My Best Friend's Girl

by Dorothy Koomson

  The opposite page, Adele and I were graduating. We were in our green and black gowns with mortarboards and matching smiles. In the background my parents were uneasily talking to Adele’s father and his wife. When Tegan spotted her grandfather and Muriel, she snapped over the page quickly, and over the next three pages that had our graduation pictures. We moved on to another album, later pictures of Adele and me and Nate. I’d kept those pictures even though I hadn’t looked at them in an age. There was Nate and I sitting on the sofa in Adele’s and my flat. We were kissing and Adele had taken the picture. There was another of me and Adele playing Twister, taken by Nate. There was me and Nate, showing off my ruby engagement ring. There was Adele, two months pregnant, pointing to her stomach, Nate in the background watching TV. Adele, nine months pregnant. Tegan in Adele’s arms, minutes after she was born—Adele looking as bedraggled as if she’d run a marathon. Me holding Tegan. Nate holding Tegan, having been threatened with no sex for a week by me if he didn’t.

  Tegan was the one who aged most noticeably in the photos; lines appeared on the adult faces but it was Tegan who evolved from lying to sitting to crawling to walking to running to dancing. All the while laughing, giggling, smiling. Happy.

  We looked through all the pictures, had a Bung It for our tea, then an exhausted Tegan asked to go to bed at six o’clock. She didn’t need a bath, a story or a chat, she just changed into her PJs, got under her covers and closed her eyes.

  “Goodnight, Tiga,” I said after I’d switched off the light beside her bed.

  “I want my mummy,” she whispered.

  I’d decided not to read Tegan the card Adele had left her for Christmas Day, nor any of the other letters she’d left just yet. It’d only confuse her, make her think there was a chance Adele would return. Maybe the day had, too. Maybe it’d been too much for her.

  A small sob escaped her lips, “I want my mummy,” she said again, quieter.

  I didn’t know what to say so ran a hand over her bescarved hair. Had I done the wrong thing today? Had I screwed up and thereby screwed Tegan up? “I want my mummy” was her last whisper as she slid into sleep.

  Switching off all the lights, apart from those in the hallway, I trailed to bed dragging my conscience with me. I’d hurt Tegan instead of helping her. I should go back to what I was doing before—not talking about Adele. It didn’t do this to her when we didn’t talk about Adele. I slipped into bed, even though it wasn’t even seven o’clock.

  I woke up again when I was being nudged aside in bed. I opened my eyes a fraction: Tegan. She put a foot on the base of my bed, hoisted herself up onto the bed. She moved aside the covers, and snuggled against me. I wrapped my arm around her and she moved slightly to get closer to me. Within minutes she was breathing gently and slowly, asleep.

  At least she knew she had me. I wasn’t her mum, but I was there.

  “you can call me tiga if you want”

  chapter 40

  One of my favorite parts of the day was the time right before Tegan went to bed, when she had her bath.

  We’d often have a random chat as I sat on the floor beside the bath, handing her a washcloth and waiting to shampoo her hair. Luke never gave her a bath, and never offered to either; he didn’t want me to get the wrong impression about him and why he spent so much time in our company, I suppose. Even if he did offer, I would have turned him down because bath time was Kamryn and Tegan time, the most precious twenty minutes of our day.

  Two months after Adele Day, Tegan and I had settled into a routine. We were used to each other. It’d been seven months since she’d died and Adele Day had cemented in both our minds that she wasn’t coming back. Beautifully written letters, her scent in her clothes, funny pictures, all of them lovely, all of them precious keepsakes of this person called Adele Brannon, but not her. Just fragments of the impression she’d left upon the earth. Tegan and I could look at those things as much as we wanted, but she wasn’t coming back, we had to get on with life and with each other.

  Normality had settled on our lives. Luke spent more time with us with each passing week; he’d had a key quite early on, but now he spent almost every weekday here and even at weekends he didn’t go to his place in Alwoodley. Nate also came around a bit—despite the drive from his place to ours, he would drop by for half an hour or so, have a cup of tea, chat to Tegan, ignore Luke’s seething in the corner. Luke asked me a few times if Nate was going to sign the papers, which in my boyfriend’s mind meant Nate would then disappear. I’d always reply that I had no idea. I hadn’t asked Nate what his plans were because I didn’t want to push him and, since our confrontation in the street, we didn’t talk about those sort of things.

  We had a good routine worked out, even if my heart did skip every time Nate walked in, but I knew that would stop as time went on and I got used to seeing him again. There was only one fly in our ointment. Or rather a huge elephant sitting on the table that every adult pretended they couldn’t see, especially since it tripled in size every time Nate dropped by.

  Tegan scooped up a handful of white bubblebath foam and dumped it on my outstretched hand. I’d lowered my head to blow the bubbles at her when she decided to point out the elephant by asking, “Is Luke my daddy?”

  I struggled to keep my voice steady while panic streaked through me. In all this time I hadn’t worked out what to say to her. The truth? Unveil Nate as the sperm donor who had brought her to life? Or lie and say I didn’t know him? That had been true until a few weeks ago. I hadn’t known the Nate who slept with Adele. He’d explained now. I did know him and I did know why. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Regina Matheson said that everyone has a mummy and a daddy. And I said I only had a Mummy Ryn and a mummy who was in heaven and she said I had a daddy too. And then she said maybe Luke was my daddy. And I said no because he’s my friend. But then she said he might be. Is he?”

  I am going to hurt this Regina Matheson, if I ever meet her. Or, as is most likely, give her parents a mouthful.

  “Luke isn’t your daddy.”

  “But I do have a daddy, don’t I? My teacher, Miss Lewis, said everyone has a daddy.”

  “Yes. Yes, you do, Tiga.” My mouth dried, my heart buffeted itself against my ribcage.

  Tegan stopped chasing bubbles with her hands and splashing with her feet, she sat very still as the bubbles disintegrated, pooling into oily patches on the cooling water. My shaky voice had alerted her that something was wrong and she asked, cautiously, “What’s his name?” Tegan’s face was flushed from being in the hot bath, while clumps of wet hair hung in tendrils around her cheeks as she waited for my reply.

  I sighed, feeling my body tremble down into the breath as I bit my lower lip. “Nate,” I said quickly.

  Tegan’s little hands came up and she wiped them across her eyes in surprise. “Mr. Nate?” she asked, blinking at me.

  I nodded. “Yes, Mr.—I mean, Nate is your daddy.”

  “Not Luke? Luke isn’t my daddy?”

  I shook my head. “No, sweetie.”

  “Really and truly?” She was disappointed.

  I nodded again.

  “Do I have to live at Mr. Nate’s house?” she asked after a tense silence.

  “God, no!” I screeched. “You’re with me forever, Tegan. Never forget that. It’s always going to be me and you.”

  “And Luke.”

  “Erm, yeah.” Not as convincing as I would have liked.

  “Are you going to marry Luke?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it.”

  “If you married Luke, would he be my daddy? Would he be Daddy Luke?” She didn’t hide her happiness at that prospect.

  “I suppose so,” I replied.

  “Are you going to marry Mr. Nate?”

  “No.” I was sure about that. Nate and I were not getting married. Or back together. It wasn’t even a possibility, no matter how much my heart skipped when he was around. It was over with Nate, really and truly, as Tegan would
say.

  “Why not?”

  “Because Luke’s my boyfriend.”

  “But you had the pretty dress.”

  “I know.”

  “Why is Mr. Nate my daddy?”

  Did I really have to do the birds and the bees? Shouldn’t she be allowed a few more years of innocence? Shouldn’t I? That’s what I paid my taxes for, so someone else could go through the embarrassment of explaining the physicality of sex. I didn’t even know how birds and bees came into the whole reproduction thing.

  Tegan blinked her wet eyelashes while she waited for an answer.

  “Erm…” I began. I had to do the only other thing I did in these situations. “Do you mind Nate being your daddy?” Ask a diversionary question.

  Tegan twisted her lips into a thinking pout and looked down at her bubbly water. She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. Mr. Nate is funny.” She scrunched up her nose and shook her head. “Luke doesn’t like him.”

  “Did he say that?” I asked, ready to bawl him out for pushing Tegan into something she wasn’t involved in.

  She shook her head. “No. He talks funny to Mr. Nate.” Tegan lowered her chin to her neck and deepened her voice. “Nate, you’re here again. How nice.” She started talking like Tegan again. “That’s what he says to Mr. Nate, all the time. That’s not very nice, is it?”

  “Men are silly sometimes,” I replied.

  “Mr. Nate looks at you. Sometimes, he smiles at you. You don’t see him or nothing. He likes you more than he likes me.”

  “Nate likes us both.”

  “Do you like Mr. Nate or Luke more?”

  Now if I knew the answer to that question, I’d be sleeping better at night. “I like them both,” I informed Tegan. I put my hand under her chin, lifted her face, turned it left and then right. “But I like Tegan the most.”

  She broke into a smile. She had such beautiful features, that cute little ski-jump nose, the big royal blue eyes and the exquisitely curved mouth that made her the image of Adele when she grinned. She took her head back, and scooped up some bubbles, blew them at me, covering my red sweater in bubbly white spots.

  “Mummy Ryn, I’ll think about this,” she said, as serious as a judge at sentencing time.

  “OK,” I agreed. If it wasn’t Tegan talking I would have scoffed at the gravity of her tone, at her precociousness. But I didn’t laugh because all she was doing was reminding me that she was a thought-filled child and she needed to examine this new information properly.

  “I don’t know if I want Mr. Nate to be my daddy,” she explained. “I’ll think about this.”

  I nodded my agreement. And I would have to think about how to tell her, that, like it or not, want it or not, Nate was her daddy. That was something neither of us could change.

  chapter 41

  Nate was hunched over a cup of coffee in the Horsforth Coffee House on Town Street, his head resting on one hand, his eyes staring into the depths of the white coffee cup. When I’d rung to arrange this meeting, I’d suggested we meet in central Leeds but he’d said he didn’t mind driving over to my neck of the woods. When I walked in and found him sitting with his coffee as though he’d been there for hours, I was reminded of our first date.

  I arrived at his table and he raised his head. My stomach flipped in horror. He looked like a ghoul, a hideous shadow version of himself. The dark scores under his eyes told me he wasn’t sleeping, his cheekbones starting to poke through his skin meant he probably wasn’t eating. The dark stubble on his chin revealed he hadn’t bothered to shave in days. His fingernails were picked into a ragged state. And his slow, lethargic movements showed that just sitting up was an effort.

  He wasn’t taking care of himself and that hurt me. He was precious to me. He was Tegan’s father after all. I was getting used to that. Starting to accept that what happened, happened. I couldn’t change it. I wasn’t sure I would change it if I could. Like Adele said in her letter, Tegan wouldn’t be Tegan if Nate hadn’t fathered her. But he was also precious to me because he was Nate.

  “I’m not late, am I?” I asked.

  “No, I was just excited about seeing you, even though you did sound very serious on the phone, so I got here early.”

  I sat down. Close up the devastation was more marked, more ingrained into him. This wasn’t an overnight occurrence, this had been building up for some time.

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  He nodded dismissively. “I’m fine, gorgeous. So, what was the serious tone on the phone about?”

  I hesitated, wanting to question him further about his health instead of starting this conversation. The state he was in, this was the last thing he needed to hear, but I had to do this. He was important, but Tegan was number one. Everything I did had to be for her benefit. “Nate,” I moistened my lips, scared of how much this would hurt him, “it’s been nice having you around, seeing you, but I want you to sign the papers to allow me to proceed with adopting Tegan.”

  Nate sagged in his seat, staring at the table in misery.

  “I know you like her, but not enough to be her full-time dad. And she needs the stability that will come from me adopting her. She’s six years old in a few weeks and in this past year she’s lost her mum, moved to another city, discovered what having a dad is like, discovered who her real dad is, and that’s on top of all the daily things she has to contend with…I just want to give Tegan the sort of stability where she knows that I’m not going to leave her. You understand, don’t you?”

  Nate nodded his tired head, stared into the depths of his cup as though he might find solace there.

  “So you’ll sign?”

  Another tired, dejected nod.

  “Can I still come and see her?” he asked tentatively.

  “Of course,” I said. “You have to stick around, you’re part of her life now. It’d traumatize her if you disappeared. I mean, she’s still freaked out that you’re her father, that’s why she looks at you a bit funny, but she constantly talks about you. She likes you, Mr. Nate. A lot. I don’t blame her.”

  “Don’t,” he muttered with a shake of his head. “Please don’t be nice to me. It just reminds me how much I screwed things up.”

  “I never thought I’d see the day when you asked me not to be nice to you. Phrases you never thought you’d hear, or what?”

  “Ryn, do you really think I’d have stuck around if you were as nasty as you seem to think you were?”

  I shrugged at him. Who knew how the male mind worked?

  “You were so incredible to me. You were always looking after me—making sure I ate properly, you did my washing, came to every one of my work functions even though you hate those things. I remember how many times you’d stay up until I got home from work when I was on the late shift. You were always encouraging me, I believed I could do anything when I was with you. I sometimes used to wonder why you didn’t want children when you were so good at taking care of people, not just me, Adele too…” He closed his eyes, dug his hands into his hair. “Even when you wanted someone else you weren’t horrible to me. You just stopped relating to me in the same way. That’s how I knew. Every day was just flatness.”

  “Nate, let’s not…What you described was this perfect relationship and it wasn’t. I drove you into someone else’s bed. I made you—”

  BAM! Nate slammed his hand onto the tabletop, making me jump. “Stop it!” he snapped. “Stop being so hard on yourself. That was what drove me crazy about you. You were so hard on yourself. Always blaming yourself for things you had no control over, thinking anything bad was down to you. You didn’t make me do anything—I cheated on you. It wasn’t your fault.” He calmed himself with a few deep breaths, softened his voice. “It wasn’t your fault. I did it, I screwed things up. Not just with you, with Adele too.”

  “Anyway, I’m meeting Tegan and Luke down at the park,” I said, injecting sunshine into my voice while I changed the subject. I wasn’t talking about this now. I couldn’t. If I carri
ed on thinking about these things, I’d start to crack up again. Before Christmas I’d been on the verge of a breakdown; crying in Nate’s arms had been a part of it. Thankfully I’d been able to shut the door on my emotions again before they took over, before the deep scores of grief on my mind were allowed to overwhelm me. I wasn’t going to risk opening myself up to all that hurt by talking with Nate about it. “So I’d better be off.”

  “OK,” Nate replied. “Do you want me to drive you?”

  “Sure.”

  We left the café, and walked under a gray sky mottled with rain-swollen clouds toward the car park where Nate had left his car. This probably wasn’t the best time to be going to the park, but Luke and Tegan were convinced they’d have at least an hour to run around before the heavens opened. As we reached his silver Audi, Nate’s footsteps slowed to a halt, then he spun to me. “I…” he began, then stopped. His arms reached out, pulled me into a hug. His hands stroked down my back, then slowly caressed their way up again. “Do you ever think about us being together?” he murmured against my ear.

  I more than thought about it, I fantasized, I hoped, I wanted…Nate’s mouth grazed against my neck as he snaked a hand around my waist. His lips against my cold skin increased in pressure. More neck kisses. He knew I had no resistance to kisses on my neck. My knees weakened and he pressed my body closer to his. I lost my mental footing and suddenly I was tumbling into an emotional time machine. Back to the days when we’d stand at train stations, in the street, sometimes even in supermarket queues, necking and not caring what anyone thought. Kissing like we’d only just met. Laughing when people shouted “Get a room!” at us. Nate’s free hand went into my hair as he kissed my neck harder. “I won’t leave a love bite,” he murmured and reality and the present slammed itself against my head.