Real Life & Liars

by Kristina Riggle

  It’s cold down there, despite the heat that has wrapped itself around the house all day, even in the night with the windows all shut against the storm. I don’t want to go, but I have to.

  “Mom! Hurry!” I’m not sure which girl said that, Katya or Irina. Doesn’t matter.

  I pick my way down the old wooden stairs, closing the door to the kitchen behind me. I duck under the low ceiling, though I’m short enough it doesn’t really matter. I shine my beam around, and there’s my family, sitting on an old red-plaid blanket we always used for picnics at the beach, at the far corner of the cellar, well away from the tool bench with the screwdrivers and saws. An old mattress is propped up behind them. In the center glows a Coleman lantern that I can’t believe still works, from the days when I used to drag Max out camping, after he’d made a deadline and could finally be pried out of his office. The result is a greenish glow resembling the moon on a spooky autumn evening.

  “We can put this over us if a tornado hits the house, so we’re not injured by debris,” Katya explains as she sees my gaze light on the mattress. I nod, unable to shake this wistful desire I have to go back upstairs, like a captain going down with the ship. Would it be so bad, to just fly up into the air?

  I hand the clothes down to Irina and Jenny, who are huddled on either side of Van. I give him a towel, and he towels off his hair. The radio crackles in the center of the blanket, repeating its entreaties to get to an interior room, into a cellar, or a bathroom, clutching the bathroom pipes.

  The grandchildren cluster around their parents. Kit curls up in her mother’s lap, twirling a piece of hair. Tay has his head on her shoulder, and even Chip is sitting as close as he can without actually being in her lap. Charles sits cross-legged behind the three of them, talking in a low voice to Chip.

  “Where’s Bartleby?” I ask, trying to ignore the keening wind outside, the trees raking the wood exterior, as if it’s even too much for them, and they’re begging to be let inside.

  “Stalking spiders,” answers Katya, nodding to indicate she’s behind me, in the dark outside the circle of lanternlight.

  Katya looks older than I’ve ever seen her, and she keeps wincing. No wonder, with all the booze she’s had tonight. Looks like she’ll be having her hangover without the benefit of sleep.

  We should have grabbed pillows and blankets, or at least a measly deck of cards. We could be up all night long, waiting for the tornado that might never come, Max’s anxiety slowly dissipating like air out of a leaky tire.

  “Mom, sit down.”

  Max and Darius are holding the mattress up as a privacy screen, and Jenny and Irina are taking turns changing. Irina comes out first in one of my old dresses, the sweater wrapped around her shoulders.

  I fold myself to the floor, and Jenny emerges wearing a tie-dyed number I chose for her. I’ll let her take it home; it suits her. She curls on the floor next to Van, but they don’t touch. They don’t look at each other. I wonder what happened on that drive back from her car? What was said?

  Because the studious way they avoid each other’s eyes reminds me of how Paul and I have maintained for years a steadfast professionalism. At such great effort.

  But what a wasted effort for Van and this nice girl, who have no other attachments or obligations so far as I know.

  “It’s so quiet,” Kit says. “Wish I had my iPod. Oh, Mom, what if it all blows away?”

  “It won’t. And even if it does, we’ll replace it.”

  “But all my music!”

  “Dipwad,” jumps in Chip, “it’s all saved on your hard drive. You can just download it again.”

  “Shut up, pothead.”

  All faces jerk toward Kit. She answers our unspoken question. “You reek like pot. Duh.”

  “Be quiet, Kit.”

  “But Mom, he…”

  “Katherine! You will shut up, for once in your life, shut up.”

  The radio static surges and swamps the voices, and Max shuts it off. The wind outside sounds preternatural. Lightning goes off around us, flashing through the high, dusty basement windows.

  Kit whimpers. Darius murmurs to Irina. Max scuttles to my side and wraps his arms tightly around me. I look around at my family, take them in. Van and Jenny are holding hands. Charles has his arms around Chip and Katya, Katya holds Tay and Kit. Reenie clutches Darius, who looks expectantly at the ceiling. One large brown hand covers her belly.

  Even Bartleby has joined our circle, mewling lightly, circling on the blanket.

  Then there’s a fearsome crack, a creaking, and a thunderous vibration runs through all of us, from the floor to our skulls.

  My house, my house.

  My family.

  My life.

  I can’t tell if the scream is from a person, or crashing metal, or just inside my head.

  CHAPTER 45

  Katya

  KATYA THINKS, DON’T HURT THE CHILDREN, AND SHE’S NOT SURE if that’s a plea to God or a reminder to herself not to crush or smother them in her clutches. She’s grateful for Charles’s strong arm around her, though she knows how useless that would be if a twister ripped the house apart and exposed them to the ruthless sky.

  What about that mattress that Dad dragged down here?

  Too late. A crash echoes through the earth surrounding their cellar hiding place. Someone screams, and she can’t tell, maybe she did it herself, even. She squinches her eyes shut and grips her family, maybe if she holds tight enough they can all blow away together…

  Then it’s not so loud. The wind is still present, but only blowing instead of roaring. The lightning has stopped its mad flickering.

  For a moment Katya thinks she’s still drunk, and only dreamed it all. But she looks up and sees the ashen faces of her family in the light from the lantern, all doing the same thing, cautiously uncurling from their instinctive fetal positions, still gripping their loved ones, unwilling to relax yet.

  “I think it’s OK,” says Darius, his warm, firm voice a balm to Katya’s shaky fear. “I don’t think it hit us.”

  “Is it really?” Reenie’s voice sounds so small.

  “I’ll go look.”

  “I don’t know if that’s wise.” This from her father, who has released Mira long enough to fiddle with the radio. Still just static.

  Sirens in the distance. They all look to Darius, and, wordlessly, he steps past them and walks up the steps.

  Irina looks bereft without him, and she scoots toward Van, who offers his hand.

  Other than the sirens, the quiet is scarier than the noise. It might be still raining, the cellar is too far removed to really tell, but it’s definitely not the driven, pounding, drowning rain that it’s been all evening.

  Darius’s footfalls move through the whole house, and he comes down the stairs without anyone else saying a word.

  “Hard to tell because the power’s still out,” he says, “and it’s still too cloudy to get much moon. But the house seems intact. No broken windows. Couldn’t see outside too well, so I don’t know how your neighbors did.”

  “Oh. Patty…” Mira peels herself off the floor and makes an unsteady path for the stairs. Max rises to follow. “Don’t go outside, honey, just look through the window.”

  He turns back to the rest of the family. “I’ll grab pillows and things. I’d like us to stay down here. We don’t know for sure that it’s over.”

  No one argues. For once.

  Katya and the rest start looking over the cellar, picking out places to sleep. She suggests that Irina and Darius be given the mattress, given her condition. Kat expects a nasty look from Irina over the term “condition,” but Reenie only stares at her belly, her hand touching it all around, as if feeling for damage.

  Katya knows that feeling so well. She remembers falling on the ice when she was pregnant with Tay. Chip had darted out ahead of her into some store’s parking lot, and she shouted after him to stop while trying to rush as much as her girth would allow. She never saw the ice or even felt th
e falling, she was just instantly on her back. She remembered the gasp from the surrounding shoppers, though only one person stepped forward to help her up while the rest simply gawked. Chip was too little to understand why Katya was crying when she yelled at him for running ahead.

  A store security guard helped her to the car, and she squeezed Chip’s hand so hard he whined about it. Once he was in his car seat, Katya settled behind the wheel, she picked up her bulky car phone, and dialed the doctor’s office.

  She cried the whole way there, cried in the exam room, and continued crying even after the ultrasound showed Taylor bobbing and weaving in the amniotic fluid, oblivious to all the drama.

  So, although Irina’s stomach didn’t suffer one iota of trauma, she understands down to her marrow.

  Mira comes back down the stairs, loaded with blankets. Max follows behind with stacks of blankets and some old musty sleeping bags, and a few flashlights balanced on top of the pile.

  He hands out flashlights to all of them, saying he doesn’t think lighting the candles and going to sleep would be safe, so they prop up the flashlights as best they can to get situated, and ignore the spidery dust of the basement. Bartleby keeps mewling at the door until someone brings down her food bowl and litter box. She won’t have it, and finally Mira reluctantly puts them back where they belong upstairs, leaving the kitchen door slightly ajar. Trusting kitty instinct that she’ll come back down if the storm returns.

  Katya makes a nest for her family along one wall. Chip insists on his own island of blankets, but otherwise, they all pile in together. She notes with some surprise that Irina and Darius have not zipped their sleeping bags together—as her parents always did on camping trips—but have lain side by side, a pall over both of them.

  Of course there should be a pall, thinks Katya as she snuggles into Charles’s side to make more room for Taylor. Mira is dying and letting herself go.

  Why should someone with such self-conscious verve and spirit want to die? She should be wearing irreverent T-shirts that say SCREW CANCER or something, and replacing her luminous silver hair with funky hats and bandanas until it grows back. She could crack jokes about prosthetic boobs, flirt with the doctors.

  And of course she doesn’t want her mother to die. Especially if her marriage goes under, and she loses herself. Especially if her kids turn to drugs and lose every opportunity she worked so hard to give them.

  She still needs her mother. What is so wrong with that?

  Katya feels herself drifting off, relieved she doesn’t yet have to go upstairs to face whatever devastation awaits them.

  PART 3

  DEPARTURE

  CHAPTER 46

  Ivan

  IVAN IS STARTLED TO SEE JENNY’S SLEEPING FACE JUST INCHES FROM his. For a moment he thinks they’re in his apartment, and they’ve made love.

  Then his eyes focus, and he remembers the cellar, the storm, rescuing Jenny from the side of the road.

  She said she loved him.

  Ivan sits up, and his joints screech and grind at having slept on three centimeters of sleeping bag over hard cement floor. Flashlight beams still glow through the basement, but the lantern has burned out. Or someone put it out. He glances around and seems to be the only one awake. He turns away from Darius’s long arm draped over Irina’s waist.

  Van takes the stairs a few at a time, lightly as he can, stepping around the squeaky spots. He nudges open the kitchen door to find Bartleby mewing accusingly.

  He blinks against the sunlight. It rushes in, so bright it feels tangible, like he’s swimming in it.

  Van thinks of writing a song called “Swimming in Light.”

  The windows are dappled with raindrops, which look like jewels in the dawn. But there are leaves too close to the house. The view outside is not what it should be.

  Van steps through the screened-in porch and opens the back door.

  “Oh, God.”

  The first thing he sees is Katya’s Escalade, smashed by the southern neighbor’s tree. It’s gone U-shaped, as if it were a toy, and a spiteful boy has taken a bat to it. The leaves and branches of the felled tree rise two stories into the air. Even on its side, the tree is magnificent.

  He trots down the driveway, though he’s barefoot, and the drive is soaking wet. His bare feet splash in little puddles here and there.

  He glances south down the street and sags with relief. The houses are still intact. Porches are smashed, shutters ripped off and dangling, lawn furniture all over the street and scattered in random yards. Some windows are broken by limbs jutting into upstairs bedrooms, but no one’s house did a Wizard of Oz.

  Van can see other people doing the same. Stumbling out into the daylight, surveying the damage.

  He turns to face the north, to check out Patty’s house and the exterior of his parents’ home, and what he sees makes him sit right down in the driveway, right into a puddle.

  The Big Tree. The maple, taller than the house, a century old, is felled. Van feels a stitch in his chest and holds his breath to keep from breaking down. It’s only a stupid tree, anyway. They’re all safe…

  But seeing that giant splayed out like that…It stretches all the way across Dixon Avenue, its leaves brushing the porch of the house across the street.

  The roots have ripped up nearly the whole front lawn. They make up a massive labyrinth taller than two men, clumped with mud. The mass of tangled wood dangles in the air, useless. Dying already. The crater they’ve left is vast. Van knows that the morning light will crash into the house unfiltered by fluttering green.

  “Oh, wow.”

  Van turns to see Jenny on the porch. She’s wearing his mother’s old purple tie-dye dress, is wrapped in a sweater, and she has stepped into his own shoes. She looks like a girl playing dress-up.

  She was talking about Katya’s truck, but then she follows Van’s gaze to the Big Tree.

  “Oh, no. That was such a beautiful tree.” As she approaches, Van stands up and wipes the grit off his pants.

  “Thank God it fell across the street, though. Can you imagine if it had fallen the other way?” Van shivers, imagining that massive trunk slicing through the kitchen, the upper boughs tearing into his old bedroom.

  “Maybe we can blame my car in the yard on wind. The tornado blew it there.”

  “Except tornadoes don’t leave tire marks in the turf.”

  Jenny pulls the sweater more tightly around her. That’s when Van notices the cool breeze raising goose bumps on his arms. He’s still wearing his undershirt and suit pants, having never gotten around to changing clothes.

  The silence grows bigger than casual, and Van tugs on his earlobe.

  Jenny squints up at him in the morning light. He can see her freckles. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said last night.”

  “You didn’t mean it?”

  She looks down briefly at her tiny feet in his shoes. “I meant it. But it didn’t need to be said.”

  Van notices that she looks so small, all shrunken down and hunched over. Virtually unrecognizable compared to the firecracker of a girl that he’s known for years.

  She says, “But I don’t expect you to do anything about it. I don’t even know why I said it, except that…Well, it’s been getting harder not to say it.”

  Van steps closer, looking down at her quizzically.

  “Promise me something,” she says, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “It’s OK if we’re never more than friends, or even if it’s too weird to be friends now, I’ll get over it. I won’t die. But you have to date better girls.”

  “Better?” He thinks back to stunning Barbara.

  “Yes, better. I’m not talking about selfish cover models like whatsherface. Not girls who treat you like shit or girls who don’t take the time to get to know you before writing you off as a weirdo. Date nice girls. Even if they’re quiet, even if they’re a little weird themselves.”

  “I do the best I can, Jenny.” Van folds his arms, uncomprehending how bad treatment
at the hands of other people is his own fault.

  She laughs. “That’s just the point! You don’t do the best you can. You very deliberately, for as long as I’ve known you, do everything but the best you can.”

  “That’s uncalled for.”

  “It’s true. Your songwriting for example.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You’re not really trying to be successful. You’re not doing what you know you have to do.”

  Van steps back from her, warily, as if from a friendly dog that has suddenly begun to growl. “I liked it better when you didn’t love me if this is how you show it.”

  Their attention is drawn away by shouting from the house. They look back, and it’s Katya standing on the porch, her hands on her head, shouting, “No! Oh, no…”

  But she’s not looking at her smashed car. She’s looking at the front of the house and the ruined Big Tree.

  She starts to jog down the driveway, then winces and stops, walking hurriedly instead.

  “Oh,” she says again as she reaches Jenny and Van. Jenny steps to the side, turning her eyes away. Van reaches around his sister’s shoulders and looks in her eyes. Katya’s eyes shine with tears. “It’s stupid to be upset with everything going on, but…I loved that damn tree.”

  “I know. What a weekend. Irina brings home a new husband, then this huge storm.” Van decides not to bring it up, but there was also that remark last night from his niece about Chip reeking like pot. As soon as she said it, Van realized, oh yeah, I thought I smelled something…He catches a whiff of it on his students now and then. Katya’s son was doing drugs? Here?

  Katya gasps, putting a hand to her mouth. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?” Van asks. “What else is there to know?”

  At the sound of the screen door to the porch slamming, Van and the girls look up to see Mira on the porch, clutching her purple bathrobe up around her neck.