Stay (31 page)

I knew they hadn’t turned brunch into a kegger after I left, but they’d trashed my weekend. It was disappointing to find the place spotless. I wanted proof that they were destructive, soul-sucking people who made a mess and left it behind for me to clean up.

Joe sniffed around the living room for a minute and then darted upstairs, barking.

A woman screamed. It was the exact same scream Janie let out when Harold Winston the Third dropped a frog down the back of her bathing suit at the club.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs for a minute, listening to Joe barking and Janie yelling, “Get away! Get away!” I grabbed on to the banister and leaned back a little and then forward, using the momentum to haul myself up the stairs. My headache raged in full force.

Joe sat on the floor in front of my closet, barking. He looked over when I walked in the room, and then went right back to barking at the closet.

There was Janie, crouched in the closet in the middle of a pile of my dirty clothes, crying.

“Jane?”

“Van!” Her mascara pooled under her eyes like a raccoon’s mask. She looked like shit. In all the time I’d spent with her, I’d never seen her look anything less than adorable. “Make him stop. He won’t stop!”

“Joe! Dost’.”

Joe stopped immediately. He licked my hand, and ran over to the bed to lie down. He let out a big sigh as he settled into the blankets.

“Oh, God,” Janie said. “I thought he was going to kill me.”

Joe flopped over on his side and closed his eyes.

“What are you doing in my closet?”

“Why did you leave?”

“Janie.”

“This was for me. You were supposed to be throwing us a party, but you just ruined the bagels and left.” She fell from squatting and sat down in a pile of darks.

“Are you sorting my laundry?” She always did weird things like that when she was upset. Once, when Diane and Charles had a big blowout fight, my mom and I came home from the grocery store to find that Janie had arranged every book on our bookshelves in alphabetical order and color-coded all the take-out menus in the junk drawer.

“You just left!” she said, as if that made sitting in my closet and sorting my laundry the only reasonable option left to her.

“You’re sorting my laundry because I left?” I walked over and offered her my hand. “Come on.”

She didn’t take it. She used her heels to push herself back farther, under the few old shirts I had hanging.

“All your clothes are dirty,” she said, sobbing. “Why don’t you have clean clothes?”

“Janie! Get out of my closet,” I said, sighing. It felt too much like the fights we had when we were kids. We’d both get mad, but then Janie would fall apart. Putting her back together always took precedence over resolution. Here she was, married to Peter, mucking up my life with her party, but she was the one who needed consoling? If anyone had the right to fall apart, it was me.

She didn’t say anything. She just sat there sniffling.

“You know what? Stay there,” I said, walking out of the room and leaving her in my closet. “I’m going to go make coffee. If you want to talk, I’ll be downstairs.”

Someone had washed out all the glasses and mugs by hand, and laid them out upside down on a dish towel on the counter next to the sink. There was a plate of the new bagels on the counter. They were stacked neatly under plastic wrap pulled tightly. The coffeepot was sparkling, scrubbed clean of the rings that usually lined it. I started a pot. Then I noticed the turkeys.

All the paper turkeys were lined up on the kitchen table, watching me with their creepy printed red eyes. I had never been a fan of birds. The orange and brown streamers I hung up were folded in small piles next to them. I turned the turkeys around, because for some reason a row of turkey butts didn’t bother me as much as a row of turkey faces.

I grabbed a mug and switched it with the coffeepot, poured the coffee that was in the pot into the mug, and waited for the drip to finish filling it.

Joe stared at me longingly and licked his lips. I realized he hadn’t really eaten since I got back from Walmart. I liberated a plain bagel from the plastic wrap and handed it to him, and he ran over to the couch to tear into it.

Janie came padding into the kitchen in her stocking feet, carrying her shoes. Joe dropped his bagel and ran over to her. She raised one of her shoes up like she was going to hit him with it, so I called him over to me. He sat down on my feet.

She’d cleaned up her face so that her raccoon eyes were smoky and smudged like a
Cosmo
cover girl’s. Her nose was blushed red, but no longer dripping with snot. She looked like a fairy-tale character, a waif in need of rescuing. All she needed was a tear in her skirt and a strategically placed smudge of dirt on her cheek to be the perfect damsel in distress.

She put her shoes down on a chair at the kitchen table, and sat down on the other chair.

“You’ve been weird through the whole wedding,” she said.

“No, I haven’t,” I said. I was shocked that she’d noticed. I thought I’d done a decent job of phoning it in and keeping up that happy bridesmaid/ cheerleader front. I’d honestly given it everything I could have.

“Things have been weird with us for a really long time.” She flexed her fingers out and inspected her manicure. She was playing it cool, but I could see her eyes tearing up. “Why can’t you just be happy for me?”

Oh my God, I thought, it’s so much more complicated than that. I should have chosen my words more carefully, but instead, I blurted out, “Maybe it’s not all about you all the time, okay?”

Immediately, the tears went from a trickle to a deluge. I’d always thought if a chipmunk could cry, it would sound like Janie sobbing.

“I can’t believe this,” she said through a waterfall of tears. “You’re supposed to be my best friend.” She put her head in her hands. “You ruined my party and now you’re yelling at me.”

I resisted the urge to go over and hug her and apologize and reset everything back to square one again. But I wasn’t even yelling. I hadn’t yelled at all. And I was so tired of her blowing everything out of proportion all the time.

“You know what?” I said. My voice was low and shaky and quiet. It surprised me. “You know, you’re supposed to be my best friend too.” I took her shoes off the chair and put them on the floor. I sat down on the wrong side of the turkeys. They were staring at me again. I tried my best to ignore them. “You’ve never acted like it.”

“What are you talking about? I made you my maid of honor! I- You’re my best friend. You’ve always been my best friend.”

“I have always been your best friend.” I didn’t want to look at her, but I made myself. I looked her square in the eyes and said, “But you’ve never been mine.”

“I don’t understand.” She shook her head like a little kid trying to avoid a spoonful of peas.

“Have you ever been in a crowded room, like the DMV or something, and looked around and realized that every single one of those people there has a life? They have a whole complete life that has nothing to do with you. Jobs, bills, family, pets.”

“What are you talking about?” She was too distracted to keep crying.

“See, you don’t know what I’m talking about,” I said, and pointed my finger at her. “You don’t know what I’m talking about because you can’t get over the idea that someone else matters. People other than you get to have a life.”

“Van! I don’t- ”

“I get to have a life that matters.” I looked at her. Part of me felt awful for yelling, the other part of me was done with feeling awful all the time. “I get to have a life that doesn’t involve you.”

“Oh, really, Van? Really?” she said. She pulled her eyebrows in to meet each other and the wrinkle they made above her nose was not cute. She looked like a different person. “Let me get this straight, Van.” She smacked her hand down on the table.

I was fascinated.

“So, when you convinced me to have boys to my sweet sixteen, because it would be ‘fun’ and ‘cool’ ” -she was using finger quotes-“and then you spent the whole night making out with Leo Birnbaum, that was you being my best friend.”

“Janie, I-” I started to feel bad and then yanked it back to angry. “Do you remember
my
‘sweet sixteen,’ Jane?” I used finger quotes right back at her. “Do you?”

“Yes,” she said. She wasn’t apologetic, and I wanted her to be.

“We had pizza in the carriage house and watched
Sixteen Candles
. I wasn’t a princess. I didn’t have a four-piece band. I didn’t have a special dance with my father,” I said, choking up. I looked up at the ceiling to try to get my tears to reabsorb, but it didn’t work, so I ended up using the edge of my sleeve.

“You had me! I spent the whole night with you. Remember?” She looked right at me. She was walking straight into the conflict, head-on.

“It’s not like you had anything else to do,” I said.

“Yes, I did,” she said. “Michelle Macmillan was having a sleepover, and you weren’t invited, and it was your birthday, and I chose you.” Her eyebrows softened. “And we had fun, remember? We wore our matching pajamas and slept on the floor and talked all night about how much Michael Schoeffling looked like Matt Dillon. And Mom and Nat got drunk and started singing ‘Scandal’ really loud.”

I did remember. I could still see them, in the back of my head somewhere, standing on the couch, singing at us. My mom was singing “The Warrior” into Diane’s hand like she was holding a microphone, and Diane was spilling bourbon on our couch.

“I planned my birthday party for us. They brought out a cake with both our names, and I had a crown for you too, and the band played ‘Sixteen Candles.’ But then no one could find you. You just weren’t there. You were off with some boy.” She looked away from me. She spread her left hand out in front of her and twisted her engagement ring around her finger. “And then you left my wedding, and God knows where you were. Today, you leave my party, and Mom said that was all about some guy too. And then you’re saying that you were always my friend, and I was never yours. But I was there, Savannah. And you weren’t.” She didn’t whine it or cry it. She just said it.

“It was hard for me to be there. You stole my mother,” I said. And then I realized that if we were really having it out, we needed to get all of it. “And you stole Peter.”

“He’s still your friend, Van. It’s not like you can’t have your weirdo dinners with him anymore. It’s not like he’s gone.”

It must have been splattered all over my face, because then she just looked at me and said, “Oh.”

We didn’t talk for a really long time. I watched Joe sleeping on the floor. He was chasing rabbits again.

Janie played with one of the turkeys. She made tiny tears in the tissue paper tail with her fingernails. The whole turkey moved. The head bobbed like it was trying to talk to me.

“Stop it,” I said, reaching across the table to knock her hand away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you were saving them.”

“I’m not. Stop making it move.” I shuddered.

“I forgot about your bird thing,” she said, laughing. “Freak.” One by one, she took the turkeys and put them on the floor so I wouldn’t have to look at them.

“Takes one to know one,” I said, smiling. “Takes one to know one” had been our favorite comeback for all of fourth grade.

“Do you still love him?” she asked, after she put the last turkey on the floor, her smile suddenly gone.

“Peter?”

She nodded. The makings of a teardrop collected in the corner of her eye.

“You know,” I said, “I don’t think so.” It was a relief to say it, and to know that it was true. Even though I was alone, I was done lusting after someone else’s husband. I was done chasing someone who didn’t know how to love me back. I started crying. It felt clean, like I was washing out toxins or stale feelings or something.

Janie got up and put her arms around me, resting her chin on my shoulder. One of her tears ran down my neck.

“Are we going to be okay?” she asked.

I sat there for a minute and cried with her. Her arms were so skinny, but they were strong. She held me tightly. I thought about how many times I had hugged Janie and told her everything was going to be okay-all the nights she snuck over to the carriage house when Diane and Charles were fighting. My mom and I would sandwich her on the couch and hug hard.

It felt so nice to be hugged back, so I let things hang there for a minute before saying, “Diane gave me a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars to leave you and Pete alone.” I didn’t want to keep secrets between us anymore.

She stiffened, and then stood up.

“You are so full of shit.” She picked up her shoes and slipped into them, putting each foot down with a click.

“I’m not, Jane.”

“I thought we could be grown- ups,” she said.

“When have you ever been a grown-up?”