Real Life & Liars

by Kristina Riggle

  “I’m serious.”

  Katya laughs bitterly. “Did you not just witness me ground my children for an entire summer because they’re doing drugs? And you noticed how seriously they took that? Chip is probably texting his friends right now about what a joke I am. And you ask me about perfect?”

  “Every kid gets in trouble. But you seemed to get everything you wanted. Successful husband, beautiful house, healthy kids. Your own business. What did you do? More to the point, what am I not doing?” Van smirks. “I wouldn’t mind a little bit of perfect.”

  “There is no perfect. Only real life and liars.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Van, if you only knew.” Katya narrows her eyes and tries to clue him in without actually having to tell him what a joke her life is with a criminal husband and how her “healthy” kids are going to hell in a handbasket, as Charles’s parents would say, not because of one time smoking pot. But because they respect nothing and no one. He stares back at her, blank, just like Tay did when she asked why he didn’t do laundry.

  She tries again. “Don’t aspire for someone else’s life because you won’t want it if you get it. Then you’ll just get restless and start grasping for something else.”

  “To thine own self be true.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Hamlet.”

  “Mom said that to us all the time.”

  Katya’s hand rests on her wedding ring, still tucked in her pocket. It makes a frightfully big lump, gaudy thing that it is. She wonders what happened to the original one. Maybe they let the jeweler keep it. Maybe Kit used it as a Barbie doll crown.

  Ivan says, “That’s what Mom is doing, you know. True to herself and all that.”

  Katya looks up. “Oh, you mean the whole dying thing? She’d like us to think that, I’m sure.”

  “Why are you so nasty about her?”

  “I’m not nasty, I’m just…tired. I’m tired, Van. I think I’ve been tired since I was born.”

  Van stands up and stretches out. “Point taken.” He ambles to the stairs in an unfocused way, as if he’s trying to take the long way around. He pauses at the bottom of the stairs. “Real life and liars, huh?”

  He goes upstairs without waiting for a reply.

  Katya strokes her temples, willing herself not to think of Charles and what he’ll do to get himself—correction, both of them—out of his mess.

  Not her concern. She told him to solve it, and he will, like he’s always solved everything, and they can all get back to normal, or something like it.

  But does she want that, considering what their normal has been?

  Katya stands up and brushes off her slacks, though there doesn’t seem to be anything on them. She steps back into her high heels and clicks off to check her phone upstairs, to see if the insurance agent has called back yet about the Escalade. Also, maybe the radio has a weather update. The air feels muggy.

  CHAPTER 58

  Ivan

  THE CLOSEST PAPER HE COULD FIND WAS A TAKE-OUT MENU FROM Wing On Lau.

  He’s cross-legged on the sleeping porch upstairs in the house, the cool breeze ruffling his hair and scooting the paper around the scuffed wooden floor when he doesn’t have his pen to it, scribbling.

  His guitar in his lap still trembles from the most recent chord when a creak in the boards causes him to jerk his head up.

  Jenny. She’s wearing a new dress, this one rather simple compared to her usual wild patterns. It’s loose and pale gold, embroidered with something in the same color thread. From his vantage point, he can see the tattoo on her ankle, a swirly pattern of black shapes weaving around in a circle. He likes the way the breeze swirls the hem of her dress around.

  “You look nice,” he tells her.

  “That’s supposed to make up for you disappearing on me all morning?”

  He would tug his ear, but he has a pen in one hand and the guitar neck in his other. He bites his lip instead, unable to think of a suitable excuse.

  Jenny folds herself to the floor in front of him. She leans forward, balancing her elbows on her knees, and at this he gets a glimpse of the freckles on her chest and a shadow between her breasts.

  He glances away.

  “I have never regretted anything more in my life than what I told you last night.”

  He stares at his guitar, and from his peripheral vision, he can see Jenny lean closer.

  “OK, then, you don’t have anything to say. Fine, I don’t blame you. I’d undo it if I could, now that I see the feelings aren’t mutual. Because you’ve been a terrific friend to me. I’ve never met anyone so loyal and sincere, who can also quote the whole Monty Python dead parrot sketch. And now I’m afraid that’s gone since you won’t even look at me.” She stands up and looks out over the backyard and the harbor. “Then, to compound my whopper of a misjudgment, I get on your case about songwriting at the same time. So. I guess this is a rambling apology and a desperate wish I could unsay what I said. If I could have one superpower right now, I’d choose the ability to give someone selective amnesia.”

  “You’d have people lining up around the block. You’d make a fortune.” Van was smiling before he realized she was being serious. He couldn’t help himself.

  “I hadn’t even thought about charging. I’d just do it pro bono.” She smiled back, though her eyes were still sad. “Hey, what was that tune, just now? It was pretty.”

  “I don’t know. Something I’m fiddling with. Something my sister said got me thinking.”

  “Irina?”

  “No, Kat.”

  “About your mom?”

  Mom. Van feels a thud in his chest as it hits him again. Cancer. Pulling her off the pier had felt like a hallucination, same as when he’d clocked Irina’s deviant boyfriend in the face a year ago. Not only is Mom sick, she is apparently in denial, or otherwise just reflexively stubborn about doing what other people want.

  “Did you hear what happened on the pier?”

  “Irina told me. She looks awful, by the way. I think she’s been throwing up.”

  Van set the guitar down next to him and stretched his legs out along the wood floor. “My mother has always been the most vivid person I know. That’s the word, vivid. Doesn’t that come from the word for life?”

  “La vie. Yes, you’re right.”

  “So why she won’t fight for it now is completely beyond me.”

  “Maybe she hasn’t had time to let it sink in. Maybe she’ll change her mind.”

  “My mother doesn’t ever change her mind. About anything.”

  “That kind of certainty must be comforting.”

  Comfort? He’d never thought of certainty as comfortable. After all, he was certain his days would remain much the same the entire school year and all the foreseeable years after that, and he found only life-crushing drudgery in that fact. Or did he? Maybe he’d grown comfortable himself.

  Did his mother find death more comfortable than an uncertain prognosis?

  “So what was it then?” Jenny asks, her gaze still out on the water.

  “What was what?”

  “The song. That melody, you said it didn’t have anything to do with your mother. Can I hear it?”

  Van shrugs, picks up his guitar, and starts picking out the chords, humming the melody, lilting along, knocking the body of his guitar now and then where he imagines a drum.

  When he finishes and looks up to Jenny, her eyebrows are up, and she’s smiling, with her whole face this time. “Van, that’s lovely. Why didn’t you sing the words?”

  “Still working on them.”

  “You should sing it for your family.”

  “They wouldn’t be interested.”

  “They might enjoy it. Give them something to think about besides your mom.”

  “Nah. I’m sure it sucks as much as every other song I’ve written.”

  “Your songs are good, Van, and that one’s really good. You’re just…”

  Jenny stops, biting her lip.

  Van fi
nishes for her. “Not trying hard enough.”

  “That’s not what I meant, not really. But you’ve told me before all the songwriters are in New York or Nashville, and that to break in from way over here in Michigan is next to impossible. So why not go? Give it your best shot? Wait tables and ply your art in the great American cliché?”

  “I’ve got a job, an apartment…”

  “You hate that apartment, and the job isn’t much better.”

  “Are you trying to get rid of me? Won’t you miss me?” Van tosses off the remark casually, like he’s joking, but he’s not, in fact. The thought of being thousands of miles from Jenny has caused his chest to ache.

  Jenny looks him in the eye, softly smiling, her stripey orange hair standing out like feathers, dancing in the wind. “I’d rather miss you than have you miss out.”

  Then he feels something, like something rising in his chest, something that might burst free and fly off, only it can’t, so he stands up himself and crosses the room to Jenny, pushing his guitar behind his back as he does it, leaving his hands free.

  Jenny doesn’t return the kiss for a moment, freezing in place, then she grabs his face with her hands and rises on tiptoe. Van wraps his arms around her, lifting her off the floor.

  CHAPTER 59

  Irina

  IRINA’S KNEES TREMBLE SO HARD SHE CAN HARDLY BALANCE, awkward as her position is, poised over the toilet. She grasps the countertop for support, and the side of the tub.

  It’s blood.

  Just a drop or two, but definitely there, scarlet beads in the water.

  “Darius,” she murmurs, wanting him but knowing he’s out with Max buying ice at the corner store.

  “Mom?” she calls. Her bedroom is close, and she knows Mira is lying down, but it’s her mother she wants now. “Mom!”

  Irina nearly reels with a sense of déjà vu, when she saw blood in the toilet all those years ago, more than a decade now. She’d been terrified, thought for sure she was bleeding to death, and she’d had to call out four times before her father shouted through the door. Her mother was not home from her night class, yet.

  So it was Max who dug around under the sink until he came up with a maxi pad, her father who assured her it was perfectly normal and that her mother would explain when she got home.

  After the fear and embarrassment ebbed away, Irina was enraged that her mother hadn’t told her. Mira apologized, consoled, made her tea, and let her stay up late, cuddled under a quilt, eating cookies.

  She said, I didn’t know you would start this young, you’re barely ten years old. She said, I’m surprised your school hasn’t had “the talk” yet, I guess I’m out of practice, all those years since Katya…

  And Irina shrank smaller into the quilt, reminded again that she was an afterthought, an unwelcome echo of her accomplished older sister.

  “Mom!” tries Irina again, her voice breaking.

  She hears light, quick steps before Mira bursts into the bathroom without knocking. Her hair is wild and ratty, her eyes shiny and face marred with red splotches. “What’s wrong?” she says, shutting the door hard behind her.

  “I’m bleeding…” Irina chokes out, standing up with considerable effort, checking her panties. There are small dots there, too.

  Mira moves over to inspect the toilet. “It isn’t much. A little bleeding is normal early on, it’s probably fine.”

  Irina pulls up her panties and shorts, finding herself pinned to the corner of the bathroom by her mother’s position, damn these tiny bathrooms and old houses.

  Mira says, “Did your doctor say bleeding was normal at your appointment?”

  “I haven’t been yet.” Irina gulps at saying this aloud, realizing she’d failed her child at least once already.

  Mira gulps hard. “I could drive you to emergency. If you want.”

  Irina shudders. That long wait, a strange doctor poking around.

  “There’s nothing they can do, is there?”

  “I don’t think so, baby. If there’s anything wrong, which there probably isn’t.”

  “But you don’t know that for sure. I could be…it could be…”

  “No, I don’t know for sure.”

  Something breaks inside Irina’s chest, she feels it giving way. “Mom,” she says, falling into her mother’s arms. “Mom, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this, but I don’t want to lose it, I don’t want the baby to die…”

  Irina feels her mother sway in place, the breath of “shhh” blowing past her ear.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” she says again. “I’m going to screw it all up, I know it.”

  Her mother whispers, “Sweetheart, we all screw up our kids. You just try to keep the screwups small and love them like anything.”

  Irina pushes back from her mom, and finds herself eye to eye with her chest. “Mom, I’m sorry I’ve been so hard on you this weekend.”

  “It’s okay, sweetie.” Mira brushes a lock of hair behind Irina’s ear. “It’s a lot to process, and I haven’t handled it well myself.”

  “I just…the thought of raising a child without you around to help me…But maybe now there won’t be one.”

  “Think positive, sweetheart. I’ll brew some raspberry-leaf tea. That’s supposed to help at times like this.”

  Irina gulps air, now feeling winded and claustrophobic in the airless bathroom. “Darius would be crushed. He lost a baby before this. I can’t bear to tell him because he’s already upset that I’m leaving him.”

  “Are you?”

  Irina looks away from her mother, not sure what she’ll think. “I thought I didn’t want the baby, so I told him he could divorce me and keep the child. He got very upset; now if he thinks the baby isn’t coming, either…”

  Mira searches out Irina’s gaze until she has no choice but to look at her mother, right into her reddened eyes. “Tell him how you’re feeling, Reenie. Tell him you are scared for the baby and you are not sure about anything yet. Tell him you spoke rashly because you’re not sure, are you? You don’t want to give away your baby so much as you want to hit the panic button and reset everything back to normal.”

  Irina nods. How easily her mother can read her.

  “There’s no panic button. But there can be a new normal, and you might love that new normal.”

  Irina wonders if her mother speaks from experience, if she was reaching for the panic button twenty-two years ago when Irina was conceived. She decides not to ask. Not today.

  Mira pulls her into an embrace again. “Call the doctor on Monday, see if they’ll see you, see if they’ll reassure you the baby bean is just fine.”

  Irina nods into her mother’s shoulder, clutching her hard, and finds herself praying that her mother is right.

  CHAPTER 60

  Mira

  A CHAIN SAW WHINES OUTSIDE, AND IT MAKES THE HAIRS ON MY neck stand up.

  I’ve retreated back to the bedroom, to our double bed with the snail’s trail quilt handed down by Max’s mother. I’m feeling loopy and wrung out from being yanked out of my nap by Irina’s desperate cry for me. How that brought back memories, hearing that plaintive call of “Mom” that sets you running. Because it’s a different tone, the “Mom” called out from genuine need as opposed to the persistent whiny demand.

  The chain saw makes me wonder if they’re going to work on our big tree or the one that crushed Katya’s car, but the noise is too distant for that. Some other neighbor cutting away the debris.

  Trying to shake off the high, and it’s proving more difficult than usual. My eyes don’t like to stay focused. But I should go downstairs for brunch with a semblance of dignity after my display on the pier this morning.

  Must remember to flush any remaining pot in the house.

  At the time it felt wonderful, to flee my family and this house and go commune with the lake, it felt freeing to be hanging over the water, eyes on the horizon. To think I almost jerked myself right off the edge when Max and Ivan tried to pull me in.r />
  It was their hands on my arms that did it, made me want to pull away from them because it made me think of that day, after we talked to Dr. Graham.

  As soon as we stepped into the kitchen after the long drive home, Max tried to fold me in his arms, and I shook him off like a sodden raincoat.

  “Mira, I know you’re afraid…”

  “You don’t know anything about it.”

  I’d forbidden him from talking to me in the car, and he obeyed, probably because he could barely concentrate on the road. I could tell that by the way he clutched the steering wheel. His hand shook when he flicked on the turn signal.

  All the way home from Traverse City, I’d watched the highway reflectors along the side and in rhythm with their passing thought “no, no, no.”

  So the minute we got in the house, he tried to hold me, but to me it felt grasping and aggressive.

  “Why did you leave? Why won’t you listen to the doctor?”

  “She says I have to let them mutilate me, and I won’t do it.”

  “Mutilate?” Max repeated the word, his jaw hanging open and his voice strained by an effort not to shout. It was an effort that would soon fail. “And what do you think the cancer would do? Anyway, did you hear her say you could get reconstruction? They can build you a new breast, you’d look perfectly normal.”

  “How happy would you be if they said, ‘Mr. Zielinski, we have to cut off your penis, but don’t worry, we’ll bring around a flap of your ass and you’ll be good as new.” And yes, I laughed. “Flap of ass” struck me funny somehow, and I was feeling a little crazy. It was all wrong, me in a doctor’s office, being told I was sick when I felt just fine, and Max ordering me around like a child, like his little obedient wife.

  “This isn’t fucking funny!” he screamed, and it felt like a punch. My insides crumpled up, and tears sprang to my eyes. He ripped off his glasses and threw them to the floor at my feet. “Will you take your life seriously for once!”