Like me. Like my heart, which has no desires in it, no longings. I don’t care if I ever act again. The character who has so revived my career in recent years is languishing in a hospital in a coma, and as far as I’m concerned, she can go ahead and die, and I’ll be done with it, with the long hours and the constant pressure to look good, keep my weight down, be polite in interviews about things that don’t matter at all.
This ennui has been brewing for a while, honestly. My longtime partner, Dmitri, a Greek director who swept into my world when I was long past expectations of a partnership, died of COVID. Like everyone else I was shaken by the pandemic, and then Beryl died a year later. Phoebe and I fought viciously at the funeral, leaving yet another hole.
The doorbell, sudden and unexpected, makes me jump a foot. I rush to the door, hoping, and when I see Phoebe standing there in a soft pink jacket, with a loaf of sweet bread in her hands, my heart starts to beat again. I want to hug her, hard, rock back and forth, but an invisible wall keeps me from doing it. Our friendship is not where it was. My trust is not where it was. Even after the attack, our connection has been quite tenuous, mostly texts with a phone call here and there.
Still. “Phoebe. Come in.”
“I brought you some cranberry bread.”
“Yum. Come in the kitchen. I’ll make some tea.”
“That sounds good.” Her hair is cut in a straight line along her shoulder blades, dark brown still with only a few threads of white. She was always going to be thick in the hips and thighs, like Beryl, and time has proved that truth. This shadow shape makes me miss Beryl.
“I saw you walking on the beach,” Phoebe says. “How was it? See anything good?”
“Yeah. The sea stars are coming back a little, aren’t they? I saw a beautiful rose-colored one.” As I enter the kitchen, I point. “And dolphins. They’re still out there.”
She sets the bread, still in a glass pan, on the counter. “I figured you can eat carbs for a while, right?”
I laugh without humor. “May as well. Pretty sure my career is dead.”
“Eh, you don’t know.”
Silence falls between us, and I feel the awkwardness of knowing she’s on a duty visit. Our friendship, once so deep and sustaining, has frayed so badly I barely recognize the garment.
That doesn’t mean I don’t miss her. “Look—” I say.
“Suze, I know—”
We both halt, wait. I fold my arms over my chest. “Thank you for coming to the hospital. It meant a lot to me.”
She nods. “Of course. And”—she swallows—“I’m sorry about the fight.”
“Me too.”
“Truce?”
“Yes.” It doesn’t really solve the trouble between us and both of us know it, but it’s something.
We settle at the built-in corner table, with its views of the wide, open sea. “How are things?” I ask, pushing the milk pitcher toward her. “The flower farm? Jasmine? I see that the book is still on the lists.” I’m really proud of her work, although I was deeply wounded when she asked someone else to write the text, not me, as we always planned. “Quite an accomplishment.”
“Thanks.” She stirs cream into her mug, tilts her head, and looks at me. “Is that what you want to talk about?”
I shift my gaze to the view. “I don’t know.”
“How about we start with how you’re doing?”
“I’m fine.”
Phoebe smiles. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Okay, I mean, maybe not fine fine, but okay. Stable, I guess.” A weight of discomfort presses on my chest. “You don’t have to take care of me, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
I feel the sting of that in my cheekbones. “Sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize, Suze. Eat some bread.” She cuts a slice and hands it to me on a paper towel. I see that same hand over the years—the girl, the teenager, the young mom—offering me cranberry bread, tuna sandwiches, books. “The flower farm is doing very well,” she says, returning to my conversational gambit, “thanks to Ben Thomas. Remember him? He was a year younger than us.”
I frown, trying to pull him up. “Dark hair, kinda chubby?”
She grins. “That’s him. He’s managing the farm. I hired him when Old Man Durgen dropped dead last spring.”
“That’s good.” I bite into the bread, and an explosion of pleasure bursts in my mouth. “Jeez, Phoebe,” I say with my mouth full. “This is ridiculously delicious.”
“Amazing how good sugar tastes, huh?”
I nod fervently, shoving more in my mouth. Tart cranberries, sweet orange in the glaze. It’s nirvana.
“Jasmine is coming today. It’s her favorite.”
Safe ground. “You must be so happy. Odd time of year for her to stay, though, isn’t it?”
“I’m happy she’s coming, but not for the reason.” She takes a breath, and I feel the misery in her before she continues, “Stephanie has been offered a job in London.” Her voice is calm, but her eyes fill with tears. She slaps them away with impatience. “She’s going to find them a place to live.”
“Oh, honey!” Jasmine is her heart. I reach for her hand and stop just in time. She still pulls her arm back, out of reach. “I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head, folds her hands in her lap tightly. “This is harder than I thought. I’m sorry. Maybe I can’t pretend things are normal. That we are normal.”
“Seriously, Phoebe?” I narrow my eyes. “Why do you always do this? Give me love with one hand and take it back with the other?”
She stands, her mouth tight. “This was a mistake.”
I feel winded. Unconsciously, I touch my chest, right in the middle, and to my horror, tears well up in my eyes and fall down my face as if I’m six. It’s humiliating, but they don’t stop. I expect her to roll her eyes and storm out.
Instead, she softens, then wraps herself around me, tugging me close, stroking my hair. “Oh, Suze, I’m so mean. You bring out the mean in me.”
“I always have,” I say, but her arms feel so good that I lean into her, taking comfort in the round of her shoulder, the faintly vanilla smell of her. She rocks me, just as I had hoped, and I wonder if I’ve manipulated her or if my emotion was real. Does it even matter?
I have no idea.
“Come to dinner tonight,” she says, letting me go, but before she does, she strokes my hair in a familiar way. “Jasmine will keep us from getting too weird.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I know you’ll want to see her.”
I nod. “Thank you.”
A pause. In it, I feel our history—the diaries and promises, her art school days and my first movie. Joel, always.
“Okay.” She lets me go. “I have to get down the hill. Come over around six, I guess.”
“Do you want me to bring anything?”
She raises a brow. “Did you suddenly start cooking?”
When I left my father’s house, I vowed never to cook again, and I haven’t, aside from the wild spree during the pandemic.
“Ha.” I wipe my face with the heel of my palm.
In that liminal moment, she touches my cheek. “You look like shit.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you sleeping?”
“No. Almost never.”
She nods. Drops her hand. “Okay, I’ll see you at six.” Pointing to the bread, she adds, “Eat at least two slices.”
Which means she’s noticed my wristbones. “Promise.”
She leaves, but a moment later, the doorbell rings. I open the door, and she looks sick to her stomach. “There’s a dead squirrel out here. I don’t know how I missed it before.”
On my front porch step is a dead squirrel. It has been sliced from throat to tail. Entrails spill from its belly. Bile rises in my throat and I have to step urgently to the side of the poor squirrel to barf over the edge of the porch, which means I have to see it again as I turn back. “You couldn’t have missed that.” I look around. “Someone just put it there.”
She bends over. “It’s cold.”
“It was probably killed somewhere else and brought here.”
“Why do you say that?”
I point. “No blood.” I press my hand over my belly. “You can go. I’ll call the police.”
“I’ll stay until they get here. Let’s go inside.”
A fine trembling has started beneath my skin, and it infuriates me. “Let’s look around, see if we see anything.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She takes me by the arm and pushes me inside.
Chapter Five
Phoebe