Here We Lie

Mom didn’t miss a beat. “We were so worried about her, but she’s been growing stronger every day. This virus just hit her hard, poor thing.”

I leaned against the wall, listening to the women’s sympathetic murmurs as Mom reinvented my troubles—fevers and listlessness, loss of appetite, how devastated I’d been not to participate in more of the campaigning. “Lauren’s a strong girl, though,” Mom said. “She’ll be back to her old self in no time.”

It was an amazing performance, award-worthy. Somehow, Mom had managed to erase the drugs in my backpack, the hours I’d spent in the police station, Marcus bleeding to death in the Hartford Correctional Center, the months I’d spent crying into my pillow. She’d reinvented me as a brave warrior, a dutiful daughter.

She was so convincing, I almost believed it myself.

OCTOBER 10, 2016 (#u7d714980-24eb-5b13-8c26-2defe74dab6c)

Megan

The alarm on my cell phone went off at 6:25, then again at 6:30 and, as a last call, at 6:35. Marimba—the world’s most hateful sound. Bobby’s side of the bed was empty, and when I entered the kitchen five minutes later, he was already draining his first cup of coffee and filling his thermos with the thirty-two ounces that would get him through the day.

I stood in the doorway, yawning.

“Well, if it isn’t the woman of my dreams,” Bobby said, grinning at my disheveled state. I was wearing one of his old UMass shirts, the decaying hem hanging to my knees.

I pulled a face. “Save any for me?”

Bobby gestured to a steaming cup on the end of the kitchen peninsula. The coffee was the exact murky shade of brown I liked, tempered with a bit of cream. He was dressed in everything but his shoes and his pants, which were draped over a bar stool, and I gave him a thumbs-up at the effect: a blue-and-white striped shirt, a tie with the tiny floating heads of the Beatles, plaid boxers, tan dress socks. Bobby was one of the cool teachers. Every high school had one—the teacher who donned the giant tiger mascot for pep rallies, who somehow managed to make class so interesting that his students forgot all about their smartphones for fifty minutes. If he had to, he would stand on his desk to get their attention, à la Dead Poets Society or challenge a student to a lunchtime dance-off as a form of motivational bribery. Once, I accused him of having literally no shame, and he seemed surprised by the idea. Why in the world should he have shame?

I took a few fast sips, willing the caffeine to head directly to my brain. “What’s on the agenda for today?”

He screwed the lid on his thermos, tightening it and holding it upside down, just to make sure, before setting it next to his briefcase. “Still slogging through the American Revolution.”

“At least you’re finally done with those Puritans,” I commented.

“Those prudes.” He grinned, giving me a slap on my decidedly round ass. I looked more and more like my mother each year, despite eating salads for lunch and pounding out the miles on a treadmill at Planet Fitness.

The movement sent my coffee sloshing, and I cupped my hands around the rim to stop it from spilling. “It’s far too early to be so frisky.”

“No such thing as too early.” Bobby was stepping into his pants, creased sharp from ironing the night before. “What’s your day like?”

I grimaced. “Meetings from eight-thirty to noon, drop-ins after that.”

“Do we have any plans for tonight? Because if we don’t—” he tucked and zipped and reached for his belt “—a few of my buddies are playing at this bar in Ballardville.”

I shrugged. “Okay.”

Bobby worked his feet into his shoes, bending to tie the laces. “They aren’t very good, or at least they weren’t the last time I heard them.”

I smiled. “I’ll adjust my expectations accordingly.” Bobby was the exact opposite of me—he made friends easily and collected them everywhere he went: work, fast-pitch softball, hockey games. Two minutes after leaving a party, Bobby’s phone would ping with the notification of a friend request from someone he’d just met. Me—I kept things cooler, played my hand close to my chest. For the most part, other than those times I snooped from Bobby’s account, I avoided social media altogether, and my work friends were just that—friends at work.

I met Bobby’s goodbye kiss head-on, cringing at my own blend of sleep and coffee breath. Bobby didn’t seem to mind.

He grabbed his thermos and laptop bag, patted around for his wallet and keys. “Maybe we can leave around seven?”

“Sounds good.”

I emptied the rest of the coffee from the pot, swirled it with cream and sugar and reached for the remote. These were my private moments each morning—coffee, the Boston Globe and whatever dishy gossip was happening on the Today show. At work, I would be slammed—first our weekly departmental meeting, with its twenty-bullet-point agenda, then the dozens of students I would see, some in two-minute bursts while I helped them find the right form or directed them to the right staff member, and others for long, tear-streaked discussions that began with a question about registering for fall classes and ended with a general unburdening about the difficulties of balancing work and school, the impossibilities of child care, the unreliableness of their transportation.

I flipped from NBC to MSNBC to CNN, dodging commercials. Like the rest of America, I was on election overload, but it was an itch I couldn’t resist scratching. What had happened overnight? Who had said what on Twitter? Bobby and I rarely talked politics—not because we weren’t interested in elections or invested in their outcome, but because there were sticking points, touchy subjects that led us from reason to argument in about sixty seconds flat. “I thought people from the Midwest were supposed to be conservative,” Bobby would tease.

“That’s a stereotype,” I would remind him, and besides, it was a long time since I’d been in the Midwest.

I heard news of a suicide bombing at a market in Pakistan, then the financial report. The Dow was up, and that was a good thing. Thirty-five years old and I still had only a basic grasp of the stock market, although for the first time in my life, I actually had money there, in the form of a direct transfer from my monthly paycheck. I stretched and stood, making my way back to the sink. Behind me the news had switched back to the national scene, to politics. That’s when I heard the name Mabrey and wheeled around. It was as if I could face him head-on, as if he were in the room with me, that slow grin on his face. My head went fuzzy with the white noise of memory—rushing and pulsing, things that were long buried threatening to rise to the surface.

The caption on the screen read Senatorial Sex Scandal.

I didn’t even know that I’d dropped the mug until I heard it shatter, the last inch of lukewarm coffee splattering on the tile and a small shard of ceramic nicking me in the shin.

And just like that, it all came back.

FRESHMAN YEAR 1999–2000 (#u7d714980-24eb-5b13-8c26-2defe74dab6c)

Megan

From the window seat on the bus, America was a blur of fields and forests, the brick fronts of small-town buildings, the jutting skylines of cities. Every bit of it was unfamiliar and terrifying. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe Woodstock, Kansas, was my destiny, and I was only fighting it by heading all the way to the East Coast with my worldly possessions crammed into two army-green duffel bags and my old JanSport backpack. Maybe Woodstock was what I deserved after everything I’d done.

Enough. I tried to sleep, but besides the occasional jolting was the fear that I might close my eyes and wake up in Canada or Texas, or all alone. Each time the bus stopped, I hooked my backpack over my shoulder and lined up for the exit, then rushed to the bathroom and back, afraid to be left behind. Once a man about my dad’s age tried to chat with me, but outside the bounds of Woodstock and the diner, I seemed to have forgotten how to have a polite conversation. Did I look like a typical college student or an overgrown runaway?

“I’m not going to kill you, you know,” he huffed, and when I slid back into my seat, my cheeks were flaming.

We were delayed fifty miles outside of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with an overheating engine, and it took a few hours for a replacement bus and luggage transfer, then for new tickets to be issued. It didn’t occur to me until we were on the road again that I would be arriving at the bus station in Scofield much later than originally planned. Keale’s shuttle system ran on the half hour, but it stopped each night at nine. Using my wristwatch and the illuminated road signs, I calculated the distance and realized I was officially screwed. The bus wouldn’t be arriving until ten at the earliest. In the beam from the overhead light, I consulted the map supplied by a travel agent at AAA and learned that the Scofield station was five miles from campus—an impossible distance to walk with my bulging duffel bags.

Three hours later, I pressed my forehead to the glass when I saw signs for Scofield. You live here now, I told myself—something that seemed both impossible and incredibly surreal, as if I were trying to convince myself that I’d grown a third foot. Two miles south of town, the bus rumbled past a good-sized lake, the surface shimmering with boats and Jet Skis docked for the night. Everything felt sleepy, winding down from too much summer. I squinted out the window at the license plates on the Audis and Peugeots, trying to determine if they belonged to locals or vacationers.

Either way, I thought, wealth lives here. Privilege. People different from me.

The main drag was settling down for the night—lights off at most of the stores. Everything had a cutesy name—To Dye For and Slice of Heaven and Scoops & Swirls, which had a giant ice cream cone protruding from its striped awning. A few families were still clustered around sidewalk tables, wearing flip-flops and suntans, catching the drips on their ice cream cones.

There were four passengers left aboard the bus, and only two of us—myself and a man with a pronounced limp—stood to disembark at the Scofield station. The porter handed down our luggage, and the other man left immediately with his pull-along bag, dragging his bad leg behind him, aiming for the lone car in the parking lot.

I stood with the duffel bags that contained everything I owned in the world, my gaze following the porter’s gesture to the pay phone at the end of the platform.

“Maybe you can call a taxi, if you don’t have someone meeting you,” he said, although his voice was hesitant, rising in a question. We hadn’t passed any taxis in town.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, not wanting to concede helplessness already. As the bus pulled away, I hauled my bags one at a time up to the platform, plopping them beneath the closed ticket window. Fishing a few quarters from my wallet, I set out to investigate the payphone. If there was no taxi service in Scofield, I’d try the college. And if no one answered there, what would I do? I could call Mom back in Kansas, where she and Gerry Tallant were probably sitting down to dinner, thrilled that I was out of the picture and that they had the place to themselves. It was a horrible idea, one that belonged to my life as a teenager, not an independent college student. How could my mom help from fifteen hundred miles away?

Twenty yards out, I saw that the payphone was broken, its coiled metal cord dangling without a receiver.

Well, shit.

The night had quickly descended into late-summer darkness, the air humid and thick with insects that dive-bombed my face. I circled the station, weighing my options. In Woodstock, I would have hailed a passing car, because I was likely to know the person who stopped—someone whose kids I’d gone to school with, someone who had worked with Dad or managed a booth at the fair with Mom.

The phrase You’re not in Kansas anymore burned in my brain. Hah, a bad joke.

An older-model Honda passed on the road, tailpipe rattling. I wondered if the driver had seen me, or if I should have tried to flag down the car. Too late now.