Best Friends Forever

by Jennifer Weiner

  “I don’t know,” she answered. He didn’t think she was lying—there was no hesitation, no flinchy look away, no hand raised to the hair or fingers to the mouth.

  “Why’d you run?”

  “I didn’t run,” she said. “I just decided to take a little vacation.”

  Jordan took a step forward—to do what, to say what, he wasn’t sure. The toe of his foot caught a tree root, and he stumbled, astonished at the speed with which the ground rose up to meet his face. He heard Addie say, “Hey!” and felt her fingers brush his sleeve as he fell… and then his forehead bounced off the sidewalk and he groaned, thinking, before the world went black, that this wasn’t going well at all.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  “The police chief?” Valerie stared down at Jordan Novick’s driver’s license and then up at me. “What’s he doing here?

  “I assume he came here to find us. He had our pictures in his pocket.”

  Valerie considered this. “Was it a good picture? God. I hope it’s not the one from Wikipedia. Some asshole who’s, like, obsessed with me keeps posting this terrible shot, and it looks like I have three chins…”

  “Valerie. Focus.”

  She sat down cross-legged in an armchair. “Well, shoot,” she finally said. “What are we going to do now?”

  I wasn’t sure. I’d gone out to watch the sunrise, thinking that I’d snap some pictures with the cheapie camera I’d bought, maybe do a few quick sketches of the sky. We’d been walking on the beach the day before, and the setting sun, the play of that strange fiery light on the water, enchanted me. I wanted to paint it, and not one of my miniatures, either. For this, I’d want a big canvas, maybe one as wide as a whole wall, and maybe something other than my usual watercolors. Maybe I’d do it in encaustic. The colored wax gave you a rich, layered look, the illusion of depth. It was wonderful for water, and I bet it would be great for the sky here, too.

  So I’d gone out barefoot, in my nightshirt, with my camera in one hand and a house key in the other, and noticed the car parked in front of our driveway, with Jordan Novick asleep behind the wheel. After he’d fallen, I’d thought about calling 911, telling whoever answered that a man had passed out in front of our cottage, then just hanging up and leaving him there, but when I’d bent down to see if he had a phone in his pocket, Jordan had moaned and grabbed the hem of my nightshirt. Please, he whispered. I’d helped him inside, half walked, half dragged him into the bedroom, and left him on my bed, on his side, so that he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit. Then I’d woken up Val, who’d been on her way to the bathroom. She’d peeked into the bedroom long enough to see his passed-out, prone figure, and said, “Oh, hey! You met someone!”

  I’d told her what had happened. Together, we’d taken off Jordan’s shoes and cleaned off his face. Then we’d adjourned to the living room to try to come up with a plan.

  “How about this?” said Val. “We’ll put him in a shopping cart, and we’ll leave him in front of the emergency room. Like they did with that girl in Animal House.”

  Oh, Lord. “Okay, first of all, I don’t think Animal House was supposed to be instructional. He might have really hurt himself. And where are we going to get a shopping cart?”

  Val thought it over. “Excellent points. Okay. We call a cab…”

  “I think we’d better just take him to the police station.” I paused. “And confess.”

  “I don’t know,” said Val, frowning. “He doesn’t seem to be exactly in an official capacity at the moment.” She picked at a cuticle. “Especially since I took his pants off.”

  I stared at her. “You did?”

  “Yup,” she said, looking pleased with herself.

  “Why?”

  “They were dirty.” She nibbled at her thumbnail. “Also, you know, if he tried to escape or something. It’s very hard to escape when you don’t have any pants.” She worried at her nail some more. “Not that I know this from personal experience.”

  “Valerie.” I struggled for patience. “Have you ever considered that there might be something wrong with your brain?”

  She gave me a sweet, guileless smile. “Oh, I think that maybe there’s something wrong with everyone else’s.”

  I picked up the telephone. “Maybe we should just call the cops.”

  “Let’s wait until he wakes up,” she said, standing and stretching. “Why rush?”

  “I should make sure he’s okay.”

  “You do that,” said Val. “Go on with your bad self.” She drifted toward her bedroom, and, after a minute, I walked into mine.

  Jordan Novick lay underneath the light down comforter, his face already starting to swell where he’d struck it. I brushed the hair off his forehead, feeling its thickness against my fingers. I was just looking, I told myself. My interest was purely professional. I had to make sure he wasn’t bleeding. He sighed in his sleep and burrowed his head into the pillow, looking like a little boy. I went to the kitchen, wrapped ice in a dishtowel and pressed it against his cheek. He groaned and rolled over.

  “Patti,” he said.

  “Shh.” I let myself stroke his hair again, very gently, just once, and touched his cheek. This was what I’d wanted, maybe all I’d ever wanted: a man to lie beside at night, a man who knew me, and who’d say my name. Or who’d lie beside me and say someone’s name. At this point, I’d take what I could get.

  “Nighty-night,” said Jordan.

  This was weird. What if he had a concussion? What if his brain was bleeding? I thought for a minute, trying to remember the dialogue I’d read in medical mysteries or remembered from TV. Pupils fixed and dilated were bad. Reactive pupils were good. A patient who was oriented to place and time was also good. I knelt on the bed beside him, took the shade off the lamp by the side of the bed, and brought the bulb down close to his face.

  “Jordan,” I whispered.

  He opened his eyes. His pupils shrank to slits. He squinted, then covered his eyes with his hand. “Ow.” I flicked the light off.

  “Do you know where you are?” I whispered.

  “Bed,” he said. There was a pause. “Florida.”

  “Can I call someone?” I asked. “Your wife or… someone?”

  “No… wife.” He was struggling to push himself upright. The covers and sheets slipped as he did it, exposing white boxer-briefs. “Divorced.” He rubbed his head, wincing. “She married our dentist. They adopted a girl.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say to that.

  “You sure you don’t know where Dan Swansea is?”

  I sighed. “Valerie—my friend Valerie Adler—thinks maybe she hit him with her car in the country club parking lot after the reunion.”

  “She thinks?” I couldn’t see his expression in the dark—couldn’t see anything more than the outline of his face and body—but I could imagine the skeptical look. “Isn’t that the kind of thing you’d remember one way or the other?”

  “For most of us, yes,” I agreed. “My friend is an exception to many rules.” I gave Jordan a minute to take that in, then continued. “She came to my house all upset because she thought she’d hit him…” I paused. “In her defense, though, she said he jumped in front of her car. And he was naked. Val made him take his clothes off.” I waited for Jordan to ask me why, but he didn’t. Then I remembered that Val had taken off his pants. Maybe he remembered that, too, and figured that, with Valerie Adler, de-pantsing was standard procedure. “We drove back to the country club…”

  “You didn’t call the police?”

  I pulled my knees up toward my chin. “We were going to see if he was okay.”

  “It was November, and he was naked, and he’d been hit by a car.” Jordan sounded skeptical.

  “Well, Val wasn’t sure she’d actually hit him. We just wanted to see…”

  I heard Jordan take a slow, deliberate breath, the kind I’d heard the mommies in the coffee shop take when their kids dumped their lattes on the floor. “Okay,” he said. “Va
l shows up, you go back…”

  “And Dan was gone! We found his belt… and then we went to look for him…”

  “In Key West?”

  I bit my lip. “Well, no. We actually started our search in Pleasant Ridge. The Key West part was only after we couldn’t find him. We thought maybe we’d get out of town until he showed up again.”

  The bed creaked as Jordan shifted. “He hasn’t. Shown up.”

  I wrapped my arms around my knees. Jordan sighed again, and when he spoke, his voice was a raspy growl. “I liked you,” he said.

  “You… you did?”

  “I liked your house.”

  I gulped, thinking I was going to start crying. “Oh.”

  “And your bedroom.”

  My skin bristled with goose bumps. “Wait. You were in my bedroom?”

  “Looking for you. Only because I was looking for you. Your neighbor’s worried.”

  I sighed. Mrs. Bass. Lord love her. But still. How long had I been waiting for a man to say that he liked my house, that he’d been looking for me? Under different circumstances, of course, with the words meaning something else entirely. Jordan reached for my face, cupped my cheek in his palm and turned me toward him.

  “I liked you,” he said again, his voice cracking as he pulled me close. His lips were warm against mine, his hands moving in my hair, his body easing mine down into the bed. I felt like I was slipping under the water, as if the warm air, the heavy smell of flowers, the sunshine outside were all conspiring to make me behave in ways I never would in sober, cold Chicago. Jordan’s whiskers rasped against my cheeks.

  “Addie.” We kissed and kissed. The bed rocked like a boat on the sea, and I could feel myself glowing, every inch of my skin lit from the inside, and somewhere nearby, something was buzzing, louder and louder.

  It took everything I had to pull myself away from him, to recognize the sound, to form the words. “Phone,” I said, and reached across him to turn the light back on.

  He sat up, bruised and blinking. “Huh?”

  “Phone,” I whispered, and pointed toward the chair where Val had left his pants.

  Jordan crossed the room in three long steps, pulled out his cell phone and looked at the screen.

  “Novick,” I heard him say. “Gary, is that you?” He listened for a minute, rubbing his head, frowning in the faint light, his body—stocky, but graceful—turned to the side. “He’s here?” he said after a minute. His voice had gotten louder, and he sounded confused. “Turned himself in for what?”

  I couldn’t keep quiet, couldn’t hold still. “Is it Dan Swansea? Is he all right?” The words had barely left my mouth when Valerie burst through the door. She was wearing her Gap nightshirt, and there was a small silver gun in her hand.

  “Hands up. Drop your weapon.”

  Jordan looked at her and let the cell phone slip to the floor, where it landed with a thunk. “Chief?” said a tinny voice. “Chief, you there?”

  Valerie kicked the phone into the corner of the room without taking her eyes, or the barrel of her gun, off of Jordan, who had raised his hands in the air. “Now listen to me, you son of a bitch,” she hissed. “My friend and I are walking out of here. Doesn’t make any difference to me whether we do it with you dead or alive.”

  “Val,” I said.

  “Chief?” said the voice from the phone. “Chief, can you hear me?”

  “She’s sick,” said Val, pointing her chin at me. “She needs to go home. She needs to see her doctor, and…”

  “CHIEF! WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO ABOUT SWANSEA?” shouted the voice on the telephone. For a minute, there was silence. Then Jordan looked at Valerie, eyebrows lifted.

  “May I?” he asked.

  She waited a moment, then nodded and lowered her gun. Jordan crossed the floor, keeping his hands in the air, and waited for Val’s okay before he picked up the phone and pressed it against his ear. “Gary? What’s going on?”

  Val came to sit on the bed beside me, gripping my right hand in her left one. Her own right hand was aiming the gun at Jordan’s head. “You might want to put that down,” I whispered.

  “Not a chance,” she whispered back as Jordan said, “I’m on my way. I’ll give you a call from the airport,” and flipped the phone shut.

  For a moment there was silence. The three of us were as still as if we’d been frozen—Val and I on the bed, Jordan standing in his blood-spattered button-down shirt and boxers, Val still pointing the gun toward his head.

  “Swansea turned up,” he said, and Val exhaled in a gush and quickly made the gun disappear. Shakily, I rose to my feet and looked at Jordan. His face was closed up tight as the phone as he grabbed his pants. “We’ll be in touch,” he said, pulling his pants on, pocketing the phone, and walking without a backward glance through the front door.

  FORTY-NINE

  Jordan had to give Daniel Swansea credit—the man had his story, and he was sticking to it.

  “Just one more time,” Jordan said for the fourth time that night. He was exhausted—the two-hour drive back to the Miami airport, the delays waiting for the rental-car shuttle, the special security screening that buying a last-minute one-way ticket guaranteed you had all taken their toll. “You left your belt in the country club parking lot?”

  “If you found it in the parking lot, then that’s where I left it.” Seated across from Jordan at the conference table, with his hands folded in front of him, Dan Swansea was, as Christie had said, a good-looking guy, but he was wearing old man’s pants that left a good three inches of his hairy shins bare, and a shirt that smelled like it had been exhumed from an attic, if not a coffin. Dan was tall and rangy, square-jawed and well built, with a full head of dark-brown hair and a dazed look in his eyes. He did not look like a man who’d trashed lockers and vandalized driveways, who’d raped a high school classmate. Sitting there, pale-faced and clean-shaven, he looked like a man who’d had all the fight taken right out of him.

  “Do you remember leaving the party with Valerie Adler?”

  Swansea rubbed at his head, saying nothing.

  “Do you remember being struck by a car?”

  Dan looked puzzled. Then he shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. “I don’t remember anything like that. I think maybe I fell in the parking lot.” He rubbed his forehead and gave Jordan what was meant to be a rueful smile, except it looked like he’d learned how to smile only a few hours before and hadn’t gotten good at it yet. “I was kind of wasted. They had an open bar. At the reunion.”

  “And you went home with a woman.”

  An odd look passed over Swansea’s face. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right.”

  “You won’t tell us her name?”

  Swansea shook his head. “A gentleman never kisses and tells.”

  Jordan bit back a frustrated sigh and looked down at his notes. “You spent Sunday and Monday with your friend Reverend Charles Mason.”

  “Chip. He’s a minister,” Dan said.

  “And you said that you wanted to confess to something?”

  Dan balled his hands into fists, set them in front of him on the table, and stared straight ahead as he said, “When I was in high school, I was at a party with Valerie Adler. We’d both been drinking, and we were fooling around, and we went into the woods, and we…” He rubbed his head, swallowing again. “She told me no,” he said, his voice barely audible. “I didn’t listen. I raped her. I want to confess to that.”

  “This happened when?”

  “Senior year,” said Dan. “Fall of 1991. October, I think.”

  Jordan slid a pad of paper and a pen across the table. “Write it down,” he said. Dan bent his head over the paper, holding the pen between his fingers for a minute before he started to write. Jordan slipped out of the room, easing the door shut behind him, and went to his office. It took him a few minutes to get the county’s district attorney on the phone.

  “One more time: He wants to what?” Glen Hammond asked.

  “Confe
ss,” Jordan said.

  “Jesus, did he hear a really inspiring grace at Thanksgiving?”

  “Not sure,” said Jordan.

  “And he says this happened when?”

  “October of 1991.”

  “Ancient history,” said Glenn Hammond, laughing to himself. “Look, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, Chief, but your guy’s shit out of luck. Statute of limitation’s ten years. Even if he took a Betamax of himself and his buddies screwing third graders and their little dogs, too, the state of Illinois officially no longer cares.”

  Jordan hung up the phone and sat at his desk, thinking. It was what Grandpa Sam would have called a boondoggle, in his thick New England accent (“A boon-dawgull, Jordy!” he’d cackle, steering his Cadillac one-handed through downtown New London, “that’s what this is!”). He couldn’t arrest Addie or Valerie. Without a victim willing to press charges, without witnesses, without any evidence of a crime, there wasn’t a case. Nor could he charge Daniel Swansea with Valerie’s rape. Which left him with a hot, steamy bucketful of nothing, as his grandfather also used to say.

  Back in the interview room, Dan lifted his head from the pad when Jordan came through the door. “I’m sorry,” Jordan said, feeling awkward. “We can’t prosecute you. The statute of limitation has expired.”

  Dan pressed his hand against his forehead, then stared up at Jordan. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that even if there’s evidence, even if you confess, we can’t prosecute. Too much time has gone by.”

  Dan was shaking his head. “I did a terrible thing. I know that now. I want to make it right.”

  “Well…” Shit. Jordan was good at many things: solving crimes, punishing wrongdoers, finding lost cars, lost cats, lost keys. Lost ladies, down in Florida. He was not equipped to handle a perpetrator’s plea for justice that the courts and the system couldn’t deliver. “You could do good things, I guess. Good deeds.”

  “Good deeds,” Daniel repeated, looking unhappy. He got to his feet and, after a moment, stuck his hand out at Jordan. “I’m sorry for any trouble I caused,” he said. “If people were looking for me over the holiday weekend. I’m sorry.”