My Best Friend's Girl (2 page)

chapter 2

D
olce & Gabbana. Even now, at what was probably one of the darkest hours of her life, Adele wore designer clothes—a white D&G T-shirt peeked out from under the covers. She always did have more style than sense.

At one time, that thought, twisted as it was, would’ve been out of my mouth—callously uttered to her because she would’ve appreciated it. I couldn’t today. Things had drastically changed between us. I hadn’t seen Adele in two years, and the last time I saw her, she had her fingers buried in her hair as though on the verge of ripping her blond locks from their roots, mascara was running down her face and snot was dribbling out of her nose. She was talking, stumbling over her words, saying things I didn’t want to hear. I was grabbing my clothes and my bag and blinking back tears and trying not to collapse in a heap. Things don’t go back to being normal after you part on those terms. Now, she was ill.

We didn’t speak as a nurse fussed around Adele, noting the readings on the machines, checking the lines on the drips, plumping up the pillows so they propped the patient upright. The nurse had a round, friendly face with big brown smiling eyes. She grinned at me as though she knew me, told Adele not to talk for too long and left us to it.

Still we didn’t speak. “Hi” seemed a pretty insufficient way to greet someone I’d sworn never to communicate with ever again.

“That nurse reminds me of your mum,” Adele said when the silence had started to drown out even the hum of the machines.

I nodded in agreement but couldn’t bring myself to talk. I just couldn’t. This wasn’t the Adele—Del as I called her—I’d come to see, this wasn’t the Adele I’d braced myself to talk to after all this time.

I don’t know what I expected, hadn’t really thought about it when I got on that train to travel two hundred miles from Leeds to London, but I didn’t expect her to look like this. I could close my eyes and see the Del I expected to see. That mass of curly honey-blond hair, always trimmed to shoulder length, would be there. As would that smooth, healthy glow of her creamy white skin. What would be the clearest thing about the image? Her eyes, which were the blue-gray of highly polished steel, or her smile, which lit up everything around her? Whichever it was, behind my eyelids, the real Del would be there. So perfect and three-dimensional I could reach out and hug her.

With my eyes open, Del Brannon was different. Altered.

The Del who was propped up in bed had skin that was a blotched patchwork of gray, white and yellow. Her face was hollowed out by weight loss, and under her sunken eyes, conspicuously missing their eyebrows, deep dark circles were scored. Around her head was tied a royal blue scarf, probably to hide her lack of hair. My body went cold. Her beautiful, beautiful hair was all gone. Stripped away by the drugs that were meant to make her well.

I didn’t know she’d look like this. Frail. Like an anemic autumn leaf—so dried, brittle and fragile that one touch would crumble her into a million pieces.

“It’s good to see you,” she said, her voice a low rasp that was probably as painful to create as it was to hear. “I’m glad you came.”

“What’s with the voice?” I asked.

“It’s the treatment. Makes my mouth dry and my tongue feels like it’s grown shag pile.”

“God, remember when we felt like that because we’d actually enjoyed ourselves by getting drunk the night before?” I commented, then mentally slapped myself. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded—I was trying to express sympathy but it’d come out wrong.

Del’s dry, cracked lips pulled up into a smile. “Trust you,” she said. “No one else has dared say something like that to me. Too scared of making me cry, I suppose. Too scared that I might break down and die on them. Trust you to break the taboo.”

“It wasn’t intentional,” I replied, suitably shamefaced.

“Just being myself.”

“I wouldn’t want you any other way,” she said.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked. That sounded wrong too. Harsh. Unfeeling. Admittedly, part of me was still that woman who was picking up her belongings and swearing to herself she’d never be that hurt again, but most of me was brokenhearted. I was helpless and I didn’t “do” helpless very well. “I mean, you said you were…What are you ill with?”

“Leukemia,” she replied.

“I thought only children got that,” I said before I could stop myself.

“That’s what I said!” she exclaimed. “You know, when the doctor told me, I said those exact words. It went down like a cup of cold sick, I can tell you.”

“Glad to know it’s not only me who says inappropriate things,” I muttered loudly.

“Yep, even when I’m at death’s door.” She said that so blithely, calmly, that I had an urge to reach out, take hold of her bony shoulders and shake her. Violently. So violently that she was reminded what was going on. How could she be so laid-back about it? So comfortable with the notion of dying?

I was still struggling to understand how someone who was my age, who went to the gym, who ate relatively healthily, who had never smoked, who drank as much as I did, had woken up one day to find there was a clock ticking over her head; discovered she was one step closer to knowing when she’d meet her maker than I was. I’d been wrestling with this thought since I read the card she sent me.

“It’s all right, you know, I’ve accepted what’s happening to me,” Del reassured me, as though reading my thoughts.

“It took a while but I’m here. I know it’s going to take you a while to catch up.”

“Only a little while,” I said sarcastically.

“I had to get here quickly,” she continued, ignoring not what I’d said but how I’d said it. “I had to make plans. It’s not just about me. So, no matter how much I wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening, I had to remember the most important person that needs taking care of.”

Tegan. She was talking about her daughter, Tegan. How was she taking this? If I was having problems dealing with it, how was a clever little five-year-old coping?

“I suppose you’ve worked out why I wanted to see you,” Del said after another long silence had passed.

“To make me feel guilty for ignoring you for two years?” I replied.

“Apart from that,” she said, a sly smile playing around her gray lips.

“Well then, no.”

“After I’m gone…” Del paused, took a deep breath. “I want you to adopt Tegan.”

“What?”

“I want…No, I
need
you to adopt Tegan after I die.”

I could feel the frown creasing my forehead, and my face twisting itself into an
Are you mad?
look. But she stared back at me as if she expected an answer to what she’d just said.

“You’re joking, right?”

“Do I look like I’m joking?” she replied, exasperated. “If I was joking there’d be a punchline and it’d be funny. No,
Kamryn,
I’m not joking. I want you to adopt my daughter when I die.”

“All right,
Adele,
if you’re serious, I’ll give you a serious answer. No. Absolutely no.”

“You haven’t even thought about it.”

“There’s nothing to think about. You’ve always known that I don’t want children. I told you enough times, I’m not having kids.”

“I’m not asking you to have kids, just my one.” Del inhaled deeply, a move that seemed to take all her strength and added to her gray color. “I’ve done all the hard stuff, morning sickness, losing my figure, twenty-four hours in labor…You just have to look after her. Be her mother. Love her.”

“Just” look after her. “Just” be her mother. Like that was easy. And anyway…“Del, we haven’t even
spoken
in two years and now you’re asking me to adopt a child? Can you see what’s wrong with this picture? Why I’m having problems with this?”

“Tegan isn’t ‘a child,’” she snarled. Of all the outrageous things I’d said since I arrived, this was the one that got her goat; that made her so angry her steel-blue eyes seemed to pulsate with defiance. “She’s your godchild. You loved her once, I refuse to believe that’s changed.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I had loved Tegan. I still loved Tegan.

I glanced at the photo on the nightstand. It was in a plain glass frame, a big close-up picture of Tegan and Del. Tegan had her arms linked around her mum’s neck, holding her mum’s face as close as possible to hers. They were both grinning at the camera. Tegan was a miniature version of her mother in every respect except her nose. The shape of her nose she inherited from her father.

“Kam, I still think of you as my best friend,” Del was saying. “And you’re the only person, the
only
person on
earth
I’d trust with my daughter.

“She was like your child once. And I’m sorry to lay this on you but I don’t know how long I’ve got left, I can’t afford to mess about. If you don’t take her…What will happen to her? There’s no one else. There’s no one—” The whites of her eyes reddened and her chest started to heave.

“I can’t even cry,” she whispered between heaves, “because I’m not producing enough tears.” Instead of crying, she started to choke, each cough convulsing her thinned body.

I laid a hand on her forearm. “Please don’t,” I said, desperate to stop her. “I’ll think about it. But I’m not promising anything, all right?”

Del kept inhaling deeply until she’d calmed down. “You’ll really think about it?” she said when she was calm enough to speak.

“Yes. I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I ask, that you think about it.”

“And I will. But only think.”

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

We lapsed into silence. I should be going. She’d done the deed, had asked the unthinkable of me, so what was there to do but for me to leave, retreat and think about it as I promised?

“Kam,” she began. The way she said my name made me look at her and I knew instantly what she was going to say next. I didn’t want her to say it. I wanted her to leave it.

“About what happened—”

“Don’t,” I cut in, a warning note in my voice.

“You never let me explain,” she pleaded.

“Don’t,” I warned again.

“Kam, listen to me. I didn’t…”

“I SAID DON’T!” I shouted so suddenly and so brutally that I frightened myself. “I don’t want to think about it, I don’t want to hear about it, and I
certainly
don’t want to talk about it. It’s over with.
Leave it.
”

It was a wound that hadn’t healed. She’d been picking at a superficial scab, one that skimmed the surface of an injury that was so deep even the slightest jolt would have it gushing blood again. But still, I shouldn’t have unleashed my anger like that. She
was
ill. She didn’t have the strength to fight back.

“Just leave it,” I repeated in a calmer tone. “Please.”

Del refocused her line of sight on the picture on her nightstand. She half smiled, but I could see the sadness tugging around her eyes. Tegan was everything to Adele. Everything. I could never fully understand that, I suppose. Tegan was important to me, but she seemed to be Adele’s reason for living. Everything she did, thought and said was about Tegan. Nothing and no one came before Adele’s child. The idea of leaving her must be more than she could bear. And how do you explain to a child that you’re leaving them? How do you tell your child you’re dying?

“Where is she?” I asked in an attempt to diffuse the tension in the room and the guilt in my soul.

She closed her eyes briefly, as though pained, before delivering her next bombshell in a quiet voice. “With my father and his wife.”

My heart skipped a beat. Were things so bad she’d really left Tegan with them? “And how’s that been?” I asked diplomatically, instead of screaming, “Are you mad?” at her.

“Awful,” Adele replied. Her eyes reddened again; she’d be crying if she could. “They don’t let me see her. Since I’ve been in here they’ve brought her to see me once. Once in four weeks. It’s too far, they say, so they only bring her when it’s convenient. I speak to her on the phone but it’s not the same.

“I miss her so much. And I can tell every time I speak to her that she’s becoming more depressed. More withdrawn. She can’t understand why she can’t be with me now that I need her most. My father and his wife don’t want her there and she knows it. Kam, I want to be with my daughter. I’ve only got a little while and I want to spend it with her.” She looked at me, her steel-blue eyes beseeching me, asking me to solve this problem for her. “I just want to see her. Before, you know.”

No, I don’t know. I’m still playing catch up, remember? I’m not on that page yet, Del,
I silently replied. “Isn’t there anyone else she can stay with?” I asked. I knew she had no other family, but surely she had some other friends? Anyone but her father and stepmother.

“No. When I first realized I was seriously sick, I wrote to you to ask if you could take care of Tegan for a while but you never replied.”

“I never opened the letter,” I said honestly. I still had it, I’m sure. Shoved at the bottom of my knicker drawer like all the other correspondence from her—I was too indignant to open them but too cowardly to toss them out. They sat in the drawer, growing older and dustier, unopened and mostly ignored.

“I guessed you didn’t. I tried a couple of other people, but they couldn’t take on such a big responsibility, so it had to be my father.” Del always called him that, “my father.” To his face she called him “Father.” Never did she call him “Dad” or “Daddy.” There was always a level of formality between them—even now, it seemed. “When we moved in he was so hard on Tegan, but I didn’t have the strength to fight him and his wife. If there was one thing I could do differently it’d be to take back what—”

“Do they still live in the same place, down in Guildford?” I cut in. I wasn’t going to let her sneak up on that conversation again.

She shook her head slightly. “Tegan got that stubbornness from you,” Del said. “She’s exactly like that, won’t do or talk about anything she doesn’t want to. I used to think she got it from me, but no, it’s clearly from you. But yes, they still live down in Guildford.”

“OK.” I took a deep breath.
Can’t believe I’m about to do this.
“What if I go down and see her?”