Real Life & Liars (21 page)

VAN SAVORS THE TRIPPY ECHO IN THE BOATHOUSE AS HE STRUMS
a chord. A tune has burrowed its way into his brain, but he doesn’t yet know what it’s trying to tell him. He picks out a few notes of something that might be a melody. Typically, he hammers out some lyrics, then whaps together a melody that seems to fit.

This one’s different.

Everything’s different, now. His mother is dying. His best friend loves him. He tries to imagine loving Jenny. It’s easy enough to imagine sex with Jenny, because he’s already considered it, in his most lonely of nights. He’s even pondered asking her about it, but somehow asking his best friend for a pity fuck was too pathetic, even for him.

The boathouse is empty, not rented at the moment, it seems, as there aren’t even any signs of recent use other than a few liquor bottles from kids sneaking in. One open end frames the harbor,
with boats tipped on their sides, some turned completely over; still others in the public marina across the way are smashed and scraped. And all around them a sky so blue it pierces the eye.

He feels terrible having snuck out on Jenny while she was showering. But since her profession of love and needling him about his pathetic career, he couldn’t bear to look in her direction.

The sound of heavy steps on the old boards makes Van nearly topple off the barrel he was using as an ersatz stool.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was in here.”

Van appraises Darius, who looks imposing, poised in the open end of the boathouse closest to the house. His long arms hang loosely at his sides, but there’s a taut expectancy in him, as if he’s ready to draw his six-shooter at high noon.

“Trying to escape?” Van adjusts his seat on the old barrel, intently studying his fingering, to avoid having to look at his brother-in-law.

“Just walking around. Irina is getting dressed, and the house is a bit crazy right now.” He leans his long frame against the doorway. “And what did you mean exactly by ‘escape’?”

“Nothing.”

“Hmm. Like it meant nothing yesterday when you said ‘if you stick around long enough.’ There some reason you assume I’m going to run out on your sister?”

“It’s not because you’re black.” Van wishes he could grab those words and stuff them back down his throat.

“Damn, what is it with you? I never said you thought that. We’re talking man to man, here. Black’s got nothing to do with it. Right?”

Van forces his eyes up from his guitar. “Of course not. Look, you don’t know this about me yet, but I’m like an idiot savant, except I’ve just got the idiot part. I’m excellent at saying the wrong thing at the worst possible time.”

“So why have you been looking at me sideways the whole time I’ve been here? That is when you’re not stammering and trying not to sound racist.”

Van takes his time resting his guitar carefully against a pile of canvas next to his barrel.

“Why do you act like you own my sister?”

“Excuse me?”

“I heard you bossing her around about the coffee. Yes, OK, she’s pregnant, and caffeine isn’t the best. But you’re not her boss, you don’t own her.”

“I do look out for her because someone’s got to.”

“She’s got a family for that, not to mention she’s not helpless herself.”

“She’s just a…”

“Kid? Then why did you marry her? Why did you knock her up?”

Darius cracks his knuckles. “I didn’t knock anything. It’s a two-party system. She seduced me, if you have to know.”

“I didn’t have to know, but I’m not surprised. Reenie can’t be alone, for whatever reason. She’s gotta always have a guy, and sometimes she’s not choosy.”

“You think I’m that low-down to leave her while she was pregnant? Like you said in the hallway, ‘if you stick around long enough’ I believe was your phrasing.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be you that leaves.”

Darius folds his arms tight and looks down at the knotted and gnarled boards in the floor of the boathouse.

“I don’t know you at all. I just know my sister’s track record. For all I know, you’re just like…” Van stops himself. “…Just like the others.”

“She married me.”

“Well, that is different all right. You got siblings?”

Darius drops his arms to his sides. “None living. I had an older sister who died in childhood. I don’t remember her.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. If you did, you might understand the protectiveness. Especially for Reenie.”

“Who says I don’t understand?”

“Because you married her. I’m sorry to say it, I love her more than life, but since you married her, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of my sister’s temperament and attention span.”

“You don’t give her enough credit.”

“And you don’t hardly know her.” Van pulls on his ear, his stomach churning with a sudden desperate desire to change the subject. “Look, forget it. You seem like a good guy.” Van smirks at him. “You know, for being black and all.”

Darius laughs, his warm voice bouncing around in the boathouse, the water giving the sound a ringing quality, like church bells.

“You’re all right, you know that?”

“You only say that because you don’t hardly know me, either. Give it time.”

“I will. Because I don’t quit. If your sister quits on me, that’s her business, but that baby is my baby and my blood no matter what she decides, and it’s your blood, too. So. Looks like we’re connected. For a long, long time.”

Van considers this, studying Darius again. He tries to imagine their gene pools mixing.

Darius sighs, takes one more look out at the water, then turns back toward the house, striding up the grassy slope with long, purposeful steps.

Van strums another chord, feeling a growing admiration for that composed, mature gentleman who inexplicably married his ditzy sister in what will surely end up as another sordid page in Irina’s colorful romantic history. It’s as if Katya got all the good karma,
meeting her dashing and successful husband in college, having three beautiful healthy children and raising them in a showplace home. Running her own successful business. She used it all up, like she used to use all the hot water on school days, when they were trying to catch the bus.

Of course that’s silly. Good fortune is not a finite, concrete substance that gets passed around like a potluck dish. She wanted her life to be perfect, and she went out and made it that way.

“What’s her secret?” Van whispers. And he decides to go find out.

He slings his guitar over his back and steps out of the boathouse, blinking in the morning sun. That’s when he spots his dad coming down the hill, hand over his eyes, and calling out, “Ivan! Have you seen your mother? I can’t find her anywhere!”

IRINA SLAPS HER YELLOW DRESS INTO THEIR SUITCASE, ALONG
with her still-damp pajamas from chasing after Darius out into the rain.

Her shorts that morning wouldn’t snap, so she left them undone, hoping the fly wouldn’t unzip at an inconvenient time.

The door creaks, and Irina whirls around. Darius slides into the room, his eyes on the floor. He studies the floor for a time, then gazes out the window. The silence swells in the room until Irina feels it pushing her away like an expanding balloon.

He looks just past her shoulder when he finally speaks. “Will you need help finding a new place? Or maybe you will stay here because of the baby.”

His voice is hard and brittle as fresh ice.

“I haven’t thought about it.” She takes his dress shirt and shakes it out with a snap of her wrist, before folding it in the suitcase. “I’ll pack my things first, then decide.”

“I’d like you to be staying with someone, anyway. Someone to keep an eye on you. Might not be a bad idea to stay here, during the pregnancy. Your mom could…”

“You don’t get to say where I go. Ex-husbands usually don’t.”

If Darius was hurt by that, he didn’t show it. “I’m looking out for the baby. If you should pass out like you did at the party, but alone…You could hit your head, lie on the floor unconscious. It’s not good for the baby. Or for you.”

Irina couldn’t help but notice the phrasing, how the baby came first. Well, what did she expect? She was divorcing him. She’s become simply a brief affair turned quickie marriage. In fact, she’s become a baby-mama, something Darius probably never wanted to have. He doesn’t like clichés.

“I like living alone,” Irina says, needling him, knowing it’s childish and not caring. Realistically, she wouldn’t be able to afford a decent place of her own, and in all likelihood would end up in her childhood room, with a few boxes of possessions, just like she did last year during the affair with Alex. She always seemed to zoom back toward home base after every relationship went up in flames, brushing ashes out of her hair.

“Just think about it,” Darius says. “I’m not asking for my sake, because I know that doesn’t matter. But the baby needs to be safe.”

“I know.” She speaks so quietly he likely doesn’t hear. He doesn’t acknowledge her, and instead reaches around her to put his shaving kit in the suitcase. She leans her head against his muscular arm, and takes that arm in her hand, caressing it.

Darius jerks his arm away. “Do you think the roads are passable? The traffic lights are out, but that just means all the intersections are four-way stops, I think…”

“How are you so calm?” Irina swallows back a rising sob.

“I don’t know why you’re upset. You want to split up, in fact, you say you didn’t even want to get married.”

Irina turns away from the suitcase to face him. The bright morning light cuts a shaft across his body, and she wants to throw herself into him. “I’m all at loose ends, with my mom’s news, and the storm tearing up the tree…Oh, that doesn’t make sense, but, I don’t know. I’m confused.”

“You’re young, is what you are. I don’t mean that to be insulting, so don’t go getting all indignant. It’s true. I was wrong to convince you to marry me, I should have seen this coming. This is all my fault. But I did let myself believe we’d be a family, for a while. Now I believe we will not be, and I’m getting used to that. Don’t confuse the issue.”

“What are you talking about?” Irina steps toward him, and he visibly stiffens.

“I mean, you didn’t want to marry me, you don’t want to raise our child together. So don’t think you can still use me to get laid or get a hug or whatever.”

“I wasn’t trying to use you!”

“At least this time I’m only losing the wife, and not the baby, too.” Darius steps toward the door, then turns back. “Assuming you take good care of yourself. You really need to take good care of yourself, Irina.”

He steps out through the door as quietly as he came in, shutting it so gently it doesn’t latch, and swings back open with a creak.

I STUB OUT THE JOINT AND BURY IT AS DEEP IN THE SAND AS I CAN.
The sand feels beautiful in my fingers, silky and also soft like the hand of a lover. It’s cool in the lower layers underneath the hard, rain-speckled surface.

I’m so grateful for that sand, and the lake, and the breeze, and yet soon it could all be gone for me.

Then I’d better enjoy it while it’s here.

I’m halfway to the pier before I realize I’ve left my sandals by the wall, but I don’t care. My toes love the sand, too.

I’m surprised the pier is deserted on this incredible morning, this morning so fresh it feels newborn and unscarred. But then, most everyone else is picking shingles out of their landscaping.

Katya will have to get that tree off her truck somehow. She’s probably so angry, her head is spinning like Linda Blair’s. The images make me giggle, and I immediately feel rueful. It’s not what I wanted for my daughter. I had such great plans for her.

She’d be a free spirit, independent, brave, and strong. Yet from the beginning she was determined to follow. And follow what? A cause? A religion? An ideal?

A glimmer in the distance, that’s what she’s been running toward. She probably doesn’t even know what exactly, but it’s always on the horizon, and she will never, ever catch it.

All kids want to fit in, I guess, but Katya was relentless in her demands for the newest and latest and most popular. Even though I took the family to a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving to serve the homeless, still Katya wanted to spend more on designer jeans than the cost of an entire week’s grocery budget for a poor family.

Katya would have gladly traded mothers if given half the chance. She probably still would.

Van loves us, but he’s grown distant in recent years, refusing to talk about his music or his songs, when he once had such hope.

And Irina…Always so quick to take offense and assume the worst, treating herself so carelessly. She thinks I don’t know that a man beat her up last year. Falling down the stairs indeed. I may be a wilted flower child, but I’m no idiot. I didn’t press her, though. Van was there to help her, and he didn’t want to tell me, either, so I understood that I was not relevant and left it alone.

Even the university doesn’t want me anymore. Roxanne pulled out all the stops to get me to take the buyout and retire. Budget cuts, she said. The state is cutting the school’s financing. Think of the young professors, she implored.

“People with families, Mira,” Roxanne said, leaning on the edge of my desk. I was sitting in my chair, grading papers, and, when I got tired of that, making notes on the next week’s lecture on
The Tempest.
My reading glasses were on my nose, soft music was playing on my radio, and a fragrant spring breeze was rustling the leaves of the plant on my desk.

“I have a family,” I told her.

“You know what I mean.”

I do know exactly what she means.

I’m irrelevant. But my family won’t let me go, like a child who clings to an outdated toy meant for someone much younger.

They’re going to drag me under the knife, aren’t they? They’re going to drag me along and cut off my breast, then what? Go back to ignoring me while I’m left with scars and pain and big hunks of flesh simply gone? The breast gone that nurtured my children and made me a woman? And then they will be gone, too, wrapped up in their lives again, and where will I be? Irradiated and pumped with chemicals to chase away any fugitive cancer cells. Hairless and sick.

An image of Max’s face rises up in my mind’s eye. His normal pleasant countenance screwed up with rage…His hands on my arms.

I’m at the foot of the lighthouse now. It rises ahead of me like a cyclops with its huge triangle eye. I shiver in its shadow and move around it, back into the light. I lean out over the blue-metal railing around the edge of the pier. The lake is gossamer-clear over the rocks, only detectable by its light movement. It looks refreshing, and my feet have started to ache from walking on the concrete pier with no shoes.

The lake beckons with her waves, reaching out for me, then pulling back toward the horizon.

I put one foot up on the blue railing but the pot has made me dizzy and I can’t get my bearing once I leave the concrete surface. So I fold over and slip through the horizontal rails.

I feel like the prow of a ship out here. The breeze pushes my hair away, I allow my body to lean out over the water, my feet still on the pier, for now, my hands holding the railing behind me. The stretch feels good in my shoulders.

The lake’s deep green recesses beyond the rocks look soft, like moss on a forest floor. Like a pleasant place to hide.