Friends and Liars

by Kaela Coble

  I pick up Danny’s backpack, shove the pile of clothes he has strewn at the foot of “his” bed into it, and hand it to him. “Goodbye, Danny.”

  He doesn’t say anything, just looks at me as he steps backward toward the door. The hurt in his bright blue eyes makes my throat close. Absurdly, I think of the amount of parking tickets he’ll have on his car—it’s been parked in the same spot for weeks—and I briefly consider offering him money. Then I remember there’s no need. He’s got a fistful of it in his pocket, and I felt more stashed away in the socks I just packed for him.

  “Take care of yourself,” I mumble, the lone nicety I allow myself to give.

  He slams the door behind him. The vibration from the impact tingles painfully in my fingers and toes long after he leaves.

  I move my poster of the Chrysler Building to cover up the hole he’s punched in the wall, then sit on my bed and shake, the adrenaline coursing through me. I want so badly to pick up the phone and pour out everything that just happened to Murphy, the one person who knows both me and Danny better than anyone. But I can’t do that anymore. My ties to Chatwick, and everyone I’ve ever thought to be important, are now severed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  RUBY

  Now

  It’s the twenty-fourth of December. Christmas Eve, and Danny’s birthday to boot. It’s going to be a rough one.

  I pull Blue through the open cast-iron gates and onto the gravel path, having abandoned the rental Sentra in favor of my trusty steed. I turn the radio down and slow to a respectful speed, listening to the sound of my tires rolling over gravel, pebbles pinging off the wheel well. My first car accident was in this cemetery. I was fourteen, and my mother dragged me along to clean up my grandmother’s gravesite. I don’t know if it was guilt from forcing me to participate in this morbid activity, or some bright shining impulse to seize the day as her own mother could no longer do, but Nancy offered to let me drive along this very path. If I was going to learn anywhere, it might as well be a cemetery, right? The people here are already dead—how much damage could I do? I was so nervous that when I turned a corner and headed down a hill, I overcorrected and smashed right into a tree. Granted, it was at about five miles per hour, but it still dented the bumper pretty good and scared me enough that I refused to continue driving lessons with Nancy. I worried the shared memory would be potent enough to serve as a permanent bad-luck charm.

  I pull to the side of the path, exactly where I had parked for Danny’s burial, and brace myself against the ten-degree air. Without the sea of black suits and skirts and the smell of Aqua Net guiding me, I have to wander through a few rows before I find Danny’s gravestone.

  Nice to see you can show up for a person once he’s dead.

  There are tracks in the snow leading up to and away from the stone, and there is a bouquet of already-wilted red roses carefully balanced at the base, still in the plastic with the Martin’s Grocery price sticker on them. I guess the etiquette of hiding how much you spend on gifts ends when the receiver can no longer read the tag. Happy Birthday, Danny, have some flowers you’re allergic to for $12.99. They’ll rot into the ground, just like you.

  I wonder who left them. It wouldn’t be Charlene. She would know Danny well enough not to bother with something he wouldn’t appreciate. Or maybe not. Women tend to get all romantic about people after they’re dead. Maybe it was some girl Danny had shot up with, or some tragic nineteen-year-old cashier who worshipped him silently when he came in to buy his Newports. Perhaps it was even a girlfriend, someone we had been completely unaware of sitting behind us at the funeral, as if our grief were all that counted. Someone who had been foolish enough to love him, and to think he would get better for her.

  I stand with my hands in my coat pockets, looking down at the granite slab that marks the life of my friend. His name and the bookend dates of his existence are the only words etched into the stone. I’m grateful for the absence of any bullshit quip about the Lord and his infinite wisdom, or some quote Danny was known for. What would Danny choose if he had planned his death even more elaborately? “Beer is good, but heroin is quicker,” perhaps. I catch a laugh trying to escape, and then I remember that Danny is actually decomposing under my feet and I choke on it.

  None of you bothered to try to help me when I was alive . . .

  My eyes are already puffy from last night’s wine, and the sleeplessness that followed as memories of Danny and Murphy and Ally and Emmett flooded over me as I lay in the twin bed of my childhood. The tears that come now hurt as much physically as they do emotionally. They are persistent, and I wipe them away with my gloved hand to make room for more. I want to sit on the ground, to pull my knees up to my chest and talk to Danny, but it’s covered in snow. Even if it wasn’t, all I know to say is I’m sorry, so I whisper it to him now. I’m sorry for so many things I don’t know where to start.

  I feel a hand on my shoulder, and a scream escapes my throat as I spin around in defense mode, arms swinging.

  “Hey-hey-hey, it’s me. Jesus fuck!” Emmett cries, forearms raised to protect his face. “Careful, I’m forking out about a million dollars for a wedding photographer; I don’t need a black eye to be captured on film for all eternity.”

  “Damnit, Emmett!” I cry, trying to catch my breath. “You scared me half to—” I stop before I say death. I look over his shoulder. “What are you doing, sneaking up on me like that? Where’s your car?”

  He crooks a thumb westward. “I live a block away. I walked.”

  It takes some effort to catch my breath and slow the hammering in my chest, the dehydration from the wine working against me. Emmett couldn’t have known I was here, which means he came to visit Danny on his own.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask, a bit more coolly than necessary.

  He blinks at me. “It’s Dan’s birthday.” He says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, like I should be ashamed for not knowing. I guess it’s sweet that he remembered, although I can’t say I’m happy to see him. At the party last night, after my confession to Ally, he had cornered me about an article The Times had run about opiate use in Vermont. He had actually pulled the clipping from his pocket, prepared to discuss point-by-point where the article had gotten it wrong. At first I thought he was trying to pull me into one of our old debates, but then it became clear he thought I might have ghostwritten it, perhaps inspired by our friend’s death. I had been too drained to do anything but laugh in his face. “Emmett,” I had said, “if I had written an article for The New York Times, there’s no way in hell I wouldn’t take the byline, no matter who it pissed off here.” He had then called me a “fame whore” before stomping off. Yes, that’s me, in a nutshell. Ruby St. James: Account Manager. Anonymous city dweller. Non-practicing writer. Fame whore.

  He must sense my leftover annoyance, because his normally perfect posture slumps slightly. “I’m sorry about, you know, the article thing.”

  “Whatever—it’s fine,” I say.

  “I guess I’m a little on edge about the issue.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not easy to see the place we live portrayed negatively.”

  “You’re doing it again.”

  “Doing what?” I spin on him.

  “Being too nice. Too forgiving. It’s not like you, at least not with me. You’ve been treating me like I’m dying ever since you found out about my heart.”

  I think about this for a moment. “Maybe. Or maybe I’ve just grown up.” I can’t resist adding, “Unlike some people.”

  He laughs. “That’s a start.”

  We stare at the gravestone in silence for what feels like an eternity before I speak. “You know, I—of all people—was not naive about Danny. I knew . . . everything. And it doesn’t take a giant stretch of my imagination to believe he turned to heroin. Especially considering the last time I saw him.” I wince, trying to clear the image of his face, snarled with rage, and the raised fist that switched direction mid-swing to land in my dorm
-room wall. “I just . . .” I don’t know how to finish without sounding foolish, especially to Emmett. But there were other things that made Danny who he was. Other memories that I can’t shake. How he always bought four of those hideous dyed carnations they sold at school fundraisers—one for me, Ally, and Tara, and one to bring home for Charlene—even though he was allergic. How he made up little raps at the lunch table to diffuse the tension of the latest debate between me and Emmett. How he wrote poems on napkins for Ally when one of her dogs died (this happened many times, as I was only one of the sick strays that her mother had a habit of adopting, particularly after Ally’s father left).

  After the last day I saw Danny, whenever I found myself worrying about him, I invented a life I felt he could realistically have led, had that moment in my dorm room woken him up. Sessions with a counselor, classes at a community college, maybe a nice girl to marry and have children with. It used to make me feel better about never finding my way back to being his protector. Now it just feels sad, like an alternate ending to a depressing movie’s special features—it doesn’t erase the pain of the real ending, where the hero dies.

  Emmett appears to be waiting for me to finish my sentence until he realizes I have no intention of doing so. “You always saw the best in him,” he says.

  “Someone had to.” I look at him sharply.

  “Yeah. I mean, look how much good it did him.”

  He knocks the breath out of me with these words, like he bowled a strike right into my intestines. I turn my back to him and cover my tears with a little laugh. “Of course you would pick a fight with me now,” I say. “Here.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean . . .” He puts his hand on my shoulder, but quickly releases it. We are not an affectionate pair. In fact the first time we’ve ever hugged was at Danny’s funeral. But like the rest of the group, Emmett and I are family. We’re the brother and sister who swear they can’t stand each other, but ultimately miss the challenge at any gathering where the other is not present.

  “What are you even doing here?” I ask again, not ready to forgive him.

  Emmett ducks his head and nods. Fair play. “Things changed between Danny and me, you know, towards the end,” he says, reading between the lines. “We kinda…reached an understanding.”

  I stifle a giggle. “An understanding that he would sell you weed?”

  He tucks his lips in defeat and rolls his eyes up to the sky, as if he’s having a silent conversation with someone up there. He nods, as if he’s decided something, and says, “Steph made that up.”

  “Oh yeah, right, Emmett! Look, it’s really not that big a deal, I was just teasing.”

  “I’m serious, Ruby. She lied about my secret.”

  I’m stunned, momentarily unable to respond, save for the opening and closing of my mouth and the occasional pathetic squeak. “You mean, your heart . . . is fine?”

  His eyes widen and he waves his hands. “No. No-no-no. That part is true. I do have HCM; I did have the operation. All that’s true. Oh God, no, she would never make something like that up. I would never let her get away with it if she did. It just wasn’t the secret Danny wrote down.”

  Again I am in the position where I desperately want to demand the dirt on my friend, but I can’t without being a complete hypocrite. I can’t share my secret with Emmett. Not until I talk to Murphy, anyway. Three months after Danny’s big plan, none of us knows each other’s real secrets except for his. So much for his “tell each other or else” threat.

  But Emmett, to my surprise, reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out an envelope. His envelope. He opens it and slides out the little slip of paper with Danny’s handwriting on it, looks at it a moment, nods again—another decision—and hands it to me. I take it without removing my eyes from his. I want to give him every chance to take it back before I read it. But he doesn’t. So I read:

  “I am a drug dealer.”

  And I burst out laughing.

  His face falls.

  “Emmett, what is this?”

  “It’s not funny. It’s true.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’m supposed to believe that Nancy Reagan went from total abstinence to being some Chatwickian Kingpin?”

  “Not a kingpin. Not even a dealer, really. I was a runner.”

  I scoff at him, searching his face for the joke. “Emmett. Come on.”

  “A few months after the operation, the bills started rolling in. The shitty insurance I have at the bank has a twenty percent coinsurance requirement, which came out to thousands of dollars we just didn’t have. We bit off a little more than we could chew on the house; between the mortgage and Private Mortgage Insurance and property taxes and utilities, our paychecks were completely maxed out. But our salaries were just high enough that we didn’t qualify for any financial assistance through the hospital. I was still recovering from the surgery and could barely make it through a full day at the bank, so Steph took a second job stocking shelves at Martin’s at night.” He shudders, and I get a flash of him in his red smock from his cashier’s job in high school. “It still wasn’t enough. We had credit agencies calling. It was a nightmare.

  “So Steph was partially telling the truth. I did go to Danny one night to get pot because neither of us had been sleeping or eating particularly well. He, of course, was a total dick about it, and I ended up blowing up at him and telling him all about the surgery, the money problems, all of it.”

  I cross my arms, waiting for the giant leap from buying a little herb to transporting drugs.

  “You know Danny always sold,” he continues. “Once he got into the harder stuff, he sold it out of the back room of Borbeau’s. That night he told me his runner had quit, and if I was willing to assume the risk and drive to and from Montreal once a week for a few months, it would pay. Big. Enough to get me and Steph out of debt.”

  “And you accepted, just like that?” Emmett, who found the answers to a final exam and turned them into the teacher without hesitation. Emmett, who graduated summa cum laude from VTU, without once indulging in the Adderall booster used by his classmates. Emmett, who premeditatedly hid the flashlight before slapping the mushrooms out of Danny’s hand.

  “No. I told him to fuck off. But when I went home, I found Steph crying at the kitchen table in her red smock, our mountain of bills in front of her. I couldn’t let that happen again. It’s my job to make her life better, but because of me . . . Anyway, the next day I went back and accepted.”

  “And Steph let you?” This is almost as hard to imagine, even knowing Steph for such a short time. I mean, she’s a librarian, for Christ’s sake.

  “She didn’t know about it right away, not until the envelopes full of cash started appearing in the mailbox. And she was very against it, but my mind was made up and there was nothing she could do to stop me. She wasn’t about to turn me in. Then we’d really lose everything. That’s why she leaked the HCM and the pot. She thought it would be enough to throw off suspicion.”

  I shake my head, still not convinced. “Did she actually think one of us would turn you in, if you told the truth? I mean, did she hear what Murphy and I kept secret for Danny?”

  “Well, you two weren’t the only ones in the room, remember?”

  “Al?”

  He nods. “I love her to death, Ruby, but that salon of hers is like the Chat’s oxygen tank. Can you imagine the first time someone cried to her about their money problems? What she would whisper in their ear, convinced she was helping? She wouldn’t be able to help herself.”

  Of course I understand. I didn’t tell Ally the truth, either. I still haven’t.

  I look from him to Danny’s headstone and back, as if one of them (at this point, I wouldn’t even be that shocked if it were Danny) was going to break into a smile and yell, “Gotcha!” Finally I shove Emmett’s arm, again and again, and the words find me. “Jesus, Emmett! Are you insane? You were a fucking drug mule!”

  “I know.”

  “You coul
d have gotten caught! That’s a fucking felony! How could you be so stupid?”

  “I was desperate,” he says miserably.

  “How did you even pull it off?”

  “I honestly don’t really know. Danny told me to dress like I was going to work, because it made me look more legit; he gave me a car that Borbeau’s was working on—a different one each week—and the address of a mechanic shop up there. He told me he would give them my license-plate number and, when I got there, all I had to do was ask for an oil change. They hid it somewhere in the car, I crossed the border, I brought it back to Borbeau’s, and I went home. A few days later an envelope of cash was in my mailbox—my cut, after they sold it all.”

  “To people who then repackaged it, cut it with who-knowswhat, and then resold it to a bunch of addicts who need help, not something to shoot up their arm. A bunch of addicts like Danny.”

  “Oh, come off it, Ruby. You can’t blame me for Danny’s problem. I know you like to think so, but Danny was not some helpless victim. He made his own choices. He made the choice to let Roger die in front of him; and yeah, maybe given the circumstances, I can’t blame him. But he made the decision not to come forward. He made the decision never to get help. He made the decision to numb it out with drugs. And he made the decision to die. To quit. That’s not on you, and that’s not on me.”

  I bite my lip, tears rolling down my face. “Danny didn’t have the kind of life that you had, Emmett. He didn’t have parents who brought him up to believe in himself. It’s easy to sit in judgment when you don’t have to walk in a person’s shoes.”

  “But that’s what you’re doing to me!” he says, throwing up his hands. “Judging. When you have no idea what it’s like, to be fighting not to lose what you’ve worked your whole life for. To have to send the woman you love off to earn more money to pay for your medical bills while you’re sitting on the couch. You have no idea what that’s like. Just like I don’t know what it’s like to grow up with a bipolar mother, or go through whatever your secret is.”