by Lauren Fox
That Saturday morning, we left the apartment and went to Rock River, our coffee shop. After a while, Ben headed to the library for an early shift. I didn’t have to work that day. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I loitered. I sat in the big chair near the window, where I could watch people walk by, and I peeled my eyes for Jane, for the dark head that rose above the crowd, for the long legs that propelled her quick stride. I didn’t expect to see her. Why would she stroll around her old neighborhood and risk bumping into the two people who had betrayed her? I paid for a refill and made my way up the block, edging closer and closer to our building, until there I was, lurking in the alley, peering around the moldy mattress that was still propped up against the wall, waiting for Jane.
She showed up just fifteen minutes later. At first I didn’t recognize her. She was wearing a baseball cap, her hair in a ponytail and pulled through the back of it, and she seemed somehow shorter than she actually is. I flattened myself against the wall of the building next to ours, and she didn’t see me as she jiggled her key in the front door. Her mother’s blue Dodge Intrepid waited at the corner, Mrs. Weston square shouldered and grim at the wheel. I felt like a spy—like the worst spy ever, a spy who had just dreamed up her mission twenty minutes ago, one who was dressed in yellow shorts bright as a banana and pink sneakers, still clutching a to-go cup of lukewarm coffee. A spy who, if she had to escape, would undoubtedly spill her drink and then trip over her shoelaces as she ran.
I took a deep breath. When Jane exited the building, not long after she’d gone in, she was hauling her lamp and the blender. Our neighbor, James, held the door for her, and she smiled her thanks. I noticed, then, that she was dressed in a pair of Bonnie Weston’s pants, the pink floral leggings Mrs. Weston had worn on our shopping expedition, way back in June, three lifetimes ago. On Jane, Bonnie Weston’s leggings were capris.
“Mom!” Jane called, and motioned with her head for her mother to pull up to a newly vacated parking space right in front of the building, a premium spot. She tugged at the waistline of her pants and adjusted her grip on the lamp. I pressed myself harder against the wall. That was the moment I realized what we’d done, Ben and I. It wasn’t that I hadn’t known before. But seeing my best friend in her mother’s ill-fitting leggings, lamp and blender in hand, that was the moment I understood that we’d changed her—not just her future, but her past, too.
Now, Al’s living room is a crush of people. “I don’t think she’d show up here,” I say to Ben. Why would she go anywhere we might be? But as I look around at the throngs of grown adults in silly costumes—a lion, a sexy nurse, Spider-Man, a marshmallow—and then at Ben, in his shirt and jeans and furrowed brow, I realize: I have no idea what any of us are capable of.
“Willa?” A chubby witch in a long black dress taps me on the shoulder. “Willa! Hi!” Amy flings one arm over my shoulder and presses down for a second, the half hug of the noncommittal. “We’re here with the baby!” she announces. “Can you believe it? The baby!” She looks delirious, her pretty blond hair matted, her face blotchy, purple smudges so dark underneath her eyes I think it must be makeup, until I lean in closer and realize it’s not. She’s wearing a pointy black hat that has tipped precariously to the side of her head, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “You don’t have any gum, do you?” She covers her mouth with her hand. “I didn’t have a chance to brush my teeth tonight.” She laughs, then blinks hard. “The baby never, ever sleeps! It’s insane.” For a second I think she means the baby is insane, and I nod sympathetically. How terrible to give birth to a baby, only to find out that it’s insane!
Rafael comes up behind her, the tiny, wet-mouthed baby strapped to his chest in a pouch. Rafael is wearing regular clothes and, in a nod to the holiday, a headband with wobbly, bobbing antennae attached. The baby, wobbly itself, its arms and legs flailing, looks larval, like something alien-insect-Rafael might decide to snack on later.
“Wow,” I say to them, peering at the pink-clad infant, her little tongue lolling, big brown eyes gazing past me and then crossing, as if, overwhelmed, she prefers to stare at herself. “Congratulations!” Amy and Rafael both look like they’re going to cry.
“Her name is Liliana,” Amy says. “After his great-grandmother.” She jerks her head toward Rafael. “Apparently she never slept, either. Just four hours a night, right up until she died at ninety-six. Nobody told me that before we named her, though.” She narrows her eyes and glares at Rafael, then at me.
Ben, next to me, bends toward Liliana. “She’s beautiful,” he says, as Amy takes it in, the tall, handsome man she has met before as Jane’s boyfriend, here now with me, holding my hand.
Amy tilts her head; her black witch’s hat slides down to her ear. “Huh,” she says. “I mean, oh, yes, thanks. We think so.” She rests her hand on Liliana’s round, fuzzy head and walks away with Rafael.
“I think it’s been fifteen minutes,” I say, deflated, somehow demoralized by the whole interaction. Ben nods.
And then the door swings open and she glides in—tall, graceful, face powdered, lips blood red, her hair streaked and sprayed stiff: the bride of Frankenstein, white robe trailing like—oh, yes—a wedding gown.
“Oh!” Ben says as together we realize that it’s Jane, and my heart thumps fast, choosing flight.
Jane surveys the place, looking past us, smiles, and waves at a group of people near the kitchen, conspicuously far from where Ben and I are standing. She drifts across the room, stopping briefly at the big bowl of candy on the coffee table, and heads over to the group (an evil ballerina; a nun; Van Gogh, a splash of red where his ear once was; a glowworm), bending to receive an eager round of hugs. From the way Jane is enveloped and embraced by this group, I can see that the troops have rallied, that most people do know what has happened, that our betrayal has made headlines.
And as they circle their wagons around her, I know, too, that Jane will replace me, if not with one of these solicitous friends, then with someone else, and soon. Our hearts are like starfish, regenerating what we’ve lost. We move forward, regroup, reconfigure; people find ways to be happy. I try to make out what Jane is saying, but the room is too loud and full. All I hear is music and laughter and the occasional excited screech.
“Should we go over?” Ben asks. If the background noise weren’t so loud, I’d think my ears were playing tricks on me: he sounds almost eager.
“No way.”
“I think we have to. Preemptive strike.”
“And I think a jump from a second-story window probably wouldn’t kill us.”
“Come on, Will. I promise to protect you from the completely innocent woman whose life we ruined.”
I take a huge, fortifying sip of my disgusting drink as Ben, his hand on my back, guides me toward the island of misfit toys that surrounds Jane. And if my ears weren’t still playing tricks on me, I’d say a hush falls over the room.
“Ah.” This comes from the glowworm, Bridget McCarragher, the poet who, according to Jane, writes only florid iambic pentameter about her ex-boyfriend, punctuated with emoticons. Bridget plants her hands on her plush, stuffed green hips. The nun turns to Jane and whispers, close in her ear. Jane shakes her head in response, her helmet of white-streaked hair immobile.
Van Gogh, aka Larry Hirsh, rotund confessional memoirist, places his hand protectively on Jane’s arm. “Well,” the evil ballerina says. “This is awkward.”
I will Ben to put his arm around me, but he doesn’t. He stays close, though, even as he takes a half step toward Jane. “Hey,” he says to her, and I raise my hand in a little wave.
Jane swallows hard and pulls herself even straighter. In the split second before she opens her mouth, I understand that we are all here for a reason: Ben and I to find out whether or not we have destroyed her, Jane to let us know that we haven’t. And then I realize something else, something fully detached from this moment, from the clear answer she is giving us with her impeccable posture, her sublime costume, her imperio
us gaze. I hear the echo at the depths of me, the baleful howl from the darkness beneath my darkest heart. I didn’t want my best friend to have what I didn’t have. So I took it from her. I took it.
Jane looks us both up and down. “I see you came dressed up as human beings,” she says. “How clever.”
Ben turns away; I see the tears in his eyes, and the surprising shame of that makes me turn away, too. I take his hand and head for the door, and as we stumble down the long hallway of Al’s apartment building, Ben lets out a little moan, a despair that almost exonerates him. But I’m silent, a cold wind blowing through me. What did you expect? I think, but do not say.
Chapter Twenty-four
I haven’t spoken to my brother since August. We’ve had longer dry spells, but none like this—three months swollen with mutual pride, our silence so obviously spiteful and pointless. I’ve started dreaming about him, vague, gauzy, increasingly disconcerting dreams of Seth in various situations and permutations. We’re walking along the beach together when suddenly he turns into a seagull and flies away, squawking; Seth as the superintendent of my apartment building, plunging my overflowing toilet; weirdest of all, Seth and Ben, interchangeable, Sethben, Benseth, my dark-haired companion, his arms open, running toward me across an expanse of meadow, eyes misty with affection and concern and, oh, yes, there it is, lust … but who is it? Ben? Seth? This last of which is why I woke up this morning, curled around Ben, intent on making contact with my brother, finally determined to patch things up.
His phone rings seven times before he picks up.
“Hi,” I say. “It’s me. Will.”
“Will Shulman, from college? Your voice sounds different. How are you?”
“Shut up.”
“Oh, Wilma MacIntyre, from the Department of Public Works. Listen, I’ll have that report to you by Monday.”
“Seth, stop it.”
“I’m just surprised, is all.” His voice is gravelly, as if I woke him up, although it’s almost noon. Clearly, nothing has changed in his miserable life.
“So, do you want to go get coffee or something?” My heart races; I feel like I’m asking him out on a date, and I brace myself for a stinging rejection.
He pauses for a full fifteen seconds, plenty of time to come up with a good excuse, then clears his throat. I hear rustling in the background, imagine him sitting up and throwing his grimy blankets off, flinging his pale, hairy legs out of bed. He’ll tell me to fuck off; he’ll tell me he’s gotten perfectly used to his miserable life and doesn’t need me to try to help him. And I never could. Well, no. I’d rather not get some coffee or something, he’ll say, mocking, but thanks so, so much for calling. He clears his throat again, and I realize that I’m holding my breath. “Nah,” he says, and the disappointment leaks through a shoddy dam in my chest. I’m about to hang up. “But I could go for some ice cream. Are you in the mood for ice cream?”
We meet at Lakeside Licks—like Braun’s Deli, another relic from our youth. The ice cream isn’t very good: is, in fact, frequently freezer burned and often downright crystallized, possibly morphed into some other substance entirely, but the flavor options are endless, which made it our favorite when we were growing up. Bubblegum Blowout was my top choice until I was eleven, neon pink and studded with real nuggets of gum—a delicious choking hazard of an ice cream flavor. Seth usually went with Sweet Cotton Candy (as if “cotton candy” alone wouldn’t be quite cloying enough). He nudges me and points to it in its brown tub, still exactly where it was fifteen years ago, quite possibly the very same tub.
We take our ice cream (adult flavors now—one scoop of coffee fudge for me, vanilla almond and rum raisin for him) to a small orange Formica table. Seth hunches over his cone and opens his mouth onto it, sucks down a third of the top scoop with one enormous, loud slurp. He licks the corner of his mouth and juts his chin at my ice cream, which is starting to melt a little bit, a drop of beige dribbling down the side of the cone. “I’ll have yours if you don’t want it,” he says, smiling, and I realize how much I’ve missed him.
“Sorry I’ve been so out of touch,” I say, as if that’s all it is: I’ve been crazy busy!
A very tall man and an extremely short woman step into Lakeside Licks, the heavy glass door whooshing behind them.
“That’s okay,” Seth says. “I’ve been really swamped at work.” He winks. I think that this bodes well for us and points toward reconciliation. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, then licks the back of his hand. “Plus I’ve been playing a lot of high-stakes Internet poker.”
Uh-oh. “Really?”
“No.” He vacuums up another half scoop of ice cream and swallows it without any evidence of enjoyment. He looks at me again, his brown eyes tired and slightly unfocused.
“So, guess what?”
He raises an eyebrow, waits.
“I’m with Ben now.”
The tall man at the counter peers down at the top of his tiny girlfriend’s head. “I know what I saw,” the man says, under his breath.
“But I told you already,” she says, her voice a girlish whisper, “he’s just a friend.”
“Oh, fuck you,” the man says, still quiet but suddenly ugly and threatening, like a thundercloud rolling in.
“Fuck me?” the girlfriend says softly, quizzically, without rancor, as if she’s contemplating which ice cream flavor to order. “Oh, no … fuck you.”
Seth glances at the couple, who is about to plunk down at the table adjacent to ours. “Huh?” he says, distracted. “Ben’s with what, now?”
“Jane moved out. Back in August. Ben and I are together!” The story spills out of me. I’ve been waiting almost three months to tell him. For eleven weeks it’s been just Ben and me and our swirling fog of guilt, and I’ve been living the strangely lonely life of the girl who got what she wanted. “So we, you know, we got together,” I tell Seth as ice cream drips down my hand, “a few days before their wedding, or, I mean, a few days before they were supposed to get married. But they didn’t.” My heart is pounding. Out it comes, all of it—the surreal mix of pleasure and shame of being with Ben, the way I’ve begun to suspect that the shame might be part of the pleasure; the terrible emptiness of the apartment without Jane; how I never thought I’d do what I did; how easy it was, in the end, to do it. If anyone will understand this, the ugly underbelly of friendship, the way the worst of a person sometimes just wins, it’s Seth. “So we told her. We sat down at the kitchen table and we told her, and it was awful,” I say, “for everybody.”
Seth is quiet. I sit back and perform triage on my collapsed scoop as it melts down the soggy cone. “Really awful,” I say again, and I wait with relief for my brother’s reaction, for support from the one person I know whose path is littered with the detritus of the relationships he himself has ruined.
He tips back in his chair, as Fuck-me and Fuck-you decide at the last minute to take it outside. The door jingles as they leave. “Fuck me?” the woman whispers. “I don’t think so.”
Seth watches the door shut behind them and then swivels back to me. “Wow,” he says finally, and I think he’s referring to the unhappy couple, and I nod. “This must be really, really hard for you and Ben. Really tough.”
I look up at him, my coffee-fudge-flavored lips stuck in a hopeful smile. “What?”
“Oh, I mean, just, it must suck for you that you destroyed your best friend’s life.” Seth’s voice is a taut whisper now, and he’s breathing hard, almost panting. “Damn, Willa, you make it sound like you were in the path of a natural disaster. I’m so sorry about it, this you-sleeping-with-Ben-behind-Jane’s-back thing, this thing that just happened to you.”
“What?” I say again, my mouth slackening out of its frozen grin. This is not what I expected. I swallow, try to regain composure. “How can you be judgmental about this? You of all people?” Nora, I think. Libby. Shelly. Nina.
He leans in and slaps his right hand onto the Formica, his left hand gripping his ic
e cream cone so tightly it cracks. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
I tilt my head at him, narrow my eyes. “You, you’re like the, the president of two-timing. The emperor of infidelity!”
Seth exhales and relaxes just a little. “The chairman of cheating?” he says.
“The … sultan of straying?” I’ll always, always follow his lead.
He examines his broken ice cream cone and then looks around the empty shop. “Trust me, Will, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I get up and walk over to the counter for napkins and notice that the ice cream-scoop guy has been listening intently to our discussion. He’s leaning on his arms on the glass counter, staring at us, his paper cap riding high on his head, his mouth slightly open. I eye him, decide I don’t care.
“Enlighten me,” I say to my brother, sliding back into my seat. “Please.”
“I don’t know that I need to fill you in on the details of my personal life, but I will tell you that I didn’t cheat on Nina. I did not ruin my relationship with her by cheating.”
I swipe at a blob of melted ice cream on the table between us. “Oh.”