The First to Lie

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  Brooke closed her eyes in a brief instant of reluctant inevitability, then looked up from her spot at the island in the center of their kitchen, a sleek spackled marble monster with copper pots dangling overhead from cast-iron hooks. Like the sword of Damocles in the story. Metaphor, she thought. This is what they meant: dangerous stuff hanging over you. And now Mom was being critical?

  “Protein, okay?” Brooke answered, trying to be polite about the peanut butter. She knew her mom meant well and was probably just surprised since Brooke hadn’t eaten PB since she was a little kid. But it had sounded so good this morning. Her stomach demanded it, needed it, and she had to eat it. She was, like, always starving. And she had to decide what to do. She took another bite of it slathered on a thick slice of whole wheat, savoring the gooey smoothness on her teeth and tongue, the comforting sweetness as she swallowed it.

  “It’s fine, honey.” Her mom dumped the flowers on the counter by the sink, took a green glass vase from a cabinet, and turned on the tap in the kitchen sink. “Whatever you want.”

  She looked at Brooke over her shoulder as the vase filled with water. “You okay, sweetie?”

  She stashed the flowers into the vase, but instead of arranging them like she always did, she pulled a raffia stool up to the island, its cast-iron legs grating on the terra-cotta floor. She put her elbows on the marble and leaned toward Brooke. Her tanned shoulders were bare under the ties of her navy eyelet sundress, and tortoiseshell sunglasses held her streaky blond hair back from her face. She narrowed her eyes, inquiring.

  “Brookie?”

  Brooke swallowed and shifted her weight, unsticking her thighs from the woven seat. “Sure. I’m fine. How come?” she asked, truly curious. “Aren’t you?”

  Something might be up. Seriously up. Brooke had heard her parents arguing last night, and she’d even sneaked out of her bedroom and tiptoed to the balcony edge, straining to untangle the jumbled voices coming from the family room below.

  But all she could hear was a murmury rumble, her dad’s voice lower pitched and her mom’s higher. Incredibly frustrating. They were fighting again, though, that was for sure, and Brooke wished she knew what it was about. Not her big brother, of course, since he was perfect and older and never did anything wrong. And he wasn’t even arriving until next week with the girlfriend du jour, not that Brooke cared. But recently her parents had been arguing more and more, and Brooke couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t like they were drinking or anything, she would have noticed that. At least not more than the usual summer country club G-and-Ts, not like her friends’ parents, so ridiculous. Could it be about money? There was plenty of money.

  So didn’t it have to be about her? Or maybe that was paranoid. The whole world wasn’t about her. Just ask Liam, who now was ignoring her like crazy, the jerk. The creep. Loser. Brooke was better off without him. She really was.

  She hadn’t planned to tell him. That had been her first decision. But then the sand was warm, and she’d skooched it between her toes as she’d flapped out the blue-and-white-striped beach towel. The swish of the waves was always so peaceful, and the seagulls had squawked overhead, swooping and diving and floating above them all. And Liam had come up to her, as they’d planned, as they always did—always meaning this summer—in that faded red bathing suit with the dumb pockets, and a white towel around his neck, and that smile.

  “Hey, Boo,” he’d said. “Why’re you covering up that killer bod?”

  “Jerk,” she teased. “Killer bod? What, are you, like, in an old movie?”

  “Truth,” he said. “And it’s mine all mine.”

  “Good luck with that, loser.” She stuck out her tongue as she said it, secretly pleased to feel so possessed. But freaked at the same time. Still, she had to stay normal, she did, as long as she could. Whatever normal was. Or would turn out to be. “I can wear whatever I want, right?”

  “Do my back?” He’d flopped down on the towel, not answering her question. “With fifty?”

  Everyone else was in the water, but Brooke was still on shore, wearing a big T-shirt, the one her parents had given her brother when he got into college. It wasn’t cool to wear your own school’s T-shirt, everyone but her parents knew that, so Trevor had given it to her. She felt safe in it now, safe in how big it was. She missed Trev so much. Sometimes it seemed, even though he was four years older, her brother was the only one who cared about her. She wished she could ask him about Liam, about what to do. Trev was a guy, and he knew stuff, and even when he teased her, or called her Smidge like he knew she hated, she still trusted him.

  But now, Liam. He’d asked her to do his back with fifty, because he knew she knew that meant SPF 50 sunscreen, like he knew she had that, like they were totally together. And they were, she guessed, even more than he knew.

  She sighed, her knees on the terry towel, leaning over him, feeling the warmth of his skin, the muscles of his shoulders, the rise and fall of his chest under her lotioned hands. His face was turned toward her, resting on the back of one hand, his eyes closed, eyelashes impossibly long against his tanned cheek. He’d bleached out his hair for the summer, all the cool guys had, and it was silvery-pink-blond like the inside of a clamshell. How could someone so gorgeous, so perfect, so smart and cool, how could he love her? But he’d said he did, he’d told her so, and she had to believe it, wanted to believe it.

  “Nice,” he muttered, and the seagulls swooped so low she could almost see their expressions. August at the beach, and this day stretching out in front of them, and then the week, then the summer and then life.

  Could she be with him forever? She was only fifteen, but almost sixteen, like he was, and she wanted happiness, she could envision it, but what did happiness mean? To her, it meant Liam. She even loved his name. Liam. Liam Endicott. And maybe he’d be happy too?

  “Lee?” she said into his back.

  “Mmm?”

  “Seriously, Lee?”

  He turned his head the other way, looking in her direction now. Opened one eye. “Seriously, Lee, what-ly?”

  “Brooke? Where’d you go?” Her mom’s voice brought her back to the kitchen. To now. Forty-nine hours later, and nothing from him, freaking nothing, and she refused to call him. He used to call her, like, every day. Twice even, sometimes. But now, he’d completely blown her off. Her eyes hurt from crying, like there were no more tears inside her.

  “Whoa, spaced out, I guess.” Brooke tried to laugh it off. “Peanut butter carb high, maybe.” She took another bite. What was Liam doing right now? Thinking of her? Could he avoid her for the whole rest of the summer?

  “Brooke. I’m talking to you, sweetheart.” Her mom had made coffee and now fiddled with her white ceramic coffee mug, shifting the handle from one side to the other and back.

  The swishy grating of mug on marble was making Brooke’s teeth hurt. And she could smell the coffee, like the earth, acid and brown. The skin behind her ears was getting all tight, and it was like her eyes were buzzing. She looked over her mom’s bare shoulder into their backyard, where the high seagrass rustled in the morning breeze, and a squawking seagull landed, with a caw and a rattle, behind their slatted wooden fence. Birds were bad luck.

  “Brooke. Look at me.” Her mother bit her lower lip, white teeth on coral lipstick. “I asked if you were okay. You look tired. Your eyes look tired.”

  Her mom was freaking her out again, all interest and concern. This was not how she usually acted.

  “No, I’m fine, honestly,” Brooke said, and then figured she should make some excuse for all of it. Make it kind of true. “My stomach is a little weird, I guess.” She gestured with her PB. “Thought carbs and protein might help.”

  Her mom narrowed her eyes again, gave her a look, like when she knew Brooke was lying.

  “Really? There’s nothing else?”

  “Really, Mom, whatever.” Brooke ate the last of her sandwich, thought about having another one. Thought about, like, cheese. Maybe a hamburger. Or maybe tha
t would be gross. She couldn’t decide. “Aren’t you going to the club?”

  “I love you, honey,” her mom said. “You know that.”

  “Love you too,” she replied, though she wasn’t really thinking about it. It was what they always said, ever since she could remember. Like a ritual, a thing you say. A thing she’d said. And Liam had too. She kept remembering that. I love you more than the sky, he’d said. More than the wind. More than the stars and constellations. She remembered, again, that June night at the beach, after the thing at the club. Maybe I love you never counted. People just said it, said it to get what they wanted, and then it didn’t matter.

  Her mother swiveled off the chair. Cool. Maybe she hadn’t noticed. When her mom’s back was turned, Brooke brushed away her tears, so ridiculous, and picked up her plate to take to the sink. Mom would leave any minute now, and Brooke could go figure stuff out.

  “Here’s something for your tummy.” Her mom had opened her tote bag, dug around inside, then taken something out. Now she held out a flat palm, a white pill centered in the middle. “Maybe this’ll help.”

  “What is it?” Brooke left the pill in her mother’s hand. “You’re always giving me stuff. Is it like a Tums?”

  “Kind of,” her mom said. “I know how you feel, sweetheart. That queasiness. It happens sometimes. That’s what medicine is for. Just take this.”

  Brooke accepted the pill, examined it between her thumb and forefinger. Smelled it. It had no writing on it, a plain smooth disk.

  “It’s not a Tums,” Brooke said.

  “Brookie? I just want you to feel better, honey,” her mom said. “Lucky we have these things to help us. If we lived in the old days, you’d have to—”

  “O-kay.” Brooke had to interrupt, or she’d have to kill herself. When her mom went off on her miracle of modern medicine speeches, she’d never let it go. Listening to her was giving Brooke even more of a stomachache. “Yeesh.”

  “Good.” Mom handed her the rest of her water with a drink it expression. “One gulp. It’ll help. I promise.”

  CHAPTER 17

  ELLIE

  Ellie stared at the console of the landline on her desk at Channel 11, gazing at the speaker mesh as if she could see through its layer of tiny holes and to the face beyond.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked.

  Her uneaten lunch sat on a crinkly piece of waxed paper on her blotter. The guy downstairs in the newsroom caf had given her a tuna sandwich instead of the turkey she’d ordered. She hated tuna. On the other end of this call, in an apartment somewhere in Massachusetts, Meg sat with the woman who was about to reveal her devastating medical outcome. In the hideous equation of journalism, this woman’s tragedy could seal Ellie’s success.

  “We can hear you.” Meg’s voice, scratchy and muffled, came over the speaker. “I’m here with Abigail, as we discussed, and she’s fine. You’re fine, aren’t you, Abigail?”

  Someone said something in the background, and though Ellie strained to hear, she couldn’t. She stood, closed the door to her office, sat back down. An anonymous interview was not the preferred way to get a story, but at this point, she’d take what she could get. And if it didn’t pan out, so what? One step at a time, until the story was ready.

  After Ellie found the note on her door the night before, she’d been forced to admit that Meg might be an asset. Being annoying didn’t mean she was incompetent, and Ellie could not pull off this story alone. She’d knocked on Meg’s door—and Meg had slipped out into the hallway, clicking the door closed behind her.

  “My place is a mess,” Meg had explained. She pushed up the sleeves of her pink sweatshirt, worn inside out over fraying jeans. “Everything’s still in boxes. So embarrassing. I guess you got my note?”

  “Great work,” Ellie told her. She wasn’t eager to invite Meg into her place again, didn’t want to set a precedent. So the two women stayed in the hall, the elevator rumbling from time to time, and fake candles in sconces flickering on the walls behind them. “Listen, how’d you find this person? And you think she’ll talk?”

  Meg nodded. “I do. She’s…” She scratched under her chin, seemed to be searching for a word. “I don’t know how to describe it. Damaged. She’s decided her life was ruined by this medicine. By Pharminex. When I told her what you said, about the company calculating how much a human life is worth, she about lost it. I almost regret that she knows it. As if her psyche wasn’t damaged enough—not to mention her future—now she feels like it was on purpose. Premeditated. That they knew what might happen and didn’t do anything about it. She’s really out to get them.”

  “I completely understand.” Ellie thought about that. “Well, I can imagine, I mean, how that might feel.”

  “Maybe.”

  Ellie wondered what she meant by that skeptical-sounding maybe, but it didn’t matter. “How’d you find her?”

  “Don’t tell, okay? Social media private group. I pretended I was a victim too.”

  “Pretended?”

  “Well, I had to. I couldn’t say—hey, just curious, anyone get their childbearing capability ruined by a dangerous drug? Wanna chat? So I looked up an infertility support group, and, you know, told them I’d been given—well, the whole thing. And they let me in.”

  Ellie leaned back against the wallpaper, a strip of mahogany-painted molding pressing into her back. She hadn’t lost her moral compass, even though she sometimes ignored it. Pretending to be a victim? Another in the sometimes necessary deceptions of the job. It always seemed like particularly bad karma, pretending to share a tragedy, faking empathy and a shared devastation. Almost like daring it to happen in real life. But, said the journalist’s trusty rationalization for deceit, it was all for the greater good.

  “Meg? You only learned about this project this week, and you already convinced a person to talk to a reporter? Usually that kind of negotiating and persuasion takes much longer.”

  Meg smiled, modest. “What can I say? Just doing my job. Sometimes things work.”

  “We’ll have to figure out how to broach this with Warren, though,” Ellie had told her. “He specifically instructed us, no pretending. So we need to come up with an acceptable explanation of how you found her.”

  “You and me, sister,” Meg had said. “We’re in this together now.”

  That late-night partnership agreement hadn’t made Ellie exactly comfortable, but simply interviewing someone didn’t mean she’d have to put the results on the air.

  Now Abigail was ready to talk. Meg had said she’d set up a second cell phone, mounted on a little tripod, to record their interview. As they’d discussed, she’d position Abigail in front of a window, so their subject appeared only in silhouette.

  “Ready?” Ellie asked.

  By the time the interview was over, Ellie sat at her desk, spent and hollow, head in her hands, cheeks wet with tears. Television was about storytelling, information, changing the world. But hearing a personal story like Abigail’s—the sorrow in her voice, and the unfiltered longing—reminded Ellie that each of her stories were about real human beings, with tender hopes and fears and desires, with bitter disappointments and unfulfilled dreams. And sometimes, with the festering damage that accrued from loss. The pain that could sharpen into a weapon.

  “I hate those people.” Abigail’s voice had hardened after relating her pivotal consultation in the doctor’s office, the moment her doctor had divulged the truth about her “adverse reaction” to the drug, the reality it meant, the emotional paralysis that followed. “I felt betrayed,” Abigail said. “They’d promised me a child, a miracle, my future, my happiness. Now when I even see a child…”

  Abigail had stopped, leaving silence in the space between them. Then Ellie heard soft sobs through the speakers. She imagined Meg comforting the woman. Wondered if she’d turned off the recording while she did so.

  “I’m so sorry.” Ellie felt guilty, guilty she had lured the woman into this agony of memory. “I know it’s d
ifficult. Do you want to take a break?”

  “No, no, I want to say this. I want to. They—he—they—it made me feel as if…” Abigail went silent, leaving only the brown hum of the transmission. “As if I had killed my children. As if they had tricked me into murdering my own children.”

  “Oh, no, Abigail.” She needed to reassure this woman, though that wasn’t her role, but how could anyone not be sympathetic? “Please don’t think that!”

  “It is what she thinks.” Meg’s voice bit through the speakers. “Don’t belittle that.”

  “I was only trying to…” Ellie, off balance, tried to maintain her composure. She needed to prevent Abigail from hanging up. “Forgive me, Abigail.”

  “It’s okay.” Abigail’s voice came out a whisper.

  “Hold on a minute,” Meg said. “I’m gonna turn off the video. I’ll leave the sound so you can stay connected.”

  For this moment at least, Ellie was relieved they weren’t face-to-face. The smell of the tuna sandwich now turned her stomach. With three quick motions, she rewrapped it in the waxed paper, put it in the wastebasket and stuffed the morning newspaper on top of it. On the other end of the line, Ellie heard someone sneeze, then footsteps, a hiss, maybe the pull tab of a can of soda.

  “Ellie? We’re back. Abigail’s fine.”

  “You sure?” Ellie had to ask.

  More unintelligible conversation on the other end. Ellie covered her face for a beat, frustrated. But an interview like this was only one step on the journey. It was only what it would turn out to be, not what it seemed right now.

  “Abigail wants to ask you something.” Meg’s voice came though clearly. “She wants to know if you’ve ever had children.”

  Ellie flinched, startled by the personal question. Realizing the irony, she almost laughed. This conversation was already as personal as it could get. Easier to be the one asking questions than the one answering. The double standard of journalism.