Friends and Liars

by Kaela Coble

  “But—”

  “Murphy. It’s off-limits. I’m sorry if that’s not fair, but no.” I can’t go there. I will never stop crying if I do. The memory is mine, and no matter how descriptive I am, there’s no way he can share it.

  As the waitress delivers our sandwiches in red plastic baskets, Murphy grinds the ice in his cup with his straw, his jaw set. “Can you at least tell me if it was a girl or a boy?” he asks when she leaves. Neither of us touches our food.

  I swallow. If only we could have started with a softball. Why didn’t I see any stretch marks, the day after Danny’s funeral? perhaps. (Answer: You weren’t looking for them.) “I don’t know,” I say. “I asked them to take the baby away right after.”

  His face falls again. I feel like I have to give him something. So I say what I’ve never said out loud. “I feel like it was a boy.”

  He gets a little sparkle in his eye. I know he’s picturing tossing a baseball around with a hyperactive little boy with a mop of black hair in his eyes. The sparkle vanishes as the daydream does, the anger from the impossibility settling in.

  “Doesn’t it bother you that a piece of you—a piece of us—is walking around in the world not knowing us? And we don’t know if he’s happy, or safe, or feeling abandoned?”

  “Of course it does. It bothers me every day. Every single day I worry about that. And I’m really sorry to say it, but now you will, too.” As I say it, I wonder if it’s true. All these years I’ve envied Murphy for not knowing. I even resented him for it, even though it was my doing. But now, knowing that he knew I was pregnant, I wonder. Will it be the same for him? Will it stay with him, crashing into him at random times with varying degrees of strength? Or will he be able to shrug it off, like getting hit by a pitch? Take his base and forget about it by the time he gets his next turn at bat.

  The silence after this stretches on and on until finally Murphy asks, “He would be, what, ten years old?”

  An alarm sounds in my head, and I stiffen. “Nine,” I say.

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  “Murphy, the adoption is closed.”

  “I know that. You told me that.”

  “I understand this is all brand-new, and maybe your gut is telling you to find him and try to be a part of his life, maybe even to try to get him back—”

  “I didn’t say I was going to—”

  “I’m begging you not to do that. I’m begging you to leave him alone. He has the parents he has, they’re all he knows, and I don’t want his life to be turned upside down. No matter how either of us might feel, we have to think about what’s best for him.”

  He raises his hands in surrender as I talk, dropping them with an awed smile when I finish. “Wow,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Look at you. You’re a mother.”

  When a tear slides down my cheek, he puts one of his hands over mine. With the other, he pulls a napkin from the dispenser and gives it to me.

  When I recover myself, I tell him, “If he ever tries to find me—us—I promise I will include you in the decision to meet him or not.”

  He looks at me skeptically, then does the goofy face as he tries to raise one eyebrow. I laugh, wipe my hand on the napkin, and reach across the table to do it for him.

  “I promise,” I repeat as my finger makes contact. “My turn to ask questions now,” I say, pulling my hand back and swatting away the remaining tears. What I want to know is unimportant, but it will change the subject. “This might seem stupid, after all this,” I say. “But I have to know why you and Danny fought before he came to see me in New York.”

  “Ah,” he says, “I can finally tell you. It was Ally.”

  “Ally?”

  “I figured out that something happened between the two of them. Or at least, I suspected. It was right after Ally and Aaron got back together, and we were all at Danny’s for poker night. The two of them kept exchanging this look, like they had a secret together. So when Ally and Aaron stepped outside for a smoke, I just lost it on him.”

  “Why? What did you care?”

  “Aaron wasn’t just some guy Ally was dating, he was our friend. I didn’t like the way Danny slid in and took over, the minute his back was turned.”

  I knit my brow. After all the three of us had been through together, it doesn’t quite compute.

  “It seemed like he was doing a lot of that, that summer,” Murphy adds.

  Ah. “You thought there was something going on with me and Dan?”

  He nods. “After what happened with us, you shut everyone out except for him.”

  I have to smile. How wonderfully high school, with all the seriousness of what we’ve been through, that Danny Deuso and Murphy Leblanc fought over a couple of girls. “Nothing happened, Murph. Danny and I were never more than friends.”

  He shakes his head. “That night he called me, to tell me you were pregnant and that you were going to . . . that was the last time we ever spoke, and I didn’t even say anything. He just told me what was going on, and where I could find you, and then hung up. I think he and I probably could have gotten over the fight, eventually, if I had shown up for you. But I didn’t, and when I tried to reach out when he got back into town, Danny didn’t want anything to do with me. I don’t blame him.”

  I reach across the table to hold both his hands in mine. There’s nothing I can say that will make him feel better about this. If there’s one thing I’ve known since I was a little kid, it’s that sometimes things suck and you can’t do anything about it. It will never be okay that Danny and Murphy wasted that time, that any of us wasted that time with him. It will never be okay that Danny is gone. It will never be okay, truly okay, that I gave away my baby, and it will never be okay that I didn’t tell Murphy about it.

  “I love you, Ruby. You know that, right?” He says it without looking into my eyes, just like the night he first said it.

  I sniff back the fresh wave of tears and nod. “I love you, too. But where does that leave us?”

  He shakes his head, and in that gesture he is saying what we both know. There is not enough love to compensate for what we’ve done to each other, and there was never quite enough to compensate for our differences. Even if I moved back to Vermont, I could never live in Chatwick again. And unless it’s Chatwick, for Murphy it might as well be the moon. I can’t ask him to meet me halfway, or even a third of the way. He belongs here every bit as much as I don’t.

  “I could never say never. Not to you. But right now . . .”

  “It’s just so unfair,” I say. The words escape me, and I know they are from the most childish part of me, which used to believe in the fairy tales I would read by flashlight, before the days when Danny threw rocks at my window. I have long since known that love doesn’t conquer all. “It’s just—” I hasten to cover.

  “I know,” he says, “we never got to be together.”

  I nod. My heart soars. Finally knowing that this is something he regrets, too, is a gift. A painful one, but a gift all the same.

  The waitress comes back and Murphy hands her a credit card without looking at the bill. “Maybe things can change a little now,” he says after she leaves. “I mean, I miss talking to you. Maybe we can start there.”

  Damnit, Murphy. Here we are, an inch from finally closing this thing up, and he’s got to crack that door open a millimeter. I nod, say of course, we’ll keep in touch this time. But we won’t. It’s too hard. And as much as eighteen-year-old Ruby would have clung to that crack in the doorway, I can’t.

  “You know I think he had the right idea,” he says. “Dan, I mean.” The doubt must show on my face, because he explains further. “Maybe he wasn’t just trying to get back at us for the way his life turned out. Maybe he really wanted to bring us all back together.”

  I have to laugh. “And Emmett thinks I saw the best in him.”

  “Really, though, don’t you feel better now that the truth is out on the table?”

  I think ba
ck to my peaceful night’s sleep, to the lightness of my shoulders, to the pictures on my phone of all my friends. Maybe that was Danny’s intention. Or maybe he was just stirring the pot. Either way, I can’t regret coming home. I can’t regret reconnecting with people who were once my family. And I can’t deny that the burden on my shoulders feels a little lighter.

  Speaking of which . . . “You can tell them, if you want,” I say. He knows I mean tell our friends about the baby.

  “No,” he says. “It’s your secret to tell or not tell.”

  I shake my head back. “It’s not just mine anymore. That’s how this works.”

  He thinks for a moment. “Okay. Then it should just be ours.”

  He grins wickedly as he shrugs his Carhartt jacket on. It seems that he and I will always have secrets that no one else knows. No matter what Dan may have wanted.

  We stand to leave, and Murphy pulls me into a hug. “I think you did the right thing, giving the baby up,” he says into my hair. “And I’m really proud of you—the woman you’ve become—despite everything.” I hold him tighter, refusing to let go until I can blink the tears back into my eyelids. “Just . . . get back to writing now, okay?” he adds.

  I pull back, laugh. Nod. I think I have some good material. As we make for the exit, a familiar face passes through the door.

  “Hey there, Miss Ruby,” Shawna says, as if it were hours since my last shift at The Exchange, instead of years. I do not keep as cool. Seeing Shawna after such a nerve-racking and awkward conversation is like a glass of water after a marathon, and I thrust myself into her ample bosom for a hug. Murphy stands awkwardly to the side, and I wave him off.

  You can go, I think.

  Our eyes connect as he hesitates. Are you sure?

  He still looks hesitant, and I know he’s thinking the same thing as me: will this be the last time we see each other? Probably not. The last time I thought we’d never see each other again, I wound up pregnant, tied to him forever.

  Go, I think, pointing at the door with my chin. You can go now. I’m okay.

  He turns, opens the door, and walks through it. The air outside is so cold the latch is frozen, and the door refuses to close all the way, even when the waitress tugs and tugs on it. Finally she gives up and leaves it open just a crack.

  “What are you doing in town?” Shawna asks. While she collects the takeout order she will bring home to her family, I tell her I was a bridesmaid at Emmett McDowell’s wedding, which makes her laugh. She remembers Emmett as the pain-in-the-ass kid who would come in and point out the racks that weren’t perfectly straight, never offering to rectify the situation. We grab an empty booth—cooling food be damned—and catch up. She tells me she has her own bookkeeping business, a dream she was too afraid to pursue until The Exchange closed and she had no choice. Her daughter, Ashley, who in my mind is seven, is getting ready to graduate from high school. She will go to prom this year, and Shawna’s business is doing so well they were able to purchase her a car when she got her license last spring.

  She asks me how I am and what became of me, and I can tell she is yet another person who is hurt that I lost touch. I tell her I live in New York, that I think I’m finally ready to start writing.

  “Donna always did say you weren’t going to set the world on fire,” she says with a sad smile.

  I let my lips reverberate. “Most of the time I don’t even have the energy to search for the matches.”

  “I hear that, sister,” she says. “Speaking of fire . . .” She points her chin at the door, where moments ago Murphy made his anticlimactic exit from my life. “What’s going on there?”

  I shrug. “Nothing.”

  She cocks her head, surveying me, looking for clues. I fear it’s beating on my sleeve—my heart, as broken as it was when I was eighteen, but without the same concentration of grief and hormones rushing through it. “Old flames take the longest to burn out,” she says.

  “Maybe,” I say, “but I think we’ve damn near stomped it out. Now—”

  “—it’s all over but the crying,” we say in unison, quoting from one of the songs we used to sing while closing up the shop at night.

  When our laughter dies down, Shawna shakes her head. “I have a feeling about you two. Maybe now isn’t your time, but I’ll be doing your makeup for your wedding someday. I just know it.”

  I don’t argue; there’s no point with Shawna. I simply smile and shake my head. “Maybe a little less glitter than for prom, yeah?”

  EPILOGUE

  DANNY

  Now

  I watch them gather one by one. Emmett is first, perpetually punctual, and he hoists several camp chairs from his trunk, staging them and restaging them around the fire pit. Next to his own chair he places the full twelve-pack cooler on a pile of grass clippings left behind by some stoned teenage employee of the Chatwick Parks & Rec Department. Earlier today, Emmett exchanged the key to the park’s gate for $50, palming the money and sliding it into the kid’s outstretched hand like he’s seen in movies.

  Before long the others start to arrive, these people I watch over. The same people I was charged with watching my entire life, even though I didn’t know it at the time. It was a while after my death before I stopped being angry with them. I thought they should have saved me, but once I got here, I realized that wasn’t their job. The living have this Hollywood notion that friends are meant to save each other, but really we’re all just there to exist alongside each other, occasionally holding someone else’s pain in our own hearts to grant them a moment of respite.

  Ally comes next, the only one accompanied by a guest. She bounces constantly now, in part to comfort the baby swaddled tightly into a kangaroo-pouch contraption, in part to comfort herself. This is the first time she’s left the house in weeks, and she feels a sliver of the insecurity that Ruby wrestles with when she’s in Chatwick—unsure of her place, now that she has a new role. Isabelle is less than a month old, and it shows in the bags under Ally’s eyes, the hair free of its usual careful coloring and styling, the pooch that remains from her stretched belly. She is still every bit as beautiful as the girl I quietly lusted after for most of my adolescent years. More, perhaps. She loves Isabelle fiercely, but motherhood has been surprisingly hard for her to adjust to. Breastfeeding didn’t work out, no matter what she tried, which has made her feel like a failure, and while her heart is fully charged, she is exhausted and overwhelmed by the demanding little life she holds.

  Aaron pretty quickly forgave her for her tryst with me, under the condition that she never again invoke the name Christie Bedard. She hasn’t since, but she will. And he will throw my name back in her face. That’s marriage, from what I’ve seen. Regardless, she asked her husband to stay at home for this gathering. She wanted to say goodbye to me without Aaron looking for some sign of residual feelings. Fearing a hormonal surge, he didn’t argue. Besides, I’m already dead; I’m not exactly a threat to him anymore. Not that I ever really was.

  Murphy comes next, his nerves dampening the ferocity of his usually confident swagger. He hasn’t seen or spoken to Ruby since their lunch on New Year’s Day. He’s picked up the phone to call, especially when he wakes from one of his nightmares, but he always hangs up before pressing Call.

  Not long after the wedding, he told Krystal it was over. He was never going to commit to that girl, and he didn’t want to waste her time. He did her a favor, but she doesn’t exactly see it that way.

  He’s been a suspiciously good “uncle” to Isabelle, constantly dropping by with new toys she’s too young to play with, picking her up and making a fuss over her. Ally is confused by it, but grateful for the few minutes she can duck out of the room to take a shower.

  Ruby is the last to arrive, her anxiety surrounding her in a fog that no one but I can see. She hasn’t been home since the wedding, but she’s talked to Emmett several times, and she and Ally talk every Thursday evening. When Izzy was born, they Skyped, giggling as Ally held the baby up to the webcam
as if she were Simba from The Lion King. Because of all the time she’s already taken away from work, and her rigid new self-imposed writing schedule, Ruby wasn’t able to come home for Ally’s baby shower and this gathering. Ally chose this. She had plenty of women at her baby shower, but no other woman in the world could understand this.

  The crew greet each other warmly. Ruby and Murphy are the last two to embrace. Neither of them knows what Steph overheard in the stairwell. She’s never told anyone, including her husband, further proving that she is too good for our Emmett.

  They speak, one by one, about me and about the slip of paper they each hold in their hands. A secret of theirs that I scribbled angrily before ending my life. A game I thought I was creating just to mess with them, to shake them out of their monotonous existences. It served a much higher purpose in the end. If I hadn’t outed them, they would have drifted back apart the minute I was in the ground. And worse, their secrets would have remained as buried as my body, never to be dealt with. Even now, Ally and I, of all people, are the only ones who have told the whole truth. Ally and I.

  I can’t really blame the others. Like most of us, they don’t want to shine a light on the darkest parts of their souls, the weakest parts. They were sure, like all of us are sure, that no one could possibly love us, if they knew who we truly are. What they don’t understand—what I didn’t understand myself, until now—is that those dark, weak parts are not ugly. They are not unlovable. They are what make us beautiful. Resilient. Strong. They turn us into who we were meant to be. The way to be sure that happens, and to be sure we won’t be crushed by the burden, is to redistribute the weight a little so that someone else can come along, wedge their shoulder under it, and help us carry it.

  Emmett starts off the ceremony, reading the same fake secret Steph did months before. He is happy to report his condition remains stable, and he is adjusting to “life at a lower intensity.” (After this, he will pitch this phrase to Ruby for her next writing project, to which she will reply, “Write your own damn book.”) He apologizes to the crew for hiding his illness from them, but they wave him away. Who are they, not to forgive him? When he’s done talking, he tosses the slip of paper into the fire, and everyone cheers. Ruby shows no sign that she knows his real secret. Murphy doesn’t, either, although he was in on the scam. The garage Emmett went to? In Montreal? I had no connection to it. When Murphy’s brother came for his weekly weed purchase, I made sure to tell him all about the big joke, including the dates of Emmett’s “drug runs.” Just as I suspected, the little puppet ran straight to Murphy, who took over from there, leaving envelopes of cash in Emmett’s mailbox in the middle of the night. He never said a word to anyone, and I wish I had thanked him. And now that Emmett is out of the woods, I really wish I could tell him what we did, just to see the look on his face. God help me, I still get a chuckle out of it.