“But his mom is right there, talking to him the whole time, explaining things to him, like he understands everything. And then I look at the kid and I think maybe he does. I look at them together and I think maybe there’s something I don’t get.”
She knows how hard it is for Teddy to accept complexity in others—that Cara, who once hurt Suzette, might also be worthy of sympathy or even admiration. “She’s done a good job with him. Everyone says so.” Now he must be going over it all, trying to understand. He has built his life around caring for a sister who’s been hurt by a friend and something that happened in the past which June knows nothing about. She takes him in her arms, pulls him inside, and soon they are lying on her bed. She knows the pieces of his uniform by now, the clips and the buckles; even in the perfect darkness of her bedroom, she can free him from this armor he’s adopted to take on the world, protect himself from pain he doesn’t understand.
THOUGH SUZETTE SCORED higher on the SATs than anyone else in their class, she announced early in their senior year that she had no intention of applying to college. Teachers tried to talk her into it; the guidance counselor even offered to fill out an application for her. “Just leave your options open,” he said, but she refused. “If I want to be an artist, I don’t need college, I need to make art,” she told him.
True to her word, she got a job in the hospital administrative office where her mother had started working again, and kept up with her art, renting studio space in the basement of a church. For two years she and Cara both lived at home until finally Cara, desperate to escape the generous and overindulgent love of her parents, talked Suzette into renting an apartment with her in town. By this time, they moved in such different circles that it was sometimes hard to remember what they had in common besides the past. Cara took classes at the community college, worked at a restaurant, and went out at night after her shifts with crowds of nineteen-and twenty-year-olds who drank their meals. Suzette spent all her free time painting and going by herself to movies that Cara had never heard of. Cara couldn’t understand Suzette’s new taste for solitary pleasures. “Why don’t you just ask me to go with you?” she’d say, and Suzette would smile. “I like going alone. I see things better that way.”
After a while, it seemed to Cara that, living together, they saw each other less than they did in high school, which made her sad but seemed to be a choice Suzette was making. “I don’t want to hang out with your new friends, Cara,” Suzette would say. “I’m not all that interested in meeting more bartenders.”
Cara couldn’t say what Suzette was doing with most of her time except spending it alone, churning out canvases that no longer looked like anything except explosions of vivid and sometimes disturbing colors, and logging in her hours at the hospital doing clerical work in an office on the same floor as the psych unit. One evening, four months into their bifurcated apartment life, Suzette came home and announced: “You want to hear something weird—who I saw today?” There was a bit of pep in her voice, the old you’re never going to believe this. “Kevin Barrows.”
Cara felt her stomach tighten. “In the hospital?”
“Yeah, but not as a patient. Get this—his mom is the patient. I actually talked to him for a while. He said she had some substance abuse problems, only he pronounced it sustenance abuse. ‘Too much sustenance?’ I said. He was nice. He laughed.”
She looked wistful, but even this wistful smile was the happiest Cara had seen her in months. “You should ask him out,” Cara said, and saw a glimmer of consideration pass over Suzette’s face. Once she’d started, the idea became a mission, an answer to the last eight months of Suzette’s isolation. “Call him. If I know Kevin, he’ll never be the one to call you. You’ll have to make the first move.”
Suzette stared down at her hands. “You’re the one he loves.”
Cara walked over, sat down next to her. “That’s not true. After we visited him that time, I sent him a card and he never wrote me back.”
Suzette nodded, as if to say, Maybe you’re right. I guess I could do this. This wasn’t like them at all, wasn’t the pattern of their friendship: Cara getting the phone, looking up the number, offering to dial it for Suzette.
Suzette finally did call Kevin, but not until weeks after Cara’s initial suggestion. By that time Cara was caught up in her own love-life drama, the first one she didn’t share with Suzette. His name was Oliver; he taught her Writing for Business Majors class, and he was the opposite of every man she’d been drawn to in the past: hair unkempt, pens that leaked black-ink circles on his pockets and fingers. Some days he taught a whole class with his fly halfway down. Ostensibly, this was a business writing class—cover letters, résumés, project proposals—but on the first day he announced, “I don’t want to be here any more than you do.” None of this was interesting to him, none of this applicable to life success as he saw it. Instead, they spent class time discussing op-ed pieces in the local newspaper. She can still remember one debate over the licensing for a strip club on the outskirts of their town. “Is this not free speech?” Oliver asked. “Is stripping not a form of self-expression?”
She looked across the room at one of the few other women who came to class regularly but, like Cara, rarely spoke. No, they both said with their faces. “How many people here think there ought to be a strip club in this town? Raise your hands high. Don’t be shy. Maybe you won’t take your mother there, but you believe a town government shouldn’t legislate what we choose to do with our entertainment money—or, more important, limit the opportunities women have to make some pretty good money.”
Every hand went up except Cara’s and the other woman’s. Oliver turned to Cara for the first time and stared down at her. “Why not?”
Cara swallowed and said, “Because they hurt everyone. Crimes get committed. Money isn’t always a good reason to do things.”
For a long time, she stared at the floor until she realized the sound she heard was him, clapping slowly as he circled the room. “Excellent answer. Nice to see someone thinking for herself.” After that, she began reading the paper more, trying to anticipate what he might bring up. She formed more opinions, outlined arguments she might present in class. She loved the unreadable way he had of presenting his arguments, how she never knew what he really thought. Over time, it was clear he liked this class, that even if most teaching was a burden, this combination of students wasn’t. He Xeroxed extra articles, once passed out his own letter to the editor. Of course, there were students who complained and some who registered a protest with their absence. One day, out of a class of twenty-two, only six showed up. Oliver held out his hand toward the empty seats. “Ah. What to think, what to think? A flu going around perhaps? Rampant infection of the student body?” His eyes settled on Cara. “Or is it moi?”
That afternoon, they walked out of class together, fell in step talking, and discovered that, in the Byzantine maze of the college parking lot, their cars were parked beside each other. “Is this gray Toyota you?” he said, laughing with astonishment as if this coincidence represented something bigger. After that, they walked out to their cars regularly and began speaking more candidly: “I like this class, I really do,” she said once. The next day, he admitted, “I noticed your pen wasn’t working. I thought of giving you mine, but I worried it might look a little—I don’t know—too friendly perhaps.” She blushed, though this was a community college where friendships between teachers and students were not so unheard of. Many students were adults, making transitions. Most people left class and went to work, some came in uniform, or nurse’s shoes. One woman was a school bus driver who walked out every day seven minutes early. “Nothing personal,” she always said. To Oliver’s admission of noticing her struggle with a dead pen, Cara said, “I wanted to write you a note. Ask if you’d like to go out to lunch sometime.”
A week later, they went.
A week after that, she brought him back to the apartment. Some instinct told her to keep this private, to say nothing even to Suzette,
who came home the same week full of energy after her first lunch with Kevin: “He’s so interesting, Cara. You wouldn’t believe it. He’s had such an interesting life.” Cara waited for the joke the old Suzette would have made, but none came: “He’s got enough money from his accident settlement that he doesn’t have to worry about jobs, so he works with underprivileged kids. There’s one named Carlos, who he spends every afternoon with because the mom has to work and has no child care.”
They were twenty years old. “He should be going to college,” Cara said.
“He doesn’t want to go to college. He’s not interested in all that. He’s interested in using what he’s been through to help people.” For the first time in memory, Suzette was drinking a beer and taking sips from a glass that left a smile of foam on her upper lip.
Cara stared down at her. “See? What did I tell you? Mr. Perfect.”
After that, a space opened up between them. Cara stopped telling Suzette where she was going at night or inviting her along. Some nights she changed and left before Suzette got home and the next day neither one mentioned their previous evening. When she brought her professor home during the day, she cleaned up afterward so there would be no trace of the man she had never once mentioned to Suzette. When she asked about Kevin, she got shorter answers. “He’s fine. Very sweet.”
“But what’s happening?” She stared at Suzette. This was all new, keeping secrets from each other.
Suzette shrugged. “It’s nice. I like him. That’s all.”
“Come on, Suze, tell me what’s going on.” Cara was in the mood suddenly to push the matter. “Has he kissed you?”
“I’m not going to say. It’s private.”
“Oh please. I tell you everything.”
“That’s not true.”
Cara studied her friend. Did she know what was happening?
As time went on, Suzette stopped mentioning Kevin completely, or only did so in odd, circumscribed ways. “Kevin’s mom is fine,” she said one day. “It doesn’t make sense that she’s even in the hospital, when she’s more together than most mothers. She tries to be honest and open about things. She’s very open with Kevin about her problems and with me, too.”
“What are her problems?”
“Well, I mean, I probably shouldn’t tell you. It’s private to the family.”
Was Suzette part of the family now? Later, she offered this: “Kevin’s thinking about getting into teaching. He wants to go back to college and get his degree.”
Cara stared at her. “How does he go back to college when he never went to begin with?”
“You know what I mean. He’s registering next week at the community college. Actually, I might register with him. It could be nice. We could take a few classes together, share the cost of books.”
How could this happen? How could Kevin and his needs have talked Suzette into something a dozen adults had not persuaded her to do? Cara tried to point out the obvious, that Suzette graduated third in their class and Kevin had barely graduated at all. “Why are you doing this when you could get in anywhere?”
“That’s not true.”
“It is true. Look at your grades. Look at your scores.”
Suzette shook her head. “He can’t go by himself. I promised his mother I’d do this. She’s worried that if he tries to do this by himself, it’ll be a disaster.”
They started in January, with identical class schedules, though all their classes were at night, when Cara wasn’t there. “It’s fine,” Suzette said. “It’s all stuff I’m interested in, too. Once he gets the feel of it, he’ll start taking classes by himself.”
It wasn’t fine, Cara came to understand gradually, though Suzette never spoke her complaints aloud. She simply said less and less as time went on. She told fewer stories of Kevin’s kindness; eventually she began to admit she wasn’t sure if Kevin would pass all his classes. “He has trouble organizing himself,” she said once.
Cara tried to help, offer suggestions: “You can’t do this for him,” she said. “Maybe this isn’t the right thing for Kevin. Maybe you should be thinking about yourself.”
“Oh that’s nice,” Suzette said. “That’s a really nice answer.”
“Suzette. I’m just saying, it’s hard for anyone to understand why you’re doing all this for him.” By this time, Cara had come to understand there wasn’t any element of romance in this.
“We’re friends,” Suzette said. “He feels like the best friend I have right now. To me, that means something. Friendship means you help the other person. You stand by them. If it means making a sacrifice, okay.”
Cara understood this was about more than just Kevin, that she had failed Suzette, had failed Kevin as well, in some way she would never understand, and now the two of them stood together, in alliance and apart from her. She had no better friends to show for herself, nothing to mitigate the loneliness of her own failure. She also understood there was something strange—in all these months, she’d never once seen Kevin, and never heard a message from him on the machine. She assumed it was intentional, that he was avoiding her, and then one night Cara came home to the sound of the shower and found Suzette sitting in her underpants and bra, motionless, on the sofa. “Suze?” she said, to no response. She went into the bathroom and turned off the water, which had grown ice cold. She came out, touched her friend with her wet hand. “Are you okay?”
Suzette didn’t look up, didn’t say anything.
Later that week, Cara ran into Suzette in their neighborhood drugstore, moving slowly, a fan of coupons clutched in her hand. Cara had gone there intending to buy a home pregnancy test and had thought, for a moment, Suzette was following her, suspicious and knowing, even in her current absent state, about the fears and hopes Cara had intentionally kept to herself. But after a minute of watching her, leaning on her cart like an old woman, Cara knew this was something else. “Suze!” she said, getting close enough to touch her shoulder gently.
Suzette stopped, turned around in slow motion. “What are you doing here?”
“Nothing. Just shopping. What about you?”
“I have to buy soap,” Suzette said too loudly. “Everything’s dirty.”
Cara looked around, softened her voice to a whisper. “At home?”
“I need ant traps and soap. There’s ants everywhere. In the bed, in the sink, everywhere.”
“I don’t remember seeing ants.”
Suzette narrowed her gaze over Cara’s shoulder then turned. “Never mind.”
Cara left the store with Suzette and put off buying the pregnancy test when Suzette announced the next day that she was going home for a while. A weekend, maybe, or a week. That night she packed two enormous suitcases with what seemed to be everything she’d owned in the apartment. In the confusion of the days that followed, Cara found the number she’d once looked up for Kevin and dialed it. She apologized for calling him, but said she wanted to ask what was going on with Suzette, if he knew how long she intended to stay at home. He listened without speaking. “This…is…weird,” he finally said. “I don’t really remember her. I remember—well, you.”
“Oh,” Cara said, panicking. How was this possible—how had Suzette gone so crazy so quickly? “She told me she had run into you, but I must have gotten confused. Maybe it was a different Kevin. So I’m sorry. I’m kind of embarrassed.”
“Don’t be. I’m happy to hear from you.”
The following day, Oliver began class by telling a story that surprised everyone: “So this weekend my wife and I were driving back from the beach, and what did we hear on the radio?” The boy next to Cara said, “What?” just as Cara thought, Your what? The tin-tasting nausea in the back of her mouth moved from her throat to her stomach and down to her feet. After class, Oliver walked out with another student and never lifted an eye in her direction. He had obviously arrived at some kind of decision, and this was his way to tell her of it.
She called Kevin again that night, asked if he’d like to have dinn
er sometime.
She still hadn’t taken the test even though she had some signs of pregnancy—tender breasts, morning nausea that abated with a cracker—she drank at dinner because she had read in a book: Don’t worry too much about alcohol consumed before you knew you were pregnant. If she was pregnant, there was a small window here, one night to decide the rest of her life, and she needed it. With a glass of wine, she felt happy for the first time in months. It had been almost two years since she had seen Kevin, and he looked surprisingly healthy, with a full beard and a flannel shirt that made him look rugged, in spite of the cane he still carried and hung on the back of his chair. Seeing him again, away from the eyes of others she must have been far too conscious of back then, she allowed herself the luxury of all thoughts, including this one: how handsome he was.
“So Cara, Cara, Cara. Tell me all about your life,” he said after she sat down. “Are you a marine biologist yet?”
She smiled, shook her head. “Not yet. Why don’t you start? Tell me about your life and then I’ll tell you about mine.”
The surprise—and it occurred to her, he always surprised her—was how honest he was. The kidney transplant had been terrible, and set him back for a long time. He couldn’t leave the house, couldn’t make it back to school. “I was going to go to graduation. That morning I was all dressed, my parents were in the car, and I couldn’t move. Couldn’t even stand up. My parents panicked and took me back to the hospital.” He paused. “Wearing my suit, I remember that.”
Only then did Cara register the most significant change—his speech was still halting, with strange articulation, but he had words now, at his disposal: “Now I get how depression takes over your body. At the time, I couldn’t see it. In the middle of it, you can’t see anything.”
She leaned toward him, thinking of Suzette, of the possibility that if she asked, she might understand this hole in her life better: “What happens? What does it feel like?”
“Oh God,” he laughed. “You don’t have your senses. You can’t taste anything or smell. Once, I put salt in my coffee and didn’t notice. My mother tasted it later and told me.”