Lies of the Heart

by Michelle Boyajian

  For a while Katie and Sandy talk about the shower, and about Jill, whom Sandy is getting to know slowly.

  “She broke up with another guy?” Sandy asks.

  “What else is new?”

  “That girl,” Sandy says, shaking her head and laughing.

  Katie laughs, too, thinks of Jill and how much their relationship has changed since their conversation last winter.

  —I’m going to try to be better, Katie had said.—To be a good friend.

  —You are a good friend, you idiot, Jill said.—And I wasn’t sad about Amy at that lunch, Katie, I was sad about us. You barely tell me anything, but I thought that would change, with Nick, and the trial.

  —I try.

  —Do you? Really? Jill had said.—Do you have any idea how much work it is to be around you sometimes?

  And there it was again, that impatient edge in her friend’s voice.

  —Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep the conversation going sometimes, to keep everything happy and upbeat, so I don’t feel like it’s just me, complaining all the time?

  —I trust you, Katie had replied simply, knowing that was what Jill needed to hear.—I respect you.

  —I know. I know you do, Jill said, sighing.—But sometimes it’s hard to believe, you know? (Katie realizing suddenly that she wasn’t so different from Richard after all: acting her way through life at times, putting on different faces for her family, her friends.)

  But Jill has stuck by her, has even offered to go to therapy if Katie likes.

  —I think for now I can handle it, Katie told her last week.

  —I didn’t mean for you, Jill joked.—I have a couple of issues with men I need to work out myself!

  “Another baby,” Sandy says now, shaking her head, her hands coming up to rest on her stomach. “I must be insane!”

  Katie smiles, and then they become quiet. Inside, they hear Sandy’s mother talking with her friend, the whir of the dishwasher starting.

  “Sometimes I think I’ll never have this,” Katie says, spreading her hands at the garden, but Sandy understands.

  “You’ll fall in love again,” she says. “You’ll get your family, too.”

  Katie shakes her head—impossible to think of love again, of coming home to happy voices and the kind of chaos Sandy lives in. She doesn’t even know if she wants children, or even another man by her side anymore, but that, apparently, is a good thing. Not knowing means you’re thinking about what you really want, the therapist said. And when you’re ready, love will compliment your life, not define it.

  One of the last party stragglers steps outside with her son, and Katie helps Sandy off the bench so she can say her good-byes. Hanging back on this woman’s leg is a little boy Katie had glimpsed during the shower—a chubby, shy little four-year-old with light blue eyes that remind her of Jerry’s, and she thinks of him again, of who he would have been if his mother were a different person. Of who he would be today, if Katie had been a different person, too.

  Sometimes, in quiet moments like this, she wonders what Jerry is doing, if he is drawing pictures of new families—if he is placing himself firmly in the middle of the new frame of his life. They’ve stopped mentioning him in the paper, and the last thing they reported, back in the spring, was that there wouldn’t be a new trial—the DA deciding against it due to “mitigating circumstances.”

  Every once in a while now, Dana will reveal something to Katie—she used to work with a psychiatrist who’s at the Institute of Mental Health—and Katie holds her breath as her sister talks. He’s making progress. His appetite has come back. There’s a counselor there, a woman who has become really attached to him. Katie isn’t allowed to visit him, and she tells herself it’s for the best—still not knowing, really, who it’s best for: her, or Jerry. But sometimes she listens to Dana’s updates and she puts herself inside those walls that have become his home now—sees Jerry in his room, the bookshelf beside his bed, filled with his pads and pencils. Pictures him sleeping, his arms wrapped around the Bugs Bunny pillow they let her send, his face peaceful. Even when the picture changes—Jerry waking, his eyes pulsing open in panic—she sees a woman walk into the frame, her arms wrapping around him, comforting him. And Jerry, trusting her more each day, letting his head drop to her shoulder. The tears leaving as this new person keeps him safe from the dark.

  Katie doesn’t know what the future holds for him, if he will ever be allowed to leave, if she will ever be allowed to see him again. But if it happens, if by some miracle they decide that Katie can be in his life again—his room has been put back into its proper order, waiting. A long shot, yes, virtually impossible. But the pictures are taped back onto his wall, the beluga whale propped back up on the mahogany dresser. Just in case.

  “Katie?”

  Sandy walks slowly to the bench, lowers herself back onto it.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I said you look a million miles away,” Sandy says. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Jerry,” Katie says simply.

  “Okay,” Sandy says, nodding. She pats her leg. “Spill it.”

  “It’s nothing—”

  “Katie.”

  Katie sneaks a look at her friend. “I guess I was just wondering,” she says, and then she turns her body around, until she is facing Sandy. “What do you think he’s doing? Right now?”

  The car has been packed since early this morning. She’s getting ready to leave for a cookout at her parents’ house, a little party to send her off on her trip tomorrow. Jack dances in circles around her legs, not helping one bit.

  “Where’s your leash, Jack?”

  He runs to his wicker toy basket, noses around, pulls out a big rawhide. Wags his tail at Katie, supremely proud of himself.

  “Nice try.”

  Her mother will give her a hassle about taking Jack along again, but Katie doesn’t mind. Just last week she caught her mother sneaking a piece of chicken to him, as he sat underneath the picnic table, waiting hopefully.

  “What?” her mother said when Katie smiled at her. “It was just a piece of skin.”

  If Katie decides to move, and it seems inevitable that she will once Nick’s insurance money runs out, it appears that not only will Jerry’s belongings go with her, Jack will make the move, too. Keep him, girl. It’s obvious he loves you to death, Sandy said last December, over coffee. And it’s going to be even crazier around here soon enough. Her hands covering the slight bump under her shirt.

  Before long, Katie will have to find a job, go house hunting, but not before this trip.

  She finds the leash hanging off the deck outside, turns when Jack sprints outside for one last pee before they go.

  “Good boy, Jack.”

  He sniffs around the lawn, lush now thanks to her father’s attentions. As soon as the rain stopped, he showed up every morning, spreading fertilizer and laying down new seed where the leaves had suffocated the grass over the winter. And watering like crazy, until her backyard was flooded in a dozen different places. Her mother wagging her head, eyeing the puddles from the deck. “Moderation,” she had said to Katie. “A term your father does not comprehend.”

  Beside the shed, underneath the shade from the oak trees above, bright green sprouts of baby grass have pushed their way to the surface.

  “I could get up on the shed,” her father said last week, “cut down some of those branches and let more light in.”

  “Don’t you dare, Jimmy,” her mother replied. “You’ll break your neck.”

  “You’re the boss, Grace,” he said to his wife. He turned to Katie, winked. “Hey, sweetie, did your mother tell you about those hoodlums we ran into outside the Blue Grotto a few days ago?”

  “There was nothing wrong with those men, Jimmy. One of them had a walker, for God’s sake.”

  After her mother shook her head and retreated to the air-conditioned house, her father bumped her arm, gave her another wink. “It drives her crazy,” he said, complete
ly unrepentant.

  “Then why do you do it, Dad?”

  He coiled the hose around his arm, walked to the side of the house. “I used to talk about all these dangerous men to take her mind off the cancer,” he said. “To occupy her mind with something else. And now it just drives her nuts. A win-win situation.” He grinned at Katie.

  “Dad,” Katie said, incredulous. “I can’t believe you!”

  “What?” he asked innocently, and turned to the big bag of fertilizer leaning against the house.

  Outside in the baking car, Katie settles herself in as Jack pants and scratches at the window. She rolls it down, cranks the air conditioner.

  She’ll stop at Korb’s Bakery for a loaf of Italian bread, maybe make a quick trip to the Green Thumb for flowers for her mother. Suck-up, Dana will say, without a hint of malice. understanding that the tenderness and peace between Katie and her mother won’t last forever, that at some point very soon there will be too many questions, too many looks that might still hint at her mother’s opinion of her. But for now, while the fragile harmony lasts, Katie will take full advantage of it.

  She casts one last look at the house—did she remember to turn the A/C down, shut off the dryer?—and Nick comes back to her again.

  Part of trying to let him go in the past seven months has included looking around her house, trying to see it as a real home without him in it. But another part—more important than the first—has been her struggle to let go of all the questions she has about Nick, and for Nick—this need to continue waiting for answers from him, from Jerry. Attempting to forgive herself for her part in Nick’s death, even if she’ll never know the entire truth or how much of the blame is hers. But knowing, nonetheless: he may not have come back to her, but if it weren’t for Katie he’d still be here. Not in her life, not the center of her world anymore. But still here, somewhere in the world.

  She adjusts the rearview mirror, catches the expression on her face. It’s all there, especially in her eyes. The guilt, the futility of forgiveness.

  She knows that she will spend a lifetime wrestling with these guilty, tormented feelings—knows that they might ease, they might fade over time, but they will be a part of her life, always. She will carry them through the years, she will take them with her into new relationships, into a new home and a new job—they will always be as natural to her as breathing. And she knows she deserves this burden—for Nick and the life that was taken too soon; for Jerry and the love that saved him, and then almost destroyed him. Her burden such a small price to pay compared to theirs.

  She puts the car in drive.

  “Ready, Jack?” He turns to Katie, his paws slipping on the ledge of the window. “Here we go.”

  She reaches the Topsail Island exit in North Carolina just after midnight. Her original plan was to drive seven or eight hours a day so she would be rested and get to the house in daylight, but somewhere between the Delaware Gap and the heavy traffic in Washington, D.C., she decided to keep driving until she reached the house. The weariness of waking at 5:00 A.M., of what lay ahead of her, suddenly replaced by this determination to keep going.

  The house is in darkness, no surprise. She should drive to a hotel, but instead she sits in front of the house and peers into the blackness. In the passenger seat, Jack whines in his sleep, legs kicking.

  In the morning Katie will ask the new owners for Mr. Barber’s phone number, or maybe his address, though she understands that even if they have this information and are willing to share it, Mr. Barber might refuse to meet with her. That he still might be “twitchy.”

  But if he does agree to meet, what then?

  She rolls down her window, turns off the car. The warm air rushes in, and she closes her eyes, breathes in the scent of ocean and oleander.

  In the dream she is clinking glasses with Dana, and then she is hammering a nail into one of the shelves where she stores her canisters of film, the sound growing in volume, until she realizes that the tapping is happening in real time, outside her dream.

  “Ma’am?”

  Katie blinks into the gray morning light. Not the police, thank God, because what would she tell them? My husband left me and he wanted to buy this house and now he’s dead and I’m sleeping in my car because I drove all night and fell asleep wondering why I’m here in the first place . . .

  The man tapping her windshield is anywhere between fifty-five and seventy—balding and heavy and deeply tanned, with a youthful, stubby nose that looks misplaced on his wrinkled face. His robe is tied tightly over his enormous belly, and he has a paper tucked underneath his arm. An empty coffee cup dangles out of one hand.

  “You all right in there, ma’am?” he asks in a deep southern drawl.

  Katie pats her hair into place, runs a hand across her face, her skin already sticky from the humid air. “I’m sorry, I fell asleep.”

  “Car broke down?”

  “No, I drove all night—” Jack scurries onto her lap, and Katie pats him, too. She points to the house. “Do you live here?”

  The man turns, surveys the house. Over the swell of the lawn, the ocean is just visible. “Going on forty years,” he says.

  “Are you Mr. Barber?”

  He eyes her curiously. “Have we met?”

  “I’m Katie Burrelli,” she says. “I’m Nick Burrelli’s wife. Or I was Nick’s wife.”

  Mr. Barber nods, slowly. He watches her for a moment, nods again. “Suppose a cup of coffee might do you some good?”

  “I lied to you, Mr. Barber,” Katie says, wrapping her hands around the coffee mug.

  Mr. Barber nods, keeps his eyes steady on the ocean. They’re sitting in white rocking chairs in the gazebo, watching the sun peek over the horizon. A boat full of men trolls past them in the distance, their fishing rods pointing high into the sky. The wind carries their laughter across the water, and Mr. Barber throws up a hand in greeting. The men wave back, and Mr. Barber smiles. Jack lies at their feet, dozing softly.

  “I couldn’t go through with it,” Mr. Barber says, talking more to himself than to Katie. “Selling this house. Tried a couple of times but there’s too many memories here, I guess. Good and bad, but too many to give away.”

  They sit in companionable silence for a moment, taking in the water that is just beginning to sparkle under the sun’s early rays.

  “I didn’t lie to you, exactly,” Katie says. “I told Mr. Minsky that Nick and I wanted to see the house again. But Nick was already gone.”

  Mr. Barber turns to her, raises an eyebrow.

  “He died last spring, shortly after you met him. He came here the week after he left me,” Katie says. “And now I’m here, and I have no idea why.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Mr. Barber nod, turn back to the ocean. They watch a string of pelicans fly past, their wings resting on the air. Earlier, while Katie waited in the dining room for Mr. Barber to change and then pour them coffee, she tried to think of at least one good question for him. A reason that she has intruded into this man’s life. She listened to his happy whistling in the kitchen, hoping the wistful melody would work its way into her body and make some sense of this trip that had seemed so important just yesterday.

  Mr. Barber points to a fish cresting the water. “Most likely a blue,” he says, rocking in his chair.

  “Do you fish often?”

  “used to,” he says, watching the water.

  “I’m sorry for imposing on you like this,” Katie says. “Thank you for the coffee.”

  She’s about to rise when Mr. Barber places a hand on the arm of her chair, his eyes still on the ocean.

  “Back when my wife was alive, I used to call her Old Busybody. There was always someone up there in the house with her, talking away, and my wife’d just sit there and soak it all up. I never understood it,” he says, shaking his head.

  He tilts his mug back, drinks the last of his coffee.

  “I asked her once why she did it, and she said something that didn’t ma
ke sense right then. She said when people tell their troubles to someone else, it’s like they’re handing over some of the weight of those burdens. Taking the things that make their shoulders bend and giving them over to someone who can hold on to them for a while. Said that’s the greatest thing we can do for another person, carry around that weight until they’re strong enough to take it back.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “Hell no!” Mr. Barber says, facing Katie and grinning for the first time. “I thought she just liked listening to their tales. Old Busybody, that’s what I called her.” His face grows serious, eyes tracking the water again as he looks into the past. “But then she got sick and was gone before I could even think about what being alone was all about. And I had me a neighbor here, right next door, been dead going on about a year now. Charlie. And one night me and old Charlie, we drank us some whiskey and it all came spilling out of me. I couldn’t have stopped myself if I tried. All the good and the bad and the ugly and the sweet. And you know what? The trip back home that night was like walking an inch above the ground. I been grateful to him ever since. Always will be.”

  Another boat appears in the distance, a nest of seagulls chasing above it.

  “When did you know you were ready to take it back?” Katie asks quietly.

  “Don’t know if I have yet,” Mr. Barber says. “But I’m trying.” He turns to Katie, raises his empty mug at her. An invitation.

  At first she stumbles, trying to tell him about Nick, their life together. But Mr. Barber keeps his eyes on the water, calmly nodding his encouragement, and before she knows it, she’s talking about Jerry, her family, the trial. How she’ll never know exactly what part she played in Nick’s death, but how she knows the feelings of guilt will never leave her all the way. She tells him about the Cohens, too, about what they offered her, what she refused to take. And how she always felt she was an outsider in her own life, always on the outside looking in, watching and waiting for other people to give her answers. Mr. Barber keeps nodding like he understands, his eyes squinting at the ocean as he rocks in his chair.