The Good Liar

by Catherine McKenzie

  FM: I don’t know about that. Is what Anonymous does illegal? Information should be free, right? I mean, look at it this way—should it be illegal to find out who your real parents are?

  TJ: No, I don’t believe it should. But I am curious about how it all worked . . .

  FM: Like I said, I can’t say. I found out; that was the point. And it’s one of the reasons I wanted to be involved in the Compensation Initiative.

  TJ: How does one lead to the other?

  FM: It’s all about advocacy. People think they know best, right? Like how everyone told my mother, my biological mother, that it would be a great thing for me for her to give me up. She was what, eighteen when she had me? That’s too young to have a baby; that’s what they said. And they’d find me a good family and all that other crap. And look, I’m not complaining. I get it. Taking all of that on when you’re that young, that’s a lot. And I did have a good home. My adoptive parents tried as hard as they could. But it wasn’t my family, you know? Not before I knew and especially not after.

  TJ: So where does the advocacy come in?

  FM: At these adoption support groups I used to go to, that was one of the themes. We’d had all these people make these major decisions for us—our biological parents—and then we weren’t even allowed to know who they were. I didn’t want that happening to the families of Triple Ten. Especially not the kids. Let the victims decide what they want, what they need. Not the government. Not the church. Not the celebrities falling all over themselves to appear on TV looking like they’re doing something to help.

  TJ: That sounds like a worthy goal. But there’s been some controversy, hasn’t there? About who is allowed to receive compensation?

  FM: You’re talking about the Identification Protocol?

  TJ: Yes.

  FM: Well, that was my idea, actually.

  TJ: Why did you think it was important?

  FM: Because people could lie, couldn’t they? There were all the people who worked there who died, sure, but there were also tons of folks going in and out of that building all day. And then those who were just around the building . . . Anyone could claim they were there, and no one would know for sure. Take Cecily Grayson.

  TJ: What about her?

  FM: She says she was on her way there, right? And we all know that’s true because we have the photographic evidence. You took it. But if she’d actually been in the building, what proof would we have?

  TJ: Aren’t there entry logs?

  FM: Not for guests. Not electronic ones. They were still using a paper system. That got lost, obviously. And you’ve heard about the cameras, right? Totally unreliable.

  TJ: Are you suggesting that someone might make a false claim in order to get compensation?

  FM: Don’t look so shocked. That sort of stuff happens all the time.

  TJ: So the Identification Protocol . . .

  FM: Requires irrefutable evidence that their family member actually died there that day in order for them to get compensation.

  TJ: And I understand that your own . . . um, your biological mother’s family’s claim was refused?

  FM: That’s right.

  TJ: How did that happen?

  FM: I can’t make special exceptions. We can’t, I mean.

  TJ: Sure. But there’s some irony there, that the rule could affect your family in particular. You, even, I suppose.

  FM: Yeah, but that claim is under review. You never know what might turn up.

  7

  HERE WE GO LOOP-DE-LOOP

  CECILY

  This is how I found out I was a fool.

  It was six months before Tom died, as I was running around trying to make everything perfect for our upcoming wedding anniversary extravaganza weekend away! (I thought in exclamation marks back then, more often than I’d like to admit.) I received a text from Tom that said: I can’t stop thinking about last night.

  Nothing so unusual in that. In fact, he’d texted me something similar a few years before, after we’d had a particularly steamy evening when both the kids were out with friends and we’d had a few glasses of wine and ended up having sex on the kitchen counter. I’d texted an emoticon back to that one (probably a smiley face, knowing me at the time), and we’d engaged in mild sexting for about an hour until it petered out.

  But not this time, because this time—as far as I knew up until that moment—Tom was supposed to have been on the flip side of an all-nighter at work to get the bugs out of the product they were about to launch so we could leave for the weekend. He was supposed to be surrounded by bad pizza and sour coffee and people in need of showers, not something he couldn’t stop thinking about. Not someone.

  I knew the text was bad news the minute I read it. Stomach-churning, gut-twisting bad. And then my phone chimed again. Ding! Ding!

  I got the texts while I was in Victoria’s Secret. That’s right. I was actually in the middle of buying sexy lingerie for that fucker when I received the announcement that my husband had slept with another woman. Because that’s what it was, what it meant. There wasn’t any other way to read it. Or maybe there would’ve been if he hadn’t followed it up with: I love how you suck my cock.

  A classy guy, my husband. Also generally very careful, but I guess he was so taken away with his memories of the night before, the world-class cock-sucking he’d received, that he’d tapped the wrong text thread—was her name similar to mine or were we the only two people he texted with? One of a million questions leaping through my mind—and sent the message to me instead of whoever he intended it for.

  When I received the alert for the second text, I tried to look away. But in my innocent life as it existed then, I’d enabled the floating preview bar on my phone so I could see the first lines of whatever anyone sent me. I had nothing to hide, you see, nothing to fear. I couldn’t avoid the words as they appeared on the screen that was grasped in my shaking hand, warm to the touch. I read them and felt frozen to the floor, my other hand still stuck in the 50-percent-off silk underwear bin I’d been riffling through to find my size.

  My mind was whirling as fast as my gut. I had no idea how to react. Should I write back or allow him to sit and wonder why the cock-sucking genius was letting him twist in the wind without a response until he figured out who he’d actually texted? Should I simply pretend the whole thing never happened?

  I admit: I kind of wished I could do the last one. My finger actually swiped to delete the texts, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t want that filth on my phone, but I couldn’t put it in the trash and pretend I’d never read it, either.

  Oh, Tom, you stupid asshole.

  Why couldn’t you have been more careful?

  • • •

  “So,” my therapist, Linda, says. “You made it through the memorial.”

  We’re in her office, the place I’ve been coming to once a week for nine months. A friend of a friend suggested her without my having to ask for a referral. When your husband dies suddenly, it’s assumed you’ll need some kind of mental health assistance to recover.

  “I did.”

  “I saw you on TV.”

  I pull a face. “Maybe now it will stop.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Linda’s a pragmatist, and she doesn’t believe in feeding me false hope. Better to accept the things I cannot change and all that, like an addict, even though I’m the substance being consumed.

  “You were feeling anxious about the interview with Teo. How did it go?”

  “Okay, I think.”

  “I’m going to need more than that.”

  I pull my feet under me on the couch; Linda’s across from me on a matching one. One of the things I like about Linda, she doesn’t believe in creating distinctions between us. Our sessions are often like highly effective conversations with my girlfriends, sans alcohol. I don’t know what I expected therapy to be; I only know that when I got out of the car before my first session, I started cr
ying, and the first thing I said to her was, “I don’t want this to be a lifetime relationship.” She’d agreed, and we’d gone on from there.

  “You always say that.”

  Linda’s eyes crinkle. A natural beauty in her midforties, she has few lines that mar her dark-brown skin. “That is what you pay me for, after all.”

  “True. Well, I got through it. He asked all the questions I expected, and I gave the best answers I could. If I had to guess, I told two outright lies and six lies by omission, but I wasn’t keeping strict count.”

  “You don’t have to keep a tally of lies.”

  I shift my eyes away from hers. Linda’s office is a palette of taupe. I keep meaning to bring a colorful throw with me someday to brighten up the place, but it always slips my mind.

  “Don’t I?”

  “We’ve discussed this. You could simply unburden yourself. Or, alternatively, make peace with the fact that you’re entitled to certain secrets.”

  “I feel like a fraud.”

  “You’re not a fraud. Your husband died. You did what you had to do to protect your children’s future. To protect your future.”

  “But I hated him. I hated him when he died, and everyone thinks I’m this grieving widow, that I’m missing him, that I wish he was still here. Still with me and our family.”

  “Who cares what anyone thinks? And you are grieving him. Maybe not in the way you think others assume you are, but you are. Do you think you’re the only person who wasn’t happy with their spouse that day?”

  “It’s not the same. I wanted him dead. I’d even fantasized about how I’d do it.”

  “Did your fantasies involve rigging the gas pipes beneath his building so they’d explode and kill five hundred and twelve other people?”

  “No. Well, maybe just him and her. I didn’t care how it happened. But I thought it, and then it came true.”

  Linda frowns. “You don’t believe your fantasies played a role in what happened that day, do you? Because it was a terrible accident, one that could’ve been avoided with better inspections, perhaps, but nothing more than that.”

  “No . . .”

  “This is important, Cecily.”

  “It is strange, isn’t it?”

  “Coincidences aren’t strange or the evidence of anything; they’re a part of life.”

  I pluck at a loose thread on the couch, then stop when I feel Linda watching me.

  “You aren’t to blame for what happened.”

  “I know that rationally, but I wish there was a way I could get some resolution.”

  “About what? With Tom?”

  “Her. I wish she’d died that day, too, and she probably did, but I don’t know for sure.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I’ve been over it and over it. She had to be someone he worked with. Or someone in the building, maybe someone who worked at another company, because he was at work the night before we went to New York—at least part of the time. Will Blass told me so.”

  Will was Tom’s business partner. He’d hemmed and hawed when I’d asked him impulsively at the reception at our house after the funeral where Tom was the night before they launched SecretKeeper, their new privacy software. He’d pretended at first that he didn’t remember, but when I told him I knew Tom was seeing someone, he’d relented and told me Tom had been there until about midnight, if he could remember correctly, and then left for several hours. He didn’t know for sure that Tom was with another woman, though he’d suspected it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know who it was.” I was almost certain that was a lie, but when I’d pressed, he said to leave it and walked away. I haven’t spoken to him since.

  “Even if that’s true, that doesn’t mean she was there that day,” Linda says.

  “The not knowing is driving me crazy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because how could I be so stupid? How could I not know what was going on in my own life?”

  “Your husband was an accomplished liar and very, very careful. It’s not a failing of yours that you didn’t figure out he was cheating on you or who he was cheating on you with. As for the other woman, if she’s alive, she’s most likely suffering from loss herself.”

  “Am I supposed to care about that?”

  “No, but I expect the last thing she’d do is seek you out, so you’re probably never going to know what happened between them or who she is. You have to find a way to be okay with that.”

  “So she gets away with it? With destroying my life?”

  “This isn’t about her. It’s about you. About you finding a way to get past this. To get closure.”

  “How can I get closure when I have to play a role all the time and listen to everyone talk about what a great guy Tom was? When I have to preserve this lie for my kids and our friends? It’s not fair. It’s not fair.”

  “Will you be stamping your feet anytime soon?”

  “No,” I say, pouting. I know I’m being childish, but it isn’t fair. It really isn’t.

  “You can do whatever you want in here, Cecily. And I can agree with all those things. But unless you find a way to forgive yourself, and to forgive Tom, too, we are going to end up having a lifelong relationship because you’re going to be stuck in the same place you are today.”

  “So what do I do? How do I get unstuck?”

  “You do the work.”

  “That sounds . . . tiring.”

  “I never said it was going to be easy.”

  • • •

  After Linda, I pull myself together and make it to my Compensation Committee meeting early. There wasn’t any traffic for once, but also, perhaps things can change. It would be nice to think so, if even for a moment.

  The Compensation Committee meets as needed to reconsider the cases the retired judge we’ve hired to make the initial determination rejects. Given the importance of our decisions, these meetings are always a challenge, and I know already that today’s meeting is going to be harder than most.

  “Shall we discuss the Ring case?” Franny asks when we’ve assembled around the table. She speaks in a Midwestern twang, an accent she tries to cover up, though I’ve told her time and again she doesn’t need to. She’s wearing a gray wool blazer I helped her pick out a few weeks ago from the sale rack at J.Crew. It strikes me how different the Franny of today is from the one I met so many months ago. Better hair, better clothes, twenty pounds shed, but also, she has much more confidence and assurance. She’s found her purpose and her sense of place. She’s more at home here than I am. “Okay with you, Cecily?”

  “Of course.”

  We’re sitting at opposite ends of a long glass table in the second conference room in the Initiative’s offices. The others on the committee—two men whose wives died in the building, a twenty-three-year-old girl who lost her father and whose mother is long dead of cancer, and Tanya Simpson, the committee’s secretary—fill up the space between us.

  “I know this will be difficult for some of you,” Franny says, meaning mostly me, I suppose, and her. “But it’s an important part of the process.”

  I voted against Franny’s “process” when she proposed it six months ago, when we first gathered to set out the guidelines we wanted to follow. Her idea was that for a family to get compensation, they’d generally need a DNA match to something—nobody liked to use the words “flesh,” “blood,” “bone”—found in the wreckage that’s still being sifted through, even now. I understood why she proposed it, but I couldn’t bring myself to support a measure that would leave some people without the help I’d received. Especially because I’d gotten my check before the process was in place.

  In the beginning, when the money was rolling in from the celebrity fund-raisers and they wanted a photo op to keep it coming, they’d turned to me, my family, put us on a dais, and handed us a big check with more zeros on it than I could believe. Donate today, and every family can have this future . . . But when the donations slowed down and the
complaints started, the judge had been brought in and the committee was created above him to hear appeals and special cases. I owed it to all the people who didn’t get the opportunity I did to do my best to make sure that if their claim was denied, it was for a valid reason.

  When the Rings’ claim was turned down because they couldn’t match Franny or the girls’ DNA to anything in the wreckage, I’d been the one to console Franny when she wept about what she’d done. It was a stupid rule, stupid So stupid, she said over and over until I was worried she’d gone into some sort of autistic trance. I had to hand it to Franny, though: when she’d pulled herself together—a shot of whiskey had done it—she hadn’t given up on the idea that the decision could be reversed. And here we are today, with that possibility.

  “What’s the new evidence?” Jenny, the twenty-three-year-old, asks. Her thin limbs concern me. I didn’t know her before, so it’s possible that she’s naturally this skinny, this almost-see-through. But she doesn’t have anyone looking out for her anymore, so I feel responsible, as if I should paint her back in, make sure she’s visible.

  “It’s the mug,” Franny says, her voice wavering.

  A few weeks ago, the search team found a coffee mug in pristine condition. It seemed impossible that the explosion and the fire and everything else hadn’t shattered it into a million pieces, but like the pottery that survived Pompeii, there it was, covered in dust but intact.

  It wasn’t only its survival that was so arresting. Other whole things had been found—a desk, phones, paintings, many bodies, including Tom’s. It was the fact that it was a mug that obviously belonged to someone, one of those mugs kids make for their mothers at school, with We Heart Mom on one side and her picture on the other. And on the rim, the thing that made it eligible for consideration: lipstick that had been left—presumably—by its last user. The media had become obsessed with this mug, debating its provenance, wondering what we were going to do with it, and while they weren’t allowed in this meeting, it wouldn’t be long before the results of it became known, analyzed, dissected.

  Franny puts a white square box on the table. It looks like a cake box, something that generally houses something delicious, something perfectly frosted rather than tragic. None of us has seen the mug in person, only photographs, though it still was a blow when I caught sight of it on the nightly news. I remember when her children gave her this mug, almost two years ago, on Valentine’s Day.