For the Best (3 page)

Tanner was like my shadow accepting
classmate’s sympathy cards, flowers, and deflecting e-mails. He was
the perfect boyfriend.

Whenever I saw or heard my dad he was a
giant echo, repeating that exhausting idiom, “It was for the
best.”

Agonizing hours further in the day, I was
coming out of the bathroom when I overheard a whispered
conversation between my father, stepmother and some relative. In
life, everything is about timing. Their timing was wrong. My dad
was telling this blood related stranger that he had kept up with
the premiums on a life insurance policy for my mom. When I heard he
had provided money to gamble on the length of her time remaining on
earth knowing that he had dropped my mom from his healthcare policy
so she had to go on Medicaid because she had quit her own position
to get better I felt whatever composure I had crumble.

My dad said my mom poisoned my mind against
him. His actions were the real arsenic.

Hanna

Tanner just stared at me stunned. There were
a multitude of hurts coursing through my nerves, but any pain he
inflicted upon me just didn’t register. For some reason he never
saw that.

“Why did you take the fall for me?” Tanner
feebly asked.

“Because I was the one who reaped the
profits from the pills. In addition, I have nothing to lose. You
do.”

“I convinced you to do it.”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter.”

“How can you say that?”

I ignored his question. “You know what the
irony of it is? I used the money you made off those pills to pay
for school. How stupid was that? Tuition should have been the first
bill I stopped paying.”

“The first bill?” He gulped.

He had no clue what it had taken me to
survive this long. “Besides the cash from dog walking there was no
other money coming in Tanner. Mom’s savings was depleted. What
little money I had saved was used up fast. Dad didn’t provide a
penny. Since she died, I’ve written cold checks and lived off a
dead woman’s credit cards. I’m just happy I’m not going to jail.
The least of my concerns is that some uptight school administrator
thinks I was pushing.”

He gestured. “What about all this?”

I shrugged. “You mean the house? I haven’t
paid the mortgage in months. Plus, as of today the utilities have
been cut off.” I sighed. “I guess it was for the best.”

He shook his head vehemently. “No it
wasn’t.” He grasped at solutions. “You can move in with me. We’ve
got room. I don’t want you to go.”

“It’s only twenty miles. I’ll still be doing
the dog business. You’ll still see me.”

“Not if your car is repossessed.”

“Maybe… but with the money I make from dog
walking and all other financial obligations removed I might be able
to keep it. I’m going to call the bank holding the lien on the car.
See if we can work something out, I’m only behind two
payments.”

“Hanna, I….” Tanner’s voice faltered as he
rubbed his hands over his face. He walked over to his bed, pulled
out a sock stuffed to the max from the back of his nightstand. He
reached inside and extracted a huge, crumpled wad of cash. “This is
a grand. Put it toward the car.”

An apology would never come. The money was
as close as he’d get. I pushed it away. “No, you keep that.” I
refused to take the money though it was mine. Tanner didn’t know
that. He also didn’t know I knew how he got it.

Tanner

Hanna was slipping away. My partying was
catching up to me. Girls I didn’t remember hooking up with were
leaving notes in my locker making offers of more.

I was miserable.
Why did I let Hanna take
the fall for the drugs?
I contemplated marching my ass into the
principal’s office and setting him straight. I could excuse my
behavior by saying it was an attempt to get back at my own parents
for sending my brother to a group home. Draw the attention from
Hanna. I couldn’t let her drift away, at least not without me as
her anchor.

Hanna

Three days in, public school was a little
scary. My stepsister practically owned the place. Driving
separately, never speaking, no one knew we were linked by marriage.
Walking between trailers that were being used as classrooms, I
noticed people noticing me, the new girl.

I wasn’t completely alone. My old friend
Della had moved across town after elementary school. She noticed me
immediately on the first day. Her familiar face and bright blue
eyes took me in the minute I appeared in her homeroom. We exchanged
nods, a few words of acknowledgement. I didn’t want her to ask
about our old friends, the ones who’d attended private school with
me.

Somehow, I had managed to get placed in the
same morning classes on her schedule. She made the first move to
rekindle our friendship beyond the ‘How ya been?’ stage.

“Where do you hang at lunch?” she asked as
we were departing our fourth period.

“I’ve been sitting in my car.”

“Are you lighting up?” She looked at me
skeptically.

“No.” I didn’t know if she meant smoking pot
or cigarettes. I wasn’t doing either.

“You want to sit with me?”

I watched Della unwrap a pita that oozed
Hummus from its fold. A cute guy with dreadlocks walked by with his
group, a bunch of flannelled, Birkenstock wearing, stale smelling
seniors. He nodded.

Della noticed. “You know him?”

“Yeah.”

“Friends?” she asked.

“No.” I looked across the table as she wiped
dripping Hummus from her chin.

“I’d get with that. He’s hot.”

I scrunched my face, thinking if only she
knew.

Tanner

Guzzling my bottle of G2 I choked and
sputtered when someone sent me a text.

Did Hanna get snt 2 juvie?

I answered to anyone within earshot of my
position on the workout bench, “Hanna is living with her dad now.
She’s still my girlfriend so you asswipes can quit spreading these
rumors.”

“Are you really still together after what
she did?” Didge whispered.

I arched my eyebrow at the overly worked out
defensive end on my left. Nicknamed Didge because he was always
starting a question with Didja instead of Did you. “She didn’t do
anything. It’s all a mistake.” I lowered and benched two
hundred.

I caught his smirk before he returned to add
weight to his leg press. Everyone remaining at school was shit.
Gossip had escalated from one tiny shred of truth. Someone visiting
the office at the time of Hanna had overhead the word drugs. From
there it escalated to Hanna was pushing, to she was hooked, to she
was so deep in drug use she’d been giving blow jobs to feed her
addiction. It all showed how stupid these kids really were. Did
they not think twice about the “candy bowl” at my parties where
they could pick a pill for a small cover fee.

I closed my eyes wanting the burn in my arms
to deaden my guilt. All I could see was Hanna. Beautiful, amazing,
so cool...she was my everything. Was may have been the operative
word.

As kids, we were just Hanna and Tanner, two
inseparable friends. When we started seventh grade, we stopped
doing sleepovers, she stopped running through sprinklers in just a
t-shirt. Adolescence hit. She grew her kiddy bangs out and brushed
the tangles, stopped binding her long dark hair in a ponytail.
Suddenly, curves replaced flat planes on her body. I found myself
having to focus on glints of gold in her hazel eyes instead of her
chest.

She began drawing the attention of older
boys. They tried to get in through me since I was her best friend.
I always told them she wasn’t interested without consulting
her.

We made it to fifteen without me having to
share her with any of the guys who openly admired her. I was
scrawny, barely bigger than her 5’6” but I was shooting up seemed
like an inch every month. We spent endless hours on the beach. We
were tanned poster children for the necessity of sunscreen.

Her mom got sick again that first year of
high school. Things that mattered to other girls her age didn’t
matter to Hanna. She was a good girl. She did as her parents told
her. She studied hard and did well in school. I know that she could
have had any guy she wanted, but she stayed loyal to me. She didn’t
bat an eye when I told everyone we were a couple long before we
were.

Fast forward to junior year, I was now 6’2”
and athletic. Role reversal…girls noticed me. They didn’t matter.
Hanna was the one I wanted. I loved her, needed her...was consumed
by her. Yeah, I know a lot of young couples say that crap. But for
me it was true.

When she was at her most desperate, she came
up with this plan. She wanted to have a baby. Us. Together. Use the
umbilical cord stem cells to treat her mom.

No fucking way did I want a kid but I said,
“yeah, sure” and not because I wanted more sex. If we had
conceived, I would have stepped up to the plate. I did it because I
knew if it became a choice to save us or her mom I’d lose. She
would have found some other guy and just not told him what she was
doing. The thought of another guy’s hands on her made me want to
die. I wanted her mom to live. I loved the woman more than my own
mother. I knew short of a miracle Hanna’s mom wouldn’t be around in
another 40 weeks, the time it would take to bring a baby to
term.

After months of not getting pregnant, Hanna
began blaming herself. She was convinced she was the one teenage
girl in the world who couldn’t get knocked up. The thing was it was
me.

When my mom started considering a group home
for Trevor, she got all worried because she was concerned the
counselors were lax and sex would be rampant between residents. She
took Trev to an Urologist to have a vasectomy because she had a
huge fear he would get some girl pregnant and she’d have to raise
the child.

The doctor informed my mother that most Down
Syndrome men are sterile. Trev was not the exception. I freaked
thinking even though mentally nothing was wrong with me the
chromosome arrangement from Down’s was passed down to me too. I did
the whole sperm test kit available at your local Walgreens. The
results showed my sperm count was low. The package listed a
website. From there, the answer to our baby making dilemma became
apparent.

Not one person seemed to notice that a
scrawny kid who’d weighed 140 at the end of last season had climbed
to 180lbs. of pure muscle in a few months. Didge and I had been
juicing, taking steroids to stimulate strength and growth. No one
knew, and we swore each other to secrecy. Apparently the stuff had
messed up my fertility.

Hanna’s mom kept getting worse. Her quality
of life diminished. Hanna finally conceded she couldn’t save her. I
never told Hanna why we didn’t get pregnant. The risk was too
great.

Hanna

Today my pack rolled in dead pelican guts on
our beach walk, one of the hazards of living near the ocean. I had
to borrow soap from a surfer and use the beach showers. I told them
they disrespected their alpha by partaking in such low life
behavior. They splashed and played delighted.

Back in hell exhausted, I fell upon my bed
contemplating my existence. In the background a mix CD of
Springsteen classics relayed mournful stories. My mom loved Bruce.
She liked his early work best…poetic, deep, heartbreaking stuff.
Her favorite song was
If I Should Fall Behind
. When the
doctors gave her six more months she told me she wished she had met
a man that song applied to before she died. Didn’t happen.

For the funeral, I compiled classic
Springsteen hits for background music. Tanner advised that maybe I
should keep it light. “Hello, Bruce”, I said waving the track list.
Early Bruce is not light. I decided to keep the music contained
just around the television that would display a video picture
collage looping during the funeral. I removed the songs
Fade
Away
and
The River
from the play list only keeping
Born to Run
and
Thunder Road
. Lyrics about breaking
free took the mourners from tearful shots to more carefree
days.

I woke up from another dream startled. The
taste was back. Not pennies. The blood was either from me biting
the inside of my mouth or from grinding my teeth. The dream of my
mom faded. I still didn’t know what she was trying to say. Reaching
for my cell, I started to text Tanner.

The stepsister I now shared a room with
barged in. I contemplated going to the media room that I often
thought of as the lowest level of hell. Discounting this idea
because there was a chance my dad and stepmom might be occupying
the area I stayed put. Watching them engage in lovey cuddling on
the couch would be excruciating.

“Do you mind?” I asked as she hit the power
button on my stereo.

“Yes, load that crap onto your IPod and put
in earbuds so the rest of us don’t have to suffer.”

I started to retort but stopped myself as I
heard Stepmom stomping up the stairs before she turned the handle
on our door, popped her head inside. “Everything all right
Lainey?”

“Yeah Mom.” Lainey rolled her eyes at me as
her mother departed. She was nosing around my desk, picking up all
my supplements. “Folic acid, some multi-vitamin plus iron with half
the label torn off, flaxseed oil, omega 3 oils from cold pressed
fish. Why would your dad believe a health nut like you was
pushing?”

“I inherited most of my brain power from my
dead mother.”

She grunted and plopped down on her Polo
comforter. Though in his presence, she gushed and often preened my
father’s huge ego I could tell deep down she resented him. “How do
you like my school?”

I scrutinized her. This was my third week. I
shrugged unwilling to respond.