Friends Forever (6 page)

“So is he going to jail?”

“No. Not this time anyway. But if he screws up again, he probably will. I don’t know what’s wrong with him, he’s always been a pain in the ass,” Sean said, sounding tired himself. He had worried about his brother all day, and about his parents, who were so visibly devastated by what Kevin had done and by what could happen to him.

“Some people are just different, I guess,” Izzie said quietly. “Even in the same family. How’s your mom?” They had all been worried about her. Kevin’s arrest had been such a shock.

“She’s a mess. She’s not saying anything, but she looks like she was hit by a bus. So does my dad. He’s taking Kev to Phoenix tomorrow.”

“Is Kevin scared?” Izzie asked, impressed by what was happening. He was the first person they knew who was going to rehab.

“No, I think he’s pissed. He’s not saying much, and he came down to dinner tonight stoned off his ass. My parents didn’t see it, but I could tell. Dad told him he had to come down for Mom. She cried all through dinner.” It sounded awful to Izzie, and she could hear the strain of it in Sean’s voice, who hated to see his parents so upset.

Mike and Kevin left the next morning before Sean got up. Connie got up to say goodbye to her son and tried to hug him, but he shook her off and turned away, and that was more than Mike could take, and he grabbed his arm, hard.

“Say a decent goodbye to your mother,” he said through clenched teeth, and Kevin hugged her as she cried. They left then, while it was still dark, and she lay in bed and sobbed. Mike came back alone late that night, and he burst into tears when he sat down on their bed, and Connie took him in her arms and held him to comfort him.

“How was he when you left him?” Connie asked about Kevin.

“He looked like he hated me. He just turned his back on me and walked away.” Kevin had already forgotten that a judge had put him there, not his parents.

The O’Hara house seemed instantly too quiet without Kevin, although he’d already been away at college. But his recent presence had seemed larger than life, with his hostility, his clandestine
drinking and dope smoking, and the stress he caused everyone around him. At first the peace without him seemed unnatural and unfamiliar. Sean missed the idea of a big brother, but the reality of Kevin was never what he hoped.

Sean alternated studying and distracting himself by watching TV. His favorite shows were still the crime shows, and Izzie came over to study with him a few times. She baked him his favorite cookies, and cupcakes for him and his parents. It was hard to know what to do to help: she could see the sadness in their eyes, even Sean’s.

Sean was quiet for the next few weeks, and was starting to feel better when they had midterms to get through. Izzie was halfway through studying for them when her father knocked on her bedroom door and asked her to come into the living room one night. She followed him out of her room with a look of surprise, and was instantly scared when she saw her mother waiting on the couch, looking tense.

“Am I in trouble?” Izzie asked, looking from one to the other. She couldn’t think of anything bad she’d done, but you never knew. Anything was possible. Maybe school had called to say she’d flunked all her tests. If they had, it would have been a first.

“Your mother and I have something to tell you,” Jeff said quietly, after he sat down. Izzie was sitting in a chair, and everything about the scene was strange. Her mother wouldn’t look at her, and the room was so quiet that Izzie could hear the antique wall clock ticking in the hall. She couldn’t remember ever hearing it from the living room before, but no one was talking. “We’re getting a divorce,” Jeff said with a look of defeat.

Izzie stared at them with wide eyes, with no idea what to say in response.
How awful? How could you? Why? Don’t you love each other? What’s going to happen to me now?
A thousand thoughts raced through her mind, but nothing came out of her mouth. She wanted to scream or cry, but she couldn’t do either. All she could do was stare from one to the other, and finally her mother dragged her eyes to hers.

“Whose idea was it?” was the only thing Izzie could think of to say. But she was sure it was her mother’s. She always acted like she didn’t really want to be there.

“Both of ours,” her father answered as Katherine looked at her husband and daughter like strangers. She had felt like a stranger in their midst for years. She had never wanted children and had told Jeff that when they married. They had met when they were both in law school, and he had had big corporate ambitions then, but he later changed his mind and fell in love with the work he was doing for the ACLU. He took a summer job with them and never left, and turned it into an internship while he continued school.

Katherine’s ambitions and goals had never changed, but Jeff had become a different person over the years. He had thought that having a baby would help their marriage and be good for them, and had promised to do everything he could to help her, and he had. He had been far more attentive to Izzie than she was, and Katherine knew it. But even after Izzie was born, much to her own horror, she had never warmed up to the idea. As far as she was concerned, it was a terrible mistake. And there was a human being
involved. Izzie was a wonderful little girl, but Katherine didn’t feel like a mother, never had, and still didn’t now. She knew it was some important piece missing in her. She couldn’t bond. She felt guilty about it, and she hated Jeff for forcing her to do it, or talking her into it. He had been so convincing. Katherine’s own parents had always been cold with her, and nothing in her background had taught her how to be a mother, and in her heart of hearts she didn’t want to learn. She felt like a monster every time she looked at her own child, and she knew that Izzie knew it too. Jeff had denied it for as long as he could, but although he hadn’t admitted it to Izzie, he had asked for the divorce, and Katherine had been relieved.

“Your mother has a very important new job,” Jeff explained. “She’s going to be the senior counsel for a very large corporation, and she’s going to be traveling a lot of the time. That’s not the way that either of us want to be married. Sometimes things change between two people,” he said, looking at his daughter. “Our marriage no longer makes sense with your mother’s work.”

“So you’re dumping us for your new job?” Izzie said to her mother with an anguished expression, and Katherine felt a knife slice through her heart. She had always known that she shouldn’t have children, and Izzie was paying the price for it now. Even she knew how wrong that was, but it didn’t change how she felt about it, or the maternal instincts she didn’t have. And Izzie knew that most of all. She had never been able to win her mother’s affection, or even more than a small slice of her time. She had grown up feeling like an imposition, and in many ways, in her mother’s life, she
was. Jeff tried to make up for it, but he was her father, not her mother, and Izzie had been starved all her life for a mother’s love. And now she was leaving. For a job.

“I’m not dumping you,” Katherine said, looking at her daughter, knowing she should hold her arms out to her, but she couldn’t. “Your father and I have drafted a very fair agreement. You’ll be spending three days with him every week, followed by three days with me, when I’m in town. And you can spend Sundays with whichever of us is available. Or we can just do three days straight and three days on a revolving schedule, whichever you prefer.” It sounded sensible to her, for a business deal, but not for a child.

“Are you serious?” Izzie asked with a look of horror. “You expect me to bounce between the two of you, like some kind of ball you’re throwing at each other, or a dog? How am I supposed to live any kind of life like that? I’ll be packing my suitcase every three days. I’d rather be an orphan and live in an institution. I can’t live like that. It’s insane.”

Katherine looked surprised, and Jeff didn’t say anything. The difficulties for Izzie had occurred to him too, but Katherine thought it was “fair.” “I suppose we could alternate weeks, if that works better for you,” she said to Izzie, like a client she was trying to satisfy.

“I don’t want to go back and forth between the two of you,” Izzie said as tears sprang to her eyes. They were destroying her life. “You’re both crazy. I can’t live like that. It’s not my fault you don’t love each other, and you got a new job. Why are you taking it out on me?”

“But that’s what joint custody is all about,” Katherine said calmly, trying not to react to the distress in her daughter’s eyes. She would never have asked for the divorce—she had made her peace with the living arrangement they had. But when she told Jeff about the new job, he had asked for the divorce. And when she thought about it, it made sense to her too, and Izzie was old enough to understand.

“I’m not a piece of furniture that you can shove back and forth at each other and expect to move twice a week.”

“You’ll get used to it. It may even have some advantages for you. I just found a very nice apartment downtown, near my office, in a building with a pool.”

“I don’t want a pool. I need a mother and a father and a home. Can’t you work this out, or something?” But the moment she asked the question, they both shook their heads.

“We both deserve a better life than this. Our marriage hasn’t worked for a long time,” Jeff said sadly. “And I’m sorry this is hard on you.”

“A year from now, when you’re fourteen, you can tell the judge what you want. But right now, it’s up to your father and me to come up with an equitable arrangement,” Katherine explained again.

“Equitable for who? Doesn’t it count what I think?” They both stared at her blankly, and didn’t know what to do. “I think joint custody sucks, and so do you,” Izzie said, and ran into her room and slammed the door. She called Gabby and burst into tears and told her what had happened. Gabby couldn’t believe it and told
her that she could stay with them as often as she liked. But Izzie didn’t want to stay with Gabby, she wanted her own home. She called Sean and Andy after that, and they were both sorry for her.

Izzie lay in her bed and cried all night, and the next day at breakfast her father told her that they would try to set it up some way that was easier for her.

“Maybe you can do a week at a time with each of us, or two weeks, or a month. You could stay here all the time if it were up to me, but you have to see your mother too.”

“Why? She’s going to be traveling all the time anyway. Why don’t you two alternate, and let me stay here all the time? I’ve heard of parents who do that.”

“I think that would be pretty uncomfortable for us,” Jeff said unhappily, hating what they were putting Izzie through, but the marriage had been over for years. He had been going to group therapy for a year, and he didn’t want to live in a dead marriage anymore, with a woman who didn’t love him, and whom he no longer loved. But Izzie was the casualty of it now too.

“But it’s okay to make me uncomfortable, I guess,” she said bitterly as she pushed her cornflakes around the bowl with a spoon. And then she looked at him unhappily. “Just don’t blame me if I flunk out of school. I can’t get decent grades and be moving three times a week, because you and Mom don’t like each other anymore. And the minute I turn fourteen, I’m going to tell the judge that I won’t go back and forth between the two of you, so you’d better figure out something else.”

“We’ll try,” her father said sadly, but he couldn’t think of anything
yet. And a moment later he heard the front door close, as Izzie left for school.

The only thing that comforted her that day, and for the next many months, was her friends. She spent as much time as she could at the O’Haras’, being loved and nurtured by Connie, and she stayed with Gabby now and then, which helped too. Judy was a warm person, and she had always been very fond of Izzie, and felt sorry for her in the divorce. And Gabby and Michelle were very sympathetic and supportive, as were all her friends.

The custody arrangement with Katherine never really worked. She was out of town almost every time Izzie was supposed to stay with her, and eventually they dropped the plan of having her go back and forth between her parents, like a tennis ball. Instead, she stayed with her father, and went to her mother for a night once in a while on the weekend. Katherine took her to dinner, and let her bring Gabby over to swim in the pool. Sometimes Izzie went for a month without seeing her, or longer, but even when she saw her, Izzie knew that her mother had never really been there. What she had to sustain her was a father who loved her, and four terrific friends. And Connie O’Hara, as a loving adopted aunt. It wasn’t everything you were supposed to have in life, but all put together, it seemed to work for Izzie.

T
he first big event of sophomore year in high school was that Billy and Gabby “did it,” the weekend before Thanksgiving. She confided it to Izzie the next day, and to her mother the day after. She assured her mother that they had used a condom, and she admitted to Izzie that it hadn’t been quite as fabulous as she’d hoped. Billy had gone off like fireworks on the Fourth of July, a little faster than either of them had expected, and it had hurt, a lot. They were both virgins, but the best part was the tenderness between them. They had been “going together” for two years, had never cheated on each other or looked at anyone else. They were crazy about each other, and Gabby said that having “done it” strengthened the bond they shared. And her mother was very nice about it. Judy was concerned about the responsibility they’d undertaken, but grateful that Gabby was honest about it, so she knew what was happening in her daughter’s life.

By the end of the weekend, all of the Big Five, as Connie still called them, knew. Billy didn’t brag about it, but something about
the way they stood even closer to each other, looked at each other as though they had a secret, let everybody know what had happened. Izzie still thought they were too young to have sex with each other, but Gabby and Billy never doubted for a minute that they loved each other and felt ready to take on the responsibilities that went with it. He was responsible about using condoms, and Gabby told her mother she wanted to go on the Pill, so she didn’t get pregnant. They managed to do it two more times, at Billy’s when his mother was out, his father was at work, and Brian was in school. They had a break in their school schedule over lunchtime, and the second time it was better, and the third time it was great. They were glad they had finally decided to add sex to their relationship.