“I think that’s a terrible idea,” I countered. “I mean, what happens if they catch on fire, right? Don’t you think sending them away is going to make that worse?”
“Honestly, it’s better if they catch on fire in Europe than in D.C.,” she replied. “It’s less visible, less verifiable.”
“They’ve just been through a lot,” I said.
“We went to Iron Mountain,” she replied, “and that wasn’t so bad, was it?” And before I could even reply, her face fell, and she stuttered, “Well, I mean, it was a good school, right?”
“You’re going to ship them off somewhere?” I said. “That fucking sucks, Madison.”
“What else can we do?” Madison replied.
“You can take care of them!” I said.
“Okay, Lillian,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I appreciate the fact that you helped me when I needed it. But, truthfully, you have been watching them for, like, hardly any time at all. You think it’s just so easy. But you don’t have the kind of pressures that Jasper and I have. You can focus entirely on these kids because that’s all you have to do. We have to plan for our long-term future.”
“This isn’t right,” I said.
“This is the thing about you sometimes, Lillian,” Madison said, and I knew that this was going to be soul-crushing. I knew it was going to hurt. “You act like you’re above it all, and you act like the whole world owes you something because you had it rough. And you judge people like crazy. Like, I know you hate Jasper. I know you think he’s not nice. But you haven’t given him a chance. You just saw that he was rich, and that makes you feel weird, and so you think he’s a bad guy. You never really tried at anything. You had this bad thing happen, you got kicked out of school, and you let that sit there forever like it was the worst thing that had ever happened to anyone in the world.”
I honestly couldn’t tell if Madison remembered the past at all. All those years that I wondered why she never once thanked me for taking the fall for her, I had just assumed that it was because she was so embarrassed. But now it felt like maybe she just didn’t remember it, like her version of the past was that I’d gotten caught with some coke and gotten kicked out. And that she had stayed friends with me because she was a good person. And that I had fucked up because I was bound to fuck up.
“Your father paid my mom so that I would get kicked out of Iron Mountain instead of you,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, like she was humoring me, like she would let me spin this conspiracy theory for as long as I needed to.
“And you let them. You let your dad do that, because you didn’t want to get kicked out. And because you thought it didn’t matter if I got kicked out, because I didn’t really belong there.”
“That’s really unfair,” she said. “I was your friend. I cared about you. And you never thought about what I was going through, what I was dealing with. And, Lillian, even if you’d graduated from Iron Mountain, what would you have done? Do you think you’d have my life? Do you think that would be possible?”
“I don’t want your life,” I told her. “Your life seems fucked up. It seems sad.”
She stood up suddenly, and I thought we were going to fight. I clenched my hands into fists, my face already so messed up that it didn’t matter what else happened to it. But Madison just started jogging away from me. She started running. She ran to the basketball court and she flicked on the floodlights, the whole court now illuminated. She started dribbling, running drills, and hitting layups. She set up at the free-throw line and hit turnaround jumpers. And that sound, the ball bouncing on the court, the way the net swished, it just opened me up, made me feel like there wasn’t a single emotion in my body. It made me not want to kill her. I was so grateful for that half-second reprieve from wanting everyone to be dead. And I walked over to the court.
For a while, I just watched her shoot. And she ignored me. And if I was in her head, her game didn’t show it. She was hitting almost everything, so easily.
“You really are my best friend,” she finally said, not looking at me. “And, yes, I know that’s pathetic because I haven’t seen you since freshman year of high school. But you were. For that little while, you were the best friend I ever had, and I just never met another person like you. But I was so embarrassed by what my dad did—or what I did, whatever—that I kind of thought of you as my friend, but frozen there, in that dorm room. I wrote to you and it made me happy to share my life with someone who fucking cared about me. And I liked hearing from you, knowing that you still thought about me. I wish I’d been a better friend to you. I wish I’d done the right thing and taken the blame. Honestly, I’d still be right here. Nothing was going to keep me from this. But, okay, maybe your life would have been better.”
“I was in love with you,” I told her.
“I know you were,” she admitted. She took a shot and it clanged off the rim and that gave me this tiny measure of hope.
“It was so easy to be in love with you back then. And I liked it, because as long as I was in love with you, I didn’t have to love anyone else,” I said. “And I’ve always kind of been in love with you. And I’m still kind of in love with you.”
She nodded, and then she looked over at me. She was so beautiful, and I remembered those nights in our dorm when she looked at me and accepted my weirdness. She held on to me like nothing mattered. She was kind to me. Even if it had only been a few months, it was longer than anyone else had.
I waited for her to say something, and she just stared at me, figuring me out. I don’t know what I thought would be there, in her eyes. She just shrugged, like what could she do about it? I knew she was sorry. It broke my heart, and I knew that a good part of my life had been spent waiting for it to break so I could get it over with.
I didn’t think she was going to say anything, but then she started speaking, not really at me, to the darkness, to the universe, which of course wouldn’t be able to hear her. “I know, Lil. I know. I know. I know. But what? What did you think I’d do with that? What kind of life could I have? Us? I think about it, okay? I think about you. But it can’t be anything else. The minute it became something else, what would happen? We’d be so unhappy.”
“I wouldn’t,” I said, staring right at her. “I would not be unhappy.”
“You have no idea,” Madison said.
“Could you just say it?” I asked her. If I heard her admit it, if I heard the words in her own voice, I could remember them, could replay them in my head. Maybe it would be enough.
“I can’t,” she admitted. “Lillian, I can’t.”
And that was it. What else could I do?
“Please don’t send the kids away,” I told her.
“Do you want them? Is that it?” she asked. “Do you think that would make you happy?”
“I just want someone to take care of them,” I said.
“Why does it have to be me, though?” she asked. “Why does it have to be Jasper?”
“Because you’re their parents now,” I told her, and I thought maybe this was a trick question.