Real Life & Liars

by Kristina Riggle

  Irina slams the door open and stomps down the stairs. At the bottom of the steps she finds Katya and Van in the kitchen, and at the same time, her father comes in from the back porch, with Patty shuffling along behind.

  “You kids won’t believe what Patty just told me.”

  Katya pushes her hair out of her face—unlike her to appear willingly so disheveled—and asks, “Is your house okay?”

  “Lost some shingles, but I don’t care about that. Look, I saw your mother climb out of her window.”

  “What?” Van says, gaping at Patty.

  “She climbed out her window. I was brushing branches off my porch and plain as day I saw her slip out of her study like a cat burglar in reverse, and she marched off toward the lake. I thought maybe you all had a stuck door or something, but then your father here said he couldn’t find her…”

  Max was pulling on a ratty old university sweatshirt, already wearing a moldering pair of swimming trunks and sneakers made green by a thousand lawn mowings. “We have to go find her. Something’s wrong. Something’s really wrong.”

  Van says, “My shoes are on the porch.”

  Katya goes sprinting for the stairs. “I’ll get my sneakers, I’ll catch up to you.”

  Irina looks down at her sandals and follows Van to the porch.

  He turns to her briefly, in his crouched position, lacing his shoes. “You should stay here. You need to take it easy.”

  “I feel like a walk. I need the air.”

  He seems to swallow back some words. “Okay. If you get tired, just sit down on a bench, and we’ll swing by on the way back.”

  He stands up to his full height, and with that determination written on his face, Irina gets a glimpse of him as he looked when he burst through the door in Alex’s condo.

  “Do you think she’s okay?” Irina asks.

  “I don’t presume to know anything anymore,” he answers, already stepping out onto the porch.

  CHAPTER 56

  Mira

  ARE THE ROCKS TALKING TO ME? IT SEEMS LIKE THEY ARE…I HEAR voices, but they’re far away. Maybe underwater? I release one bar of the pier, and for a moment the swinging motion alarms me, then it’s thrilling. A heart-stopping swoop toward the lake. My fingers are much too far above the water, but I want to touch the rocks, the pretty mottled things that must be ancient, so sturdy…

  “Mother!”

  I can’t kid myself. That was meant for me. Seeing as there’s no other mother here on the pier.

  I can’t seem to pull myself back, though, and the metal of the railing seems more cold and slippery than I remember, but a hand slaps over mine, and more hands pull at my blouse. This fresh tethering allows me to turn my feet back again, to face the shore. It is with more than a little regret that I leave behind the unending vista of the lake stretching ahead to kiss the sky.

  Kiss the sky, Jimi wailed, back in the day when my life was endless.

  Now I see Ivan’s face, and he’s red and wild, and for a crazy moment he looks like the day he was born, when he came out screaming like a little angry tomato with all that black hair.

  So I laugh, because how could I not?

  Now all their voices bubble together like a stew, and I don’t hear anything, but I can see Irina holding herself a few yards back and Max seizing my other arm—ouch, he’ll leave a mark—and Katya is bellowing something, and she’s drawing out her cell phone.

  That I definitely don’t want.

  “Stop!”

  That must have been loud because some gulls explode away from the pier in a puff of white wing. Kat freezes, with her phone not quite to her head.

  “You better not be calling 911. I’m not a cat in a tree for God’s sake.”

  Katya closes the phone and shoves it back in her pocket. The eyes of my eldest daughter betray confusion, anger, and impatience. Probably the way I looked to her many times in our growing-up years when she behaved in a baffling teenage way.

  Ivan and Max have my arms so tight, and my son is reaching past the pier to my waist, and I realize he’s fixing to haul me in like a sack of flour.

  I brace my knees tight, much as I can anyway, and lock my elbows. “No.”

  “Mom,” Ivan pleads, quietly. “Come back over here. It’s dangerous out there.”

  Max’s voice quavers. “Mirabelle, don’t do this.”

  “Do what?” I laugh again, this time I’ll admit a little harshly. “Oh, you think I’m trying to drown myself. Ophelia, I’m not.”

  Katya’s voice is cold, like cracking ice. “So what are you doing out there?”

  “Enjoying the view.”

  “And you’re high, too, I suppose?”

  “I just want to be left alone!” I try to yank my arms free of my husband and son because they feel like jailers; they feel like chains around my limbs, and I won’t yield. I jerk momentarily backward, and a screech comes from Irina. I didn’t mean to scare her.

  Katya steps closer to me, while Ivan and Max continue to hold me, Van trying to nudge me closer to the pier, but I’m bracing myself away from them.

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” Katya says, her skin so pale I can trace a blue vein through her temples. “But in case you haven’t noticed, your actions do have something of an impact on other people, and we’d rather not have to fish your dead body out of Lake Michigan.”

  Van barks at her. “Katya!”

  Irina lets go of herself to step closer to Kat. “No, she’s right. Because that’s the whole point of all this, isn’t it?” She turns her small frame square to me, glaring and shuddering. “Mom thinks her life is hers to throw away to hell with anyone else, and I don’t know why I should be surprised.”

  Katya joins in gamely. “Well, exactly. So what if I’d like her to be there to watch my children graduate from high school? If I need her in my life. She’d rather lie there and die rather than even remotely consider doing what the doctor says.”

  I wonder if Van and Max can feel my limbs tremble. The sun has climbed higher in the sky, and it’s behind the lighthouse, casting us all in shadow, but a corona of sun beams out around it, it hurts my eyes like an eclipse, and I wish they’d shut up and let me be, for once…Even Van whispers to me, “C’mon, Mom, we just want what’s best for you…”

  “How do any of you know what’s best for me!”

  All three of the children start to answer at once when another voice joins the fray, to my left.

  “Shut up, all of you!” Max loosens his grip on my arm, moves his hand down to my hand on the railing. He turns to me. “Mira, I don’t want you to fall,” he says with perfect calm, his eyes the color of amber couched by wrinkles and bags, those eyes that have been smiling at me for four decades, much longer than I’ve deserved.

  Van releases my hand, and I reach for Max, who helps me under the railing, the same way I got out there. Past his shoulder I see a spectator, some jogger who paused to gawk. I flip him the bird, and he gasps and turns away.

  I pat Van’s arm because he’s the closest, and I fold into Max, letting him hold me, feeling where he’s heavier and thicker than he used to be and not minding at all.

  I don’t look up as he addresses the children.

  “In all your dither about yourselves and how this affects you, have any of you have given your mother a hug, and said ‘Gosh Mom, I’m sorry.’ Or, ‘Is there anything I can do?’”

  He starts to walk away from them, and I close my eyes and let him lead me, following with no hesitation because he won’t let me fall.

  CHAPTER 57

  Katya

  CHARLES REFUSES TO MEET HER EYE WHEN SHE AND THE CHILDREN gather in the living room. Katya doesn’t think she can bear the knowledge of his crime. Besides the logistics of it—is she an accomplice now, after the fact?—is the knowledge that her all-powerful husband who could do anything, of whom she was so proud, was reduced to thievery to install a SubZero refrigerator in the kitchen and Jacuzzi in the backyard.

  Well,
no one ever said it was easy being a wife and mother, and Kat Peterson is nothing if not stoic, thank you very much.

  In their mother’s living room, the children sit on the chocolate brown velveteen couch in ascending order of height. Kit steals glances at her brothers in a mixture of awe and glee. She could barely hide her delight at being included on the lecture and punishment.

  Punishment will indeed come. But first, Katya wants some answers, before she can figure out how to deal with her mother, who is probably programming Dr. Kevorkian into speed dial at this very moment.

  Charles is on the overstuffed chair at the corner of the couch, looking for all the world like one of the children, awaiting his punishment.

  “So, Chip.” She paces in front of him like a TV lawyer. She’s put on her slacks and high heels from Friday, and this has not only made her feel taller, but more secure in her own world, the world where she is in control, not sketching trees and pulling her crazy mother off the pier. “You seem to think it’s a lark to use an illegal drug. Not only a lark, but apparently you’re quite practiced at it. Did none of those DARE meetings do a thing for you?”

  He laughs. He actually laughs, right there in her face. Katya could rip off his eyebrows. “DARE. Right. Ask how many kids in my school graduated from DARE and get high every weekend. And what about Taylor?”

  “I’m getting to him, but I’m starting with you.”

  “It’s no big. It’s like sneaking a drink now and then, so what? You like your wine enough, and you’re not an alkie.”

  Kat lets the wine remark pass, but she could almost hear Charles’s silent agreement, always needling her about “hitting” the bottle. A more pressing matter is Chip’s casual dismissal of the dangers of drug use. She hadn’t planned to use their neighbor’s dirty laundry like this, but…“I suppose you think Mr. Johnson down the road started out using meth every weekend when his kids were at Little League? He started somewhere before that.”

  “I’ll tell you how it started, it started with Mrs. Johnson moving to Ann Arbor with the little Johnsons. I’m telling you it’s nothing. Everybody does it, and everybody knows that everybody does it.”

  “How did you get so…entitled? No, I mean it, answer me this, all of you. Why do you think it’s okay to laugh in my face? And treat all your expensive things like they’re disposable? Why do you act like I’m not even there when I ask you to do a simple thing like, heaven forbid pick your clothes up off the floor and get them in the laundry hamper. I’d fall over and die of a coronary if any of you actually used the washing machine.”

  “I don’t know how.” This from Taylor, who is plenty old enough, and Katya balls up her fists to keep from slapping him across the face, but in a moment she realizes he’s in earnest. His face is blank and slightly puzzled, there’s a hint of a crease between his eyes, an echo of the one Charles has permanently imprinted on his face in the exact same spot.

  She’s never taught him to use the washing machine.

  “Well you’ll know how soon enough, but why do you tune me out when I ask you to pick up your clothes?”

  Taylor seems to be struggling with the question. He stares at his sneakers, scuffed and muddy, and shifts in place. He looks over at Kit, who has turned her attention to the farthest corner of the room, suspecting—rightly so—this conversation isn’t just about her brothers.

  Chip finally answers, not a whit of shame or embarrassment in his voice. In fact, his voice takes on a commanding resonance, much like his father’s.

  “I guess we always figured if it really meant anything to you, you would have made us do it. Because you never have. You might yell at us, but you always do it yourself in the end. So we figure it doesn’t matter that much.”

  Kit pipes up. “I’m just busy. I have homework and dance class.”

  Taylor jumps on that train of thought. “Oh sure, and band practice.”

  Band practice. Dance class. All these stupid classes that she spends half her life driving them to, so they will stay out of her hair and learn something and be well-rounded, or at least as well-rounded as the neighbors’ kids. So when the McCartys ask, “What are the kids into these days?” she has something to say besides, “Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution.”

  She points a finger at Chip, then Taylor. “You are both grounded the entire summer.”

  Taylor launches into a whine that surely must have dogs cowering for blocks.

  Chip just rolls his eyes and elbows his brother. Katya reads their silent communication. Chip doesn’t think she’ll stick with it.

  Kit believes it, though. She’s covering her mouth in shock and glee.

  Finally, Katya turns to Charles, who has been clearing his throat like a thirty-year smoker. “We should talk about this,” he says, and Kat knows he doesn’t want to stick with it either because it means both boys underfoot and sullen, and making sure they don’t sneak out, and it’s a hell of a punishment for them, too.

  “We just did talk about it.” She turns back to the kids. “Get out of my face.”

  Kit scampers down the hall, Taylor snivels along behind her, and Katya could swear she hears Chip mutter an obscenity as he passes by.

  And Katya thinks, I pick adolescence years to start disciplining my kids? Must remember to buy more wine. Her mother was probably onto something when she suggested Katya be more strict all those years ago, though at the time Katya had blown her off. Right, the flower child telling me to be tougher on the kids? Though, she had to admit that she herself and her siblings were—mostly, anyway—well behaved.

  “Wow, it sounds like you really meant it.”

  Katya whirls around to see Van standing in the doorway from the kitchen.

  “How long have you been there?”

  “Not long. I just came to tell you Mom’s lying down in her room, and later on we’ll have some brunch. She has the stuff already, assuming the fridge stayed cold, it should be OK…”

  Katya waits for Ivan to finish up and leave, but he starts tugging on his ear. She can feel Charles simmering behind her.

  “Van, what?”

  “I just wanted to talk to you.”

  She points a finger toward the kitchen. “Look, just wait a minute. Whatever it is can wait.”

  Katya glances at her watch and starts counting the minutes until her own personal happy hour at 5 P.M.

  Charles stands up and moves close to her. She inhales his musky aftershave and looks up at him. He’s so close she has nearly an Adam’s-apple view.

  “Kat, what are we going to do?”

  “If you don’t want to deal with the kids, fine, I’ll handle the grounding and stay home all summer long—”

  “Jesus, not that. Though I do think that’s crazy. I’m talking about our other trouble. You know, with Tara.”

  “That’s for you to figure out.”

  “What do you mean, exactly?” Katya sees his jaw clench, lines around his mouth growing more severe.

  “Solve the problem. I don’t care how, and I don’t want to know another thing about it. Just make it stop.”

  “You’re not leaving me then?”

  “No.” Katya grinds her teeth, hating the sound of that word because it sound like capitulation. It’s not though, it’s the braver choice. For the children. “But this can’t go on. It just can’t.”

  He slumps a little, and Katya can see that he was holding his breath. He really did care about losing her.

  He moves past her without another word, brushing his fingers through hers quickly as he passes.

  She sinks into the chair Charles had occupied and puts her head in her hands, elbows on her knees. She pushes the heels of her hand into her closed eyes until she sees stars. She just wants normal back. She wants to know that their paychecks can cover the mortgage and the credit-card bills and they’re still saving for retirement and college…Katya bolts up in the chair. The retirement accounts. She hasn’t looked at the balances in months. Years, maybe. Did Charles clear them out before ra
iding the charity? He must have. Why else would he have been so desperate?

  Which means even if they manage to keep Charles out of jail and out of the headlines, they have nothing to live on in their dotage. Unless they start selling all their expensive toys and saving again, as if from scratch. Katya gazes down at her ring, which disgusts her suddenly. For baubles like this, Charles felt driven to embezzle. She yanks it off her hand and crunches it into her palm, squeezing until the diamonds’ sharpness burns into her hand. She would like to crush it down to the tiny thing Charles bought her when they first got engaged. Katya cringes now to recall her disappointment back then. And he must have registered that disappointment, because he patiently explained that they had to save for a long, long future together. “I’ll take care of you, Kat,” he said then, tipping her chin up, looking into her eyes. “You can trust me to take care of you.”

  Katya blinks several times and rubs her eyes with her free hand. She will sell the ring. Sell it, and build their retirement back up. Maybe in her own account at first, just her name. Because Charles’s crime could still blow up in their faces, and she might need it to feed and house the children.

  “Hey, you OK?”

  Ivan’s back.

  Katya slumps back in the chair and kicks off her heels, which feel superfluous in Mira’s house, decorated with beads and silk wall hangings and framed prints of unrecognizable things. She slips her ring into her pocket, unwilling to look at it again.

  “Nothing. It’s fine. What did you want to ask me?”

  Van sits on the couch closest to the chair, scratches his nose, and takes a couple of tries before he speaks, as if he’s working up to something. “How did you do it?”

  “What?”

  “Get such a perfect life?”

  Katya glares at him. “I don’t need sarcasm. Anyway, that’s Irina’s gig.”