The Good Liar

by Catherine McKenzie

  I have a child on either side of me—Cassie, fifteen, on my left, and Henry, thirteen, on my right. Their hands are firmly in mine, and they’re dressed in matching black outfits—their decision, not mine, one that kind of breaks my heart. They used to do that when they were little—Cassie was small for her age then, and Henry was tall, so they used to pretend they were twins and dress the same to play up their similarities.

  They haven’t done that in forever, but when they told me of their plan a few days ago, I let them choose something for me, too. And so here we are, looking at the line of important men in front of us, a trio of blond, pale-skinned grief.

  We look like a family a candidate might use in a campaign ad in the Middle West.

  Henry strains against my hand. He loves sports, and violent video games I don’t want to know the name of, and history books about World War II. He’s still tall for his age, passing me in height a year ago. Of all of us, he’s been the hardest hit by this. He and Tom were close, closer than Cassie and me, much to my dismay. Tom was a great father, and I’m at a loss to know how to fill the hole he’s left behind.

  It’s very loud inside, the noise jump-starting the headache I knew I’d have today. The air’s both stale and full of too much aftershave and the perfume coming off the bank of white flowers behind the stage. The kernel of unease in my stomach has grown to fist size, like a punch; I wish I still had some of the medication my doctor prescribed to deal with the first month after Tom died, when I couldn’t sleep without it and going outside seemed impossible. But I didn’t think to keep any for emergencies, so we stand there for a few minutes, not saying anything, taking it all in, while I remember how to breathe.

  Then one of the senators notices us and nudges his colleagues out of the way. The First Family of Grief, we’ve been given special status with seats in the front row, small Reserved signs holding our spaces on the foldout chairs draped in white fabric. Like so many things, I didn’t ask for this, but I couldn’t turn it down. I’ve let myself be photographed in an endless cascade of black dresses, and now there will be more time on camera, more exploitation of us for the “common good,” that eternal excuse that has led me to agree, time and again, to interviews, appearances, and even a few sweaty-palmed speeches.

  There’s a thick book on each of the seats, professionally produced. For once, my face is not on the cover. Instead, it’s another shot of Teo’s, taken in the minutes before the explosion, when the building was highlighted by a sunbeam and the puffy blue clouds above held no sense of foreboding.

  It’s 513 pages long, one page for every person lost. Those who were simply injured, or scarred in other ways, have their own book, their own groups, and though they were invited today, they’re seated in the back, out of the line of sight of the cameras. For some reason their injuries, their very real, physical ones, don’t seem as important as ours, the psychological remnants of those who are gone. As a result, many of the survivors are angry, disillusioned, fighting for recognition. I don’t blame them, and I should help them with that fight, but I don’t have the energy.

  The hour grinds on. The room is overflowing and hot. There are big screens behind the stage projecting a stream of family shots, a photo collage of memories. When it’s our family’s turn, Henry starts shaking next to me. I pull his towhead to my shoulder, making soothing sounds. Cassie stares straight ahead, watching as her father splashes her with a garden hose while she giggles, as he stands proudly next to her when she dressed up for her first formal, as she unwraps a Christmas present while Tom laughs. We chose these photos together a few weeks ago, picking randomly among the digital files I’d never managed to get into physical albums. We had a good cry and a good laugh, too, and I thought about all the progress we’d made since I finally got home on October tenth, and in the days after when it became clear that Tom wouldn’t.

  Cassie’s been harder to read since then, withdrawing into herself instead of acting out. Will I learn later that she’s been sneaking off in the dead of night to meet the wrong kind of boy and numb herself with alcohol, pills, or meaningless sex? There’s no sign of this, though more than one person has suggested I should be on the watch for it. Do you know something I don’t? I always ask. No, no, of course not. Only . . . I’ve heard stories about some of the other girls . . . And then they shrug. You know girls . . .

  These stories—and their casual acceptance as inevitable for my daughter—make me so, so angry. As if the only way women can deal with their grief is some form of self-injury.

  The din cuts out suddenly. Teo’s assistant—the scars from the burns he got that day on his arms still visible—scurries across the stage and tweaks the flags behind the podium. Several tall men in black suits with earpieces surround it. It’s 9:59 a.m.

  And while a year ago, I might not have even noticed, now I know what this means.

  The president’s coming.

  • • •

  “Where do you want to begin?” I ask Teo four hours later, when the speeches are done and we’ve been allowed to return to our everyday lives that do not involve bear hugs from presidents and crudités passed on silver platters.

  Despite the abundance that surrounded me, I’m hungry. I never eat any of the funeral fare; the food they serve at the parade of events I’ve been to all tastes the same to me, high quality or low. It’s like the meals that still show up at my door on a regular basis, so much so that I no longer need to cook for my family. I still do; I’ve always loved to cook, and I cannot eat another slice of frozen lasagna, ever, but there’s security in knowing that if I disappear, too, my children will have provisions for several months.

  This is how I think now. I don’t know how to stop it.

  Teo gets me to give my basic details: name, age, occupation. And then: “Why don’t you tell me about that day?” Teo says. “From the beginning.”

  He wore a suit for the event, but now he’s changed back into his trademark T-shirt and jeans. How many versions of this outfit does he have?

  “It was an ordinary day,” I say, trying to focus on the now. “Nothing about it stands out.”

  Teo raises an eyebrow. “Nothing?”

  “I mean before the explosion. It was the usual getting the kids ready for school and getting myself ready, and . . . I know that probably doesn’t help you.”

  “It’s fine. I’m just surprised because the other people I’ve talked to, well, most of them seem to remember everything that happened that day.”

  We’re sitting in the solarium off the kitchen. It smells like slightly rotted rosemary; the plant it was Tom’s job to water barely survived this year without him, putting up with Henry’s imperfect memory as best it could. Beyond it lies the backyard—a cedar hedge, a covered barbecue that hasn’t been used since last summer, burnished gold mums in a set of planters my mother gave me years ago.

  “I think people enjoy saying stuff like that,” I say. “Like, if they missed a flight that ended up crashing, they’ll say: Something was bugging me all day. I just knew from the moment I woke up I shouldn’t get on that airplane. I think that’s why I was late, et cetera. But think of all the times you feel that way and nothing happens.”

  A shiver runs through me, because that is how I feel now all the time, that nervous feeling like something bad’s about to happen, something I could avoid if I knew which event to skip, which route not to take, which call not to answer. Sometimes it’s overwhelming, trapping me in the house because if I don’t leave, then I can’t make a bad decision. Most of the time, like now, it’s simply a companion, a new part of me I have to carry around, like weight I can’t shed.

  “What is it?” Teo asks. “Have you remembered something?”

  “Nothing, really . . .”

  “Tell me.”

  “This is probably ironic given what I just said, but I was late that day. I got behind with the kids and . . . I was late. Nothing unusual for me, but that’s why I wasn’t in the building.”

  “Did you hav
e a bad feeling? Is that what made you late?”

  “No . . . I was annoyed with myself, but it wasn’t a premonition or anything. I used to be late all the time. If you asked Tom, it was my main character flaw.”

  “You were going to meet Tom that day, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “An early lunch?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “It was ten in the morning. Seems like an odd time to meet your husband at his office.”

  I look out the window. The grass is longer than Tom kept it, and it hasn’t received the final mowing he used to give it before the snow flew. We have a service that comes now, but they close up in September. A burst of Indian summer a week ago pushed a few inches out of the ground. What would Tom think if he came back? Would he find things to complain about, or would he just be so happy to be alive everything else would pale by comparison?

  “We did that sometimes. Met up when he had a break in his schedule. We were going to go look at some furniture. At CORT, I think, that discount place on Lake Shore.”

  Teo looks around. “Seems like you have all the furniture you could use here.”

  “I know, right?” I bring my attention back to him, looking right into his brown eyes. “There are so many things—after—that seem silly in retrospect.”

  Even though he’s filming this, Teo’s taking notes. He’s got his questions typed up on pieces of paper with spaces below for my answers. I don’t feel anything as I watch him write down my lies.

  After a year of telling them, it’s become second nature.

  4

  DREAMS

  KATE

  In Montreal, Kate was dreaming. A few hours before, she thought she’d have a sleepless night, a “white night,” she used to call them, back in her old life, when it still seemed as if a night without sleep could be benign. But sometime soon after two, she’d gone under, and her brain, like her daughter’s, was torturing her.

  In the dream, she was in her old house. She’d forgotten to pull the shades on her bedroom windows tightly closed. They hadn’t wound the clocks back yet, so the light that pushed her awake wasn’t the sun but the street lamp on their front lawn that her children would decorate in a few weeks for Halloween. Kate knew without looking that her alarm would sound soon. That she’d have to pry herself away from the warmth embracing her and face another morning of getting the kids ready for school and herself ready for work.

  She could feel her husband sleeping next to her. When she thought of him, Kate was always split in two. Sometimes even being married seemed weird, like a word you repeat so many times it loses its meaning. Other times Kate wondered how they’d ended up together. Had it simply been a case of musical chairs? That he was the one she was sitting next to when it was time for the music to stop? She knew she was being unfair to him, forgetting all the great things that were the reasons she was lying next to him in the first place. But instead, often, all she could focus on were things like the fact that he’d become a great father against his will.

  When they’d discussed having children, it had never occurred to Kate to ask whether he wanted to be involved. Weren’t all fathers involved these days? They both worked equivalent jobs. Surely he wouldn’t expect her to give all that up and become the kids’ primary caregiver?

  But he had. In those first months after they came home from the hospital, he’d refused to do diapers. He never offered to get up for a night feeding, or any feeding at all. Kate was at first amused, and then, slowly, furious. What was happening? She was too tired to understand. Too worn out to have the conversation she knew she should before this pattern became set in stone. They’d both come home from the hospital with the same amount of information. How had she become the expert and he the helpless?

  And then things had shifted, she’d shifted, and he’d come to the rescue. He learned all the things they should’ve been learning together, and he’d done it so seamlessly, so easily, she often thought she’d made up the time before. Regardless, now he was in the trenches right along with her, maybe more than that, even. The cavalry, while she was the rear guard. A bad analogy. Of course, she was dreaming. She hadn’t thought all that, that morning a year ago. She’d just waited for the clock to click over. The music to start playing. The day to start up.

  Time passed. Maybe she fell asleep again. Maybe it had been earlier than she thought. All she knew was that when she finally woke up, she was running.

  • • •

  Now, a year into her new life, Kate felt as if that was all she was doing—running. The direct result of her job as a nanny to a pair of three-year-old twins.

  That was a laugh.

  In fact, Kate did laugh when she accepted the job and realized what it would mean. She laughed again her first night in the basement apartment that came along with it. Lying in a brand-new bed (her employer, Andrea, had a horror of used mattresses and insisted on buying a new one for Kate, along with two pairs of Frette sheets and a set of the softest bath towels she’d ever used). Listening unaccustomed to the groans of the old building. Kate had stuffed a (organic) pillow into her mouth to keep the sound from flowing upstairs to the family she was now bound to.

  “I can’t believe how lucky I am,” Andrea said the first time Kate met her, when she’d gone to an interview a week after she’d arrived in Montreal.

  “Lucky?” Kate asked, but they both knew what Andrea meant. Of course Andrea was lucky. Look at where she lived—a sprawling brick house on a street in Westmount called Roslyn “on the flat,” as Kate would learn to call it, as if she were selling real estate. Everything on the property was neat as a pin. Even the leftover leaves from the big maple that dominated the front yard, yellowed and spotted with black nickel-size marks, had been bagged with more precision than anything she’d ever been able to accomplish.

  “To find you,” Andrea said. Her hair was an ash-blond color most of the women in the neighborhood wore. Andrea was personal-trainer, low-carb-diet skinny, and though it was October, her skin had a glow to it that was a shade too orange.

  “My French is not very good, though.” Excellent French had been listed as a job requirement.

  Andrea frowned. From the moment Kate had shown up in the chino slacks and argyle sweater she’d bought on sale the day before at the Gap, she’d been able to read the thought bubble over Andrea’s head. Kate was white. She was educated. She had the job.

  But now there was a hesitation. Kate had revealed something about herself that was less than ideal. Were there other things to worry about?

  “Oh, I don’t care about that,” Andrea said, her laugh tinkling. “They’ll be going to French school starting when they’re four. No.” Andrea leaned in. Kate could see the black hollows under her eyes that even a thick layer of foundation couldn’t hide. “I just need help getting them to four, if you know what I mean?”

  Kate glanced over her shoulder at the photograph of Andrea’s boys that sat on the granite counter in the gleaming all-white kitchen. They looked harmless, with their milk teeth showing and their matching coveralls. But Kate knew that was likely deceptive. Two two-year-old boys. They’d be full of energy and questions. She wouldn’t have time for herself. It sounded . . . perfect.

  “I do,” Kate said. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  Kate’s dream shifted again. A tumble of images from the last year. The boys. The house. Her small moments alone. The picture she tried not to look at too often. The people she’d left behind. She felt herself sink deeper, even as it lightened outside. And perhaps that’s what this last year had been, a dream within a dream.

  But it was time to wake up now.

  So wake up, Kate. Wake up.

  INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

  TJ: Your mother . . . You mean your biological mother?

  FM: That’s right.

  TJ: When did you first learn you were adopted?

  FM: I know this’ll sound like a cliché, but I think I always knew.

  TJ: 
Why do you say that?

  FM: I never belonged in my family, you know? I mean, my adoptive parents, I think they tried to love me like my sister, but biology. Biology is something that can’t be denied. It can’t be faked.

  TJ: Did they treat you differently?

  FM: Not deliberately. If you could ask them, they wouldn’t think they’d done anything wrong. But it’s the little things, you know? Like how people were always saying that my sister looked like my mom, my adoptive mom, and then they’d look at me and be all puzzled. “Does she look like her father?” they’d ask. And Mom would always say, “Yes, I think so.” But there was this hesitation, right? This moment before she’d actually answer when the word “adopted” sort of hung there. Like, if I wasn’t there, then she might tell them the truth.

  TJ: That must’ve been tough.

  FM: It was. Those kinds of things work on a child. They wear them down.

  TJ: But they did tell you eventually?

  FM: Yeah, when I was eight. They sat me down in the living room and said they had something to tell me. And I know, because I’ve read all the literature, okay, that there are lots of different theories about how to do this, when to do this. Some say do it from the beginning, don’t make it a big thing. Others say it’s better to do it later when the child can understand. There’s even some who think you should never tell. But it is a thing. Whether it’s said or not. Like if I were gay, I would’ve known. I wouldn’t need my parents to confirm it, right?

  TJ: What did they tell you?

  FM: They said they loved me, and part of me thought they were getting divorced, because that had just happened to my friend. But then I thought if they were getting divorced, they’d tell my sister and me together, because they were always careful about treating us equally. My mom even had this book where she wrote that kind of stuff down. Gave Sherrie a toy at the supermarket, with the date, et cetera, et cetera. Weird, right? Anyway, so I knew I was going to hear my dad say I was adopted. And that’s what he said. And then they tried to put this positive spin on it, like, “We picked you. You are our special chosen baby,” or whatever. But I started asking, “Who is my mother? Who is my mother?” I think that upset my mom, you know?