The Better Liar

by Tanen Jones

  “I’ll do his bath.”

  “You will?”

  “Yeah.” I stepped back from the counter and collected Eli from Dave’s arms. “All you have to do is watch to make sure dinner doesn’t explode. It’s done in forty minutes, I set a timer.”

  “Wow. Helpful Fridays. Is it likely to explode?” Dave called after me as I carried Eli upstairs.

  * * *

  —

  The guest room was at the top of the stairs, its door still open. I looked inside and saw that the duffel was gone. She’d come to the house again, maybe while I was at the store, or maybe she’d let herself in while I made dinner, slipping upstairs in bare feet so she’d be quieter.

  Eli wriggled in my arms. He’d wet his diaper. I hurried to the bathroom, turned on the water, and set him naked in the tub. He flapped his hands and sent two wings of water arcing up to sprinkle me.

  It wasn’t hard to wash him, although I hated it, his helplessness; his body was so small. How long until he would be able to wash himself? I didn’t remember ever having been washed by my mother, although I was sure she had done it at some point, maybe hating me just the same.

  I still remembered what it felt like when Dave and I had started trying to have a baby. The decision was nonexistent; he’d always wanted to have a big family, and I wanted to give him everything. And it was another way to tether him to me and me alone; his family was nearby and we spent a lot of time at their houses before we bought our own, so that he devoted almost as much time to being a Flores man as he did to being my husband, mine.

  When I told him I was ready to get pregnant, it was like everything else fell away. Sex became beautifully serious. He made me ride him while he watched with his mouth open, like I was all new to him again.

  It took me almost four months to get pregnant. I took a test every month, and on the last month I was too excited to wait until morning. I got up at midnight and went to the bathroom, and then I crawled back into bed and whispered to Dave that it had worked. He started to cry, and I reached for the light so I could see his face.

  I blinked. Eli was making spit bubbles, sinking down so that they would float on the surface of the water. He poked one with a stubby finger.

  “That’s a bubble,” I tried.

  He didn’t respond.

  I held his head so he wouldn’t hit the metal faucet as he wriggled around. His skull was soft and warm in my palm.

  Eli looked up at me. His eyes were dark and glossy like Dave’s. I didn’t know what his expression meant.

  Would he remember me at all?

  I had hated being pregnant. The baby sent a ripple across my body, disrupting even the extremities. Pimples broke out across my nose and cheeks, and I carried new weight on my hips and thighs. I’d always been long-legged, easily slender; now I was sluggish and heavy. Everything I ate sat on me like a snow. I had to take an antiemetic, which made dry skin peel off my lips and kept me from sleeping. I lay awake picking at the corners of my mouth and trying not to move too much, knowing it would upset Dave if he woke up and saw me half-dead and angry.

  Three months in, I looked in the mirror and saw that a blood vessel had burst overnight, turning the white of my eye an alarming, febrile pink. At the same time my thighs grew hot. My underwear soaked through, purple-black with blood. It was over.

  Dave had been desperate to try again. After the experience of pregnancy, I understood my body in a way I never had before, as a kind of receptacle. I read pregnancy books, which called me a vessel, meaning it positively; but it implied a passivity I found demeaning. I could have been anyone under him. I knew he would have denied it if I said it. Later, he would not even remember the way he had looked at me during those nights—as if fatherhood was just behind me on the mattress and I was in his way.

  I lifted Eli out of the bath and wrapped him in a towel. He protested wordlessly as I scrubbed his hair dry, twisting his body this way and that, and screeched when I tried to help him use his new teething toothbrush, a yellow banana-shaped thing that Dave had brought home yesterday. “Spit,” I instructed. He swallowed.

  I sighed, and Eli began to cry.

  I opened my mouth to soothe him, and my jaw sent a spear of pain through the right side of my face. I’d been grinding my teeth and hadn’t noticed.

  Eli wailed.

  I picked him up and held him to my chest as I didn’t often do when we were alone, and carried him to his room. In the corner was the rocking chair I’d used when he was younger and still on formula. I sat in it now and leaned back.

  It had taken me half a year to get pregnant again. When I was congratulated by the doctor I made myself smile at him. I thought, It’s only nine months. You can do anything for nine months.

  I didn’t think of Eli as a person until he began to move inside me. Then I waited to love him. When that didn’t happen, I waited for birth; I had read that the body released chemicals in the first five minutes of mother and infant meeting.

  I asked Maria if she’d enjoyed being pregnant. She’d said it made her feel strong, and that she used to cry when Joachim sang to the baby through her skin.

  People say you don’t remember the worst parts of birth, but I remember everything. To make room for Eli’s shoulders, they cut me open. Dave held me down while I screamed. The doctor said, It’s only a small incision to avoid any more tearing, and then Eli was born and they took him away to be cleaned. I lay panting on the bed, Dave’s hands still pinning me to the mattress as a nurse kneaded my belly until the placenta came free. It felt like something had been ripped out of me by the roots.

  They brought Eli back to me. I was half-conscious, black spots on my vision. I tried to stay awake long enough for the chemicals to release. Instead I felt nothing. I could have been holding my appendix. Dave was crying and I thought, Now we are really separate; he has been changed and I am the same. We can’t go back.

  Because that was what I was hoping for, secret even to myself: that when I looked at Eli and felt the right thing, Dave and I would knit ourselves back together, and I too would forget the way he had driven himself into me when I was a vessel, and my mind could be open to him again, free of snakes.

  I think that was the end of us, that moment. And yet if I could go back, I wouldn’t change it. I’d said I would give him everything he wanted. For him, I would let myself be held down and the weeds pulled from me.

  Isn’t that what love is?

  * * *

  —

  “Your timer went off!” Dave shouted up the stairs.

  After a while he came upstairs. “Your timer went off,” he repeated.

  “I know,” I said. “Take it out. We’re cuddling.”

  “Looks like one of you is cuddling and one of you is screaming,” Dave said. “Do you want me to put him down for you?”

  “Not tonight.” I held on to Eli even as he sobbed, red in the face.

  Dave cocked his head and went back downstairs.

  Eli cried for another twenty minutes until he exhausted himself into sleep. I opened and closed my mouth a few times, stretching my jaw. “I love you,” I said aloud. I wasn’t sure who the lie was for; Eli wouldn’t remember it and Dave wasn’t there. “I love you,” I repeated.

  I set him in his crib and stood over him. The nothingness I felt when I did this terrified me. It was like being a child again. I couldn’t help probing for movement in the sea of myself.

  Tonight, for the first time since he was born, the numbness abated; I felt something when I looked at him. Not for Eli, exactly; more for my mother. I’d told Robin that I wasn’t like Christine, and I did believe that. But she had been dead long before Robin held her under the water, and now I knew what that was like.

  It was a relief.

  * * *

  —

  Later, after dinner, I stretched out in the bed. “Tell m
e about Cadence,” I said. “How is she?”

  Dave rolled over. “You’re going to see her again on Sunday, you could just ask her then.”

  I shrugged.

  “She’s good. Nothing new since last week as far as I know. Still waiting on UAD acceptance.”

  “How about Maria and Joachim?”

  He made a face. “What’s up with this?”

  “I don’t know. We just haven’t talked about your family all week.”

  “My family is fine.” Dave kissed my eyebrow. “Want to watch a movie?”

  What I wanted to do was spend all night asking him every last question that occurred to me before we never saw each other again. I said, “You pick,” and walked into the bathroom to wash my face.

  When I came back, My Cousin Vinny was playing and Dave was sprawled out with his eyes closed, his feet on top of the decorative blanket at the bottom of the bed. I tugged it out from under his feet and wrapped it around me. It had the texture of a placemat. I climbed on top of him and pulled the blanket over our heads, making a little cocoon.

  He blinked awake and focused on me. “Why are we in here?”

  “It’s warm.”

  “It’s warm outside too.”

  I smiled. “I was cold.”

  “Well, let’s watch the movie.” He was annoyed with me.

  “In a minute. You’re almost asleep anyway.”

  “I was resting after my long day of not cooking and not putting the baby to bed,” Dave said. “Shit’s hard. Your food was good, by the way.”

  “My mother taught me how to make it.” I laid my head on his shoulder.

  His voice was careful. “I’ve never heard you talk about your mom without me bringing it up.”

  “Robin made me think of her.”

  “She’s not here tonight. Did you work out whatever it was with the lawyer? Is she out?”

  “She went back to Vegas,” I said softly. “I don’t think I’ll ever hear from her again.”

  Dave wrapped his arms around me, dislodging the blanket and letting a shaft of light in. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s not so bad. She really shook you up.”

  “It wasn’t her fault,” I said. “I always thought it was the way she acted that kept us apart, but maybe it was me too. I wasn’t—I wasn’t good family to her. I was harsh.”

  “You’re good family,” Dave insisted, pressing our chests tight together. “I have firsthand experience.”

  I breathed out against his face.

  “Okay, let’s watch the movie,” Dave said. “Stay under this uncomfortable blanket with me. Why did you buy this thing?”

  “It goes with our room,” I told him.

  Was that the last thing I’d say to him?

  He was asleep in less than thirty minutes. I thought about waking him up to say something else, but what could I say that wouldn’t give me away?

  I reached for my phone. Is everything ready for tomorrow? I texted Robin.

  She replied right away. Ready if you are. 10 a.m., bring whatever you need. We’ll pack some boxes :)

  I’m ready, I replied. Then I shut off the light and curled up against Dave’s body, his heartbeat in my ear almost as loud as my own.

  55

  Robin

  I went to the bank after I left Leslie that morning, staying on the east side of the city, as she’d suggested, which was where the only other branch large enough to keep fifty thousand dollars on hand was located. I gave them my real ID, as well as the nearly expired passport. They kept me there even longer than Leslie, since I wasn’t a customer. Three different bankers and a manager came by to try to convince me to open a checking account, or put the money in savings, or invest it with one of their financial advisers. I kept smiling until they finally came back with a thick white envelope.

  In the car, I ripped off the tape and upended the envelope into my lap. Five bound stacks of bills fell out. I gathered them together; the money was barely thick enough to fill both hands. It wasn’t as much as I’d imagined. How long would it last me in LA?

  My phone buzzed with messages from Nancy.

  The first time I’d left her, I’d done it without thinking. I resented the way she had begun trying to fit me into her future, wondering to me if she should tell her family, if we would stay in Albuquerque if things went badly. I had just met a guy with a truck who had family in Texas; I thought to myself, You don’t see me at all. I’m halfway out of here already, and you don’t even see it. And when I slung my foot out the window that night in late spring—a decade ago now—it felt like I was fulfilling my own prediction. I’d put everything that mattered to me into my turquoise backpack—high-tops, iPod, star-shaped sunglasses. The guy who was waiting for me in the truck down the street wiped cheese from his fingers, truck still smelling like Wienerschnitzel drive-thru. I’d climbed out of my bedroom window thinking: I’m free, I’m free, I could eat the moon! I’d hung my head out of the car window like a dog, my fingers squeezed tightly by his oily ones, as if he could feel my future straining away from him, too big for my flesh to hold, much less his. And Nancy had faded next to the marquee-bright image of my future self.

  Now I saw that I had only been telling myself I was free, just as Leslie had. She had molded me into her perfect companion, fitting my personality around her own. A zero-sum girlhood—you be smart, I’ll be charming, you’ll cut your hair and I’ll grow mine out. You be the general and I your lieutenant. When she’d loosed me from her, I’d been only half a person, Leslie inverted. It was just as Daddy had done: dreamed us up, his children, put his name on us, fleshed us out in his imagination, and then, when we arrived, found us lacking—not pretty enough, maybe, not boy enough; not enough like him, or too much so, idiot mirrors.

  It sounds like horror, but it’s lovely to be invented, to know what you’re for. And awful to know your purpose and be kept from it. If Daddy had invented us because he wanted silent children, we would have been thrilled to silence ourselves. But he’d wanted to love us, and we knew it, and he couldn’t really—so we went on straining, contorting ourselves into lovable poses. If he’d loved us more, I would have been less beautiful, I thought, and Leslie less dependable. In the years that Leslie had refused to speak to me I’d only grown better at being what she needed.

  On some level I’d known that when I’d picked out her car in the Vegas parking lot and climbed onto the hood. I had spent ten years coring strangers and spitting them out, covering myself in lesser love, ruining them in the process. I wanted what everybody wants: to see and be seen. But I frightened ordinary people when I grew tired of niceties, and the other ones, the ones like Clery, were incapable of appreciating my infinite tenderness. The only one who had ever got close was Nancy, who let my love suffocate her, who let me dig her fears out of her with my nails. I was desperate to be known again. I think that’s why I decided to let Leslie meet me all-new. To see if she would still love me. And she did still love me. She did.

  I hadn’t been sure of that before. When I ran away, I thought she would be indifferent to my disappearance, as she had been to my presence. Like my mother, I’d made the mistake of thinking I could remove myself from my life in a neat, single motion. But it cost something to disappear—I was older now, and understood a little more. The escape Leslie had imagined for herself would cost her all her old happiness. And mine would cost me Nancy.

  I wondered where she was now. I decided I would keep her in my head just as she had been that day at the lookout, small, lean, gold, with her chin tilted up and the bloody smudges of my lips across her face, marking her before she knew I’d done it.

  Leslie was gone when I got back to the house, and my things were packed on the bed, the room stinking of lemon cleaner. I went through the duffel bag curiously, but she hadn’t touched the veladora, only folded my clothes and stacked them inside. It felt like the kind of
thing she might have done for me when I left ten years ago, if we’d been friends then.

  I carried the duffel bag downstairs and took out my phone, letting the back door slam shut behind me. This morning I’d told Leslie I knew people, good people.

  It was true.

  56

  Leslie

  I sat with my father in the sunken living room. The television was on, flickering in the darkness. He couldn’t speak anymore, so he wrote to me on a little whiteboard in his cramped lawyer handwriting.

  The squeak of the dry-erase marker. He held up the board so I could see.

  Where is Robin

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He bent and coughed into his paper towel. I kept the roll right next to his armchair so he could always reach for a new sheet. There was a pile of crumpled dirty ones in and around the wastebasket.

  I went back to watching the television. It was an old cartoon, leaping wraithlike figures whose limbs lengthened as they walked. Cab Calloway.

  He held up the whiteboard again.

  Find her

  * * *

  —

  I opened my eyes. Dave was still next to me under the Chimayo blanket, his chest rising and falling peaceably.

  My alarm was bleating into the sheets. I swiped my phone off and got up, moving slowly so as not to rock the mattress. Going to Daddy’s house to pack up the last of the stuff, I texted him. On the bedside table, Dave’s phone made a noise like a triangle.

  I didn’t take anything with me except my phone and my purse with the fifty thousand dollars in it. That was all I would take if I were going to clean out the house.

  It was hot outside even at nine-thirty. Memorial Day weekend. The pool would be open till midnight now. I wouldn’t be here to visit.

  The sky was a huge flat expanse before me, and the Sandia Mountains recalled their name, the morning light turning them pink as fruit flesh.