We Were Liars (4 page)

Gat and I climbed up to the attic with glass bottles of iced tea and sat on the floor. The room smelled like wood. A square of light glowed through from the window.

We had been in the attic before.

Also, we had never been in the attic before.

The books were Dad’s vacation reading. All sports memoirs, cozy mysteries, and rock star tell-alls by old people I’d never heard of. Gat wasn’t really looking. He was sorting the books by color. A red pile, a blue, brown, white, yellow.

“Don’t you want anything to read?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“How about
First Base and Way Beyond
?”

Gat laughed. Shook his head. Straightened his blue pile.

“
Rock On with My Bad Self
?
Hero of the Dance Floor
?”

He was laughing again. Then serious. “Cadence?”

“What?”

“Shut up.”

I let myself look at him a long time. Every curve of his face was familiar, and also, I had never seen him before.

Gat smiled. Shining. Bashful. He got to his knees, kicking over his colorful book piles in the process. He reached out and stroked my hair. “I love you, Cady. I mean it.”

I leaned in and kissed him.

He touched my face. Ran his hand down my neck and along my collarbone. The light from the attic window shone down on us. Our kiss was electric and soft,

and tentative and certain,

terrifying and exactly right.

I felt the love rush from me to Gat and from Gat to me.

We were warm and shivering,

and young and ancient, and alive.

I was thinking, It’s true. We already love each other.

We already do.

GRANDDAD WALKED IN
on us. Gat sprang up. Stepped awkwardly on the color-sorted books that had spilled across the floor.

“I am interrupting,” Granddad said.

“No, sir.”

“Yes, I most certainly am.”

“Sorry about the dust,” I said. Awkward.

“Penny thought there might be something I’d like to read.” Granddad pulled an old wicker chair to the center of the room and sat down, bending over the books.

Gat remained standing. He had to bend his head beneath the attic’s slanted roof.

“Watch yourself, young man,” said Granddad, sharp and sudden.

“Pardon me?”

“Your head. You could get hurt.”

“You’re right,” said Gat. “You’re right, I could get hurt.”

“So watch yourself,” Granddad repeated.

Gat turned and went down the stairs without another word.

Granddad and I sat in silence for a moment.

“He likes to read,” I said eventually. “I thought he might want some of Dad’s books.”

“You are very dear to me, Cady,” said Granddad, patting my shoulder. “My first grandchild.”

“I love you, too, Granddad.”

“Remember how I took you to a baseball game? You were only four.”

“Sure.”

“You had never had Cracker Jack,” said Granddad.

“I know. You bought two boxes.”

“I had to put you on my lap so you could see. You remember that, Cady?”

I did.

“Tell me.”

I knew the kind of answer Granddad wanted me to give. It was a request he made quite often. He loved retelling key moments in Sinclair family history, enlarging their importance.
He was always asking what something meant to you, and you were supposed to come back with details. Images. Maybe a lesson learned.

Usually, I adored telling these stories and hearing them told. The legendary Sinclairs, what fun we’d had, how beautiful we were. But that day, I didn’t want to.

“It was your first baseball game,” Granddad prompted. “Afterward I bought you a red plastic bat. You practiced your swing on the lawn of the Boston house.”

Did Granddad know what he’d interrupted? Would he care if he did know?

When would I see Gat again?

Would he break up with Raquel?

What would happen between us?

“You wanted to make Cracker Jack at home,” Granddad went on, though he knew I knew the story. “And Penny helped you make it. But you cried when there weren’t any red and white boxes to put it in. Do you remember that?”

“Yes, Granddad,” I said, giving in. “You went all the way back to the ballpark that same day and bought two more boxes of Cracker Jack. You ate them on the drive home, just so you could give me the boxes. I remember.”

Satisfied, he stood up and we left the attic together. Granddad was shaky going downstairs, so he put his hand on my shoulder.

I FOUND GAT
on the perimeter path and ran to where he stood, looking out at the water. The wind was coming hard and my hair flew in my eyes. When I kissed him, his lips were salty.

GRANNY TIPPER DIED
of heart failure eight months before summer fifteen on Beechwood. She was a stunning woman, even when she was old. White hair, pink cheeks; tall and angular. She’s the one who made Mummy love dogs so much. She always had at least two and sometimes four golden retrievers when her girls were little, all the way until she died.

She was quick to judge and played favorites, but she was also warm. If you got up early on Beechwood, back when we were small, you could go to Clairmont and wake Gran. She’d have muffin batter sitting in the fridge, and would pour it into tins and let you eat as many warm muffins as you wanted, before the rest of the island woke up. She’d take us berry picking and help us make pie or something she called a slump that we’d eat that night.

One of her charity projects was a benefit party each year for the Farm Institute on Martha’s Vineyard. We all used to go. It was outdoors, in beautiful white tents. The littles would run around wearing party clothes and no shoes. Johnny, Mirren, Gat, and I snuck glasses of wine and felt giddy and silly. Gran danced with Johnny and then my dad, then with Granddad, holding the edge of her skirt with one hand. I used to have a photograph of Gran from one of those benefit parties. She wore an evening gown and held a piglet.

Summer fifteen on Beechwood, Granny Tipper was gone. Clairmont felt empty.

The house is a three-story gray Victorian. There is a turret up top and a wraparound porch. Inside, it is full of original
New Yorker
cartoons, family photos, embroidered pillows, small statues, ivory paperweights, taxidermied fish on plaques. Everywhere, everywhere, are beautiful objects collected by Tipper and Granddad. On the lawn is an enormous picnic table, big enough to seat sixteen, and a ways off from that, a tire swing hangs from a massive maple.

Gran used to bustle in the kitchen and plan outings. She made quilts in her craft room, and the hum of the sewing machine could be heard throughout the downstairs. She bossed the groundskeepers in her gardening gloves and blue jeans.

Now the house was quiet. No cookbooks left open on the counter, no classical music on the kitchen sound system. But it was still Gran’s favorite soap in all the soap dishes. Those were her plants growing in the garden. Her wooden spoons, her cloth napkins.

One day, when no one else was around, I went into the craft room at the back of the ground floor. I touched Gran’s collection of fabrics, the shiny bright buttons, the colored threads.

My head and shoulders melted first, followed by my hips and knees. Before long I was a puddle, soaking into the pretty cotton prints. I drenched the quilt she never finished, rusted the metal parts of her sewing machine. I was pure liquid loss, then, for an hour or two. My grandmother, my grandmother. Gone forever, though I could smell her Chanel perfume on the fabrics.

Mummy found me.

She made me act normal. Because I was. Because I could. She told me to breathe and sit up.

And I did what she asked. Again.

Mummy was worried about Granddad. He was shaky on his feet with Gran gone, holding on to chairs and tables to keep his balance. He was the head of the family. She didn’t want him destabilized. She wanted him to know his children and grandchildren were still around him, strong and merry as ever. It was important, she said; it was kind; it was best. Don’t cause distress, she said. Don’t remind people of a loss. “Do you understand, Cady? Silence is a protective coating over pain.”

I understood, and I managed to erase Granny Tipper from conversation, the same way I had erased my father. Not happily, but thoroughly. At meals with the aunts, on the boat with Granddad, even alone with Mummy—I behaved as if those two critical people had never existed. The rest of the Sinclairs did the same. When we were all together, people kept their smiles wide. We had done the same when Bess left Uncle Brody, the same when Uncle William left Carrie, the same when Gran’s dog Peppermill died of cancer.

Gat never got it, though. He’d mention my father quite a lot, actually. Dad had found Gat both a decent chess opponent and a willing audience for his boring stories about military history, so they’d spent some time together. “Remember when your father caught that big crab in a bucket?” Gat would say. Or to Mummy: “Last year Sam told me there’s a fly-fishing kit in the boathouse; do you know where it is?”

Dinner conversation stopped sharply when he’d mention Gran. Once Gat said, “I miss the way she’d stand at the foot of the table and serve out dessert, don’t you? It was so Tipper.” Johnny had to start talking loudly about Wimbledon until the dismay faded from our faces.

Every time Gat said these things, so casual and truthful, so oblivious—my veins opened. My wrists split. I bled down my
palms. I went light-headed. I’d stagger from the table or collapse in quiet shameful agony, hoping no one in the family would notice. Especially not Mummy.

Gat almost always saw, though. When blood dripped on my bare feet or poured over the book I was reading, he was kind. He wrapped my wrists in soft white gauze and asked me questions about what had happened. He asked about Dad and about Gran—as if talking about something could make it better. As if wounds needed attention.

He was a stranger in our family, even after all those years.

WHEN I WASN’T
bleeding, and when Mirren and Johnny were snorkeling or wrangling the littles, or when everyone lay on couches watching movies on the Clairmont flat-screen, Gat and I hid away. We sat on the tire swing at midnight, our arms and legs wrapped around each other, lips warm against cool night skin. In the mornings we’d sneak laughing down to the Clairmont basement, which was lined with wine bottles and encyclopedias. There we kissed and marveled at one another’s existence, feeling secret and lucky. Some days he wrote me notes and left them with small presents under my pillow.

I didn’t write back, but I drew Gat silly crayon drawings of the two of us. Stick figures waving from in front of the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, on top of a mountain, on the back of a dragon. He stuck them up over his bed.

He touched me whenever he could. Beneath the table at dinner, in the kitchen the moment it was empty. Covertly, hilariously, behind Granddad’s back while he drove the motorboat. I felt no barrier between us. As long as no one was looking, I ran my fingers along Gat’s cheekbones, down his back. I reached for his hand, pressed my thumb against his wrist, and felt the blood going through his veins.

ONE NIGHT, LATE
July of summer fifteen, I went swimming at the tiny beach. Alone.

Where were Gat, Johnny, and Mirren?

I don’t really know.

We had been playing a lot of Scrabble at Red Gate. They were probably there. Or they could have been at Clairmont, listening to the aunts argue and eating beach plum jam on water crackers.

In any case, I went into the water wearing a camisole, bra, and underwear. Apparently I walked down to the beach
wearing nothing more. We never found any of my clothes on the sand. No towel, either.

Why?

Again, I don’t really know.

I must have swum out far. There are big rocks in off the shore, craggy and black; they always look villainous in the dark of the evening. I must have had my face in the water and then hit my head on one of these rocks.

Like I said, I don’t know.

I remember only this: I plunged down into this ocean,

down to rocky rocky bottom, and

I could see the base of Beechwood Island and my arms and legs felt numb but my fingers were cold. Slices of seaweed went past as I fell.

Mummy found me on the sand, curled into a ball and half underwater. I was shivering uncontrollably. Adults wrapped me in blankets. They tried to get me warm at Cuddledown. They fed me tea and gave me clothes, but when I didn’t talk or stop shivering, they brought me to a hospital on Martha’s Vineyard, where I stayed for several days as the doctors ran tests. Hypothermia, respiratory problems, and most likely some kind of head injury, though the brain scans turned up nothing.

Mummy stayed by my side, got a hotel room. I remember the sad, gray faces of Aunt Carrie, Aunt Bess, and Granddad. I remember my lungs felt full of something, long after the doctors judged them clear. I remember I felt like I’d never get warm again, even when they told me my body temperature was normal. My hands hurt. My feet hurt.

Mummy took me home to Vermont to recuperate. I lay in bed in the dark and felt desperately sorry for myself. Because I was sick, and even more because Gat never called.

He didn’t write, either.

Weren’t we in love?

Weren’t we?

I wrote to Johnny, two or three stupid, lovesick emails asking him to find out about Gat.

Johnny had the good sense to ignore them. We are Sinclairs, after all, and Sinclairs do not behave like I was behaving.