Big Summer(76)
The rabbi nodded, and as he wrote, I told him everything I thought he could use. I told him that Drue loved jokes, and didn’t say how often my classmates and I had been the target of them. I told him that she liked pranks and fun, and didn’t mention her cruel imitations of our math teacher’s limp or a classmate’s stutter. I said that she’d been popular, with lots of friends and lots of boyfriends, and I didn’t mention her habit of starting up with a new guy before she’d entirely ended things with an old one, leaving me to offer explanations and excuses to the wronged party. I said that she loved music, and art, and that she had a great sense of style. I said that she was beautiful, and didn’t tell him that she’d had her nose and her breasts both done, or how she’d flirted with bulimia all through high school. I could still remember the time I’d found her in the bathroom after lunch, on one of the rare occasions she’d actually eaten something substantial. She’d been poised above the toilet bowl, holding her hair away from her face, and she hadn’t even needed to stick her fingers down her throat. She’d just bent down, opened her mouth, and sent her grilled cheese splashing into the water. See? she’d said. Easy!
“What else can you tell me?” said the rabbi. When I hesitated, he said, “Don’t worry about trying to be entirely complimentary. I want to get a real sense of her. Of course, I’ll make some choices about the stories I tell. But I want to know what she was really like, as much as I can.”
My throat ached, and my eyes stung. I thought about the quote from The Great Gatsby, about how Tom and Daisy Buchanan “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness… and let other people clean up the mess.” I thought of how awful Drue had been, how carelessly cruel, and, still, how much I’d loved her, how I’d been powerless in the face of her charms; how, as soon as I heard the familiar cadences of her voice, as soon as I felt her attention, her regard, all of that focused on me, I was ready to forgive her, to forgive everything, just to have her in my life again, because life with Drue was a good time, a memorable time. Every moment with her had the potential to turn into an adventure. She’d made me feel clever and beautiful, just by association. She’d made me feel special.
When I felt like I could speak, I cleared my throat. “When she asked me to be in the wedding, I think it was the first time that she asked about me, and what I was doing, and really listened when I answered. It was the first time she didn’t see me as… oh, I don’t know. A sidekick. Someone lesser than she was. Or a cautionary tale. Someone she could look at and say, At least I’m thinner and prettier than she is. At least I’ll never be that.” My eyes were burning again, and my throat felt tight. “I think that she was sorry that she’d hurt me, and that she wanted to do better.” I sniffled and took a sip from the cup of water. “That’s what I’m going to believe. Because that’s how I want to remember her.”
Rabbi Medloff touched my hand. “In the Jewish tradition, when someone dies, we say ‘Baruch dayan ha’emet,’ which means ‘Blessed is the true judge.’?” He looked at me, his eyes intent. “God knows your friend. God knows her heart. Who she was, and who she was trying to become.” He squeezed my hand. “There is a true judge, and I believe that judge will see her.”
I nodded, and sniffled, and wiped my cheeks.
“Do you have friends here?” His voice was gentle. “Any family? People who can be with you?”
I felt gratitude flood through me, that Darshi was here, and that Nick was, too, and that my parents were standing by, waiting to hear from me, wanting to help. Then I thought about Drue again, the way her eyes had followed her father at her engagement party, how her parents had squabbled over the cost of the wedding, how her fiancé hadn’t come to comfort her. I wondered if, at the end, she had known that she was dying, if she’d been in pain or if she’d been afraid, and I thought about how, in spite of all the ways we were different, Drue had spent a lot of her life being lonely… just like me.
Chapter Sixteen
The hospital cafeteria smelled like overboiled coffee and industrial cleanser. The floors were pea-soup green; the walls were a dispirited beige. A pink and silver IT’S A GIRL! balloon hung, half-deflated, from a chair where it had been tied with pink ribbon. At a table for four, three women in blue jeans sat in the metal-legged chairs, their heads together as they talked softly. A janitor wearing earbuds pushed a mop behind a cart made of scuffed yellow plastic, bobbing his head in time to music only he could hear. I spotted Darshini and Nick at a table. Nick looked tanned and healthy in his pinkish-red shorts and white shirt. Darshi had discarded her jacket, and her shimmering silk plum shell matched the sheen of her lipstick. I felt something painful and familiar flare up inside of me. She was pretty and he was handsome. They looked like they belonged together, like they matched in a way that Nick and I never would.
I turned away to fill a paper cup with coffee, doctoring it with sugar and cream, when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a familiar figure dart down the hall. I turned around in time to see a flash of Corina Bailey’s silvery hair as she vanished into a room with a sign that said CONFERENCE ROOM on its door.
“The plot, she thickens,” I whispered. Abandoning my coffee on the table, I told Darshi and Nick what I’d seen and padded quietly down the hall, hard on the heels of the not-groom and his erstwhile fiancée. When I arrived at the conference room door, I gave them a minute, knocked once on the door, and pushed it open before anyone answered.