How We Learned to Lie

by Meredith Miller

  Dedication

  For Chrissie V and Ray F, wherever you are

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Weedy Sweetness

  Joan

  Joan

  Daisy

  Daisy

  Daisy

  Joan

  Joan

  Daisy

  Daisy

  The Watery Breath That Shaped Them

  Joan

  Daisy

  Joan

  Joan

  Daisy

  Daisy

  Skipped, Beat

  Joan

  Daisy

  Daisy

  Joan

  Joan

  Joan

  Daisy

  Daisy

  Daisy’s Electric Map of America

  Joan

  Daisy

  Daisy

  Joan

  Joan

  Daisy

  Daisy

  Daisy

  Joan

  Daisy

  Joan

  Joan

  No Spark and No Wave

  Daisy

  Joan

  Daisy

  Joan

  Daisy

  Joan

  &

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Meredith Miller

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Weedy Sweetness

  Joan

  THE DAY ROBBIE McNamara came and dripped blood on our front stairs, the world was still happening to other people. We were still clueless, hiding in the woods at our end of the harbor, watching the gentle tides. Before the hurricane. Before the disappearing started. Before all the violent surprises.

  I was on my way across the street to call Daisy and make him come outside. To go to the McNamaras’ from our house, you climb up the wooden staircase outside our front door and cross the road. Through the pine trees and up Daisy’s driveway. I’ve been making that journey every day since I was maybe seven.

  Daisy would be in his attic window watching everything, or in his room trying to make his own telephone. If his mother’s car was gone, I didn’t even have to knock. It was never going to be anyone but me coming through Daisy’s door.

  You could feel the end of summer coming. Gramps and Arthur had just replaced some rotten boards in the steps, and they stood out all yellow and full of sap against the rest of the weathered staircase. They made a different sound when my sneakers hit them. I crossed the landing halfway up without even checking under the bench to see if Daisy had left me anything. Two steps up from there I ran straight into Robbie McNamara’s chest.

  His hair was wet, but there was no way he’d just gotten out of the shower because, like I said, his hands had blood on them.

  “Joan.” He said it like I was what he came for.

  His eyes kept pulling away, and he was jumping from one foot to the other and talking in little bursts.

  “My brother with you?”

  “No, Robbie. I was on my way to your house.”

  He wasn’t going to back up the steps. After a minute I stepped down onto the landing and asked him what happened.

  “You see this?” He held out his hands to me. “This isn’t mine.”

  It was getting dark under the trees, and the blood was gray in the yellow street light. It wasn’t dripping, but it wasn’t dried up, either. Whoever it belonged to was probably still leaking. Robbie’s voice was a little proud and a little crazy. He was trembling with fear or excitement, maybe both.

  All I could think was Shit, I have to get him out of here. What if my dad came home? What if Arthur came bouncing up the stairs two at a time reciting Gramsci to himself, and came across Robbie staring at me with blood all over his hands? I leaned over the railing because I thought I might throw up onto the landing just thinking about it. A twitchy white guy showing up on your front steps covered in blood kind of does that to you.

  Honest truth, at the moment I didn’t really care what had happened to Robbie McNamara. I just didn’t want him, my brother, and somebody’s blood all on those stairs at the same time. We all know how that story ends.

  The blood had gotten on the sleeves of Robbie’s jacket. He had two zits on his forehead and nothing in his pockets. I saw him fish around for cigarettes or keys and look bewildered when he came up with nothing.

  “Robbie, I don’t understand. Maybe we should go find Daisy, huh?”

  “I’m taking care of my family, Joan. I’m the man now.”

  Oh, God. If Robbie McNamara started thinking he was the one in charge, anything could happen. Half the time, he couldn’t muster up enough focus to button his shirt the right way. He was so high he just played with the threads on his jacket and slouched onto anything that was available to hold him up. You had to hit his arm every time you wanted him to join the conversation. If my dad knew him better, I would never have been allowed over Daisy’s house at all. Robbie was older than us, but the term big brother didn’t really apply. We used to have to remind him to eat and take a shower.

  “I need to talk to him, Joan. Where is he?”

  “I just told you, I thought he was at your house.”

  “Tell him he needs to look out for my mom for a couple days.”

  “You’re freaking me out a little, Robbie.”

  “Some people might be kinda mad at me. Tell Daisy don’t answer the door.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I got business, Joan. Help me out, all right? Tell Daisy what I said.”

  He forgot he was standing on the stairs. When he turned around to leave he twisted his leg against the step behind him and fell sideways.

  “Robbie?”

  “I gotta go.”

  “Okay, Robbie. I think you should go inside and wash your hands though, yeah?”

  He looked down at the blood and his shoulders jerked.

  “Shit. Yeah.” And then he bounced up the steps.

  I sat down on the bench and tried to stop shaking. I forgot all about Daisy, and it was a few days before I saw him again.

  Was I thinking: This is it; the world changes right here? Of course not, but it seems like it looking back. Everything rolled on from Robbie’s bloody hands to bad angel dust and good biology teachers and people disappearing, and on into a whole string of revelations and consequences. By Christmas, people were leaking out of our lives so fast me and Daisy could hardly keep track. I spent most of last year trying to hold it all together and failing.

  However I tell this, it’ll just be a slice of everything. The sum total of nothing. The meaning will come from where I decide it starts and ends. So the beginning was Robbie, shaking his bloody hands at me. Me not knowing that soon he would disappear too, gone with his yellow Charger and his Kool 100’s and his nervous junkie boredom. That was the moment when everything started breaking apart. I couldn’t see it at the time, but it was. I was trying to get to Daisy, and Robbie got in between us, covered in blood. If this was one of my mother’s plays, she’d say that was the metaphor that held it together.

  Start the story with Robbie’s bloody hands, and end it with mine.

  Before the leaves fell and came back again, me and Daisy were left trying to figure out how to live in a world chock-full of nasty new information. Which is why I’m on this train right now, taking five million years to get home from Rockaway. Trying to put it all back together in my head. Why Daisy isn’t where he’s supposed to be and I have to actually think about where to find him.

  The A train is still aboveground, but it’s dark, and all I can see in the window is the inside
of the car. It’s just a mirror, throwing orange plastic and fluorescent glare back at me. I’m trying to see through that reflection to what we felt like before everything happened, but all I can see is here and now and no one sitting next to me.

  Joan

  I FIGURE THERE are three things about last summer that need to be remembered, three things that happened before Robbie and his bloody hands. First I got a scalpel, and then I got a microscope, and finally a car crashed into the wall on Jensen Road. Plenty of other things happened too, but those are the ones that go in the story. Looking at the whole thing from both directions, I can see the devastation waiting in those little moments.

  It was a hot day in August when me and Daisy went to the abandoned house and there was already somebody there. That house was ours, always empty and waiting in the trees for us. Some family walked away from it during the Depression and never came back. When we were littler we planned imaginary wars and bank heists in there. Once or twice, we snuck out and stayed there all night. We smoked our first cigarettes and drank our first bottle of Rita McNamara’s booze in there.

  There’s a couch in the front room, but all it has is springs with some straw caught between them. Good for torture maybe, but not relaxing. There used to be an art deco floor lamp with two sockets, but we carried it home one night and Daisy rewired it. We got a red and a blue bulb at a head shop in Huntington. I guess later Daisy stuffed the lamp in his aunt’s hatchback and took it away with him, because it was there in his room when I visited him today. When we came back from Rockaway Beach in the dark, he turned the bulbs on and we sat in the weird double shadows they made, trying to make sense of everything.

  Trying to tell each other this story.

  That day last summer, the only light in the abandoned house was a dirty square falling from the window. And there was a stranger with a limp and an old army kit bag. I guess maybe he went to Vietnam, or even some war before that. It was hard to tell how old he was.

  The guy was cooking tomatoes and anchovies on a can of Sterno. He waved his fork at us like, Come on in and have some. I said no thanks and sat in the doorway. It was one of those days that’s so hot you can’t even stand your clothes pressing on your skin. I didn’t want to be near an open flame.

  “Eugene,” the guy said. It took us a minute to realize he was introducing himself.

  “Hey, I’m Daisy.” He could have said Anthony. No matter how many chances Daisy has to shed that nickname, he never seems to take them. “This is my friend Joan.”

  “Hi.” I gave the guy a little wave and offered him a cigarette.

  “Eating.” He bowed his head at me for thanks. A one-word-at-a-time guy.

  We all went quiet. What were we supposed to say? The whole point of the abandoned house was that me and Daisy didn’t have to make conversation in there. Not even with each other.

  Eugene took his tomatoes and anchovies off the flame and put a forkful in his mouth before he looked up at me.

  “You’re the one who likes to fish.”

  Creepy. What was he, watching us through the trees?

  “I’m not fishing. I don’t eat that stuff.”

  “She cuts it open so she can look inside. She’s weird.”

  “I’m not weird, Daisy. I’m a scientist. And I only cut up dead stuff.”

  “I’d change the subject if I were you, Eugene. Unless you want a lecture about the importance of fish guts and hard facts.”

  The guy didn’t laugh. I liked him.

  “What d’ya pull out of here?” He waved his fork at the water.

  “Bluefish. Clams. Some sea bass. The other day I found a dead spider crab. That was strange, for down at this end.”

  “It was fucking disgusting. She took its legs off and cut its body open with a kitchen knife. Tell me that’s not sick.”

  “Spider crabs are pelagic. They live in the deep places. How did it get down here?”

  Eugene wasn’t listening. He was digging around in his kit bag, his arm in there up to the shoulder and his face peering down into the dark. Finally he just dumped everything out onto the floor. There were some boxer shorts, a road atlas, two more cans of tomatoes, his sleeping bag, a bunch of newspapers, and a thermal undershirt. He pushed all that around until he found what he was looking for.

  “Better than a kitchen knife.” He lifted out something gray and sharp, then loosened up his arms and held his hands down by his hips.

  I looked at Daisy to see what he thought, but his eyes were wide and scared, fixed on Eugene’s right hand. All the sound drained out of the air around us, and the house settled and slipped another millimeter down the slope. Or maybe I just imagined that.

  Then Eugene shook his head and flipped the thing around, holding it out to me by the blade. “It’s a scalpel.”

  So right now I’m thinking, How did he know? How did Eugene know that scalpel was what I needed? How much it would change everything? How nine months later that very blade would tell me all the truth about myself I ever needed to know.

  “You want me to take it?”

  “Yeah. You wanna cut stuff up without butchering it? That’s what they designed that thing for. Me, I can get by with a regular knife.”

  “Uh, thanks.” Taking it seemed like the safest response at the time. I didn’t feel any kind of premonition. I just put it in the front pocket of my backpack. “Daisy, we gotta go do that thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “For my dad. Come on.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Joan.”

  “Well, I gotta go. You coming or what?”

  “Oil,” Eugene said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Clean it with some oil. Use tin foil.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  We had to jump down from the front door because the steps had rotted away long before. Every time it rained, the space underneath the front room got a little deeper. One day that house will tilt forward and fall down into the water. I pictured Eugene in his sleep, sliding across the floor and out the door, still dreaming of highways and boxcars and women in Minnesota. Or whatever it is guys like him dream about.

  It was Mr. Johnson who gave me the microscope. If this was the story of someone else’s life, the microscope might even be the reason last summer mattered. The year I saw the tiny world inside the world, looked at water differently, the summer I realized how much of life was invisible. I had revelations, found my vocation, buckled down and got ready to ace the Biology Regents. All those things did happen I guess, but by spring it seemed like I was in some other life, watching them happen to someone else.

  Mr. Johnson comes to the church lunch every Saturday and mostly sits at a table by himself. I went there and helped all last year, because Gramps thought it was good for me. Also, it pissed my mom off, which was a bonus. Mr. Johnson was a science teacher from Brooklyn. When he retired, his kids brought him out east and put him in an old folks’ home.

  He saved up his National Geographics for me, the ones with articles on underwater expeditions. Sometimes when I brought his coffee I’d sit down at his table and we’d talk.

  “Tell me something useful, Mr. Johnson,” I said to him one day.

  He grabbed one of my hands and turned it over, pointed to the veins in my wrists.

  “That,” he said. “That’s useful and it’s real. These.” He pointed to his own eyes, then his ears. “These are how you get your useful facts. Can’t argue with the life that’s in front of you, Joan.”

  Mr. Johnson is the only grown-up I know who actually coughed up when I asked for some real information. He understands about science, about how sometimes facts are all you can trust. No wonder his own kids stashed him somewhere they don’t have to deal with him. People hate facts.

  So one Saturday in August, he gave me an old microscope and some volumes of the Encyclopedia of Animal Life, the ones about fish. He said his kids wouldn’t want those things, but he knew I’d appreciate them.

  I haven’
t seen Mr. Johnson in months. He could be dead, for all I know. A nice normal death in his sleep. Sad because I liked him, but natural at least. You breathe out and your heart stops and someone finds you the very next morning, looking peaceful. The way death is supposed to be.

  I was looking through Mr. Johnson’s microscope at harbor water on a slide when I heard a car hit the wall on Jensen Road. Somebody had taken the curve too fast. Again. I got up and ran straight over to Daisy’s before Gramps or Arthur could catch me and make me stay inside. I was across the road before the sirens started.

  We live on a bad curve. There’s always been a yellow sign, and after that day they put black-and-white arrows up, too. Every once in a while somebody ignores all that and decides to play chicken with the laws of physics.

  The reassuring thing about the laws of physics is that they’re immutable. That’s why they call them laws. If you get the math right, the outcome is the same every time. No room for metaphors or ambiguity or what Mr. Driscoll calls “poetic excess.” Speed, weight, momentum, centripetal force, surface tension, resistance. Crash.

  Me and Daisy decided to go around into the woods and look over the wall from above. If we went along the road, people would stop us long before we saw anything.

  We lifted up some blackberry vines so we could lie down, and stuck our heads out over the top of the wall. The windshield was smashed, and a lady was moaning in the driver’s seat while a fireman wedged a crowbar into the door. There was blood all over the steering wheel and some on the dash. It looked like most of it had come out of her nose. I couldn’t even see her mouth. There was a jagged piece of bone sticking out of her left arm.

  It wasn’t like looking at the inside of dead stuff. That lady was all warm blood pumping and breath moaning in and out of her lungs. It was like when you pull a fish out of the water and there’s still time to throw it back in. She was going to be fine.

  I started memorizing things so I could write them down. I was pretty sure ulna was the bone that was sticking out of her arm. I didn’t know the name of the membrane that must have ruptured in her nose; I’d have to look it up later. People aren’t really as interesting as fish, but how often do you get to see inside one?