After the worst of the toxic fear spills from my body, I raise my head. “Where was she?”
“In the hippie bus. We talked about you painting it when she was with me.”
A twist of panic reappears. I would never have thought of looking for her there. “What made you think of it?”
“I don’t know. I was praying and—it popped into my mind.”
A zing of fury blasts through my sinuses. “Oh, of course God answers your prayers and not mine.” The bitterness is ridiculous and even I know it as it comes out, but I need to be angry and she’s there.
“Phoebe,” she says with reproach. “That’s not what I meant. You know better than that.”
All the terror I’ve been feeling transforms into a white-hot anger. “I don’t know what I know. Clearly I’ve been a fucking idiot for forty years because you and Joel aren’t just friends. You never were, were you? He was the father of your baby.”
“Look,” she says with quiet reason. “You have some things to answer for as well, but this is not the time for that discussion. You’re upset, and very understandably. Let’s talk about this tomorrow.”
But there’s a roaring in my ears and her reasonable tone is more than I can bear. “Stop trying to settle me. Tell me the truth.”
For a long second, she stares at me. She swallows and straightens her shoulders. “Yes.” She sighs. “I’ve been trying to figure out a way to tell you for ages.”
“It’s been a while, so why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know. It was weird that I kept the secret in the first place and I knew you would get mad, and I’ve been trying to find the right time, but you can be so . . . volatile.”
“Maybe because people lie to me!” I step back. Cross my arms. “You need to go.”
“Seriously? We’re doing this again?” She narrows her eyes. “I’m not the only person who lied, though, am I?”
A frisson of guilt moves through my gut. “What are you talking about?”
“Joel gave you a letter for me, and you never gave it to me.”
I bow my head. Nod.
“So I guess we’re even. Sort of. But you must have known when you kept the letter that Joel and I were together, that he was the father of my baby, the baby, by the way, that I had to give up. Maybe if I’d known how to reach him, how to talk about—”
“Oh, you would have kept it. What? Gotten married at sixteen to another sixteen-year-old? That would probably have worked out better.”
“Who knows?” Her voice takes on a dangerous darkness. “Who knows? Because everybody made choices for me. Not even my very best friend was there for me in that moment.”
Acute, wild guilt scalds my heart, and my anger pours away. “You’re right,” I cry. “I’m so sorry.”
“Do you have any idea what you cost me? I counted on you, loved you so much, and all you ever do is undermine me and—” She breaks off. “You’re exhausting, Phoebe,” she says. “It’s completely impossible to please you.”
“That’s not entirely fair. You know I try to take care of you.”
“No. You hold me to this ridiculous standard, but not yourself and not anybody else. I have been in your corner since we were twelve, and you’re only in mine when it’s convenient.”
“That’s bullshit!” I cry. “I’m always here for you. Who sat in your hospital room for weeks? Who takes care of the house you love so much—a house I had planned to buy myself, actually, until you swooped in and stole it out from under me.” I wish I could take the words back the minute they’re out of my mouth, but they’ve already spilled. “Never mind—”
“You never told me that.” Tears well up in her aquamarine eyes, making them even more ridiculously beautiful. “Why didn’t you just say something? I thought I was doing the right thing!”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from.”
Her voice is raw with exhaustion. “I can’t do this.”
She slams the door, and as if the sound has broken me, I bend over, barely able to breathe. The aftermath of terror, the sorrow over not listening to Jasmine, the mistakes I’ve made for so many years, the terrible cost for my beloved, beloved friend.
I collapse on the floor and cover my face. Shame burns through me. “Oh, Amma, I am so sorry.”
Jasmine is sleeping next to me when I wake up. It’s an overcast morning, so I have no idea what time it is, but it doesn’t matter. I turn in to her body without touching her and inhale the scent of her hair. Her cheek is as smooth as an egg, pale and faintly touched with pink. Her lashes spill in an arch below her eyelids. Her mouth is wide and full, and will one day be very pretty.
It’s so hard to love people, knowing they might die, knowing they might not always be there for a million reasons. I have always worried about people being taken from me, long before they were. I worried about my grandmother, and she lived to be ninety-four. I worried about my dad, and he did end up dying too young, of a random soft tissue cancer when he was only fifty-one. Younger than I am now. I was a nervous wreck as Stephanie’s mother, terrified she’d slip through some safety protocol I’d failed to set and be grievously injured or killed.
Somehow, she survived.
I turn over and stare at the ceiling, thinking of the fight with Suze. There’s something I have to do.
Quietly, I get up and open one of the low drawers in my dresser. It holds diaries and letters from those days when we were young. The collection can still send up tiny puffs of stationery perfume, a scent I would recognize apart from any other stimulus. It swerves right past my rational brain, and my limbic system offers me a vision of opening the mailbox and finding a letter or package from Suze. How it lit up my day!
I pull out a handful of letters, pierced by our youthful handwriting, and open one at random. Seventh grade, classes, Suze excited about meeting Joel. I remember how jealous I was, that she had a friend and I didn’t. It was the way I always reacted to everything she did.
Why was I like that? It seems so small and mean spirited now. I genuinely loved her and wanted to keep her for myself. I didn’t want her to have Joel or my grandmother or Mary. I wanted her all to myself—her beautiful eyes and her kind nature and her curious mind.
At the very bottom of the letters, I find the one with Joel’s handwriting on the front. It’s sealed because I never opened it. On the front, it says, Suze. As I hold it in my hands, shame burns through me, shame and a resolution to finally put this right.
From downstairs, I hear a voice. “Hello?”
It’s Stephanie. I texted her as soon as Jasmine showed up, but she was already on a plane. I go to the bedroom door and call, “Up here.”
After a big reunion, with tears and then some coffee and pancakes, Stephanie and Jasmine sit on the couch. I’ve built a fire to offset the cold wet of the day. “Jasmine,” Stephanie says, “you can never ever scare us like that again, do you understand me? It was very dangerous for you and terrifying for us.”
She nods, her gray eyes serious. “I’m sorry.”
“That said”—she sighs—“I’ll let them know I’m not moving. I thought it might be fun for us, and that we could explore Europe, and you’d learn a lot of new stuff, but I didn’t let you have any say in the matter.”
The grandmother balance is knowing when to speak and when to be quiet. “Stephanie, you’re the mother. You have been glowing since you arrived in London.” I look at Jasmine, small and thin beside her mother.
She looks troubled. “Nana!”
Stephanie picks up Jasmine’s hand. “We can talk it through, how about that? See if we can come to a compromise. I have been really happy there, and I think you would be, too. Can we at least try it for a little while?”
Jasmine falls into her mother’s chest. “I want you happy.”
“Let’s see what we can figure out, okay?” Steph strokes her daughter’s head, kisses her forehead. Such love. It pierces me.
I will miss them both so much.
Stephanie looks ready to fall over. “Why don’t you both go take a nap?” I suggest. “I have some things I need to do.”
“Can I sleep with you, Mommy?”
“Oh, yes, please,” Steph says, and they head upstairs.