Friends and Other Liars

by Kaela Coble

  Murphy grabs his keys, and we make our way back down the stairs. “So I guess climbing these is the drawback to living in ‘the penthouse’ rent free?” I ask.

  He laughs, but he wears an offended expression. “Have you met Cecile? Not only do I pay rent, I don’t even get a discount for being the super.”

  When we get to his truck, I think back to yesterday and how I wanted nothing more than this ride. Part of me wishes I had just hopped in then and demanded he take off. We would never have heard Danny’s suicide note, dripping with disdain. We would never have been handed our secrets in little envelopes like remotely operated bombs. The others could read them, but who cared? We would be long gone.

  As soon as I buckle up, I kick off my flip-flops and fold one leg underneath me. I reflexively reach for my purse before I realize rooting around in it will not produce a pack of Camel Lights and a lighter. I quit before I went to college, just one of the many bad habits I decided to leave in Chatwick.

  Murphy is eyeing me. “Feel free to make yourself comfortable,” he says, laughing.

  I flash him a sheepish smile. “Force of habit.”

  “Your feet stink,” he says.

  “They do not!” I protest, whacking his arm with the back of my hand.

  “Some things never change.”

  We look at each other, and I see that damn twinkle in his eye. I look away. “And some things do,” I mutter.

  We’re both silent for a few minutes after that. Murphy takes me through town, and it’s so surreal I feel almost sick. With its row of brick buildings from the 1800s, hand-painted signs hung in front of each shop; with Barnard Park and its Saturday farmers’ market and its twelve-foot oxidized-copper fountain that hasn’t worked since the early nineties, downtown Chatwick is so charming that passersby might assume the people in this town live sleepy, uncomplicated little lives. They don’t see what happens behind closed doors; they don’t guess at how the boredom and the lack of lucrative jobs and the six months of postcard-perfect snowy winters create the ideal breeding ground for depression and addiction.

  As I drove through it myself yesterday, it was easier to keep my eyes safely trained on the car in front of me without seeing what I now see. The Burger King the crew would hang out at after Emmett and Aaron’s hockey games. Margie’s Pub, and the retail space where the Exchange used to be—it closed about five years ago, Murphy tells me as we pass. After I left, at their insistence, I used to send Shawna and Donna letters care of the store, actual handwritten letters on fancy stationery I purchased at the NYU bookstore.

  I told them the same pack of lies I told my parents during my rare calls home. That I was healthy. Happy. Thriving in my new life. After a while, it got to be too hard, so I stopped. Had I kept up my correspondence, I probably would have known they went out of business. Suddenly, the image of them closing up shop for the last time, without me, wrenches my heart almost as badly as Ally’s call about Danny’s death. Everywhere I turn, more grief.

  We pass the high school, that pile of ivy-covered bricks that used to look so gigantic and frightening. There’s my pediatrician’s office, where I used to love going because at the visit’s conclusion they would give me this weird kind of bubble gum with a cold, liquid center. Nancy tells me Dr. Bates is still practicing, despite the fact that he was approaching retirement age when I was his patient twenty years ago. Murphy turns onto Lake Road, and we go over the tracks and pass Charlene’s Deli, formerly Deuso’s Deli.

  I stiffen, and Murphy squeezes my shoulder, only for one second, before returning his hand to the wheel. I close my eyes against the words repeating in my head: None of you bothered to try to help me when I was alive, when it counted. When I open them, I see we’re passing Hardy Crane’s old house. Neither Murphy nor I comment on this particular landmark.

  Not far after the deli, the homes and shops become farther apart, and Murphy picks up speed as we head into farmland. We pass the old white church I used to feel a tug toward. I was not raised religiously, like Murphy and Danny. Instead, I grew up worshipping Santa Claus and Bob Barker, so the source of the tug was more a sense of mystery and magic than of any type of real faith. The people spilling out the church doors on Sunday mornings always seemed so bright and happy, and I longed to belong with them.

  After the church come the farms and the manure. I take a deep inhale and instantly feel more relaxed. This is the part of Vermont I truly miss. The country. “Nothing like a little cow shit to remind you you’re home,” I say. I glance at Murphy and instantly realize my mistake.

  “There’s more to Chatwick than cow shit, Ruby.”

  I forgot the number one guiding principle of this town. You can only talk smack about it if you’re an insider. The crew and I used to bitch about this place all the time, but that was when we were in it together. The second I packed my bags and left, it became forbidden for me to utter so much as a syllable against it. It’s like how you can criticize your mother, but no one else had better except your sister. Even then, it’s only okay if your sister still talks to your mother. (I know, because mine doesn’t.) Murphy, like Ally, like everyone I know here, is poised to attack anyone—including, or maybe especially, me—who talks shit about their proverbial mother.

  “I’m actually serious, Murph,” I say. “I really have missed this.” It’s the truth. The sensations I’m experiencing from riding around with him are exactly what give me anxiety every time I think about coming home. They’re exactly what I was afraid of feeling: Youthful. Yearning. Alive.

  As we drive farther, I can see the sun starting to set over the lake. This used to be my favorite time of day to ride around, the light filtering through the leaves and branches of the hundred-year-old maple trees. The promise this time of day has always held, the night stretched ahead so full of opportunity for mischief or excitement or even disappointment. Anything to make you feel…something. Now, just like back then, the moment is so romantic it feels sad. That beautiful, lonely kind of sad.

  We pull into the parking lot of Chatwick Bay Park. We’re not supposed to be here past dusk, but that’s never stopped us before. I look out over the lake and remember all the times I came here with Murphy or Danny or Ally, or by myself to let the placid waters smooth out the clutter in my mind from the latest blowout at home. Murphy swings the truck around in the parking lot so the bed of the truck faces the water. We get out, and Murphy opens the tailgate. He holds out his hand to help me into the bed of the truck. I pretend I don’t see it and haul myself up on my own. He laughs. “Still a toughie,” he says.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “It just kills you to ask for help. Or even accept it when it’s right in front of your face.”

  “I didn’t need it.” I shrug my shoulders. He nods, looking at a spot on the lake way in the distance and smiling to himself.

  We sit in silence for a while before he says, “So…should we talk about—”

  “Emmett. We should talk about Emmett,” I interrupt. I know he’s going to want to talk about our secrets, and I can’t lie to him. And I definitely can’t tell him the truth.

  “Right,” he says, his face becoming grim. He turns to face the water. After a moment, he whispers, “He could die. He could have already died.”

  As overwhelmed as I feel, I can only imagine what Murphy must be feeling. Emmett could have died during that basketball game, or on a morning run, or just sitting at his desk at the bank, and they wouldn’t have known what happened until after he was gone. Like Danny. This could be the second funeral I’ve come home for, instead of the first. Murphy could have lost them both in one fell swoop. These people are part of my past—hell, they are my past—but to Murphy they are his present and future too. And they all seem to be disappearing. Even though Emmett assures us he’s fine, that could change at any minute, according to Steph.

  “Are you okay?” I ask. He nods, staring off int
o the distance. “It’s okay if you’re not, you know,” I say. I put my hand on his knee, and he covers it with his. I get a flash of us in this same position, Murphy’s hand over mine on Blue’s gearshift, on the way to dropping him off at baseball practice. I remove my hand and tuck both of them underneath me.

  “Why was it always so hard for them?” Murphy asks softly.

  “Hard for who?”

  “Em and Dan.”

  I look at him in shock. “You’re kidding, right?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Oh, Murph. You really don’t know?”

  “What?” he asks, his voice edged with irritation. “What the hell else don’t I know?”

  I ponder how to word this thing that has always been so obvious to everyone but him. “It was a competition.”

  “For what? They never dated any of the same girls.”

  “Not over a girl. Over you.”

  It’s true. Murphy’s mother, who was no great fan of Danny Deuso, once confided in me while we watched Murphy pitch a no-hitter that she blamed herself for Danny’s presence in Murphy’s life. She and Emmett’s mother were in the same birthing class—so Emmett and Murphy really were, as Danny so bitterly articulated, “friends since the womb.” Their moms decided to separate them in kindergarten to allow them to develop more on their own. This didn’t faze the affable Murphy, but Emmett, who was painfully shy at the time, was miserable.

  At the end of their first day of school, Emmett’s mother called Cecile to report Emmett coming home in tears. Apparently, at recess time, he looked all over for Murphy and found him up the highest branch of the tallest tree, Danny by his side, both boys hanging from their knees and grinning like they didn’t have a care in the world. I don’t think Emmett ever recovered from Danny’s abrupt and unwelcome entrance into his life. He spent the remainder of Danny’s life competing for Murphy’s love.

  “The thought never even occurred to you?” I ask.

  “I guess I never really thought about it like that. I just thought they rubbed each other the wrong way.”

  “They are very different,” I agree. “Were.” Truth is, the two couldn’t have been more different. Where Emmett was well behaved and liked to be in control, Danny was a troublemaker who went with the flow. Where Emmett was smart and liked by the teachers (despite his occasional smart mouth), Danny battled with paying attention and was constantly lectured by even the nicest of our instructors. What neither of them realized was that they balanced each other out perfectly, and that Murphy needed them both. They were like the angel and the devil, one on each shoulder. The good and the bad, the stable and the adventurous.

  “We should probably talk about the other thing. You know, the secrets,” Murphy says.

  Surprised by the change of subject, I don’t have enough warning to stop myself from tensing slightly, which I’m sure Murphy notices. He leans forward to reach into his back pocket and pulls out his envelope, already creased at the midpoint, the ink spelling his name already faded as if he’s been carrying it around with him for years.

  Just remember that all things done in the dark have a way of coming to light.

  “All right. What’s your secret?” I dare.

  “What’s yours?” he asks.

  Simultaneously we shout over each other, “I asked you first!” which makes us laugh.

  When it gets quiet again, I feel the panic tighten my gut once more. How reckless of me to play chicken with something this serious. If he does tell me his secret, it’s only fair I tell him mine, and as I mentioned, that is not an option. If my suspicion is correct, Murphy thinks my envelope matches his. He thinks all he covered up yesterday with the crew was a simple indiscretion between two consenting, horny teenagers, and I want to keep it that way without having to lie to his face.

  “We don’t have to talk about it, Murph. I mean, let’s not.”

  He seems relieved, and I wonder briefly if I’m wrong. Does the paper in that envelope say what I think it says? Or is Murphy’s secret some other twisted, dark thing? Maybe it’s something that doesn’t have anything to do with me. It’s been ten years. It could be anything. He could have lied, stolen, killed, or all three in that amount of time. But no. It’s about me. It has to be. Why else would he be pressing the point now that we’re alone?

  “What about what Danny said?” he asks. “If we don’t tell each other—”

  “Oh, Murph,” I say, smiling in that pitying way I know he hates. “Do you really think Danny Deuso—the guy who wanted to climb Mount Kilimanjaro but wouldn’t even go for a short hike up Hardrock Hill, the one who was going to find the cure for AIDS but failed chemistry, the King of Big Ideas with no follow-through… Do you really think he would have actually taken the initiative, as his last act, to prearrange some big, public reveal of all our deepest, darkest secrets?”

  “Danny was a lot smarter than people gave him credit for,” he says.

  I purse my lips against the frosty mood that is suddenly in the air. “I know Danny was smart. Don’t talk to me like I didn’t know him.” Murphy looks away. “I’m just saying,” I continue, realizing I’m using one of Nancy’s famous introductory clauses Coral and I always mocked, “he wasn’t much of a doer. He was smart about people and, I hate to say it, about how to get them to do what he wanted. He was pissed at us and blaming us for everything that went wrong with his life, and in some drug-induced haze, he wanted to get back at us. He’s just saying he arranged for everything to come out because he wants to force our hands.”

  “Then why wouldn’t he just put them all in his letter?” Murphy asks.

  I sigh. “I’m guessing he liked the idea of us all squirming to figure out how to cover up whatever we didn’t want the rest of the crew to know. I mean, how would it even work? Say he picked someone to reveal our secrets out in public, announce them at Margie’s or wherever he felt appropriate. What’s the trigger button? How would that person know whether we already told each other or not?”

  “You’ve given this a lot of thought,” Murphy says. “And you sound a little panicked.”

  He’s right; I have given this a lot of thought, and I’ve decided to buy into my own theories. I have to believe that Danny’s threat was empty, that in this town where everyone knows everybody’s everything, somehow the five of us will be allowed to keep our secrets. The alternative would be disastrous. Still, I know I sound like Nancy when she’s manic, so I take a deep breath and count to ten before continuing. “I just think I knew Danny pretty well.”

  “And I didn’t?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But that’s what you meant. You always mean what I think you mean, but you say ‘I didn’t say that’ because you think I’m stupid and can’t read between the lines.” His words snap like a whip, and I look at him in shock. As much as he and I have bickered in the course of our friendship, I don’t remember ever feeling such blatant hostility from him. There was a hint of it in Charlene’s driveway, but last night with the crew, he was… That’s it. He’s fine when we’re in a group, but when we’re alone, the real feelings come out.

  “You’re angry with me,” I say.

  He snorts and folds his arms. “I see the great New York education has paid off.”

  “You’re angry with me?” I launch myself off the tailgate, spinning around on him.

  “Well, I know that’s just impossible to believe, isn’t it? That I, the asshole, the villain of every story, could be mad at the Almighty Ruby St. James, who is so high above everyone else she thinks she knows everything about them. Even though she hasn’t bothered to so much as pick up a phone in ten goddamn years!”

  Well, that shuts me up.

  I march around to the passenger side of the truck, slamming the door after hopping inside. I glance in the side-view mirror and see Murphy kick at a clump of dirt and storm off toward the water. I sit
with my arms crossed, fingers tapping on opposite elbows, lips pursed. I know I look like Nancy when I do this, but I’m angry, and I can’t help it.

  A few minutes later, he wordlessly opens the driver’s side door and climbs in, slamming it closed behind him. He looks over at me, and I look out the window. He sighs, starts the truck, and we rumble out of the parking lot. I remain in the defensive position, cursing Danny for dying and Emmett for having a heart condition and Ally for looking at me at the funeral as if we were strangers for a millisecond before she hugged me. Most of all, I curse Murphy. It’s because of him that this is all so much harder.

  When we pull into his apartment parking lot, I jump out of the truck practically before he comes to a complete stop. We both slam the doors after we get out, and as he bounds up the flights of stairs to his apartment, I rummage through my purse for my keys, coming up empty. “Shit,” I whisper as I increase the intensity of my search. “Shit, shit, shit.” I go back to the truck, whose door is mercifully unlocked, hoping my keys fell out in one of Murphy’s angry sharp turns on the drive back from the bay. Nothing on the floor, in the glove box, in the cup holders. Not between the cushions, or under the seat, or in the side panel.

  I get out and dump the contents of my purse onto Blue’s hood, but my search is futile. When I look up, Murphy is at the top of the stairs, dangling my keys over the banister. “Missing something?” he shouts.

  “All right, Murphy, drop ’em.” He raises his arm, and for one horrifying moment I’m sure he is about to throw them with his pitcher’s arm into the woods beyond the parking lot. I get a mental image of how demeaning it would be to crawl on my hands and knees through the bushes to find them, especially as the sun sinks below the horizon and I, like many years ago in Danny’s backyard, do not have a flashlight. Perhaps he gets the same image, because he lowers his arm and turns around to go back inside.

  “Come get ’em,” he calls over his shoulder.

  I stand at the bottom for a minute, contemplating alternative solutions that don’t involve spending one more second in this man’s—scratch that, this boy’s—company. I could walk home, but there’s no spare key for Blue, so I’d have to come back anyway. I could call Nancy to pick me up and send her up the stairs to his apartment. She’d probably love it; when has she gotten to rescue me? For a second, I actually consider having Nancy call Cecile. That would serve him right—a phone call from his mother telling him to cut the crap. But I can’t bring myself to sink to the same tactics I used when we were ten and he wouldn’t stop yelling “Mushroom!” every time I walked in the room for six weeks after I cut my hair short.