“Adam,” I beseech. He stays silent, refusing to accept he’s been caught. I can understand trying to avoid it, but the moment to come clean is here. Instead, he’s leaning in the other direction. How can he be so cruel to Rini? And why won’t he admit what he’s done to Aimee? I briefly wonder. But I already know the answers: because he can and because he doesn’t have to. He does what he wants and never has to take responsibility. It’s always been that way.
I remember watching the very first episode of Friends, “The One Where It All Began.”
Monica gets raked over the coals by her parents, about her middling job, her lack of a husband, her general failure to live up to their standards. Monica, in turn, encourages her older brother, Ross, to share his news, knowing it will take some of their parents’ judgmental heat off her.
Finally Ross spills his guts. He is getting divorced. His wife left him for a woman, but she’s also pregnant with his child, whom he wants to raise with the new lesbian couple. And what happens? Their parents look at Monica with disappointment and say, “And you knew about this?”
My mother had warned me, If you clean up their messes, they start to think you’re the one who made them.
She said it when I was five years old and putting away the crayons Adam had left out. She said it when I was eight years old and picking up the Cheerios dust that Adam and I had stomped into the floor tiles. It wasn’t just that I’d help, but that I let him pretend he needed my help, encouraged his helplessness. I did it because it made me feel powerful.
If you clean up their messes, they start to think you’re the one who made them.
Like when Adam told me Eden was on this trip because of me.
Technically you brought her. She’s your husband’s best friend’s wife.
Or when he shattered my memory of Dad.
Margot, that wasn’t love. That was demoralizing, the way Dad treated her.
His problems, made my problems. His version of events, made mine.
My brother and sister-in-law stand over me with their arms wrapped around each other in such a deep and loving gesture, and there’s not a selfie stick in sight. It’s wonderful, but is it real? Would I even know?
The rain makes everything a little blurry, even in my mind.
Is this the true Adam and the true Aimee, or are they characters in “The One Where They Push Margot over the Edge”?
FARAH
Inside the house, Ted is in the kitchen and has inexplicably shifted from nearly passed-out drunk to wired. Joe’s talking his ear off while they wait for another pot of coffee to brew. I think he’s had more than enough.
“Margot needs you,” I say.
Ted sprints ahead as I jog back toward the center of the action. Aimee and Adam embrace in the rain. It would be romantic if it weren’t for the allegation that he’s currently having an affair, in addition to the one Aimee apparently knew about ten years ago. I cannot hold my tongue any longer.
“Aimee, what are you doing? Rini just said Adam is having an affair with Eden. Eden, a woman under this roof with us, someone who is part of our friend group.”
“Well, Rini’s a fraud,” Aimee says.
“And what about Margot? Is she lying too? Because I heard her subtext loud and clear.”
“What?” Adam snaps.
“Oh boy,” I say. “And then there’s that reaction. Doesn’t exactly scream innocent to be angry at your sister for revealing your dirty secret.”
“Margot was asking me tough questions, trying to unearth what I want. She wasn’t tattling on her brother,” Aimee says.
I can feel my patience wearing thin. Aimee will counter every inference I make. She needs new information. Straight from the source.
“Why don’t you go inside and ask Eden? Her reaction might be all you need to confirm or deny. You had a feeling on that first night. You made me go through his stuff with you.”
“You went through my stuff?” Adam asks. His victim meter is off the charts.
“I didn’t make you,” Aimee says to me.
“That’s right, you didn’t. Because I would do anything for you. That’s my bad.”
I can’t take any more of this. This entire group has the primal responses of a trapped animal. Their instinct has no rational thought; it’s all lashing out.
“Don’t listen to her,” Adam says to Aimee. “She wants you to break up with me so she can control you. All she does is order you around like you’re her nurse.”
The underlying connection between me and Aimee’s-mother-the-cold-nurse is meant to be hurtful, to both me and Aimee. It’s true I’m confused about my feelings for Aimee, but I’m pushing her to do the right thing. To confront the truth and then decide how to move forward. I’m not secretly hoping she divorces Adam and falls in love with me, at least not consciously. And not yet. It’s too soon to know. Adam’s warped words send me back toward the house.
“Wait,” Margot calls. I turn to see her cross the lawn to Ted. He opens his arms and pulls her into a warm hug away from the cold rain. It’s a genuine display of love that comforts me, as opposed to the farce of Adam and Aimee.
“Part of the concern here—for me too—is whether Rini is a fraud, a fake astrologer,” Margot says. “Well, in my reading she told me I’m going to have a baby in nine months’ time, which would mean I’m pregnant right now. I have a pregnancy test upstairs.”
“You do? We agreed there’d be no tests this weekend,” Ted says.
“I know. I found it in the bottom of my suitcase this afternoon. I didn’t buy it or pack it, but it’s there. It must be old,” Margot says.
“Lucky,” Ted says with a weak smile.
I jump in with the obvious conclusion. “So if the test is positive, Rini was right and Aimee confronts Eden for her side of the story.”
“And if the test is negative, we run Rini back to her cottage and head home the minute it’s safe. Let’s allow fate to have a say in what happens next,” Margot says.
