The Better Liar

by Tanen Jones

  me: Yeah :) I’ll think about it

  Elaine’s icon showed ellipses for a few seconds, then went blank. The chat was over. I scrolled up again, this time to their earlier conversations. Last Thursday, 2:55 P.M.:

  Elaine: I got a lil sloppy

  me: Uh-uh it was amazing

  You serenaded us

  Elaine: You loved it

  me: Who wouldn’t

  Elaine: I’m ugly pink in the face right now

  me: Let me see

  Before that, a conversation about some project, small talk about the coffee machine, an exchange of Beyoncé gifs…I got bored and clicked on Elaine’s profile. Jesus! Sixteen thousand friends…All of the most recent items on her wall were autoposts from her Instagram. She’d posted a photo of herself that morning in the car with a Cheerio stuck to her cheek. It was captioned, Literally did not notice Brody’s “decoration” until I went to take a picture of my makeup today…#toddlergifts #realglamour #ifeelpretty #ohsopretty #momlife.

  I scrolled down. Shiny hair, pretty house…smaller than the Floreses’, but nicer-looking inside, with bright colors accenting every corner and professional frames for her children’s drawings hanging on the walls. Elaine had two kids, one maybe kindergarten age and the other a little older than Eli. No husband in any of the pictures.

  Halfway down her wall, Eli appeared, his face turned away from the camera, toward a funny-faced cat in the distance. She’d posted it this weekend, when Leslie had been away.

  Last week was fun :)

  I thought about the way Dave had singsonged to me in the dark last night, flirting almost reflexively, just as I did. I felt the same tone in his messages to Elaine. Was it just something he did with everyone, or was it serious? I couldn’t tell.

  If Leslie knew…if she’d been through his Facebook as well…

  Maybe to Leslie, fifty thousand dollars was divorce-lawyer money.

  That gave me a certain relief to imagine. The Flores house, with its real grass and kitchen-drawer organizers and matchy chandelier, creeped me out. Walking around in it alone was like being a mannequin in a showroom. If Leslie and Dave were falling apart, maybe that was the only reason it felt so strange to be a guest here. Maybe there was nothing more sinister to it than a rotten marriage.

  It was almost a perfect theory. I closed the lid and replaced the laptop under the pillow, smoothing the comforter where I’d left an ass print. Then I let myself think it: if the money was for a divorce and not to save the house, then Leslie hadn’t only been lying to Dave. She’d lied to me.

  23

  Leslie

  I pulled into the daycare parking lot and shut off the car. I meant to go in right away, but the late-afternoon sun filled up the car with warm mushy air so quickly that I felt as if I’d been plunged into a hot tub. I sat back against the seat, momentarily paralyzed, as my face heated.

  Get up, I said into my own skull.

  I didn’t move.

  Get fucking get up.

  Inside the daycare, a sheaf of kids sat along the duct-taped line on the floor—the “quiet line.” Miss Alma sat in front of them on a small beanbag chair, reading aloud from I Want My Hat Back.

  Eli wasn’t among them.

  Miss Alma saw me enter and raised her eyebrows at me over the kids’ heads, pointing toward the back door.

  “What do you guys think?” she said as I headed for the door. “Where is his hat?”

  “There!” chorused the toddlers.

  Outside, Miss Gloria held Eli draped halfway over her shoulder. He sobbed snot into her T-shirt. I watched them for a while as she did a funny little jiggling walk that made his teakettle screams wobble in pitch, Auto-Tunelike. She had flat, wide feet and square hips; her low center of gravity gave her the air of a sphinx.

  “Oh, Mrs. Flores.” Miss Gloria grinned, holding the still-whistling Eli out to me. “We’re teething this afternoon. Third top tooth!”

  I took him and set him against my shoulder, just as she had. He screamed against my cheek, and I imagined my ear fluttering in the breeze from the sound waves like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

  “Thanks for walking with him,” I said.

  “Oh, no problem. He’s been very good about learning his sign language. He signed ‘Up!’ during story time, and he didn’t cry until we made it outside.”

  I nodded and smiled. “Well, thank you,” I said. “Have a good night.”

  She tilted her head. “Sure, honey,” she said. “You too.”

  In the hot-tub car, Eli shrieked as if I were cutting him as I buckled his seatbelt and handed him his gummy key ring. He flung it away, and I replaced it in his lap. He flung it away again, and I abandoned the effort and shut the door, heading for the front seat.

  “Hurts, huh?” I said over the noise of his screams and “Cheap Thrills” on the radio.

  He sent another wave of sound up toward the driver’s seat.

  I hummed along with it tunelessly.

  He tried to drown me out.

  I pulled onto the main road toward the Sprouts.

  “Ahhhhhhhhh,” I said into the din. Slowly, I got louder and louder to match him, until we were both screaming in the car.

  He fell asleep in the parking lot of the Sprouts, wheezing a little with exhaustion.

  I wish Dave were here, I thought, looking in the rearview mirror. I wish Miss Gloria were here.

  For the first time since I’d become a mother, it occurred to me to wish my mother were here. Robin—Mary—had put her into my head, played me that record.

  But I didn’t want her with me. Not really.

  I thought about what Eli might look like as a grown-up. Babies were so featureless, like tadpoles. I pictured him looking like his older cousin, Maria’s kid, curly-haired, broad-shouldered. Would Eli ever sit in a parking lot with his kid in the backseat, both of them screaming at each other? Would he think about me then? Wish for me to be next to him? Or would he take after his mother, as my mother had taken after hers, and be grateful he’d escaped me?

  Back in the driveway at home, I lifted Eli’s limp form out of the car seat and pressed him into my shoulder, hefting the grocery bag with the other. He stirred but didn’t wake as I made my way up the walkway.

  “Mary?” I called as I opened the front door, then thought better of it—Dave could have come home early, been dropped off by someone else…“Robin?”

  My voice echoed in the front hallway. I dropped the grocery bag in the kitchen, then spun slowly. All the cabinet doors stood open. “Robin?”

  She wasn’t on the patio or in the living room. I went upstairs. The guest room door was open, and her bed was unmade, half her few clothes strewn across the floor.

  “Mary?”

  Against my shoulder, Eli woke up and began to sob in the empty house.

  24

  Mary

  It was brighter outside in the afternoon than it had been when I’d crawled onto the porch in the morning, and I shaded my eyes as I made my way through Leslie’s neighborhood. I’d run out of cigarettes around four in the afternoon, and I’d figured that wasn’t too long to be locked out. Besides, I wanted to send a message to Leslie: I wasn’t her pet. She couldn’t just lock me in her house and expect me to be there when she got back.

  There was a surprising number of people out, despite the hour and the heat—women, mostly, in sleek gray-and-neon athletic wear, jogging or biking down the wide white sidewalks. Like the women, the houses matched, although each one boasted some unusual feature: timber accents, Spanish tile, lime-green Nikes. It was impossible to look into any of the houses, or any of the women’s eyes; the latter wore shiny mirrored sunglasses, and the sun turned the former’s plate-glass windows into mirrors themselves.

  After fifteen minutes or so I came upon the entrance to the neighborhood. The sidewal
ks turned grubby along the edge of the main road, broken here and there by creosote and yucca. The road was flat and straight, so that I could see a long way in either direction. To the right lay the mountains. To the left was another residential pocket, this one patterned with single-story adobe houses, and beyond that I could see a sign for a Shell station.

  I was gathering sweat underneath my tits and shoulder blades by the time I made it to the station, and the cold air from the refrigerated drinks was a relief. “Two packs of Spirits,” I said to the woman behind the counter.

  “Yellows, blues?”

  “Blues.”

  She blinked slowly and got up to get them. “Thanks,” I said when she handed me my change, and turned to leave.

  “Oh—hi,” the woman behind me in line said as she saw my face. Her expression was sheepish, like a student running into her teacher outside of class, except she was at least thirty.

  “Hi, uh…” I said, stuffing my change in my pocket.

  “Lindy,” she supplied, shifting her purse straps on her shoulder. “Serrano, now. Sorry, it’s so weird to run into you.”

  I tried not to let my confusion show on my face. An old customer? A friend? I couldn’t place her; she was Asian, with a wide, apple-cheeked face, an upturned nose, long soft bangs.

  “Lindy,” I repeated, going for a smile.

  She didn’t like that. “You don’t remember me,” she said, her nose wrinkling a bit.

  The cashier interrupted. “Ladies.”

  “Oh—just these,” Lindy said, pushing a couple of Cokes toward the register. She turned her attention back to me. “I’m Nancy Courtenay’s sister. I didn’t think we would see you around Albuquerque again, Robin.”

  Understanding broke over me like an egg.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t recognize you at first. How are you?”

  She opened her wallet to pay the cashier, then looked back at me a bit warily. I tilted my head, and she answered in a rush, “I’m good. I’m good. How are you?”

  I felt strangely elated.

  “I didn’t think I would come back,” I said, leaning on the counter. “How’s Nancy doing these days?”

  Lindy’s face tightened. “She’s a police officer,” she said. “She’s married, so.” There was a defensive tinge to her tone.

  “Married!” I echoed. “Wow. To who?”

  “That’s not…” Lindy paused and collected her change, scooped up the Cokes, and headed for the door. “It happened a while ago. Are you married?”

  “Me?” I hurried after her. “No, no. I guess I never met the right one.”

  We were outside now. I felt my face heat up. Lindy said, “How come you’re in town?”

  “Oh, um, my sister had a baby,” I told her.

  “Congratulations,” Lindy said, thin-lipped. I watched her face avidly; it was like playing a game of hot and cold. She had relaxed a little as we left the store. I decided to reverse course.

  “So, I’d love to see Nancy while I’m here,” I said, walking with her toward her SUV. “Catch up, you know.”

  “Well,” Lindy said, trailing off while she stuck her arm in her purse and fished for her keys. Getting hotter.

  “Could you give me her number, maybe?” I pressed.

  Lindy found her keys and pressed the button too many times, making her car honk. A voice yelled in delight from the backseat. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said, not looking at me. “Nancy lives her life the way she’s going to, and I don’t think you need to go around shaking her up again.”

  I could tell she was struggling to remain polite. “It was ten years ago,” I said, leaning on Lindy’s car. “Wasn’t it?”

  “I have kids in the car,” Lindy said stiffly.

  I didn’t know what that had to do with anything. “I just want to see how she’s doing,” I said, smiling. “Since we used to be really close.”

  Lindy blinked several times, too fast, then yanked the driver’s-side door open, pressed the button to roll up all the windows, and stepped back, slamming the door. The sound of her kids’ chatter disappeared. She leaned toward me and said in a rapid-fire mumble, “I have accepted what Nancy wants to do because she is my sister. But don’t think I have forgotten that this all started when you began hanging out with Nancy and telling her she was your little girlfriend. You treated her like shit. She doesn’t need to see you again, and I certainly won’t be telling her that you’re back in town. Go find somebody else’s family to screw up, please, Robin.”

  She got into her car and drove away in a determinedly sedate fashion, not making eye contact through the windshield. I stood where she had left me for a few seconds and then a great big smile crept over my face, and I laughed too hard and had to sit down on the curb.

  * * *

  —

  I hadn’t expected to run into anyone like that. Leslie had kept me locked up in the house, and maybe this was why: so I would play the version of Robin she wanted me to be, and not the one Lindy had known, the kind of person you hoped never to run into at the gas station.

  But if Lindy didn’t want me to talk to Nancy, she shouldn’t have told me so much about her. Thanks to our surprise conversation, I knew that Nancy Courtenay still lived in Albuquerque, and that she was a police officer.

  My burner phone didn’t have Internet, only call and text, and I couldn’t return to Leslie’s yet. I went back out to the curb and finger-combed my hair, rubbed underneath my eyes to smear my makeup—only a little, just enough to suggest tears. Then I waited, smoking.

  An old man passed me, then another. The second one stopped. “You need help, sweetheart?”

  I could see his phone hanging from a holster on his belt. Old-fashioned, flip top. “No,” I said flatly, and looked away until he went inside.

  A family with two toddlers passed through, and a couple of middle-aged women. Finally a teenage boy walked up on foot. He had his phone out already, a smartphone in a bright orange case. I stubbed out my cigarette and arranged myself on the curb, knock-kneed. “Hi,” I said when he got close enough to hear me.

  He glanced up, then at me. “Hello?”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, “but I kind of got stranded here and I don’t think my ride knows she’s supposed to pick me up. Can I please use your phone for a quick call? It’ll only take a second.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure,” he said. “I’m Vincent.”

  “Oh, wow,” I said, pushing my hair back and sticking my hand out. “I’m Mary.”

  He was too young to shake hands; he put the phone in my hand instead. “Nice to meet you,” he said. “Where you from?”

  I was already on the phone. I googled albuquerque county police station phone number. “I’m from Texas,” I said absently.

  “Oh, damn,” Vincent said, then trailed off into nothing.

  The first number was for the Sandoval County sheriff’s department. I called it, smiling quickly at Vincent. “Hi, I’m looking for Officer Courtenay?” I said.

  “Officer who?”

  “Nancy Courtenay?”

  Typing noises. “We don’t have anyone by that name,” the voice said after a minute.

  I hung up. “Sorry, I guess I called the wrong thing. I’ll try her other number.”

  Vincent capitulated, but he was getting restless, shuffling rocks with the toe of his shoe.

  The next number was for Bernalillo County. I called that one. “Hi, I’m looking for Officer Nancy Courtenay,” I said.

  “Officer Courtenay?” the man on the line said. “Okay, can I tell her what it’s regarding?”

  “It’s, um, it’s Robin Voigt. I mean, that’s the name to give her.”

  “Fine,” he said, and there was a brief rustling silence. Then I heard the click of the line transfer and more ringing.

 
“This is Officer Courtenay.”

  “It’s Robin,” I said. “Robin Voigt? I just ran into your sister Lindy. She wouldn’t give me your phone number, but I had to look you up now that I’m in town.”

  “Robin?” She sounded young.

  “Yeah, it’s me.” Too late I thought: She’s a police officer. What if she looks the name up in her system, or…

  But there was a sudden exhale on the line, and Nancy said, “Oh my God. I thought I’d never hear from you again.”

  “Me neither,” I said. Vincent was staring at me now, trying to make me uncomfortable. “Listen, I can’t talk much now. Can you call me on my other number and we can meet up?”

  “Today?” Nancy said.

  I hadn’t been expecting that, but what else did I have to do? “Yeah, today,” I said, putting a little extra enthusiasm into my voice, and I gave her my new number.

  “Okay. I’ll call you,” she said. I smiled and took the phone away from my ear to hang up. At the last second I heard her say tinnily: “I can’t believe it’s really you.”

  25

  Robin

  She didn’t even know she wanted me. That was what was so appealing about Nancy. I’d lost Leslie—Grandma Betty died—my father turned further inward, like a snail—but in those absences boys started offering themselves to me, one after another, and I accepted, again and again. I felt voracious, like I could eat a dozen and it wouldn’t be enough. I liked the way they died to touch me, suffering tremors down their skinny, ropy arms, giving off that hothouse smell. But the look in their eyes was all wrong, a brief startled yop, like when you turn the flashlight on the raccoon. I thought there had to be something more to it than that.

  It was there in Nancy’s eyes the first time she saw me, outside the schoolyard. A little pained grimace, totally involuntary, she wasn’t even aware she’d done it; she saw me, wanted me, denied herself immediately. The next second it was gone, replaced by confusion: Why are you staring at me? I couldn’t help myself: I smiled, completely charmed. In a single glance she’d given more of herself to me than any of the boys I’d slept with. A stranger one second, and the next, I knew more about her than her own family.