One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  She still didn’t look at me but she did nod.

  “And I know you think I’m an idiot to have ever ended up in this situation, so why won’t you just say it—because, really? The iceberg thing isn’t working back here.”

  Needless to say I’d worked out all the possible responses from Wendy:

  You’re right. I do think you’re an idiot.

  I don’t just think you’re an idiot; I know you are.

  What are you talking about? I don’t even think about you.

  Which raises the question, why did I bother to bring it up? Maybe because I just wanted to have an excuse to yell at somebody—because I couldn’t yell at the anonymous source and I couldn’t yell at Cousin Whoever up in Maine and I couldn’t yell at the person who abused my Seth when he was only ten years old.

  But apparently I was losing my scripting touch. Wendy’s violet eyes nearly burst from her face, and then she ran for the bathroom. When she didn’t come out for ten minutes, I slunk away.

  I really was an idiot.

  That was one of the reasons I almost didn’t answer the text I got from Alyssa the next morning, Wednesday. I overslept and missed church and was making myself a cup of coffee in the kitchen when it came, and I sat on a stool at the snack bar and read the words at least five times: NOW you can talk. Come to the Mansion.

  I had already driven poor Wendy to tears because I wanted to blow at somebody. Alyssa was one of my oldest friends . . . although I didn’t have to read between the text-lines too much to know she was ready to blow at me. I didn’t need that either.

  But as I ran my finger around the rim of my coffee mug and read the text again, it hit me. Now I could talk. And maybe it was time to start putting some of those broken-off pieces back together. Everybody was telling me I needed to be getting myself healed while Seth was off doing the same. Everybody, including Seth himself.

  I got dressed and walked down to the hotel.

  I’d never visited Alyssa when she was on the job as a concierge at the Mansion on Forsyth Park, but I wasn’t surprised to see how vivacious she was with the middle-aged couple she was advising when I walked across the art gallery of a lobby. She was drawing happy purple circles around things on a Savannah street map with so much spontaneous energy, you would never have known she’d done it at least five hundred times before—and complained about it to her friends every chance she got.

  Her blonde hair was up in a neat bun and shiny silver droplets dangled from her earlobes. She was striking, really, and so self-assured. She and Wendy and Jacqueline were finding a confident place in the world.

  I waited until the couple was cheerfully on their way before I went any closer to the gold-trimmed concierge desk. I got about three steps when Alyssa saw me, whipped out a sign that said Back in Five Minutes, and came out with a sleek black sweater around her shoulders.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Across the street.”

  “Look,” I said as she took off ahead of me across the lobby, “I know you still don’t get—”

  She put a hand up behind her and pushed through the Victorian Romanesque doors. I shut up until we got across Drayton Street and sat on either end of a bench on the west side of the park. That gave me enough time to work up a head of steam.

  “I didn’t meet you so you could yell at me,” I said. “I know you’re mad because I didn’t talk to you but I couldn’t and that’s the way it was. I’m sorry.”

  Alyssa stopped with only one arm in the sleeve of the sweater. “What makes you think I’m going to yell at you?”

  How about everything you’re doing right now?

  “I just need to tell you something,” she said, and slid the other arm into a sleeve.

  My heart took a dive straight down. Did she see Seth with a prostitute too? Didn’t I have enough “evidence” already?

  Alyssa put her arm on the back of the bench and leaned toward me. Whispering wasn’t her strong suit but she gave it a try. “I don’t know how much you know about what Seth was doing.”

  “Enough,” I said. “I’ve seen some of what he was watching. I caught him at it.”

  She closed her eyes and talked with them shut. “So you’ve seen, what, five minutes?”

  “Less than that. I don’t need to see any—”

  “No, you don’t.” Alyssa glanced over her shoulder as if the porn police were walking their beat. “But I have. Prepare to be disgusted.”

  “I don’t want to be disgusted anymore,” I said. “Really—”

  “I’m not going to give you graphic details, but you need to know this.” She stopped and looked over my head and for the first time I saw in her eyes how hard this was for her. Pain tightened her pretty mouth.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’ve dated two different guys who asked me to watch porn with them. It was more like they said, ‘Let’s watch a movie,’ and it turned out to be Las Vegas Vixens or something.” She closed her eyes again, almost as if she didn’t want to see me watching her. “I know. I should have just left, but these were great guys before that. When the video started talking about these not-all-that-attractive women being dogs and whales and pigs, the first guy turned it off. But I still never went out with him again.”

  I was almost too dumbfounded to nod, but I did.

  “The second guy . . . I’m not even sure why I said I’d date him except he was cute and I was alone and he seemed decent, you know?” She blinked rapidly, but I knew we weren’t talking eyelash in the contact. “I went to his place to pick him up because he said his car wasn’t running and I’m thinking we’re going out the door and he turns on this . . . awful video and he starts . . .”

  “You don’t have to tell me.” Please, don’t tell me.

  “He starts acting it out with me.” Alyssa looked straight at me, face writhing. “Tara, I went and threw up and I haven’t been out with anybody since. It’s like, is there a guy out there who can enjoy sex if it doesn’t involve props?”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “So, you’re not going to marry Seth now, are you? The paper said he was getting treatment, but I just think you should run and not look back.” She grabbed my hands. Hers were cold and clammy. “I work in probably the classiest hotel in this town, and guys come to the concierge desk all the time asking me to come up and watch a movie with them . . . like I’m some call girl or something. It just makes me feel so dirty.”

  “But you’re not!”

  “You know how it feels, though, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, because I did.

  “I’m looking for another job, something where I don’t even have to come in contact with men. Maybe I’ll go back to school and become an elementary school teacher.”

  I couldn’t picture that—even with my imagination—but I kept saying yeah. Until she said, “Promise me you’re not ever going to marry him, Tara. Swear to me.”

  I pulled my hands away. “I can’t.”

  “Tell me you aren’t going to try to save him.”

  “No!” I said. “But there’s more to it than just Seth being a jerk. Not that he is.”

  I paused and looked back across the street at the hotel’s cupolas. That was the first time I was the one to say this wasn’t all Seth’s fault. And it might be the first time I believed it.

  “Okay,” Alyssa said. Her arms were folded.

  “Okay what?” I said.

  “If you marry him, don’t count on me to be a bridesmaid because I won’t have any part in it. Matter of fact, I already sold my dress.”

  I stared at her. “So you’re saying we can’t be friends if I even consider marrying Seth?”

  “I love you, Tara,” she said, “but I can’t, like, hang out with you and listen to you talk about helping him and go, ‘Yay, girl.’ I might not be as deep as you, okay, but I won’t be a hypocrite.”

  She stood up and did everything a person does to keep from weeping—swallowing, blinking, chomping down on the lower lip. F
inally she just walked across the street and disappeared inside the Mansion. I watched until I could no longer see her beyond the windows.

  That was one friendship out of three basically gone. Didn’t I predict to myself that day when Mama and I had lunch at Soho South that friendships would unravel over this? I couldn’t just sit here and let all the threads come loose. I called Jacqueline.

  We met an hour later during her lunch break in Oglethorpe Square. I could tell from the way she walked toward me, her longer-in-the-back-than-the-front skirt dancing flirtatiously in the breeze, that she wasn’t angry with me. That wasn’t her. What I saw on her face when she joined me at a live oak facing the Owens-Thomas House with a smoothie in each hand was something more akin to fear. A straight vertical line cut between her eyes that couldn’t quite seem to settle.

  “Thanks,” I said as she handed me one of the cups.

  “You look like you could use it. How much weight have you lost?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You’re not okay, are you?” she said.

  “No. But it’ll get better.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Look, I want you to know I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you about this—”

  “No, no, I totally get it now. That must have been so hard for you.”

  I felt a little guilty that I was surprised by Jacqueline’s empathy, but, really, she was the practical one, the one to give advice for moving forward instead of compassion to let you rest where you were for a while.

  She leaned against the great tree, carefully positioning her feet in the leaves so she wouldn’t slide. “So what are you going to do?” she said.

  Ah, there it was.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I’m trying to heal and Seth’s trying to heal and then I guess we’ll see.”

  “Don’t wait.”

  I quit pumping my straw and sighed hard enough to stop her. “I already heard this from Alyssa.”

  Jacqueline tucked her chin. “I know you didn’t hear this from Alyssa. I’m sure she told you to cut and run.”

  “She did.”

  “She’s wrong . . . in my opinion.” Jacqueline set her cup on the ground and all but wrung her hands. “I’m sure she told you all about the guys asking her to watch porn with them.”

  “She did,” I said again. I was gladder than ever that I’d not told Alyssa before. The girl couldn’t keep her mouth shut even about her own secrets.

  “I never had anybody do that, but I had a lot of guy friends at Auburn, and Oliver told me about some too . . . You can hardly find a guy who doesn’t struggle with porn, Tara. Oliver said he didn’t—and I guess I believe that—but it’s, like, an epidemic. Even with Christian guys.”

  “Why did I never know that about men?”

  She did the chin tuck again. “Really? Who’s going to tell you that? You’re so sweet and innocent and perfect.”

  “Stop!”

  “I’m serious. But it’s true, all of it.” She pulled away from the tree. “The thing about Seth is, he’s willing to get help, and that’s so hard, especially now that somebody’s blabbed it to the newspaper.

  Do you know who—”

  “No.”

  She seemed to shake that off. “It’s huge that he admits he has a problem and he’s doing something about it. Whoever you marry is going to have issues.” Jacqueline’s eyes filled. “I’ve been through a breakup with the guy I thought was the one, and if he’d take me back I’d go in a heartbeat. I don’t know if I’ll ever love anybody again.”

  I scanned the balustrade on the house without seeing it. “Neither do I.”

  “Then don’t lose him.”

  There was no point telling her it wasn’t that easy, just as it had been senseless to argue with Alyssa. Maybe unless you’ve been there, you just shouldn’t say anything at all.

  Jacqueline pulled her arms around her middle and looked down at me, mascara puddling under her eyes. “Well, just so you know, I still have the dress.”

  “Duly noted,” I said.

  “If you need anything, call me, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  But as her heels clicked down the brick pathway, I knew I never would.

  That left Lexi. She hadn’t been over to watch movies for a while because she said she was working on a project she had to do at night. I knew Lex. I knew the bond between us. But with so many pieces scattered on the ground around me, it was almost impossible not to think she didn’t want to be around me now that she knew.

  “It’s ridiculous. I know,” I said to the Watch after my shift that night. “But it’s like I’m not sure I know anybody anymore.”

  “Let me ask you this,” Gray said. She had her hair down and she looked somehow wiser without the ponytail. “Is it good that you found out what you did about—what are their names?”

  “Alyssa and Jacqueline,” Ms. Helen said. I had to wonder if she took notes.

  “Is it a good thing that you know what you know? Not, ‘Is it easy?’ Is it good?”

  “It kind of is,” I said. “It’s clear to me now that I don’t want to dump Seth right now, but I can’t just marry him and hope for the best either.” I drew my shoulders up to my earlobes. “I guess I knew that before, but saying it to them made it more like the truth.”

  “Then that’s a good thing,” Betsy said.

  “So?” Gray wiggled her hand. “Maybe talking to Lacy? Lindy?”

  “Lexi,” Ms. Helen said. “Gray, honey, honestly.”

  “Maybe talking to her will show you something else you need to know.”

  “What if I don’t want to know?” I said.

  “Oh, darlin’,” Betsy said, warm hand on mine. “Wantin’ isn’t the same as needin’. Never has been.”

  “I hate that,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” Betsy said.

  “I guess I’m calling Lexi.”

  Gray pushed my phone toward me.

  Lexi’s voice was quiet during the call, as usual, so I couldn’t really read anything, but she said my timing was perfect and invited me to her apartment.

  Oddly, I’d never been there before. She’d only been in it since just before Thanksgiving—she lived with her parents out in Ardsley Park after undergrad until she could save enough money for her own place—and with all the wedding plans, there hadn’t been time to go see her new digs.

  As I walked the three long blocks to Montgomery Street, which included making my way around the monstrous civic center, I tried not to feel guilty about that. She’d never actually asked me over. In fact, throughout our whole friendship she’d always spent more time where I lived than vice versa. I didn’t have four younger siblings in a three-bedroom house with one bathroom and a kitchen that could have fit in my mother’s walk-in closet. It wasn’t that Lexi was ever ashamed of her home. Mine was just quieter.

  Most of the streets of Savannah weren’t bustling on a Wednesday night in late January, but that end of Montgomery was a different matter. I never spent much time there, not being a fan of pizza joints that made the Mellow Mushroom look like a Ruth’s Chris Steak House and dark-windowed bars that brought Jason Statham movies to mind, but whenever I did go there late in the evening like this, it felt like a neon noon. My father would be having a fit if he knew I was down there.

  I shoved my hands in my jean jacket pockets and tried to look like I belonged, which probably made me look even less like I did, and hurried up the outside steps Lexi had described to me on the phone. They led to a door with a smeared glass window, which in turn led to a narrow hallway with dark green carpet that had obviously been laid two decades ago. That many years’ worth of drinks had been spilled on it and left to soak in.

  Oh my gosh, Lexi.

  She answered before I knocked and pulled me into her place, and there all resemblance to the rest of the complex ended. It. Was. Precious.

  We’re talking one room with a kitchenette and a bathroom no bigger than one you’d find in a motor home
, but what she’d done with it was nothing short of amazing. The walls were the color of real butter and textured in a way that was vintage Lexi. I remembered her saying the landlord had given her permission to paint as long as she didn’t do anything weird.

  A few nice pieces of her own art hung on those walls, bordered above with lengths of fabric that found their way around the windows like magic wings. The rug I recognized from her room at home—a woven affair she’d saved up her money to buy in Charleston at a street market when she was seventeen. A futon in a frame that converted into a bed, a trunk for a coffee table, and two blue director’s chairs were all the furniture she had, but she’d grouped it cozily and punctuated it with pillows I knew she’d beaded and embroidered herself. A selection of pots and small sculptures she’d made over the years completed the look. There was never a place that more clearly announced who lived in it.

  “Lex, this is awesome!” I said.

  “You think?”

  “Yes! I love it.”

  “I fixed us some food.”

  I resisted saying, You didn’t have to, because I knew she loved doing it. I’d learned to cook only because I was getting married. Lexi learned it because it was yet another art to master.

  “You still like quesadillas, right?” she said.

  “Do I live?”

  She laughed her soft laugh and produced two folded tortillas bubbling with cheese and smelling of chicken and cilantro. It was the first thing I’d had put in front of me in weeks that I actually wanted to eat. I had half of it down before she could get the lemonade on the table-trunk. That was, of course, homemade too.

  When she sat down, I said, “So what have you done with your bridesmaid’s dress?”

  “I’m sorry?” she said.

  I wiped my mouth with the bandana she’d rolled up by the plate as a napkin. “Alyssa sold hers because she thinks I should flush Seth and our whole relationship down the john. Jacqueline’s keeping hers because she thinks I should marry Seth immediately—and would probably think that even if he were a serial killer. So—you?”