Best Friends Forever Part 20

"Check it out," Val said, and led me through the French doors. There was a living room with a tiled floor and a ceiling fan paddling at the humid air. Two bedrooms down a short hall, a bathroom in between them. A bowl of mangoes and papayas and limes sat next to the kitchen sink. In the back was a small brick patio that was thick with the scents of jasmine and jacaranda and filled with spiky-leaved palms and orchids.

Val led me to the screened-in porch and reached for a gla.s.s pitcher full of pale-green liquid. "Key limeade. The landlady leaves it for new tenants," Val said, and poured us each a gla.s.s. I sipped mine, tentatively at first, then more deeply: I was thirsty, and this was delicious, the perfect balance between tart and sweet.

"Isn't that good?" Val looked pleased.

"Have you been here before?"

"Twice." She slipped off her shoes and settled into a chaise longue, stretching and sighing with pleasure. "With a friend." She fanned her hair out against the cus.h.i.+ons and looked at me sideways. I recognized my cue.

"Anyone I know?"

"Charlie Carstairs." The name was p.r.o.nounced reverently. Clearly, I was supposed to know who he was. Sadly, I didn't.

"Isn't he..."

"My station manager."

"Ah." I rummaged around in my brain for Val-iana. "Wait a minute. He's the one who's married to-"

"It's a marriage in name only," she said quickly.

"Ah." Charles Carstairs's wife, Bonnie, was herself a former newscaster turned full-time fund-raiser for breast cancer research. You'd see her picture in the paper a few times a year, her head swathed in a hot-pink bandanna, beaming at the finish line of some bike event or swim or marathon. After my mother's sickness, I'd started contributing to breast cancer research and advocacy groups, and I'd ended up on her mailing list, which meant I got her hot-pink bandanna'ed face smiling up from my mailbox at least once a month, exhorting me to race for the cure, or dance for the cure, or shop or garden or dine out for the cure.

"You know her hair grew back," Val said. "She's been in remission since 1993. She just wears that bandanna for show."

"Well, in that case, you go on and take her husband. If she's got hair, she can get a new one."

Val frowned faintly. I took a sip of my limeade. "You know," I offered, "they don't actually leave their wives. Even if they say they want to..."

She shook her head, ice tinkling in her gla.s.s. "Oh, G.o.d, like I'd ever want him to leave his wife," she said. "Please. Six a.m. tee times and stinky cigars after dinner! Once a week's about all I'd want of Charlie." She stretched back in her chair, reaching her arms up over her head. Her eyes were hidden under the dark gla.s.ses she'd bought in St. Louis, her arms and shoulders bared in the red halter top she'd picked up in Atlanta. I wondered if Val missed her old clothes-the boys' jeans and T-s.h.i.+rts, the laceless sneakers she'd wear until the soles peeled away from the uppers. Maybe she pined for the days when she would cut her bangs with the craft scissors she'd swiped from school and ride a too-big boy's bike, helmetless, through town. Now there wasn't an inch of her that hadn't been worked on, improved somehow, from the tips of her polished toes to her tanned legs, lasered hairless and painted brown in the privacy of a spraytan booth. Her belly was prairie-flat. There were acrylic finger-nails glued to her fingertips, and hair extensions (for volume, not length, she'd taken pains to tell me) cleverly braided and knotted onto her scalp. She had, she confessed, done some "fine-tuning" on her nose and chin out in California, where she'd gotten her first job on-air. Still, I could catch glimpses of my old friend underneath the polished facade; like a coin or a sh.e.l.l glimmering underneath shallow water. She still bit her nails when she was nervous, still tucked her hair behind her ears as a conversational placeholder, still preferred snack foods to actual meals, and was, as ever, still full of plans, adventures I would never dream of, up to and including running from the law for a tropical vacation.

I went inside to use the bathroom. "Don't take a bath!" she called. "There's an outdoor shower!" Val led me to the backyard, where, sure enough, a showerhead sprouted from the wall. It curved over a square of wooden planks with a drain set in the middle. A white fence surrounded it and there was a built-in shelf with an oversized bar of creamy pink soap, bottles of shampoo and conditioner and body wash made of raspberry and avocado oil. "It's really just so you can rinse off after the beach," Val said. "But I use it all the time." She gave me a slanting smile. "A couple of times, Charlie and I used it together."

"Just tell me you cleaned it after."

"Addie. It's a shower. Showers are clean by definition." She tossed me a towel. "We can go shopping later, pick up some more clothes."

"And then what?"

"Shower first. Then we'll talk."

It felt strange, taking my clothes off outside, in the middle of the day, exposing my poor imperfect body to the suns.h.i.+ne. But after a few minutes under the warm spray, I started enjoying myself. I could feel the breeze, scented with salt and jasmine, moving across my skin. When I tilted my head back to rinse my hair, I opened my eyes and saw the blue sky above me.

Finally, the water turned cold. Inside the bedroom closet, I found a white robe, plush and thick as a comforter. I tied the sash around my waist and walked barefoot back to the porch and sat on the chaise longue opposite Val's. I thought she was sleeping-her eyes were closed-but as soon as I sat down, she started to talk.

"Have you ever been in love?"

"I..." I stared at the b.u.mps of my knees and pressed the heel of my palm gently against the b.u.mp in my belly. Tell her more about Vijay? Keep the details my secret? Before I could decide, Val plunged ahead.

"Listen, all I'm saying is that we're going to have to go home eventually, and while we're here, you should take advantage. Do everything you always wanted! Get drunk! Get high! Have s.e.x with the pool boy!"

I looked around. "There's a pool?"

"Out back," said Val, pointing. "Behind the hedges. We share with the other cottages." She leaned back, eyes narrowed at the horizon. "I bet I could get you a guy."

"I appreciate the thought, but I'm okay. How about this," I said. "We rent bikes and pack a picnic and go to the beach?"

She frowned. "That's not very exciting." Reaching underneath her chair, she pulled out a blue-and-white plastic bag. "Pork rind?" She waved one at me. "Low carb!" I shook my head. She shrugged and popped one in her mouth. I listened to the crunch, frowning. Something was teasing at the edge of my mind, and when I finally figured out what it was, I gasped.

Val looked up at me, mouth full, blue eyes wide, freckles dotting her cheeks. "What?"

"Val," I said, struggling to keep my voice even. "Where'd you get those?"

She popped another pork rind in her mouth. "Nashville? Wherever we stopped for gas yesterday morning." I remembered. I'd gone to use the bathroom, and when I'd come back to the car, she'd had a plastic bag of snack food at her feet and a jumbo-sized fountain drink in her hand, and was complaining about the car's lack of cup holders, and I hadn't thought anything about it at the time, but now...

"How'd you pay?" The gas station where we'd stopped had ab.u.t.ted a six-stall car wash. s.h.i.+rtless guys in droopy jeans had been standing there, waiting with rags in their hands. As the wet cars had come through, they'd toweled them off. A radio had been blasting reggaeton. I remembered the guys smiling at Val as she'd twitched her shoulders to the beat before I'd gone to the restroom, leaving my purse in the car beside her. I'd reclaimed custody of our cash, and that had been tucked into the front pocket of my jeans, but my purse held my wallet... and all of my credit cards. Now I held my breath, hoping that I was wrong. Maybe Val had tucked a twenty into her bra-a Naomi-style trick.

"I used a..." Her face got pale, and her voice, when she spoke, was tiny. "Oh. Oh, s.h.i.+t."

"You used your credit card?"

"Um." She folded up the bag of pork rinds and tucked it back under her chair. "No. Yours."

"Valerie!"

"Well, I'm sorry!" she said, jumping to her feet. "I left mine at home, and I figured you wouldn't mind, and I forgot we weren't supposed to be using them."

"How could you forget?"

"I've got a lot on my mind right now! You know, this whole mess with Dan, and remember how I told you that the station went high-def? I'm already getting laser resurfacing once a month, and even that..."

"Pork rinds," I said, grabbing the bag and waving it at her. "Pork rinds! I can't believe this. We're going to go to jail because you had to have your freakin' pork rinds!"

"It's not that I had to have them," she said sullenly. "They're just a relatively healthy snack option." She swung her legs off her lounge chair and started pacing. "Okay," she said. "Let's not panic. Maybe they'll think we're in Nashville."

I started talking, thinking out loud. "We got the money in St. Louis. We spent the night in Atlanta..."

"But they won't know about that," she said patiently. "We paid cash at the hotels, and we used fake names."

I made myself take a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Val. This isn't going to work. Not for very much longer."

"It's not my fault," she said. Her face set in a pout.

I waited until she picked up the bag and shoved another pork rind into her mouth. Then I said, "We need to talk about what comes next." I paused, watching her face, reading the weather in her eyes. "If they find Dan."

She crunched her snack thoughtfully. "We'll tell them it was an accident," she said. "Tomorrow. I'll call the police tomorrow and tell them what happened."

"Will you tell them what Dan did to you?"

A crease appeared between her eyes. "I don't know. It'd be all over the papers. And the blogs. Everyone would be all up in my business."

"There's worse things than that."

Val didn't seem to hear me. "And I left the scene of the crime. I never reported it."

True. "Maybe say you had post-traumatic stress disorder? That you saw him and you flipped out?"

She was shaking her head, the crease deepening as she frowned. "I'm never going to get my job back. I'm in a position of public trust, you know."

I made myself breathe in, then out. "Val. You know I love you, but you're not exactly Walter Cronkite."

"People will laugh at me," she said darkly, and tugged at a strand of her hair.

"Walter Cronkite never rode a mechanical bull..."

"Oh, would you let that go?" she snapped.

"Having people laugh at you is not the worst thing in the world." I remembered the little boy in the booth in the hot... apple... pie restaurant. I remembered his mother. I remembered the guidance counselor and her fistful of plat.i.tudes, a football player with his face hanging out of the bus window, mouth open, hollering "Burn it off, fattie!"

I touched her shoulder. "Maybe Dan's okay."

"I hit him with my car." She had her chin tucked against her chest, her eyes on her knees. "You're generally not okay after that happens." She lowered her eyes some more. "Probably dead in a ditch."

"We checked the ditches," I said.

"We're going to get in trouble." Her voice was flat. "I mean, we did rob a bank."

"We'll just say it was a misunderstanding," I said. Let her think we'd actually robbed the bank, I decided. She'd been so pleased at the time.

She scrunched her eyes shut. "Maybe they'd buy that," she said. "I could say we just wanted to make a withdrawal, but the girl saw my gun and got scared." She picked some polish off her nails, letting the scarlet flecks drift down around her. The sun was setting, a glowing orange ball dipping majestically toward the water to the cheers and applause of the crowd in Mallory Square, where, I knew, the tourists gathered each night to sip frozen drinks and watch the sunset and the street performers-guys who juggled chainsaws, dogs who swallowed fire.

"Screw it," Val muttered. "Who needs it, anyhow? Stupid weather. Like I care. I'll just stay down here. Be a waitress. Whatever." She looked at me. "You could stay, too. I'll bet it's great for painting. The light, you know. And Jon could come. We could take him to the beach..."

I closed my eyes. That was Val, always running. To California, to Kentucky, to Dallas and Boston and wherever else her glamorous job would take her. She could run, and I was stuck in place, and I would be until I died.

"You could sell your house," she said. "And I'll sell my condo. We could work at a bar. I'll bet half these places are hiring..."

"I need to tell you something," I said.

She looked unsurprised as she settled into her chair and waved the bag in my direction. "Pork rind?"

I shook my head. "I think I might be sick."

"Huh?" She blinked. "What are you talking about? You didn't even eat any."

"I found a lump."

Val sat up fast. "You did? When? Where?"

"About a week before the reunion. I think..." I gulped. I wasn't sure I could say the words out loud, wasn't sure if speaking them would somehow make them real. "I think it's what my mother had."

"Oh my G.o.d." She stared at me. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm supposed to see a doctor on Thursday. My mom's doctor. Her oncologist. That was the soonest they could take me. Thursday morning."

"We'll go home," Val promised. "First thing tomorrow, so you can go see the doctor. We'll go to the police, and I'll tell them what I did." She thought for another minute. "But I'm totally going with that post-traumatic stress thing." She chewed on her thumb. "Maybe I should get a book about it. Or look it up on Wikipedia."

"Okay."

"Can I stay with you?" Before I could answer, she nodded as if she'd made up her mind. "Yeah. If I don't go to jail, I'll stay with you."

My throat was tight, my eyes were stinging. n.o.body had ever stayed with me. Vijay had never spent the night. It had just been me in the house since my mother had died. "For how long, do you think?"

Val took my hand and I felt her fingers, thin and strong, lacing through mine. "For as long as you need me," she said.

FORTY-FIVE.

Even through his sorrow, through the tape loop playing the words "little girl" over and over in his head, Jordan Novick managed to be impressed when his Monday morning flight, on an airline he'd never heard of, pulled away from the gate on time and touched down a mere fifteen minutes behind schedule. In the noisy Miami airport, he waited in line behind a family chattering in a language he didn't recognize for thirty minutes before the rental-car line inched forward enough to deposit him in front of an agent (there were puddle-jumper flights from Miami to Key West, but driving was cheaper and he hated little planes).

By the time he'd picked up his car and made his way onto I-95 South it was after two o'clock. He got off the highway long enough to grab a burger and fries, and drove until the road dwindled to two lanes, a ribbon of blacktop draped like a necklace over astonis.h.i.+ng blue-green water. His rented car had satellite radio with an all Bruce Springsteen, all the time station, which was a nice surprise. When he drove past the Dolphin Research Center in Marathon (swim with the dolphins! invited a billboard out front), he gave the school-bus-sized concrete dolphin leaping in the parking lot a thumbs-up and sang along to "Badlands" in a voice that was, to his own ears, credibly Bruce-like. He pa.s.sed Key Largo and Islamorada, Lower Matec.u.mbe and Conch Key, Little Duck Key and Little Torch Key, heading toward the sunset with the windows rolled down.

By six o'clock, he'd arrived in Key West. Making his way through the outskirts of town, Jordan thought it could have been any mediumsized city in America, with its big box stores and fast-food chains... but as a series of turns took him closer to the water, the streets narrowed, and the palm trees got more plentiful, and pedestrians and cats outnumbered the cars. The sky was pink from the sunset. The air smelled like salt and liquor, and everyone seemed cheerful (although, to be fair, many of them also seemed drunk). After a few wrong turns, he found his motel and checked into his room, a cheerless, boxy bedroom on the second floor of a two-story cinderblock building, with a mattress that sagged in the center and the scent of mildew and Pine-Sol in the air. He hung his jackets in the closet and put his s.h.i.+rts and underwear in one of the bureau drawers, and looked at the telephone for a long moment before making himself look away.

At seven, he turned up the rattling air conditioner as high as it would go, made sure he had his wallet and his room key (this place was so budget that it still had actual keys attached to a diamond of aqua plastic with the room number printed in white), and made his way to Duval Street, which the brochure he'd grabbed informed him was Key West's main drag. Before he'd left Pleasant Ridge, he'd printed a list of the rental agencies and was pleased to find one of them still open. But his good luck ended there: the clerk behind the counter hadn't ever rented a cottage to Charlie Carstairs or Valerie Adler or Adelaide Downs, and he didn't recognize their pictures (Jordan had downloaded Valerie's from the TV station's website, and Addie's he'd pocketed at the Crossroads). "It could've been a private rental," one young man told him. "You know, they could have set it up over the Internet with someone who owned their own place and not gone through an agency at all."

Great. Jordan marched up one side of the street and down the other, ducking into scooter-rental shops and souvenir stores, galleries and boutiques and bars, plodding through packs of drunks and rowdies and sweating parents who pushed tank-sized strollers and glared at pedestrians who didn't get out of the way fast enough, flas.h.i.+ng Addie's and Val's photographs, asking over and over Have you seen them, unsurprised when, over and over, the answer was no.

By ten o'clock he was lightheaded. A beer and a burger seemed like a good idea. (Two burgers in one day? Patti asked in his head, and Jordan told her to shut up, because what did she care what he ate anymore? She had a new husband and probably a baby now, unless the cross-dressing banker had gotten it wrong, so what did she care about anything?) He stopped into the first place he saw, not realizing until he'd taken a seat at the bar and been handed his laminated plastic menu that he wasn't in a restaurant as much as a Jimmy Buffett theme park, with a gift shop up front and a menu filled with Buffett-inspired fare.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, he thought, and ordered a Cheese-burger in Paradise and a Red Stripe. One beer became two, two turned into three, and then the guy next to Jordan at the bar bought everyone a round of Coronas and paid the bartender fifty bucks to put "Fins" on repeat, which necessitated more beer, plus a shot of tequila to dull the din of a hundred sunburned middle-aged Parrotheads waving their hands in the air and singing.

"You okay?" asked his ponytailed waitress as she dropped the check in front of him. She had a steel bar through the top of her ear, through her pinna, which was a useful Scrabble word. Jordan and Patti had once been Scrabble buffs. They'd had a travel set and taken it everywhere they might have been stuck with time to kill. They'd played on the beach on that last trip to the Bahamas and, before that, in the doctor's waiting room, and in the hospital, where Patti lay, pale and wan, an IV needle in the back of her hand, ultrasound gel on her belly, trying not to let him see her cry.

"Can I ask you a question?" He fumbled in his pocket with the waitress staring at him, and wondered how many times she'd been propositioned by vacationing Midwesterners who were old enough to be, if not her father, then her much older brother. "Have you seen either of these two ladies?"

She gave the pictures a cursory glance, then shook her head. "Did you lose someone?" she asked.

Oh yes, he thought.

"Hey, good luck," said the waitress. He left her a big tip and dragged himself back out into the sticky, thumping night. A group of three guys in khaki shorts and baseball caps were standing underneath a streetlamp, consulting a map. Jordan tapped the smallest one on the shoulder and flashed the photograph. "Have you guys seen..." He swallowed, struggling to remember the rest of the sentence, and the small guy patted his shoulder.

"Dude," he said not unkindly. "You are wrecked."