I believed that adopting the four sons of my best friend would be the most difficult decision in my life, until an unfamiliar appearance appeared in my door years later. He confirmed that my friend “wasn’t the one who said it”, and then he handed me a card. The minds that my friend have gone back to improve the life we have built since her.
Rachel has been my best friend since I remember her.
There is never a concrete moment in which we are looking for each other. Simply, we always did.
In primary school we sent one to the other because our names were searched in alphabetical order.
In the secondary exchange we change clothes. At the university we shared horrible apartments and stories about new ones.
Later, when we became mothers, we shared calendars and turns to raise our children.
“This is all,” I said to Rachel once while she was standing with a pie in my kitchen, with a baby resting on the side and another holding onto her pierna. “This is the part of what nadie tells you”.
“¿El ruido?”
“El amor”. I smiled with intensity. “How can we multiply”.
I had two children. She had four.
She was longed for all the time, but she radiated a sense of happiness that seemed genuine. Rachel loved being a mother more than anything.
Or at least, that was what I created.
I think that after twenty years I really know someone. I think that friendship means honesty, but now, looking beyond, I wonder what secrets Rachel looked at that I never noticed.
How many times have I been about to decide the truth? Never know it.
Everything started to change a little after Rachel told the light of her heart, a little girl who called Rebecca. It was a difficult embarrassment, and Rachel passed the second half in absolute rest.
Just a month after bringing Becca home, Rachel’s husband died in a car accident.
I was doubling stuff when I was on the phone.
“I need you,” I say Rachel.
“I need to come now”.
When she arrived at the hospital, she was placed in a plastic carrier with the baby carrier placed between the carriers. He looked up at me with tears in his eyes.
“If it was. Así, sin más”.
No more than that to say, but simply hugged her while she was crying.
The funeral was on a Saturday. The rain fell on the cement floor while Rachel remained there with her children reunited with her elder.
“Don’t know how to do this alone,” he whispered to me afterwards.
“Don’t be alone. I’m here.”
Shortly after this, they diagnosed cancer.
“I don’t have time for this,” I said when he told me. “Just get off a weighing bag”.
He wanted to stay strong for his kids. She hugged her stuffed animals and insisted on taking the kids to school even when they could barely keep their feet. I started every morning.
“Descansa. Yo me encargo.”
“Ya teners a los tuyos,” he protested débly.
“What? All are just kids.”
During these months, there were moments when Rachel wondered how she wanted to tell me something important.
He began to talk, then he stopped and looked at his eyes with a worried expression.
Once I said: “You are the best friend I have ever had. Do you know that?”
“You are also mine”.
“I’m not sure I’m… a good friend, I want to decide”.
At this moment I guess she felt guilty because I was helping her a lot, but now she felt bad.
Six months later, he was dying.
“You need to listen to me,” he whispered.
“Here I am”.
“Promise me that you will stay with my children, please. No more, and I don’t want them to separate. I have lost them forever…”
“I will ask you with them, and I will treat them as they were mine”.
“You were the only one in this conversation”.
These words were felt deeply inside me.
“Hay more,” I say, in a barely audible voice.
I inclined towards her. “What is it?”
I’ll look for the eyes. For a moment he thought that he had fallen asleep. Then he opened them again and he looked at me with such intensity that I felt a heat on the back of my neck.
“Rebecca… keep an eye on her, yes?”
“Claro”.
see continuation on next page
