Truth Be Told

by Kathleen Barber

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Aunt A went to her sister’s side. She had already fallen back asleep, her face relaxed and serene. Aunt A tenderly brushed a stray hair off her cheek and kissed her on the forehead.

  Outside, an engine started, and then we heard the crunch of gravel as Lanie pulled our shared car out of the driveway.

  Aunt A glanced up at me. “Should she be driving?”

  “No,” I said. “But I don’t know how to stop her.”

  By the time Lanie returned home the next morning, freshly stoned but blessedly calm, our mother was gone.

  • • •

  Arriving for the burial was hard, but leaving the cemetery was nearly impossible. There was nothing to do once the urn containing my mother’s ashes had been lowered into the ground—nothing could undo the years of estrangement, the times that I had cursed her name because she had abandoned us—but just the thought of walking away and leaving her there in the ground made me shake with guilt.

  “We’re going to Mom’s house, hon,” Ellen said softly, squeezing my shoulder. “Did you want to come with us?”

  “I—” I started, but couldn’t finish, unable to articulate that I couldn’t leave, not just yet.

  “I’ll stay with her,” Caleb said to Ellen. He sat beside me and took my hand. “Take as much time as you need.”

  And so I sat in a chair, watching as the others dispersed. When Lanie walked away, she didn’t look back once, and I had to wonder what she was feeling. Lanie had always been our mother’s favorite—something I had rationalized away as a child, thinking that our father liked me best. Lanie was the one who volunteered to help our mother in the garden, the one who read Wuthering Heights with her; I was the one who listened to our father’s mini-lectures on American presidents and spent weekends with him scouring yard sales for discarded reference books. On the family trivia nights my father regularly instigated, I teamed with him, combining his knowledge of history with my self-studied geography, and we battled Mom and Lanie, who together dominated the arts. Now it was just the two of us left, me and Lanie, virtual strangers where we had once formed the two halves of one magnificent whole.

  From Twitter, posted September 25, 2015

  chapter 13

  Caleb and I returned to find Aunt A’s house full of her friends, who had arrived with store-bought appetizers and bottles of wine. I couldn’t tell which friends I recognized and which ones I had never met, so I kept my conversations light and impersonal. At one point, I was certain I saw Poppy Parnell, but when I charged over to order her to leave, I realized it was just one of Aunt A’s colleagues, and so I thanked her for coming and refilled her wineglass.

  In the kitchen, I found Ellen arranging carrots on plastic crudités trays and opening containers of dip.

  “There you are,” she said, shoving a tub of something purporting to be French vegetable dip into my hands. “I need help. Open this.”

  Grateful for the distraction of minor manual labor, I began wrestling with the pull tab as I wondered aloud, “What about this dip is French?”

  “Name alone. I guarantee that the French don’t eat this crap. This is wholly American.”

  “Ze Americans have ze lard ass,” I said, putting on my most comical French accent. “Although, I have to tell you, I have met some French people who were really into eating processed junk.”

  “Well, of course you did, darling. You were socializing exclusively with dirty backpackers.”

  “Hey, I was a dirty backpacker,” I protested, setting the now-open dip down onto the table.

  “And yet I love you anyway. Speaking of dirty backpackers and assorted foreign characters, do you want to tell me what’s going on with Caleb?”

  “No,” I said, plucking a carrot from the tray and shoving it in my mouth.

  “Tell me anyway,” she said, spreading crackers out into a fan shape on a plate. “He’s here. Did you call him after I left the bar yesterday?”

  “No, that would have shown some maturity.” I crunched through another carrot and admitted, “Caleb surprised me.”

  Ellen set down the cracker box and gaped at me. “You didn’t know he was coming? I can’t believe I let Peter talk me into staying at a hotel last night! I miss all the good stuff.”

  I nodded grimly. “It was quite the surprise. For both of us. First he met your mother, who I’d said was dead. And then he met my sister, who I’d never mentioned.”

  “I can see how that would be a surprise.”

  “Yeah. Oh, and Lanie pretended to be me.”

  “As she does.”

  A vision of my sister at that long-ago party flashed through my mind, her wearing my pink sweater, her hair rumpled and cheeks flushed. A spark of fury ignited beneath my breastbone, and I snapped, “Well, she must be out of practice because she didn’t fool Caleb.”

  “Of course she didn’t,” Ellen scoffed.

  “It’s not that crazy,” I said, put off by Ellen’s dismissive tone. “We’re identical twins. And it’s not like she’s never fooled anyone before.”

  Even as the words left my lips, though, I remembered the puzzled expression on Caleb’s face, the disbelief evident in his voice even as he said “Jo?” It was clear he hadn’t believed she was me. Caleb could tell the difference between us and he didn’t even know there was a difference to tell. How was that possible? Unless . . .

  “Oh,” I said suddenly, the realization a swift kick in the gut. “Adam knew.”

  I looked to Ellen for confirmation, but it was no longer a question in my mind. Adam had known that it was my sister he took by the hand at Benny’s party, my sister who he locked himself inside an upstairs bedroom with, my sister who he had sex with that night. He had always known.

  “Oh, honey,” Ellen said, laying a sympathetic hand on my arm. “Yes. I thought you knew that.”

  In the aftermath, Adam had sent a deluge of emails, proclaiming over and over again and in all-caps, I THOUGHT SHE WAS YOU. Had I ever truly believed that? I had certainly wanted to believe it. It was easier to believe Adam thought she was me; it was easier to find only one villain in the situation instead of two. Lanie had been disappointing me for years, whereas Adam had been my lifeline, my rock. Knowing both of them had deliberately betrayed me would have completely destroyed me. Believing he had been fooled by my untrustworthy sister had been an act of self-preservation.

  “But why?” I sputtered. “Why would he . . . with Lanie?”

  “Why do eighteen-year-old boys do anything, Josie? Hormones. Beer. Idiocy. They’re simple, base creatures.”

  At that moment, Lanie pushed open the kitchen door. Speak of the devil, I thought unkindly. She looked glamorous in a tailored black wool dress and understated pumps. I was wearing a black H&M sweater on loan from Isabelle and a pair of old black pants I found in my closet, neither of which fit me very well. It seemed grossly unfair that she could remain so composed given the havoc she had wreaked on so many lives.

  Ellen clocked my discontent from underneath her eyelashes and shoved the platter of crudités in Lanie’s direction. “Here, take these into the other room.”

  “No,” Lanie said, staring at the platter while making no moves to accept it. “I’m not a servant.”

  “I’m just asking you to help,” Ellen insisted, pushing the platter at her again. Lanie stepped to the side, and the platter sailed out of Ellen’s hands. It clattered noisily to the floor, and carrots rolled in every direction.

  “Thanks a bunch,” Ellen snapped as she stomped out of the room, leaving my sister and me alone with the spilled vegetables.

  “Josie,” she started.

  I stared at her, searching her face, hoping for clues that would unravel the mystery of her: how she ended up with Adam, why she turned on me, what she really saw that night.

  She frowned. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  I sighed. “What do you want, Lanie?”

  “I want to talk. About us,” she hastened to add, “not that podc
ast.”

  “Not now, Lanie. We just buried our mother.”

  “Making it even more important for us to clear the air,” she said, lifting her chin determinedly.

  “I said, not now.”

  Adam pushed open the kitchen door, an empty wine bottle in his hands, and paused, looking from Lanie to me, clearly trying to decide whether getting a fresh bottle was important. “Everything okay in here?”

  “Yes,” Lanie said sweetly at the same moment that I said, “No.”

  Adam’s eyes locked on me, and my guts churned. Whereas I had once given him credit for apologizing while my sister remained silent and unrepentant, I now was certain that those apologies had been riddled with lies. If I had only been a bit more skeptical, had held his untruths up to the light . . . then what? I wouldn’t have left? If I hadn’t left, I never would have met Caleb, and I couldn’t imagine my life without him.

  “Josie, can we—?” he started.

  As little as I wanted to speak to my sister, I wanted to talk to Adam even less in the moment. I turned sharply to Lanie and said, “Fifteen minutes. You and me.”

  • • •

  Lanie paused in the entrance to our old bedroom, her manicured fingertips tracing the stained wood of the doorframe. If it had been another day, I might have made a joke about emotional vampires not being able to cross thresholds any better than their mythological counterparts. Instead, I took a seat in the desk chair and watched as Lanie looked around the room.

  “Wow,” she said quietly. “It’s just the same.”

  I nodded stiffly. “You haven’t been here lately?”

  “Not to this room.” She shook her head. “Not since I moved out.”

  “You’re not close with Aunt A? Even though you live in town?”

  “Come on, Josie,” Lanie said scornfully. “What do you think? I’m the one who drives everyone away: our mother, you. Aunt A wants nothing to do with me.”

  “She said that? That doesn’t sound like her.”

  “Of course she’s never said those exact words. But I know. I know the only reason she tolerates me at all is because of my daughter.”

  “That’s not true, I’m sure,” I murmured, looking down.

  I picked up the model Washington Monument and turned it over in my hands, clasping my fingers around it so that the jagged edge where the tip had once been bit into my palm. I waited while Lanie looked at the pictures on the wall, and then finally sat on her old bed. She stared at her feet for a minute, and when she finally spoke, it was not what I expected to hear. I had expected an excuse, a reason why the things that had transpired were beyond her control. If I was honest, I had hoped for an apology.

  Instead, Lanie said, “I named her Ann. After Mom. Her middle name, you know.”

  I wanted to hiss that of course I knew our mother’s middle name was Ann, that Ann was the name I had selected for my own hypothetical future children with Adam, and that Adam knew that. But there was nothing to be gained from saying these things, or even thinking them, so I kept my mouth shut and pushed the monument deeper into my palm. My eyes watered.

  “I’ve been dreaming about her,” Lanie said quietly.

  I looked up. “Your daughter?”

  “Mom. I’ve been dreaming about Mom.”

  “Oh.” I turned the monument over in my hands, unwilling to admit that I had not been dreaming about our mother, afraid that it showed Lanie was a better daughter than I.

  “The dreams, though . . .” Lanie trailed off. “Sometimes they feel like more than dreams. Sometimes I feel like she’s trying to tell me something. Do you ever have those?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “And if I’m not dreaming about her, I’m not sleeping. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve gotten more than a collective ten hours of sleep since she died.”

  “Lanie,” I interrupted. “What is this? You dragged me up here to talk about your insomnia?”

  “I just thought you might understand,” she said, looking chastened.

  “There are so many things we need to talk about. We can’t just skip all that and go directly to lamenting our sleep schedules. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to start with all the havoc you’ve wreaked on my life.”

  “Fuck that,” she said, eyes darkening. With a curse on her lips and a scowl on her face, she looked more like the sister I remembered from high school than the chic Stepford wife that had inhabited her body. Part of me felt relieved to see her calm veneer cracking once more; there was a certain comfortable predictability to her temper.

  “Every time I see Aunt A, she’s always telling me how perfect your life is.” Lanie’s scowl deepened and she affected a shrill voice that I assumed was supposed to be Aunt A’s. “Did you know that Josie’s boyfriend is a humanitarian? Did you know that Josie and her boyfriend own a one-bedroom apartment in New York City? Did you know that Josie sold a book to that funny lady comedian from Saturday Night Live?”

  “Kristen Wiig? Yeah, I did,” I said automatically. I caught myself and returned her scowl.

  Lanie was wrong. My life wasn’t perfect. It was good more often than it was bad, and some days it was close to great, but it wasn’t perfect. I had Caleb, who was a decent, honorable man, and a place to call home and enough money to feel secure, but I also had a lifetime of pain and regret. I knew not all of that was Lanie’s fault—no matter what I said, some of the blame fell on the shoulders of my father’s killer, whoever that might be, and another portion rested on those of my late mother. Still, I held Lanie accountable for most of the lingering hurt.

  There were so many things I could have said to Lanie, so many examples of how she had failed me, but, regrettably, when I opened my mouth, what came out was: “You married Adam.”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding readily. “I did.”

  “You . . . How . . .” I stuttered, unable to find the words to express how I felt. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  She frowned a little. “I was just trying to do the right thing.”

  “How was that the right thing?” I demanded, a suppressed sob threatening to break my chest in two. I would not cry in front of her; I would not show her how much her betrayal still hurt me. “I just don’t understand what happened.”

  “Do you really want to know?” she asked quietly.

  No, I thought, as my mouth whispered, “Yes.”

  Lanie’s finger danced across the quilt, tracing what looked like a heart. She cleared her throat and, in a tiny voice, said, “When Adam and I slept together—”

  “When you took advantage of him,” I corrected automatically, even though an electric jolt ran through my body, reminding me that Adam’s account was untrue.

  Her eyes flashed with sudden anger, and she sent her fist flying into the bed with a small thwump.

  “That’s bullshit,” she spit. “Is that what he told you? That’s not what happened.”

  “What happened, then?”

  “Adam came on to me.”

  Unbidden, Ellen’s voice came into my head, a line from the past: Adam looks pretty wrecked. Cursed with the last scheduled final, I had been driving home for summer break days after everyone else. I had planned on leaving first thing the following morning, but the campus was deserted and so I decided to leave that evening instead. I called Adam as I neared town, eager to see him. Because he had gone to school out of state and our spring break plans had fallen through, I hadn’t seen him since the holidays. I was disappointed when he didn’t answer his phone. I called Ellen next, who shouted into the phone over the din of music and laughter that Benny Weston’s parents were out of town and he had a couple of kegs.

  “Come straight here,” she commanded. “Everyone’s here.”

  “Is Adam there? He didn’t answer when I called.”

  “Probably because he’s too busy drinking his face off. Want me to tell him you’re on the way so that he has a chance to sober up?”

  “No, let’s keep it a surprise,” I said, imagi
ning the delight on Adam’s face when he saw I was home early.

  It was a devastating mistake, but I hadn’t known it then: I simply had never known Adam to be much of a drinker, and I didn’t assume that one year of college could have changed him that much. I thought Ellen was just being Ellen—that is to say, overly judgmental.

  “You might want to drive fast, then. Adam looks pretty wrecked.”

  “Adam was drunk,” I said to Lanie, my voice wavering.

  “And you think I was sober? Honestly, Josie, why do you think I was even at that party? Ryder had heard that Benny’s mom had a decent stash of painkillers, and we raided the medicine cabinet. I was so high I didn’t even know my own name.”

  I nearly snapped that it must have made it easier to pretend to be me, but I swallowed the response. Adam had known. Lanie didn’t need to impersonate me. I closed my eyes, recalling how I had made my way into the sweaty mass of people in Benny’s living room just in time to see Adam descending the stairs, Lanie at his side. Adam’s cheeks were flushed, his golden hair tousled, his smile dopey. His T-shirt was on inside out. His glazed eyes landed on me, and his color drained. He ran a hand over his face, a gesture that I interpreted at the time as astonishment, but in retrospect was clearly guilt. How could I have missed it?

  Adam had known. It was a punch in the gut, realizing that the anger I had clung to for so many years—the notion that my sister had purposefully imitated me in order to steal my boyfriend away—was misplaced. Adam was no innocent in this . . . but that didn’t absolve Lanie. She owed me a duty of blood. Adam might have betrayed me, but Lanie was the one who broke my heart.

  “You’re my sister,” I said, my voice nothing more than a whisper. “How could you do that to me?”

  “I did a lot of things then that I’m not proud of,” Lanie said, her voice hardening. “But what about you?”

  “What about me?” I demanded, surprised. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You left,” she spit. “Without so much as ‘goodbye’ or ‘have a nice life’ or ‘fuck you.’ You just left. You were all I had, and you left.”