Recovered

Fiction

Lauren grabbed her by the throat once. Just once. The only time in decades of friendship a rare disagreement had gotten physical.

They were seventeen, and Dierdre had said “I’m so jealous of you.”

Lauren knew girls were jealous. But she would not allow her best friend to be.

When Dierdre sat in her basement after Lauren had left that night, idly plunging the ball on her mom’s vintage pinball machine, and letting it drain without touching the flippers, she realized that Lauren had prepared her speech. That she knew what Dierdre was feeling.

But more than that, she had known what Dierdre needed to hear.

“You are smart, you are wonderful, and you are beautiful,” Lauren had screamed, screamed, the scratch and screech in her throat utterly at odds with the kind words.

“You will not live your life feeling inferior to anyone, or we will not be friends.”

And at 17, Deirdre had cried as Lauren got on a plane to Columbia to be a full-time college student and part-time model.

Deirdre now held the photo they had taken together at Metro Airport. Her hand trembled, the photo fluttering, the hilarity of the outdated fashions and hair the only thing keeping her from crying again.

“It’s your choice, Dee,” Lauren had said tonight, October 2021, with a steady timbre of support and confidence in her voice. “I only offer that choice because you asked. I know you believe that there’s no way I could have imagined this.”

Deirdre looked at her Emmy on the shelf in the office.

That distant voice, Deirdre at sixteen, before Lauren had grabbed her by the throat, whispered “It’s only a local Emmy, Deirdre, it’s not a big deal.”

Deirdre stood so that she would be face to face with her gleaming prize. Her reflection in the framed Montreaux Jazz poster next to it grabbed her by the throat like Lauren had, this time the visage choking off much more air than her best friend had.

She was no longer what one would consider beautiful. She knew that, and embraced it. Her makeup and hair people worked Vegasworthy magic to make her presentable for nightly news broadcasts, but a few ill-advised cosmetic procedures and she was an aging porcelain doll recreated in Lego.

“You work in a visual medium, Deirdre,” her logical adult voice reminded her. “ If you were in management, you might be tempted to let you go.

She placed her thumb at the base of the Emmy. She had intended to lift it, caress it, remind herself how grateful she should be, but the age spots and wrinkles on her fingers drew her eye, her thoughts.

“It’s your choice, Dee.”

Lauren, as everyone at Marysville High had predicted, led a charmed and glamorous life.

She did the magazines, the lingerie catalogs, dated the rockers and the hockey players, married the son of a Rhode Island real estate tycoon.

Her Yale degree in her back pocket, she had streamlined the process for single mothers to get into long-term public housing and continued education. She was a UNICEF ambassador and on domestic hunger task forces.

And then the charm bubble popped. 

Scouting some property to develop in the UK, Lauren and Evan had been in a helicopter crash.

Evan lost his life. Lauren was severely injured and burned.

Lauren was treated at the Chelmsford Burn and Plastic Surgery Center. 

Dierdre made plans to fly across the ocean to be with her.

Then Lauren was transferred to a clinic in Switzerland.

Dierdre made plans again.

“There are no visitors allowed,” Lauren told her, her voice still confident, self-assured.

“Give me an address, I’ll send a care package,” Dierdre said.

“It’s remote, Dee. No one gets mail here. All my needs are being met, and then some.”

She got weekly updates from Lauren. The journalist in Dierdre noted that Lauren referred to the “staff” never “doctors” or “surgeons.”

Dierdre had come home from a particularly distressing news day of rural opiate overdoses and racial slurs spraypainted on a Montessori school, to an unexpected email.

Lauren had fallen in love with Julian, her “care team leader.” Her affection was being reciprocated. Deirdre hated herself for thinking this was too soon, hated herself for the pictures this conjured in her mind. She set them aside. Her friend’s happiness and good health were all that mattered.

After months, Lauren was well enough to come home.

After a brief visit, she would fly back to Europe, where she and Julian would be wed on Malta.

“You’ll love what I’ve done with the guest room,” Deirdre told her before Lauren said that she would be staying at a small place in Greenbush, nearly 4 hours to the north. 

“I’m seeing my mother, and you, Dee, that’s it. My appearance may be...awkward...and I don’t wish to see the entire town.”

Deirdre visited a therapist for insights on how best to treat her injured friend, the things to say, the things to avoid discussing.

Deirdre was tough. As a reporter, she had seen human bodies after all types of trauma. None of them had been her friends. Certainly not her best friend.

                                                           ***

Deirdre drove up the long gravel driveway to the little cabin.

Smoke came from the chimney. Deirdre pumped the brakes in shock. Lauren, who she knew to be alone, had built a fire in the fireplace.

“You are one fearless bitch, Lolo,”  Dierdre said out loud in the car.

A note on the door said: “ Dee-Come in and have a seat-L”

Despite the autumn chill, Deirdre felt sweat form on her upper lip. She steeled herself, repeated some things she had rehearsed in her head. 

“It’s okay to cry,” the therapist had said. “It can be very emotional. Just try your best not to scream.”

Deirdre walked into the cabin’s great room. There was a sofa and two chairs, nothing Lauren would have furnished her own homes with.

Deirdre chose the sofa, wanting Lauren to know that she was comfortable with her friend sitting next to her.

“Hi, Lo !” Deirdre called, though her friend was nowhere in sight. 

“Brace yourself, beautiful girl,” Lauren called from down the back hall. “You’re not going to believe it.”

Deirdre heard Lauren’s footsteps.

“I’m, I’m…” Deirdre stammered. It felt like a child had reached up between her ribs and left a fistful of Playdoh at the base of her diaphragm. “I’m just so happy you’re here.”

Lauren came into the great room.

Deirdre bit her left index knuckle and slammed her head back against the thick padding of the sofa. Somewhere, somehow, the imaginary Playdoh had stifled a scream. 

“I know, I know,” Lauren said and shuffled toward her friend, arms outstretched at her sides.

Deirdre’s whole body was a tremor. She could not stand up to hug her best friend.

Lauren put one knee on the sofa and embraced  Dierdre’s shaking frame, burying her face deep in Dierdre’s hair.

Deirdre accepted the hug, arms hugging back but quaking as though attached to a massage chair.

Her eyes blinded by Lauren’s hair, Deirdre felt, immediately and strongly, that there was a possibility she was in a very lucid dream.

She shoved Lauren back, something she could not have imagined doing even one minute prior, and stared at the face in front of her.

It was her friend Lauren Marie Reynolds Van Cortland, her friend of thirty-eight years, and Lauren looked to be perfectly healthy and twenty-three years old.

“Holy Mother of…”

“I can’t believe it, either, Dee. I am the luckiest woman--almost the luckiest--in the world.

“Lauren…”

Deirdre couldn’t finish her sentence.

She felt oddly nauseous, though the woman in front of her was strikingly beautiful.

Deirdre self-consciously reached for the folds of skin at the jawline of her own fifty-one-year-old face.

Lauren hugged Dierdre again.

For the first time, she began to talk about the helicopter crash.

Dierdre switched, nearly successfully, from utterly astonished friend to attentive journalist.

When Lauren described seeing Evan’s body, her lip trembled and she made crying sounds.

Dierdre reached in her purse for a tissue, and as she produced it, she realized no tears were coming from Lauren’s undulating face.

                                                             ***

Over the course of the next three hours, Deirdre would shed many tears; for Lauren, for Lauren’s mother, who was going to be shocked and baffled, and for herself.

The most surprising thing to Dierdre in an evening absolutely teeming with surprises might have been when Lauren cut herself off and refused to keep answering questions until Dierdre had signed a non-disclosure agreement.

And finally, after having thought it for an hour, reconsidered articulating it, reconsidered the concept altogether, vacillated, agonized, Deirdre finally said the words out loud:

“I want to go to Julian’s clinic. I want Julian and his team to work their magic on my face.”

Lauren rubbed Deirdre’s upper arm with her silk gloved hands, hands that had not finished treatment.

“I need to make this clear, Deirdre, Lauren said. Much of this took place before I fully understood what was going on, how greatly experimental and controversial it is.”

Dierdre stared.

“This is magical, Lauren, utterly magical. You don’t look like you’ve had work done. You look precisely like the person you were when we were in our twenties, when you were wearing black lace teddies on catalog covers.”

“Yes, Dee, I know. And I will be completely open with you about this: Julian would love a new client, especially one that I have known most of my life and whom we can trust implicitly. But here is the situation. “

Lauren reached down and pulled at the wrists of her silk gloves.

“Julian’s procedure is absolutely in its infancy. I believe in Julian, I believe in his vision, I believe in his science. But know this: If you opt for the procedure, you will never cry real tears again, you will permanently lose your sense of smell...”

Lauren paused, swallowed. 

“...and you and I would look exactly-- exactly-- alike.”

***

Photo used by express permission of the multitalented Ivizia Dakini

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