Best Friends Forever Part 7

"My dad had an aneurysm the fall after we graduated." I knew from Mrs. Ba.s.s that Valerie had been in California by then-she'd been able, through her father, to establish residency and enroll in one of the state schools. Mrs. Adler was still technically our neighbor, but by then she was spending most of her time in Cleveland with a new man. I'd been in New York for ten days, had settled into my apartment and started my cla.s.ses in Art Appreciation and History of Painting at Pratt. My dad had been driving home after a day of installing windows in one of the big new houses in a development that had gone up in Elm Ridge. According to the drivers who'd been on the road behind him, his car had slowed, then drifted over the yellow line and through a metal barrier and proceeded almost gracefully down a slope before coming to rest in a pool of shallow water at the bottom of a ditch. He was just forty-six, dead behind the wheel. He'd had a weak spot in an artery at the base of his brain that had probably been there for years and had finally, quietly, exploded.

I'd been numb as Mrs. Ba.s.s gave me the news on the newly activated telephone. I'd felt like one of my father's puppets, a thing made of wood and wire, as I'd told my new roommate what had happened, and called the dean of students, then a travel agent to book a flight back home. I'd stayed numb as I'd filled my suitcase and carried it to the sidewalk and caught a cab to the airport, numb as I'd boarded the plane, and then, when we were airborne, I had remembered a Sat.u.r.day morning the previous spring.

I'd gotten up early and was going through what had become my weekend routine: bury the empty wrappers and ice-cream carton at the bottom of the trash can, put on a pot of coffee, pull on sweats and shoes, grab a bucket and scrub brush from the front hallway, and go outside to scrub graffiti off the driveway. Most mornings my father would come out to help me. We'd scrub, then go inside to drink black coffee once the words were gone. But that morning, he'd said, "You know, Pal, it won't be like this forever." The older and bigger I'd gotten, the less physically affectionate he'd become, but that morning he'd pulled me close and hugged me roughly, his arms tight around my back. "I'm proud of you," he'd said. "You're going to be fine." The memory pierced me, and then I wasn't numb... I hurt all over, burning with an agony I didn't know I'd be able to survive. In 16D on the plane, I'd doubled over as if I'd been stabbed, sobbing, unable to catch my breath. My seatmate called the stewardess, who'd regarded me with contempt showing through her makeup. I wasn't looking pretty, crammed into the tiny seat, the seat belt cutting into my belly, my cheeks bright red and my face wet with a plaster of tears and snot. "Are you all right, miss?" she asked, and I tried to collect myself. "My father died," I blurted.

"I'm sorry," she said, and handed me a stack of napkins and a can of Diet c.o.ke-the best she could do, I guessed, under the circ.u.mstances.

At home, my mother was sitting on the sunporch, a notebook, with both pages blank, spread open in her lap. "I can't believe he's gone," she'd said. Tears rolled steadily down her cheeks. I thought of all the condolence cards she'd written, how her job had been to find the right words for moments such as these, and how, now that it was her, she'd fallen back on that one phrase that she repeated all through the night and the following days: I can't believe he's gone.

The next morning, I'd been the one to take Jon to Marshall Field's for a new suit, and explained to him over and over why he needed it. He'd remember for a while, then look down at himself, frowning at the stiff white s.h.i.+rt, fingering his tie. "Addie?" he'd say, and I'd take him aside and tell him again.

There'd been an obituary in the paper. I waited to see if Valerie would call, or send a letter, or maybe even show up at the service or the grave, but she didn't. She was gone, her mother, too, and I guessed-at least I told myself-that it was likely neither one of them had heard the news.

My father died on a Tuesday. Though he'd been barely Jewish in life, death turned my dad into a believer. He was buried as quickly as we could arrange it, two days after his death, in accordance with the traditions of his faith-in a plain pine casket with a Star of David carved on its top, and a rabbi in a black suit with a black silk cap on his head, praying in a language I'd never heard before as the body was lowered into the ground.

On Sat.u.r.day morning I woke up early, with the plan of clearing out the bas.e.m.e.nt, packing up my dad's tools and whatever puppets he'd left. Bas.e.m.e.nt in the morning and his closet in the afternoon, I thought, slipping down to the kitchen to make toast and coffee. Maybe Jon would want some of my father's clothes, cuff links or a watch to remember him by.

"Addie." I jumped, badly startled as I heard my mother's voice. She was sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. She wore her blue bathrobe, and her hair hung uncombed around her cheeks. Her hands cupped a mug I'd painted for her one of my summers at camp: a red heart with the words I Love You in cursive underneath. "I need to talk to you about something."

I took my customary seat at the table. I couldn't stop looking over to the stove, expecting to see my father there with his frying pan, making his famous pancakes, saying Hey, Pal, did you have sweet dreams?

"It's bad news," my mother began. Across the table, in the dusty shafts of light coming in through the window, she looked old, with veins bulging on the backs of her hands, and her face drawn and haggard. "In May, I found a lump in my breast," she said. "They did a biopsy and then they scheduled a mastectomy."

I sucked in my breath. "Oh, Mom."

"I was going to tell you at Thanksgiving when you came home. By Thanksgiving, I'd be through the worst of it-the surgery and then the chemo-but now..."

"I'll stay here." I said it instantly. "I can call the admissions office, I'm sure they'll let me defer. They'll probably even refund the tuition."

"No, honey. I don't want that." But there was no force behind her words, and she was looking down as if afraid to meet my eyes. In the silence, I understood, in a way I never had before, that as much as she'd taken care of my father and helped him navigate the world, he'd helped her do the same thing... and it was my job now.

I'd called the admissions office and arranged for a deferral. My roommate s.h.i.+pped me the clothes I'd barely unpacked, the brilliantly colored Helen Frankenthaler prints I'd just tacked to our walls. Together, my mother and I found a halfway house for Jon, a homey, well-run place that his disability checks would pay for. "It's time," my mother said. "He should live on his own, he should have as much of a life as he can." Jon settled in, getting used to the social workers, the other men, the job they'd found him at the drugstore. Then it was just the two of us.

I drove my mother to the hospital for her surgery and then for her chemotherapy and radiation. On the way home I'd grip the wheel, watching for potholes, inching along as carefully as I could as she sat beside me, pale and silent, with Band-Aids in the bends of her elbows and a plastic basin in her lap.

I'd pick up her prescriptions and cook her meals, soft, bland things that wouldn't make her nauseous or irritate the sores in her mouth. I'd check books and videos out of the library, buy fancy lotions and skin creams when I found them marked down at Marshalls or T.J. Maxx. I taught myself to knit and made her shawls and hats-a jaunty beret in purple wool, a striped ski cap with a frothy pom-pom on top.

When she was too tired to work, we'd sit on the porch and she'd tell me stories: an Easter egg hunt where she and her sister had gotten stuck in the chimney, a trip she'd taken to Canada with her college roommates, how she'd met my father (it hadn't been in the water at all, but at the musical, when her camp had hired him to run the lights for the end-of-summer show).

On Wednesday nights we'd go to visit Jon. We'd take him to dinner at the Greek diner down the street from the Crossroads, or pick up pierogi, which he loved. If there was something playing he wanted to see, we'd go to the movies, or we'd wander around the bookstore, or the big electronics store where Jon could try out different video games. He had the tastes of the teenager he'd been when the crash had happened, a pa.s.sion for starchy foods and shoot-'em-ups, comic books, and Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. He would be, in some ways, like a child until he died, and it was tragic, to be sure, but there was also something almost fairy-tale-ish about it. Jon would age, but he'd never grow up, never have to worry about the things grown-ups worried about.

It was on those Wednesdays, on our way back home, that my mother would try to talk to me about my future. No matter what happened, she instructed, I was to go back to college, and when I was done, I should travel as much as I could. I should spend at least a semester in Europe; I should visit Italy and Spain; I should see the Louvre and the Prado and as many Vermeers as I could. Sitting in the pa.s.senger's seat, she was hardly recognizable-she'd lost so much weight so fast that you could see the outline of her bones underneath her pale, loose sheath of skin. She'd lost her hair, her eyelashes and eyebrows. Okay, Mom, I would say as she instructed me on books to read, on paintings to look at, on the churches and beaches and cities to visit, a list of places I knew for a fact she'd only read about. Okay.

"Whatever happens to me," my mother said, her voice soft and sweet and faint as I turned off Hightower and onto Crescent Drive, past the Sheas' house. After twenty-two years and fifteen children, Mrs. Shea and her husband had gotten divorced the year before. Now Mrs. Shea lived in the house alone, with her silvery hair cut short, and could be seen each weekday morning in spandex pants, with her Bible in her hand and her yoga mat hooked over one shoulder, on her way to early-morning ma.s.s at six, then yoga cla.s.s at seven. "Whatever happens, you're going to be fine."

I told her that I knew I'd be okay, even though I didn't believe it. While she'd gotten thinner with her illness, and was as flat-chested as a boy after the double mastectomy, I was getting fatter. She would sit in the chemo lounge, with cla.s.sical music wafting through the air and poison dripping into her veins, and I'd take the elevator three floors up to the hospital cafeteria and gorge myself on plastic-wrapped slices of cake and pie, shoveling tasteless forkfuls of chocolate and custard and crust into my mouth and wondering whether they'd given the food a dose of radiation, too, or shot it full of chemicals that had taken away its taste. I didn't enjoy it, but I couldn't stop-not the cake and pie binges, not the cookies and candy I'd eat in my room in secret, after the lights were out and I had to concentrate on pretending not to hear my mother cry.

In between the hospital visits and the trips to the grocery store and the pharmacy and to visit with my brother, I set up an easel in the dining room, and I'd s.n.a.t.c.h an hour or two, here and there, to paint. Back in November, my mother had sent a painting I'd done to her editor. It was a watercolor of a Christmas tree with a s.h.i.+ning star suspended above it and the words Peace on Earth underneath. Her editor said she loved it, and the next thing I knew I had a check for two hundred dollars and an invitation to submit more work. All through the fall and into the winter I painted, as the leaves fell and the air grew chilly, as the new gourmet grocery store in the center of town changed its display from pumpkin pie and chestnut stuffing to Bche de Nol and, eventually, diet frozen dinners for the New Year's resolution crowd. Without any planning, I had found myself with a career. As my mother shrank and dwindled, I painted and ate, painted and ate and dreamed of New York City, which seemed farther and farther away with each day that pa.s.sed, like a place I'd only dreamed.

Winter was brutal that year. The temperature rarely rose past freezing in the daytime and plummeted past zero in the night, when the wind howled down the street and battered at the walls. After a dinner of soup and pudding, I'd help my mother into the shower. We'd stand together underneath the water, and she would brace herself against the tiled wall as I washed her, trying not to notice the way her hipbones and the b.u.mps of her spine pushed against her skin, or the bruises that bloomed on the scant, loose flesh of her arms and thighs. Once she was dry and powdered and in a fresh nightgown, I would read to her: Pride and Prejudice, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, her schoolgirl favorites. She was regressing, I would think. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were gone, her hips and hair were gone, and sometimes at night she would cry softly, the way I imagined a baby would.

Near the end, when there were no more surgeries or chemo and radiation, when there was only the hospice nurse and the morphine drip, I was sitting by her bed, a book in my lap and my knitting in a bag beside me, when my mother rolled onto her side and took my hand. "Addie, you have to promise me you'll go back to school. You can't just stay here."

"I know, Mom." This was a conversation we'd had many times before.

"I know you're afraid," she said. "But you have to believe me. There are good things out there. There are good people. Good men." Her bright eyes softened. "You could have a baby."

I looked down at myself, b.r.e.a.s.t.s spilling onto my belly, belly threatening to erase my lap. The last time I'd stepped on a scale, I'd watched the numbers roll past two hundred, then past two hundred and fifty, and I'd jumped off, shocked, before they could go any farther. Who would want to have a baby with me? "I'll be okay," I told my mother, and she sighed and closed her eyes. I thought she was done, but a minute later she said, "Have you talked to Valerie?"

I didn't answer. My mother persisted. "You two were such good friends."

"She ruined my life," I said. The words came tumbling out as if they'd been held back, dammed up. "She turned everyone against me..."

"Don't be so hard on her," said my mother.

"She ruined my life," I repeated.

She sighed and shook her head. "High school isn't life, Addie. Your life is not ruined." With an effortful grunt, she propped herself up on an elbow. "I think Valerie hasn't had a very easy time of it."

"Oh, sure," I said, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice. "I'm sure it was really hard for her."

She reached for my hand. "You should call her. Promise me you will."

In the too-warm bedroom that smelled like toast and eggs and arnica gel and the lemon-scented lotion I rubbed on my mother's legs and feet, I told her that I would-another promise I had no intention of keeping.

"Addie," said my mother from the depths of her bed. "There's all kinds of love in the world, and not all of it looks like the stuff in greeting cards." She lay down, grimacing, and I glanced automatically at the clock, counting backward from her last shot of morphine, then forward to seven a.m., when the hospice nurse would arrive. "I just want you to be happy. Your father and I..." Her voice trailed off and her eyes filled with tears.

"I'm happy," I said. I read to her until she fell asleep. Then I sat beside her, picturing that long-ago summer morning, in the canoe with my best friend beside me. We'd paddled past half a dozen little boats riding at anchor in the shallow waters. The sky had been blue, with a few cottony pink-tinged clouds. If I concentrated, I could remember the names of each one of the skiffs: Lovely Lu. Tall Cool One. Evangeline.

My mother died in the middle of a warm night in September, just over a year after I'd come back from New York, as I lay beside her, listening to the s.p.a.ces between her breaths grow longer and longer, until finally there was no breath, just silence. "Rest now," I said. I covered her poor skinny body, her birdy-bones and bald head, with the afghan I'd knitted from ivory-colored chenille, and kissed her cheek. "Rest." When the sun came up, I called Dr. Shoup, who said she was sorry for my loss, and the hospice nurse, who cried and said how lucky I was to have a mother who'd loved me so much. Jon and I did it all again: the long black limousine, the barely worn black suit, the neighbors over at the house, carrying cold cuts and ca.s.seroles and saying how sorry they were, my brother looking at me with muddy confusion in his eyes, tugging my sleeve to ask, "Addie, where's Mom? Why isn't Mom here?"

I was nineteen, almost twenty. I'd inherited the house on Crescent Drive, the life insurance policies my parents had both left, the small trust they'd set up to care for Jon. I could have done what my mother had wanted-sold the house, packed my bags, gone back to school, gone to Europe, gone dancing, gone to the beach-but it was as if every bit of energy and optimism I'd ever possessed had left me, and New York City was a place I'd made up, a fairy tale I'd told myself. Besides, I was so big. The world was not a place where I belonged. It was high school writ large, full of bad things waiting to happen and bad people waiting to do them. Better to stay home, to work at the easel I had set up in the dining room, to make my little circuit from the grocery store to the library, where I knew people and people knew me, where it was at least relatively safe.

My mother had insisted that I get a degree, and that was one promise I kept. I signed up for art courses at the local community college, where most of my cla.s.smates were what were euphemistically called "returning students," people in their twenties and thirties with day jobs and, in some cases, night jobs, too; with little kids and aging parents and weekend obligations. I got a bachelor's in fine arts and lived at home, where I worked painting the images I'd eventually become known for: tiny, exquisitely detailed, iconic renderings of a single thing-a heart, a flower, a gull in flight, a spray of fireworks-set against a background of white. No need for an office, no need to ever meet the people who employed me. No need for them to know how I lived or what I looked like. I'd eat oatmeal for breakfast, tuna salad or peanut b.u.t.ter for lunch, cookies and cakes and pudding and pie in private. I worked during the daytime; I ate, and read, at night. I didn't bother anyone, and for years, n.o.body bothered me.

"Addie?"

From the driver's seat, Val poked my arm with one bright-red fingertip. "You still with us?" I rubbed my eyes. We'd arrived in Chicago. The sun was up, but the street was in shadows cast by the skysc.r.a.pers on either side. I looked up at the high gla.s.s-and-concrete tower we'd parked in front of. the moderne, read the marquee above the entryway. "Looks like he's done pretty well for himself," I ventured.

"I bet he's in an efficiency," said Val. "And anyhow, karma's a b.i.t.c.h." She unbuckled her seat belt, letting it slither over her body and smack against the door. "I'm going to go talk to the doorman. I'll tell him I gave Dan my car keys 'cause I was drinking, only now I need them back."

"And what about this car?" I asked, indicating the keys in the ignition.

"I'll tell him it's yours."

"Okay." This sounded like as good an idea as any, and I had to admit I was amused by the thought of owning a Jaguar.

"If he's there, we're fine."

"And if he's not?"

She pulled the seat belt back and forth. "Maybe we'll just go clamming."

"Clamming," I repeated. Val turned to look at me. "Hey," she said, "are you okay?" I shook my head. "What's wrong?" Val asked. I couldn't answer. She looked at me for a moment. "Sit tight, okay? I'll be right back," she said, and got out of the car and pulled open the Moderne's heavy gla.s.s doors, moving as if she had nothing more on her mind than what to cook for dinner or whether the shoes she'd seen had gone on sale.

I sat with my arms wrapped around my knees, watching the clock in the dashboard tick the minutes away. Nine of them had elapsed when Val came loping back to the car. "Not here," she reported, starting the car. "Also, no regular girlfriends, no regular guy friends, he parties a lot and... oh, and he might be getting fired, but he doesn't know it yet."

"You got all that from the doorman?"

"He's a viewer," she said modestly. She drove a few blocks, then pulled over to the curb.

"What are you doing?"

"We need," she said with her eyes narrowed, "to start thinking like criminals."

"What?" I asked. We? I thought. Valerie reached behind her and gathered an armful of men's clothing. I caught sight of a blue s.h.i.+rt, a pair of pants, a flash of white underwear. Then Val jumped out of the car, looked quickly over her shoulder to make sure we were alone, and shoved the clothes down a sewer grate. A minute later, she was back in the car, breathing hard and looking pleased. "I dumped everything but the wallet and his cell phone. I'm gonna leave them in a trash can. Maybe they'll think he's been the victim of ident.i.ty theft." She thought as we accelerated toward the highway. "Maybe he actually will be the victim of ident.i.ty theft." I didn't answer. "It'd serve him right." We drove for a few minutes, the wheels whispering over the road as, behind us, the city woke up. "Let's go home. I bet you're tired," Val said.

"Home sounds good," I answered, and she flicked her turn signal on.

PART TWO.

Into the Woods.

FIFTEEN.

Dan Swansea trudged down the road toward the light of the rising sun. His legs were bare above his socks, his skin burning with the cold. The storage shed door had been unlocked, and that was lucky, but he hadn't found any clothes or blankets there, just a box of contractor-sized trash bags that he'd used to swaddle himself, poking his head and arms through one, wrapping another around his crotch like a diaper. He'd rested for a while, curled up in a drafty corner of the shack, and then he'd started down the road. He swished when he walked, and he didn't even want to think about how he looked. There was nothing he could do about it. That b.i.t.c.h Valerie Adler-he'd remembered her name-had taken his wallet and his phone.

There has to be something, he told himself as he walked. A convenience store or a gas station or something. He would walk until he found it. He would go home, get clothes, get warm, and then he'd find the b.i.t.c.h and he'd fix her wagon.

He was so lost in thought that the van was almost on top of him before he noticed, and it was too late to jump into the ditch on the side of the road, too late to hide himself. The van slowed-Dan braced himself for laughter, a hurled bottle, some kind of joke-"Time to take out the tras.h.!.+" is what he personally would have gone with-but instead, he heard a woman's voice calling kindly through the grayish half-light.

"Dan Swansea? Is that you?"

Eyes dazzled by the headlights, he squinted at the van, but couldn't make the face behind the wheel.

"Are you all right? What happened to your clothes?"

"Long story," he managed. The van's door slid open without anyone touching it. For a minute, Dan thought about supernatural phenomena, about psychic forces and otherwordly visitors, about the Holy Ghost, unseen but ever-present (his mother had been big on that), before remembering that all vans these days had remote controls.

"Come on in," said the voice. "I'll take care of you."

No time to weigh his options. As he saw it, his choices were getting into the van or continuing to trudge through the frigid darkness, naked except for his shoes, his socks, and a pair of Hefty trash bags. Dan Swansea limped across the road and climbed inside.

SIXTEEN.

The call came in at just after six in the morning, less than three hours after Jordan Novick had finally managed to fall asleep. Except, he acknowledged, "fall asleep" wasn't exactly accurate. "Pa.s.sed out" might have been a better description of what had occurred in the folding chair in his living room after a great quant.i.ty of beer, a tumbler full of whiskey, and a fast, furtive episode of masturbation as The Nighty-Night Show played on the TV.

He groped for the telephone. "Novick," he grunted, noticing that his pager was spasming on the coffee table like a rodent having a seizure.

"Good morning, Chief," said Paula the dispatcher. "We've got a situation in the Lakeview Country Club parking lot. Acknowledge?"

Jordan rubbed the bridge of his nose, then his stubbled cheek. "What kind of situation?"

"That's the thing. We're not exactly sure," said Paula. "I know you're 10-10-A, but it's a possible 10-80. Or maybe a 10-81 with a 211. Or it could be..."

"Hey. Hey, Paula." An old line, but it was usually enough to get her to stop with the numbers. Paula Albright, the Pleasant Ridge dispatcher, was a fifty-four-year-old retired school cafeteria worker who took her work very seriously and knew the codes for everything, including "lost bicycle."

"Yes, sir?"

"How 'bout you just tell me what happened?"

"Sure, Chief. The club custodian found a man's belt and some blood in the parking lot, but no victim yet."

An actual mystery, Jordan thought, getting to his feet with the telephone pressed against his ear. That was unusual. Situations in Pleasant Ridge tended to fall into a few large and easily quantifiable categories. You had your accidentally tripped burglar alarms. Your lost dog, your cat up a tree. Your missing children, usually teenagers who hadn't bothered to tell Mom and Dad where they'd be, and neglected to keep their brand-new state-of-the-art cell phones charged. There was credit-card fraud and ident.i.ty theft, car crashes and house fires and DUIs. There were, of course, husbands smacking their wives around and, occasionally but not as infrequently as most people would think, wives. .h.i.tting their husbands. These incidents were unpleasant, but at least they were a kind of expected, predictable unpleasantness, and there was a protocol, honed over time, for handling them. Jordan couldn't remember anything in his ten years of service that had been along the lines of an actual mystery.

He swallowed and coughed, grimacing at the sour taste in his mouth, and tucked the phone under his chin so he could zip his pants. "10-8, acknowledge," he said to make Paula happy, and to cover the sound of the zipper. "On my way."

"You're going to the southeast corner of the parking lot, by the Dumpster."

"Got it," he said, and grabbed for his keys.

By the time he arrived at the country club, all three of the town's uniformed patrolmen (one of them was Holly Muoz, so he supposed it was actually three patrol-people) were waiting. An investigator from the county district attorney's office with rubber gloves on her hands and a high-tech digital camera and an old-school Polaroid looped around her neck met him at his car. "What have we got?" Jordan asked the investigator, a young woman named Meghan, who wore her hair in a high ponytail and had a tiny silver stud glittering in one nostril.

"Come take a look," she said. Jordan forced himself to breathe steadily through his nose, in case during the twenty minutes it had taken him to get there, they'd discovered a body. He kept his eyes between Meghan's shoulder blades until she stopped and pointed down. "Weird, right?"

Jordan aimed his flashlight at the ground. There was something wet and rusty-red that had trickled into the gravel and splashed on the corner of the Dumpster. There was a man's black leather belt with a silver buckle coiled neatly a few feet south of the blood. That was all.

"The club custodian, George Monroe, found this stuff when he took out the trash this morning," said the tech. She pointed to a skinny guy in khaki pants sitting on the steps outside of the country club's kitchen. When the man saw Jordan looking, he raised one hand and waved.

"No body?" asked Jordan.

Meghan shook her head. "We looked: the road, the parking lot, the golf course, the ditches along the road, a mile in each direction, and we went through the Dumpster. If there is a body, it's been moved, but I gotta say, there's not a ton of blood here, so I'm not necessarily thinking corpse."