Best Friends Forever

by Jennifer Weiner

  Val and I sat in the middle of the canoe. Mrs. Adler pulled off her tank top to reveal a blue bikini top. She pushed us into the shallow water until the waves lapped at the hem of her shorts, then hopped into the boat and began to paddle, propelling us past sandbars thick with bright-green sawgrass and cattails, heading out to where the marsh gave way to the rippling dark-blue sea.

  The sun sparkled off the water. Wavelets like tiny hands patted the metal sides of the canoe. Val scooted until she was sitting in front of me, then leaned her back against my knees. Mrs. Adler steered us toward a sandbar, and when the prow of the canoe nosed the sand, she hopped out and pulled the boat up onto the shore. “Come on, Addie,” said Val.

  We knelt down, and Val showed me how to look for bubbles and, when I’d found some, how to dig with the rake, then slide my fingers sideways until I felt the edges of a clamshell. It took us a few minutes to get started, and then Val squealed as she pulled her first clam out of the sand. “Here,” she called, “there’s tons of them!” I hurried over and knelt beside her, her bony shoulder against my round, tanned one as we worked our hands down into the sand, me in my blue one-piece, Valerie in a red-and-pink-striped bikini that kept riding up over her flat chest and drooping down her skinny hips. We dug out fistfuls of clams, laughing as they squirted us and tossing them in the mesh bucket we’d left standing in the water.

  The sun climbed higher in the sky. We filled the first bucket and started in on the second, taking breaks to suck at our fingertips, which were laced with tiny cuts from the clamshells. Every few minutes, Val would pause to stand up and peer at the shore.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked after the third or fourth time.

  “You need a permit to take clams,” she said.

  “Do we have one?”

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Probably not.”

  “I’ve still got my money,” I told Val. “We’ll just say we came all the way from Illinois and we don’t know the rules.” This earned me a thin smile, before Val plopped back down and started digging again. For lunch, Mrs. Adler gave us turkey-and-cheese sandwiches, potato chips, and warm apple juice from the cooler. We ate sitting cross-legged at the edge of the shore, slapping at the greenhead flies that landed on our arms and legs, then rinsed our hands and went back to clamming. When the second bucket was full, Valerie and I lay side by side at the edge of the shore and let the incoming tide push the water over our toes… then our knees… then our hips, our waists, our chests. Finally, we floated, our hair waving in the current, hips and hands bumping as the waves lifted us and let us down, until Mrs. Adler pushed the canoe into the water and told us it was time to go.

  We clambered back into the boat and paddled back to shore. The buckets of clams floated beside us, tied to the canoe with Mrs. Adler’s bandanna, our hair drying, salt-stiff, against our bug-bitten shoulders. My fingers itched for my watercolors and the pastel crayons I had at home when I looked out over the blue of the water, the green grass and silvery sand, the layered gray-blue and apricot of the sky. I held my breath as we approached the beach, worried that there would be trouble, that the family whose canoe we’d taken would be there, that our clams would be confiscated, that we’d be arrested. The parking lot was full, but the shore was empty, quiet except for the sound of the waves and the gulls. We helped Mrs. Adler wrestle the canoe back onto the struts, and watched as she wrapped the clam buckets in the paper grocery bags and set them in the backseat.

  “Awesome,” said Val dreamily as she climbed into the car. She said it exactly the same way the shellfish constable had.

  “Vomit,” I said back. Vahhhwmit. Val laughed and laughed.

  I can remember how my nose was itchy with sunburn, the way my fingernails were ragged and torn, how my thighs were dotted with bug bites. I can remember stopping at convenience stores off the highway, buying cigarettes and Tab and black coffee for Mrs. Adler, Sprite for Val, and juice for me, garbage bags and ten-pound bags of ice for the clams.

  We made it back home late Monday afternoon, after spending another night asleep in a rest stop (Goodnight to the back! Goodnight to the front!). My mother took one look at me and hustled me into the bathtub, pinching my dirty clothes between her fingertips before depositing them in the hamper. She made me soak, then scrub my nails with a brush she’d extracted from the depths of a vanity drawer, and wash my hair twice. After Mrs. Adler’s repeated assurances that the clams could not possibly have gone bad, my mother opened her Joy of Cooking and made us linguine with clam sauce, with white wine and lots of garlic, flecked with fresh parsley, served with salad and crusty French bread. I remember the six of us—me and my parents and my brother, Valerie and her mom—gathered around our kitchen table, devouring plate after plate of pasta, soaking crusts of bread with the garlic-and-wine sauce. I remember the feeling of floating in the water with my best friend beside me, underneath that beautiful sky. It was the best time of my life.

  EIGHT

  “Home sweet home,” Jordan Novick announced, unlocking his front door and letting himself inside. Nobody answered. Not terribly surprising, given that he lived alone.

  He tossed his coat in the direction of the closet, kicked off his boots and left them standing in the hall, then shoved a box of food into the microwave and pulled off his jacket and his tie. The TiVo had recorded a new episode of The Nighty-Night Show, he saw with his usual queasy mixture of shame and satisfaction. When the microwave beeped, he peeled the plastic film off his dinner, popped the top off a beer, and parked himself in a folding camp chair in front of the television set.

  The food—it was some kind of pot pie—tasted terrible, the crust a sodden, gummy mess, the interior icy in sections, scalding in others, and gluey the whole way through. Jordan drained his beer, took the empty bottle back into the kitchen, and inspected the box… which, of course, said in very large hard-to-miss letters, microwave not recommended. “Well, shit,” Jordan said, and frowned at the oven, which had a heavy-duty childproof lock on its handle, a lock that only his ex-wife had ever been able to figure out how to work.

  The locks had actually been one of the house’s major selling points. “We’re all set for a young couple,” the seller had announced when they’d come through with their real estate agent, beaming as he displaying the locks on the stove’s controls, the gates at the top and bottom of the staircase, and the pronged plastic caps plugged into every electrical outlet. “You’ll just need to supply the baby!” He’d laughed. Patti and Jordan had laughed. The agent had chuckled, too. They’d bought the house, and when Patti had gotten pregnant for the first time in 2004, there was nothing to do and not much to buy (Patti’s sister, a mother of three, had gladly handed over a crib and a changing table and a mysterious plastic pail known as a Diaper Genie). With the house prepared, Jordan and Patti had marked the occasion by programming their TiVo to record children’s shows: Blue’s Clues and Barney & Friends, Max and Ruby and The Nighty-Night Show.

  The joke was on him. Now he was alone, no baby and no wife; alone in a house that defied him—how many hours had he wasted struggling with the doorknob guards or the lock the previous owners had installed over the toilet tank? He’d canceled his season passes for the children’s shows, but there was no way to tell the computer chip that lived inside of the TiVo that there were no children here and never would be, so the machine continued to record scores of programs for the five-and-under set, including The Nighty-Night Show, which was hosted by the Nighty-Night Lady, a friendly brunette who wore V-necked ribbed sweaters while she sang lullabies and told short, sanitized versions of fairy tales. The Nighty-Night Lady was, in Jordan’s opinion, smoking hot. It made no sense. He’d even considered writing a letter to the network, asking why they’d hire a babe like that to appear on a show for three-year-olds. He wondered if he was the only man who tuned in, hoping she’d bend over to pick up one of her props—the Styrofoam castle, the felt princess crown, feeling ashamed of himself even though he knew t
hat nobody would show up to say Hey, what are you watching, or Isn’t that for kids? or, simply, Pervert!

  It didn’t matter now that he was alone. He could indulge himself any way he chose, whether that meant eating a diet based on deep-fried foods, or furnishing his living room with metal-and-canvas fold-up camp chairs from the end-of-season sale at Target, or whacking off to a woman who wore a snail puppet on her hand. Ain’t nobody’s business if I do.

  NINE

  The Lakeview Country Club was a white clapboard building with six tennis courts off to one side, a swimming pool on the other, and a golf course stretched out behind it. At two in the morning, the club’s windows were dark, the parking lot was deserted. I could hear the faint hum of a generator as I killed the Jaguar’s engine.

  “Over there,” said Valerie, pointing. “Next to the Dumpster.”

  I unfastened my seat belt and opened my door. When the dome lights came on, I looked at Valerie. “Come on.”

  She wiped her face, then shook her head. “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean you can’t?”

  “I can’t,” she repeated. “You know how I am with this stuff. You go. You look. I’ll just wait here, with my cell phone, and if you wave at me, I’ll call 911.”

  “We’re both going,” I said, but even before the word “both” had left my mouth, Valerie was shaking her head.

  “I can’t.”

  “Valerie…”

  “I can’t.”

  I exhaled, weighing my options, finally deciding that every second I spent in the car, reasoning with her, was a second in which Dan Swansea could be bleeding out onto the gravel. Behind a Dumpster. No matter what he’d done to Valerie, no matter what he’d done to me, I didn’t want his blood on my hands.

  “Fine.” I left the keys in the ignition and Valerie frozen in her seat. The door slammed behind me with a discreet thunk. I cut across the parking lot, pep-talking myself along the way. Okay, let’s just get this over with, it could turn out to be nothing, maybe Val just imagined the whole thing…

  Then I saw something shiny and leather coiled like a snake in the shadow next to the Dumpster. My heart froze. I bent down in slow motion and saw that it was a belt, a man’s black leather belt. I could see something wet and dark on the parking lot’s gravel beside it. But there was no sign of Dan Swansea, living, dead, or anywhere in between.

  I knelt down and touched my fingers to the wet, sticky stuff, then lifted them and sniffed. Blood. I picked up the belt, unrolled it, then rolled it up again. I reached into my pocket for my phone before remembering that I’d left it in my purse, and that I’d left my purse in Val’s car. I straightened up to wave at her, then stopped, mid-wave, and stared at the car. The car was empty. Valerie was gone.

  TEN

  With Val as my best friend, I didn’t have to depend on my brother quite as much—Val was happy to speak up for me, for both of us, for anyone, and she was full of ideas for adventures, which left Jon free to go his own way. My brother had always been a charmed child, tanned and handsome and nice to me, most of the time, even though he called me brat and gave me Indian burns and told me that I was adopted.

  When I catch myself wondering if it really had been that way—if he’d been that good-looking, that graceful, that beloved—I can look at pictures for proof. There he is, a beaming, sunny baby, a towheaded toddler, a chubby-cheeked, mischievous little boy who grew into a young man with wavy hair and long, curling eyelashes and an easy grin. There he is in high school in a maroon-and-cream uniform with his name written on the back, breaking the tape of a finish line; there he is, posed on the edge of the diving board, preparing for a backflip that would send him slicing cleanly into the water with hardly a splash. Jon was everyone’s buddy, everyone’s friend. All the boys liked him, and lots of the girls did, too. But by the time Jon was fifteen, his kindness toward me had dwindled to the occasional pleasant word or considerate act. Mostly, he ignored me. My sense was that he was getting ready to leave our family behind. To him, the three of us were like strangers who’d been assigned adjacent seats on a train, foreigners who talked too loudly and gesticulated with their hands and ate strange, strong-smelling foods. Jon was resigned to being polite to us for the length of the trip, knowing he’d never see us once he’d reached his destination.

  Each morning, Jon and I would take turns in the bathroom and eat breakfast in the kitchen—or, rather, I’d have toast and milk and cereal while Jon would slouch against the counter, lean and graceful, gulping orange juice straight from the bottle when my mother wasn’t looking, then would grab a banana or a handful of crackers and run out the door.

  After school, he’d have practice. He’d made the varsity squad as a sophomore, so most of his teammates were seniors, and most of them could drive. After practice, he’d have dinner, usually at a friend’s house, or the team would gather for pizza at the shop downtown. At twilight one of his teammate’s cars would pull into our driveway. There’d be a burst of laughter and loud music as the door opened, a chorus of “byes” and “see yas” as Jon climbed out. By the time he’d made it up the driveway, his face would be shuttered, his smile would vanish, his shoulders would pull forward, like he was trying to protect himself from a blow. He would look at his feet, at the floor, at a schoolbook or magazine, anywhere but up at us.

  When he came home, my mother would meet him at the door, barefoot in leggings and a long skirt and one of her loose cotton blouses, with a fringed shawl wrapped around her shoulders when it was cold. “Hello, honey,” she’d call. “How was school?”

  “Hey, champ,” my dad would say, emerging from the basement and heading to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. “Good practice today?”

  Jon would shrug off his backpack, let it drop to the floor, then kick it sideways into the closet. “Fine.”

  My mother would call questions as Jon shucked his shoes and his jacket: How was the geography test? Was he hungry? Did he think they’d win the meet this weekend, or…

  He’d look at her, expressionless. “You don’t have to come.”

  “I want to,” she’d say. I’d be watching or listening from my seat at the kitchen table, and my heart would sink. Jon acted like he hated my mother. He flinched when she touched him, he answered her questions in as few words as possible, and he always had someplace else to be—the swimming pool, a friend’s party, an extra session the coach had called, a team meeting, or, lately, a school dance. Maybe it wasn’t that he hated her, I’d think as he’d hurry upstairs to his bedroom and lock the door behind him. Maybe he was ashamed of her. That, of course, was worse.

  Teenagers, said my mother, unruffled, as she went back to her notebook, or the pot of whatever soup or stew she was simmering. Teenagers are like that. My mother never missed a race. She’d dress up in Pleasant Ridge’s school colors, and she’d cheer for him from the bleachers near the finish line. I’d gone with her twice and seen that mothers did these things—they went to meets in red-and-cream sweatshirts and scarves, they whooped and hollered when their sons ran by, chests heaving, cheeks flushed, eyes narrowed to pained slits—but none of the other mothers was anywhere near as big as our mother. When she’d jump in the air, clapping and calling “Yay, Jon!” her whole body would jiggle and quiver, and continue jiggling and quivering even after she’d stopped moving. People would stare. The boys on the other team would nudge one another, laughing and pointing, and Jon would turn his back to us, talking to his coach, splashing water from a squirt bottle into his mouth and over his face. If my mother noticed him ignoring her, she never let on… she’d just keep clapping, cheeks flushed, cheering as each of the Pleasant Ridge runners crossed the finish line.

  I tried talking to Jon about it once, in October, when the team was six weeks into its season. My mother was out on the porch, my father had gone down into his workshop. I could hear the buzz of something from down there, a saw or a drill. “Go away!” Jon called over the throbbing bass of his angry-sounding rock and roll—Tom Petty�
�s “Refugee”—as I knocked on his door.

  “I need help with math.” I didn’t—and if I did, Jon wouldn’t have been the one to ask—but he unlocked the door and I walked inside, gingerly making my way across layers of crumpled papers and comic books, dirty sneakers, T-shirts and shorts, grease-spotted napkins and sweat-ripened socks. His comforter lay in a heap on the floor, and the blue plaid sheet was pulled halfway off his bed, leaving the mattress bare. In one corner I spotted a cardboard box containing the marionettes my father had made him, tumbled in a heap, their wooden limbs dusty, their strings tangled. “Why are you so mean to Mom?”

  “What are you talking about?” He was sitting at his desk, barefoot in shorts and a sweatshirt, with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird pinched between his thumb and forefinger. His room smelled like B.O. and rotting bananas, and the soles of his feet were callused and almost black.

  “You’re never home,” I began.

  “What do you care?” Jon asked. “You’re home too much. You should get out more.”

  “This isn’t about me,” I said, feeling my face flush, worried that he was right. I was thirteen. My classmates were getting their ears pierced, sometimes twice; they were going to the movies at the mall with groups that included boys, but I wasn’t interested in any of that. I was happy at home, with my parents, my books, my paints and paper, my best friend.