My Best Friend's Exorcism(93)

They kept talking for years.





And She Was


The exorcist wound up sitting in jail for eight months, but ultimately no one would testify, so they threw a bunch of minor charges at him and commuted his sentence to time served. He walked out and disappeared. Abby always meant to write him a letter. She started a few, but she never knew where to send them; and after a while, like it always does, life happened, and the fall of 1988 began to fade.

It was little things at first. Abby missed a phone call because she had an away game. Then one time Gretchen didn’t write back and never made up for the missing letter. They got busy with SATs and college applications, and even though they both applied to Georgetown, Gretchen didn’t get in, and Abby wound up going to George Washington anyways.

At college they went to their computer labs and sent each other emails, sitting in front of black and green CRT screens and pecking them out one letter at a time. And they still wrote, but calling became a once-a-week thing. Gretchen was Abby’s maid of honor at her tiny courthouse wedding, but sometimes a month would go by and they wouldn’t speak.

Then two months.

Then three.

They went through periods when they both made an effort to write more, but after a while that usually faded. It wasn’t anything serious, it was just life. The dance recitals, making the rent, first real jobs, pickups, dropoffs, the fights that seemed so important, the laundry, the promotions, the vacations taken, shoes bought, movies watched, lunches packed. It was a haze of the everyday that blurred the big things and made them feel distant and small.

Abby returned to Charleston only one time. The year she landed her first real job, she got the call everyone gets twice in their lives, and she packed a dress and drove out to New Jersey and sat in the church and stood in the graveyard and wished that she felt something besides tired.

The plan was to stay with her dad for a couple of days, but the first night she woke up from a dream she couldn’t remember, and she knew she had to see Charleston again. She bought a ticket before her dad was even out of bed.

It wasn’t until she was checking into the Omni downtown (now called Charleston Place) that she realized why she’d come. From there it was just a couple of phone calls before she was pulling her rental car up in front of the Franke Home visitors entrance, and a perky girl was telling her that he was leading a tai chi class in the Wellness Center. Abby walked over and looked through the window and waited for the exorcist to finish teaching repulse monkey pose to a roomful of eighty-somethings.

After class he helped his elderly students pick their bones up off the floor and then he was standing in front of Abby again for the first time in over ten years. He looked the same, only now he sported a hard little pot belly and wore a baseball cap to hide that he was balding. He was wearing baggy Joey Buttafuoco pants and a tank top.

Abby stepped forward and stuck out her hand.

“Hi, Chris,” she said. “I don’t know if you remember me.”

Reflexively he stuck out his hand, but clearly he didn’t.

“Did I teach one of your parents?” he asked.

“I’m Abby Rivers,” she said. “I came here to apologize for ruining your life.”

He looked confused for a minute, and just as she was about to fill him in, he remembered.

“I was the—” she began.

“Exorcism girl,” he finished.

Now they were both nodding. Abby was prepared for him to storm away, chew her out; to drop her hand and disappear.

“Come on,” he said. “I have a break until Low Impact Aqua Dynamics at four. Let’s get a smoothie.”

That’s how she found herself sitting at Tasti Bites and Blends while the exorcist drank a large Green Dragon Juice with a double wheatgrass shot and she sipped a bottled water.

“I came to say thank you,” Abby said. “For what you did. The way you came forward. You don’t know how good your timing was. They were about to ship me away to Southern Pines.”

“Your folks wouldn’t have let that happen,” he said. “Besides, it was the right thing to do. How’s your friend?”

“Gretchen,” Abby said. “She’s good. It . . . worked. Not the way I thought it would, but it worked.”

“That’s good,” he said.

The exorcist took a long pull on his straw.

“I don’t think you’ll be too happy though,” Abby said, filling the pause. “She doesn’t go to church or anything. I don’t either, really.”

“Who cares where you sit on Sunday mornings?” Brother Lemon said, and smiled. “I tried to come see you, after I got out, but I heard you’d moved. And with everything that went on, it didn’t seem like a good idea to write you. But it’s a blessing to see you again. To see that you’ve moved on, grown up. Where do you live now?”

“New York,” she said.

“My life partner can’t get enough of that Broadway,” he said. “We saw Phantom when it came through here, and The Lion King. They’re only the road companies, but they’re still pretty good. Still waiting for Mamma Mia! Have you seen it?”

“The music’s great,” Abby said, not quite sure why she was sitting here talking about ABBA with Chris Lemon.

“Well,” he said. “Maybe Barbara and I will get up there someday.”