Real Life & Liars

by Kristina Riggle

  A glimmer in the distance, that’s what she’s been running toward. She probably doesn’t even know what exactly, but it’s always on the horizon, and she will never, ever catch it.

  All kids want to fit in, I guess, but Katya was relentless in her demands for the newest and latest and most popular. Even though I took the family to a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving to serve the homeless, still Katya wanted to spend more on designer jeans than the cost of an entire week’s grocery budget for a poor family.

  Katya would have gladly traded mothers if given half the chance. She probably still would.

  Van loves us, but he’s grown distant in recent years, refusing to talk about his music or his songs, when he once had such hope.

  And Irina…Always so quick to take offense and assume the worst, treating herself so carelessly. She thinks I don’t know that a man beat her up last year. Falling down the stairs indeed. I may be a wilted flower child, but I’m no idiot. I didn’t press her, though. Van was there to help her, and he didn’t want to tell me, either, so I understood that I was not relevant and left it alone.

  Even the university doesn’t want me anymore. Roxanne pulled out all the stops to get me to take the buyout and retire. Budget cuts, she said. The state is cutting the school’s financing. Think of the young professors, she implored.

  “People with families, Mira,” Roxanne said, leaning on the edge of my desk. I was sitting in my chair, grading papers, and, when I got tired of that, making notes on the next week’s lecture on The Tempest. My reading glasses were on my nose, soft music was playing on my radio, and a fragrant spring breeze was rustling the leaves of the plant on my desk.

  “I have a family,” I told her.

  “You know what I mean.”

  I do know exactly what she means.

  I’m irrelevant. But my family won’t let me go, like a child who clings to an outdated toy meant for someone much younger.

  They’re going to drag me under the knife, aren’t they? They’re going to drag me along and cut off my breast, then what? Go back to ignoring me while I’m left with scars and pain and big hunks of flesh simply gone? The breast gone that nurtured my children and made me a woman? And then they will be gone, too, wrapped up in their lives again, and where will I be? Irradiated and pumped with chemicals to chase away any fugitive cancer cells. Hairless and sick.

  An image of Max’s face rises up in my mind’s eye. His normal pleasant countenance screwed up with rage…His hands on my arms.

  I’m at the foot of the lighthouse now. It rises ahead of me like a cyclops with its huge triangle eye. I shiver in its shadow and move around it, back into the light. I lean out over the blue-metal railing around the edge of the pier. The lake is gossamer-clear over the rocks, only detectable by its light movement. It looks refreshing, and my feet have started to ache from walking on the concrete pier with no shoes.

  The lake beckons with her waves, reaching out for me, then pulling back toward the horizon.

  I put one foot up on the blue railing but the pot has made me dizzy and I can’t get my bearing once I leave the concrete surface. So I fold over and slip through the horizontal rails.

  I feel like the prow of a ship out here. The breeze pushes my hair away, I allow my body to lean out over the water, my feet still on the pier, for now, my hands holding the railing behind me. The stretch feels good in my shoulders.

  The lake’s deep green recesses beyond the rocks look soft, like moss on a forest floor. Like a pleasant place to hide.

  CHAPTER 53

  Katya

  KATYA SLAMS THROUGH THE CUPBOARDS IN THE KITCHEN, FINDING only herbal tea. The slamming hurts her head, but she revels in it anyway, in the spectacle she’s creating, though no one is there to witness it but Charles, who has put on the “patient endurance” face he uses when the children are acting up.

  “If you’re looking for the wine, I think you drank it all last night.”

  “Shut up.” The thought had occurred to her, though it was only midmorning on a Sunday. But people have mimosas with brunch. Bloody Marys, too. Mira might even have tomato juice, though the vodka isn’t likely. Katya abandoned her search and wheeled on Charles. “Now you need to tell me what the hell is going on. I’ve seen the e-mails. Are you having an affair?”

  Charles whips his head around. “Jesus, what if the children were in here?”

  “The boys are picking up branches in the yard, thinking that will get them out of being grounded for getting high. Kit is in her room, listening to her iPod until the batteries die. I notice you didn’t answer the question.”

  “I can honestly tell you, no, there is no affair.”

  Charles rakes his hand through his hair and frowns into his instant Folger’s, which he made with lukewarm tap water.

  “You’re not exactly filling me with confidence. If it’s not an affair, then it’s something.”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Katya’s heart goes twitchy in her chest, and she wipes her clammy hands on her flannel pants. “No, I don’t. But now you have to tell me, or I’ll lose my mind.”

  “Those e-mails are from Tara, but it’s not an affair. It’s blackmail.”

  Katya’s world shrinks to the size of a pinprick, and when she shakes her head to clear it, she’s holding the side of the kitchen counter. “What did you do?” Her voice comes out as a whisper.

  “Times have been tough.” Charles stares intently at his coffee, and Katya sees a glimpse of his father in the new furrows across his forehead, fresh lines around his eyes. She hadn’t noticed them before. He continues, “We made some bad investments, in some technologies that seemed promising at the time but turned out to be a bust.” His speech had a studied, rehearsed quality. Katya realizes he’s been planning this for some time, this confession. Charles shifts in his chair. “Normally, we can handle a few bad investments, that’s the whole point of our business, but we never really recovered from 9/11.”

  “Hard times aren’t cause for blackmail, Charles.”

  “You know how I’m on the Literacy for Kids board with Tara?”

  Katya frowns and searches her memory. She recalls a charity function where he had cajoled his assistant into joining the board with him. Tara had joked that he only wanted to run her life after hours, too, but there had been a hard edge to her voice, the way people have when they are not truly joking. In the end, she had joined the board after all.

  Charles could be going over the same memory, because he’s stopped speaking and has begun turning his coffee mug in a circle on the kitchen table.

  “Charles, please.”

  “I started borrowing a little money from Literacy for Kids.”

  Borrowing. Otherwise known as embezzling. From a charity. A headline flashed into Katya’s mind: “Businessman indicted for stealing from illiterate inner-city kids.”

  “I always intended to put it back. I figured it was a stopgap measure, and no one would ever notice.”

  Kat forces her vocal cords to work. “I take it that Tara noticed.”

  “I never realized she was paying such close attention.”

  The hair on Katya’s neck stands up. “Are you going to the authorities?”

  He narrows his eyes at her. “You want to see me in prison?”

  “This can’t go on forever.”

  “Maybe it can. Tara won’t want to mess it up, she’s got a pretty sweet deal.”

  “How are you paying her if you can’t afford to keep the business afloat?”

  Charles doesn’t answer but Katya makes the assumption. More embezzling. He’ll never be able to stop.

  Katya sinks to the floor, next to the counter, and puts her head in her hands.

  “This is no picnic for me either,” Charles says. “I’m the one she’s got by the short hairs.”

  “Which she couldn’t have done if you hadn’t stolen money in the first place.”

  “As if I had a choice.”

  Katya drops her hands from her eye
s. “You had no choice but to steal? Oh that’ll go over well with the judge.”

  Charles flinches. “There will be no judge unless you decide to rat me out. You’re not going to do that to the children, are you? The media attention, sending me to prison. Losing the house because who’s going to pay for it otherwise? Assuming we didn’t lose it to restitution or a civil suit.”

  Katya feels like a hand is closing on her throat. “I fail to grasp how you had no choice. We could have done something, gotten a second mortgage…”

  “We already have a second mortgage.”

  “We could have made it work!”

  Charles smacks his hand on the table. “Don’t you think I tried! But I had to do something to keep our life going because you wouldn’t have settled for anything less than what we have.”

  Katya feels her blood drain out of her face. “Are you putting this on my doorstep?”

  “Would you have stayed with me if I came to you, and said ‘Honey, we’re broke, I invested in junk, and now we’ve got nothing? Let’s declare bankruptcy and sell the house.’ You think we would have stayed together through that?”

  “And you expect me to stay now?”

  “You’re going to leave me in this position? Break up the family? And what will you tell the kids?”

  Katya feels the anger drain out of her limbs and lets herself go limp on the floor like a corpse. Any action she takes will result in the explosion of everything she’s ever worked for.

  Her eyes meet Charles’s from across the room. His eyes look damp, and a sheen of sweat films his forehead. He looks hunched and defeated, and never more vulnerable since the night he proposed to her, with a ring at the time that seemed so extravagant, but at their fifteenth anniversary he replaced it with a new setting, befitting her status as Mrs. Peterson of Peterson Enterprises.

  Kat looks down at the ring as it catches the light and bounces it across the room. So that’s her life—nothing more than pretty-colored light reflecting off a cold stone.

  CHAPTER 54

  Ivan

  IN HIS SEARCH THROUGH THE HOUSE FOR KATYA—AND NOW HIS mother, too, since Max can’t find her—Ivan is distracted by the unmistakable sound of sobs. Something he heard often growing up in a home with two sisters.

  He knocks and opens the door at once, not giving her a chance to order him out of the room. Darius is nowhere in sight. The room is empty of their personal effects, and the result is a curious absence of pulse. Like the room prepped for an estate sale: bloodless, a commodity.

  Van’s never thought of his childhood home as just a house before. But his mother and father will be gone someday, his mother, perhaps quite soon.

  Irina wipes hard at her face, leaving pink marks on her skin from the pressure.

  “Hey, hey…” he says, coming around to the side of the bed, where she sits hunched like an elderly woman. She shakes him off, and he leaves his hands in his lap, not knowing what else to do. He thinks back to his chat with Darius, getting the impression that it was Irina who wanted to leave him. So why did she look so devastated?

  “What do you want?” she croaks out, sounding eerily like herself ten years ago, in her preteen years.

  “Is it Darius?”

  Irina looks up at the ceiling as if searching for her answer in the air above her head. A breeze from an open window stirs the loose hairs around her face, and for a moment his sister’s beauty hurts him, because he knows the price she has paid for that beauty and how the men in her life have used it.

  “Yes,” she says, letting out a shuddery breath.

  Van stands up from the bed. “Bastard.” He was lying all that time, he really was going to ditch her, leave her with his baby after…

  “Bad choice of words.”

  “Oh, Reenie, I wasn’t talking about…”

  “I know. And anyway, it’s not him that’s the jerk. It’s me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She draws herself up straight on the bed, which is high enough that her feet barely touch the floor. As she talks, one hand drifts to her abdomen. Van doubts that she has noticed the gesture.

  “I told him I don’t want the baby, and I don’t want him. We’re splitting up, and I’m going to let him raise the baby without me. And it upset him, I mean I think I really hurt him.”

  “So why are you the one crying?”

  She chuckles and wipes her face again. “Men. They just don’t get it.” She points at her face. “This…this is regret. This is thinking that maybe if I cry hard enough and feel bad enough, God will spin the world backward and I can not sleep with him, or not even meet him, or I can get the morning-after pill or whatever. Or not that far, maybe just far enough for me not to marry him and lead him on into thinking he’d get that family he really wanted. I’m a terrible person, Van. Really terrible.”

  Van kneels down so he can peer up into her face and take her hands. “You haven’t done anything yet, just take it back. Change your mind. Women do that all the time. Believe me, I know.” He tries a rueful smile, but she doesn’t react. “You can keep the baby, tell Darius you want to stay with him. I mean, if you want to. Do you love him, Reenie?”

  There’s a long pause while Reenie gazes out at the harbor. “I might. I don’t know. I’d really like to, because that would solve a lot.” She chuckles and rolls her eyes, wiping off her face again. “It doesn’t matter though. He’ll never take me now. Not after I’ve jerked him around like this.”

  “Then live here…”

  “Mom has cancer, remember? She’ll be getting sick, I can’t expect her to take care of me.”

  “Then live with me.”

  “What?”

  “I’m serious. I’ll ask my apartment complex about finding a two-bedroom apartment. I’ve got the summer off, I’ll be around for a while anyway, and I’ll take a leave of absence. I like being an uncle, and Katya’s kids think I’m an idiot.” Van smiles at Irina’s midsection. “I’ve got a fighting chance with this one yet.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Why can’t it be? I’m tired of everything being so damn hard all the time. Keep the baby, Reenie. We’ll help you.”

  “Won’t it crimp your style?”

  Van laughs. “Right. My style. I’ve got girls banging down my door. Hell, a cute niece or nephew might be just the ticket for changing my romantic fortune.”

  Reenie’s expression softens a little, a smile playing around the edges of her lips. Then she closes her eyes and shakes her head.

  “No. It won’t work and, anyway, I don’t want to be a mother. It’s not a matter of where I sleep or who will take the baby for walks. I fundamentally don’t want to be a mother, and this baby is better off without someone who feels that way.” She turns a hard glare on Ivan. “This baby deserves to be wanted.”

  Ivan hears her loud and clear. “You were wanted, Reenie. Unplanned isn’t the same as unwanted. Mom loved you, loves you still.”

  She shakes her head. “No, I’ll give Darius the baby as soon as it pops out, then make my own way, like I always have. I have some old friends I can stay with. Alex’s number is still in my cell phone.”

  Van feels both hot and cold, and leaps to his feet. “You will not go back to that sadistic asshole. Anytime you have to be rescued from a man is a pretty good indication he’s bad news.”

  “He was nice to me lots of times.”

  Van jabs a finger at Irina. “Why do you treat yourself like you’re disposable? You go back to him, you can forget I exist. I’m serious. I’m not going to stand by and watch you go through that again.”

  “So you’ll throw me away, too?”

  Van closes his eyes, and the memory of Irina cowering in that man’s room, blood trailing from her mouth, looms large. “I won’t watch you destroy yourself.”

  He crosses to the door, and, before he goes out, he tries once more to get through to his baby sister, the one who once grabbed his hair in tufts, while riding his shoulders as he galloped throug
h the house. She screamed with glee and terror, and he made horsey noises, even. And she thinks she wasn’t loved? What twelve-year-old boy makes horsey noises out of anything but love?

  “You think you’re not important? You’re important to that baby. If you feel so terribly unwanted, how is your child going to feel growing up, knowing his mother gave him away?”

  He doesn’t stay around for her reaction, continuing his search for Katya, to unravel the secret of her life, and their mother, who still seems to be missing.

  CHAPTER 55

  Irina

  IRINA SLAMS THE DOOR AFTER VAN, NOT CARING IF HE’S RIGHT because he sounds like a freakin’ Dr. Phil. And he’s a fine one to talk. Mr. Go-Nowhere with big-shot dreams to be a songwriter and nothing to show for it but a crappy job at a crummy high school.

  As if.

  She could call Alex right now, even. See him on her way out of town. He’d probably get an extra kick out of it, smacking around a pregnant woman. That’ll show that stupid Ivan, thinking he can tell her what to do.

  And then a coldness runs down her neck and over her shoulders. Did she really just consider putting herself in physical harm’s way? While carrying a child?

  She checks the mirror on the back of the door. She smooths her loose shirt tight over her abdomen, and there’s an unmistakable arch that wasn’t there before. It’s real. The baby is real and could be hurt.

  She feared for it during the storm, realizing that if a tornado sucked them out of the house, what chance did a tiny fetus stand? Darius must have felt it, too, holding his hand over her stomach as if he could magically keep it safe.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, being a mom. Irina ponders her examples: Katya, whose children use her like a combination ATM machine and whipping post, and Mira, who was barely available for Irina’s own childhood…

  And now will be unavailable for her adulthood as well. And irrational anger bubbles up in Irina because her mother didn’t choose to get sick. Yet, when was the last time she had a mammogram? And she is choosing not even to let the doctors try and help her. Choosing her own priorities over whatever her children might want. Or need.