How We Learned to Lie

by Meredith Miller

  I knew as soon as she said it. I would have put Arthur in danger. Serious danger, and I didn’t even stop to think. He told me he was only doing it for Joan, but I didn’t get what that meant, either. Not until later.

  “Joan, I didn’t . . .”

  “Save it. Stay here and try not to electrocute yourself.” She threw the door open. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

  I ran up to the attic so I could see her before she disappeared down the Harrises’ steps. I looked over at the dormer and pictured that spitting wire writhing over Jensen Road and lighting up the rain. Then I pictured the tear on Joan’s cheek, red spark instead of blue. I remembered sitting up there with a cup attached to a long string, trying to talk to Joan across the road. We were maybe nine then.

  I checked behind the insulation for Mrs. Harris’s notebook, but it was gone. After a while Arthur came out and drove away. For a minute I wanted to throw myself down onto the roof of the car. I might survive, cracked and bloody but alive and clinging on while the force of the curve on Jensen Road tilted me and held me in.

  Joan came up her front stairs and all of a sudden I saw how pretty she was. I mean I’d seen her look pretty before, dressed up or floating on someone’s pool in the pit, not paying attention. And not pretty too, when we got drunk and threw up or when she was really mad. Right then, though, I realized that some time last year she’d gotten pretty like women are pretty. Like probably most people noticed. Pretty like you couldn’t ignore it. Unless you were me.

  I heard the front door open and yelled her name.

  She came up the stairs and pushed a cookie tin and a pack of cigarettes up onto the floor before her head appeared.

  “People can hear you yelling in Commack.” She walked under the peak of the roof, where you can stand all the way up. “Gramps made you some cookies. I don’t know why.”

  She pointed at the tin and we both laughed. It was so weird that people were still making cookies in the world we live in now.

  “Joan, guys are hitting on you because you’re really pretty.”

  “What, now?”

  “Listen. I’m not being weird so don’t get mad and tell me to shut up. This year, you got really pretty. I only just noticed.”

  “Am I supposed to say thank you right now? ’Cause I kinda can’t tell.”

  “No! I’m saying people are hitting on you and I don’t think you get why.”

  She pushed the cookie tin at me with her foot.

  “You leave my brother out of your shit, hear me?”

  “That’s exactly what he said about you.”

  “Fine. Maybe we’re not your own private social workers. Get it together, McNamara.”

  “I have it together. You guys are the ones freaking out. I’m fine. I have food and I’m doing my homework.”

  She let out a breath and sat down then, looking fed up and maybe sad.

  “All right, Joan. I’ll figure something out, okay? But do you get what I’m saying about the other thing? You used to just be you. Now you’re somebody people want to get with, even if they don’t really care about you.”

  “Guess what?” She pointed a finger at her own heart. “I live in here. So, you know, I kinda got that already. But thanks.”

  “Don’t you care whether people actually like you for who you are?”

  “Not really. What difference does it make to the outcome?”

  I looked at her while she looked past me to the window, and I felt like that downed wire in the hurricane. Like whatever kind of energy was bleeding out of me was going nowhere, connecting with nothing, fizzing out in the pouring rain.

  Overnight the world warmed up and set all its water free again. In the morning, Joan came up her outside stairs while me and Arthur were standing around the car.

  “Where are you guys going?” she said. “Never mind; it doesn’t even matter. I’m coming.”

  I looked at Arthur, but he just kept his head down, leaning on the car and reading The Wretched of the Earth.

  “We weren’t going anywhere without you. We were only talking.”

  “Get a grip,” Joan said.

  Actually it was true, but I guess neither of us believed a word the other one said anymore. Arthur dog-eared his page and looked back and forth between us. That was when the cop pulled up. He stopped in the road and put his flashers on, then he picked me out first.

  “These your friends, Mr. McNamara?”

  He was the same one who’d been at the bus stop. How did he know my name? What if somebody had called and told them everything? What if he was there about the phones? My knees went soft and I tried to cover it up by leaning back on the car next to Arthur.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “We all live here on Jensen Road.”

  “When was the last time any of you were on Dr. Tukes’s land?”

  “Sorry, I don’t know where that is.”

  “You do, and you know it. Hatchet Mary’s, when were you there last?”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but the cop ignored me. He looked at Arthur and Joan like they were the real reason he was there. Especially Joan. The way he looked at her made me feel like that dogfish again, like somebody had cut me open and lifted out my lungs.

  “So, which one of you three is coming with me today?”

  Nobody said anything. I thought about Patrick Jervis and Ray with his poison weed and about me and Joan having picnics at Hatchet Mary’s before all that. I thought about that frozen carp and the moment when it must have moved its tail and broken free. The cop leaned one hand on Arthur’s trunk, looking straight in Joan’s eyes.

  “Ms. Harris?”

  Arthur’s whole body went stiff, and he lowered his book slowly down. Things were flying between the three of them like switch codes through telephone lines. I could feel them sparking, but I couldn’t translate. When a voice came over the cop radio it ripped the air like Joan’s scalpel going through fish scales. The cop peeled his eyes off Joan.

  The guy on the radio didn’t use codes or numbers or cop language like on TV. The voice just said, “You’re all gonna want to be there for this. They’re bringing him in.”

  “Don’t go too far,” the cop said.

  He got in his car and turned the siren and the lights on, then sped up around the curve and headed out toward 25A. Wherever he was going, it wasn’t Highbone Station. When I looked over at Arthur, he was writing the cop’s license plate number down on the flap of his book.

  “Change of plan,” he said. “I’m gonna take you two to Sag Harbor.”

  “You’re gonna . . . why?” Joan said.

  “I gotta see Shirley. Told her I’d talk her through Gramsci, and . . . you know.”

  Joan rolled her eyes. I tried to see what Arthur was thinking, but he looked away and opened the driver’s side door.

  “You two can find weird shit on the beach and cut it open, or whatever it is you’re into these days. Go get your stuff.”

  The roads were wet with sun shining on them. Water sprayed up in rainbows from Arthur’s wheels, and Joan sat in the middle of the front seat with the map.

  “Go to the beach on the east.”

  “I’m going to Shirley’s house. You two can go wherever you want.”

  She looked at me. “Let’s go to the ocean side. There’ll be stuff you don’t get in Highbone.”

  The car felt small, and I wanted to open a window. Joan’s voice got far away and I thought about the seats bursting into flames. I looked at the road and tried to breathe while I blocked out pieces of my life. I covered up Robbie’s burning car and my mother’s taillights, the skinny cop and his sticky eyes, Ray Velker’s lonely body and the whole of Mr. Tomaszewski’s existence.

  Then it was just me watching Joan open the glistening guts of something with no consciousness. Me and Arthur and Joan, heading down a road to a beach.

  Joan

  THE DAY THEY arrested Scottie Hall, Arthur took us to Sag Harbor. He went to Shirley’s house and we went to Havens B
each. You could walk out around the point there, into more open water where all the life was different. The open ocean was like another planet compared to the beach in Highbone.

  On the tide line there were loads of skate egg sacks. Daisy called them mermaid’s purses, because he learned to talk from the kind of woman who nicknames her son Daisy. We found some green crab shells and a smelly bluefish, then I rolled up my jeans and went wading. I pulled out a horseshoe crab and Daisy shrieked like . . . Daisy.

  “She’s early. It’s not even April.”

  “Okay. Joan, you are not going to fucking cut that open.”

  “Well, I did bring my scalpel.” I waved the crab again and nearly cut myself with the spike.

  “Christ! Is it even legal, carrying that blade around? And aren’t these things protected?”

  “Relax. The scalpel’s only three inches, and I’m not going to cut her open. She’s alive.”

  “I can see that! Jesus, it has like four hundred legs.”

  “Or just ten.” The crab was agitated and her legs were waving, but there were only ten. I held her out to Daisy and he backed up. “You should see the blood, though.”

  “No! I should not. Why am I friends with you?”

  “It’s blue, because it’s made of copper instead of iron.”

  “Okay, that is kind of cool. Can you put it back now?”

  I put her down on the beach so she could go somewhere private to lay her eggs. We went up into the dunes and lay down out of the wind. It was warm in that little hollow, and we took our jackets off. The sun was so blinding the sky didn’t even look blue. We put our arms over our eyes and I pushed my wet feet down into the sand.

  That day was the first time Officer Kemp had threatened me in front of other people. Did I have a ridiculous fantasy where Nick saved me? Not exactly, but I thought if I was with him other people would keep off me. Hormones, I guess. A lot of stuff that happens in your body isn’t rational. It just thinks stuff without you. Not much difference between me and the horseshoe crab, really.

  What should I do about Daisy? He just lay there next to me like everything was fine, like he wasn’t living off boxed macaroni and cheese and washing his clothes in Palmolive liquid. Maybe I thought about Ray right then, too. Last spring we never really stopped thinking about him. Running away to the Woods Hole summer program was starting to seem like a really good idea.

  “Daisy, would you be pissed if I went away for the summer?”

  “Yes! Do you think blood conducts electricity? Copper blood would conduct more, I think. Iron isn’t such a good conductor.”

  “And you think I’m the gross one? You are so the mad scientist in this friendship.”

  “Put us in a bag and shake us up, we’d be Dr. Frankenstein.”

  “Yeah, we could make creatures that are half squid, half human, half telephone. If we open your attic window we could definitely animate them during a lightning storm. What time is it? We told Arthur we’d meet him at two thirty.”

  “No idea. Are you still seeing Mr. Tomaszewski?”

  “It’s complicated, Daisy. I kind of don’t know. Have you heard from Robbie?”

  “I promised Arthur I wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “Arthur again? Is it Arthur who got beat up with you in fifth grade? Is it Arthur who listens to you go on and on about the telephone network? Is it Arthur who does your biology homework? What the hell does Arthur know about anything? He thinks it’s cool that my mother never comes home.”

  “Arthur helped me, and he’s trying to help you. I didn’t tell him about Mr. Tomaszewski. I’m keeping your secrets.”

  “Yes, that’s the point. You keep mine and I’m supposed to keep yours. Not Arthur.”

  “He’s trying to protect you.”

  “Yeah, Arthur’s a superhero. I heard you already. You’ve been telling me since we were nine.”

  “Robbie’s dead, Joan.”

  So, when I tell you me and Daisy lied to each other, when I tell you that silent chasm between us got too big to jump across, I’m not talking about little shit. I’m talking a hole full of dead bodies and sleazy policemen, naked biology teachers and burned-out cars. I’m talking sex and angel dust and death.

  Robbie was dead and I couldn’t deny it anymore. Ray Velker, too.

  I guess while we were lying there on Havens Beach, they were interrogating Scottie Hall in a gray-painted room in mid-island somewhere. Tape machines rolling and toxic molecules of melted plastic seeping into the coffee from those flimsy cop-station cups. Later, most of what was said in that room wound up in newspapers and magazines. People who had never been to Hatchet Mary’s knew how many feet it was from the road to the pond and who owned the land. All those details somehow landed in the space that had opened between me and Daisy, part of what we didn’t say, part of why we couldn’t really face each other anymore.

  I should have hugged him or something, but the minute he said it I lost my stomach. I knew right away that it was me covering up the facts. I had the truth about Robbie all along, and I pretended it didn’t mean anything. There was a good chance I saw him die.

  Instead of saying that, I said, “So, were you gonna tell me at some point?”

  I acted like Daisy was the one with the problem. I’m not proud of it, but it’s true. So really, which one of us was the bigger liar?

  “I’m telling you now,” Daisy said, “even though Arthur said not to.”

  “You really need to decide whose friend you are, McNamara.”

  But he’d already decided. We’d both already decided. When Daisy needed rescuing, he went to Arthur, not me. When men started inviting themselves into my body, I didn’t go anywhere. Well, I went to my mother. Same thing. If we’d been talking to each other, we would both have known the whole story about Robbie months earlier. We might have even figured things out about Ray.

  We got back to the parking lot by the harbor at two o’clock. We ate fried clams and ice cream and sat on the hood of Arthur’s car waiting while people stared at us. I looked over at Daisy’s skinny little arms and his bewildered eyes and wanted to kill Robbie for dying on him.

  “I’m sorry, Daisy. Seriously.”

  “You didn’t like him.”

  “That’s not true.” But it was. “I just wished he was a better brother. I’m still sorry it happened.”

  Arthur came back at three o’clock, when all our cigarettes were gone and we were feeding our crumbs to the gulls. He bounced across the parking lot with that walk of his, his tam on, some book of Marxist theory hanging out of the pocket of his army jacket and a cigarette in his mouth. Way to blend in, I thought.

  I got between him and the car door.

  “I know everything, Arthur. You need to stop treating me like a baby.”

  “Okay, let’s get in the car.”

  He didn’t take the tam off, even on the highway. He thought Daisy’s whole family were screw-ups, and he was right, but Arthur has his own way of looking for trouble, too. It’s just that Arthur’s trouble is always some kind of mission. He gets that from my mom, I guess.

  We were on the Northern State Parkway when he started lecturing. The road had dried off, and we were driving into the setting sun. Arthur flipped his visor down and drove sixty miles an hour, straight into the glare.

  He talked at us the whole way home, and then we went to Daisy’s.

  I had a plan. Kind of.

  Me and Daisy stood around the McNamaras’ kitchen drinking tea and eating crackers with Cheez Whiz. The boy needed someone to teach him to shop before he died of pernicious anemia.

  “We have to tell the cops,” I said, “and we’re not bringing Arthur.”

  “Why? I mean, why do we have to tell them?”

  That was when I explained everything. All of it. Even the cold and the dark in Fiddler’s Cove parking lot, the way I felt sitting for hours on the floor of Robbie’s car on Meadowlark Road. I told him the facts, and I dug up all the feelings, too. I guess I felt like I owed him.


  Daisy washed off our plate and the knife, looking at himself in the window over the sink while his hands moved without him.

  “You lied.”

  “I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell you.”

  “You lied. You told me about Mr. Tomaszewski, but you didn’t tell me this? How does that work, Joan?”

  “You weren’t safe. You don’t EVER protect yourself from anything!” I guess I was yelling.

  “I wasn’t the one that needed protecting. Someone I love did.”

  “His car was gone. I thought he was alive. And I was afraid of what you’d do.”

  That wasn’t the whole truth. The truth is, I didn’t want him to know who Robbie really was. I didn’t want him to have to live with that.

  “I thought he’d come back, Daisy. I thought if you knew, you’d try to bail him out or something. He tried to get Andre to sell shit for him. He tried to make Teresa into a junkie! He didn’t . . .”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “I didn’t know how to tell you, okay? And then other stuff started happening. Fast. You were living here alone and you didn’t tell me.”

  “So it’s my fault you watched my brother get killed and didn’t say anything?”

  “I don’t know what I watched. I know we have to tell somebody.”

  “They’ll take me away, Joan. Don’t you get that?”

  I didn’t get it. It hadn’t even occurred to me. Daisy was the one who watched my life from the attic window. He was the one who stayed scrawny and the same while the rest of the world got way too big and then rotted and bled and tried to terrify me. That was the first time I ever bothered to picture the world without Daisy in it, right there in the McNamaras’ kitchen the night they arrested Scottie Hall.

  “Joan?”

  “Okay but look, this isn’t about us. I mean it isn’t about you. People died, Daisy. We have to say something. What if they find out later? Or what if we’re the only ones who get the connection?”

  “What connection?”

  “Do the math, Daisy! Robbie was getting people to deal angel dust in school. Patrick was looking for him, and that was after Ray disappeared. Patrick and them knew where Ray was. This is all one thing.”