Friends and Other Liars

by Kaela Coble

  He knocks the breath out of me with these words, like he bowled a strike right into my intestines. I turn my back to him and cover my tears with a little laugh. “Of course you would pick a fight with me now,” I say. “Here.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean…” He puts his hand on my shoulder again, but quickly releases it. We are not an affectionate pair. In fact, the first time we ever hugged was at Danny’s funeral. But like the rest of the group, Emmett and I are family. We’re the brother and sister who swear they can’t stand each other but ultimately miss the challenge at any gathering where the other is not present.

  “What are you even doing here?” I ask again, not ready to forgive him.

  Emmett ducks his head and nods. Fair play. “Things changed between Danny and me, you know, toward the end,” he says, reading between the lines. “We kinda reached an understanding.”

  I stifle a giggle. “An understanding that he would sell you weed?”

  He tucks his lips in defeat and rolls his eyes up to the sky as if he’s having a silent conversation with someone up there. He nods decidedly and reaches into his coat pocket to pull out not one but two envelopes, both of them with his name on them, scrawled in Danny’s handwriting.

  He hands me one of them. “This was under my car windshield yesterday morning.”

  I hold it in my hands, looking from it to him until he nods his confirmation that I should open it. I have a feeling I know what it says. I pull out the slip of paper.

  “‘All things done in the dark have a way of coming to light,’” I read. I look back at Emmett. The words are right there on the tip of my tongue—“I got this message too”—but I don’t say them. If I do, he’ll know that Murphy lied and that we both have secrets left to tell. And I can’t share the truth with Emmett before I share it with Murphy.

  “I think I got it because I made up my secret,” Emmett says like a scolded little boy. “Well, Steph made it up.”

  I’m stunned, momentarily unable to respond except for the opening and closing of my mouth and the occasional pathetic squeak. “You mean, your heart…is fine?”

  His eyes widen, and he waves his hands. “No. No, no, no. That part is true. I do have HCM. I did have a defibrillator put in. All that’s true. Oh God, no, she would never make something like that up. I would never let her get away with it if she did. It just wasn’t the secret Danny wrote down.”

  Again, I am in the position of desperately wanting to demand the dirt on my friend but not being able to without being a complete hypocrite. But I don’t have to. Emmett hands over his second envelope, this one slightly more worn around the edges, the envelope he received after Danny’s funeral. He opens it and slides out the little slip of paper with Danny’s handwriting on it, looks at it a moment, nods again—another decision—and hands it to me. I take it without removing my eyes from his. I want to give him every chance to take it back before I read it.

  “Go ahead,” he says. “Maybe you being here when I really came to yell at Danny’s headstone was some kind of sign. Maybe if I tell you the truth, all this nonsense will stop.”

  So I read it.

  I am a drug dealer.

  And I burst out laughing.

  His face falls.

  “Emmett, what is this?”

  “It’s not funny. It’s true.”

  “Yeah, okay. It’s one thing to think of you puffing a little cheebah, but now I’m supposed to believe that Nancy Reagan went from total abstinence to being some Chatwickian kingpin?”

  “Not a kingpin. Not even a dealer, really. I was a runner.”

  I scoff at him, searching his face for the joke. “Emmett. Come on.”

  He inhales in preparation. “A few months after the operation, the bills started rolling in. The shitty insurance I have at the bank has a twenty percent coinsurance requirement, which came out to thousands of dollars we just didn’t have. Even before that, we bit off a little more than we could chew on the house. Between the mortgage and PMI and property taxes and utilities, our paychecks and credit cards were completely maxed out. But our salaries were just high enough that we didn’t qualify for any financial assistance through the hospital. I was still recovering from the surgery and could barely make it through a full day at the bank, so Steph took a second job stocking shelves at Martin’s at night.” He shudders, and I get a flash of him in his red smock from his cashier’s job in high school. “It still wasn’t enough. We had credit agencies calling. It was a nightmare.

  “So Steph was partially telling the truth. I did go to Danny one night for pot because neither of us had been sleeping or eating particularly well. He, of course, was a total dick about it, and I ended up blowing up at him and telling him all about the surgery, the money problems, all of it.”

  I cross my arms, waiting for the giant leap from buying a little herb to transporting drugs.

  “You know Danny always sold,” he continues. “Once he got into the harder stuff, he sold it out of the back room of Borbeau’s. That night he told me his runner had quit, and if I were willing to assume the risk and drive to and from Montreal once a week for a few months, it would pay. Big. Enough to get me and Steph out of debt.”

  “And you accepted, just like that?” Emmett, who found the answers to a final exam and turned them into the teacher without hesitation. Emmett, who graduated summa cum laude from UVM without once indulging in the Adderall booster used by his classmates. Emmett, who premeditatedly hid the flashlight before slapping the mushrooms out of Danny’s hand.

  “No. I told him to fuck off. But when I went home, I found Steph crying at the kitchen table in her red smock, our mountain of bills in front of her. I couldn’t let that happen again. It’s my job to make her life better, but because of me… Anyway, the next day I went back and accepted his offer.”

  “And Steph let you?” This is almost as hard to imagine, even knowing Steph for such a short time. I mean, she’s a librarian, for Christ’s sake.

  “She didn’t know about it right away, not until the envelopes full of cash started appearing in the mailbox. And she was very against it, but my mind was made up and there was nothing she could do to stop me. She wasn’t about to turn me in; then we’d really lose everything. That’s why she leaked the HCM and the pot. She thought it would be enough to throw off suspicion.”

  I shake my head, still not convinced. “Did she actually think one of us would turn you in if you told the truth? I mean, did she hear what Murphy and I kept secret for Danny?”

  “Well, you two weren’t the only ones in the room, remember?”

  “Al?”

  He nods. “I love her to death, Ruby, but the police have been hot to bust anyone they can connect to drugs, and that salon of hers is like the Chat’s oxygen tank. One of her clients lost their cousin to that batch that was laced with fentanyl. Do you really think she could keep her mouth shut?”

  My eyes narrow. “You were the one who brought that shit into this town, Em? The stuff that killed all those people?”

  He nods. Swallows. “I don’t know. I might have. It’s the reason I stopped. After the first death. I couldn’t take it.”

  I look from him to Danny’s headstone and back, as if one of them (at this point, I wouldn’t have been that shocked if it were Danny) was going to break into a smile and yell “Gotcha!” Finally, I shove Emmett’s arm, again and again, and the words find me. “Jesus, Emmett! Are you insane? You were a fucking drug mule?”

  “I know.”

  “You could have gotten caught! That’s a fucking felony! How could you be so stupid?”

  “I was desperate,” he says miserably.

  “How did you even pull it off?”

  “I honestly don’t really know. Danny told me to dress like I was going to work because it made me look more legit. He gave me a car that Borbeau’s was working on—a different
one each week—and the address of a mechanic shop up there. He told me he would give them my license plate number, and when I got there, all I had to do was ask for an oil change. They hid it somewhere in the car, I crossed the border, I brought it back to Borbeau’s, and I went home. A few days later, an envelope of cash was in my mailbox. I assume I got a cut after they sold it all.”

  “To people who then repackaged it, cut it with who knows what, and then resold it to a bunch of addicts who need help, not something to shoot up their arm. A bunch of addicts like Danny.”

  “Ruby, don’t you think I already feel disgusted with myself about that? But just remember, those overdoses happened months before Danny died. He knew what it was doing to people, and he saved some of it for himself, waiting until he was ready to write all those wonderful notes before he shot it into his bloodstream. He wasn’t some helpless victim. He made his own choices. He made the choice to let Roger die in front of him, and yeah, maybe given the circumstances, I can’t blame him. But he made the decision not to come forward. He made the decision to never get help. He made the decision to numb it out with drugs. And he made the decision to die. To quit. That’s not on you, and that’s not on me.”

  I bite my lip, tears rolling down my face. “Danny didn’t have the kind of life that you had, Emmett. He didn’t have parents who brought him up to believe in himself. It’s easy to sit in judgment when you don’t have to walk in a person’s shoes.”

  “But that’s what you’re doing to me!” he says, throwing up his hands. “Judging. When you have no idea what it’s like to be fighting not to lose what you’ve worked your whole life for. To have to send the woman you love off to earn more money to pay for your medical bills while you’re sitting on the couch. You have no idea what that’s like. Just like I don’t know what it’s like to grow up with a bipolar mother or to hide the fact that your friend is being abused.”

  He’s right. I know he’s right. Here I am, defending Danny’s fucked-up choices and judging Emmett just because he made some of his own. And all that before we get to my own past. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I guess I just got defensive. You know, now that he’s not here to defend himself.”

  “You always defended him. Even when he was here to defend himself. And most of the time he was smirking behind your back like the little brother who just got away with something by telling Mommy that the other kids were mean to him.”

  There’s a hurt in his voice, and in his eyes, I see a frightened teenager realizing he was on hallucinogens against his will. I see a humiliated, gangly preteen sprawled out on the auditorium floor because Danny had stuck his foot out to trip him in front of the whole school. I see a little boy, gazing up at Murphy and Danny swinging from their knees in a moment of fearlessness he wasn’t capable of. What must that have felt like to a boy who was, at five, already set in his ways? Like the earth was shifting on its axis. Like he would never be good enough. Suddenly I see Danny grinning maliciously down at Emmett from the tree, raising his middle finger. Whether it happened or not, it certainly feels like it could have.

  “Murphy didn’t love him more than you, you know,” I say, almost forgetting that I’m now speaking to Emmett the grown man, and not the little boy. “He loved you both the same.”

  A deep crimson spreads across his cheeks, already pink from the cold. I’m about to apologize for embarrassing him, when he says, “Everyone has their favorites though. Dan was everyone’s favorite.” He glances at me for just a second before tearing his gaze away again. I wonder for the first time if maybe Murphy’s friendship wasn’t the only thing he competed with Danny over. Maybe it was mine as well. And Ally’s too. Danny needed us more than Emmett, and so he got us. And Emmett got left out. As much as he tried to make Danny feel like an outsider, Emmett felt like one too. I guess, for one reason or another, we all did.

  I don’t want to embarrass him any further, so I keep this thought to myself. Instead, I say the first thing that pops into my head. “I saw this movie a few years back about this guy who could travel back in time and fix all the mistakes he had made. Any little thing he changed made all his loved ones’ lives change completely.”

  “I remember it. No matter what he did, everything still ended up shitty, so in the end he did everything exactly the same.”

  “I read some interviews after I watched it. Originally it was supposed to end with the main character going back to the womb and strangling himself with the umbilical cord.”

  The words hang in the air for an uncomfortable moment, and I wish I hadn’t said them.

  Graciously, Emmett clears his throat and changes the subject. “So you didn’t write the article, but when are we going to see your name in print?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t think journalism is in the cards for me. I prefer fiction. It’s…tidier.” I remember something from the variety of conversations I had last night. “Ally thinks I should write about this,” I say, waving my arm at the headstone, then at Emmett, and then sweeping it around to indicate Chatwick as a whole.

  “Maybe you should. You’d have to be a bit of a journalist to figure out the rest of the secrets. Of course you know mine, Danny’s, and obviously yours.”

  My heart begins to pound. The look in Emmett’s eyes tells me he’s not buying that my secret had anything to do with hiding Danny’s.

  “And I’m guessing you know Murphy’s,” he adds. “Don’t think I can’t tell when he’s lying,” he says.

  All things done in the dark…

  “I don’t know what Murphy’s secret is,” I say, wishing I could erase the edge of desperation in my voice.

  He gives me the same nod. Yeah, right.

  “Really,” I add. “And it’s none of my business.”

  “Me and Danny weren’t the only ones Murphy loved.” He gives me a meaningful look. “Still does, I’d bet the house.”

  I force a laugh. “I think you’re in enough trouble without making ridiculous bets like that.”

  He smiles sadly. “Ruby.”

  I hear all his disappointment in those two syllables. We were having an honest moment, as honest as I can be right now, anyway, and I pulled away. It’s going to take some time to break this habit. I swallow the lump in my throat and shake my head. “He doesn’t even know me. Not really. He hasn’t for a long time.”

  “And whose fault is that?” He waits a moment for his point to resonate and then cuffs me on the shoulder. “See ya at the wedding.” He turns to leave.

  “Emmett!” I cry after he’s walked a few paces toward the exit. Suddenly, I feel desperate for him to stay. I’m not ready to say goodbye. To him. To Danny. To Chatwick. Emmett turns back. “Aren’t you going to talk to Danny?” I ask. “That’s what you came here for, right? To yell at him?” If he does, it will reset my perception of Emmett, and that feels easier than watching him grow up and become a man.

  He shakes his head. “Do you really think it will make a difference?” he asks, but he walks back anyway, passes me, and snatches up the bouquet. “Danny would have hated these.” He starts to walk away again, but I grab his arm and pull him into a hug. Our second hug ever.

  When we come apart, I turn to Danny’s headstone and say, “Happy Birthday, Danny.” I try to keep a smile on my face when I say it. Just in case he’s watching.

  “Yeah and Merry Christmas,” Emmett says. We look at each other with sad, tucked-in smiles. “And I’m sorry.”

  I look at him, surprised. “What are you sorry for?”

  “Everything,” he says, and something in his eyes tells me he’s talking about more than just giving Danny atomic wedgies and calling him a loser every chance he got. But he doesn’t say more, and I think we’ve pressed each other enough today.

  “Come on, I’ll give you a ride home,” I say.

  He nods, slings his arm around my shoulder, and we walk back to my car. And for once, we don’t debate,
or bicker, or dig at each other. We just let the silence settle over us. I look back at Danny’s stone, left behind alone and in the cold. I try to convince myself that it’s not him. That he’s moved on to that hideously clichéd better place. That he’s been forgiven for what he’s done, and that maybe he’s even forgiven himself. And us.

  Halfway to the car it starts to snow. I’ve never been a big believer in the afterlife, but something tells me it’s Danny’s doing.

  23

  STEPH

  SIX MONTHS AGO

  The knock on the door comes in the middle of the night, so sharp and insistent I snap awake in fear for my life. Somewhere between the dream world and the real world, a thought appears: The British are coming! The British are coming!

  Emmett awakes at the same time, and we look at each other silently, the blankets pulled up to our noses like children afraid of the boogeyman. Last week, Emmett made his last run from Montreal, and yesterday he deposited the wad of cash we got in the mailbox a few days after. Then he paid off our creditors, made love to me, and we both had our first good night’s sleep in months. I thought we might be done being up in the middle of the night, worrying the police were coming for him.

  The knocking doesn’t stop, so finally I throw back the covers. Emmett does the same. I follow him to our front door, and when he opens it, Danny is standing there.

  “Dan, what the fuck? It’s two o’clock in the morning!” Emmett says.

  Danny stands there, looking back and forth between the two of us, his eyes as wide as they can be considering he’s stoned out of his mind. He looks like a wild animal in a trap. I get the sense that he’s as surprised to find himself here as we are to see him.

  “Hey,” Danny says as if Emmett hadn’t spoken. “Hey, man. Hey…you,” he says to me, clearly not remembering my name. We’ve only met in passing down at Margie’s Pub, so it’s not like we’re such great friends, but he is at my doorstep in the middle of the night, for crying out loud.

  “Do you want to come in?” I ask. Emmett shoots me a look, and I give him one right back that says, Hey, I don’t necessarily want this person in my house either, but can’t we at the very least get this over with?