Part 10 (1/2)

So they sat and they listened to some black singer she'd never heard of, a woman with a croony, needy voice. Don't go to strangers, darling, come to me. Don't go to strangers, darling, come to me.

And the music did something, and suddenly they were talking about big things, personal things.

She told him the way she felt after Caitlin was born, like the secret of life had been told to her at last and the secret was this: in the end all the things you think matter are just disappointment and noise.

And then he told her about his wife.

”Do you remember the story on the news?” she whispers to me, leaning close. ”A few years ago. That meth head from upriver drove through the front window at Keen's pharmacy? And the customer inside who died?”

I didn't remember exactly, these stories like static on faraway currents, but something about a photo they ran on the news and in the papers that alarmed everyone. A plate gla.s.s window sheeted red. A figure slumped behind it.

”That was Will's wife,” Coach says, so solemn. ”She was five months pregnant.”

Sitting together that night, under the pin oak on Ness Street, he told her all about it. About the things it had done to him, the way he saw the world. His year in Afghanistan nothing like the dark hole her loss drilled in him.

They talked for an hour, two, and by the time his hand dropped, almost as if by mistake, into her lap, it was like it was meant to be there.

The feeling took her by surprise, a buckling in her stomach, and he saw it, and then everything started and, eyes shuttering back, she thought, This is happening, right now. And it had to happen. How did I not know this? This is happening, right now. And it had to happen. How did I not know this?

You have something that I need, he told her. But he had it backwards. he told her. But he had it backwards.

The backseat, the seatbelt buckles cutting into her, her foot sliding on the windowpane.

After, her own hands tingling and helpless, he b.u.t.toned her s.h.i.+rt back up, slid her barrette back in her hair. The tenderness, like when Matt French b.u.t.toned Caitlin's pinafore, when he tied her little shoes.

When I get home, Beth is waiting in the middle of my front lawn, which she hasn't done since she was nine, and it has the same quality of ominousness it did then. Why did you go to Jill Randall's birthday party when we said we hated her? Why did you go to Jill Randall's birthday party when we said we hated her?

Or like last summer, legs dangling from my upper bunk at cheer camp, asking when I decided I wasn't bunking with her after all.

”Where were you?” she asks. ”We have items to discuss.”

”At Coach's,” I say, unable to stop the giddy hiccough in my voice. My body still feels stretchy and my heart proud and strong.

”She is so transparent,” she says, eyeing me head to toe. ”Now she wants to be your best friend, huh? Sharing secrets on her outlet mall sofa? She thinks she can work us like two-dollar wh.o.r.es. I hope you are not a wh.o.r.e, Addy. Are you a wh.o.r.e?”

I don't say anything.

”Are you a wh.o.r.e?” she says, walking toward me, ”and is Coach your sweet-lipped Mack Daddy whispering promises in your ear?”

”I was practicing,” I say. ”She's the coach.”

Beth folds her arms and stares me down.

I don't say a word.

”Haven't you learned anything, Addy?” she says. I'm not sure what she means, but I know I have to settle her.

We are both quiet, my hands getting cold and Beth in her puffy jacket unzippered.

I see something in her eyes I know from back when, from some girl-recesses of time spent hiding in playground tunnels together, nursing schoolyard wounds.

n.o.body might understand about Beth because her seeming power overwhelms. But I can see behind things.

And so I find myself reaching my pinkie out to twine hers, and she shakes it off and gripes some more, about Coach's treachery and false friend ways, but I do see her rest the smallest bit inside, her shoulders unhunching from a toadlike curl.

We end up back at her house, down in the bas.e.m.e.nt. No one ever goes down there except Beth's brother when he used to robotrip with his friends.

We lie on the sofa and the moonlight tumbles through the high window and I start it this time, our favorite thing. Or what used to be our favorite thing, but we haven't done it in so long.

Taking the vitamin E oil from my backpack, I do a soft ma.s.sage on Beth's right knee, where she tore ligaments landing on the marble floor of the school hallway, which is the kind of thing Beth sometimes does.

I do these light-as-a-feather tap-taps with my fingertips, which she likes.

After, hands pearled with her sweet almond salve, she does her hard magic on me.

We started this at age ten at PeeDee Tumbling Camp and it was our thing and it was the way, always, to soothe us. Sometimes it was like a visitation, a trance.

She once said, breathless after, that it was a coolness that stilled her like nothing ever did.

We stopped when we hit fourteen or so, I guess, which is when everything changes or you realize it has. I wonder why we stopped? But time gets away from us, doesn't it? That's a thing I know.

In the bas.e.m.e.nt now, there is a powerful nostalgia. This is a Beth I haven't seen for a while, the Beth of subterranean nights, our self-whipped adolescent fears and JV yearnings: I will never what if we never will we ever. I will never what if we never will we ever.

I'd forgotten we were like that, before we were everything.

Her hands move quietly to my calves, of which I am newly proud, the muscle there, tight as a closed bud.

Her thumb slides up the diamond shaped middle of the calf, and notches there, working slowly, achingly, pressing down to the hardest place then sliding her thumb up, the two muscle heads forking. It's like her thumb is a hot wand, that's how I always used to think of it.

I can feel Beth unloose it the way the last back tuck unloosed it. It feels warm and wet under my skin, and everything is lovely.

”You were burning this tonight,” she says, so dark I can see nothing but the whites of her eyes, the silver eyeliner.

”I was,” I murmur. ”Back tucks.”

And there's this sense that somehow she knows.

”How did it feel?” she whispers. ”To nail it.”

”Like this,” I say, curling under the hard pressure from her hand. ”But better.”

11