Best Friends Forever Part 2

She turned and stared as if just remembering I was there. I took her hand and tugged her down into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. There was the sugar bowl, my teacup and spoon, her gla.s.s and the bottle of vodka, everything just as it had been, everything the same. I willed myself to be still, praying for my voice to be calm. If I wasn't panicking, she wouldn't panic, and she'd give me the whole story, a story that would make sense and have a beginning and an end and would not involve a corpse. "Tell me what happened. Start at the beginning, okay?" Another breath. "Start with Dan."

She looked down at her lap. "I saw him at the bar," she said. "Him and his friends." I waited. Valerie pressed her hands together. "I was just going to ignore him, but he walked right up to me, and it was okay at first. He said he'd seen me on TV, and how nice it was that someone from our cla.s.s had gotten famous." She allowed herself to preen briefly at the word "famous." I didn't have the heart to tell her that reading the weather on the nightly news did not exactly make her a movie star. The truth was, anyway, she was right-if you considered the combined resumes of the 296 surviving members of our cla.s.s, Valerie was the most famous... unless you were inclined to count Gordon Perrault, who'd blown out his back raking leaves, developed an unfortunate addiction to fentanyl patches, and was currently serving five to seven for robbing a drugstore while wearing a Burger King mask.

"I was just having a good time, talking to people, and I had a few drinks, and things were winding down when I heard him at the bar. He was with Chip Mason and Kevin Oliphant, remember them?"

I nodded, vaguely recalling two hulking boys in football jerseys.

"And Kevin said something to Dan like, 'Hey, Valerie's here. You going back for seconds?' And Dan laughed. He laughed."

I didn't answer. Of course he'd laughed. Laughing was what guys like Dan did.

"They didn't know I heard him," Val said. Her voice was climbing higher and higher. "So I went back to the bar, and I started flirting with him. You know. Touching his arm, asking lots of questions, acting like I was into him. I told him to meet me outside... that I'd give him a ride. I waited for him, and he came outside, and we were fooling around and then..." She gulped. "I made him take his clothes off."

I gaped at her. "Why?"

"Because it's humiliating," she said, as if this were obvious. "And it's cold out. Major shrinkage. I took a picture with my cell phone..."

"As you do," I murmured.

Val ignored me. "I got in the car and I was going to drive away, you know, just leave him there, let him see how he likes being the one everyone's laughing at, and I turned the car on, and he was grabbing at the mirror, and I stepped on the gas, and I think he must have jumped in front of me and maybe I was in drive instead of reverse and then... he was..." She buried her face in her hands.

"You hit him?"

She bent her head, shoulders shaking, saying nothing.

I said it again, only this time not as a question. "You hit him."

"It was an accident," she breathed, and stared at me defiantly. "I think it was kind of the car's fault. I've got this new Jaguar. I didn't know my own power." She pushed her hair behind her ears, first one side, then the other, a gesture I remembered. "He deserved it," Valerie said. "He deserved it for what he did to me."

I couldn't speak. I could only look at her. Valerie twisted her hands in her lap. "I tried not to think about it... about what happened. About what..." She gathered herself. "What he did to me. And you... I'm so sorry, Addie," she whispered. "You were trying to do the right thing. I know that now."

"It doesn't matter," I said. My throat was thick with unshed tears; my eyes were burning. "It was a long time ago."

"But you were my friend." Val's voice cracked, and I made myself look away, knowing that if she cried, I'd cry, too, and if I cried, I would remember. I would remember, for example, a cardboard box filled with tangled marionette wires, or my brother's face, blank and bewildered, as the vice princ.i.p.al asked him, impatiently, which boys had thrown his backpack down the stairs, or Halloween night and the cop car parked outside my house, lights flas.h.i.+ng, painting the walls red, then blue, red, then blue. I'd remember Mrs. Ba.s.s's voice on the telephone, telling me about my father. I'd remember covering my mother's body with a blanket that I'd knitted, telling her to rest.

"So then what happened?" I asked.

"He was by the Dumpster. He was lying there, bleeding. His... his..." She touched one hand to her temple. "He wasn't moving. I tried to get him to talk to me, but he was, like, pa.s.sed out, and I was going to call 911, but I knew they'd trace the call and it would be in the papers, and I didn't know what else to do, so I grabbed up all his clothes and put them in the car and I came here." She looked up. "We have to go. You have to come with me. We have to go see if he's... if he's..."

"Dead?" I supplied. She made a mewling noise and reached past me, grabbing for the vodka bottle.

"Just so I'm clear here," I asked, "you never tried to get back into the country club? You didn't tell anyone?"

Val dumped more vodka into her gla.s.s. "I was so freaked out! I had blood on my hands, there was blood on my coat, and you know how I am with blood."

"Which you'd think would be a deterrent against hitting people with your Jaguar," I mused. My telephone-a new one, cordless and sleek-sat in the same spot on the counter where my parents' old rotary phone had been. I picked it up and pointed it at her. "Call the police."

"And say what?" she asked. "Hi, I think I just ran over this guy from high school, could you please go see if he's dead?"

"That sounds about right to me."

"We'll just go look!" she pleaded. "If he's alive, we'll call an ambulance and get him to a hospital! I promise!"

"And if he's not?"

She drained her gla.s.s, wiped her cheeks, and raised her chin. "Then I will call the police and turn myself in."

Ha. Valerie Adler was not the call-the-police-and-turn-yourself-in type. Valerie Adler was the steal-a-car-and-drive-across-the-border-to-Mexico type. She was also the type to stash her former best friend as a hostage-slash-accomplice in the pa.s.senger seat. She was brave and clever, ruthless and fearless. It was why I'd loved her so much when we'd been girls.

"We should call an ambulance. We shouldn't just be sitting here."

"Right," she said, and grabbed my hand. "Go get dressed. Let's go."

No, the rational part of my brain insisted, even as I walked upstairs to the bedroom that I still thought of as my parents' and pulled on jeans and a sweater and heavy black clogs. You don't have to do what she tells you!

I grabbed my purse, my keys, my wallet, watching my hands move as if they belonged to someone else, gathering my coat, my scarf, a hat I'd knitted. And then we were outside. The mist had turned into an icy drizzle, and Val's diamond earrings flashed in the moonlight, and somewhere in the stream of time, the waters were s.h.i.+fting, and all of this had happened already, only I didn't know it yet.

She handed me her keys. "Can you drive?" she asked.

"Better than you, evidently."

"Ha," she said, and followed me to the Jaguar. She got into the pa.s.senger's seat. I looked for signs of damage-a dent, a crumpled fender, a blood-washed headlight-but I couldn't see a thing. G.o.d bless British engineering. I got behind the wheel, backed carefully down the driveway, and aimed the car toward the highway.

SEVEN.

The Adlers moved in during the last week of June, and by July, Valerie and I were inseparable. Every morning, I'd wake up and wave to her through the living room window, and she'd grin at me and wave back from hers. At noon, when Jon and I came home from day camp at the rec center, Valerie would be sitting on our front step, in her cutoff shorts and too-big flip-flops. Sometimes she'd be reading an Encyclopedia Brown book, or bouncing a red rubber ball that she kept in her pocket, but most of the time she'd just be waiting there, calm and patient in the sticky heat. My mom would make us lunch, and if he was home, my dad would join us for sandwiches, potato chips, pickles, and fruit, served with Country Time lemonade that we'd mix up and drink by the pitcher.

After the first week, we got used to setting an extra place at the table, and to making extra sandwiches. I usually ate one or one and a half of the ham and Swiss or peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly, and Jon always ate two, but Valerie could put away three sandwiches by herself, along with multiple helpings of chips, gla.s.ses of lemonade, a peach or a plum or sometimes both, and once, an entire quart of blueberries.

While we had lunch, my parents would ask us questions: What had we done that morning? What had we made in crafts? Who had we played with? Jon, with his mouth full of whole wheat and lunch meat, would rattle off the names of a half-dozen boys, shoveling food into his mouth as fast as he could without my mother objecting. I'd keep quiet, letting Jon talk. There was one girl named Heather who would let me sit with her at snack time, but only if I gave her my graham crackers. When I told my mom about it, she got a sad look on her face and said it would probably be best if I just stayed with the counselors.

After lunch, my mother would return to the screened-in sunporch, taking along a notebook and a pitcher of iced tea. My father would return to the bas.e.m.e.nt or the garage. Jon would dump his dishes in the sink, jump on his bike, and vanish until dinnertime. I'd pack snacks-cherries and pretzels, apples and granola bars-and wait for Valerie to determine our afternoon activity. She was full of ideas, and I was happy to go along with them. Let's try to skateboard down Summit Drive, she'd say, and off we'd go, to borrow a skateboard and give it a try. Or, Let's ride our bikes to the mall and see a movie! I was terrified of biking on busy roads, but even more terrified of telling Val that and having her find another friend, so I'd follow her, the taste of copper pennies in my mouth as I pedaled, my hands greased with sweat as I gripped the handlebars for the length of the two-mile trip.

Most days, though, we'd end up at the pool. Jon and I had summer pa.s.ses to the Kresse Rec Center. Once Val's bike was unpacked, we'd ridden there together. While I'd carefully locked my bike to the bike rack, Val had squinted at the sign above the desk that said admission was fifty cents. "I don't have any money," she'd said.

"Oh." My face heated up. This was a complication that hadn't occurred to me. "We could go back home. I've got my allowance..."

"Let me think," said Val. She frowned at the sign. "Wait here," she said, then hopped back on her bike. A few minutes later she was back, flushed and sweaty and looking pleased. "Okay," she said. "Here's what we'll do." Her plan was for me to present my card to the bored, magazine-reading, gum-chomping teenage girl at the booth, then spread out my towel at the far edge of the deck, near the chain-link fence, and slip the card through the fence to Valerie, who'd use it to get herself in.

"But isn't that stealing?" I asked.

Val shook her head. "You're really just paying for the lifeguards, and I don't need a lifeguard. I'm a very good swimmer. In California, I swam in the ocean." I was meant to be impressed by this, and I was. I locked my bike to the rack, flashed my card at the girl behind the desk, who barely looked up from her Cosmopolitan, and made my way to the edge of the concrete. A minute later, Val was there waiting for me. I rolled my card into a tube, looked around to make sure no one was watching, and pa.s.sed it through one of the chain-link diamonds. A minute later, Val was walking past the pool, a raggedy towel tucked under her arm, the knot of her bathing suit halter top sticking up from the back of her T-s.h.i.+rt. "See?" she said, spreading her towel out next to mine. "No big deal."

On rainy days we'd stay in the kitchen, making concoctions of peanut b.u.t.ter and coconut flakes and whatever else we could scrounge from the pantry, or we'd go to the bas.e.m.e.nt and take turns doing laps with my old pair of roller skates while listening to Val's favorite (and as far as I could tell, only) record, a 45 of Kenny Rogers's "The Gambler." Sometimes my father would sing along.

One Sat.u.r.day morning, Val gave her usual knock at our door, then, as had become her habit on the weekends, pushed it open and presented herself at the kitchen table. "Hey, Addie, can you come over? My mom and I are going to paint my room."

I looked at my parents. My father was scrambling eggs. My mother stood at the sink, rinsing juice gla.s.ses and humming to herself. "It's fine with me," she said. "Do you girls want some breakfast first?"

Valerie did. Perched on the edge of her seat at the kitchen table, all skinny legs and scabbed elbows, she polished off a plateful of eggs and French toast and bacon, then squirmed impatiently as my mother rejected the first two outfits I tried on, finally okaying an old pair of shorts and a ripped T-s.h.i.+rt previously destined for the rag pile. Val and I ran out the front door, dashed across my lawn, grabbed each other's hands, and sprinted across the street.

After her parents had died, Mrs. Adler had inherited the house on Crescent Drive. Her brother, Val's uncle who lived in Sheboygan, had gotten all of the furniture, and so far, Mrs. Adler hadn't bought anything new. There was a folding table and two metal chairs in the kitchen, a television set that stood on four orange milk crates in the living room, and in front of it, the DiMeos' old couch, a hulking antique made of red velvet and carved dark wood that I guessed the uncle either hadn't wanted or couldn't fit through the door.

When the DiMeos had lived there, the bedroom at the top of the stairs was crowded with a queen-size bed, two side tables, and a squat club chair covered in cabbage-rose print fabric. Now the room was almost empty, and the yellow carpet-pristine in spots where the bed and club chair had stood, sun-faded and stained everywhere else-was covered by a sheet of plastic. No, not a sheet. There were actually multiple sheets of Saran Wrap lining the carpet, and someone-either Valerie or Mrs. Adler-had Scotch-taped them together. Bare light switches jutted out of the walls, and strips of tape lined the edges where the wall met the ceiling and the floor. A third strip of tape split the wall in half. Two aluminum pie tins, one filled with pink paint, the other with green, sat on the Saran Wrap. Val's flimsy wooden dresser and single bed in its metal frame had been pushed into the center of the room. Lying on the bed, propped on one elbow, was Mrs. Adler.

"Good morning, Addie," she said, in her drawling voice. Her running shorts-navy-blue cotton with white piping-were as brief as the ones Daisy Duke wore on The Dukes of Hazzard reruns, and she didn't have a bra on underneath her white cotton T-s.h.i.+rt. She smelled like mentholated cigarettes and Breck shampoo, and looked more like a teenager than like a regular mother, barefoot with her hair pulled back in a blue bandanna and a thin gold chain around her neck.

"What does your mother do all day?" I'd asked Val once, when we were at the Kresse Park pool, treading water in the deep end (I stayed close enough to the wall to grab it if I had to). All of the mothers I knew were busy. They complained about it all the time-"I'm frantic," they'd say, or "I'm exhausted!" They drove carpools and led scout meetings and taught Sunday school; they shopped and gardened and cooked and cleaned. Some of them had part-time or full-time jobs in doctors' offices or banks or shops. Then there was poor Mrs. Shea at the corner of Crescent Drive, who had eleven children and spent all of her days doing laundry, or going to the grocery store to pick up her daily five gallons of milk. But Mrs. Adler didn't seem to do anything. She was always home, curled up on the couch watching soap operas, or lying on a towel in the backyard, wearing a white crocheted bikini, listening to the little boom box that she kept plugged in on the porch.

"She gets alimony," Val had told me, explaining that alimony was money her father paid her mother so that her mother could take care of herself and Valerie.

"But what does she do all day?" I'd asked again.

Val had shrugged under the water. "I guess she waits," she said. "She waits for it to be night."

In Val's room, I ducked my head shyly as I said h.e.l.lo. Mrs. Adler made me nervous. It wasn't just that she looked like a teenager. She behaved like one, too. She cursed, and smoked, and sat in the corner of the kitchen having long, tense conversations on the telephone with a boyfriend back in California. She did not believe in balanced meals, and thought that popcorn and Lipton's Cup-a-Soup was a decent dinner, even a decent breakfast in a pinch. Sometimes she'd let Val go days between showers-if she'd been swimming, she said, that was close enough. Val had no official bedtime. She got to watch whatever she wanted on TV, even movies and Tales from the Crypt on HBO, whereas Jon and I were always getting herded into the bathroom to wash our hands or upstairs to do our homework, and we didn't even have premium cable. Mrs. Adler, who was always saying Call me Naomi, seemed sometimes like an impatient babysitter, waiting for Valerie's real parents to come home and relieve her of her duties so that she could go live her actual life.

That morning she'd been lying on Val's bed with her torso curved around a clamsh.e.l.l that she'd been using for an ashtray. "My daughter"-she indicated Val with a c.o.c.ked elbow-"wants a pink-and-green room."

"It's pretty," said Val.

"What should I do?" I couldn't wait to kick off my shoes and tie back my hair in a borrowed bandanna, to baptize myself in pink and green paint.

"Grab a roller." Mrs. Adler yawned, then fished a mother-of-pearl lighter and a box of Salem Lights from her pocket.

"Ugh. Ma!" Val coughed. "Remember? Lung cancer?"

Mrs. Adler flicked her fingers at her daughter cheerfully. "We're all gonna go sometime." I watched, entranced, as she extracted a cigarette from the crushed pack, tapped it against the crinkled plastic, lit it, and sucked in the smoke.

"She's disgusting," Val announced. I waited for the reprimand, for the don't-you-talk-to-your-mother-that-way that surely would have followed such a remark in my house. It never came. Mrs. Adler gave me a sly, pleased look-That Valerie! Isn't she something? She blew twin plumes of smoke out of her nostrils, then tapped the ash on the lip of the clamsh.e.l.l.

I crossed the room, my bare feet sticking to the Saran Wrap, and picked up a roller, aware that Mrs. Adler was watching me and looking amused. "Addie Downs," she said (talking about me like I wasn't even there was one of Mrs. Adler's favorite things). "The good influence."

I bobbed my head affirmatively and dabbed pink paint on the wall. Valerie, meanwhile, was slathering green on the bottom half of her section in speedy strokes, splas.h.i.+ng droplets on the plastic, like she couldn't get the wallpaper to disappear quickly enough. I watched her, my forehead scrunched, as the paint pooled and beaded up on top of the wallpaper.

"Um," I said. Mrs. Adler raised her eyebrows. "Aren't you supposed to take the wallpaper off before you paint?"

Mrs. Adler looked at me, then at the wall. "Huh."

Valerie threw her roller onto the Saran-Wrapped floor, leaving a big blotch of mint. "MOM!" she yelled. I tensed, waiting for Mrs. Adler to tell Valerie not to raise her voice, but Mrs. Adler just shrugged.

"Honey, I never said I was an expert," she said, and ground out her cigarette in the clamsh.e.l.l.

"We could ask my dad," I volunteered. "He could help us. He did Jon's room last winter. I think that he rented a steamer from somewhere. You steam the paper first, and then you sc.r.a.pe it off, and then you paint the wall with white stuff. Primer, I think."

"Huh," said Mrs. Adler. "This is starting to sound complicated." Valerie, meanwhile, was staring at the half-painted wall with her chin trembling.

"You STINK," she said without looking at her mother. "You are the WORST MOTHER EVER. We're doing this all wrong!"

Mrs. Adler uncoiled herself from the bed, planted her feet on the floor, placed her hands on her hips, and leaned backward. Her hair spilled out of the back of the bandanna, brus.h.i.+ng the small of her back. "You're right," she said, not sounding especially concerned. "I have screwed this up completely. Then again, I never claimed to be a professional."

"You didn't have to be a professional!" Val yelled. "All you had to do was read a book or something!"

"You're right," Mrs. Adler said again.

"Read an article," Val said miserably. "You could've just read an article."

"Let me make it up to you," said Mrs. Adler. She put her hand on Val's shoulder.

Val shook it off, rattling her mother's silver bangles. "You can't. This is a disaster. All I wanted was a nice pretty room, with PINK and GREEN, a nice room like Addie has, and you said that I could..."

"My dad can help," I offered again, but no one was listening. I recognized that this was a bad situation, but I was still flushed with pleasure: Val wanted a room like I had.

"Disaster," Mrs. Adler agreed. "You're right. I vote we go clamming."

Valerie sniffled. "I don't want to go clamming. I just want to paint my room, and you promised that I could."

"It's one of the last nice weekends of the summer. We can paint your room anytime. But summer won't last forever."

Valerie frowned. "How are we supposed to get to Cape Cod?"

"We can drive."

I inched toward the bedroom door, unsure whether this was a private conversation, but reluctant to leave. Three years ago, my parents and Jon and I had driven to Lake Charlevoix and rented a cabin for a week. The cabin had been cobwebby and had smelled musty, and on the way up I'd shared the backseat with Jon, who'd spent hundreds of miles farting and then categorizing the smell of each of his farts ("This one smells like a McDonald's hamburger... ooh, here comes baby food"). I'd pinched my nose shut and kicked his legs, telling him to stay on his side of the seat. Jon had grabbed my seat belt and pulled it until I felt like I couldn't breathe. My father had snapped at us ("That's enough, you two!"), and my mother had tried to distract us with the license-plate game, which was hard to concentrate on when you were trapped in what smelled like a bowel movement on wheels.

"It'll take, like, two days," Val was saying. She'd gotten an atlas from between her mattress and her box spring and spread it open on the floor. "You see? This, right here?" She stabbed the state with her finger. "That's Illinois, and this..." She stabbed the map again. "Is Ma.s.sachusetts. And this..." She whacked the page so hard that it rattled. "Is Cape Cod. All the way up here at the top."

Mrs. Adler adjusted her bandanna. "When does school start?" She looked at her daughter. Valerie looked at me. I swallowed.

"September third."

"That's not for another week!" Mrs. Adler said. "We've got plenty of time."

Val pouted. "We need a license."

"We'll use Poppy's."

"And a canoe..."

"We can borrow a canoe. Come on, come on, come on!" Mrs. Adler was saying. "It'll be an adventure! Go find your swimsuit!"

"We should call Poppy first."