“How do you eat like this?” I finally asked after she’d pushed her empty plate away and then, unable to decide between the cheesecake and the crème brûlée, ordered both.
“Oh, well, normally I don’t.”
“Normally you don’t eat like this?”
“No, normally I don’t really eat. At all,” she explained. “I have protein shakes, and soup sometimes. Oh, and sushi.”
“That’s it?”
“Oatmeal.” She sighed. “With almond milk and blueberries. And salmon.”
“On the oatmeal?”
“No, no, I have that for lunch. There’s this service I use that delivers my meals…”
“I didn’t hear anything in there that sounds like a meal.”
“This is the life I have chosen,” she said, and looked up, beaming, as the waiter brought her desserts.
“Yeah, about that,” I said. “Weather? I never remember you caring that much.”
“News flash,” she said, forking cheesecake into her mouth. “Nobody really cares that much about the weather. It’s a means to an end. What I care about is the anchor’s job.”
I snagged a spoonful of her crème brûlée. “You want Austen Severson’s job?”
“Old,” she said, still eating. “He’s old and in my way.”
I winced. Austen Severson was a Chicago institution, a trim, silver-haired grandfatherly type with twinkly blue eyes and a reassuring manner who’d been reading the news since the 1970s. “Is he going to retire?”
She smiled sweetly, patting her lips with her napkin. “Yes indeed,” she said. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”
Back in the hotel room, I pulled the nightshirts out of the shopping bag, handed one to Valerie, and went to the bathroom to wash my face, brush my teeth, and change. When I came back she was still lying on the bed, barefoot in her new jeans and silk halter top, staring at the ceiling.
“Are you all right?” I ventured. She gave a tiny nod. “Want your eye cream?” She shrugged. “Pillow chocolate?” I threw her one. She batted it away.
“We should get some pot,” she said to the ceiling. “Maybe I’ll see if one of the valet guys can hook us up.”
I sat cross-legged on my bed, sinking into the down-filled duvet. “I think that we should maybe try not to break any more laws.”
Valerie ignored me. “Did I ever tell you about my mother’s don’t-do-drugs speech?”
I shook my head.
“Naomi sat me down one night—I think we were, like, in seventh grade—and looked at me very seriously and said, and I quote, ‘Valerie, you shouldn’t do drugs. It’s not like it was in my day, when you knew what you were getting. They lace that shit now.’”
“That’s what she told you?”
“Good old Naomi.” Val unwrapped her pillow chocolate and popped it in her mouth. “Mother of the year.”
“Where is she these days, anyhow?”
“Remarried. Her current husband is twice my age and exactly half as interesting. She’s still in Cleveland.” She shook her head in disgust—at Naomi, or at her new stepfather, or at Cleveland, I couldn’t tell—and rolled onto her side. “This is fun,” she said. “Like a slumber party. Hey, wanna raid the minibar?”
I shook my head. I’d fantasized about going out of town with Vijay—he traveled often, for conferences and drug-company-sponsored retreats, usually held at some fancy golf resort or at a beach. We could go out to dinner, in a town where nobody knew either one of us. We could hold hands at the table and spend a whole night together in some plush hotel room. “I had a boyfriend,” I told Val, who was crouched down in front of the minibar, inspecting the options.
She looked up and waved a fistful of miniature bottles at me. “You did?” She sounded so proud. “Ha. I knew that lingerie was for something. Good for you!”
“He was married,” I said.
“Oh.” Val considered this. “Well, did you have fun?”
“So much fun,” I said. “At first. And then for a while. I liked being with someone. You know. Watching TV. Holding hands.”
“Sweet,” Val said. She patted my arm and poured me a shot.
“I felt sorry for his wife,” I said, and drained my glass.
“Wives,” said Val. “So problematic.” She dumped another tiny bottle of vodka into a cup filled with ice and sat on her bed, sipping.
“Hey, Val.” My tongue felt like a sock stuffed full of quarters. Wine with dinner plus vodka after equaled more than I’d had to drink in a long time. Carefully, I set my glass aside. “What happened that summer you went to California?”
“Ah yes,” she said. She pulled a mirrored compact out of her purse, dug around for a cotton ball and a bottle of face cream, and started removing her makeup. “Old Naomi had a new boyfriend that spring. He used to hang around the house when I came home from school, and Naomi thought it would be a good idea if I went away for a while.”
I thought this over, not liking the way it sounded. “Did he do something to you? The boyfriend?”
“Not exactly.” Her eyes were trained on the tiny mirror in her hand. “Not really. He bought me dresses. He wanted me to wear them. Try this one, try that one; try the white, try the pink. Come sit with me. Pretty girl. You know. That kind of shit.”
“Oh, Val.” I thought that I should try to touch her—her arm, her hand—but she was too far away.
“Anyhow.” She flicked the mirror shut and stuffed her equipment back in her bag. “I don’t think Naomi wanted the in-house competition. So she scored a ticket somehow and put me on a plane, and then she called my dad to tell him I was coming.”
My throat clicked as I swallowed. “Was your father glad to see you?”
“Thrilled,” she said drily. “What forty-year-old down-on-his-luck stuntman turned craft service manager wouldn’t want a sixteen-year-old showing up for the summer? He had a girlfriend, though. Shannon. She was nice. Do you remember how bad my teeth were?”
I spoke carefully. “They were pretty crooked.”
“Oh, it wasn’t just that. I’d never been to a dentist. Not since we left California.”
“Naomi never took you?” I was shocked.
Val shrugged. “Shannon fixed me up. I got my teeth cleaned, got my cavities filled, got braces, got a haircut, got some new clothes. Shannon ran a tight ship. She had two kids of her own. Little girls. I wanted to stay with them.”
“Why didn’t you?”
She shrugged again. “No room at the inn. They had a two-bedroom apartment, and Shannon’s girls were eight and six. I tried all summer long to be… what’s the word? Indispensable.” She pronounced it slowly, then said it again, “Indispensable. I’d wake up early, do all the dishes, unload the dishwasher, sweep the floors, get the girls dressed, braid their hair, make their lunches… everything.” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Turns out I was completely dispensable. They had me on the first plane back home the week the girls started school. Naomi took me to the orthodontist a few times. Then she started dating the orthodontist. Then they broke up, and she got drunk one night and told me she was gonna pull my braces off herself. She had pliers and everything.”
I shuddered, wondering why I’d never known about any of this, why I’d never even guessed. Val reached across the space between the beds and patted my arm. “But never mind. It’s ancient history. Let’s talk about you! I bet your parents would be proud of you. All responsible, and thin and stuff.”
“Hah.” It was revoltingly superficial, I knew, but it made me sad to think that neither one of my parents had lived long enough to see me thin. Or thin-ish. Neither one of them would know about my career, or how beautiful the house was, neither would ever look at my cards, my mugs, the spoon rest I’d done, and think, Hey, she turned out okay. “We should get some rest,” I said, and got under the covers, pulling them up to my chin. I rolled onto my back and shut my eyes. Then I opened them to see Val, still seated on her bed. Her knees were drawn up to her chest, and her chin reste
d on top of them as she gazed at the gold-striped wallpaper.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Dan.”
Oh. That. “Listen,” I said. “Maybe he’ll turn up. You said you didn’t hit him that hard, right? Maybe he was just stunned.”
“Not what I did to him,” she said impatiently. “What he did. What he did to me.” She yanked back her covers and flicked off the light, plunging the room into darkness.
“Did you ever tell anyone?” I asked after a minute. “Your mom?”
She snorted. “Naomi. Hah. She would have probably been mad that I didn’t get him to buy me dinner afterward.” She sniffled. “She was dating his father for a while.”
“Your mother was dating Dan Swansea’s father?” Another thing I hadn’t known. I thought back to what my mother had said about Val not having it easy, and wondered what she’d known; if she’d had more of a sense than I did about what kind of mother Naomi Adler had been, if she’d seen behind the beauty and the glamour and the spur-of-the-moment road trips and been a lot less enamored than I was.
Valerie’s voice was muffled, so faint it could have been coming from the far end of a tunnel. “The Swanseas split up for a while freshman year. He had car dealerships. Naomi drove me by their house once. This great big place with a three-car garage. I think she’d had her eye on him for a long time.”
“Oh, Val.”
The room was quiet for so long I figured Val had fallen asleep until she said, “I told my dad, though. I called him up. Woke him up. It was the middle of the night. I thought…” I heard her take a wavering breath. “I don’t know what I thought, really. That he’d get on the next plane and fly to Illinois and beat the shit out of Daniel Swansea. Tell him, ‘That’s what you get for hurting my little girl.’”
“I take it that didn’t happen?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.
“He told me he’d call me in the morning, after I’d had a chance to calm down. I waited by the phone all day. He never called.” She pulled in a breath, and I heard the sheets rustle. “For the longest time, I just never let myself think about it. It was nothing. That’s what I’d tell myself. It was nothing. But it wasn’t…” Her voice cracked. I thought that she was crying, and I didn’t know what to do. Should I try to hug her? Say something consoling? It had been so long since someone had told me a secret, so long since someone besides Jon had needed me.
Before I could decide on a course of action, Val got off the bed and padded to the bathroom. There was a brief flash of light as the door opened, then shut. Poor Val. If it had been me, if I’d told my father, I was sure that he would have done exactly what Val had wanted her father to do. He would have found a way to make the boy who’d hurt me sorry.
A few minutes later, Val stepped out of the bathroom and flicked on the light. Her face was scrubbed, her hair pulled back, and she was wearing her new nightshirt, a long-sleeved navy-blue cotton number. “Hey,” she said, climbing under the covers, “we’re twins!” She fished a discarded chocolate off the floor and popped it in her mouth, and as she chewed, I thought of what I could tell her; of how I could help.
“I missed you, you know,” I said.
Slowly, she unwrapped another piece of chocolate and spoke without meeting my eyes. “Even though I was such a bitch? Even though I lied about you?”
“It wasn’t all lies,” I confessed. “I did have a crush on Dan.”
She gave a short, bitter laugh. “Big mistake.”
“And I did think that there’d be consequences. If you wound up accusing Dan, some of the cheerleaders would probably drop you.”
She gave another unhappy snort. “Try all of them.”
My throat tightened. “I thought they’d dump you, and then you’d need me again.”
She was quiet for a minute. When she rolled over, I thought she was going to turn off the light, but instead, she stretched her hand across the space between the beds.
“I always needed you,” she said, and grabbed my hand. “Friends?” she asked.
I felt the warmth of her palm against mine, the comfort of another body in the room, someone to laugh with, to drive with, to be with… until the end, if that was what was coming. “Friends,” I replied.
PART THREE
Best
Friends
Forever
THIRTY-NINE
“‘He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy,’” said Merry. “Proverbs 28:13.” Her voice was hoarse. Outside the windows, the sun was coming up, which made it, by Dan’s fuzzy reckoning, Sunday morning. They’d been at it for hours, kneeling bare-kneed on the wooden floor, with only a cup of chicken broth for sustenance, a few hours’ sleep, and only one bathroom break (when Dan had worked up the courage to ask for another, she’d merely looked at him narrowly and launched into another prayer).
He pressed his hand against his head, feeling faint. When Merry looked at him, when she spoke to him about his sins, about the harm he had done to Addie and to Val, she didn’t look angry, she looked… He shook his head. Never mind how she looked. He had to get out of here. “Listen,” he said in a voice as raspy as hers. “Merry. I have a friend.”
She stared at him impassively.
“Chip Mason. Remember him?”
She shook her head. “Another idolator. ‘He that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.’ Mark 3:29.”
“He’s changed,” said Dan, hearing the edge of desperation creeping into his voice, but unable to stop it. “If I did something wrong—and I’m not saying I did…”
“‘And it shall come to pass,’” Merry continued, raising her voice, “‘in that day, that the Lord shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth.’”
“I want to talk to Chip,” Dan said, keeping his head down, his voice low. “He’s a minister now. I want to make amends.”
That shut her up. She stared at him, lips clamped together, finally quiet, watching him.
“I want to go to my church. Chip’s church,” he said, and held his breath as time stretched out until, finally, she gave one brief nod. She handed him clothes he guessed belonged to her father—baggy old khakis, a mothbally plaid shirt, a pair of cracked old rubber boots that pinched his toes—and led him out into the twilight, to a minivan festooned with HONK IF YOU LOVE THE LORD bumper stickers. She waited until he’d fastened his seat belt, then drove into the sunrise.
FORTY
By the time I turned thirty, my weight hovered somewhere south of three hundred and fifty pounds. That was just my best guess. I didn’t ever weigh myself, and I didn’t go to doctors—in fact, I rarely left my house. By 2004, you could get almost anything you wanted: your clothes, your groceries, new toothbrushes and dental floss, fancy chocolates, art supplies—over the Internet. Supplement that with the pizza and Chinese food and the dry cleaner’s that did pickup and delivery, and weeks could pass without my venturing beyond the end of my driveway unless I was on my way to visit Jon.
Mostly, I was happy at home, filling my days with books and work, my online Scrabble games and the little black cat that sometimes came by my door, but every once in a while, I’d get an itch. I’d want to go to a department store and spray a new perfume on my wrists, to browse in a bookshop, holding the hardcovers in my hands, cracking their spines, smelling the paper. I’d want to go to Pearl Art Supply and touch the bristles of the paintbrushes, or sit in a coffee shop or a restaurant, eavesdrop on strangers’ conversations, look at different faces; be part of the ebb and flow of a normal day.
One winter morning I’d found myself at the post office. I could order my stamps online and arrange for FedEx pickups for my art, but I liked one of the clerks—she remembered my name, and I’d ask her about her grandchildren or her vacations. Walking back to my car, picking my way along the slushy sidewalks of what passed for Pleasant Ridge’s downto
wn, I’d paused in front of a diner with a neon sign in the window reading HOT APPLE PIE. Transfixed, I stood there, watching the words light up, one at a time: HOT… APPLE… PIE. A piece of hot apple pie, maybe with ice cream on top and a cup of coffee, sounded like just the thing for this chilly, overcast day.
The hostess looked at me dubiously before leading me to a booth. Booths, I saw, were all they had, unless you counted the spinning seats bolted in front of the long, curving counter, and I knew for sure that I wouldn’t fit on one of them.
I took a deep breath, sucked it in, and slid into the seat. The hostess dropped a menu in front of me and fled. This was a mistake, I thought, even before the little kid in the booth in front of mine turned around and stared at me. I tried a wave. Ignoring my overture, the kid turned to his mother and whispered loudly, “Why is that lady so fat?”
“Probably because she eats large portions of foods that aren’t healthy,” the mother responded without bothering to lower her voice. I felt my face heat up. What ever happened to a simple Shh! or I’ll explain it to you later?
By the time my waitress arrived, I’d given up on the pie—I was too ashamed to order or eat it in front of judge-y Mommy, and the edge of the table was digging painfully into my belly. I asked for a cup of soup, slurped it down as fast as I could, scalding my mouth in the process, slapped a ten-dollar bill on the table, and was poised to make my getaway… except I couldn’t. I was stuck.
I pushed my hands on top of the table, inhaled hugely, and pushed as hard as I could, wriggling my ass as I shoved. Nothing was happening. I tried again, a little squeak escaping me. Still nothing. “Mommy,” said the kid through a mouthful of half-chewed French fries (the little brat had turned around and propped himself up on his knees, so as not to miss a minute of the show), “is the fat lady stuck?”
My waitress wandered over. “Everything all right?”
“I’m fine,” I managed. I was sweating—I could feel it trickling down my back and my sides in hot rivulets—and I was sure my face was red as a stop sign. “I’m fine,” I repeated, and sucked, and pushed, and as I finally, thank you God, felt myself move incrementally to the left, toward freedom, a single word rose up in my mind, and that word, which might as well have been written in ten-foot-high neon letters that had been doused in gasoline and lit on fire, was ENOUGH. I had had ENOUGH.
Best Friends Forever Page 24