The lies among us, p.8
The Lies Among Us, page 8
“Oh, of course, I love banana bread.”
“You haven’t aged a day.”
“I was almost a concert pianist, but I had to choose between a career in the arts and raising kids. All the rehearsing. All the travel. I never regretted the choice for an instant.”
“I don’t mind.”
“I was here first.”
“You must have lost the reservation. I made one weeks ago.”
“I’m sorry, but we can’t come to your holiday party. Leah’s been throwing up all day, poor dear, and I just don’t feel comfortable leaving her with a sitter.” With the phone to her ear, she winked at Leah, who was watching TV while shoveling pretzels into her mouth. “Oh, no, Hannah’s fit as a fiddle. Stomach of steel, that girl. Yes, please give our regards to Harold and tell him we’re sorry we’ll miss his bagpipes.”
Leah was staring at her when she hung up.
“She didn’t know,” Mommy explained to Leah. “It would have made the conversation awkward. This was easier.”
For who?
The next time it happened was at Target, approximately eight months after Hannah died.
Leah was following her mother through the cleaning-supplies aisle and wishing she could have stayed in the toy section when a voice rang out from beyond the sponges. “Eleanor?”
It was a woman with a flower-print skirt and platform shoes.
Louder, she said, “Eleanor Riggs?”
“Eleanor Allen now,” Mommy corrected, squinting at the woman. Leah thought she wore a lot of makeup and wondered if her art teacher would ever let them paint their faces. She’d use more blue, she decided. Less pink.
“Sasha,” the woman said. “Remember? From Greenville High. Go, Timberwolves!” She struck a cheerleader pose. “You were voted most likely to be in a music video, and I was most likely to marry my high school sweetheart.”
“Ah, Sasha!” Mommy beamed at her. “So great to see you! And did you marry . . .”
“Josh, and yes,” Sasha said. “Although we took a break for college, but now three kids later, and we’re happy as clams!”
Glancing longingly at the toy aisle, Leah wondered how happy clams were.
“And you?” Sasha asked. “Is this gorgeous pumpkin yours?”
I’m not a pumpkin.
Mommy steered Leah in front of her and smiled brightly. “Yes, this is Leah. Leah, this is my old friend, Sasha. We went to school together.”
Sasha laughed, close to a bray. She had very yellow hair, Leah thought. Like a crayon. She thought about drawing her. “Oh, don’t say old!” Sasha said. Then to Leah: “How old are you, sweetheart? Five? Six?”
“Six and three-quarters,” Leah said. She’d requested a bike for her birthday, or a skateboard. She didn’t know if Daddy would approve of either. Their street had a lot of traffic, he’d said. She’d need to wear a helmet, knee pads, and elbow pads, and she could only ride in the park. With work so busy, he didn’t know when he’d have time to teach her.
“So precise!” Sasha clucked. “You have a little mathematician here. My oldest is a whiz at math. He’s taken math two grade levels above.”
“Leah’s teachers say she’s advanced for her age,” Mommy said. “We’re thinking of having her skip a grade, but we’re worried that will shorten her childhood. It’s so fleeting. You don’t want them to grow up too quickly.” Skip a grade? Leah wondered. She’d never heard her parents mention that. Maybe they’d talked to her teacher and hadn’t told her? Or maybe this was just another of Mommy’s stories.
“So true,” Sasha said with a sigh. “Is she your only?”
“She’s not,” Mommy said and then stopped.
Leah suddenly felt as if the store were too hot. She thought of the box underground and the dinosaur onesie hidden in her drawer. Somehow, she’d gone almost the whole day without thinking of Hannah. Guiltily, she looked again at the toy aisle and tried to think of what Hannah would have liked. She wondered if the next time she went to the cemetery with Daddy, she could convince him to bring a toy instead of flowers. Hannah would have liked that better.
Sasha glanced around the aisle like she was looking for someone. She doesn’t know. Leah thought of Ms. Bailey. There was rarely anyone in Leah’s life who didn’t know—all the teachers, all her friends, all her classmates, even the school bus driver, knew. Leah tensed. She knew the kind of sympathy that was going to come. It would ooze all over them. It made Leah uncomfortable.
But Mommy said, “My youngest is spending the day with her grandmother so that Leah and I can have some quality time together.” She placed both hands on Leah’s shoulders.
Sasha nodded wisely. “Ah, it’s so crucial to remind the oldest that they’re still important, especially when the youngest sucks so much attention. I make sure to take each of mine on a special outing each season. Last month, the zoo with my youngest. Next month, a play with my middle—she loves musical theater, so we’re treating her to the revival of Oklahoma!”
Leah felt her mother’s grip on her shoulders tighten. “Hannah loves the theater too,” Mommy said. “You should hear her sing. Voice like an angel.”
A neighbor had told her Hannah had become an angel. Leah didn’t think that was what Mommy meant, though. She wondered what Hannah’s singing would’ve sounded like. Maybe Mommy was imagining that?
“How wonderful! Does she perform? My middle girl is in the youth choir over at Lady Catherine’s. She had a solo last Sunday. Wowed everyone.”
“She was once recruited by an agent,” Mommy said, “but we elected to wait. It’s so important that young kids have a normal childhood, free of feeling like they have to compete.”
Leah didn’t know what an agent was, but she knew no one had recruited Hannah. Unless it was God recruiting her to be an angel? Maybe Mommy was just trying to explain in a way her friend would understand. Grown-ups did that sometimes.
“It does require a particularly mature child to handle the pressure,” Sasha said. “You’re wise to protect them as long as possible.” She waved at her nearly full cart. “Well, I have to be going. I promised my husband it would be a quick trip to pick up a couple items, and now look at me!” She brayed a laugh again. “So great to see you, Eleanor! We should get together sometime. Coffee or lunch.”
“I’d love that.”
Sasha waved and pushed her cart out of the aisle. When she’d disappeared from view, Mommy squeezed Leah tight and kissed her on the top of her head. “Let’s go home.” Abandoning their cart, they left the store.
Ten months after Hannah died, Leah was told they were having company for dinner: a new colleague of her father’s and his family, which included a seven-year-old girl—wasn’t that nice? They could play in Leah’s room while Mommy and Daddy prepared dinner.
Emma reminded Leah of a rabbit. She had tiny eyes, a tiny nose, and soft brown hair that looked pettable, though Leah knew it would be weird if she touched it. She darted through Leah’s room, examining everything. She picked up and put down all Leah’s stuffed animals, peered at the books on Leah’s shelf, and fiddled with Leah’s hair ties.
“What do you want to play?” Leah asked her.
“House,” Emma said. “I’m the mommy, so you have to do what I say.”
Daddy had given a speech about how Leah had to be a good host, play whatever Emma wanted her to play, and be a nice, good girl so that his friends would think they were a nice, good family. “Okay.”
“We’re going to make pancakes,” Emma declared. She began bossing Leah around, demanding that she fetch ingredients—a handful of dirt from one of Mommy’s potted plants, shampoo from the bathroom, and pencil shavings from inside Leah’s pencil sharpener. She mixed them together in Leah’s trash can. “We have to be done before the baby wakes up. Babies love pancakes.”
And then Emma pointed to Hannah’s crib.
Daddy had said they needed to give it away, and Mommy had said, “Not yet.” She wasn’t ready yet. Leah had said she didn’t mind. Most days, she barely noticed it, even though it filled a corner of the room. Hannah had been close to outgrowing it. She’d tried once to climb out, before she’d gone to the hospital.
“Where’s the real baby?” Emma demanded.
Leah opened her mouth. Gone, she almost said. In Heaven. In the cemetery. Asleep. Instead, she said, “She’s at the zoo, with her grandma.”
Emma’s rabbity face squished up. “At dinnertime?”
“She likes to feed the giraffes,” Leah said. “They have long tongues.” She’d seen a picture once of a zookeeper feeding a giraffe. Its tongue had wrapped around the woman’s hand. “And she likes to watch the monkeys.”
Emma nodded as if this made sense.
Leah continued. She wasn’t sure why she did, but she couldn’t seem to stop talking. “She likes the elephants too. When she’s older, she’s going to work in a circus and be an animal trainer.” It could have been possible. She remembered how much little Hannah had loved her stuffed elephant with the floppy ears.
“Our dog sits when you give him a treat,” Emma said.
“She’s going to train elephants,” Leah said. “That’s why she’s at the zoo. She’s practicing.” She didn’t think they let you practice training elephants at the zoo, but the words were already out of her mouth, and she had no idea how to reel them back in.
Emma considered this for a moment. “I think you’re lying.”
She could have said yes, it was just a story she made up, but she didn’t. “I’m not lying. Hannah is at the zoo. Ask my mom if you don’t believe me.”
And then Leah looked up to see her father standing in the doorway. He stared at her, and she stared at him.
By the time she came home from school the next day, the crib was gone.
Within six months, they’d moved to a drab one-story house in Garden City with a porch and no memories of Hannah at all, except what they brought with them.
CHAPTER NINE
I wake to the whistle of a train and the glare of the sun. Sitting up, I run my tongue over my teeth, trying to make them feel less sticky, and rake my fingers through my hair. It’s late morning, and I don’t know how many train whistles I’ve slept through.
If it was sleep.
Holding up my hand, I try to determine whether it looks less distinct than it used to. Am I fading? Did I wink in and out of existence while the morning trains blared, losing hours the way I did in Mom’s living room? It’s possible. In fact, I think it’s likely, given that it feels like I slept for only a few minutes but clearly much more time has passed. I shudder and lower my hand.
That’s twice now. It’s never happened before, not to me.
At least I did wake or come back or . . . whatever. I’m still here. And the shadow wolves haven’t appeared. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they don’t exist anymore. They could have faded with my childhood . . . except that I don’t believe that—they lurked outside my window for too many years for that to be true.
They haven’t found me yet. That’s enough for now.
I have, as I see it, two choices:
Get on a train heading back west, toward my sister and her life. Or board a train in the opposite direction and keep heading east, as far as the train will take me. Right now, both sound as appealing as Mother’s casket.
So I let fate decide.
I take the first train that arrives: eastbound, to Montauk.
I don’t bother to look for the man in white—it’s beyond unlikely I’ll find him now. Instead, I let the conductor walk through me as he checks tickets; then I sink onto the floor as the train pulls away from the station. As we chug eastward, I try to think as little as possible.
Two hours later, the train lurches when it reaches the end of the line, the very tip of Long Island before it vanishes into the Atlantic, and I think about staying exactly where I am. Just ride the same train back in the opposite direction, back to Leah . . . but I don’t. I can’t. There’s nothing for me in that direction. There’s only forward.
What’s out there?
As if I’m a passenger like any other, I disembark, careful not to walk through the family of three ahead of me. The kid is shoving pretzels in her face as she walks. She’s gawking at the blue sky, the platform, and her flip-flops as if every sight is new. Her mother is carrying a beach bag. The handle of a plastic shovel pokes out the top.
“Do you like the beach?” I ask the girl.
I pretend she answers.
“Sand does get everywhere, and your parents are right to make you wear sunscreen,” I tell her. She doesn’t look back as her father pulls her by her free hand along the platform. “You should listen to them. As much as you can. And they should listen to you.” He’s pulling a suitcase with his other hand, and her mother waves toward a car in the parking lot. I wonder if it is a grandmother, grandfather, sister, friend, uncle, cousin, but I don’t wait to see who emerges.
Instead, I take stock of where I am: the Montauk train station. The station itself looks like a house, white with black shutters, and while the usual mist swirls around the train platform, it doesn’t extend beyond the station, perhaps because people don’t linger there—they board a train, or they drive away. I don’t see any shadow wolves, and there’s no toxic muck near the station either. It feels a bit like a different world from either Queens or Garden City, but it may only be because there are fewer people this far east, especially right here, right now.
I walk across the parking lot and breathe in the salt-tinged air. It smells like seaweed, and I hear seagulls crying to one another. I breathe in deeply and tell myself there will be another train heading west whenever I want to take one. For now . . . I follow the road leading away from the station.
Soon, I’ll see the ocean.
Already, I can taste it, and I can feel it on my skin, the salty droplets in the breeze.
And then before I’m ready, it’s there, the Atlantic.
You’d think that, having lived on an island my whole life, I would have seen the ocean before, but Mother wasn’t a beach person—she didn’t like the sand, the sun, or the salt. She preferred a pool, ideally owned and cleaned by a neighbor, heavy with chlorine. Our house was—is? was? is it our house anymore?—inland, sandwiched between a family of four that constantly bickered and an elderly man who loved to putter in his garden and criticize everyone else’s yard. There wasn’t much within walking distance, except the elementary school where Leah went. I used to go with Mother and Leah to the school playground on the weekends when my sister was little, and Leah would swing so high that Mother would warn her she’d flip over. The top of the swing set was festooned with sneakers, memorializing the kids who’d sworn they’d swung a full circle around the crossbar—dozens of sneakers that only I could see. Once, I spent an entire afternoon trying to figure out how to knock down a pair that I liked. I ended up prodding one off with a neighbor’s unused fishing rod.
Loved those shoes.
The ocean stretches before me in all its varieties of blue. And the sky is as blue as a kindergartener’s crayon art. I stop in my tracks, staring at the blue meeting the blue, with a smear of purplish land between—Rhode Island or Connecticut—far in the distance. I don’t know how long I stand there, awed. There isn’t a hint of haze on the horizon. I think it’s the only view I’ve ever seen that isn’t marred by the unreal.
Veering off the road, I head for the beach. My feet sink into the sand, and its heat penetrates through my shoes. I walk straight toward the water, shuck off my shoes, and wade ankle deep into the edges of the crashing waves. The water is cold enough to bite. I can feel it even though it doesn’t curl around my feet the way it would anyone else’s. Holding my shoes in one hand, I stroll along the shore, feeling but not disturbing the sand.
They call Montauk “The End,” and I wonder if this is where I will end.
It’s not so bad.
It’s beautiful. Peaceful.
Eventually, I see houses. Mansions. First, a sprawling mansion with an infinity pool, then a New England–style estate with a widow’s walk, then a beach cottage. They’re wreathed in a sparkling haze, and they shift before my eyes. My stomach plummets, and I feel the peace dissolve. It’s here, too, the haze and the shadows.
Of course, it is.
It’s everywhere. Or at least it’s everywhere I’ve ever been. Out there in the vast blue, maybe there’s a place free of the haze. A place where I wouldn’t have to fear the shadow wolves. A place where nothing could hurt me, and I could just . . . be.
And if that place could hold someone else like me, someone who could be like Jamie was to Leah, a person who could hear me, see me, make me laugh, then what would it be like to be in such a place with such a person?
I continue to walk toward the houses, watching them shift. The center one stays relatively the same, I notice: a beach house with wide windows and a deck. I stop and try to separate out what’s real and what isn’t. It’s impossible to tell just by looking at it. It could be like Mother’s house, overlaid with dreams and intentions, or it could be fully unreal, an entire mirage, though I’ve never encountered a place that was entirely illusory before.
I realize I’m walking up to it when I reach a gate in a white picket fence that’s drowning in beach roses. I think of Mother’s roses, riotous in her front yard. Tentatively, I stretch out a hand, expecting my fingers to slide through, but they’re stopped by wood. I close my fingers over the latch. It feels like metal, solid, hot from the sun, and it clinks as I lift. Inside, the yard is perfectly manicured, with a stone walkway of blue slate that leads to the pool and patio. Hydrangeas are in full bloom, big fat bunches of blue blossoms, though I’m certain they’re not in season. Like Mother’s yard, I don’t think that matters here. The grass under my feet bends as I step, and when I glance behind myself, I see I’ve left footprints.
I’ve never left a footprint before.
I walk up to the patio. Touch a lounge chair. Run my fingers over a glass patio table. There’s a pitcher of lemonade with ice and glasses next to it. Lifting the pitcher, I pour lemonade into a glass. The ice pours with it, splashing as it lands in the lemonade. I raise it to my lips and take a sip. Sharp but sugary.
