Friends Like Us

by Lauren Fox

  “Yeah, oh. It wasn’t like that.” He cracks his neck, tipping his head to the left, then to the right. “Nina got pregnant.”

  “Seth. God.”

  “And believe it or not, your asshole brother wanted to marry her.” He takes a napkin and wraps bits of his broken cone in it. “But she didn’t want to marry me, and she didn’t want the baby.” A ceiling fan clatters above us, and in the back room, tinny music from the oldies station starts playing, Elton John. Good-byyyye Yellow Brick Roooaaadd. “She, um …”

  He blinks, and I finally see what the last ten months have done to my brother, how they’ve altered him, how his newly discovered penchants for self-help books and sugary indulgence have been not the desperate pursuits of a man sunk in his own useless remorse, nor even the wild graspings of an aching soul trying to conquer its pain, but Seth’s futile, his utterly futile, attempts to defeat the bitterness. To not let it win. “So she got rid of the pregnancy, and then she got rid of me,” he says, shrugging. “And I really, really hate her.”

  There have been times that I have thought, I do not love my brother. There have been times that I’ve longed so hard for his absent approval, his distant, wavering affection, that my longing hardened into dislike, into a solid mass of ill will, and I have thought, I don’t care if I never see him again.

  Only now, I realize that all of that was nothing, my disappointment just a drizzle, my anger a cloudburst compared with this, this cyclone of sympathy, this hurricane of love for Seth that knocks me down, leaves me breathless and soaked and clinging to a branch: this knife-pain I feel is his own heart, beating inside mine.

  “I didn’t know that,” I say. My voice is thick and clogged. I reach for his hand even though we don’t, as part of our unwritten sibling contract, touch each other. “I hate her, too,” I say, my eyes filling, and Seth nods and lets me rest my hand on his for a moment before moving it away, and yes, I understand what it means, to feel the pain she caused, to hate Nina: the woman who did what she thought she had to do.

  I saw it yesterday, when I came home from the store. I set my bag of groceries down on the counter. Ben was at work. His computer was open on the coffee table, the screen blank. I wanted to look up pictures of sea cucumbers. Are they fish? Are they vegetables? I didn’t think twice about turning the computer on. I thought twice about opening the document on his desktop labeled “Letter to Jane—draft,” but then I did it anyway.

  Dear Jane,

  If you’re reading this, then you’ve seen my name in your in-box and you haven’t hit “delete.” For that alone I’m grateful.

  I know I have no right to say this, after everything I’ve done, but I miss you. And I’m so, so sorry.

  I thought I’d have a million things to say to you, but I find myself at a loss. I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing—which I know is a little bit beside the point. Jane, I don’t know how to tell you how sorry I am for hurting you. If I could somehow change the way it all happened … well, that’s beside the point, too, isn’t it?

  I heard from Amy that you got accepted into all of the law schools you applied to. That’s great news. I’m a little surprised you’ve decided on Marquette, especially since that wasn’t on the original list. But things change. Obviously. So you’re staying in Milwaukee, close to your family. They must be pleased.

  Write to me, if you want to. I’ll understand if you don’t.

  Ben

  I shut the computer down, tiptoed away from it as if it were a sleeping skunk. I went to the bag of groceries on the counter and unpacked slowly: four bags of pasta, four jars of sauce. Some oranges. An onion. A tub of strawberry yogurt. I waited for the squeeze in my gut, the twitch of jealousy or anger that never came. There was only a jolt of eager anticipation: could we somehow be friends again, the three of us?

  I figured Ben would come home and tell me. I was sure he would.

  But when he walked in the door he had other stories to recount: about the woman on the bus who’d grabbed his hand as he walked by; about Spencer, his coworker at the library who got high during his lunch break and then ate an entire birthday cake meant for Margo, the children’s librarian. “It said HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO A SPECIAL LADY on it,” Ben said, “in pink frosting. And Spence downed the whole thing. He said he thought it was, like, public property.” He peeled an orange and imitated Margo’s reaction: “ ‘Goddammit, I’m seventy-two years old today. I thought I might have a piece of my own goddamn birthday cake.’ ”

  I laughed and said, “I didn’t know children’s librarians were allowed to talk like that,” and Ben smiled at me. And then he noticed that his computer was sitting there, on the table, and he picked it up to move it, carefully clicking it shut.

  Ben peers over my shoulder, munching on a waffle. “I like the way your mermaid is wearing a business suit,” he says. “You don’t usually see that.”

  “Mermaids have a reputation for being slutty. But this one is a corporate executive.” I’m drawing a template for a mural that we’re going to paint in Jane’s old room: her final, colorful exorcism. In three months we’ve done our best to erase her physical presence from our lives. We’ve moved furniture, painted the walls, bought a replacement lamp and armchair from a cheap secondhand store. We still don’t have a blender. But we can live without one. Some absences are easier to abide than others.

  Ben watches now as I sketch the mermaid’s jellyfish cell phone and clamshell briefcase. “She’s in trouble,” I say.

  “Huh?”

  “Her company’s underwater.”

  With little fanfare, Ben moved into the apartment as planned: but into my room, my bed. Jane’s old room is empty except for a few boxes. The door mostly stays closed.

  “I like her chest,” he says. He raises his eyebrows and points to the sunken treasure chest I’ve drawn in the background. “But what the hell is that?” He crooks his finger toward the menacing gray creature swimming near the mermaid, dorsal fin slicing the water, a thick wad of money clamped between its sharp teeth.

  “A loan shark,” I say. A few waffle crumbs sprinkle down onto the table, onto my drawing. I brush them away.

  “You are a very strange person, Willa,” he says. “Very.” There’s the slightest key change in his voice, a sharp note, a barely discernible shift, and I hear, in that one sentence, how things can swerve off course without warning: not that they have, but that they could.

  “Yes,” I say, “well, you have to respect the artistic vision, even if you don’t understand it.”

  He’s silent for a long minute.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” He runs a hand from the top of my head lightly down the length of my hair; it makes me shiver.

  “You can tell me.”

  “I’m thinking how Jane would like this. Your weird drawing. A mural in her room.” He leans down close, his chin on my shoulder, breath on my neck; I can smell it: warm and sweet, like bread. He watches as I put the finishing touches on the spiny ray of a starfish, then begin to sketch the wriggling arms of a sea anemone.

  “With friends like us,” he says.

  I stop drawing for a minute and lean into him. “Yep,” I say.

  The mural template is not quite finished. I grip my pen and hold it over the paper, arcing a few small circles in the air. Ben is still next to me, still breathing in my ear.

  I love you, I think. I can’t believe how much I love you. I lower the pen and begin to ink the fleshy, intestinal curves of a shrimp, its long, groping antennae and stumpy tail. I draw another one, as veiny and disgusting as I can make it.

  Ben straightens and moves away.

  “Not a big fan of the shrimp?” I say.

  “Ugh,” he says and laughs. He turns and heads out of the room. “Did you not know that about me?”

  What do you want for your birthday? I type.

  A robot guinea pig, Ben writes back.

  Oh, but all the kids want a robot guinea pig. What if they’re sold out?

  I don
’t care. Find one! It’s my birthday and I WANT A GO-GO GUINEA PIG.

  Ben will turn twenty-seven in two weeks, just before Thanksgiving. After everything that’s happened, it feels momentous, an occasion we need to mark, if only because: here we are.

  Do you want a party?

  Yes. I do. A princess Barbie dress-up party.

  We’re sitting next to each other in bed, blankets scrunched down at our feet, laptops resting on pillows. A tree branch bangs against the bedroom window. There’s the low howling sound of wind outside and, inside, the tapping of our fingers on the keyboards. I press my thigh against Ben’s. You can have a princess party, I write, or a Barbie party, or a dress-up party. Not all three. The familiar little note dings on his computer.

  He presses back against my leg. Screw that, then. Let’s just go clubbing and get high on E.

  Okay! Yes! But we’ve never gone clubbing, and I don’t exactly know what E is, and neither do you.

  Last year, Ben’s birthday was a month before our high school reunion: before he and I had reconciled, before I introduced him to Jane. He celebrated at a bar downtown with a group of friends from the library and a girl named Lydia who, he found out that night, did not return his budding affection. He ended the evening alone in his dingy apartment, a little bit drunk, eating Doritos and watching Starsky and Hutch on the Retro channel. He told us this sad story on our first three-person date at the bowling alley. “God,” he said to us then, “that was a depressing birthday,” as if he could finally breathe, because depressing birthdays were behind him forever.

  He starts typing now, then stops and sighs. “To tell you the truth, Will,” he says, “I’m not really in the mood for anything big. How about we go to that new vegetarian restaurant, I can’t remember the name, the one that opened up near the theater?” He shifts his body on the bed, his hands still resting on the keyboard.

  It’s called the Vegetable Garden. Tempeh Tantrum? I write.

  Ha. Good one, he writes back.

  He hasn’t said anything to me about the note to Jane. Did he think better of it? Did he send it? Has she written back? I don’t mind, I would tell him. I’m glad. But I can’t tell him that, because then I’d have to admit that I was snooping. Even though I wasn’t, not exactly—it’s more like I stumbled on it. Or tripped right over it, and then picked it up and examined it closely. No, wait, it’s not Tempeh Tantrum, I type. It’s called Soy to the World.

  He clears his throat and looks at me. “No, it’s not.”

  The Lentil-men’s Club? I hit return.

  “Willa.” He presses his finger and thumb against the bridge of his nose. “Enough puns now. No more. Do you know the name or not?”

  Sorry. I falafel about this. Return again.

  “Jesus, Willa, stop!”

  My face goes hot. When did my cute, annoying jokes stop being cute? Tears prick up behind my eyes. I have no arsenal for this. Ben has always been able to see right to the core of me, only now sometimes he doesn’t like what he finds there. I turn my head toward the wall for a second, then back to the computer. Gluten-berg Bible.

  He makes another noise in his throat and shakes his head. “I don’t even … that doesn’t even make sense.” He snaps his computer shut and sets it on the floor next to the bed, and then he rolls over, his back to me. He got his hair cut the other day, and there’s a half inch of tender, pale skin visible at the nape of his neck. “I’m sorry, Wildebeest,” he murmurs. “I’m just really tired.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. I really don’t carrot all. I could shut down my own laptop and inch over to him, curve into his body. I could close my eyes and slow myself to the rhythm of his breathing. But instead I sit here and keep staring at my computer screen.

  Ben stretches, sighs again, arranges his pillow. After a while, his breathing becomes regular and deep, his back rising and falling. Then, in the dark and for the millionth time, I type Jane Weston into the search engine: not sure what I’m hoping for, knowing I won’t find it.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The flower shop in early November is a bleak place. Halloween, with its rush on lurid, not-found-in-nature orange lilies, spider mums, and curly willow, is over; Thanksgiving, a cheery, bustling long weekend, is still around the corner. It’s two weeks of dull anticipation now, two weeks of a chilly, empty store enlivened only by the occasional customer looking for a quick bunch of boring roses. As autumn fades and the gray clouds gather, maybe people are too blue to believe that a pretty arrangement of flowers might cheer them up but not so accustomed to the low light of winter as to have developed coping strategies.

  That’s my theory, anyway, born of too much time behind the counter at the store, staring into the distance and thinking about my life. Molly is in Las Vegas for the annual meeting of her feminist entrepreneurs support group, Businesswomen Against the Longstanding Legacies of Sexism, so I’ve been working a lot of hours and passing the time by making inappropriate signs that I don’t put up: LIFE MIGHT GET BETTER ONE OF THESE DAYS, BUT IT PROBABLY WON’T. SAY THAT WITH FLOWERS! And NOTHING TELLS HER “I’M SO SICK OF YOU BUT WE’RE TOO STUCK IN A RUT TO BREAK UP” LIKE DAISIES.

  Ben kissed me good-bye before I left for work this morning, a lingering kiss at the door, his mouth on mine, the taste of cornflakes and toothpaste, and as he held me a strange, small shiver moved through me, a filament of regret, a thread of something electric and dire. “See you later,” he said softly, his hand still on my back, and I knew that we would, but nothing, to my ears, had ever sounded so sad.

  I’m concentrating so hard on this memory and how that one kiss held, in its peculiar moment, every deeply imperfect connection I have ever made in my life that when the door swings open and Declan hobbles in, on crutches, I’m hardly even surprised. I’m magical! I knew it! I can conjure my thoughts! I close my eyes for a second and picture a hot-fudge sundae, then open them.

  “Hello there,” Declan says. Everything about him is sheepish: his longish hair; his scruffy, unshaven face; his bowed head; the tone of his voice, somehow both apologetic and yet aware of its own appeal.

  “Hello there to you,” I say, smiling in spite of myself.

  “Ah,” Declan says, relieved, and looks up at the ceiling. “She’ll talk to me.”

  “I thought you’d be in Dublin by now.”

  “Well. That.” He shrugs, as best he can while still gripping his crutches, and I understand, all of a sudden, the secret of his success: the little golden parcels he hands out that pass as information, as answers. Well, that?

  I raise one eyebrow, drum my fingers on the glass. “Did you want to buy some flowers or something?” I think how Jane would love this, the story I would tell her, how she would tilt toward me, hands clasped, an evil smile on her face. Is it even happening if I can’t tell Jane about it? I’ve been wondering that lately.

  Declan makes his way over to me, one slow tap-step-swing at a time. He’s wearing the green Trinity College sweatshirt that he used to stash in my closet sometimes. Blood suddenly rushes from my head, or to my stomach, or near my pancreas; somewhere, inside me, blood is rushing like a river when it should be, I don’t know, rolling gently like a stream. Declan! How is it that we can live in this world, love people, and then say good-bye to them?

  When he reaches the counter, he’s breathing hard. He stabilizes himself for a second and then looks at me. There’s a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, on the skin I used to touch, and I realize how much this little visit is costing him. “As you can see, I’ve a broken ankle,” he says with another half shrug.

  “Let me get you a chair.”

  “No.” He raises one shoulder. All of his gestures are newly confined to his upper arms. “I’ll be on my way in a moment.” On me way.

  “Your accent’s gotten thicker.”

  “Well, it does when I’m nervous.”

  “I thought you’d be long gone by now,” I say, bringing the conversation back around to Well. That.

  Declan pauses
and adjusts himself. “No, not gone yet.” He looks away from me with a skittish dart of his eyes, glances at the back wall, then down at the counter. “The thing is, after you, after we … I, I met someone.”

  Is he here to confess? Is that it? Did he think he needed to break the devastating news to me in person? I cover my face with my hands and pretend to sob. Ooooowaaaahhhh! and then I peek out through my fingers to enjoy the stunned horror on his face, watching as it shifts, in a quick minute, to relief, to Declan’s customary good humor. “Willa!”

  “Hi!”

  “Well, I didn’t know. How was I to know? We haven’t spoken! You kicked me out, you’ll remember.”

  I nod, thinking of the camping trip, of the sharp, surprising pain of his rejection. “So, you met someone.”

  “Yes. Well, and as a matter of fact, that’s over.”

  “You’re not here to—”

  “No! I mean, not that I wouldn’t. And now that you mention it, if you’re interested …” He winks.

  “Maybe just a quickie in the storeroom,” I say, my hands on my hips. “I’ve always had a thing for men on crutches.”

  “Right,” he says, winking again. “I’ll get to my point.” And then he just stands there, in front of me, for a full thirty seconds, until I start to think I’m the one who’s supposed to say something. “Okay,” he says finally. “Well, it’s come to my attention that I may behave, in certain situations, with women … I may … I may not, ah …” He puffs out his cheeks and lets out a long, whooshing sigh. “I may be, well, you know, just … I don’t know.” He stops abruptly and looks at me with big, hopeful, puppy dog eyes.

  “Wow.”

  “I was in a minor bicycle accident,” he says. “You Americans really ought to drive on the left, as God intended. Anyway, I’m fine. But I broke my ankle, and Emma, lovely girl, that’s her name, Emma, she wanted to care for me, to nurse me back to health.”

  “So you broke up with her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s understandable.”