Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (9781455517763)

by Verge Higgins, Lisa

  There, she thought. Not everyone here was an adrenaline junkie. That hunk of young man couldn’t possibly have a bum knee or a bad back, yet he wasn’t spider-dancing down the cliff.

  “So,” Bob said, a hesitant note in his voice, “what I think is happening is that lots of people of many different ages are abseiling.”

  “And I’m sitting here letting this stone bench steal the heat from my ass.”

  “I think I’ve got this pinned.” He spoke as if he were checking things off a list. “Arthritis commercials. Your friends are abseiling. A bunch of kids are getting strapped in. You’re feeling pressured by your own and other people’s unrealistic expectations. Here’s my verdict, hon—don’t go down that cliff.”

  “I already told you there’s no way I’m going down this cliff.”

  “The last time I heard that tone in your voice, you threatened to take a sledgehammer to the wall between the kitchen and the dining room.”

  “It would open up the floor plan. I still think it’s a good idea.”

  “It’s a better idea than you risking those lovely knees in the Alps.”

  Just then another biker approached the young man in the sidecar. The biker seized the boy under the arms and yanked him up. Judy expected the boy to fight but the kid just grinned and let the guy manhandle him. It wasn’t until the biker had deposited the young man on the leather seat of the motorcycle that Judy realized why the boy hadn’t complained.

  The boy didn’t have a bum knee…because the boy had no knees.

  “Oh, fuck me.”

  Laughter rumbled over the phone line. “As soon as you get home, Jude. As soon as you get home.”

  She watched as the biker pulled two prosthetic legs out of the inside of the sidecar and fixed them on the stumps of the boy’s legs. The boy wiggled himself off the bicycle to test his balance and then made a jerky walk toward the abseiling instructor.

  Judy glared up at the blue, blue Swiss sky. She knew, deep in her heart, that there was nothing wrong with knowing one’s limitations. She knew that there was no shame in reaching the point in one’s life when one accepts that not all things are physically possible. But Judy also knew that once Becky flew back to the States, Monique would need Judy as a friend more than ever, and Monique would need her willing and absolutely fearless.

  Judy wasn’t going to disappoint her best friend.

  “I have to go, Bob.”

  “Judy, don’t go down that cliff—”

  “I’ll call you later.”

  She slipped the cell phone back in her belly pack. She sucked in a lungful of frosty air. She reminded herself that she’d once been a very silly young woman, but she’d had bravado. She’d lived day-by-day on sheer nerve. That same courage had sustained her when she’d taken the plunge with Bob. And if raising five kids had taught her anything, it was that there was more than one way to face one’s fears, and not all of them were as loud and flashy and physical as dangling from a rope off some cliff.

  Blood coursed to her head, a sudden plunger-rush of adrenaline. She narrowed her eyes on all those bikers.

  Then Judy took her heart in her hands and stood up from the bench.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  There’s still hope.

  A breeze teased Becky’s ponytail. The whole cloud-and-crystalline sky spun above her as she twirled at the end of the rope. When she first heard her diagnosis she’d numbly asked the doctor if she should stop reading altogether and start wearing sunglasses even indoors, hoping she could hold off the deterioration by good behavior for both herself and her children. The doctor had conceded that wearing sunglasses might help. But, he continued—and she still felt the impact of that “but” like a blow to the solar plexus—you need to understand that you’re not doing anything to ruin your eyesight. It’s just going to fade away, all on its own.

  So she shut her eyes and then peeled them open again. She twirled to face the cliff. She spied the tufts of yellow-green lichen growing out of the spidery cracks. She eyed the places where the rub of the ropes had worn the stone shiny. The sharp Swiss sunlight and the reedy mountain air must act like a magnifier, for she could even trace the pattern of blue shadows on the peaks that surrounded Interlaken.

  It was true. Most people didn’t truly appreciate what they had until it slipped away.

  “You’re wrong, Becky.”

  Becky hazarded a glance toward her friend. Since Becky had shared her opinion about Lenny’s bucket list, Monique had gone stone-cold silent. Monique had worked her way down the cliff at half speed in brooding, inching little jerks. Across the eight feet or so that separated them, Becky could see the whites of her eyes.

  “I sat with Lenny,” Monique insisted, “and we planned every single thing together. We talked about the Rhine cruise, the catacombs, Munich, Monaco. I know he wanted to take every one of these excursions, just as much as I did. And I can’t believe you’d say something crazy like that to me while I’m up on a cliff.”

  “It’s all part of my evil plan.”

  “I keep my mouth shut for five weeks about Brian and Brianna, and now you just lob grenades at will.”

  Becky winced. It probably hadn’t been the smartest idea to be so frank. Defiance and denial were a grieving woman’s last defense mechanism. It was the sort of behavior that Becky had become uncomfortably well-acquainted with over the past month. In fact, when Becky sat in the hospital office listening to the doctor dropping terms like “autosomal” and “digenic” and “mitochondrial,” she’d reacted in a similar way. That doctor was stupid. The doctor was just so wrong.

  But yesterday Becky felt like she’d shrugged off a suit of lead armor when Monique forced her to hear the truth. Now Becky wanted Monique to accept the reality of Lenny’s list and share the same lightness of being.

  “All right, Monie.” Becky mentally braced herself as Monique came level with her. “I’m going to ask you some hard questions now.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, I’m not. And you can’t duck.”

  “Monique Franke-Reed does not duck.”

  “Not usually, so you should be okay to answer this. Did Lenny really know he was dying when he made that list?”

  “Oh, for goodness sake, of course he knew,” she said sharply. Then Monique hesitated longer than she should, fussing with the back end of the rope so it moved in undulating waves to the valley floor. “But there’s a world of difference between knowing something like that and talking about it like it’s an appointment coming up on the calendar.”

  “Nice dodge.”

  “Ever been with someone who’s dying, Beck?”

  The memory returned like a sharp plunge of a needle. “Yes.”

  “Someone close?”

  “My grandfather.”

  “How old were you? Six? Seven?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  He’d collapsed in the dairy barn in the middle of the five o’clock milking. She’d found him lying in scattered hay, clawing his chest. She’d gone to the hospital in the ambulance. Once out of the ER, she’d taken a spot at his bedside and held his thick-knuckled hand. All through the night she played connect the liver spots with her thumb, a silent rosary.

  Her father was dead and then her grandfather was dying. Men were always dropping out of her life.

  Monique’s voice softened. “If you’ve seen someone die, Beck, then you should understand. It’s bad luck to talk about that stuff in the sickroom.”

  “Now you sound like your grand-mère.”

  “Smartest woman I know when it comes to things like this.”

  “You and Lenny didn’t even discuss the funeral arrangements?”

  “Please.” Monique made a grunting sound that had nothing to do with the way she bounced against the harness. “I might as well just tell the guy he’ll be buried in a week.”

  “I remember how surprised you were after the funeral when that lawyer told you he had an addendum to the will.”

  “Tell
me how you slide down like that so fast. I keep thinking I’m going to get rope burns through these gloves.”

  “Use your left hand as a brake on the guide rope. And don’t change the subject.”

  Monique looked anywhere but at her, fussing with the rope and trying to adjust the harness and setting and resetting her feet on the cliff, until she finally confessed, “The sneaky fool didn’t want me to know he’d set money aside just for the list. Like I hadn’t noticed the periodic withdrawals he’d been making online.”

  “Then there’s the answer to my question.” Becky lifted the guide rope, walking her feet down in pace. “I didn’t think you could fool a radiologist with cancer and certainly not a man as sharp as Lenny. He understood exactly what was happening.”

  “I never denied that.”

  “The real question is—did you know?”

  Monie’s lips tightened so Becky could see the bright white line of pressure around the edges. “I see patients die all the time.”

  “Neonatal. Those poor little things can’t talk.”

  “I saw plenty of dying in the ER, too.”

  “Where dying, from what I hear, happens really fast.”

  “And?”

  “That means there isn’t a lot of time to deal with that pesky coming-to-terms thing.”

  “Lenny and I had plenty of time to come to terms. Six weeks of family leave, thanks to my hospital policy. We had nothing to do but read magazines and talk about the things we both wanted to do, the places we both wanted to see.”

  Stubborn, stubborn Monique, repeating the same litany. Becky suspected that her friend had memorized Lenny’s last words by rote. In the process they’d become no more than a gathering of words, bereft of any sense of deeper meaning. But after a week with that list Lenny’s intentions had become as clear to Becky as if they’d been written on a white wall in black Sharpie.

  Clearly it was time to change tactics.

  “While Lenny was dying, Monie, did you ever get up to fetch something, or make a meal, or get some tea, when you couldn’t sit there anymore?”

  “Of course. Even a dying man’s got to eat something.”

  “When my grandfather was dying, we drank enough tea to float us to China.” Becky could still smell the hospital room, the heavy scent of the freesias one of her father’s friends had sent, wilting on the bedside table. “That’s because my mother kept finding an excuse to get a drink or make a meal whenever he brought up the fact that he wanted to be cremated. My mother didn’t want to hear anything about caskets or cemeteries or cremation.”

  Monie paused, twisting a little as an alpine breeze swept around the edge of the cliff, making their ropes sway.

  Becky said gently, “Is there anything you didn’t want to hear, Monie? Was there a reason why Lenny arranged that addendum to the will when you weren’t around? Or made those money transfers in secret?”

  “He was trying to surprise me.” Her voice was clipped.

  “Or maybe Lenny wanted to talk to you about a whole lot of things. Maybe he knew that you weren’t in the right state of mind to hear them.” Like her grandfather, struggling to speak, anxiously tugging at the edge of the blanket, begging her to promise. “Or maybe he just couldn’t find a way to bring up the subject of all those things you gave up when you married him.”

  “I didn’t give up anything when I married Lenny. He knew that working mothers don’t have time for three-hour bike rides through the local preserve. He knew that I cut back on the trips to Trinidad just so we could put a little more money in Kiera’s college fund.”

  “Oh, he definitely knew all those things.”

  “Life has a way of taking things away simply by the changes it brings, Becky. If you don’t believe me about that, just go ask Judy.”

  Becky didn’t need to go ask Judy. Life was going to take away something from her, too, something that had, until yesterday, paralyzed her with terror. Someday, in the not so far future, her eyesight would dim and wink out.

  But not here. Not today.

  Becky said, “Deny it all you want, but here’s the truth. These first six things on his list give back to you what you lost when you married him. And the second six excursions have a special meaning too.”

  “Stop. You’re reading fortunes in tea leaves.”

  “The second half is a road map, Monie. They’re Lenny’s hopes for your future.”

  *

  Ten minutes later Becky landed in the dry, crinkling carpet of pine needles at the base of the cliff. Two guides unleashed her and Monique from the ropes. Becky pulled off her helmet, unbuckled her harness, and walked with her terribly quiet friend to a safe zone to wait for the shuttle. Monique made an excuse and wandered toward one of the portable toilets nestled in the pine woods. The poor woman looked ready to vomit.

  Becky suppressed yet another pang of guilt. It was the same kind of regretful distress she felt whenever she grounded Brianna. Becky’s heart ached listening to her daughter sob into her pillow, but there wasn’t anything she could do. Hard lessons had to be learned.

  Hard lessons had to be learned, indeed, and not just by Monie. Becky sought distraction by watching the other climbers. She saw a heavy man in a leather jacket rappelling down the mountain to the faint sound of bells. She watched another man with strange curved appendages for legs—metallic strapped-on prosthetics that gave his walk down the side of the cliff a certain bounce. She felt a fierce urge to rappel down the cliff again. She took deep breaths as her body trembled from the vestigial effects of adrenaline.

  She knew she was trembling from more than just adrenaline. She knew that her urge to repeat the rappel had more to do with avoidance than excitement. After the painful discussion with Monique she’d be a hypocrite if she didn’t take a hefty dose of her own bitter medicine and faced what she now most feared.

  When she got home tomorrow she’d have to face Marco. They would have to talk about what Monique had told her about the genetics. They’d have to make some decisions about Brian and Brianna. She couldn’t shuck responsibility and defer to Marco’s judgment in this, as she’d done so many times with Gina. No matter how icy their relationship grew—no matter how fractured their marriage became in the months to come—the two of them had to decide right now what to tell the kids about her diagnosis and whether genetic testing was even a good idea.

  A cold wave of dread passed through her. She thought of those medieval maps she’d seen framed in the Château de Vincennes, parchment drawings where, etched on the edges, were words of warning.

  Here be dragons.

  She heard Monique shuffle up behind her. Becky got hold of herself and turned to find her friend not poised and calm but more wild-eyed than ever.

  “You know what, Becky?” Monique walked a few steps in one direction and turned in another, like a runner trying to work off leg cramps. “If I could see Lenny now, I’d shake him. I’d just shake him silly.”

  “You shouldn’t be angry with him.”

  “Don’t tell me how I should feel.”

  Becky took the hit. Clearly the time had come for empathy, not advice.

  “I’ve made a decision.” Monique scuffed in the gravel. “I’m not going to finish Lenny’s list. As soon as I get back to the hotel I’m tearing that thing up.”

  She’s just kidding, Becky thought, eyeballing her twitchy friend. She doesn’t really mean it. Monique was just shocked and angry and blowing off steam.

  “And when we get to the Zurich airport,” Monique continued, “I’m going to check if there are any seats available on your plane for me.”

  Becky blurted, “No, Monie.”

  “I know Judy will be disappointed.” Monique wiped her face on the sleeve of her fleece. “I can’t help that. If I fly Bob out to take my place, Judy will at least have a reason to stay.”

  Becky tried to catch her eye but Monique avoided it. Monique fixed her gaze on the dust rising up on the road as a line of rumbling motorcycles pulled into the clearing. Bec
ky searched for words as she struggled with a sense of growing guilt that she, and her self-righteous honesty, was the exact cause of this about-face.

  She had to change Monique’s mind. “You’re already halfway done, Monie. You have to finish it.”

  “No, actually, I don’t have to do anything.”

  “You always finish what you’ve started.”

  “Maybe it’s time for a change.”

  “And what kind of example would that be to Kiera?”

  “Kiera will be thrilled. She never wanted me to do this at all.”

  “You promised Lenny.”

  “Only because I was too blind to see what that sneaky fool husband of mine was trying to do.”

  “He was trying to help.”

  “No. Lenny is trying to make me forget him.”

  No, no, no. Becky ran through their conversation on the cliff, trying to figure out where she’d gone wrong, how she’d made Monique think of the list all wrong. Then she glanced around the clearing to look for Judy. Where was she? Judy would know what to say. She should have been here long before now. Becky peered past the gathered bikers dusting off their leather jackets. She swung around to the group of Japanese tourists chattering to their left, huddled around the screen of a video camera to view the descent they’d just made.

  Then Becky became aware of a man approaching. He was big and burly and tall. He pulled off his leather gloves as he looked them both over. The chains on his leather jacket rattled. He had a faded tattoo of a pagan symbol right between his eyebrows.

  In German-accented English, he asked, “Becky? Monique?”

  Monique answered with a hesitant, “Yes?”

  “Judy says wait. She comes.”

  Becky stared at this guy with his grizzled beard and chained epaulets and a red bandana tied around his probably balding head. Nervously she scanned the road for the shuttle. And then, with growing disbelief, Becky followed Monique’s gaze and looked up the cliff face.

  Monique murmured, “She wouldn’t.”

  “She couldn’t.”

  Becky scanned the ropes. She looked for a healthy female bottom. She saw one older woman, too thin to be Judy. She wondered if Judy were up at the top right now, strapped into the harness. More bikers zoomed up in front of them, kicking up a spray of pine needles as they filled the clearing with the smell of exhaust. The biker closest to them canted his front wheel as he twisted the ignition key. His companion swung her leg off the back of the seat. She pulled off her helmet and tossed her brown hair.