Lies You Wanted to Hear

by James Whitfield Thomson

  Sara and I had a beer in the clubhouse after our round of golf.

  “When’s El getting in?” she said.

  “Tuesday afternoon. Around two-thirty. You want to pick him up?”

  “Sure. I can’t wait to see him. Has he told you about his band?”

  “A little. We talk every Sunday evening. He’s not exactly the world’s best communicator.”

  “He’s a college freshman, Dad. He’s got a million other things to do.” She wouldn’t let anyone say anything remotely negative about him, even if it was true.

  “I take it he’s writing you two or three long emails a day.”

  “He keeps in touch,” she said, ignoring my sarcasm, which probably meant she felt as out of the loop as I did. She sipped her beer. “I think he has a girlfriend.”

  “Really? That’s terrific.” Elliot had always been shy around girls. I’d catch him looking, but he could barely say hi, let alone strike up a conversation. In his sophomore year a girl who had been a classmate of Sara’s started flirting with him. I tried to caution him but he was already under her spell. They went on a few dates, and I think she may even have taken his virginity, but she lost interest quickly. Elliot was devastated and retreated back into his music. He went to his senior prom with a girl who was a wonderful violinist, but he said they were just friends.

  Sara went off with some of her pals Sunday evening. I called Elliot, but he was busy studying for his last exam and our conversation was brief. I went to bed early. I’d been busy at work and hadn’t even done any Christmas shopping yet. Not that I was complaining. The dot-com boom was in full swing and business had never been better.

  When we moved to California, I spent two years working as a carpenter and getting to know other guys in the trades. Then I got my contractor’s license and went out on my own. My time with the courier company had also served me well. I made up my mind to work with people who saw me as a professional. I wanted clients, not customers. I told my prospects I wasn’t interested in being the low bidder. I said my goal was to turn their visions into reality and keep their hassles to a minimum. Within a year I had two three-man crews working full time. I paid good wages and held my workers to strict standards—safety first, no foul language or loud radios on the job, keep conversations with the clients to a minimum. I had made my share of mistakes in the ten years I’d been in business, but my company had a reputation for excellent work. Most of my jobs came through referrals from former clients.

  On Tuesday I got home from work at five-thirty and heard the sounds of Elliot’s oboe coming from his room. It sounded like something new. A sad, sweet melody, not the usual jangle of notes he’d been playing all summer before he left for college. Sara was in her room with the door closed. I tapped on Elliot’s door, and the music stopped.

  I poked my head in. “Welcome home, bud.”

  “Hey, Dad.”

  He had a wispy mustache and a little tuft of hair under his lower lip. I resisted making a crack about it. We gave each other a hug, and I asked him how his last exam had gone.

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Whadya say we go to Limoncello’s for dinner?”

  “Sounds great.”

  Sara came out of her room and joined us.

  I said, “I liked that piece you were playing. Is that one of your own?”

  “Yeah, the last thing I turned in for my composition course. The professor said it needs work.”

  “Sounds beautiful to me. What’s it called?”

  “‘Lost and Found.’”

  “El?” Sara said, a threat in her voice.

  He gave her a dirty look. “Whatever.”

  I glanced at her, then at Elliot. She was bossy and he was as stubborn as crabgrass. They didn’t fight often, but when they did, things could get ugly fast. Cross her and she’d go for blood. “What’s going on here, guys?”

  “Nothing.” Sara’s eyes flashed at her brother. “Nothing at all.”

  Elliot said, “Everything’s fine, Dad.”

  I shrugged. “I gotta go clean up. We’ll leave for Limoncello’s in an hour.” I said to Sara, “You want to ask Ajit if he wants to come too?”

  “Ugghhh. You must be kidding.”

  “Well, okay then.” It was no use trying to guess what she was upset about. I’d probably find out soon enough. I headed down the hall, singing, “’Tis the season to be jolly. Fa la la la la.”

  Sara dominated the conversation at dinner. She talked about Paris and how much she loved it. She said she could see herself living there someday. I asked Elliot about The Spendthrifts. Besides him, they had keyboards, saxophone, guitar, and percussion. He said the group had been offered a chance to play a free gig at a small jazz club in Somerville.

  I said, “Where’d you guys get the name?”

  “Our drummer came up with it. He said when you give a performance, you have to give it your all. You know, spend everything you got.”

  “Who writes your music?” Sara said. “Is it mostly yours?”

  “No, we all do. So far it’s been great with everybody contributing. But it’s easy to see why bands are always breaking up. People start bickering about whose stuff is better and what gets played.”

  When I asked about Berklee, he said the musicians there were so good it was intimidating, but I could see in his eyes that he was holding his own. He told us how much he liked Boston. I noticed Sara give him one harsh look during dinner, but they seemed to have put aside whatever they had been arguing about.

  When we finished eating, I said, “You guys interested in a movie? Or we could go get a Christmas tree.”

  Sara said, “I’ve heard The End of the Affair is excellent.”

  “Ahh, Julianne Moore,” I said. “I could watch her sleep.”

  “You may have to,” Elliot said. “That movie has boring written all over it. I say we go see Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo.”

  Sara and I laughed.

  “Laugh now,” he said, pretending he was miffed, “but that movie’s destined to be a classic.”

  “Like Evita,” Sara said.

  Elliot clutched an imaginary knife in his chest. In his hierarchy, Madonna and Andrew Lloyd Webber ranked alongside Hitler and Pol Pot for the evil they’d unleashed on the world.

  While we finished dessert, we laughed and tried to name the worst movies we’d ever seen. We ended up going to The End of the Affair and all agreed it was wonderful.

  ***

  When I came home from work the next day, Sara was in the kitchen taking a pan of cornbread from the oven. The table was set, a bowl of bean salad in the middle. Sophomore year of high school Sara announced she was a vegetarian and would be taking over our meals. I had never been much of a cook and relied a lot on pizza and Chinese and Mexican takeout. Much to Elliot’s and my relief, Sara’s vegetarian phase didn’t last long, but she became a wonderful cook. Shellfish stew, chicken tetrazzini, goulash that would have made Sandor proud, great salads with homemade dressings. A few of my girlfriends made snide remarks about me turning my daughter into a surrogate wife, but it sounded like jealousy to me. As far as I was concerned, it was a perfect arrangement. Sara liked being in charge; Elliot and I loved the meals she made for us. When she left for college, he and I fell right back into our old habits.

  I went to the sink and washed my hands. I could hear the sound of Elliot’s oboe coming from his room.

  “I have to admit I was wrong about Berklee,” I said to Sara. “It seems like it’s really been good for him.”

  “Seems like it,” she said, but the tension in her voice suggested something different.

  I dried my hands and put my arm around her shoulder. “You cut yourself?”

  She looked at the Band-Aid on her finger and shrugged. “Occupational hazard.”

  Elliot came into the room. “Hey, Dad.”

/>   “Hey, El. You guys have a good day?”

  “Yeah, it was okay.” I knew the way he said it that things still weren’t right between them.

  “Sit,” Sara said, pointing with a spatula.

  She took the lid off the frying pan on the stove and served us each a wedge of the frittata stuffed with cheddar cheese, onions, mushrooms, and broccoli—the kind of thing you’d pay twelve bucks apiece for in a restaurant. Over dinner she told us more about Paris and her research on Cézanne. She seemed a little manic. Elliot was quiet and distracted, which wasn’t unusual. Sometimes he’d be looking right at you, but you could tell he wasn’t there. If he were a cartoon character, there’d be musical notes flashing across his eyes. He cleared the dinner dishes from the table while I made a pot of coffee. Sara brought out an apple cobbler she had baked, and we all sat down at the table again.

  “Dad?” Elliot said as I was pouring sugar into my coffee. “There’s something I—”

  “Elliot, don’t,” Sara said.

  “I’m sorry. I have to.”

  “No you don’t. You don’t have to do anything. You promised you’d wait.”

  “I said I’d think about it.”

  “Well then, think, you selfish little shit. This isn’t only about you.”

  “Hey, enough,” I said. “Come on, guys. What’s going on here?”

  She glared at her brother and jabbed a finger across the table. “I’m warning you, El. If this whole thing blows up, I’ll never forgive you.”

  He paused for a second, then turned to me. “I was in the library on Thanksgiving weekend, working on a paper for my contemporary history course. Our professor likes us to do original research, so I was going through some newspapers on microfilm, and I came across a photograph from the Herald that won a Pulitzer Prize. It was a picture of a young woman and a little girl and some flower pots falling from a collapsed fire escape. In the photo you can’t see the ground or the top of the building, just the woman falling head first like she’s doing a clumsy swan dive and the little girl with her arms and legs spread out wide. It said in the caption that the little girl lived but the woman died.” He poked at his cobbler with his fork but didn’t take a bite. “That picture got me thinking about our mother and how she died in a fire too, and I started going through the microfilm to see if I could find the story in the newspaper. You never wanted to talk about it, Dad, or tell us how it happened. I wasn’t…I mean, I don’t know. I just wanted to read about it and maybe find a picture of her in the paper. All I knew was the year she died. It took a long time to scan each roll of film. I’d almost given up when I came across this.”

  He took a piece of white paper from his back pocket, unfolded the paper, and handed it to me. It was a photocopy of a newspaper article with a photo of him and Sara as little kids. The caption read, Ex-cop disappears with children. I glanced at the story without reading it. My heart was a jackhammer. I couldn’t have spoken if I’d tried.

  Elliot said, “I probably wouldn’t have noticed the article if wasn’t for Sundae.” In the photo, Sara was holding the llama in her arms. Elliot looked at me. “She still lives in Boston. In the same house in Jamaica Plain, I think. Her number is listed in the phone book.”

  Sara said, “I can’t believe you’ve known about this for a month.” She turned to me. “He only told me about it yesterday.”

  “What was I supposed to do, Sar?” Elliot said. “You were in Paris. It’s not exactly something you can talk about long distance.”

  “So, you wait till it’s three days before Christmas?”

  I was trying to get my bearings and think of something to say.

  I said to Elliot, “Have you contacted her?”

  “Not exactly. I called the phone number Monday evening and got an answering machine. I wasn’t going to say anything if she picked up. Not without talking to you and Sara first. I’m not sure why I called or what I was expecting. Maybe just to hear her voice. On the machine she says she hasn’t seen her children since you kidnapped us in 1983. She asks people to leave a message or call her other number if they have any information about us.” He swallowed hard. “Then she speaks directly to Sara and me, except she calls me Nathan. It’s really sad. She says she misses us every day.”

  I laid the photocopy of the article on the table and smoothed the creases with my thumb. In the picture the kids looked so cute. I had only a few photos of them before Elliot was about six. Another caution, I suppose—a way to keep the past unseen.

  “Tell us what happened, Dad,” he said. “Why did you take us? Did she hurt us or something?”

  I blew out a long breath, still struggling for something to say.

  Sara said, “You’re the best father ever, Daddy. You don’t have a mean bone in your body.” She pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her hands, wriggling with anxiety and love. “I know you did what you had to.”

  I picked up the newspaper article and looked at it for about ten seconds and put it back down again. “Listen, you guys deserve answers. It’s just I…I’m feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment. I need to clear my head.” I stood up. “I want to go outside and get some fresh air. Just for five or ten minutes, that’s all. Then I’ll come back and we can talk. I’ll tell you everything.” I kissed Sara on top of her head. “Please, honey, don’t be angry at El.”

  The air was clear, and the stars shone bright in the sky. I walked down to the grove of lemon trees. Perhaps it was just a defense mechanism, but I had always believed that one day I’d be caught. Some nights I’d lie awake and imagine myself in a courtroom, explaining myself to a judge and jury. I would tell them what I had done might be wrong in the eyes of the law, but not as a father trying to protect his kids. My children were in danger. Sometimes justice works too slowly. I had to act. Yet for all my fine reasoning, I never considered what I would say to Sara and Elliot. What did it matter what verdict a jury might reach when the worst penalty could come from my children? Did I assume I would never have to explain myself to them? Elliot wanted to know what had been taken from him, a reckoning between the life he’d had and the one that might have been. In time, Sara would want answers too. The irony was that in my attempt to comfort my children for their loss, I had turned Lucy into the perfect mother. Now I had to tell them the ugly truths, the same ones I’d so often told myself.

  “Well, here goes,” I said, my voice cracking a little. We were all sitting at the kitchen table. “You guys have been my first priority since the day you were born. You are my world. Everything I do comes back to you. The trouble is, I told you a huge lie and committed a crime. I told you your mother was dead, and I stole you away. I could lie some more and say it was the hardest decision I’ve ever made in my life, but the truth is, it wasn’t that hard at all. I did what I had to do to keep you safe. Over the years I’ve tried to pretend that Lucy was a good, kind, loving mother, but she was not a stable person. She was incredibly irresponsible and self-absorbed. When we were going through the divorce, my lawyer got her to admit to all kinds of bad stuff in a deposition. I tried to get full custody of you kids, but the court wouldn’t allow it. The law bends over backward to protect a mother’s rights. Do you guys remember anything about her?”

  “Not really,” Elliot said. “Just a few things you told us.”

  “I remember she was tall and pretty,” Sara said. “She smoked. She liked to read to us. She used to call me sugar pop.”

  “Do you remember Griffin?”

  Sara narrowed her eyes, trying to recall. “The name maybe. Was that her boyfriend?”

  “Yes, he was a creep. They did a lot of drugs together. She was involved with him for a few years after college. They broke up and I came along, and Lucy and I fell in love. I did anyway. I think she tried. She got pregnant, and we got married. As far as I was concerned, I was the happiest man in the universe, but Griffin was like a dark shadow hanging over us.
Sometimes I’d just look at her and know she was thinking of him. He came back, and they started having an affair. I caught the two of them in bed together. They were both high as kites. There was an altercation, and he gave me this.” I pulled the hairs apart to show them the scar above my ear.

  “Oh my god,” Sara said. “It sounds like a nightmare.”

  I nodded. “With you guys stuck in the middle.”

  “Do you remember when you broke your wrist?”

  “A little bit. I remember how itchy my cast was.”

  “Do you remember how you got it?”

  “I fell off a trampoline.”

  “You were on it with Griffin. He was probably stoned out of his head. Lucy tried to dismiss it as a simple accident, but I kept thinking how you could have sailed into the jungle gym or landed differently and broken your neck.”

  Elliot gave me a questioning look. “And the courts wouldn’t do anything?”

  “I didn’t even report it. I told my lawyer, but he just shrugged. It’s ridiculous how biased the system is toward mothers. A woman has to be an axe murderer before she loses custody of her children.”

  Sara said, “Is that when you decided to take us? When I broke my arm?”

  “That wasn’t the half of it. Every time I turned around, it was something new. Lucy would forget to pick you guys up at day care, send you outside in the middle of winter without your hats and gloves. You remember Nanda, your grandmother? She got arrested for drunk driving with you kids in the car? I couldn’t believe Lucy let you ride with her when she knew the woman was a total lush. One day I found a burn hole in a cushion on your mother’s couch, the kind that goes all the way down into the stuffing. It’s a wonder the whole place didn’t go up in flames. Lucy and Griffin would smoke dope and get so wasted they couldn’t see straight. I’d go on business trips for three or four days and be sick with worry the whole time I was away. I was afraid I’d come home and…” I shook my head. There were tears in my eyes.