The Good Liar

by Catherine McKenzie

  “She is! That sounds fun.”

  Kate quickly closed the browsers and shut the iPad. There was no need for Andrea to see that she was looking up bus rides to Chicago.

  “I think he misunderstood, didn’t you, muffin?” Kate ruffled Willie’s hair and put him down on the floor. “Aunt Kate is much too big to ride a greyhound.”

  “Clearly,” Andrea said. She was sucking on a straw that was stuck into a plastic cup full of green goo. She turned on the TV. More all news, all the time.

  “Did you see this?” she asked, nodding to the screen, which was reporting on a story that Vogue had broken. “What a crazy story.”

  Kate looked away. It was all anyone was talking about online that morning. The news wasn’t going to tell her anything she didn’t already know. It was the reason she was looking at Greyhound trips. Figuring out the logistics. Counting up her money and preparing herself to say goodbye to the only two people she cared about in this new life.

  What she hadn’t figured out yet was what she was going to do once she got there.

  Was there a way for Kate to convince anyone that what she’d done was forgivable? Was there a cover story that could make her acceptable in her old life?

  What would convince you?

  If she told you Joshua was abusive? That it had started six months into their relationship. Just words, in the beginning. He didn’t like her going out. He didn’t like it when he didn’t know where she was or who she was with. That it felt romantic at first. Then something she pushed against until, one day, he pushed back. But they were already engaged by then, everyone had been told, and the thought of telling them that he’d . . . What? Gotten a bit out of control during an argument, lost his temper after being provoked? Well, that happened. And he’d apologized so thoroughly that . . .

  She’d tried that story out on IKnowWhatYouDidLastSummer.com. And while it had been satisfying to get anonymous encouragement for her decision, it was crap. Joshua wasn’t abusive. He was cold sometimes. They didn’t, in the end, see eye to eye on many things. A fundamental lack of compatibility that seemed exciting when she was twenty-four but wasn’t good in the long run. And he hadn’t understood what the postpartum depression was or the more general depression she’d had before that. How it alienated her from her children. How she never felt about them as she should’ve. But he was a good man. A good father. That most of all. Why else would she have left her children with him? Who else could she trust?

  The truth was that there wasn’t any reason Kate could offer up that could explain her behavior to anyone, even herself. Make it acceptable, wipe away what she’d done. And what was the point of trying anyway? If she went back, it wasn’t going to be for her. It was going to be for the girls, for Joshua. She had to leave herself out of the equation.

  But why was she even thinking about going back?

  That had everything to do with Franny Maycombe.

  The Triple-Tenner You’ve Never Heard Of

  by TED BORENSTEIN

  Special to VANITY FAIR

  Published on OCTOBER 29

  I finally caught up with Franny. She was elusive at first, reluctant to go on the record. She’d caused enough trouble, she said, she wasn’t the story, and besides, she’d signed an agreement with the producers of a documentary, giving them exclusivity. But that movie wasn’t going to be out for at least a year, and I could sense that she had some hesitation about the project. She’d talk to me on background, but I couldn’t get her to commit. This happens sometimes in long-form journalism. You can spend a lot of time mining a story that doesn’t work out. You have to learn to roll with the punches. Besides, perhaps I’d written enough about Triple Ten, and it was time to move on.

  Then Franny calls.

  “I’m ready to do it,” she says. “Go on the record.”

  She sounds breathless, as if she’s run to the phone to catch the call, though she’s the one who called me.

  I ask her if she’s sure. She is, she says. Then what changed her mind?

  “Don’t you want to talk to me?”

  I assure her that I do but remind her about her contract.

  “Don’t worry about that,” she says. “I just have one condition.”

  She tells me what it is, and we set up a time and place to meet.

  We meet two days later at Joshua Ring’s house. She answers the door in a tan skirt and crisp white blouse, something she describes as “interview clothing.” She’s bubbly, almost dancing on her toes. This is in contrast to our previous meetings, where her tone was more marked and cautious.

  Joshua Ring is here, too, but Franny’s in charge. She shows me around the house, a typical suburban living room, dining room, kitchen. As in the other Triple Ten houses I’ve been in, there are photographs of the lost on the mantel—Joshua’s wife, Kaitlyn. And there’s a picture of Franny there, too, taken with her half sisters, two cute girls under ten.

  “We never took a picture together,” Franny says as she pauses to gaze at the picture of Kaitlyn on her wedding day. “Me and . . . Kaitlyn. I’m not sure why.”

  “She didn’t like having her picture taken,” Joshua says. “I’m not surprised.”

  “I’m not a picture taker, either,” Franny says, then breaks into a funny impersonation of a young woman taking a series of selfies. “So silly.”

  “Rather,” Joshua says, smiling. He’s a slightly formal man. I suspect he was baffled after his wife died, as so many of the newly single fathers in his situation were. In my experience, the women always seem sadder but more in control—a stereotype, I know, but a truth I’ve observed.

  Franny touches his arm. “Shall we sit?”

  We move to the couch in the living room. Franny waits for Joshua to take a seat, then sits next to him. Close enough that I note it. Is this what Franny wants me to see? That she’s stepped into her mother’s shoes? Then Franny leans away from Joshua, and I banish the thought. Franny does seem different, though, from our earlier conversations. As if she’s grown up overnight.

  We discuss many things. How Joshua learned about Franny, how he’d processed the news. How helpful it had been to have Franny around since then, helping with the girls, distracting the family from their grief. That a part of Kaitlyn lives on in her and how she fits into the family.

  Franny speaks very little. When the girls come in to ask for snacks, she leaves to attend to their needs.

  Joshua watches her walk out of the room. “She’s great with them, don’t you think?” I agree. “She’s so natural. Almost as if . . .” He trails off. I try to prompt an answer. “Nothing, nothing. I’m a bit nervous today, is all.”

  What did he have to be nervous about?

  “This interview, for one.”

  Franny comes back and sits closer to Joshua. She’s licking something sticky from her fingers. She doesn’t seem nervous. She seems, if I had to use a word to summarize her, triumphant.

  She pats Joshua on the knee. “Did you want to tell him or should I?”

  “That’s a lady’s prerogative, I think.”

  Franny turns to me as she takes Joshua’s hand in hers.

  “It’s all a bit sudden, but . . . we’re getting married.”

  27

  NEW ROUTINE

  CECILY

  The days flip by after the incident with Teo and the police.

  When I got back downstairs from making sure the kids were okay, Teo had gone. He responded to my text asking him if he was okay with a terse explanation that he had to go. I’m sorry, he said in a text he sent the next day to which I didn’t respond, because what am I going to do? Go back to being friends? Pretend his rejection doesn’t sting more than I’d like to admit? Besides, I don’t know what to say, so it’s easier to say nothing at all.

  I settle into a routine at the restaurant. It’s good to have something to distract me, to pull my focus from myself. I skip my next interview with Teo and cancel coffee with Franny. I keep my therapy appointment, but I’m flirting with cu
tting that off, too. Linda can tell I’m distracted and asks me if I’d like to take a break. We’ve been over all the same ground, so maybe it would be good for me to see if I can make it through a few weeks on my own? I ask her if this is some kind of tough love, pushing me out so I can find my own bottom and admit the help I need, but no. She’s serious, and when I get out into the parking lot, I feel a weight lifting from my soul. I’m not saying I’ll never go back, but Linda was right. I needed to move on from her and the rut I’d created in her office, the deep depression in her couch that wouldn’t go away no matter how much fluffing we both did.

  In the days that follow, I can feel myself cutting ties as if I’m taking an actual pair of scissors to them, snip, snip, snip. The only ones I keep are the children, and Sara, and my mom. These people used to be enough for me, and they ought to be enough for me now. And now it’s October twenty-ninth, a few days before Halloween, and it all seems flat. I hated the attention, but something about it made me feel alive in a way I don’t now. As if the attention was what made me real, and now that it’s gone, I’m like the photograph that made me famous in the first place. Artificial. A picture of someone I used to know.

  “Cecily?”

  “Yes?”

  It’s one of the waiters, Carlos or Carlitos, I haven’t quite learned his name yet, much to my shame. I didn’t use to forget details like that.

  “There’s someone on the phone for you. They say it’s an emergency.”

  “The kids?”

  My fear pushes him back on his heels.

  “I don’t think so. It’s a man. I think his name is Joshua?”

  I grab the phone from him. “Joshua? What is it? The girls? Franny?”

  “No, not . . . I can’t do this on the phone. Can you come over?”

  • • •

  I know that most people have never understood my friendship with Franny. There’s the almost twenty-year age gap and our very different backgrounds, to start, and our very different personalities added to it. My mother thinks I’m trying to fill in for Kaitlyn, to be another mother to her, but that’s not it. My feelings toward Franny aren’t maternal.

  My friend Sara’s theory is that I’m close to her because she’s wounded.

  “You can’t pass a hurt person by. It was the same with Kaitlyn,” she said once when we’d gone for a drink last summer.

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Of course not. But you give too much of yourself. You need to leave room for you.”

  But leaving room for me wasn’t working, it was giving me too much time to think, to regret, to ruminate. And I did feel bad for Franny. What a terrible position to be in, to have something you’ve wanted so badly ripped away from you. To know you were a secret that couldn’t be revealed even once the secret was out. If I felt lost in my manicured house surrounded by my healthy children and my mom and my friends, how must she be feeling? I wondered and wondered for weeks after Kaitlyn’s funeral, and then I started looking.

  It wasn’t hard to find her. She was living in Chicago and had already connected with the survivor community, joining one of the support groups for people who’d lost parents on October tenth. The woman who ran the group told me where I could find her. She was working in a diner on the east side of Chicago. One of those leftover places from the fifties where the menus are caked with grease and the women look older than they should. All the customers were men.

  I sat at a table in her section. Her uniform looked newer than the other waitresses’, as if she’d just cracked it out of the clear plastic wrap it surely came in. Her hair was pulled back tightly from her face, stretching it slightly. She looked tired and uncomfortable. I knew the feeling.

  “What can I get you?”

  “Hi, Franny.”

  “Do I know you?”

  I searched her face for some sign of Kaitlyn. “We met about a month ago at . . . Kaitlyn’s funeral.”

  Her pencil remained poised above her pad of paper. “You’re one of her friends.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Just to talk.”

  “I’m on shift.”

  “Maybe you could ask for a few minutes off? Don’t you get a break?”

  She glanced over her shoulder at the counter. I could see the half hulk of a man through the order window.

  “Give me a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  She disappeared. I pulled out my phone to check it, half expecting, still, a text or e-mail from Tom. That gentle flow of daily contact we’d always had, now a constant itch. Cassie had forgotten her homework at school, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that.

  Franny returned and sat down.

  “You sure you don’t want anything?” she asked.

  “I’m fine. I’m trying to cut back on coffee.”

  “How come?”

  “Can’t sleep.”

  Her eyes traveled to my wedding ring. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you. How are you holding up?”

  “Me?”

  She laid her hands flat on the table. Her nails were painted a bright, festive red.

  “I’m doing all right.”

  “Are you okay for money?”

  Her chin rose. “Why are you asking me that? You here to help me out?”

  “No, I . . . This is hard for me, too, Franny.”

  “Is it?”

  “I was very close with your mother. I miss her.”

  “But she didn’t tell you about me, right?”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  Franny looked out the greasy window. Some version of “White Christmas” was playing on the sound system. I shuddered at the thought of Christmas morning with the kids without Tom.

  “I don’t need your help,” Franny said. “I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing it my whole life, you know?”

  “I don’t know. But I’d like to.”

  “Really?”

  “Why is that such a surprise?”

  “I haven’t had much luck with people. Friends.”

  I covered her hand with mine. It was surprisingly soft. “I’d like to help change that, if you’ll let me.”

  “How can you change it?”

  “What if we gave ourselves a fresh start? I’m sure we both could use it.”

  A corner of her mouth lifted. “That sounds good.”

  I reached out my hand. “I’m Cecily, and I’m so happy to meet you.”

  Franny shook, firmer this time than she’d been at the funeral. “Nice to meet you, Cecily. I’m Franny Maycombe.”

  • • •

  When I arrive at Joshua’s house, Emily opens the door in tears.

  “Daddy’s marrying Franny! I don’t want a new mommy!”

  “What? I . . .”

  I reach for her, but she turns on her heel and runs into the house. She’s up the stairs before I can even get a word out. Julia barrels into my legs. One of her braids is coming undone.

  “Aunt Cecily, it’s horrible.”

  I drop down so we’re at the same level. “What’s horrible? Where’s your father?”

  “Upstairs. And Franny. Franny is horrible.”

  I feel the same sense of shock I felt the day I got Tom’s texts, as if I’d stopped experiencing reality and stepped into some kind of altered state. Franny and Joshua? It can’t be true.

  “What did Franny do, honey?”

  Julia wipes at her nose. “She made Daddy love her. But Daddy’s only supposed to love Mommy. Even if she’s gone. That’s what he said. He said he would always love Mommy.”

  “Of course he’ll always love Mommy. But sometimes, grown-ups love more than one person and . . .”

  I stop myself. What am I saying? This isn’t my situation to explain. I don’t even know what’s going on.

  “Where’s Franny?”

  “She left.”

  “Why?”

  “She and Daddy had a fight.”

  I f
eel light-headed. Where is Joshua?

  I take Julia’s hand and lead her into the living room. I pull her onto my lap, missing, for a moment, those days when I could do that with Henry or Cassie.

  “Can you tell me the story from the beginning? As much as you remember.”

  Julia plops her thumb into her mouth but speaks anyway. “Last night, Daddy and Franny said that Daddy loved Franny and they were getting married.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She just looks at me, slow tears running down her cheeks.

  “Okay,” I say. “And then what happened?”

  “Em was mad. Real mad.”

  “What about you?”

  “I didn’t see that coming.”

  I want to laugh. Julia’s always said the damnedest things, a sponge who absorbs all the language around her and spits it out at the oddest moments.

  “Me, neither, honey. But when did Franny leave?”

  “That happened today.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugs. “Daddy was saying maybe it was a mistake.”

  “Getting married?”

  “Because of Em. Because she was so sad.”

  “And Franny was angry?”

  “Yes, but also sad. I wouldn’t like it if someone said he was going to marry me and then said nuh-uh, not going to happen.”

  Who had this child been listening to? “What happened next?”

  She leans her head back. “They told us to go back to bed.”

  “Wait, were you spying on them?”

  She pulled her thumb out. “We snuck out of bed, but then they noticed us.”

  “That was naughty.”

  “That’s what Franny said.”

  My stomach tightens. “Did she?”

  “Yes, but then Em started crying again, and she said she was sorry, and we were all crying together, even Daddy. Em said she was sorry and that she would get used to it. She wants Daddy to be happy.”

  “What happened next?”

  “We went to bed, but this morning, Daddy was making breakfast, and then Franny showed him some papers, and he got so mad. I was scared.”

  I hug her to me. “I’m sorry, darling. You don’t have to tell me any more if you don’t want to.”