Something True

by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  As Tate drifted off to sleep she could not remember if she was indoors or outside, and she dreamed that she was in the desert.

  She was walking along a rocky path. In front of her, her mother and Maggie were old women trudging along with canes in their hands. But when she called to them to see if they needed help, they both laughed.

  “The fair is just starting,” Debby-Lynn said. In the dream, she had a long, silver braid, not the blond permanent she had worn from Tate’s infancy to the last day Tate saw her through the window of Jared Spaeth’s front room. “We can always be late, but why would we want to?”

  The dream-Maggie pointed, and the desert bushes parted, and Tate saw an open-air market. Red and indigo scarves adorned stalls full of handmade goods. Krystal and her friends, some in colorful clothing and others naked, danced around open fires. Plates of bananas and other fruits Tate did not recognize glistened in the shadows beyond the fire. Suddenly Maggie and her mother were absorbed into the crowd.

  “I can’t see you,” Tate called after them. “Come back.”

  Then, in her dreams, Laura was standing before her naked.

  “See me,” she said.

  Sunlight filled the upstairs sunroom like liquid gold. Tate stretched. Beside her Laura stirred, then opened her eyes and smiled.

  “You like the view?” Laura asked.

  The room provided a view of the entire valley, but Tate was not looking at that landscape.

  “Yes,” she said, running her hand across Laura’s belly. “Very much.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Laura said, but the warmth in her eyes said Be silly.

  Laura rolled off the bed and stood at the window. She spread her arms open to Palm Springs, baring her naked body to the city. Tate got up and stood beside her. There was no one for miles. The city was barely more than a grid. Still it was exhilarating.

  Laura turned and wrapped her arms around Tate, pressing their bodies together, and Tate thought, Maybe, just maybe, this will all work out. Then she felt Laura stiffen.

  “What is it?” Tate asked.

  “I heard something.”

  “What?”

  “There is someone in the house.”

  Of course, Tate thought. She was happy, so now she would have to be killed, probably by an escaped convict with a history of eating his victims’ ears. Everyone would say it was a freak occurrence. QUIET NEIGHBORHOOD SHOCKED BY BRUTAL KILLING, the headline would read. Back home her friends would say, It figures. She just met a nice girl.

  “Quick.” Tate tossed Laura’s robe across the bed. “Put this on and your shoes too.”

  Tate pulled on her jeans and the sweater she had borrowed from one of the well-stocked closets. She glanced around. There was no place to hide in the rooftop sunroom and no way to lock the door since the “door” was a spiral staircase that rose from the floor below.

  “The room beneath us, does the door lock?” she asked.

  “I can’t remember.”

  Tate dropped to her knees, listening at the top of the stairs. She heard it too now: voices, a door slam. But they were still far away, somewhere deep inside the house. She tiptoed down the staircase. The room below was eerily still. She checked the door. It locked, although the push button would not keep an intruder out for long. She pressed it anyway, then beckoned to Laura to come down.

  Laura took her hand, and, for a second, they stood frozen, staring at the door.

  “I’m calling the police,” Tate said. She had left her phone somewhere in the house, but there was a landline on the table. “You sure there’s no one in here, like a maid or a chef or something?”

  She had the vague impression that wealthy people had staff. Perhaps there was a housekeeper, a faucet sanitizer, a painting restorer. Or perhaps one of California’s many disenfranchised had come with a shotgun. She lifted the phone.

  “What’s the address?”

  Laura said nothing. She stood transfixed, listening.

  “The address?” Tate asked again.

  When Laura still said nothing, Tate dialed 9…1…Even if she did not know the address, the police would be able to trace the call. For that matter, she could just say “the huge house on top of the cliff,” and they would know. She was about to press the third number, when Laura leapt across the room and slammed the lever on the base of the phone.

  “Stop!” Laura said.

  Tate heard the dial tone.

  “It’s my family.”

  “We have to get you out of here.”

  Laura had dressed completely in the time it took Tate to readjust the phone in its cradle and say, “What’s the big deal then?” Laura now wore a charcoal-gray dress, nautical scarf, and pantyhose. Tate did not even know how it happened.

  “Where did they come from?” she asked, perplexed by the transformation. Did Laura keep an arsenal of professional clothes in some hiding place? Did pantyhose spontaneously grow on women like Laura in emergencies?

  “I don’t know,” Laura said. “They probably flew in from Alabama.”

  “What?”

  Laura smoothed an invisible wrinkle out of her dress.

  “My family. They probably heard that I was here and flew in from Alabama. I’m sorry. You have to go. They can’t see you.”

  Tate was so startled it took her a moment to form the words: “Go where?”

  Laura looked around the room.

  “In the closet.”

  “No!”

  “Then sneak out to the rock where we were last night. I’ll get them out of here, and I’ll come find you.”

  The voices in the house were drawing closer. Tate thought she could distinguish an older woman, a young woman, and a man. Maybe the father. Maybe the brother.

  “They didn’t catch us having sex, if that’s what you’re worried about. Just tell them that I’m your friend.”

  Friends—what a sad cliché. If Abigail had asked her to pretend to be a “friend” she would have refused on principle. But she was willing to bend her principles to ease the worry on Laura’s face. Anyway, Laura was her friend, in a way. A kind of gorgeous friend, who would certainly break her heart into a million pieces but probably leave her thinking it was all worth it in the end. That kind of friend.

  “Tell them I live in Palm Springs. Tell them I drank too much last night, and you let me crash here. Tell them I’m your friend from college.”

  Laura ran a hand over her perfect hair.

  “I don’t have friends.” Laura gave a shrug and a thin smile.

  “Everyone has friends.”

  “I don’t have friends like you.” It was just a fact. “Don’t be mad.” She strode to the window and looked out, her breath fogging the glass. “You didn’t tell Maggie.”

  “That’s different.”

  Laura turned from the window.

  “Hide in the closet,” Laura instructed. “Then go down the back stairs. If they catch you say you’re the new gardener.”

  Tate looked down at her own outfit: motorcycle boots, jeans, and a sweater belonging to some previous occupant of the mansion, a large insignia emblazoned on the left breast. Snakes and a shield and an anchor. Of course, an anchor.

  “What about the schoolboy I mugged to get this sweater?”

  “It was my brother’s. He’ll never remember.”

  “I look as much like a gardener as you do.”

  “And we don’t have a garden.” Laura took Tate’s hands. “If they see you, they’ll guess. At least my brother will. The important thing is that they know you’ll lie. They just want the fiction. They tell everyone I’m engaged to a lawyer in Atlanta.”

  “What?” Tate pulled her hands from Laura’s.

  “I hardly know him. He’s probably gay too,” she said, as though the thought had just occurred to her. “It looks good in the literature. You can’t have a single daughter over thirty. And if I’m honest with them, they’ll start worrying who else I might be honest with.”

  “You mean, like yourself?” Tat
e shot back.

  The footsteps in the hallway were drawing closer. Tate could make out the flurry of questions tossed back and forth between them.

  “You have no idea what the political landscape of the country looks like.” Laura lowered her voice. “If I come out, I’m risking everything my father has worked for, and he is a good man. You don’t know what the competition is like. They’re clan members. They want to criminalize birth control. My father is a moderate.”

  “Where I come from we don’t lie about who we are. We make mistakes. We do dumb things. We’re not perfect, but we don’t lie about who we are.”

  “Where you’re from is a fantasy. Even the conservatives are liberal in Portland. You can’t go out there and be honest.” Laura spoke as if Tate had just proposed walking on water.

  “I am not going to stand in front of your family and tell them I’m a gardener for a house with no garden who stole your brother’s sweater,” Tate said.

  Suddenly, there was a knock on the door.

  “Laura?” a man’s voice called out. “Are you decent?”

  No, Tate mouthed.

  “One sec,” Laura called out, her cheerful voice at odds with the look on her face.

  She grabbed Tate’s elbow. It was not a lover’s touch. It was the grip mall cops used to drag shoplifters to the office to await their fate. Tate wrenched her arm free.

  “Get in.” Laura pointed to the closet. “Now.”

  From outside the door, an older woman sang out, “Yoo-hoo! Laura-bear, I’m coming in.”

  “My mother,” Laura whispered.

  “I came out when I was ten.” Tate took a step toward the door, the waiting mother, the man’s voice, the whole Enfield clan.

  “That’s the whole problem.” Laura gave Tate one last, appraising glance. “You look it.” Then she grabbed Tate’s arm again and pushed her into the large walk-in closet.

  The closet wasn’t really that bad. A sliver of light came in from beneath the door illuminating a space slightly smaller than Tate’s apartment. The whole space smelled pleasantly of cologne and expensive textiles. Tate wondered if Laura expected her to insinuate herself behind a rack of slacks. Would her family check the closet?

  Tate heard a door open.

  “What are you doing here?” That was Laura.

  Several footsteps entered the room. It sounded like someone landed on the bed with a bounce.

  “Natalie. Mom.”

  So it was Laura’s sister, mother and, Tate guessed by the man’s voice, her brother.

  “Laura,” her brother said. “I didn’t know you still used this house.”

  “Apparently you did,” Laura said, “because you’re here. Or are you here on vacation?”

  “Your mother and sister were visiting friends in LA, and they heard from Dora that you had ordered a room made up.”

  “You’re stalking me.”

  At least Laura was not enthusiastic about seeing her family. That was something, Tate thought.

  “And we saw you were here with someone.” Natalie affected a childish, singsong voice that made Tate want to burst out of the closet and hit her over the head with a shoe. She really did sound a lot like Abigail.

  “Are there spy cameras in here? What the hell?” Laura said.

  The man’s voice interrupted. “We just checked the alarm records. You know it records movement in the house. Utilities usage. You don’t flush the toilet when you’re not home.”

  “Did you finally meet someone?” Laura’s mother asked.

  Laura stumbled over her words. “I had to pull a few overnighters with the accountant from the Bonhoffer account. It was just easier to work here.”

  “Was he cute?” That was Natalie again.

  “Yes. Gorgeous. And he fucked me senseless every night. I’m probably pregnant with his love child.”

  “Laura!” her mother exclaimed.

  “Come on now, Nat was just asking,” her brother said.

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  Tate took a quiet step toward the door of the closet, trying to picture the scene outside. She knew what Vita would say. Carpe fucking diem. Vita would tell her to take her shirt off, jump out, and scream, She’s a dyke! Instead she listened.

  “They heard that you were here, and they just couldn’t contain themselves,” Laura’s brother continued. “They wanted to tell you the good news.”

  “Tell her,” Natalie urged.

  “Your father…” her mother said dramatically.

  “Our father…” her brother added.

  “…is going to be president of the United States of America!” Natalie crowed.

  “He’s being considered for a presidential nomination,” the brother said. “Nat is getting ahead of herself, but it’s true. Some very influential people have been mentioning his name. They like our campaign. They say we’re ‘untarnished.’”

  “We?” Laura asked.

  Say it, Tate urged. Just tell them. It’s that simple.

  “The Enfield campaign. All of us together,” her mother said with treacly sweetness.

  The brother was clearly trying to play it cool, but Tate could hear the excitement in his voice. “So we thought we’d fly up, pay you a visit, and talk to you about working on the campaign. There’s going to be a press conference tomorrow.”

  “You’ve been out of the loop,” her mother added. “Your father would like to strategize with you before the conference.”

  “I’ll have to think about it,” Laura said.

  “What could possibly be more exciting than campaigning for the president of the United States of America?” her mother asked.

  Lesbian sex, Tate thought. Love. Everything! But she had already sunk to the floor, her knees tucked under her chin, her arms wrapped around her legs like a child. She knew the answer.

  “Of course,” Laura said, her voice flat. “It’s wonderful. Let’s go downstairs, and you can brief me. Who’s going to be at the press conference?”

  Chapter 23

  Laura had been sitting in the living room listening to political strategy for over an hour, all the while trying to devise her own strategy to get her family out of the house and Tate out of the bedroom closet. So far she had not been able to budge her family. She had not even gotten a word in edgewise. It was all polling stats, issue treatments, and the aesthetics of campaign materials. It was still early in the morning—too early for a drink, which was too bad because the desire to strangle someone was growing with each thinly veiled reference to Laura’s fictional accountant.

  Natalie dropped another one, and John said, “You know Natalie is right. You’ve got to establish some sort of stable, monogamous relationship.”

  “I don’t see why you can’t get married,” her mother added. “You’re a lovely young lady.”

  Laura rose and walked toward the window.

  “No one here is young,” she said, more to the landscape than to her family.

  “Speak for yourself,” Natalie said.

  “Natalie, you were born old.” Laura scanned the desert below. Miles of unadulterated rock, scrub brush, and rattlesnakes surrounded the house. And something else. A figure moving in the distance. A woman making her way from rock to rock, the early sun casting a long shadow at her feet.

  Tate.

  Overhead, a hawk circled on the hot air currents. Beyond her, Palm Springs spread itself out like a distant mirage. As Laura watched, Tate paused, looked up at the sky, and then set off again, heading downhill, toward the highway, toward the city. It occurred to Laura, she had never seen anything more elegant, more resolute. In that silhouette was everything John Wayne was meant to be all wrapped up in the body of a lean, muscular woman. She almost stopped her brother in midsentence to show him. That’s what he wanted for his campaign flyers. That integrity. That grace.

  “I have to go,” Laura said.

  “Where?” her mother asked.

  “Out.”

  “What’s going on?” John cal
led after her.

  “We were talking to you,” Natalie said.

  Laura ignored them. She slipped on the most practical pair of shoes she could find in the front hall closet. Then she ran into the desert, calling for Tate.

  She did not get far. She had drawn a map of Tate’s trajectory in her mind, but when she reached the desert she wasn’t sure. Every time she headed in one direction she thought maybe Tate had gone another way. She listened. Every sound could have been Tate’s distant footsteps. Every sound could have been the breeze blowing against the spruce trees. Laura scrambled down to a lookout point where she knew she could see the valley, but there was no sign of anyone.

  “Tate!” Her voice echoed off the rocks. No one answered.

  Finally, sweaty and past tears, she trudged back to the family tribunal that awaited her. Someone had poured a round of mint juleps.

  “What was that about?” her mother asked as she entered the living room.

  She was aware of her disheveled hair, her red face, and her family’s cool reserve. She turned. They all sipped their drinks in unison. It was cultish.

  “How do you do that?” Laura asked.

  “What?” her mother and Natalie said together.

  Except for her long, red hair and freckles her sister was a carbon copy of their mother.

  Laura wandered into the kitchen, surveyed the mint julep fixings, and poured a shot of rum in a glass. She took a swig, feeling the liquor burn her throat.

  “It was a woman,” Laura blurted out. “I was here with a woman.”

  Laura thought she could hear the houndstooth rustle as her mother and sister stiffened simultaneously.

  “The accountant?” John asked. “It’s a small thing. Just be more careful. We don’t want any impression of impropriety. You know once Dad is nominated, we’re going to be in the tabloids. There’s just no way around it, and they don’t care if it’s true.”

  “It is true!” Laura slammed her glass down on the counter.

  “I know you were just here with a female accountant, but the tabloids can make anything into a scandal,” John said, as if explaining a simple lesson to a dim student.