How We Learned to Lie

by Meredith Miller

  When I got to two hundred Mississippis, Joan came to the surface next to me and shook the water out of her hair.

  “Why does anything live on dry land?” she said. “Why crawl up into a world where you can’t breathe and your muscles aren’t designed for the specific gravity? Why couldn’t we develop brains and keep the gills?”

  “Because we’re trying to get to the stars.”

  “We can’t live in the stars. We’re designed for the exact conditions of this planet. That’s how evolution works.”

  “But we have brains, Joan. Remember what Mr. Kasven said in sixth grade? Thumbs and brains are what make us different. Trying to get to the stars is a side effect of having brains. They make us want things.”

  “Yeah, like built-in pools full of dead water.” She rolled over and exhaled. I watched the bubbles drift up from her mouth and burst around her until she came back up again. “Perfectly clear, completely toxic environment,” she said. “Not even a microbe could survive in here. People do this to water on purpose. What the hell?”

  I kicked away from her and swam backward to the deep end, using my arms like I was making snow angels.

  She got out and climbed up onto the diving board. I lay on my back while she arced over me into the water, then swam over to one of the pumps. She held her hands out and let it push her toward me.

  When she bumped the top of her head against mine, I said, “You want to know where your mother stays in the city?”

  “No. I don’t know, maybe.”

  “I can find out.”

  “What are you, the FBI? You’ve got enough to worry about at your house, anyway.”

  “It’s not even a thing, Joan. I can do it in five minutes, on the phone.”

  “Stop moving your arms, Daisy.”

  We held hands and put our heads together then. We didn’t need to think about it; we’d been lying on the water together like that our whole lives. If we did it just right, there was nothing in the world but sky and the little waves at the edges of our vision.

  Here comes the moment I will keep. Years from now, when everything is over and I leave my body behind, I will take this one thing with me.

  We went still and started counting in whispers. When we got to seventeen, the floodlight went out and the stars came back and captured us. We didn’t need to laugh or poke each other or point at the sky. Something carried thoughts between us, but it wasn’t sound or language. We didn’t need to look in each other’s eyes. Was it electricity? Telepathy? Maybe just memory. Habit.

  And then Joan’s hand in mine felt different. A wave went through me and I could feel all the blood moving inside. My lungs stopped working and then started again with a gasp. There was either something new or something I’d never noticed before. I held perfectly still, because if I moved a finger or said a word I might break the circuit. I might let whatever was traveling between our arms loose. In my body it felt like fear, but I knew that wasn’t what it was.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to make this a love story, but it is a story about love. Whatever we had, it was golden. Right then it was still there and still whole, but something was changing inside us. We were about to burn it all and scatter the ashes, like millionaires showing off with hundred-dollar bills.

  Now we’re broke. Broken.

  So I’m looking back from here at that night when I was happy. I think Joan was, too. We were at the top of a curve—the force of the turning earth was about to tip us down. But all I could feel right then was the rising and the rushing and the moving through the starry, watery world.

  Then a screen door slammed and a man shouted, “Hey, you!”

  We floundered to the edge of the pool and splashed out. I think I yelled “Shit!” which really wasn’t helpful. The guy was standing on his back porch in boxers and a pin-striped bathrobe. He was in perfect country club shape, with hair on his chest and a clean-shaven face. We fumbled for our clothes and ran out through the hydrangeas.

  He shouted, “I called the police!” after us, but that was probably a lie. If he’d really thought we were dangerous, he wouldn’t have stopped for his slippers on his way out to yell at us.

  We ran across a stretch of sod and behind a stockade fence, lighting up all the backyard security lights we passed.

  “Joan. The boat!”

  “We’ll go back later.” She was leading the way out of the pit. There was only one road up the hill, so she dove into the dark alongside it, waiting to see if anyone was coming.

  I fell down next to her, out of breath and missing my shorts. The moon was coming up behind the LILCO stacks, making the stars disappear in the east. It hadn’t rained in days, and the dirt was dry and dusty in between the weeds at the roadside. I put on my T-shirt and started to tie my sneakers.

  “I can’t walk home in my bathing suit, Joan.”

  “You can so. It’s basically shorts, anyway. Come on!” She dashed out onto the road and headed up. “We’ll cut through the woods, just in case.”

  So we went down the ridge behind Main Street, catching our breath and shivering into the air blowing from the harbor. After the pool water dried off me, my legs were covered in yellow dirt from the pit, and my T-shirt was filthy.

  Once you pass behind Davis Marine, you can hear the music and the voices from Flannagan’s and know when to turn toward Jensen Road. Me and Joan could find our way through Highbone blindfolded and never miss a step.

  At the top of the hill we saw the light. Someone had a fire going by the ruined church. Without even thinking, we turned to go around. It would just be some partiers, spending the night getting drunk and stoned in the woods. Probably spooking each other out with stories about the ghosts and witches that were supposed to gather at the church. Whoever it was, we didn’t want to run into them in the woods at night.

  Someone stood up and walked toward us. I saw the silhouette against the fire, and Joan shoved me behind a tree. Whoever it was, they were stumbling into the dark for a piss. They were just a shadow and the sound of piss hitting the leaves, but while we waited my eyes adjusted to the firelight and I saw the rest of them. Patrick Jervis, Matt McBride, and some guy I’d never seen before sitting there. The shadow, not twenty feet from us, zipped up its jeans and went back.

  We headed home through the trees and never gave it a second thought. We were still laughing about the guy in the pit, thinking when we’d go back for the boat and whether someone else would find it first. I followed Joan through the trees and tried not to think about whatever I’d felt in the pool.

  Now I’m wondering about what we saw in the woods, of course. Wondering whose face we didn’t see that night. Trying to fit it in with everything those kids did later. That might have been the night they first crossed the line. Right then, maybe they were sitting around that fire coaxing each other into a world of chaos and violence. We’ll never know.

  We climbed to the top of the hill and looked down on Jensen Road.

  Imagine it from high up, at night. There is my roof, and then the Harrises’, and then the water, sparkling if there’s a moon. Carter’s Bay is a stretch of lights across a pool of darkness. There might be the beams of headlights, traveling the road in a circle around the water, the trees lighting up and then disappearing again. You could see the leaves on the slope below Jensen Road because they show up as shadows against the light from Arthur’s bedroom. You could see the road between our houses, flat sodium yellow in the summer night.

  That was the size of our world. You could take it in with one look. The water came and went, we swam and rowed around in it. We let the screen doors slam behind us while we ran in and out of each other’s houses. We lay in the abandoned house and said nothing, blowing smoke into the rafters for whole afternoons at a time. That was enough.

  It didn’t look any different that night, but all the invisible changes were already working their way to the surface.

  Daisy

  MOST OF LAST summer was like always. I’d spend the whole
day with Joan, riffling through things in the abandoned house and watching her unpick the messy guts of bivalves, talking to Arthur, and sitting with the quiet lady who always came to the floating dock at low tide. There was a car crash on Jensen Road, but even that was pretty normal. Every day at sunset, I’d go inside to sit at the dinner table, breathing in lemon Pledge and mothballs, watching my mother drift and sparkle.

  The day of the accident was heavy and hot. One look at the wreck made me sick, but Joan just peered down over the wall at the carnage, taking notes. I told her she was a freak, and she said she was a scientist. Then we had to go inside so she could look stuff up in the encyclopedia, on those pages where you can lift up the transparent overlays and see what’s inside you. After that, we rowed the boat out and lay in the bottom until we had to go in for dinner.

  “Daisy? Robbie? Wash your hands and sit down, you two.”

  Mom stood behind the table with a white wine spritzer.

  “My hands are clean,” Robbie said. “I just washed ’em.”

  “Do it again. Make your mother happy.”

  I looked through her fingers at the little bubbles in the glass and through the liner at her eyes. Everything about her was shining through the cracks, and it made me happy to see it.

  Robbie disappeared for ten minutes. I helped my mother fold napkins and pretend Robbie wasn’t taking too long in the bathroom. We lined up silverware while I thought about him in there, leaning against the orange plaid wallpaper with his lighter turned all the way up. Turning powders into liquid, turning the world into something he could handle. I lay the knives on napkins and thought about the chrome fixtures shining in the bathroom.

  My mother was really into table settings. She forgot other stuff, but the knives were all to the right of the plates and there were two kinds of glasses, even though me and Robbie only used one. When we finished setting the table, she would stand with her hands on the back of a chair, breathe out, and smile like a president’s wife. Quivering with control.

  Robbie came back from the bathroom, sat in front of his perfect table setting, and started pouring the salt and pepper out onto the table and playing with it. I guess Mom was high too, but that was legal.

  “Can Joan come over and watch TV later?”

  “Can Joan watch TV?” Robbie said.

  “It’s a school night, Daisy.”

  “School doesn’t start for another week and a half, Mom.”

  “It’s not a school night.” That was Robbie’s way of joining the conversation. He borrowed pieces from us and then gave them straight back.

  “Where is that mother of hers all the time, anyway?” Mom said.

  “She stays in the city for her work. She writes plays.”

  “She writes plays,” Robbie said. “She famous?”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe if you’re into it you’d know who she is. She’s in the city a lot, but they’re not divorced.”

  “Sad, isn’t it? Children in an unstable situation like that.”

  “Dad’s in the pen, Mom. Pretty sure that beats the Harrises for instability.”

  Then I felt guilty because she looked like I’d slapped her. My mother wasn’t made for the sharp edges of life. That’s what the pills were for, a little bit of padding between her and reality.

  She got lost somewhere during the quiche. I looked at her and she was staring out the front door with both hands gripping the edge of the table. Her lips were moving but I couldn’t tell what they were saying.

  “Robbie?” I said while Mom was distracted. “What happened the other night? You got in a fight?”

  “Other night?”

  “Joan saw you. She said you were hurt.”

  “I was just taking care of business, Daisy. Don’t worry about it.” He picked up his glass and tilted it toward his mouth, then realized there was nothing in it.

  Joan was right. He was changing. I knew he was up to something, and I knew him, which means I knew that whatever it was he wouldn’t be able to handle it. But whatever was at that dinner table, however fucked-up it was, it was mine. I had to protect it. Even from Joan.

  “Not for you to worry about, kiddo,” he said, and Mom woke up.

  “You and Joan can watch TV until nine. It’s a school night. You need to be in bed early.”

  “It’s not a school night, Mom.”

  “What are you gonna watch?” Robbie was corralling his field of salt and pepper by lifting up the corner of the tablecloth.

  “Huh?”

  “TV,” Robbie said. “What?”

  “A Jacques Cousteau repeat. We can’t watch it at Joan’s. Andre always wants to watch The Waltons.”

  “The Waltons,” Robbie said.

  I laughed out loud. It was just something about Robbie droning “The Waltons” while him and my mom were nodding their separate nods at our kitchen table that had too much silverware, not enough food, and a serious overabundance of opiates. All I could think was, Wait until I tell Joan.

  Robbie lifted the corner of the tablecloth all the way up and knocked over the empty glass I wasn’t using. Mom reached out to set it back up, exactly two inches above the knife I wasn’t using either.

  I heard Robbie’s bedroom door slam while I was loading the dishwasher. Upstairs in my room, the red-and-blue lamp was casting its double shadows onto my bed and my work table. Through the open window I could hear the murmuring of the crowd on the deck behind the Narragansett.

  I switched on the overhead light and looked in the mirror, imagining the size of Robbie into the air around me. Would I ever take up that much room in the world? I kept waiting for my body to catch up with his, the way everyone promised it would. I was nearly sixteen, and I only shaved once a month. You could still see all the blue veins through my skin, and my arms were so ridiculous in short sleeves that I mostly wore football shirts. I squinted at my reflection and watched myself disappear into the room behind me.

  A strong wind could blow you away, isn’t that what people say? I felt like a strong light could erase me. A strong wave could pull my feet out from under me, carry me out into the deep where no one could reach me. I was so pale and insubstantial, any minute something would come along and push me out of the world.

  Joan knocked at about seven thirty. We went up and sat in the attic to catch the last of the thick orange sunlight in our eyes. I swung the little round window frame open so we could smoke. Then I did an imitation of Mom and Robbie at dinner and droned out “The Waltons” in Robbie’s wasted voice. Joan fell over backward on the attic floorboards and laughed so hard she had to wave her hands around, trying to catch her breath.

  That was it, all I wanted. When I hear her laugh, something lets go inside me. My shoulders come down and my breath gets easier.

  “Is that lady gonna be okay, Joan?”

  “What lady?”

  “The one who smashed into the freaking wall! The one who almost died ten feet from us today.”

  “Yes, you wimp. If you weren’t so busy puking you’d know she was fine. She didn’t almost die. She could have done that to herself falling off a bicycle.”

  “It looked bad.”

  “Everything looks worse to you because you turn your face away and let your imagination take over.”

  “I know, I know. ‘Facts, Daisy. Evidence.’ You told me already like four million times.”

  “And it still hasn’t sunk in. You’re impervious to logic, man.”

  “Logic is your job.”

  “I want to go to the Museum of Natural History,” she said. “Wanna come with me?”

  “To the city? Yep.”

  “You’re right. I need to see where my mother goes. It might be weird.”

  “I am with you through all weirdness, Joan Harris. I am the companion of your strange.”

  “You are the strange. Also, I don’t exactly know where she stays.”

  “Ask them.” I pointed to her house, sitting bare in between the trees, and thought about the warmth inside. The
people at the table, thinking and talking about things that mattered.

  “They won’t tell me. I think they’re afraid I’ll run away.”

  “Why would you run away?” I pointed out the window. “Look where you live.”

  “Yeah, that’s my house. Full of nothing but boys and dead people’s stuff. Even my mother ran away.”

  “If it weren’t for me, Joan, you wouldn’t appreciate the beauty of your life at all. Do you realize that?”

  “You spend your spare time playing with pay phones, Daisy. It’s not like you’re van Gogh or something.”

  “The telephone system is beautiful, Joan. You just won’t let me explain.”

  She stared out at the darkness leaking onto the driveway from under the trees.

  “Okay,” she said, “go ahead and tell me one beautiful thing about telephones.”

  “I explained this to you already! The phones are all connected.”

  “Well, yeah, Daisy. That’s kind of the point.”

  “No. I mean they can talk to each other, kind of without us. Different beeps make them do stuff. Some guys have figured it all out. The whole world is on an electrical network, just like the nerves in your body. If you know the pattern, you can control it. We can call Venezuela for free.”

  “You don’t know anyone in Venezuela.”

  “See? You think I’m the one who doesn’t get stuff. You want to know where your mother goes? You can leave that one to me.”

  “So you keep saying. How the hell are you gonna find out, Secret Agent Man?”

  “I could be a secret agent. How would you know?”

  “You got the smarts, but you’d never pass the physical.”

  “Go ahead, make fun of me. You’ll see, Harris.”

  I looked out the window and pretended we were alone in the world. No Robbie and not one mother between us. Nothing but me and Joan and the last of the sunlight, stretching all the way from Newton to Montauk.

  We went back down and watched Jacques Cousteau on channel thirteen. My mom and Robbie were upstairs behind their separate doors. I made popcorn and got my grandmother’s crocheted afghan out of my room. Mom wouldn’t let me keep it in the living room because it didn’t match. We got under it and watched an octopus change colors while Joan took more notes.