Real Life & Liars

by Kristina Riggle

  No one answers.

  “Hello? Am I alone?”

  “We’re all here, Dad,” Katya says with a sigh.

  She could just find her way to her room, though. As well as she knows the old house. She should probably lay off the wine anyway, as Charles is always saying. Katya wonders how late it is, whether Tom would be awake.

  Kat is possessed by two powerful urges. More wine, to keep her headache at bay, and to talk to Tom. Because Tom knew her before she was old.

  The flashlight beam stops in front of her, and her father’s hand holds out a candle and a book of matches from Nanny’s, the restaurant on Ferry Avenue Beach that used to be the scene for all the Zielinski birthday dinners and other celebrations.

  Katya takes them wordlessly and shuffles into the darkened house.

  “Wait for me,” Charles says from behind her, and she stops for him to catch up. “Are you going to light that?”

  She wasn’t going to because she can find her way around by memory. But Katya hands him the candle and the match flares up, bringing his face into view like something out of a Vincent Price film. With his stubble and the lines around his mouth, he looks a decade older than her mental picture of him.

  The candle reeks of that hippie incense stuff her mother is fond of. The Yankee Candle scents Katya has given her over the years are probably in the closet next to the pot. Or maybe Mira gave them away to a thrift store.

  Katya moves into the kitchen, which lights up in the stuttering flashes from the storm lightning. Between those bursts, and outside the soft orb created by the candle, there are only shapes of black. She tries to peer out the window, but all she can see is wetness on the pane. There’s not even a moon, and with no streetlights, or neighbors’ lights, the night looks primeval. She feels her way along the counter until she encounters the wine bottle. Since she left her glass in the living room, she takes a swig right from the bottle.

  “Charming,” says Charles. “I thought you were going to bed.”

  Katya casts a glance behind him. The kids are talking to Max on the porch. He’s probably telling them one of his fanciful stories, like he used to when she was a girl, when he wasn’t away on a tour, or holed up in his study with a manuscript. She doesn’t see Mira.

  “We have to talk about the kids. I caught them getting high. The boys, anyway.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh? That’s all you have to say is ‘Oh?’ We’ve got two druggies on our hands…”

  “Get over yourself. Everybody experiments. Even you, Mrs. Peterson.”

  “Trying a joint at a frat party does not count, and I was in college. For God’s sake, Taylor is not even in high school!”

  “Where did they get pot?”

  Kat snorts and swigs from the bottle again, unable to believe what she has to say. “My own mother.”

  “She gave them weed?”

  “She didn’t give it to them. They were snooping and found it.”

  “I’ll have a talk with them when we get home.”

  “What’s wrong with now?”

  “Besides the fact that it’s late, we’re in the middle of a storm and blackout, and they just found out their grandmother is dying? A lecture can wait.”

  “You just don’t feel like dealing with it.”

  Charles sighs roughly. He’s moved the candle away from his face so it illuminates his T-shirt from the 5k instead. Katya was supposed to run that race with him, but she got busy with some last-minute client projects. “No, I don’t feel like dealing with it. I’ve got a lot on my mind. Can’t we just go to bed?”

  “Do what you want. I don’t feel like it. I’m upset.”

  Charles steps forward with his arms out to embrace her, but Katya steps back, fearing the candle will set her hair on fire.

  Charles stops, arms frozen outward. “Fine. I’ll be upstairs. If the power comes back on, wake me, because I should log into the office computer if I can. Some stuff was going on that I should take a look at.”

  “Oh, great.” Katya knows just what “stuff” he means, and she nearly spits out what she knows about Tara, but stops. There will be a more advantageous time.

  “Hey, I held up my end of the deal. I didn’t check e-mail or take one phone call through the whole party. Party’s over.”

  Is it ever, thinks Katya. Is it ever.

  “Just take the candle,” she says. “I can feel my way around.”

  He steps away into the enfolding darkness, and Katya sighs, relieved at being left alone. After two tries, she succeeds in hoisting herself onto the kitchen counter, and plunks the wine bottle next to her. In doing so, she bumps against her phone, which she left on the counter after the party. She flips it open and dials a number, the phone providing its own little glow in the blackness of the kitchen.

  “H’lo,” mumbles a voice.

  “I’m sorry, is it too late? It’s Kat.”

  “I had a long day so I turned in early,” Tom says, clearing his throat gently. “How are you?”

  “Fine, I guess. Sort of. Actually, I’m having a rough day.”

  “Oh?”

  “I just found out my mom is dying, and she wasn’t telling any of us. And she can probably save herself, but she won’t have the surgery, and my kids are smoking pot and my husband doesn’t care about me at all, he’s forever walking away from me. I didn’t know it would be this way, being married, I thought we’d always talk, but lately we’re more like co-managers than lovers, but maybe you know just what I’m talking about? And I really miss being young, that feeling in your stomach like Jell-O when your phone rings, and it’s a boy you like? I always felt that way talking to you.”

  “Wow, um. Are you OK?”

  “I’ve had too much wine.”

  “Maybe you should call me back when you’re sobered up a bit.”

  “Well of course I will, but did you hear me? I said I feel like Jell-O talking to you.”

  Katya grips the phone with both hands and holds her breath. She closes her eyes and imagines Tom’s youthful face before hers, his soft lips tweaked in a playful grin, and her stomach is indeed quivering, just like it did when he asked her out, then on their prom night. Graduation night, when they sneaked away from the party…

  A third voice interrupts them. A feminine voice. “Tom? Who is that?”

  Tom’s answer is muffled, as if he’s covering the phone with his hand.

  “Look, Kat, it’s been nice to talk to you, but maybe we’ve done enough catching up for now. I wish you all the best. I’ve gotta go.”

  “Tom, I’m sorry, that was really inappropriate…” Kat draws herself up straighter on the counter, grasping the air with one hand as if trying to find her dignity.

  “G’night.”

  And he’s gone.

  Katya closes her phone and sets it down on the counter with utmost care.

  She picks up the bottle for one more drink, then tips it way, way back. She feels her way along the counter and drops the empty bottle in the sink, where it lands with a clunk on the enamel.

  Her tongue tastes like a strip of duct tape, and she puts one hand over her eyes. Then she laughs.

  Laughs because she just drunk-dialed a high-school love with a woman already in his bed. Because her kids are using a gateway drug, and Charles is bonking his assistant, who isn’t even particularly pretty.

  Because Mira gets to escape it all and leave the mess for everyone else to clean up.

  She sniffs and wipes her damp face with her hands. Just as well she’d polished off the booze. If she drank any more, she might end up dancing naked in the rain, and she’d be hauled off to a loony bin.

  This is why she’s not a carefree, impulsive person, she reflects. She places one impulsive call and spits out her feelings and ends up sitting alone on the kitchen counter with tears drying on her face and an empty bottle of wine the only thing to show for her effort.

  Max comes into the kitchen, the flashlight beam bobbing ahead of him, the kids following beh
ind. Katya hears a protesting mewl from Bartleby, in the clutches of one of the kids, apparently. Katya wipes her face again and hops down from the counter, landing unsteadily but without actually collapsing.

  “Katya, we should get to the basement.”

  “Why? What’s in the basement?”

  “There’s a tornado coming.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Ivan

  THE SHEETS OF RAIN DRAPE OVER THE CAR, AND VAN NAVIGATES by following a set of taillights ahead of him. M–66 is a twisty two-laner along Lake Charlevoix, threading the woodsy countryside between Charlevoix and the main highway south. With every slip of his tires as they surf through the storm water, Van curses himself for sending Jenny out in this.

  “Stupid insensitive jackass,” he mutters. He distracts himself from the real possibility of crashing his own car by coming up with more insults. “Nutter. Imbecile.”

  Jenny didn’t sound hurt on the phone, but it could happen yet. She’s stranded on the highway and could get run over if a truck plows off the road.

  Van swears as the car fishtails again. He’d been pressing down harder on the accelerator without realizing it.

  If he lost Jenny, she’d leave a huge tattered hole in the fabric of his life. Even without working side by side anymore, they saw each other weekly, called or e-mailed every single day. Only Jenny knew how inadequate he felt in comparison to his father, his older sister. Only Jenny knew about that night and Irina, about which he’d never told another soul.

  He casts his mind back to the first day they had met, before he had grown so cynical at Death March High. He was wearing a blazer over a Rolling Stones T-shirt, khaki cargo pants, and Converse Chuck Taylor sneakers. It was all at once an attempt to look self-consciously cool to his students, clutch desperately to the filaments of his own youth, and walk the line of the dress code.

  The music room was just down the hall from the languages corridor. He’d gotten lost and turned into Jenny’s room by mistake. Her hair was black, then, so black it shone blue under the classroom lights. She had a nose ring. In a teacher! It was tiny, barely to be seen. But still. Van was intrigued. She started to give him directions, then slipped into French, and kept talking to him as if he could understand. Van was confused, then panicked. Had he gone insane and was hearing in other languages? Did he indicate he could speak French? Had this girl chosen this precise moment to go completely barking mad? He stammered and perhaps turned pink, and she tossed her head back and roared.

  “You should have seen your face! I knew I was speaking French to you. It was my own little private joke. Pardonez moi.” Then she took his elbow and steered him toward his room, depositing him there with a wink tossed back over her shoulder.

  Van slows the car, peering through the sheets of rain, looking for Jenny’s hazard lights. That’s when he notices it’s even darker than before. The car ahead of him—whose taillights he’d been following like bread crumbs in the forest—has turned off, or sped up and away. Based on her description, she should be…

  He sees it. Her Cavalier, with the dome light on. She’d skidded off the road, and her car is parked on the lawn of some cottage, her front bumper aimed right at the front door. In Van’s headlights he can see the deep, muddy ruts made by her tires. He pulls into the driveway of the cottage and is nearly alongside her car when he hops out into the rain. The storm slaps him in the face, which Van decides he richly deserves.

  She opens the door before he gets there. Her wet dress sticks to her, and her hair is matted to her head.

  “I’ve been trying to get it off the yard, but I can’t, driving or pushing, either one,” she says without prelude, not meeting his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Jenny…”

  “Let’s just move the car!” she shouts over the sound of rain hammering metal.

  Van nods and gestures for her to get back behind the wheel. He stands between the car and the house, bracing himself to push it away from the house and back toward the road. The lightning is coming more frequently, and Van questions the wisdom of putting his hands on a metal car in an electrical storm. Jenny looks down, then gives him a thumbs-up in the dome light to indicate she’s put the car in neutral.

  Van’s shoes—still his good shoes from the party—slip pathetically on the slick grass. He can’t even see where he’s pushing the car. The interior of Jenny’s car is the only thing visible. All he can see is her face, frowning, her hands tense on the wheel.

  Then it starts to roll. Toward him.

  Van backpedals but the slick grass offers no escape traction, either, and the car under his hands is tilting forward, giving Van the sense that it’s about to gather speed and run him down, even with no motor.

  So Van hops on the hood, causing Jenny to yelp and cover her mouth with her hands.

  The car rolls forward about six feet, Van grasping the windshield wipers to keep from falling off, Jenny starting to laugh, then it bumps to a stop against what looks to be a heavy concrete planter filled with geraniums.

  Jenny continues to laugh, and Van laughs, too, nearly drowning at the same time, as rainwater pours down his face and into his open mouth.

  He gestures for Jenny to get out, and together they dash into his car.

  For whole minutes they can’t do anything but start partial sentences and guffaw.

  “You jumped on the…”

  “I thought the car…”

  “Looked like a maniac…”

  “Car was trying to kill me!”

  Jenny finally wipes the rain off her face and picks up her cell phone. “I guess I better call a tow truck. I should have earlier, but I thought you could push it out of the way.” She smirks at him. “Guess I should have remembered I was calling Ivan Zielinski, not Mr. Universe.”

  “I should have brought my soccer cleats instead of my dancing shoes.”

  Jenny tosses her phone back into her bag. “No signal.”

  Van tries his, with similar luck. “Not here, either. I guess we’ll have to leave it for now.”

  Jenny nods. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s home at the cottage, anyway. Will you drive me back here tomorrow? Then I’ll get the car and leave the owner a note. Does insurance cover lawn damage?”

  “Ah, who cares. Some rich prat with a summer home can spare some money for grass seed.”

  Van cranks the VW’s engine and puts his arm on the back of Jenny’s seat to brace himself as he peers into the dark, backing out onto the road. “I’m sorry, Jenny. I don’t know what I was thinking to let you go home in this.”

  “You should be sorry.”

  Both of them jerk back slightly in their seats as he punches the brake. In the years he’d known Jenny, much as he occasionally deserved it, she’d never been angry at him. Not for one minute.

  “Well, I am.” That familiar regret settles in his stomach. A combination of nausea and that dizzying feeling of an elevator dropping too quickly. If only he could go back, before he behaved badly enough to lose his best and only friend.

  “You should have just told me you invited Barbara. I wouldn’t have come out here and spent the gas money and made it so awkward for all of us that I risked the monsoon rather than stay there anymore.”

  “I didn’t invite her. I mean, I didn’t think she’d come.”

  “You thought wrong.”

  Van resumes driving, gingerly taking to M–66 again, keeping more or less to the middle of the road, straddling both lanes, as no one else is stupid enough to be out in the weather.

  “Are you cold?” Before Jenny can answer, Van pulls to the side and shrugs out of the raincoat Max loaned him. “It’s wet, but not as wet as you are. The inside is dry.”

  Jenny regards it for a moment, then wraps it around herself, shawl style. She nearly disappears in it.

  “Maybe we should wait out the rain,” he says, before pulling back to the road.

  “We could wait all night, in that case.”

  “Never mind.”

  They drive for a
few more minutes, Van longing to look at Jenny, to see her eyes and determine if their friendship is over or only damaged. Maybe he could patch it up, yet, make this the first relationship in his life he saved instead of destroyed.

  “Jenny? Are you OK?”

  “Fine. I bumped my knee on the steering column, that’s all.”

  “I meant besides that.”

  Van exhales as the strip malls on the outskirts of Charlevoix appear in his headlights. It didn’t seem like such a long drive this time.

  The streetlights aren’t working. A blackout. No wonder it was so pitch-dark on the road, no streetlights, no lights from the surrounding homes.

  “I guess I’m OK, except that I love you.”

  Van jerks forward against his seat belt. He’s hit the brake too hard at the intersection. “What?”

  “You haven’t gone deaf, have you?”

  Van shakes his head. No, he hasn’t. But he may have had a coronary.

  Van thinks of writing a song called “Coronary.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Irina

  IRINA BOUNCES ON HER TIPTOES, PACES THE ROOM, STOPS TO bounce again, hugging herself. Her shadow slices back and forth along the wood floor in the light of a single candle on a bookcase, the flame bouncing around in a draft.

  Darius sits on the bed, leaning back against the headboard, long legs stretched out in front of him. He’d given up trying to hold her.

  “I want a drink so bad.”

  “You can’t have one.”

  She shoots him a glare from behind her hair, which has gone all askew from raking her fingers through it. “One can’t hurt.”

  “We’re not taking any chances with my baby.”

  “It’s not just your baby.”

  “You’re just upset. It will pass.”

  Irina stamps her foot. “It will not pass. My mother will not suddenly get cured. I can’t believe she didn’t tell us. If I’d only known…”

  “If you’d only known…then what? What, Irina?”

  “I can’t do this alone.”