When We Were Friends (27 page)

“You didn’t take extra undies or socks but you took a photo?”

“Yeah, that’s the embarrassing part of the story. But you know, I was a kid, and it felt like the one perfect thing I had was the memory of the night Demi took the pen and photo from me and said, ‘Sure I will.’ ” He smiled. “So there I was, hitchhiking to wherever the people who picked me up were going. Truckers mostly, so I made it long distances in short amounts of time. If you traced my route you’d get something that looked like a spiderweb: Pennsylvania to Maine into Vancouver to Florida to Louisiana. I met amazing people who’d been through hellish lives, and it taught me more about spiritual poverty than anything I’ve seen since. This is an unhappy country, Leah.”

I thought about the distant look Alex sometimes wore, and then, I
thought about myself. With Molly, I was happy. But knowing there’d come a time I’d only feel happiness from the memories, well that kind of negated all of it.

“I was actually going to tell you I found a home in just being with those truckers and listening to their stories, and that maybe they found some kind of home in me, because all it really takes is having someone understand you. I wanted to say that, but we’d both know it’s bull. It helps, but it’s not home. Because here I am. I have friends who love me and as good a life as pretty much anybody, but I still don’t feel like I have a home.”

I turned to look at him and our eyes met and held, something passing between us that felt as intimate as a touch. “Yeah,” I said softly, “I don’t think I’ve had a real home for years. And I have no idea how to go about finding one.”

Alex hesitated, then said, “I’m really glad I got to meet you, to know you. You’re not going to understand this, but in a way it changes everything.”

I felt a twisting inside me at the implied finality of Alex’s words. I shot a smile at him that I hoped looked like a thank-you and nothing more, and then Pamela called from the porch, “Hey! She ever done this before?”

I turned and there Molly was, on her feet unsupported, watching us through the porch rails. I rushed over to her, feeling a spear of pride followed by guilt. “I missed her first time!” I said.

“What did you miss?” Pamela raised her eyebrows. “Here it is and here you are.”

But the fact remained, I’d missed Molly’s first time standing because I’d been gripped by the pain of leaving a man I hardly knew. There had to be a lesson there.

We spent a minute profusely admiring the strength of Molly’s legs until she raised her arms to me, which made her promptly fall backward onto her butt. She let out a surprised yelp, then looked at me as if deciding whether to cry, before she unexpectedly started clapping.

“Well now she thinks everything she does is worthy of applause,” Pamela said.

Alex smiled almost shyly at me, then scooped Molly into his arms and planted a big kiss on her cheek. “First standing, then walking, and soon I’ll be teaching you ice hockey moves!”

Pamela shook her head at me, and I smiled and shrugged. Alex saw the gesture and smiled back. “Yeah, I know. I’m acting like she’s mine.” Which made Pamela give me a look and another small shake of her head like she was saying,
Don’t you go there, missy, don’t you dare …

We ate lunch at the dining table with Molly crawling at our feet, pulling at our shoelaces, periodically stopping to taste her fist. Star didn’t mention the results of Alex’s chart, and when he finally brought it up she gave a startled frown, then said she wasn’t ready to discuss it. And that was all she said for the next ten minutes, just sat there shuffling the food on her plate, arranging and rearranging it with great concentration like she was trying to create some expressionistic form of food art.

Lunch was an extravaganza of the type of food you’d eat if you used lunch as a verb: flat bread with roasted red pepper tapenade, feta cheese and Kalamata olives, a salad with pine nuts and baby lettuces. “How does a tiny grocery in a tiny town keep all this in stock?” I said.

“Oh, it’s Raymond, the grocer; he humors me. First time I shopped there after coming from the city, I went up to the counter and asked where the edamame was, and he just stared at me like I must’ve evolved from somewhere strange and distant. But the next time I went in, there it was, edamame. And then without me asking, he started ordering all these random, weird things like anchovy paste and quail egg jelly. I don’t know if he was making fun of me or if he was trying to impress me, but I had to bring them home, because of course he’d gone out of his way to find them.” He shrugged. “So after the first couple weeks I realized if I wanted anything edible I’d have to place actual orders.”

“You use the word ‘grocer’ and know him by his first name,” Pamela said. “I think I might have to move here.”

Star sniffed at an olive, then dropped it. Her hand was shaking. “I guess my stomach’s not up to it today,” she said. “I’m sorry, d’you mind if I go back up to the bedroom?”

“You okay?” Alex said, then gave a small cough, probably aware of the absurdity of the question. He glanced at me. “Why don’t we bring our food up like this morning? Another picnic.”

“No.” Star stood quickly. “No, no, I just need to rest a little. This is all … it’s all a little much.” She gave each of us a wavering smile. “But I’ll be fine!”

I stood to take her arm. “I’ll go with you.”

“No, stay! What’re you gonna do, hold my hand? The only thing that might help me is if you opened my skull, took my brain in your fists and squashed it. Just stay and enjoy your lunch.” She walked out into the hall.

Pamela looked at me. “Well!” she said brightly. “This is going great!”

“Better than I expected, actually.” I shrugged. “I mean I didn’t know
what
to expect. But she’s alive, she’s not unconscious, she hasn’t OD’d yet on Xanax.”

“Should I stay tomorrow too? Just in case I have to take her back?”

“You really want to relive yesterday’s trip? I’ll
make
her be okay, through sheer force of will. Aided by pharmaceuticals.” I gave a half smile. “Excuse me, I’m sorry, I’m just going to try and settle her down. Mind watching Molly a minute?” I left the room and went upstairs.

Star was in bed, rabidly tearing paper into scraps over the trash bin. As I watched, she lifted those scraps again to tear them into smaller bits, her face red and her eyes fierce.

I sat next to her and waited for her to explain. When she didn’t, I said, “What?”

She let the scraps sift between her fingers, then stared down at them a minute before she spoke. “That was his chart,” she said.

Despite myself, this scared me a little. I didn’t believe in astrological charts, just like I didn’t believe in Star’s card readings. But
the charts she’d done on me, and various neighbors and movie stars, had proved true often enough that I guess I was holding open the possibility they might be loosely relevant. “What did it say? Is he an axe murderer? He going to die before he hits forty? What?”

“I can’t tell him. Some of this I can use, but I’ll make the rest up. It’s not a good chart, Lainey. Nothing’s good; I shouldn’t be here, you shouldn’t be here.”

“Look at me.” I reached for her chin and roughly turned her face toward me. “Stop. Snap out of this.”

Her eyes filled. “Okay. You want to know? He’s been through awful things in his life, Lainey, that’s what my readings last night said and now his chart’s saying the same thing. They’ve made him too vulnerable and trusting, and it’s the issue he’s going to deal with for the rest of his life. It’s just not right for you to be messing with his trust like this. It’s going to end up destroying his soul.”

“Destroying his soul.” I tried to put lyricism and humor into my voice, but it wasn’t exactly a humorous phrase, so I ended up sounding like the narrator in a horror spoof.

“He’s a good man, too good. And you’re going to hurt him.”

“Well as long as he’s not an axe murderer.”

“This isn’t funny!”

And she was right, it wasn’t funny. Not that I believed her, or at least most of me didn’t, but the problem was, she believed herself, and this would only exacerbate her paranoia.

“The themes of his life are betrayal, especially by strong women, and entrapment. I told you I did a chart on that poor man in Louisiana who got arrested three times for things his girlfriend set him up for? Well this was the same sort of chart.”

“I’m going to get him arrested?”

She watched me closely. “What do you know about him, Lainey? How much has he told you?”

“He’s told me enough. Enough that I know I can trust him.”

She shook her head slowly. “He’s not a happy man, Lainey. This isn’t something I got from his chart, it’s something I can tell from
seeing him. He’s the kind of person who puts on a happy attitude so he can hide everything that’s underneath, but I think there’s a lot hidden. It’s not a good energy field to be around.”

I refrained, rather admirably, from reminding her of the energy field I’d been around all my life. I couldn’t tell her yet that we’d only be here for another few days, so instead I said, “So what’re you suggesting I do, exactly? Do you have any ideas? Should I turn myself in and surround myself with the energy of a jail cell?”

“Lainey, I can see how you feel about him, and I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”

I felt a thump in my chest, like a bowling pin being knocked over. “The way he looks at me?”

“But he’s haunted. I don’t know by who or what, but you’re not going to be able to help him. Whatever happens here, you’ll only make it worse.”

She glanced up as Pamela knocked and entered. “Your mail,” Pamela said, handing me a pile of envelopes. “I’ll pick it up every other day and forward it if there’s anything you should see. But you should put your newspapers and magazines on hold.”

I looked down at the mail: fifty percent bills, fifty percent junk. “Thanks, I will.”

“I was hoping we could talk in the other bedroom. We okay here?”

“We aren’t,” I said. “We think we’d be better off incarcerated.”

“Interesting.” Pamela smiled grimly. “Okay, I’ll post bail long as you don’t implicate me.”

I smoothed back Star’s hair. “You’ll be okay,” I said, more to reassure myself than anything else.

In Pamela’s bedroom, I sat in the armchair and she sat on the bed and leaned back against the headboard. “I guess I assumed she’d be feeling better by now,” she said. “That once she realized there wasn’t any cataclysmic impact from leaving, she’d have an epiphany and be cured.”

“The problem is, she does still think there’s about to be a cataclysm.” I slumped back in my chair. “She doesn’t like Alex’s energy field.”

“What the heck is there not to like? I love his energy field. I could marry and have babies with his energy field.”

“I’m sure she’s just projecting her own issues on him. I have to think she’ll feel better about everything once we can finally settle somewhere.”

“Settle somewhere?” Pamela glanced at me. “What’s your plan, Lainey? How long are you going to do this?”

“I’ll do it as long as I have to, until I’m sure David McGrath’s going to be in jail for good, and that Molly’s safe. I’ve called real estate listings, know a couple possible places to stay for the short term.”

“Crap, Lainey, this is so crazy. I have this unbearable urge to shake you like you’re one of my kids. And I’d do it too, if I thought it would do any good.” She rose to sit on the arm of my chair. “So you want to talk about Sydney?”

No
, I thought. “Okay,” I said.

“You know, after talking to her I almost got how you were sucked in. She almost convinced me she knows what she’s doing, although there were little things that didn’t add up, made me think she might be hiding something. I don’t know, I’m usually pretty good about reading people, but she’s … different. The only thing I know for sure is she does love her daughter.”

I felt an involuntary twinge at the words,
her daughter
. “Somehow that doesn’t quite excuse anything,” I said.

“Believe me, I know. But she had this desperation; she kept asking how Jacqueline was, even when I said I didn’t know anything. Like did I think Jacqueline missed her? Did she seem angry? Or like her feelings were hurt?”

“Molly,”
I said.

“Right, no comment. Or I’ll imply a comment, but not actually make one.” She folded her arms and fixed her eyes on mine.

“Okay, I’m choosing to ignore you now. What did Sydney say about what she’s planning? Does she even know?”

“Well that was one of the things that didn’t add up. First she tells me not to worry, that she’s got everything planned out, but then she gets all nervous and says she actually has no idea how to make this
work but that she needs me to reassure you that you’re safe. She kept begging me not to turn her in, saying how this was her only chance to save …” Pamela stretched a slim smile. “
Molly
. But now she’s had to turn David in, I don’t know. She said she’s waiting for him to admit he abused them before she takes Molly back from you and confesses to the cops, but it seems like that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

“So she’s stuck.”

“If he doesn’t confess, she said her plan of last resort would be to just take the baby from you and disappear somewhere. But the crazy thing was how she kept talking about David, what a complete scumbag he was, but in a way that made it sound like she was more hurt than scared or mad. She said he had no idea how to love someone, how all he cared about was whether he’d be invited to whatever clubs and VIP parties and blah, blah, blah. You hear these stories about abused wives who still have this sort of love for their husbands, need them in some way despite everything they’ve done. And how she was talking, it made me wonder what her real motives are.”

“You mean she’s more interested in hurting him than protecting Molly?”

“I’m sure she wants to protect Molly too, but there’s got to be other ways she could’ve kept her safe. I mean, giving away her baby so she can accuse him of kidnapping? It’s so bizarre. Who’d do that?”

I picked a stray thread off the armchair. “Did she say anything about me? What she’s expecting from me?”