pulled out two ginger ales. I watched her slowly fill glasses with ice and pour the drinks, not wanting to disturb her as she took a moment to calm herself.
“Thanks,” I said, taking a sip as she sat down at the table. Pat made eye contact with me over her glass, her eyes fixed intently on mine.
“So, Bobby told me who you are and what you’ve been doing,” she said. I nodded, and she glanced at the kindergarten picture of Helen on the fridge. It was framed with painted Popsicle sticks, glitter scraped on haphazardly with a child’s hands.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Pat said quietly.
“Thank you,” I said, uneasy at the idea that Pat might have agreed to talk to me only because she believed we had a criminal in common.
“Jenny, I don’t really know how I can help you. Obviously, if I knew something, I would have told the police,” she said.
“I know, I just…I just want to know…what was she like?” I asked finally.
Pat smiled, a wide tremulous smile that made my heart hurt. She’d been waiting for someone to ask her. The words began to pour out of her, as if she’d been subconsciously writing the news article that had never run, the respectful obituary that no one requested.
“She was a wonderful daughter. Helen was always a quiet girl, but she had such a big heart. I always thought she would be a mother someday—even as a kid she was always watching over her little cousins. My husband died of brain cancer when my daughter was eleven. After that, Helen helped out a lot. She didn’t like school that much but she stayed in it because she wanted to work in a hospital someday. Seeing her dad so sick made her want to help people like him.”
The Lives of Desperate Girls Page 10