Best Friends Forever

by Jennifer Weiner

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “A beater. Crap on wheels. A death trap. A piece-of-shit car.” She sniffed. “Clearly you missed our series on urban slang.”

  “Clearly.” I had to smile. Val looked like she’d just bitten into something rotten as she twisted back and forth, peering out her window to inspect the station wagon’s exterior. Finally, she gave a loud, displeased sigh. “Did something die in here?”

  “My father,” I said, feeling guilty at enjoying the horrified look on her pretty face. “We had it cleaned after.”

  She gasped. “You didn’t sell it?”

  “It wasn’t the car’s fault,” I said. “It still runs fine.”

  Val snorted, slumping down as far as she could in the seat. “Hey,” she said after a minute. “Do you watch me?”

  “Sometimes.” I could feel her disappointment, as if the weather in the car had dipped ten degrees. “I’m hardly ever up that late.” I snuck a look sideways. Val’s forehead was furrowed, arms crossed over her chest, pouting. “I get the weather online,” I said. Val glared at me. I lifted my hands off the wheel and raised them, palms up, at the sky. “Everyone does! It’s very convenient! They update all the time.”

  “That,” Valerie said, “is a myth. Online weather services use the exact same meteorological models that we do, so the idea that they’re giving you better information is just B.S.”

  “Okay, but it is more convenient.”

  She snorted. “Oh, like it’s such an imposition on your busy lifestyle to spend two minutes watching the news. Like you’ve got so much else going on. We do it at the top of the hour, you know. Right at the beginning of the newscast, so you can go to beddie-bye at ten oh three.”

  “Why would I watch the news when I can get the weather on my phone?” I asked.

  “You know what’s wrong with America?” Valerie asked. “There’s no loyalty. People watched the same channels for their entire lives. For entire generations! Grandparents and parents and children, all sitting around the TV set, watching the on-air personalities. And now it’s all…” She raised her voice to a simper. “‘Ooh, I can get the weather on my phone! I don’t need the MyFox Chicago News Team anymore!’”

  Her mouth was contorted. “Hey. Take it easy,” I said.

  Val slumped back into her seat. “It’s not just you. You know what the average age of a MyFox viewer is?” She paused. “Dead. Because everyone’s getting the weather on their phone or the news on their BlackBerry.” She frowned. “And ever since we’ve gone to high def…” One hand rose to rub her cheek. “I mean, it shows everything. Every line, every pore… it’s been a very stressful time for me.” I considered telling her it was probably an even more stressful time for Dan Swansea, wherever he was, but kept my mouth shut as we slipped into the passing lane. “You never got married?” Valerie asked.

  I never even had a boyfriend until this year, I thought of saying. Instead, I just said, “No.”

  “Do you want kids?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” I liked the idea of being a mother, but the reality of children wasn’t quite so sunny. A lot of them had pointed and laughed at me over the years. Still, sometimes I thought I’d like a baby, and the friends that came along with babies. There was a coffee shop on Main Street downtown where I’d sometimes go on my way back from the post office. On Tuesday mornings a group of mothers with tiny babies and big strollers would gather by the back door. They’d drink chai lattes and chat about their husbands or an article in the Times that said it was healthy for kids to eat dirt. Once, one of the women, a perky, skinny, ponytailed thing, had tried to whip up some interest in a baby sign-language class, and one of the other moms who was still wearing maternity jeans nine months later (I’d spotted the tag when she’d bent over to grab an errant teething ring) had looked at her daughter, perched in a high chair, mashing a lump of banana into her forehead, and said, “I’m not sure she’s got anything to say that I’d be interested in hearing at this point in time.”

  “So tell me what’s going on with you,” Val said. I wondered what I should tell her: how, at my heaviest, I’d order frosted cookies on the Internet, and every time I’d get them in a different tin—Thanksgiving, Christmas, Happy Birthday, Fourth of July—so that whatever faceless person filling my order wouldn’t guess that I was eating five pounds of dessert by myself. How, at my loneliest, I’d go to supermarkets when snowstorms were in the forecast, joining the crowds fighting their way toward the last dozen eggs or gallon of milk or roll of double-ply toilet paper, just so I could feel part of something. How, in the coffee shop, I’d watched the maternity-jeaned mother laughing at her little girl, the baby’s plump little palms slapping the wooden floor as she crawled and the other mothers murmured about splinters and germs, and thought, I could be friends with her. Only I’d been too shy to say a word.

  “Nothing much,” I said.

  “You’ve got fancy underwear for nothing much,” Val observed.

  I tightened my grip on the wheel. “I like nice things.”

  “Sure,” said Val, sounding like she didn’t believe me for a minute.

  We stopped at a gas station to fill the tank, and the tires, then at a convenience store, where I bought chips and sodas and a tuna-fish sub for my brother, and located what I had to guess was Chicago’s single remaining pay phone. I’d wanted to call the Crossroads from home, but Val had decreed that any call we made, from either our cells or a landline, could be traced. Better safe than sorry, I thought as Ms. Jennings gave me the news I’d been half expecting: Jon had gone wandering again.

  “Bad news,” I said, climbing back in the car, where Val was touching up her makeup in the rearview mirror. “Jon took off.”

  “So what do we do?” she asked.

  I slid the key into the ignition and backed out of the parking space. “I know where to find him,” I said.

  Forty-five minutes later, we left my father’s old car in a parking lot two blocks from the Art Institute, one of Jon’s favorite non-working-hour hangouts. I pulled on my hat and scarf and mittens. Val draped the coat I’d lent her over her shoulders and adjusted the fringed shawl that she’d tied over her hair, babushka style. “There,” she said, pulling on oversized sunglasses. “I’m incognito.”

  “Beautiful,” I said, and led her toward the sidewalk.

  It took us half an hour to find my brother, sitting underneath an overpass a few blocks off of Michigan Avenue, with his back against a concrete piling and his eyes on the sky. His sleeping bag, my gift to him last Christmas, was pulled up over his legs, and he’d tucked his hands inside to stay warm.

  “Hi, Addie,” he said when I sat down beside him.

  “Hi, Jon. How are you?”

  “I’m good.” Think of this as a birth, one of the neurologists had told us after Jon had woken up from his coma, before he’d started to talk… and curse, and throw things. The person you knew is gone. This is a new person. My father had turned away, his pale face white as the doctor’s lab coat, looking like he wanted to knock the horn-rimmed glasses right off the guy’s smug face, and my mother had wept softly into her hands. The new Jon, the one who had been alive now for longer than the old Jon, was short-tempered and forgetful, clumsy and occasionally frustrated, with flashes of his old, childlike sweetness glinting through like sunshine on water.

  I sucked in a breath of the icy air. “You were at work last night, right?”

  He thought for a minute, frowning, trying to remember. “There was a meteor shower. I wanted to see.”

  My heart sank. No work meant no alibi. “Oh, Jon.”

  “But I called in! Just like I’m supposed to. I called in, and they said it was okay.” His forehead furrowed. “I’m sure. Almost. I think I called.”

  “I’m not angry.” I reached into my purse, handing him the things I’d packed: a hat and mittens, in case he’d forgotten his own (he had), a tube of ChapStick, in case his lips were chapped (they were). “Jon. I’m going to go awa
y for a while. With Valerie. Remember my friend Valerie? We’re going on a trip.”

  His eyes were still fixed on the sun. “Are you going someplace warm?”

  “I don’t know. Just… away for a few days. I want you to go back home. If you come with me, I’ll give you a ride.”

  “Can I go to the movies first? I promise I’ll go back for dinner. And I’ll go to work tonight.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Movie first, then home. And listen, Jon, this is important. If anyone comes to ask you questions about where you were last night, you have to tell them the truth.”

  His mouth hung open, and I could hear him breathe. “Addie,” he said. “I always tell the truth.”

  “Okay.”

  “Always.” He looked so serious. I gave him a quick hug.

  “Okay.”

  I sat beside him for a minute, feeling the chilly concrete against my back and the sunshine on my face. “Hey,” I said. “This isn’t so bad.” Jon tapped the back of my hand with two fingers. It was like being pecked by some small, insistent bird.

  “When you get there,” he said, “say hi to Mom from me, okay? Tell her I saw two total eclipses and one partial.”

  “Oh, Jon.” It happened this way sometimes. We’d be having a perfectly normal conversation… or, at least, a conversation as close to normal as we could have—and then he’d say something that would remind me that nothing was normal, nothing at all. “Okay,” I said, instead of explaining, for maybe the millionth time, that our mother was dead. “I’ll tell her.”

  I helped him roll up his sleeping bag and walked him to the bus stop when he refused to let me give him a ride (Jon loved to take the El and the buses, and the social workers had told my mother and me long ago that we should let him, that the more independent he became, the better off he’d be). I wrote down the number of the bus and the name of the theater, slipped him twenty dollars and kissed his cheek. “I love you,” I said. “Love you, too,” said Jon. Then I made my way back to Val, who was waiting on the sidewalk, watching us from behind her sunglasses. “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine.” Back in the car, she curled up in the passenger’s seat, pulling off her sweater and her scarf, making a little nest.

  “Hey,” I said as she yawned and slipped off her shoes. “So where are we going?”

  She raised her head. “Just drive south,” she said. She closed her eyes and was instantly asleep.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Jordan had stayed close to the station wagon, pulling up to the curb when Addie drove in to a gas station, watching as she stopped at a convenience store, then at a pay phone, then a parking lot. He watched as the woman in the passenger’s seat with her head wrapped in a scarf freshened her lipstick in the rearview mirror, and Addie, who’d been driving, got out with a plastic grocery bag in her hand. He stayed a block or two behind them as they made their way along the sidewalk until Addie approached a man bundled in a sleeping bag, leaning against a concrete post beneath an overpass. Jordan had waited while she talked to him, gave him the bag, and walked him to a bus stop. Then, when she was gone, he shouldered his way through a few homeless guys up to the man, who was leaning against the glass of the enclosure with his sleeping bag tucked under his arm, staring calmly at the sky. Jordan said hello, and when the man didn’t answer, he touched his shoulder.

  “Jonathan Downs?”

  “Hmm?” asked the man—Jon—without meeting Jordan’s eyes. Jon had Addie’s fair skin and light-brown hair. There was a nick high on one cheek, and his knuckles were bruised and scabbed. Jordan looked at them and wondered whether that meant he’d been in fights.

  “Jonathan, my name is Jordan Novick. I’m the chief of police in Pleasant Ridge. Can you tell me where you were last night?”

  Jonathan hummed, keeping his eyes on the sky.

  “I know you weren’t at work. Were you here?” Jordan asked. “Outside somewhere?”

  “I was watching the moon.”

  “Anyone see you last night?”

  “Only the moon,” Jonathan said, and tilted his face toward the sky again. His khakis were held up by a leather belt—brown, not black.

  “You didn’t go back to Pleasant Ridge? Didn’t go to the country club?”

  “Don’t go back to Rockville,” Jonathan said. “Waste another year.” Jordan watched as Jon dug into his pocket and pulled out a blue nylon-and-velcro wallet, then proceeded to remove its contents: a non-driver’s photo ID card and a library card, a frequent-diner’s card from the Old Country Buffet, a membership card from Blockbuster video, and a paycheck stub from Walgreens. There were forty-seven dollars in cash, some change, and a laminated rectangle of paper that said IF LOST PLEASE CONTACT ADELAIDE DOWNS. Finally, with a grunt of satisfaction, Jon located a bus pass. He repacked his wallet and squinted toward the corner, looking for the bus.

  “Hey, Jon,” said Jordan, trying for a tone of casual camaraderie. “Anyone ever mean to you in high school?”

  “Addie,” Jon said instantly.

  “Not your sister,” Jordan said. “Other people. Other boys. Maybe the ones who dropped your backpack?”

  “I didn’t care about that,” said Jon. “I was watching the moon. I saw two full eclipses and one partial. Have you ever seen an eclipse?”

  “Who was mean to Addie?”

  Jon wasn’t listening. “The Perseid meteor shower can be viewed with the naked eye beginning in the middle of August. I have a telescope, though. You can see it even better with a telescope.”

  “Jonathan, someone got hurt at the reunion last night. Do you have any idea who it could have been?”

  Jon turned toward him, looking alarmed. “Addie? Did someone hurt Addie?”

  “No, no, Addie’s fine.”

  Jon shook his head, frowning. “Addie got hurt.”

  “She’s fine. I just saw her.” And so did you, thought Jordan. This must be the short-term memory stuff his sister had described.

  “Not now,” said Jon with exaggerated patience. “In high school. Dan Swansea and Kevin Elephant and all the rest of them. They wrote things about her on the driveway.”

  Writing on driveways. Kevin Elephant. It sounded like nonsense, but Jordan wrote it down anyhow.

  “Do you need anything? Are you going to be all right here?”

  Jonathan looked at Jordan as if he were crazy. “I’m not staying here,” he said. “I’m taking a bus to the movies.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “Bus number sixty to the theater. Buy a ticket for the two-ten show. Use the bathroom before the movie starts. Take the seventy-two bus home.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Jordan thought for a minute, then dug in his pocket and came up with ten dollars. “If you get hungry at the movies,” he said. Jon opened his wallet, smoothed out the bill, and slid it inside. “Can I borrow your pen?” he asked, and when Jordan handed it over, Jon wrote the words “buy snack” in tiny letters under his reminder to buy a ticket. Jordan waved awkwardly, then walked back to his car and drove to the home where Jonathan Downs had lived for the last fifteen years.

  TWENTY-SIX

  “No way,” said the social worker, a tall, thin black woman named Verona Jennings. She wore eyeglasses on a chain hanging down against her chest, and had her arms crossed on top of them. “Uh-uh. Not without a warrant.”

  “Let’s back up,” said Jordan. He and Ms. Jennings were in the Crossroads kitchen at a table covered in a plastic red-and-white gingham-checked cloth, with a vase of fake daisies in the middle. On the refrigerator were laminated pieces of colored construction paper with names—ROGER, DAVID, JON, PHIL—on top, and schedules—6:15: alarm, 6:20: use toilet, brush teeth, shave, 6:30: eat breakfast, take medication—written underneath. Only two of the residents were currently in the house. The other six had gone home for the holidays. One of the men was standing in front of the window, staring silently out at the street. “You ever know Jon to be violent?”

  “He’s hurt himself,” Ms. Jennings said. Before she’d
let Jordan through the door, she’d asked for his badge number, then made him wait while she’d called it in to the station. “I’ve seen him get frustrated. He smacks himself in the head if we don’t stop him.” Jordan couldn’t keep from wincing in sympathy. “But he’s never hurt anyone else. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen, but I’ve never known him to be violent toward another person.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Yesterday afternoon,” she said. “He came home from work that morning just before eight o’clock and went right up to his room. That’s normal. He came down for lunch—we have mac and cheese on Fridays—and went out for a walk after. All normal. He goes to the library and the museum and the movies several times a week, and I’m sure Tim, who was on duty then, assumed that’s where he was going. He didn’t come back for dinner, though, but we didn’t worry. Friday night is baked fish. Not Jon’s favorite. He likes McDonald’s sometimes. Tim must have figured he’d gone out for dinner and was going on to work after that.” And if he didn’t, it wouldn’t have been unusual.” Ms. Jennings explained that Jon would stick with his routine—job, and meals, and walks, and trips to the movies and the library—for three, four, even six months at a time. Then something would happen, and he’d stop taking his medication, and he’d vanish, usually just for a night or two. Addie would find him. She’d talk to him and bring him home, and if things were bad, she’d take him to doctors’ appointments to try to readjust his medication—Jon, Jordan learned, took an antidepressant and a drug to prevent seizures.

  He wrote it all down. “There was a high school reunion last night. Jon mention it?”

  Verona Jennings gave him a sad look and shook her head. Jordan tried another tack. “What did he do for Thanksgiving?”

  “His sister brought him dinner.” She led Jordan to the kitchen to show him a stack of leftovers in neatly labeled Tupperware. “See? Turkey, candied yams, green-bean casserole. That’s Jon’s favorite. They watched some sci-fi thing up in Jon’s room after. Addie went home by three, and Jon took a nap.” She shut the refrigerator and gave him a level look. “Now what is this all supposed to be about?”