And how to answer that? Worst case scenario, Joy and Chrissie mayneversee each other again. I’m agonizing about that, when Chrissie tugs on the side braid that falls thick and vibrant over my daughter’s collarbone. “I may have to head right back, Joy. But somewhere or other I’ll catch you. Go, be with your cousins.”
When Joy gives her a parting hug, I realize something else. Chrissie is good at equivocating. She knows how to be vague in a way that sounds definitive but that doesn’t say a hell of a lot. A therapist does this. A friend should not. Chrissie could have told Joy she would see her tomorrow morning, or next week in New York, or next month at the Jersey shore, because Dante’s place is large. But any of those promises would lessen her options.
The evidence mounts. Right now it’s circumstantial, but I sense that’s about to change.
After Joy leaves with Margo, Anne and Bill linger at Dad’s grave watching workers fill in the rest of the dirt. Jack stands with Paul a short distance from us, and with the rest of the mourners heading for their cars, it’s Lina, Chrissie, and me.
“Why are you here, Mom?” Chrissie asks Lina, but she sounds confused, not accusatory.
“She’s Dad’s housekeeper,” I explain.
“Why areyouhere?” Lina hisses at Chrissie again.
I answer this as well, perhaps more sharply than I might have, but I’m in a rush to move past the preliminaries. “We’re friends in New York,” I tell Lina, though all the while I’m staring at Chrissie. I want her to know that I’m waiting. “She’s here to support me.” A beat passes. “Aren’t you?” I ask, hating the bitterness in my voice.
“That was the idea,” Chrissie says with a snort. “Clearly it backfired.”
She looks hurriedly around. Then, telling Lina that we need a few minutes alone, she grabs my arm and leads me down a paved path, past headstones and under trees whose leaves whisper in the ocean breeze, toward a stone bench facing the sea. As we walk, I smell age and foliage and ocean, even a trace of honeysuckle wafting from nearby bushes. I also smell Chanel’s Gabrielle, which I gave to Chrissie last Christmas.
Her voice is breathless as we walk. “I know you have to be back at the house. This might have waited if my mother hadn’t seen me.”
“Waited how long?” I ask as we leave the grass and reach the bench. Her hand has left my arm, removing this last bit of connectedness.
I don’t sit. I can’t. I can barely even hear the sea, so if Chrissie thought that would calm me, this plan backfires as well. And here is another memory, poking at me like a bratty child. How many times have I told Chrissie about my love of the sea? How many times have I described growing up beside it, seeking solace in the fact that it is always, always there? These were doors that I naively opened, that she knowingly ignored.
“Tell me, Chrissie. Now.” The warning in my voice is for real. Our friendship depends on what she says. As it stands, I’m feelinglied to and betrayed. The one relationship that I have relied on most these past few years is in serious jeopardy. If there isn’t truth, there isn’t trust, and if there isn’t trust, what is there?
She puts the back of her hand to her nose. It is a gesture I know, one that means she is trying to decide what to do. Only this time, she isn’t grappling with her three-year-old’s all-out, on-the-floor temper tantrum.
Finally, her fingers go to her sunglasses, which she removes. Her eyes are frightened, which is good. I’m glad it’s not just me.
“When I walked into the gym that first day,” she begins, leaning against the stone bench, then straightening again, seeming unsure which to do, “I had no idea who you were. I swear it, Mal. It was pure coincidence that we ended up next to each other. Then we started talking and just kept at it.” She is begging now. “I’d never clicked with anyone like that before. And the conversation had nothing to do with hometowns or parents. It was about the gym and kids and baby fat, and when we went for coffee afterward, we talked about work. Do you remember?”
I nod but am only marginally relieved. “That was the first of, what, a thousand conversations, during any one of which you might have told me who you were? When did you make the connection?”
Her eyes widen, like she fears what she is about to say. After a last pause, she blurts out, “When we exchanged names and phone numbers.”
“That first day?” I ask in horror. Fine. She hadn’t planned it in advance. Still. “You knewallthis time? You knew and didn’t tell me?”
“I wanted to,” she cries. “I really did.”
“Whydidn’tyou?” I shout with a ferocity that sounds harsh even to me. But hell, I’m not the peacemaker with Chrissie. That’s one of the things I love—loved—about our friendship. I don’t need to be in control.
Her eyes grow teary. “I don’t know,” she whispers. “We were at Starbucks, sitting between a geek on a computer and a couple whocould have been our parents, listening to every word we said. You gave me your information, and I typed it in my phone, and seeing it there in print, I realized I knew it. But it seemed too bizarre to be true. And if it was true, I wasn’t sure how I felt.”
I drew back. “What doesthatmean?” If she was embarrassed to claim me as a friend because of the Aldiss-MacKay affair, I would scream.
But no. Chrissie wasn’t that petty, which is small solace in this shitty situation. In place of it, she is off on a different tack.
“I had issues with Bay Bluff. My growing up years weren’t the best. My mother and I were always at odds, my dad was a serial cheater, their marriage fell apart. Suddenly there you were at the gym, my best friend in waiting, and we hit it off so well that I knew I’d met someone special. But I didn’t want you to be from Bay Bluff. I didn’t wantanyconnection to Bay Bluff. Just to be sure, I asked where you were from. Do you remember?”
No. I do not.
Actually, I do. After I told her I was from Westerly, she said she was from New Haven, and I assumed that was where she’d grown up. I continued to assume it even after she explained that she and her husband had lived there before moving into Manhattan. Technically, she hadn’t lied.
Still, I’m devastated. “How could you not have said something, Chrissie? You learned we were from the same itty-bitty little village—I mean, what were the odds? Okay, so you didn’t want any connection to Bay Bluff, but we were miles from there, miles from the people we’d been. Weren’t you even a littleexcitedabout that?” A normal person would be jumping up and down. To immediately click with someone and then discover a kind of karma connection?
“Iwas,” Chrissie insists, sheltering herself with an arm over her head. “You have no idea. But I didn’t say anything that day—I don’tknowwhy—and time went on, and I loved that you were my New York friend, and we grew closer, and you held my hand through mystruggle to conceive and then my nightmare pregnancy, and Kian was born, and I fell in love with Joy, and the time was never right, because saying something after years of silence wasimpossible.”
