Second Chance Friends (14 page)

“I tackled you,” Melinda said.

“I know you tackled me. I damn near bit my tongue off.”

“But you're okay?”

Maddie finally turned to Melinda then—head only, the rest of her body still stiff and frozen. “No, I've already told you that.”

“I mean, you're not hurt? The baby's not hurt?”

Maddie rolled her eyes and went back to her original position. “The baby is fine, unfortunately,” she said. “And, unfortunately, so am I. Although I do present some challenges for my doctors, who are pretty sure I need every antidepressant, antianxiety, antipsychotic, anti-me medicine ever made.”

“They're probably right. You were trying to kill yourself. That's not okay. You need meds.”

She shook her head. “If I'm going to be forced to live this life and have this baby, I'm not going to take any chances with it. I'm alone here. I can't raise a kid with problems on top of that.”

“Stepping out into the middle of rush hour traffic is a hell of a chance, don't you think? There are meds that are perfectly safe during pregnancy. A lot safer than depression.”

“No.”

Melinda leaned forward so she could better see Maddie's face, not that it had changed any. “Maddie, you can't just go on like this.”

“I said no. Michael wouldn't have wanted it.”

“Yes, he would have wanted you to be safe. He would have wanted your baby to be safe.”

Maddie sprang out of her chair so quickly, Melinda actually jumped. The blanket that had been covering Maddie shucked off, and it was then that Melinda could see that
Maddie had been wearing only underwear with her coat. She was barefoot as well.

“How would you know what Michael would have wanted?” she screamed. Melinda could see Helen's form appear at the sliding glass door. “You didn't know him. Not for one second. He was already dead before you even got to the car, wasn't he?”

A memory pressed in on Melinda, of Michael Routh as he had been when she'd arrived at the car. She'd been standing on the passenger side—miles away from him, it seemed—and had been so fixed on getting Maddie out, she'd barely noticed him. But she noticed the blood. She noticed the way she could hear it fall in heavy droplets—
pat pat pat
—against the cloth roof liner. She noticed the sounds that were coming from him—rattling, gasping sounds, and then a final gurgle that she knew from experience was a very bad sound.

She should have been over there. She should have been on Michael's side, helping him. She was the only one trained to do it. Karen had stood there and watched him die; Melinda might have been able to prevent it, if she'd been able to find where all the blood was coming from.

This was the first she was able to articulate, even to just herself, what had been bothering her since the crash. She was born to help, to fix, and yet she'd watched a man die while wasting her time trying to unbuckle the seat belt of someone who was sure to survive.

It was just more proof that something was wrong. She was all wrong. She was not fit to be a mother, or a wife, or
even the woman sitting here lecturing Maddie Routh about depression. Maybe she was the one who needed help. Maybe she was the one who needed meds.

“He was, wasn't he?” Maddie repeated. Foamy spit had collected in the corners of her mouth, and her legs were shivering, but still she made no move to cover up. “Dead as the proverbial doornail.”

“Yes,” Melinda said. “He was gone.” It was a lie, but it felt like a merciful one. If she didn't do anything to save him, the least she could do was save Maddie from the pain of knowing he suffered, even if for only a very short time.

“That's what I thought,” Maddie said bitterly. “You didn't know him, so how could you possibly know what he would have wanted for me and our baby? And what does it matter now anyway? He's not here. I'm stuck with this all by myself, so I might as well make the decisions and I say no. I don't want to be drugged up. I don't want to feel better.”

“Why wouldn't you want to feel better?”

“Because I don't deserve to. It's unfair. I deserve to feel like this.”

“You don't deserve that,” Melinda said, standing. “Don't say that. You've been through so much.”

“I deserve to be dead!” Maddie shrieked.

Helen opened the sliding door and stepped out, looking concerned. “Maddie, you should put that blanket back on,” she said in a pleading voice. Unsure. Melinda added this to her list of the potential atrocities of motherhood—moments when your child doesn't die, but desperately wants to.

Maddie stared at Melinda for so long she started to feel
uncomfortable, and then Maddie slowly bent and picked up the blanket. She wrapped it around herself loosely, most of one leg still bare to the cold November air.

“What do you want from me? What do I have to do to make you leave me alone?” she asked.

Melinda thought about it. She licked her lips. “Live,” she said. “You have to live.”

Maddie loosed a quick snort of laughter. “If that's what you call this,” she said, “then great. I'm living. You can leave now.”

Melinda pulled her own jacket tighter around herself and started toward the door.

“You've done your good deed,” she heard from behind her back. She stopped, but didn't turn. And, when Maddie Routh didn't follow it up with anything else, she moved on.

If it was such a good deed, why was she leaving feeling so bad?

J
oanna hadn't expected it to feel so good to come home on Thanksgiving Day.

She'd been avoiding her parents for so long, she was almost afraid to come around. But her mom had become overwrought when Joanna had made noises like she might not make it on Turkey Day, and so she'd given in.

It had been the opposite of what she'd feared. It had been warm and accepting and the food had been delicious. Her aunt Francis had plied her with glass after glass of wine and had asked her zero questions about her life. Her mother had been so happy to see her, she didn't say a word about the months she'd been MIA.

And, of course, they'd all loved Stephen, who was charming and kind and brought her mother a fall bouquet—
rust-colored sunflowers and orange spray roses. He had helped Joanna's father carve the turkey and had washed the pots and pans after dinner and was stunningly, annoyingly perfect.

They'd been making it to Sunday dinners ever since.

And now here Joanna was, seated at her mother's table on a Thursday afternoon, just days away from Christmas, picking at a beautiful chicken salad that her mother had “thrown together” out of leftovers, feeling her gut twist with dread and guilt.

Feeling the
Venus in Fur
ticket she'd been given earlier that day practically burning through her pocket and into her hip.

“So how is Stephen?” Joanna's mom asked, curling herself into a kitchen chair the way she curled into every chair—legs folded into pretzel-like contortions, house slippers dangling at odd angles.

“Fine,” Joanna answered. She didn't want to talk about Stephen. She felt too wretched to talk about him.

“Just fine?” her mother asked. “Is something wrong?”

Joanna felt twelve again, her mother joining her for an after-school snack and a manipulative grilling session, where Joanna began by feeling like she was just answering her mother's innocent questions but ended feeling as if she'd betrayed all her friends by spilling their juiciest secrets. Her mother was a master of wheedling information out of people.

“Not really,” Joanna answered. She speared a piece of chicken and poked it into her mouth. It tasted like the
refrigerator—she'd always hated the flavor of leftover chicken. “Everything's fine.”

The truth was, they'd been fighting. Well, not Stephen. It was nearly impossible to get Stephen to fight over anything. More like Joanna had been picking fights. Had been picking at him, pointing out his every flaw, and even some that she'd conjured just to have something to pick at. She'd begun to see their relationship as something of an old scab—dangling and dangerous, ready to be ripped away. Yet she couldn't quite pinpoint what was wrong with it.

He was kind and generous and they had so much in common. They were still the best friends they'd always been, and in some ways, Joanna felt as if nobody would ever know her as deeply as Stephen did.

But there was something absent. She missed Sutton. Her confusion grew clearer every day. Stephen could never fully give her what she wanted. They were destined to always be at a polite distance that only she could feel. She'd begun to regret coming on to him. She'd begun to resent herself for having done it. So cliché. So tired.

“Not really? Everything's fine?” her mother repeated. “Well, that doesn't sound great. What's wrong? Did he cheat?” Joanna put her fork down impatiently. “Did you cheat?”

“No, Mom, nobody has cheated on anyone. There's nothing wrong.”

Her mother continued to eat, shoveling in chicken as if there were nothing awkward between them, but Joanna couldn't make herself eat any more. She pushed her chair
away from the table miserably, stretched her legs out in front of her.

“Joanna, you know I can tell when there's something wrong with you. I'm your mother.”

“I just don't want to talk about it,” Joanna said, thinking,
More like,
can't
talk about it.
“It's fine. We're fine.”

Her mother folded up the cloth napkin that had been in her lap and daintily—a little superiorly, Joanna thought—laid it on the table next to her plate. “You know what I noticed the last time you two were here?” she asked.

Joanna didn't answer, but flicked her eyes upward, impatient, nervous. Vanda Jordan, the leading lady in
Venus in Fur
, was said to carry the play. Desperate, coarse, charming, sexy, bold. She would spend some of her time onstage stripped to lingerie. She would seduce her opposite—a character named Thomas Novachek.
Kiss my foot,
she was meant to say at one point, flinging aside her filmy white gown to reveal a black leather high-heeled boot. Joanna had learned, through Rhyan Singleton, another of the Hot Box girls, that Sutton had scored the role of Vanda. And Rhyan had given Joanna a ticket. Having the ticket in her pocket made her breath feel shallow.

Was this what her mother had seen the last time she and Stephen were there?

“Do you know?” her mother prompted.

Joanna shrugged, morphing, as she always did when her mother started to irritate her, into an insolent preteen. “No idea. I had spinach in my teeth?”

“Don't be obtuse, Joanna May. I saw Stephen pining
over you with hearts in his eyeballs. You could have ordered him to lick the bottom of your shoe and he would have bent to his knee.”
Kiss my foot!
“He is in love with you, Joanna.” Her mother leaned forward and poked the table with a fingernail. “I can see it plain as day. But I don't see hearts in your eyes, honey. I see something else.”

Joanna lifted her eyes to meet her mother's, daring her to see, begging her to.
Please,
she thought,
please tell me that you see in me what I do. Please make me say it out loud. Or, better, say it for me.

“What do you see?” she finally asked, through numb lips.

Her mother shook her head, biting her lower lip, thinking. “I don't know,” she said. “Fear, maybe? Reluctance? Are you afraid of falling in love? Or just afraid of falling in love with him?”

Joanna felt tears spring to her eyes. It was not what she'd hoped her mother would say, yet the woman was surprisingly close.

“Mom, it's not love,” she said. “We've only been together a couple months.”

“Maybe it's not for you,” her mom said, picking up and unfolding her napkin, spreading it neatly across her lap. She grabbed her fork and began eating again. “But I can see it in him. You mark my words.” She pointed at Joanna's plate with her fork. “Eat something. You're getting so thin.”

“I've been eating healthy,” Joanna said. She caught a knowing look from her mother. “Not for him,” she added, “so don't get excited.”
He couldn't be farther from the reason,
she added internally.

“Well, I don't see what could possibly be wrong with him. Why wouldn't you want to fall in love with such a sweet guy? What am I missing?”

Again, Joanna thought of the ticket in her pocket, of the beret resting on Sutton's head, of the way the makeup tubes and vials pressed against her hip as she fell under the weight of Alyria in the dressing room.

“You're not missing anything,” Joanna said. “He's my best friend. I love him.”

All true statements. Yet her mother chewed her chicken salad slowly, squinting at Joanna with her head tilted to one side, unconvinced.

•   •   •

The set of
Venus in Fur
was stark. Whitewashed brick walls all around, a singular desk off to one side—messy, covered with papers and foam coffee cups. A writer's desk. Along the back wall, two chairs, empty, waiting for auditions that would never happen. In center stage, a tattered chaise lounge—the only prop necessary for the audition of the play.

Nothing sexy here, yet Joanna couldn't help but feel the tingle of anticipation. Somewhere backstage was Sutton. Somewhere existed black leather thigh-high boots that were meant to be zipped over her silky legs—
kiss my foot!
—and somewhere in the hushed excitement of the darkened backstage area, Sutton's shoulders glittered with lotion and makeup. No, nothing sexy about the unadorned stage as it was now; the sexiness was in what Joanna knew lay ahead.

She sank into her folding chair, watching the couples
stream in, and tried to block out her mother's words from earlier in the day. She had been unable to tell whether the woman could see what was really going on or whether she actually thought Joanna was being obstinate about Stephen, afraid to love him for some unknown reason. She'd sat there miserably, pushing the chicken salad around on her plate and listening as her mother hopped from topic to topic—Aunt Irene's colonoscopy, cousin Samara's new baby, her father's new golfing habit—gingerly, as if avoiding something. But damned if Joanna could figure out what topic was being avoided exactly.

By the time she'd left the house, she'd already been well into berating herself for her inability to tell even her own mother the truth. If anyone deserved to know, shouldn't it be the woman who'd raised her? Didn't she believe in her mother's unconditional love? She supposed that was the worst part about being confused—you didn't want to find out how many unconditional loves had conditions that you couldn't live up to after all.

She honestly didn't know what would happen with Stephen. She loved him. She did. And she still felt something when they made love. But it was a hollow something. Or maybe she was so messed up in the head that she didn't even know what real love felt like anymore. Maybe she'd worked on closing herself down for so long, she'd forgotten how to open up again.

She couldn't imagine ever breaking up with Stephen. She needed him for too many things. She would miss him terribly. She would probably want to die without him.

Wasn't that love?

Yet the idea of never breaking up with him made her chest ache. And when she sat in the audience at the tiny Trimbull Theater, watching all the happy couples filing in, she felt so isolated. Stephen would have come with her. He loved the theater—it was one of the millions of interests they shared. In fact, he would probably be hurt to find out that she'd gone without him. So why hadn't she brought him? Why wasn't she walking in with her fingers looped through his?

She knew why. She just hated admitting it.

The lights dimmed and the play started, and immediately all thoughts went out of Joanna's head. It was the intoxication of the theater itself along with the adrenaline of finally seeing Sutton again.

The actor playing Thomas Novachek was short, dark-haired, stocky. Not very attractive, Joanna was happy to see. He had an intensity around his eyebrows, something that bespoke a perfectionism that would make him a horrible leading man to play off. He would be the kind who would passive-aggressively toss barbs at you after a rehearsal because you'd run over his line or stood in his light or any of a million other imagined infractions. The kind of leading man who had a reputation. The kind that everyone mocked at after-performance parties over beers and glasses of Crown and Coke.

Thomas Novachek stormed the stage and bemoaned not being able to find the right actress to play the role of Wanda von Dunayev, when suddenly there she was,
bursting into the room like a thunderclap. Sutton Harris as Vanda Jordan—disheveled, pushy, loud. Dear God, she was perfect.

Joanna closed her eyes and just listened for a moment. The sound of Sutton's voice both calmed and exhilarated her. She longed to be on the stage with them. Scratch that—she longed to be on the stage
instead
of that persnickety leading man. Wouldn't that turn
Venus in Fur
, with its breathy BDSM undertones, on its head?

She opened her eyes and slipped into Sutton's voice, letting it carry her, float her above the theater. She felt in that moment the same way she did when mesmerized by Stephen's touch. The same feeling of caress, the same feeling of guilt, the same feeling of being torn in two.

Sutton was amazing. Sultry and funny and breathtaking. The audience rode the play through her—laughing and nodding their heads and holding their breath. The play could have gone on forever and still it would have felt like only moments to Joanna. She was the first to jump to her feet for curtain call. She could tell by the extra crook in one corner of Sutton's mouth that she had seen her.

When the curtain fell, Joanna was unsure what to do. Go along with the tide, let herself be carried out of the theater on the chatter of all those happy couples, or stick around, hope to find her way back to the makeup room?

In the end, it hadn't been up to her. Sutton popped through the curtain before the audience had even cleared out. She trotted down the stage steps and made her way over to Joanna.

“I didn't know you were coming,” she said. “What'd you think?”

“So good,” Joanna said. “Really, you were amazing.”

Sutton clasped her hands in front of her belly and hopped on her toes, like an excited child. “Really? Thank you. It means so much coming from you.”

“I knew you would be, though. That's why I came.”
Well, not entirely why,
a tiny voice inside Joanna's mind corrected, but she shoved that voice aside.

“We miss you,” Sutton said. “Theo is backstage. I should get him.”

“No, no,” Joanna said. “I have to get going pretty soon anyway.”

Sutton's face fell. “I was sort of hoping you'd come out with us tonight,” she said. “I'd love to have drinks with you.” She reached out and brushed Joanna's arms with her fingers as she said this, sending spikes of pleasure and nostalgia through Joanna. A fantasy of sitting at a high-top table, toasting Vanda Jordan—
kiss my foot!
—shuddered through her before she could shut it down. Stephen would be coming home from work. He would be waiting for her to call. Maybe even waiting in her apartment, the “guest bedroom” that only he had ever slept in a mere formality at this point.