Friends and Liars

by Kaela Coble

  And now, Ally’s a grown woman. From the clippings my mother periodically sends me from The Chatwick Gazette, I know she’s recently been promoted to manager at The Cutting Edge, the salon where she’s worked since she graduated from cosmetology school. I picture her ruling the roost from her position behind her chair, affectionately clucking directions to her junior hairdressers without taking her eyes off the clump of hair she’s expertly snipping away at. Gathering bits of gossip from her clients like bits of feed. As we listened to the memorialization of our friend, I noticed Ally scanning my hair, and I know she was contemplating whether she would give me highlights or lowlights. She won’t get the opportunity. I don’t care how much practice she’s had, I remember all too well the time in eighth grade when she convinced me to darken my hair to a chocolatey-brown. She dyed it out of a box we got at Brooks’ Pharmacy. I cried for a week until the black streaks came out.

  Since we’ve last seen each other, she’s married the man beside her, the man we all knew she would marry since the moment he rescued her from a scum-of-the-earth date at Dunphy’s field after homecoming. And I’ve become the girl who didn’t even attend their wedding. Ally’s become a person I don’t know. Someone who knows that it’s expected to bring food to a bereaved person. I imagine this knowledge was passed down to her in some kind of handbook that women receive on their wedding day, which tells you how to handle every uncomfortable situation that life presents.

  Next in the door are Emmett and Steph, Emmett looking impossibly mature in a suit and tie that he moves in as comfortably as if he wears it every day. I get a flash of our eighth-grade formal dance, me straightening his tie for him every ten minutes. He was so obsessed with keeping it straight, but so uncomfortable in it that he couldn’t stop tugging at it, ruining my efforts. He blamed me for tying it wrong, so I told him to screw off, which started the common splitting of alliances between the girls and the boys of the crew. Oh, the drama of those days, over a tie and a few harsh words. Over absolutely nothing at all. How I long for that now.

  Nancy tells me Emmett works in finance now, in the loans department. Apparently he golfs with my father on Sundays. The WASPiness of it all turns my stomach. I half expected him to walk in with a cable-knit sweater tied around his shoulders. There is something different about the way Emmett moves now, and it takes me a minute to pinpoint it. He used to bound into a room, filling every molecule of air with nervous energy, constantly in motion. Now he moves slowly, cautiously, and only his eyes dart around the room anxiously. I attribute it to the situation; it must be difficult to attend the funeral of the boy you once treated like a fly to be swatted.

  Steph, whom Ally had pointedly introduced to me at the funeral as Emmett’s girlfriend of three years, (in case I didn’t already understand how ludicrous it was that I hadn’t even known she existed), is tiny in comparison to Emmett but just as smartly dressed. She has warm brown eyes, and when I hugged her at the service I felt an instant comfort with her. Perhaps this is because, comparatively, our embrace wasn’t impregnated with ten years of absence, resentment, and disappointment. She carries a fruit basket, thus debunking my wedding day Uncomfortable Situation Handbook theory. I am feeling more and more inadequate with each guest.

  Everyone takes turns hugging, even though we already went through this at the church and then again before leaving the cemetery. But it’s something to do, I guess. When the ritual is over, there is nothing else to do but to shift uncomfortably until Charlene tells us the reason we’ve all been summoned here, and why we were the only ones invited.

  “Must be weird for you to be back here,” Emmett says, his talent for adding more tension to a room already humid with it still, unfortunately, intact. I feel my face instantly begin to burn as I search for an appropriate response. Am I to apologize for being gone so long? I know that’s what they’re all expecting. At the very least, it’s what they deserve.

  “At least she is here,” Ally cuts in. “More than I can say for Murphy.”

  Even as it softens to Ally’s defense of me, my heart jumps at the name. After all the anxiety at the thought of seeing him, Murphy wasn’t at the funeral. When Charlene told us about the closed reception, she had asked me where Murphy was, as if no time had passed and I was still the keeper of his whereabouts. Ally had jumped in and offered to make sure he came. I had overheard her on her cell phone before I closed the door to my car: “Murphy Leblanc, if you don’t put aside your stupid pride and get your ass over to Charlene’s house—” In that moment, despite my leftover resentment, I felt sorry for him. He and I were in the same boat, helpless against Ally’s authority, even if we were rowing in opposite directions.

  We hear a vehicle pull up in the driveway, but when minutes pass without a knock on the door, Ally goes over to the window and peers through the curtains. “Speak of the devil,” she says. My stomach drops. He’s here. Like a ghost conjured by speaking its name, what I’ve been simultaneously dreading and looking forward to since I returned to Chatwick is now parked not fifty feet from where I stand, separated only by a rotting porch and a bright teal wall.

  I can’t help but join Ally at the window. There Murphy is, sitting in a truck I’ve never seen before. The side is emblazoned with the logo for Leblanc Johnson Construction, the contracting company Nancy tells me he has owned with Aaron for some time. His arms are stretched out straight, with the same death grip on his steering wheel as I had moments earlier. “What’s he doing?” I ask.

  Ally rolls her eyes and snaps her tongue. “Who knows? Aaron, can you go see if he’s coming in for a landing anytime soon?”

  “What am I supposed to say?” Aaron asks, a deer caught in headlights. Business partner or no, he wants as little as possible to do with the emotional turmoil that today is bringing up. He’s a dude. A proper one.

  Everyone is quiet. I lock eyes with Emmett, silently battling to relinquish this task to the other. I surrender more easily than I should. “I’ll go.” I head through the door before there can be any more discussion. The first time Murphy and I see each other should be just the two of us anyway, even if Ally has her nose pressed up against the windowpane the whole time.

  I step out onto the porch, my breath catching in my throat as our eyes meet. I feel the pull. I’m circling the drain. Even though his window is rolled down, I can’t hear the four-letter word his mouth forms as he breaks eye contact, but it puts an abrupt halt to the centrifugal force anyway. Thank God.

  “That happy to see me, huh?” I ask as I approach the driver’s side. Up close, I see that Murphy’s jet-black hair is now peppered with grey that’s too mature for his twenty-eight years, and his rolled-up shirtsleeve reveals a tattoo encircling his forearm, which is thicker, tanner, and more muscular than I remember. Otherwise, he looks exactly the same.

  He exhales an unsmiling laugh but doesn’t make eye contact again. “Didn’t think I’d see you here.” His voice makes it more real. The voice I talked to every night on the phone until one of us fell asleep.

  “Ally didn’t tell you I was coming home for the funeral?” Funny, Ally tells everyone everything, especially if she has a part in making it happen.

  He ignores me. “Kinda forgot you even existed,” he says, staring straight ahead.

  Even though I know he can’t possibly mean it, hearing the words and the icy tone of his voice feels like a bullet to the chest. A bullet I quite possibly deserve, although perhaps not fired by him.

  “Why weren’t you there?” My voice falters, and I realize I had wanted him to be there more than I had wanted him not to be there. In fact, I had needed him to be there. Suddenly I wish he would jerk his head in the direction of the passenger side, indicating that he wants me to get in. To ride around the back roads of Chatwick, head down to the bay. As dirty as this section of town is, the below-the-tracks section where Danny grew up, if you stick with the road for another mile, suddenly it breaks open to beautiful green rolling pastures of farmland. I can smell the cow manure from here;
it’s a sweeter smell than I remember. Past the farmland is Chatwick Bay, where we used to escape on the boiling hot summer nights—skipping rocks, talking about life, skinny-dipping. I suddenly ache to be sitting in Murphy’s passenger seat, my legs stretched out, my toes cold in the wind, headed away from the center of town and into our own little world.

  Murphy still stares straight ahead, so I risk putting my hand on his arm. “Hey. Look at me.”

  When he finally does, I see the anger and hurt burning in his eyes. I wonder if he can see the same in mine. “You’re not the only one I haven’t seen in a while,” he says, breaking our gaze almost immediately.

  “You fought?” I ask, knowing the answer is yes before he nods, but not wanting him to know I know. It works in my favor that they stopped being friends just two weeks before Danny and I did. If they had continued to be as close as brothers, Murphy and I would be having a very different conversation right now. “What was it about?” And this I have truly never known, have tried not to want to know.

  His face finally twists into a smile, although not the warm, easy one I remember. “It wasn’t about you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  My mouth drops open in feigned shock, because that’s exactly what I was thinking. “That’s not what I was thinking!”

  He snorts out an infuriating laugh.

  “Excuse me for trying to figure out what could make the best of friends completely cut off communication for ten—” I stop, realizing what I’m saying. I am a huge pile of hypocritical crap.

  Murphy doesn’t say anything, he simply continues to smile that scary, un-Murphy-like smile.

  I raise my hands against the gun I imagine he’s about to reload. “Okay. You’re right, I’m no master communicator myself. It’s just ... I know what happened between the two of us,” and I wave my finger between him and myself. “And I know what happened between me and Danny. What I don’t know is what happened between the two of you.”

  “Ruby, not everything is some dramatic thing. I told you it wasn’t about you. So mind your own damn business!” he says.

  I spin to go back inside, anger and hurt stinging my eyes. I hear him curse and then the door of his truck opening and closing. He grabs at my elbow and I shrug him off, turning back to face him with my arms crossed.

  “Tuesday!”

  The nickname stops me in my tracks. Only he and Danny call me that. Now, I guess, it’s only Murphy. It used to drive me crazy, the way they would walk behind me in the halls in elementary school, singing that song over and over again until I shouted at them to stop. Now, I would give anything to hear Danny sing just one horribly out-of-tune chorus of “Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday.”

  “Listen, I’m sorry,” Murphy says. “I’m a little shook up. It was a long time ago and neither of us got over it . . . in time. I don’t want to talk about it, because it seems stupid now. Everything seems kinda stupid.”

  I know this is as much as I’m going to get from him. “Well, I tell you what’s stupid: us standing out here fighting while everyone else is inside, ready to hear what Danny has to say for himself. No one is looking forward to it, Murphy, but maybe . . . it will . . . help.” When the tears come to my eyes, I see, finally, graciously, his face soften. He takes a step forward, opening his arms to hug me, and I get a whiff of his cologne, the same stuff he’s always worn. I step backward, away from him, shaking my head. I can’t be hugged by Murphy. It will kill me; I’m sure of it. When I turn to climb the steps, I feel him hesitating behind me, but eventually he follows.

  Charlene makes even more of a fuss over Murphy than she did over me. He looks sheepish, undoubtedly feeling the full weight of the rift between him and Danny, now that he’s in Charlene’s house with Danny’s school pictures lining the walls. Neither Murphy nor I will resolve our final fight with Danny, and both of us should have been fighting to keep him with us.

  Charlene leads us into the basement, which is different from the last time I saw it. There’s a futon, a bed, and a mini-fridge. Danny must have adapted this room into an apartment of sorts, giving him the illusion of independence and the privacy to numb himself against the world. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and suddenly I know: Danny died in this room. I picture Charlene coming down with a basket of laundry, calling out in forced cheeriness, “Get up, lazybones!” only to find . . . I shudder. I can’t even go there. God help me from ever going there.

  Aaron hands out the folding chairs we used to use for poker nights. He offers Charlene a chair, but she shakes her head. She stands in front of the old television we once screened porn on; the girls curious to see what all the fuss was about, the boys simply horny teenage boys. We arrange ourselves in a semicircle to face her, reluctant pupils in a class we never elected to take. The couples sit together, holding hands, while Murphy and I are lumped together off to the side. As always, the single ones.

  I close my eyes, just for a second, and picture the crew as it used to be. Aaron and Ally remain unchanged, save for the wedding bands on their fingers, but suddenly it’s Emmett’s high-school girlfriend, Tara, by his side instead of Steph. Danny is in the corner, making out with whatever blocker he’s found to entertain him this month. And I—without anyone thinking anything of it—am able to lean into Murphy for support. In this world, at the end of the night it’s quite possible I’ll return home to find Nancy either high or low, or one of those plus drunk, but it still feels lighter and simpler than the reality I return to when I open my eyes.

  Charlene holds a stack of envelopes and two sheets of loose-leaf paper. I can see Danny’s scribble through the white-lined sheet, and I remember the first time I looked over Danny’s shoulder at this same handwriting. He was showing me a poem he had written, which was better than I expected, much better than my own drippy attempts anyway. Charlene reads:

  “Dear Mom,

  I’m sorry I have to leave you this way. With all we have been through together, I always hoped I could someday make you proud. But life is hard, and sad. It has been for a very long time. At first, pot made it better, and then it didn’t, so I moved on to other things. They all helped at first, but then they didn’t anymore. And now I’m nothing but a junkie.”

  Charlene’s voice falters here, and it takes her several minutes to get through the rest of the letter:

  “I’m a disappointment as a son and as a human being. Nothing I do now can change that. I hate myself for what I’ve done. For what I am. I don’t even deserve the grief I know you must be feeling. Please don’t hate me. Try to be happy I’m finally at peace. I want you to know there is nothing you could have done to prevent this. You tried to help me as best you could.”

  I can tell when she breaks down at this part that, no matter what Danny says, Charlene will always wonder what she should have done differently. As will we all.

  “The trouble is, if a person has no hope things can get better, there’s not a whole lot anyone else can say to change that.

  I love you very much,

  Danny

  P.S. There’s another letter I’d like you to read to Ruby, Murphy, Emmett, and Ally, if you can get them all together. Please read it before you give them their envelopes, or else they won’t understand.”

  I barely hear the last part, I’m so furious with Danny. I’m sorry I have to leave you this way. As if he had no say in the matter. I could kill him, if he hadn’t already done such a thorough job of it.

  “Got the autopsy results back yesterday,” Charlene whispers. “It was heroin. But I wasn’t sure if it was on purpose or not, until . . .” She flaps the piece of paper. “I found it when I finally made myself strip his bed this morning.” My eyes dart over to the bed, which I had been avoiding until this moment. The little twin mattress is made up with sheets so crisp and tightly tucked in, even Nancy at her most manic would approve. Then I remember Nancy telling me she was helping Charlene out with the arrangements, and realize this was probably her handiwork.

  Heroin. Suicide. The weight of t
he words hangs in the air, already dense with emotion. Ally’s hand springs to her mouth, and Aaron wraps his arm around her. Murphy leans forward and hides his face in his hands. My hand shoots out instinctively to rub his back, freezing about an inch above his shirt when I realize the intimacy of what I’m about to do. I pat him awkwardly a few times and then return the disobedient hand to my lap. I look over at Emmett. Steph is looking at him too, but he stares straight ahead, white as a sheet. No one knows what to say. I mean, what do you say?

  Finally Emmett seems to return to himself. He clears his throat. “The note says there’s letters for us?” I shoot him a sharp look. He’s trying to get this over with, and I understand the urge but don’t think rushing Charlene is very kind. He doesn’t notice my glare.

  “Yeah,” she says. She puts the first sheet behind the second. “I haven’t read this one yet, since it ain’t addressed to me.” Even with her bastard ex-husband and her troubled son in the ground, Charlene is still waiting for someone’s temper to explode. She sniffs deeply and reads: