Real Life & Liars

by Kristina Riggle

  Trying to shock us by marrying a black man makes no sense, however. We’re as liberal as they come, and the last people to give a fig about an interracial marriage. Maybe Katya would have her conventional feathers ruffled, but tight-ass though she may be, she’s no bigot.

  Now, I feel robbed. It’s not enough that this disease—now I feel like Max, I can’t even think the word right now—could steal so much life away from me, Christmases I might never see, great-grandchildren I might never hold. But for Irina to get married and steal away my chance to be there for her…

  She didn’t know. Maybe Max was right, and we should have told them right away. But day after day when I tried to pick up the phone, I could not. They would call me, and still I could not find the words. And I didn’t yet have the answers to the questions I knew they would ask. Like, what are you going to do?

  Max has suggested that we lie and tell them that there is nothing to be done whatsoever, so they won’t know that I’ve decided, consciously decided, to do nothing. I know he thinks I’ll change my mind, and the children could then believe there’s been some miracle of medicine to spare me.

  I’m emotional, I’ll tell her. I’ll tell Irina that I overreacted because of the anniversary party and the passage of time, which has gotten me all weepy. I can’t tell her the truth yet. Let my children live in happy ignorance—the same happy ignorance I swam around in like amniotic fluid for years as I blew off mammograms and pap smears—let my children have at least the anniversary party to themselves, before I lower the boom.

  CHAPTER 11

  Katya

  GALLOPING FEET POUND DOWN THE STAIRS, AND KATYA COCKS AN ear to listen: Yes, it seems to be all three of the kids barreling down the steps. Darius is answering her questions politely, though he does seem a bit guarded. Was that a slight edge in his voice describing his job? Is there maybe a tinge of defensiveness when talking about his MBA studies?

  Or she could be imagining things. Katya hides a smile behind her wineglass as she steals a look at Van. He still looks ashen, like he fears he has a burning cross on his head. Irina stares past them all out to the harbor beyond.

  “Mom!” bellows Chip as he crashes through the door, nearly destroying a lamp on an end table where her father had been sitting. “Taylor won’t let me play his Game Boy!” Taylor appears behind Chip’s shoulder, shouting, “It’s mine! I don’t have to share!”

  Kit whines, “They were fighting, Mom! They almost kicked me in the head!”

  “What’s wrong with yours?” Katya demands, trying to send her best Glare of Death, but the kids have long ago built up immunity to it.

  “The battery’s dead.”

  “I told you to charge it before we left home.”

  “Isn’t it about time we left anyway?”

  Kat’s blood burns in her veins at the imperious way Chip spoke to her, sounding all too much like Charles.

  Katya stands up and stares hard at her son from across the room. He’s big—bigger than she could imagine from his tiny newborn self—and he’s leaning against the doorway to the kitchen. He has the temerity to yawn.

  “You will not tell me when it is time to leave. I don’t give a damn about your lousy stinking battery, and if you can’t play nice up there, I’ll take Taylor’s away, too, and Kit’s iPod, and you’ll sit up there in silence and, horror of horrors, maybe you’d have to read a book or, heaven forbid, actually talk to each other. But we won’t leave this house one second before I’m ready. Are we clear?”

  Kit emits a high-pitched sound somewhere between a whine and a disgusted snort. “What did I—”

  “Nothing, shut up, I don’t care, get out!” Kat digs the fingernails of her left hand into the palm to keep herself from throwing her now-empty wineglass against the doorframe, where Chip lounges. He finally peels himself away from the door and leaves without comment. Kit turns back to roll her eyes, and it’s only the presence of Darius the outsider that keeps Katya from flying across the room and slapping her impudent little face.

  Katya hasn’t even sat down, smoothed her hair, or regained her composure when her husband comes in, clicking his cell phone closed as he goes. “Oh, I just told the kids to get their stuff. We need to get back to the hotel.”

  “Why.” She throws the word like a dagger. Charles doesn’t even flinch.

  “I need to upload some files to Tara, and we need the Wi-Fi connection at the hotel.”

  Mira files in quietly behind Charles, followed by Max. Despite her earlier outburst, she looks serene, floating into the room, in sharp relief to the homicidal rage Katya feels roiling in her own gut. She swallows down a primal scream. “I’m staying here.”

  Charles finally looks directly at her for the first time all night. He says nothing, merely raising his eyebrows slightly.

  “You take the kids to the hotel, but I feel like staying with my family now. We’ve just had quite an announcement here, which you’ve missed all this time on the phone. Irina has gotten married to Darius, here. He’s a sales manager at a BMW dealership, and he’s studying for his MBA.”

  “Congratulations,” Charles said, but he hasn’t looked at his sister-in-law and her groom. He turns the phone over in his large hand. “How am I going to get any work done around the kids?”

  Tend to them yourself for the first time in your life, you lousy selfish motherfucker.

  “Give Chip his Game Boy battery, and they’ll leave you alone. It’s not rocket science, as you’ve mentioned to me more than once.”

  This finally provokes a reaction in Charles. He had turned away, but he looks back at her through lowered eyelids. Katya is sure that only she notices the tiny lift on one side of his lips, a sneer meant for her eyes only. “Fine. I’ll bring your bag in from the car.”

  He strides out to the car, and behind him in a blur are the children, spitting out, “Bye Mom,” as they run past, giddy to be getting out of their grandmother’s house. Katya knows without her there, they will empty the minibar of all the twelve-dollar cashews and five-dollar cans of pop, and probably order room service, since Charles won’t notice once he boots up his laptop.

  Katya knows that a better mother would care about this, and further, would do something about it.

  Charles opens the back door and deposits Katya’s Louis Vuitton bag next to the couch where Darius sits with Irina. Only his arm actually makes it through the door, just enough distance to drop her bag and disappear outside again.

  The grinding of gravel under the Escalade’s tires is the only good-bye she gets.

  An hour later, Katya sucks down more wine in a lawn chair on the back lawn, which overlooks the harbor. With Charles and the kids absent, and the fuzzy warmth of wine wrapped around her, she feels liquid in the chair. Virtually mellow.

  She holds the goblet of Pinot Grigio up and peers through it at the sailboats. They look wavery and yellowed. The sun has fallen below the buildings across the harbor, leaving behind a vapor trail of bright orange clouds and a halo of pink that brushes everything with a pastel glow. A mosquito lands on her linen pants and stabs through to suck at her. What’s one more parasite, Katya thinks. Go ahead, suck me dry along with everyone else. The reflexive shame kicks in at thinking of her family this way.

  So Charles is imperious and high-handed. She knew that when she married him; in fact, she considered it one of his charms.

  Katya tips her head back in her chair and closes her eyes to the dusk, remembering when she met Charles at a fraternity party. She’d just rushed Gamma Phi Beta. In those days, the girls took to calling her Kitty Z. He never was physically imposing; it was his personality that made people abandon their own wills to him. He had his hair rakishly long and wore neatly ironed shirts in a sea of frat boys with their T-shirts with vulgar slogans. There was a guy at the Sigma Nu house causing trouble, the loudest lout of the bunch, who was groping the wrong girls too often. The girls stayed away from him in ever-wider orbit, but he never got the hint—more likely, didn’t care—and he was
nearly chasing them around the room in the space of an hour. Katya herself had been tit-squeezed near the keg.

  The other frat guys had been cracking their knuckles and exchanging glances, but thus far no one had done a thing about it. Perhaps it was the lovely furnishings in the room that no one wanted to bust up, maybe they were waiting to build up their liquid courage, or maybe the knuckle-cracking was just a show, and they never intended to do a thing about it. They were probably cheering him on, silently.

  Charles, who as far as Katya knew was not attached to any one particular girl at that party and thus had no real stake in anything, suddenly slapped his arm around that guy and started talking to him loudly and forcefully, like a tourist in a foreign country wanting to be understood. Katya couldn’t hear what he was saying from the kitchen, where she was hiding out with her sloe gin fizz. But she could see the man’s face turn red, then pale, then he was out the door and down the steps and into a cab. It was either a stroke of incredible luck, or Charles had thought ahead long enough to call him a taxi, whether to see him home safely or just make sure he wouldn’t stumble back in, was anyone’s guess. As the door closed behind the drunken loser, applause erupted around Charles, who smiled in a satisfied, feline way. Katya wouldn’t formally meet him for another two weeks, but right then she was awestruck by the force of his personality.

  She watched him through their courtship build his reputation on campus and in the fraternity as a smart young man with a future in power. She watched him maneuver his way into the best internships by befriending the professors with the best connections. She witnessed that same finagling into a job, and by the time they were married, stood in awe of his wooing venture capitalists to start his firm, wooing them again to start her design business, then that relentless push forward led him to take his company public at a tidy profit.

  Barring some unimaginable disaster, they will retire in comfort with all their children’s college educations paid for in full. Which is exactly what Katya wanted, along with the beautiful home, two new cars, and happy, conventional stability.

  So, who is she to complain?

  “Aren’t you cold?” Irina has appeared next to her and settles into the lawn chair at her side. “It’s pretty out here.”

  Katya looks over. She’s wearing one of Darius’s suit jackets; it’s tremendous on her. She also looks about twelve years old.

  “Congratulations,” says Katya, trying to screen for bitterness, but feeling impaired in that goal by all the wine.

  “Thanks. I didn’t mean to upset Mom like that.”

  “What did you think she would do?”

  “She normally rolls with things. Ivan freaking out, sure. But I didn’t expect that from Mom.”

  “Wait ’til you have kids someday. You’ll understand.”

  Irina shifts in her chair. “I guess. Anyway, I apologized. Seems like something’s wrong, though.”

  “You heard her. She’s just emotional because of tomorrow. Thirty-five years married, wow.”

  “Yeah. Wow.”

  “Aren’t you happy? You’re a newlywed.” Katya studies Irina and detects not an ounce of marital glow.

  “I am, I’m just overwhelmed is all. Tired by the flight.”

  “Where are you going to live?”

  “Darius has a condo in Bloomfield Hills.”

  “He seems very nice.” Katya can’t help herself, and says, “But he’s so much older than you are.”

  Irina sinks lower in the chair and pulls the jacket tighter. “And?”

  “Isn’t that a problem?”

  “It’s my business if it is, and no, it’s not,” she snaps. Katya could have anticipated her answer. Always on the defensive.

  “Does he have other kids?”

  “Oh, why? Because a black guy has to have three other baby-mamas in the ’hood?”

  “I don’t even know what you just said. A guy doesn’t usually get to be forty years old or whatever without an ex-wife and kids behind him in the dust.”

  “Go to hell, Kat.”

  “So I’m right?”

  “He has an ex-wife. No kids, by her or anyone else. Happy?”

  “If you say so.” Katya sips again. The sky is bluing above her, the pink fading away. It is getting chilly, and Katya is relieved, because that means maybe the weather predictions are wrong, and the storms predicted for tomorrow night will miss Charlevoix. Though she’d just checked her phone before coming outside, and the forecast hadn’t changed, Katya reaches into her pocket to look again. But she must have left the phone in the kitchen.

  The boats are coming in from Lake Charlevoix to one side, Lake Michigan from the other, gathering in Round Lake, a man-made harbor between the two. They’re tying up at docks, mooring out in the water if the boat’s draft is too deep. Charles wants a boat, says he’d name it Katya, or Kitty Z, if she’d prefer.

  “How did you meet?” If Irina is going to remain sitting, Katya might as well get her out of sulking.

  “At the dealership.”

  “You bought a BMW? Never pegged you for the type.”

  “Har de har. No, I was applying for a job as a receptionist.”

  “Did you get the job?”

  “Actually, I never even took an application. Darius came out to help me, and I left him my phone number. Forgot all about the job until I got home.”

  “He is a handsome man.”

  “That he is.”

  “He looks a little like Denzel Washington, doesn’t he?”

  “I guess.”

  “Or maybe a young Sidney Poitier.”

  “Yes, I get it, Kat. You think black men are handsome. Fine.”

  “What is up with you? I’m not prejudiced against your boyfriend. Husband. Nobody is, it’s all in your head.”

  “So stop trying to prove it to me. And anyway, you certainly asked him lots of questions about his job, didn’t you?”

  “I do that with everybody. It’s just interesting to know what people do.”

  “Hmmph.”

  Katya and Irina both turn at the sound of shoes gliding over grass. It’s Ivan, carrying a bottle of beer limply between his fingers, hanging his head. As he reaches them, he looks around briefly for a spare lawn chair, then plops down on the grass, folding his spidery limbs.

  “Hi, girls,” he says, head curved down toward his lap. “Where’s your husband?”

  Irina pulls Darius’s jacket tighter around her. “Studying. He’s taking a class over the summer to finish his MBA faster.”

  Katya notices Van’s shoulders slump and decides to needle him. “So you can relax, Bubba. The big scary black man has gone.”

  Irina whips her head around. “Shut up, Kat! Jesus.”

  “I’m just teasing. Relax already.”

  “Oh, you’re one to talk about that,” Irina spits back. “Did you check the weather again in the last thirty seconds? How about your voice mail?”

  Katya scowls at Irina. So she’s keeping tabs on things, so what? “I have a business to run, thank you very much. That means I have responsibilities, unlike some people.”

  “I have responsibilities!” Irina wheels around in her lawn chair so fast it leans to one side, and Van sticks out his arm in case she falls. “You don’t know everything about me.”

  Katya bites back a retort. She wants to ask, what responsibilities? Are you raising three kids? Running your own business? Keeping a house? She didn’t even know if Irina was working anywhere, if she was, it was yet another punch-clock job involving a counter and hairnets, or maybe rudimentary typing skills.

  Irina sits back in her chair, sinking lower and scowling at the beautiful harbor.

  “Can I get you a drink, Reenie?” offers Van, taking a pull from his beer.

  “No,” she barks.

  Irina never wants anything when she pouts. Katya is as sure as her name is Mrs. Peterson that Irina wants a drink, for the same reason Katya herself is enjoying her wine. A little booze files off the rough edges. Already her ann
oyance is falling away.

  A gull caws in the distance, and Van startles at the sound of the Beaver Island ferry blowing its horn for the bridge.

  Van says, “Barbara dumped me.”

  “We know,” responds Katya, then regrets sounding so hard. She really is too tough on her brother. “Sorry.”

  “What happened?” asks Irina, most likely by rote. She fiddles with the buttons on Darius’s jacket sleeve. They’ve been down this road many times before.

  “I dunno,” he says, pulling on his ear with his non–beer hand. “She said she needed space. I think she wants enough space for another guy. I would have given her that. I wasn’t trying to marry her or anything.”

  Katya slides her eyes over to Irina, who smirks at her behind Darius’s sleeve. They’ve heard that tune before, too. Van falls early and hard, and never, ever wants to share.

  Katya finishes her wine and decides to go inside. It’s getting cold out, and too dark to see her siblings. She has a big day tomorrow, having to get her mother up and around first thing in the morning for a hairdo, and maybe a pedicure if she can talk her into it. She’ll have to get on the phone to confirm with the florists, the caterer, have to get over to the inn to supervise the setup. As she stands up, she has a sudden thought.

  “G’night, guys. Reenie, let me ask you, do you love him?”

  “’Course I do. I married him.”

  “Just asking.”

  Katya walks back to the house, casting a glance over her shoulder, half-expecting Irina to be sticking out her tongue, making a nyah nyah face.

  CHAPTER 12

  Ivan

  IVAN RESTS BACK ON HIS CHILDHOOD TWIN BED AND CHECKS HIS cell-phone voice mail. Three messages, all from Jenny.

  One: “This is an EX PARROT!” into the phone in a perfect Brit accent.