Emily asked me to meet her in the bar of a Sheraton Hotel beside the interstate, about thirty miles from our town, on a weekday in the middle of the day. Neither of us had to say that the boys would be in school and that Sean would be in the city. We didn’t need to mention their names.
She said that she needed to meet me in a public place. Public, but private. Anonymous. “No one who knows me can see us. We should probably meet in an underground parking garage.”
I didn’t know what she meant, but I laughed. I could tell that I was supposed to laugh.
“Do you understand, Stephanie?”
Once more I said I understood, though I didn’t. But maybe I would soon.
She said, “Could I ask you one more favor? Well . . . maybe two.”
“What is it?” I said guardedly. Hadn’t I done Emily enough favors?
“Could you bring my ring?” she said. “My engagement ring from Sean.”
“I know where he keeps it,” I said, then wished I hadn’t. What a ridiculous thing to say. It would only remind her of my intimate knowledge of Sean and his habits.
“I know you do,” she said.
“How do you know that?”
She didn’t answer. Could she have seen me through the window when I looked through Sean’s desk? Or was she bluffing, trying to unsettle me more than she already had?
“And another thing . . . this sounds a little weird. Could you bring me Sean’s hairbrush? And don’t, you know, feel that you have to clean it.”
I sensed trouble. Real trouble. Had I learned nothing during this terrible time? Hadn’t my trust in my fellow humans been damaged beyond repair? Did I still believe in friendship? In the natural bonds between moms?
My brain was no longer in control, if it had ever been. My heart was calling the shots. My heart was speaking to my friend. My heart said, Yes. What day? What time? What place? I’ll be there.
I arrived first, on purpose. Emily had picked a strange place. A bar from another decade. A throwback. It was decorated like a fake library with fake books, which were actually part of the wallpaper, and a fake fire burning in a fake fireplace. Like an English gentleman’s club, except that it was in a hotel on a small rise just above the interstate. In the middle of nowhere.
All that fake decor—was Emily saying something about the fake nature of our friendship?
The bar was comfortable, and I didn’t mind nibbling on microwaved baked potato skins while I waited for her to arrive. There were only two other customers, an elderly tourist couple already on their dessert and coffee. The husband went to the men’s room and took forever. Then it was the wife’s turn. She took so long that her husband went to the bathroom again after she got back to the table. They weren’t much fun to watch. I missed Davis. We would never grow old together like that couple.
I went through two orders of potato skins with cheese. I was hungry and nervous. I didn’t know what to expect or what I was about to encounter. Was Emily setting me up to betray me again? Would this be another trick, another deception? Another chapter in her plan to punish me for sleeping with her husband?
I told the waiter I was expecting a friend. I don’t know what he imagined. Boyfriend, maybe, or girlfriend. Who else would arrange to meet here except adulterous lovers on the down low?
This was nothing like that. It was my friend. It was Emily. Right there.
I searched her face for any signs of anger or lingering resentment, for any indications that she meant to hurt me—again. But I saw nothing like that. All I saw was the familiar face of the friend whom, despite everything that had happened, I still loved. And who still loved me.
I jumped up from the table. The elderly tourists watched us hug. Emily smelled like she always had. I pulled back and looked at her. She looked like Emily. Radiant. Beautiful. As if nothing had happened.
But something was different. She looked . . . I don’t know. Sad. As if half of her was missing.
She was dressed for work. The way she would have been dressed that evening, months ago, when she came to pick up Nicky on her way home from Dennis Nylon.
But she hadn’t come home. She owed me an explanation.
I ordered a gin and tonic, though I never drank in the middle of the day. Certainly never before I was supposed to pick the boys up from school. Emily drank one margarita, then another. All the time we didn’t speak, until I finally couldn’t stand it.
I said, “The man who’s following you . . .”
She said, “Stephanie, please, can we talk about that later? First I need to know that you trust me. I’m sure you have some questions. Ask me whatever you want to know.”
Her laying herself open like that made it hard to ask anything at all. It all seemed like such an intrusion. I didn’t know where to begin. Why did you pretend to be dead? Why did you involve me? Are you still angry at me for what happened with Sean? What were you thinking? Who are you?
But all I said was, “Why didn’t I know you had a sister? Why didn’t you tell me you had a twin?”
I don’t know why I led with that, out of all the questions I could have asked, the accusations I could have made, the mysteries I wanted explained. I suppose because it was the first question that popped into my mind.
“I don’t know. I really don’t.” Emily opened her palms and closed them. A familiar gesture, but something was different. She wasn’t wearing her ring. I had the ring, in my purse. The ring that had turned up on a corpse in a lake in Michigan.
“I compartmentalized,” Emily said. “You understand how that can happen. You know exactly how someone can not talk or even think about things she doesn’t want to think or talk about. How she can have secrets even from herself. That’s one of the reasons we’re friends.”
I’d never thought about that before. But Emily was right.
“What was your sister’s name?” I said.
Tears popped into Emily’s eyes.
“Evelyn.”
“What happened to her?”
“She killed herself at the lake house in Michigan. I rushed out there to try to save her. That’s why I didn’t get in touch with you. I’m so sorry for what I put you through. But I was frantic about Evelyn, and I had no time to explain to people who didn’t even know I had a sister. Can you understand that?”
“Yes,” I said, though once more I wasn’t sure that I did.
“I tried every way I knew to help her. At first I thought I’d won. I’d thought I’d convinced her to live. She swore to me that she wouldn’t kill herself.” Tears slipped down Emily’s cheeks. “She did it when I was asleep. And I’ll never get over it. Never. Sometimes I feel as if I’m dead too. I knew that you and Sean thought I was dead. It was easier for me that way. I didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t want to talk. I couldn’t explain. I didn’t want to exist.
“But finally I missed Nicky too much. And I missed you.”
I said, “Do you think that was fair to us?”
“Us?” said Emily. “You’re joking.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Sean believed you.”
“Actually,” she said, “he didn’t. I was right to think I couldn’t trust him. That’s why I never told Sean about Evelyn. About how my love and fear for my sister controlled my life. I couldn’t trust him with that information. I controlled information, that was my job. But I couldn’t control something so . . . personal. So painful.”
I looked at my friend and saw a whole new person. A more tormented person than the strong, glamorous, have-it-all mom with the personal assistant and the fashion-industry job. A more complicated and more human person.
She said, “Sean couldn’t have understood. He was an only child. My love and fear for my sister was part of why I’d had problems with alcohol and pills. She and I were keeping each other company in our self-destructive addictions. And then I turned off that particular path, and she went on ahead, on her own.”
Emily was finally being honest about her brushes with substance abuse—and about her sister. And about her husband. Our friendship would never be the same. There would always be that little hiccup now. That edge of . . . discomfort. We could thank Sean for that.
I felt as if she was reading my mind when she asked, “Did you bring the ring?”