Friends and Other Liars

by Kaela Coble

  Murphy stares down at the table, shredding the paper wrapper from his straw into bits. His jaw is tense. He’s angry at me, and justifiably so.

  “But,” I say, taking another deep breath, “Lucy and Michelle—the adoptive parents—insisted on adding a clause that should the child wish to meet me”—at this, Murphy looks up sharply—“meet us, they can contact the adoption agency and they will contact me to let me know and I would then have the choice. To meet him or not.”

  “But he—or she—hasn’t?”

  I shake my head. “There’s more though. The clause goes both ways. If at any point I…we…decide we want to meet him…or her, we can also reach out through the adoption agency. Lucy and Michelle promised that they would leave the decision up to him, provided he was old enough to make the choice.”

  Murphy just stares at me for a moment. The anger has been replaced with something more frightening: hope.

  “Murphy,” I say, reaching to put one hand over his. “I can’t imagine how you must be feeling about this, and I’m sure you’re having some crazy biological paternal surge right now. I just want you to take some time, let some of this drama die down, before we make any decisions.”

  “Ruby,” he starts.

  “Your gut might be telling you to march into that house and get your kid or force your way into his life, but you can’t just think about you anymore. You have to think about this kid, who has parents and a whole life that is most likely going just fine without us, and us coming into the picture would turn it all upside down. And if we’re going to get involved, it’s going to be hard, you know, for us to be on the periphery, and if you’re still angry with me, then there’s that whole drama that’s unfair to heap on the kid, and—”

  “Ruby!” he interrupts me, his hands raised in surrender. “Wow,” he adds.

  “What?”

  “Look at you. You’re a mother. You’ve been one this whole time.”

  When a tear slides down my cheek, he puts one of his hands over mine. With the other, he pulls a napkin from the dispenser and gives it to me.

  “I agree with you,” he says. “Right now is not the right time to make any decisions. We’ll leave it alone, for now.”

  I feel a rush of relief like I’ve never felt before, and my sobs gain intensity until they feel like bullets from a machine gun. He holds my hand until I stop. If only the two of us had been strong enough, brave enough, mature enough ten years ago to have this conversation. What might have been.

  When I recover myself, I tell him, “If he ever tries to find me—us—I promise I will include you in the decision to meet him or not.”

  He looks at me skeptically, then does the goofy face as he tries to raise one eyebrow. I laugh, wipe my hand on the napkin, and reach across the table to do it for him. “I swear, Murph,” I say as my finger makes contact. “We’re in this together now.”

  “My turn to ask questions,” I say after I see that he believes me. I pull my hand back and use it to swat away the remaining tears. What I want to know is relatively unimportant, but it will change the subject. “This might seem stupid after all this,” I say. “But I have to know why you and Danny fought before he came to see me in New York.”

  “Ah,” he says. “I can finally tell you. It was about Ally.”

  “Ally?”

  “I figured out that something happened between the two of them. Or at least, I suspected. It was right after Ally and Aaron got back together, and we were all at Danny’s for poker night. The two of them kept exchanging this look, like they had a secret together. So when Ally and Aaron stepped outside for a smoke, I just lost it on Danny.”

  “Why? What did you care?”

  “I don’t care about this ‘who knew who first’ bullshit,” he says. “‘Original crew member or not,’ Aaron wasn’t just some guy Ally was dating. He was our friend. I didn’t like the way Danny slid in and took over the minute Aaron’s back was turned.”

  I knit my brow. After all the three of us had been through together, it doesn’t quite compute.

  “It seemed like he was doing a lot of that that summer,” he adds.

  Ah. “You thought there was something going on with me and Dan?”

  He nods. “After what happened with us, you shut everyone out except for him.”

  I have to smile. How wonderfully high school, with all the seriousness of what we’ve been through, that Danny Deuso and Murphy Leblanc fought over a couple of girls. “Nothing happened, Murph. Danny and I were never more than friends.”

  He shakes his head. “That night he called me, to tell me you were pregnant, and that you were going to… That was the last time we ever spoke, and I didn’t even say anything. He just told me what was going on and where I could find you and then hung up. I think he and I probably could have gotten over the fight eventually, if I had shown up for you. But I didn’t, and when I tried to reach out when he got back into town, he didn’t want anything to do with me. I don’t blame him.”

  I reach across the table to hold both his hands in mine. There’s nothing I can say that will make him feel better about this. If there’s one thing I’ve known since I was a little kid, it’s that sometimes things suck and you can’t do anything about it. It will never be okay that Danny and Murphy wasted that time, that any of us wasted that time with him. It will never be okay that Danny is gone. It will never be okay, truly okay, that I gave away my baby, and it will never be okay that I didn’t tell Murphy about it.

  “I love you, Ruby. You know that, right?” He says it without looking into my eyes, just like the night he first said it.

  I sniff back the fresh wave of tears and nod, but I still don’t know what he means by it. There are all kinds of ways of loving someone, and it seems we’ve run through all of them. “I love you too. But where does that leave us?”

  He shakes his head, and in that gesture, he is saying what we both know. There is not enough love to compensate for what we’ve done to each other, and there was never quite enough to compensate for our differences. Even if I moved back to Vermont, I could never live in Chatwick again. And unless it’s Chatwick, for Murphy it might as well be the moon. I can’t ask him to meet me halfway, or even a third of the way. He belongs here every bit as much as I don’t.

  “I could never say never,” he says. “Not to you. But right now…”

  “It’s just so unfair,” I say. The words escape me, and I know they are from the most childish part of me that used to believe in the fairy tales I read by flashlight, before the days when Danny threw rocks at my window. I have long since known that love doesn’t conquer all. “It’s just—” I hasten to cover.

  “I know,” he says. “We never got to be together.”

  I nod. My heart soars. Finally knowing that this is something he also regrets is a gift. A painful one, but a gift all the same.

  The waitress comes back, and Murphy hands her a credit card without looking at the bill. “Maybe things can change a little now,” he says after she leaves. “I mean, I miss talking to you. Maybe we can start there.”

  Damn it, Murphy. Here we are, an inch from finally closing this thing up, and he’s got to crack that door open a millimeter. I nod, say of course, we’ll keep in touch this time. But we won’t. Not unless we decide to meet our child. It’s too hard. And as much as eighteen-year-old Ruby would have clung to that crack in the doorway, I just can’t.

  “You know, I think he had the right idea,” Murphy says. “Dan, I mean.” The doubt must show on my face, because he explains further. “Maybe he wasn’t just trying to get back at us for the way his life turned out. Maybe what he really wanted was to bring us all back together.”

  I have to laugh. “And Emmett thinks I saw the best in him.”

  “Really though, don’t you feel better now that the truth is out on the table?”

  I think back to my peaceful nig
ht’s sleep, to the lightness of my shoulders, to the pictures of my friends we took on my phone last night before everything spun out of control. Maybe that was Danny’s intention. Or maybe he was just stirring the pot. Either way, I can’t regret coming home. I can’t regret reconnecting with people who were once my family. And I can’t deny that the burden on my shoulders feels a little lighter.

  Speaking of which… “You can tell them, if you want,” I say. He knows I mean tell our friends about the baby.

  “No,” he says. “It’s your secret to tell or not tell.”

  I shake my head back. “It’s not just mine anymore. That’s how this works.”

  He thinks for a moment. “Okay. Then it should just be ours.” He grins wickedly as he shrugs his Carhartt jacket on. It seems that he and I will always have secrets that no one else knows. No matter what Dan may have wanted.

  We stand to leave, and Murphy pulls me into a hug. “I think you did the right thing, giving the baby up,” he says into my hair. “And I’m really proud of you, the woman you’ve become, despite everything.” I hold him tighter, refusing to let go until I can blink the tears back into my eyelids. “Just…get back to writing now, okay?” he adds.

  I pull back, laugh. Nod. “I think I have some good material to work with.” As we make for the exit, a familiar face passes through the door.

  “Hey there, Miss Ruby,” Shawna says, as if it were hours since my last shift at the Exchange instead of years. The Chat must have kept her informed of my return to town. I do not keep as cool. Seeing Shawna after such a nerve-racking and awkward conversation is like a glass of water after a marathon, and I thrust myself into her ample bosom for a hug. Murphy stands awkwardly to the side, and I wave him off.

  You can go, I think.

  Our eyes connect as he hesitates. Are you sure?

  He still looks hesitant, and I know he’s thinking the same thing as me—will this be the last time we see each other? Probably not. The last time I thought we’d never see each other again I wound up pregnant, tied to him forever.

  Go. I think, pointing at the door with my chin. You can go now. I’m okay.

  He turns, opens the door, and walks through it. The air outside is so cold the latch is frozen, and the door refuses to close all the way even when the waitress tugs and tugs on it. Finally she gives up and leaves it open just a crack.

  • • •

  “What are you doing in town?” Shawna asks. While she collects the takeout order she will bring home to her family, I tell her I was a bridesmaid in Emmett McDowell’s wedding, which makes her laugh. She remembers Emmett as the pain-in-the-ass kid who would come in and point out the racks that weren’t perfectly straight, never offering to rectify the situation. I tell her he hasn’t changed much, but as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I realize that I’m wrong.

  We grab an empty booth, cooling food be damned, and catch up. She tells me she has her own bookkeeping business, a dream she was too afraid to pursue until the Exchange went out of business and she had no choice. Her daughter, Ashley, who in my mind is seven, is getting ready to graduate from high school. She will go to prom this year, and Shawna’s business is doing so well they were able to purchase her a car when she got her license last spring.

  She asks me how I am and what became of me, and I can tell she is yet another person who is hurt I lost touch. I tell her I live in New York, that I think I’m finally ready to start writing.

  “Donna always did say you were going to set the world on fire,” she says with a sad smile.

  A surprised laugh escapes me. “Most of the time I don’t even have the energy to search for the matches.”

  “I hear that, sister,” she says. “Speaking of fire…” She points her chin at the door, where moments ago Murphy made his anticlimactic exit from my life. “What’s going on there?”

  I shrug. “Nothing.”

  She cocks her head, surveying me, looking for clues. I fear it’s beating on my sleeve—my heart, as broken as it was when I was eighteen but without the same concentration of grief and hormones rushing through it. “Old flames take the longest to burn out,” she says.

  “Maybe,” I say, “but I think we’ve damn near stomped it out. Now—”

  “It’s all over but the crying,” we say in unison, quoting from one of the songs we used to sing while closing up the shop at night. When our laughter dies down, she shakes her head. “I just have a feeling about you two. Maybe now isn’t your time, but I’ll be doing your makeup for your wedding someday. I just know it.”

  I don’t argue; there’s no point with her. I just smile and shake my head in amusement. “Maybe a little less glitter than for prom, yeah?”

  EPILOGUE

  DANNY

  NOW

  I watch them gather one by one. Emmett is first, perpetually punctual, and he hoists several camp chairs from his trunk, staging them and restaging them around the fire pit. Next to his own chair he places a full twelve-pack cooler on a pile of grass clippings left behind by some stoned teenage employee of the Chatwick Parks and Rec department. Earlier today, Emmett exchanged the key to the park’s gate for fifty dollars, palming the money and sliding it into the kid’s outstretched hand like he’s seen in movies.

  Before long, the others start to arrive, these people I watch over. The same people I was charged with watching my entire life, even though I didn’t know it at the time. It was a while after my death before I stopped being angry with them. Before I died, I put it all on them. I blamed Ruby for throwing me out of her dorm and never reaching out again; Murphy for hitting me the way my stepfather hit me and then abandoning Ruby, proving to me he wasn’t the friend I thought he was; Ally for breaking my heart, for choosing Aaron over and over and making me feel worthless; and Emmett for always giving me such a hard time, for not helping me when I really needed it.

  In a way, I expected all of them to save me, but once I got here, I realized that wasn’t their job. The living have this Hollywood notion that friends are meant to save each other, but really we’re all just there to exist alongside each other, occasionally holding someone else’s pain in our own hearts to grant them a moment of respite. When I got here, I had to forgive them, because now I understand that they are just human. Like I was.

  Ally comes next, the only one accompanied by a guest. She bounces constantly now, in part to comfort the baby swaddled tightly to her chest in a kangaroo pouch contraption, in part to comfort herself. This is the first time she’s left the house in weeks, and she feels a sliver of the insecurity Ruby wrestles with when she’s in Chatwick—unsure of her place now that she has a new role. Isabelle is less than a month old, and it shows in the bags under Ally’s eyes, the hair free of its usual careful coloring and styling, the pooch that remains from her stretched belly.

  She is still every bit as beautiful as the girl I quietly lusted after for most of my adolescent years. More, perhaps. She loves Isabelle fiercely, but motherhood has been surprisingly hard for her to adjust to. Breastfeeding didn’t work out no matter what she tried, which has made her feel like a failure, and while her heart is fully charged, she is exhausted and overwhelmed by the demanding little life she holds.

  Aaron pretty quickly forgave her for her tryst with me, under the condition that she never again invoke the name Christie Bedard. She hasn’t since, but she will. And he will throw my name back in her face. That’s marriage, from what I’ve seen. Regardless, she asked her husband to stay at home for this gathering. She wanted to say goodbye to me without Aaron looking for some sign of residual feelings. Fearing a hormonal surge, he didn’t argue. Besides, I’m already dead; I’m not exactly a threat to him anymore. Not that I ever really was.

  Murphy comes next, his nerves dampening the ferocity of his usually confident swagger. He hasn’t seen or spoken to Ruby since their lunch on New Year’s Day. He’s picked up the phone to call, especially w
hen he wakes from one of his nightmares, but he always hangs up before pressing Send.

  Not long after the wedding, he told Krystal it was over. He was never going to commit to her, and he didn’t want to waste her time. He did her a favor, but she doesn’t exactly see it that way. Poor Krystal.

  Murphy has been a suspiciously good “uncle” to Isabelle, constantly dropping by with new toys she’s too young to play with, picking her up and making a fuss over her. Ally is confused by it, but grateful for the few minutes she can duck out of the room to take a shower.

  Ruby is the last to arrive, her anxiety surrounding her in a fog no one but I can see. She hasn’t been home since the wedding, but she’s talked to Emmett several times, and she and Ally talk every Thursday evening. When Izzy was born, they Skyped, giggling as Ally held the baby up to the webcam as if she were Simba from The Lion King. Because of all the time Ruby has already taken away from work, and her rigid new self-imposed writing schedule, she wasn’t able to come home for Ally’s baby shower and for this gathering. Ally chose this. She had plenty of women at her baby shower, but no other woman in the world could understand this.

  The crew greets each other warmly. Ruby and Murphy are the last two to embrace. Neither of them knows what Steph overheard in the stairwell. She’s never told anyone, including her husband, proving further that she is too good for our Emmett.

  They speak, one by one, about me and about the slip of paper they each hold in their hands. A secret of theirs I scribbled angrily before ending my life. A game I thought I was creating just to mess with them, to shake them out of their monotonous existences.

  I feel like an asshole for putting Mom in the position that I did. I watched as she struggled over those hateful words I wrote, crying in her car after putting a follow-up threat in a mailbox or under a car windshield, or after hours of trying to figure out how to set up an anonymous email account. (Okay, I had a bit of a chuckle over that one, but I immediately felt bad about it.)