The Truth Commission

by Susan Juby

  “Be careful,” I said, much too late.

  “Don’t forget about asking yourself the truth. You know what they say. ‘Cast the stone out of your own moat before you go looking at glass houses.’ It’s pretty clear how he feels,” she added, getting up from what was probably her longest voluntary sit in about three years.

  “What?” I tried to figure out the meaning of her mangled malaprop-cliché combination. Then the last line hit me. “It is?”

  She gave me another variation of her Are you serious? face before she walked away.

  The Space Between

  Neil and Dusk had stuff to do after school, so I drove home by myself and thought about what Prema had said. It’s pretty clear how he feels.

  What was she talking about? Part of me knew, and part of me pushed the knowledge away. Okay. This is a work of creative nonfiction. It’s predicated on accuracy.

  I know that Neil has an unstated romantic love for Dusk. You can see it in his paintings of her. As I may have noted a time or two,91 he’s a huge fan of beautiful women. He loves them all. But the girls he picks to be his muses are special. He’s made more paintings of Dusk than of anyone else, including film stars of the 1960s and 1970s such as Jane Fonda and Kim Novak, and prematurely deceased rock stars such as Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse. The paintings all have un-illuminating titles: Gone-1, Gone 2-2, etc. What does this focus mean? Love.

  Neil loves me, too, but not the same way he loves Dusk. She loves him, but not the way I do.

  We all love each other.

  Complicatedly.

  Apparently, this sort of thing seems romantic to a huge segment of the reading and film-going public.92 Nothing about it seems romantic to me. I find it creepy and indicative of delusionality on the part of the less-loved point of the triangle. Allow me to explain. Unless you have one of those disorders that make it hard for you to interpret social cues or facial expressions, you should have a clue if someone likes your friend more than you. People aren’t good at hiding their feelings.

  I recognize that if you’re in a love triangle, the fact that your love object likes your friend more than he/she likes you doesn’t mean that you won’t like him. Or her. Man, this is harder to write than I would have thought! Gendered pronouns make everything so awkward. I might need to work this out in a footnote so as not to expose the gentle reader to harsh mental confusion and poor word order.

  Let me clarify.

  Just because Neil likes-likes Dusk doesn’t mean that I can stop myself from like-liking Neil.93 I can, however, act with some modicum of dignity and not acknowledge my feelings. My personal rule for emotional and mental self-preservation: “I will not openly love any person who cannot love me back the same way.” Why shouldn’t you be into someone who is not into you? Because it’s undignified and sad. There is already too much that is sad and undignified in my life. I refuse to add more to that smelly bucket, and so I spend as little time thinking about my feelings as possible. Nor will I talk about them to my guidance counseling/creative writing teacher.94 I will pretend I do not have those feelings and eventually they will die from neglect.

  So there.

  I understand where Prema Hardwick is coming from and can relate to her attitude.

  There is nothing to be gained by trying to change reality.

  I know this.

  Completely.

  And yet.

  And. Yet.

  As I drove I considered her words: It’s pretty clear how he feels.

  Was it obvious? Something about her words made a small flag of hope rise up and flap around in my brain like a sparrow trapped in someone’s kitchen. Did other people see something I didn’t? Had Prema Hardwick with her elite athletic eyes seen Neil staring at me the way he stared at Dusk? Had I misread his cues thanks to my damaged self-esteem (courtesy of my sister’s portrayal of me in the Diana Chronicles)? Was such a thing possible?

  I tried to usher the hope out of my brain but couldn’t find an open window.

  Maybe I was wrong. At minimum, I needed to find out how he felt.

  No! That was an awful thought. If I asked how he felt, then he’d know how I felt. If I even mentioned the tensions among the three of us, our friendship would change forever. Acknowledgment of the truth would ruin everything.

  I considered how cavalier we’d been about asking Prema. The nerve of us and our Truth Commission.

  And then I thought that this sort of mental ping-pong was what the other two points of Prema’s triangle, Luke and Tony, probably felt all the time! No wonder they skied so fast.

  I found that I was shaking my head as I drove, which was probably unsettling for the other commuters.

  At least I wasn’t talking to myself.

  When I finally pulled up to our house, I was exhausted.

  Unfortunately, our house is the last place a person who is overtired should go, especially since my sister’s Crown Vic was parked outside. What if Keira wanted to tell me more about her inappropriate relationship with her teacher? A person needs to have her denial shields up and her emotional baffles set on maximum before stepping inside chez Pale. So I immediately reversed and turned back toward town.

  Nancy stalled once across from the Kin Hut on Departure Bay Road, and again just up the hill behind the Brooks Landing Mall.

  I pulled halfway into a blocked-off entrance to the parking lot and waited for the truck to recover. Nancy’s interior smells of a potent combination of old truck, lunch boxes, a hint of degraded plastics, plus a whiff of despair. Maybe it’s just the odor of many art students. Who knows?

  Considerations about the specific smells inside my hand-me-down truck were a welcome change from my obsessive contemplation of Neil and me and Dusk and were interrupted only when I noticed a boy lurking near the mall.

  Hoodie up, shoulders hunched. It was Brian Forbes! He hadn’t been to school since our talk, and I’d been hoping that Dusk was right, that he’d maybe gone home and confessed his problem to his parents and then gone into rehab and had begun a triumphant journey to wellness and cautionary school talks.

  Standing uncertainly on the sidewalk between Shanghai City Restaurant and Oliver’s Pet Supplies, however, he didn’t look particularly triumphant. He looked all kinds of shady.

  Of all those the Commission had approached, he was the only one who hadn’t contacted us after. Aimee talked to Neil and so did Tyler Jones, even if Tyler hadn’t coughed up his truth yet. Prema gave me the goods after her initial refusal to cooperate. Mrs. Dekker and Zinnia talked to Dusk. I wanted my truth bond with Brian to hold!

  Spotting him was a sign. I would ask him how he how he was doing, post-truth.

  I looked into the rearview before I opened the door. Nancy was sticking into the road a little bit, but it was a thirty-kilometer-an-hour zone, so she wasn’t likely to get hit. Brian, turtled deep into his hoodie, didn’t notice me.

  As I was approaching, a young guy came out of a dark glass door to my right. I slowed. Brian walked to meet him. They shook hands and when they did so, I thought I saw something small pass between them. I stopped walking.

  Brian and the other boy exchanged a few words and then went their separate ways. The other boy headed around to the front of the mall, and Brian walked through the parking lot and across Departure Bay Road. Then he disappeared into Beach Estates Park, the many-staired and extensively boardwalked path that winds its way onto the beach facing the Departure Bay Ferry Terminal.

  I’d only been in the park a few times. It gave the impression of deep shade and rushing water. To be honest, the whole vibe was a little wet and rape-y to me.

  I followed Brian Forbes down the first set of stairs before the part of my brain in charge of self-preservation could stop me. I was immediately plunged into the kind of day shade you find only in a rain forest. Brown foaming water rushed out of a huge pipe just below street level and f
ell in a violent waterfall to the riverbed below. The noise of the street above disappeared in the roar of the runoff.

  The railing on the first set of stairs was new and strong but covered in graffiti tags and incoherent and badly spelled insults. Jo-Jo Blowz Dicks and Krystal C Suks It were illustrated with crude drawings.95

  As I moved down into the park, the sense of being in a ravine increased. The banks rose steeply on either side. I made myself walk a little faster, hoping to catch Brian before he made it too far. A wide waterfall cascaded down a rock face, and the next thing I knew I was nearly running. Then I yelled Brian’s name but I couldn’t hear myself over the water.

  I ran down metal grate stairs and across a wooden bridge covered in wire mesh and I called Brian’s name again as I rounded a corner and nearly collided with two people who stood in the path with a fawn-colored pit bull. I screamed and the dog lunged and the man strained to keep hold of the leash. The woman said something uncomplimentary about kids and I muttered, “Sorry,” and stepped carefully around them and ran on.

  The path straightened and I stopped. On the other side of the river, the bank had begun to collapse, uprooting dozens of trees. They’d been dragged out of the river and stacked in a disorganized heap on the crumbling hillside. The city had put up a sign, strangely permanent-looking, announcing that the project to reinforce the bank had run out of money.

  It occurred to me that whoever had designed Beach Estates Park had done so with an eye to making it as menacing as possible.

  I told myself to take note of the environment. To not be one of those annoying people found in horror movies who hears a noise in a basement and immediately goes down there without so much as a flashlight or a quick call to the local police. I slowed my pace to a fast walk.

  Maybe it was beautiful in the park, and my nerves were too jangled to notice. That would be a shame.

  Brian had to be in front of me. The sides of the ravine were too steep for him to have climbed out. Was he crouched under one of the bridges?

  The light grew brighter, and I saw wide, flat sky ahead where the park opened out to the beach opposite the ferry terminal.

  My steps slowed.

  It occurred to me that I was acting like a crazy woman. Brian probably lived in the neighborhood on the other side of the park. He was simply on his way home, and I was going to have to walk back alone.

  I decided to sit on the beach for a few minutes before doing so. Prepare my nerves. Look at the steel structures of the terminal and try to draw them later. Contemplate the nature of rocks and sand. Dream up new ways to describe the scent of the ocean. Salt, dead oysters, ferry.

  The small bridge that led out of the park and onto the beach was surrounded by tall, rough grasses. The river had turned into a burbling creek. The light was non-foreboding and my heart remembered how much I love the ocean and our island. When I walked onto the beach and over a row of driftwood logs, I saw Brian sitting on a log, as though he’d been waiting for me.

  His hoodie was pulled up and cinched tight around his face. I felt ridiculously glad to see him.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He turned and watched me come and made a noise like a laugh but that was not a laugh.

  “Can I sit down?”

  He nodded, and I settled down beside him.

  It had stopped raining and the day was a clean and gray. “Saw you at Brooks Landing,” I said.

  Brian Forbes dug the heels of his tattered Chucks into the sand. He made another snorting noise. “What is that noise?” I asked. Just to be companionable.

  “You know, I’m not even sure. My mother really hates it.”

  “I was just wondering.”

  “Why are you watching me?”

  “I’m not watching you.”

  “Oh, sorry. Let me be more specific. Why are you following me?”

  I could feel the grit of sand and salt between my palms and the smooth log. “That’s a legitimate question,” I said. “I don’t know the answer.”

  “I already told you the truth. Isn’t that what you guys are after?”

  “Could you call me Normandy?”

  Another snort-laugh. That’s really not a good description, because Brian’s particular noise managed to pack so much despair into a single syllable, like a man hung from the ceiling who is being punched in the solar plexus.

  “Okay, Normandy,” he said.

  “And can you take your hoodie off?”

  “You’re pretty demanding,” he said.

  It was the first time anyone had ever said that about me in my entire life.

  He slid his hoodie back, and his short hair was messed up. He ran his hands over it once and then pulled out his cigarettes. He took a half-smoked one out of his pack. It smelled worse than a normal cigarette.

  “That reeks,” I said.

  “Halfies always do. All the shit is activated already. Tastes terrible, too.”

  “That’s got to be a bad sign.”

  “No doubt,” he said. The flame from his lighter leaped as he sucked on the cigarette, a small daylight explosion.

  “I saw you at Brooks Landing,” I said, then realized I’d already said that.

  His cheeks hollowed as he puffed out a long stream of smoke. “Yeah?”

  “Were you buying drugs?”

  Snort.

  “I saw that guy give you something.”

  “My man Mark.”

  “He’s your dealer?”

  “Fellow reluctant enthusiast.”

  Brian Forbes reached into the pouch of his sweatshirt and I watched, alarmed, sure he was going to show me a baggie full of something I’d only ever seen on HBO.

  It was a business card.

  I got this unseemly jolt of triumph at the sight of it.

  “This is awesome, Brian,” I said, sounding every inch the person who should be writing bad children’s television.

  And then, like I knew him much better than I did, I said, “I’m really proud of you.”

  He turned his head to look at me, his face suddenly softening. His neck was thin. “Don’t get your hopes too high,” he said. “I’m not.”

  I stared out at the ferry terminal. Lights shone through the small portholes, but I couldn’t see anyone moving inside.

  “About what I said before,” said Brian. “The last time we had one of our little talks.”

  I went still.

  “I’m sorry. It’s not my business about what goes on in your house. With your family.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Forget I said anything. I should go. There’s probably a drug test waiting for me at home. Peanut butter sandwich, glass of milk, and a piss test.”

  “Don’t get them mixed up,” I said. And the obviousness of my avoidance and the ease with which I could be turned away from the topic made me ashamed.

  “Same to you,” he said, pushing himself up.

  “You going to use that card?”

  “Jesus, if I close my eyes, I could pretend my mother was here.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’re a nice girl, Normandy Pale.”

  No one had ever said that to me before, either. I liked it.

  “You’re a good guy, Brian Forbes.”

  “But it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it?” he said.

  It was my turn to make the snort-y noise. “Ain’t that the truth.”

  We got up and smiled at each other. His eyes were lovely, and I was reminded of a line in book I read once, that God exists in the spaces between people.96 Maybe that’s what the Truth Commission was. An attempt to find God in each other.

  The dull day seemed to grow bright around us, and then Brian took his smile and walked away, and I already missed him.

  Teacher, Teacher

  The sense of having
found God in someone else only lasted until I got out of the park. In the blocked-off entrance to the back parking lot of the strip mall was . . . an empty piece of pavement that should have been covered up with my truck. Nancy had been towed.

  I muttered a swear and started walking. I could have called my parents or Dusk or Neil, but I didn’t feel like it. The walk took about forty-five minutes, and by the time I reached our house I felt better. Keira’s Crown Vic was gone. Nancy would be fine in the impound. She’d spent the night there before. One good thing about having a peculiar and fragile family is that things that matter in a regular family, like having your vehicle towed, are considered inconsequential.

  Having my small transgressions overlooked had always worked for me, but the past few days had made me bold. Direct. I’d looked truth up the nose a few times and it hadn’t killed me or anyone else. Instead, it had given me a rush, shaken me up, unsettled and exhilarated me. I didn’t think I could go back to tiptoeing. I wanted to stomp around our house like a Lord of the Dance troupe in an uncontrolled frenzy.

  My dad was in the kitchen making vegetarian chili. Quelle surprise!

  “Norm,” he said. “You’re late. What’s going on? I didn’t hear Nancy.”

  “Stalled,” I said.

  “Oh, that girl,” said my dad. “Good thing she’s a looker, or we wouldn’t put up with her.”

  “Good thing,” I agreed. “Chili tonight?”

  “Yes, indeed!” he said. “Got this new recipe. Includes salsa, if you can believe it.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said even though it wasn’t, particularly.

  “You want to set the table?”

  I went to the cupboard and pulled out four plates. Plain plates. Ones without our faces on them.

  It occurred to me that setting a place for Keira was screwed up, so I put one back.

  “Your sister’s home.” My dad paused to taste from a giant spoon containing what looked to be a single kernel of corn coated in chili sauce. “I think she’s sleeping. Been burning the midnight kerosene at both ends,” he said. “Set a place for her just in case she wakes up.”