The Best of Friends

Kendra’s close neighbor and longtime friend, Lindsey is married to Andrew, a rheumatologist, and has three children: 16-year-old Jacob, 10th-grader Wyatt, and a daughter named Sutton, who is in kindergarten. Brown-haired with olive skin, Lindsey has passed on her looks and ambitious nature to her son Jacob, who, with Kendra’s son Sawyer, was one of the two “leading [soccer] scorers in the tricounty area” (27). One of the book’s three narrators, Lindsey describes her devastation over the mysterious shooting of Jacob, who is believed by doctors to be braindead from his head injury. Lindsey, though shattered by the “accident,” seems also to be in denial about the extent of her son’s injuries, telling herself that, whatever the doctors say, “Jacob is going to wake up. He’ll pull through this” (7). She also denies that Jacob’s shooting could have been a suicide attempt, though the police attest that his injuries and “finger placement” show all the signs. For weeks, she continues to massage and pamper his comatose body, which reminds her of an “expensive doll”—behavior that Kendra and Dani describe to each other as “super creepy.” It is only when all options are exhausted and Jacob has gone “from body to ghost” that she finally grasps that her beloved son is “not in there” (267), and resigns herself to his loss.

Lindsey’s grasp on reality seems to have been fragile long before her son’s shooting. Halfway through the novel, the revelation that her husband, Andrew, has been texting another woman for “companionship” catches her totally by surprise, because she has paid so little attention to his feelings. Lindsey confides to the reader that she married Andrew for his stable, unsurprising qualities, such as his “trustworthiness”: “It’s why I didn’t pay him any attention [in high school], but when it came time to start thinking about my future, he was the perfect candidate” (144). This selfishness reflects what Dani describes as Lindsey’s chronic “trust” issues, stemming from her parents’ devastating divorce when she was a child. Lack of trust, Dani says, is Lindsey’s biggest “trigger,” which may be why she married a man who appeared too solid and noble to ever betray her—setting herself up for disaster.

Always fearing betrayal by someone close to her, Lindsey lashes out repeatedly at her two friends. Her rage and suspicion, exacerbated by her grief, reach a furious climax late in the novel, when she excoriates Kendra for her lifelong narcissism and accuses Dani’s son Caleb of shooting both Jacob and Sawyer. Scoffing at Kendra’s “Romeo and Juliet” scenario of star-crossed love, she insists that her son was an innocent victim of Caleb’s “vicious temper.” It is only Caleb’s sudden confession that prevents a friendship-ending fight between the three women. Hearing the tragic truth about Jacob and his broken heart, Lindsey finally understands all and forgives all; tearfully embracing Kendra, she tells her, “I still love you” (265).

Lindsey is defined by her capacity for devotion and her refusal to relinquish hope even when it turns self-punishing. She exists in a state of suspended grief, unable to let go of her son despite medical evidence that he is beyond saving. Her actions, from massaging Jacob’s limbs to slapping his unresponsive body in a moment of despair, underscore her complex emotional state: fiercely maternal but also trapped in denial. In many ways, the violence she enacts on Jacob’s body is a form of self-directed rage, illustrating how deeply she blames herself for not knowing him better. Lindsey’s veneer of stability masks her internal unraveling, and her obsessive caregiving becomes a desperate attempt to maintain control in the face of profound helplessness. Her arc reveals how, in Berry’s world, love and pain are often indistinguishable, and how, for some, the act of grieving becomes indistinguishable from the refusal to accept reality.

Dani, who was known as “Danielle” before shortening her name in seventh grade in “an attempt to be cool” (69), is the novel’s third narrator. Like Kendra and Lindsey, she exults in her childhood dream-come-true of owning a big house just a stone’s throw from her two best friends, in the same “close-knit” community where they grew up. Early in the novel, she gushes to the reader about how “lucky” the three of them have been in “marrying amazing men and raising [their] children together” (14). As if by fate, their three sons (Caleb, Sawyer, and Jacob) have become the best of friends, and their whole families, she claims, get along “so well.” Quickly, however, this rose-tinted vision of suburban bliss unravels, as Dani reveals herself to be a less-than-reliable narrator. It soon emerges that her husband, Bryan, is an abuser, who controls and tortures Dani. Far from getting along with Bryan, Kendra and Lindsey mournfully shake their heads over Dani’s inability to leave him or to even stand up for herself against his abuse.

Part of what keeps Dani from leaving is the power disparity between herself and Bryan. Unlike her friends, Dani dropped out of college because of a pregnancy and has never had a career or any savings of her own. As a result, she bottles up her hurt and misery, plastering a “good-wife smile” on her face whenever Bryan orders her about. Her submissiveness to Bryan has destroyed her once-close relationship with her 18-year-old daughter, Luna, who has had “disdain” for her since age 14. After gaining some independence from the family by way of college, Luna has begun to openly defy Bryan, partly to serve as an example for her mother—a role reversal that finally gets under Dani’s skin. At long last, after Bryan violates Dani’s last-remaining “line in the sand” by hitting Luna, Dani musters the courage to confront him and leave, seeking shelter with her mother.

Dani, like her two friends, struggles through the guilty aftermath of the shooting, in which her family’s gun was the weapon. Her son’s trauma, unlike the other boys’, seems to be purely psychological, but his tortured silence and wild sobbing hint at a terrible secret that he can’t bring himself to reveal. Dani is torn between her age-old impulse to regard her “hot-headed” son as an innocent victim and her darker suspicions that he may have played some role in the shooting. Burdened by the stress of her son’s situation and her crumbling marriage, Dani takes out much of her anger on her two friends in the form of petty, judgmental remarks—though mostly confined to the interior monologue of her narration, as befits her non-confrontational nature. For instance, she derides Lindsey’s daughter Sutton as “every bit as spoiled as her name implies” (28), and sneers at Lindsey’s prolonged efforts to have a girl, which ruined the three friends’ “perfect” plan to each have two kids around the same age. She also compares Lindsey to a “Stepford wife,” and takes shots at Kendra’s secretiveness and shallowness—such as her “obsession” with smooth skin and interior design and her chronic “self-absorption.”

After Dani leaves Bryan and witnesses Caleb’s confession, she finds a core of strength within herself and moves closer to the sort of person she had always wanted to be before marrying: brave, clear-eyed, and relatively self-sufficient. She learns to quash her longtime reflex to excuse Caleb’s wild behavior, accepting—unlike her husband—that Caleb probably deserves jailtime for his impulsive shooting of Sawyer. She also reveals to the reader a platonic affair she has been pursuing for two years with a stranger online (who turns out to be Andrew, Lindsey’s husband). Describing it as the “first piece of independence [she’d] had in years” (271), she nevertheless decides to end the romance, as she now hopes to live as “authentic” a life as possible, with no secrets, for her daughter’s sake as well as her own.