Best Friends Forever (8 page)

“I’m stuffed,” she pronounced. The breeze was picking up, raising goose bumps on my bare arms and legs, bringing fal to mind. I thought of how it would feel to hurry home from school in October, with the sky getting dark and the wind at my back and Val at my side, talking about the Thanksgiving feast the sixth-graders prepared, and what we wanted for Christmas…what it would be like, for the first time in my life, to move through the school year and the concerts and the holidays with a friend at my side.

“Anyone for coffee?” the constable asked. He carried two cups back to the table, then handed Valerie a five-dol ar bil . “Why don’t you girls get some ice cream?” We bought cones from a window on the other side of the restaurant—vanil a for me, something cal ed Moose Tracks for Val—and we ate them leaning against the sun-warmed curve of the Bug’s hood while Mrs. Adler and the shel fish constable drank their coffee. She’d moved so that she was sitting next to him instead of across from him. Her hands fluttered in the air, lighting on his forearms, then his shoulders. I watched her rest her head on his chest as he slung his arm around her and pul ed her close.

“We should leave soon,” said Valerie.

“Poppy goes to bed early.”

“Who’s Poppy?” I asked.

“My grandfather. My father’s father. We used to come here every summer and stay with him.” She licked her ice cream, catching a brown dribble as it slid down the side of the cone.

“We haven’t talked to him for a real y long time. Probably he doesn’t even know we’re coming.” I worried about that while Val nibbled her cone and stared out at the sky. “I wish I stil lived in California,” she said. “I wish I could live with my dad.”

An icy finger prodded my heart. “You can’t leave,” I told her. “School’s starting next week.”

Val licked at her arm again. “Maybe we can both go there,” she said. “It’s way better than Chicago. It’s warm al the time. We could go to the beach.”

I nodded, enchanted and unsettled. I could never leave my parents, but I was, I secretly admitted, thril ed with the idea that Val would want me to, that she liked me enough to want me with her.

At the picnic table, Mrs. Adler bent down to murmur into Chris Jeffries’s ear, then rose to her feet, peering through the twilight.

“Come on, girls,” she cal ed. “Time to go.”

Val and I got into the car, our hands and faces butter slick and ice-cream sticky. Valerie ignored her seat belt, curled up like a kitten in the backseat, and shut her eyes. I leaned forward, eyes on the road as we drove, first east, then south, as the Cape curved in on itself and headlights—the constable’s, I thought—flashed and bobbed in the rearview mirror. The wheels hummed over the pavement, and when I opened my eyes it was dark, and Mrs. Adler was shaking my shoulders, whispering, “Addie, wake up.”

I stumbled out of the car. We were parked on the lawn in front of a big, dark house that seemed to start at the top of a hil and spread out in every direction: up, and out, and sideways. I could hear the suck and rumble of water nearby. Mrs. Adler pul ed Valerie out of the car and propped her up beside me. “Wait here,” she said. I squinted through the darkness, watching as she slipped off her shoes and trotted to the front door, then opened it and beckoned us both inside.

I saw the darkened house in snatches as Mrs. Adler padded over the wide-planked floors, leading us to the staircase: the fancy, patterned rugs, a long, oval table in what must have been a dining room, a fireplace big enough for a kid to stand in. She led us up two flights to a smal white-painted room under the eaves, where there were two twin beds draped in white chenil e bedspreads.

“Go to sleep,” she whispered. Her hair had come loose from its bun and curled in tendrils around her face. I set my backpack down, suddenly so tired that it was al I could do to wriggle out of my sneakers and crawl into bed.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” Val said in a draggy, babyish voice.

“Fine,” her mother snapped, “just don’t flush.”

I lay down, trying to make sense of that

—in my house, we always flushed. My eyes slipped shut. A few minutes later, or so it seemed, Mrs. Adler was shaking my shoulders again. “Addie,” she whispered.

“Wake up. The tide’s going out.”

I sat up, yawning. Lovely rosy light, a color I’d never seen, never even imagined, filtered through the window, and yel ow-and-white gingham curtains blew in the breeze. In the bed beside mine, Val was stil in her clothes, lying stiffly on top of the covers, as if she was stil sulking in her sleep. At the foot of the beds was a dol house, and in a bookcase against the wal was an entire set of faded Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew books. Mrs. Adler fol owed my gaze. “Help yourself,” she said, and pointed at a door.

“The bathroom’s in there. Remember: no flushing. We need to be quiet.”

The bathroom floor was hexagonal blackand-white tiles, some of them cracked, and the toilet was an old-fashioned kind with a pul cord dangling from the ceiling. A tarnishfogged mirror hung over the sink. I splashed cold water on my face and had just pul ed my toothpaste out of my backpack when Valerie knocked on the door, then breezed inside.

“I can’t believe we’re here!” Her shorts and shirt were rumpled, her face pil owcreased, but she was smiling, closer to being the Valerie I knew.

“This is a real y nice house.” I suspected that this wasn’t real y a house: that it was instead a mansion, a thing I’d only ever read about. Through the half-moon-shaped bathroom window, I could see the bright green rectangle of a tennis court and, beyond that, grayish-gold sand and the foaming edge of the ocean. When we got back into the bedroom, Mrs. Adler, in flipflops and the same faded pink tank top and her blue cotton running shorts, was making our beds, plumping the pil ows, running her hands over the coverlets to smooth them. She looked at us, then down at the beds, and whispered, “Be as quiet as you can.”

Val grabbed three of the old books from the bookcase. We picked up our backpacks and crept down the stairs. The clock hanging over the giant table said that it was five in the morning, and the sky was streaked with amazing shades of pink and gold. “Don’t slam the doors,”

said Mrs. Adler. At the door, she murmured something to Val, who ran down the steps, reached underneath the porch, and pul ed out two big mesh buckets and a short-handled rake. I crawled into the backseat of the Bug. Val sat in front, holding the buckets in one hand and the door open with the other. Mrs. Adler got behind the wheel, put the car in neutral, and steered one-handed as we coasted down the road. I watched the house receding in the rearview mirror and saw a light go on through one of the second-floor windows. A minute later, a white-haired man in pajama bottoms and no shirt flung the front door open and stood on the porch, shouting words I couldn’t hear. Mrs. Adler popped the clutch and the motor roared into life.

“Who was that?” I asked as Val and her mother closed their doors. Mrs. Adler turned on the radio, then pul ed a cigarette out of the crushed pack she’d tucked into the visor. Val stuck her thumb in her mouth and started chewing, with her face set in tense lines, gazing straight ahead. “Poppy,” Mrs. Adler said.

I sat back, not knowing what to make of this, and watched the road slip by. Twenty minutes later we pul ed into the parking lot of a smal supermarket. Mrs. Adler got out. Val sat as stil as if she’d been carved, staring straight ahead with her jaw clenched, looking furious.

“Hey, Val?” I whispered.

She didn’t turn around. “She wouldn’t even let me say hi to him,” she said in a furious whisper. “My own grandfather, and I couldn’t even say…” She snapped her mouth shut and crossed her arms over her chest as Mrs. Adler came out of the market with two brown paper bags. I wondered how she’d paid for breakfast as she pul ed out doughnuts and bananas and a giant cup of coffee. Had she taken Val’s grandfather’s money? I ate two bananas and a doughnut as Mrs. Adler drove down Route 6, then turned onto a narrow, sandy lane that ended in an unpaved parking lot with wooden racks of wide-bel ied metal and wooden canoes along one end. The sun was shining, the air warming up. Half a dozen rowboats and motor-boats bobbed in the water as gul s wheeled and cried overhead. “This is it, girls,” Mrs. Adler said.

Val and I wriggled into our bathing suits in the backseat, taking turns holding a towel up over the rear window, even though the parking lot was empty. Mrs. Adler loaded her Tab cooler with bags and bottles from the market. She supervised us as we smeared our arms and legs and faces with the sunscreen she pul ed from the grocery bag, and she sprayed us with bug repel ent. Then she squinted at the racks of canoes, final y pointing at a metal one, which we lifted down and set on the sand. Mrs. Adler put the buckets and the rake in the center of the boat, along with the cooler, and Val and I dragged it down to the edge of the water (not a lake, Val told me, as I’d thought, but a salt marsh, which emptied out into the ocean).

Val and I sat in the middle of the canoe. Mrs. Adler pul ed off her tank top to reveal a blue bikini top. She pushed us into the shal ow water until the waves lapped at the hem of her shorts, then hopped into the boat and began to paddle, propel ing us past sandbars thick with bright-green sawgrass and cattails, heading out to where the marsh gave way to the rippling dark-blue sea.

The sun sparkled off the water. Wavelets like tiny hands patted the metal sides of the canoe. Val scooted until she was sitting in front of me, then leaned her back against my knees.

Mrs. Adler steered us toward a sandbar, and when the prow of the canoe nosed the sand, she hopped out and pul ed the boat up onto the shore. “Come on, Addie,” said Val.

We knelt down, and Val showed me how to look for bubbles and, when I’d found some, how to dig with the rake, then slide my fingers sideways until I felt the edges of a clamshel . It took us a few minutes to get started, and then Val squealed as she pul ed her first clam out of the sand. “Here,” she cal ed, “there’s tons of them!” I hurried over and knelt beside her, her bony shoulder against my round, tanned one as we worked our hands down into the sand, me in my blue one-piece, Valerie in a red-and-pinkstriped bikini that kept riding up over her flat chest and drooping down her skinny hips. We dug out fistfuls of clams, laughing as they squirted us and tossing them in the mesh bucket we’d left standing in the water. The sun climbed higher in the sky. We fil ed the first bucket and started in on the second, taking breaks to suck at our fingertips, which were laced with tiny cuts from the clamshel s. Every few minutes, Val would pause to stand up and peer at the shore.

“What’s wrong?” I asked after the third or fourth time.

“You need a permit to take clams,” she said.

“Do we have one?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Probably not.”

“I’ve stil got my money,” I told Val. “We’l just say we came al the way from Il inois and we don’t know the rules.” This earned me a thin smile, before Val plopped back down and started digging again. For lunch, Mrs. Adler

gave

us

turkey-and-cheese

sandwiches, potato chips, and warm apple juice from the cooler. We ate sitting crosslegged at the edge of the shore, slapping at the greenhead flies that landed on our arms and legs, then rinsed our hands and went back to clamming. When the second bucket was ful , Valerie and I lay side by side at the edge of the shore and let the incoming tide push the water over our toes…then our knees…then our hips, our waists, our chests. Final y, we floated, our hair waving in the current, hips and hands bumping as the waves lifted us and let us down, until Mrs. Adler pushed the canoe into the water and told us it was time to go.

We clambered back into the boat and paddled back to shore. The buckets of clams floated beside us, tied to the canoe with Mrs. Adler’s bandanna, our hair drying, salt-stiff, against our bug-bitten shoulders. My fingers itched for my watercolors and the pastel crayons I had at home when I looked out over the blue of the water, the green out over the blue of the water, the green grass and silvery sand, the layered grayblue and apricot of the sky. I held my breath as we approached the beach, worried that there would be trouble, that the family whose canoe we’d taken would be there, that our clams would be confiscated, that we’d be arrested. The parking lot was ful , but the shore was empty, quiet except for the sound of the waves and the gul s. We helped Mrs. Adler wrestle the canoe back onto the struts, and watched as she wrapped the clam buckets in the paper grocery bags and set them in the backseat.

“Awesome,” said Val dreamily as she climbed into the car. She said it exactly the same way the shel fish constable had.

“Vomit,” I said back. Vahhhwmit. Val laughed and laughed.

I can remember how my nose was itchy with sunburn, the way my fingernails were ragged and torn, how my thighs were dotted with bug bites. I can remember stopping at convenience stores off the highway, buying cigarettes and Tab and black coffee for Mrs. Adler, Sprite for Val, and juice for me, garbage bags and ten-pound bags of ice for the clams.

We made it back home late Monday afternoon, after spending another night asleep in a rest stop (Goodnight to the

back! Goodnight to the front!). My mother took one look at me and hustled me into the bathtub, pinching my dirty clothes between her fingertips before depositing them in the hamper. She made me soak, then scrub my nails with a brush she’d extracted from the depths of a vanity drawer, and wash my hair twice.

After

Mrs.

Adler’s

repeated

assurances that the clams could not possibly have gone bad, my mother opened h e r Joy of Cooking and made us linguine with clam sauce, with white wine and lots of garlic, flecked with fresh parsley, served with salad and crusty French bread. I remember the six of us—me and my parents and my brother, Valerie and her mom—gathered around our kitchen table, devouring plate after plate of pasta, soaking crusts of bread with the garlic-and-wine sauce. I remember the feeling of floating in the water with my best friend beside me, underneath that beautiful sky. It was the best time of my life. EIGHT