The Marriage Lie

by Kimberly Belle

  I shoot Dave a confused look, and he shrugs. Together, we set off after the coach.

  “Coach Miller, wait.” He doesn’t wait, doesn’t even slow. His long legs take two steps to my one, and I have to jog to catch up. “Please. I only need ten minutes of your time. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but my husband was a passenger on that plane that just crashed, and I—”

  “Look, lady,” he says, whirling around so fast I almost slam into him, “I am the last person you ought to be asking about Billy Griffith. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, which means I’m not going to say anything. You do the math.”

  “I’m not asking you to sugarcoat your memories. I’m only looking for the truth.”

  He shakes his head, slow and stubborn. “He and I were not friends. We didn’t run in the same circles, and we didn’t get along. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “Tell me what he was like. Tell me how long you’ve known him and who his friends were and where he lived. Tell me everything you can think of, because...” Still shaking his head, Coach Miller takes a step back and then another, his big body gearing up for a retreat, and I can tell I’m about to lose him. I take a deep breath and will myself to keep going, to tell this stranger what I’m really asking. “Because my husband lied, okay? He lied to me about a lot of things. He told me that he was en route to Orlando, not Seattle, when that plane crashed. I had no idea he’d ever even been in this city. All along, I thought he was from Memphis.”

  What does a Memphis accent sound like? The question slices through my mind, sudden and unexpected. Will didn’t have much of a Southern accent, especially not compared to mine, and he never really used any of the slang Southerners are so fond of. Maybe that’s just not how they talk in Memphis? I have no idea.

  Coach Miller stops moving, and his brows disappear under the bill of his ball cap. “Billy told you he grew up in Memphis?”

  “Yes.”

  The coach leans back, squinting at me down his nose. “Now, that sounds like something he would do.” He puffs a sigh of defeat, shoves the basket of balls at Dave’s chest, doubles back for the mitts and motions for us to follow him. “Practice starts in half an hour, so you’ll have to walk with me.”

  He leads us deeper into the maze of hallways behind the gym, talking over his shoulder. “Like I said before, I remember Billy Griffith, but not because he was such a great guy. He was the type of guy that when he came walking down the hall, everybody all of a sudden had something very important to dig out of their lockers. You understand what I’m telling you? Anybody who looked him in the eye got singled out, and nobody wanted to get singled out by Billy Griffith. Not even the teachers.”

  “Why?” Dave says. “What happened if he singled you out?”

  “Sometimes a shove or a busted lip, sometimes nothing until days later. That was the scariest thing about Billy, his unpredictability. The only thing you could count on was that he’d turn on you eventually. He was mean and he was angry, and his parents were too busy beating the crap out of each other to care.”

  His parents. His father, he said, died when he was two. His mother, he claimed, raised him on her own.

  “What ages are we talking about here?” I say as we turn the corner onto a row of windowed offices. “How long ago did you know Will—Billy?”

  Coach Miller thinks for a moment. “Well, I moved to Rainier Vista the summer before second grade, so what’s that? Seven or so?”

  His answer ties a knot in my throat, because that’s when the truth hits home. Memphis was a lie. Not a fib. Not an exaggeration. Not a little white lie or a half-truth. An intentionally false statement meant to deceive. Will never lived in Memphis. I’m not certain he ever set foot there. No wonder we spent our first anniversary in Nashville instead.

  Rage coils in my belly, writhing only a second or two before it bursts to the blistering surface at the memory of Will’s silence on that surprise drive to Memphis. I think about the panic he must have felt at my accidental excavation of his lie, how he must have been scrambling to come up with an explanation, finally settling on the excuse that his Memphis memories were “too painful to relive.” I bought it without question, turning the car around without second thought. And now, walking down a dingy, smelly hallway in Will’s real alma mater, I feel like a fool.

  We stop at an office door, and Coach Miller shoves it open with a giant paw. He ushers us into a tiny and neatly cluttered room, with papers and charts and boxes of sporting equipment stacked in tidy columns along the wall. He takes the basket from Dave, sets it on the floor by the door and offers us a seat in the pair of ratty chairs in front of his desk. I fall onto mine and try to breathe around the fireball in my chest.

  Coach Miller sits, digs his heels into the carpet and rolls himself up to the desk, his chair wheels squealing like nails over a chalkboard. He does a little double take when he catches my expression. “You okay?”

  Somehow, my voice finds its way outside my head, and it sounds only slightly strangled. “I’m fine. Please, continue.”

  “Okay,” he says, but in a way that tells me he’s not totally convinced. He takes off his cap, rubs a palm over his tight curls and sets it back. “Like I was saying, nobody at home was disciplining him, which means he pretty much did whatever he pleased and got away with it, both in school and out. He fought. He stole stuff. He dealt drugs in the hallways and on street corners. He skipped so many classes, I don’t know how he ever graduated. Because the teachers wanted him gone, probably.”

  Coach Miller’s revelations are like a string of mini explosions in my head, one on top of the other, leaving me breathless and dizzy.

  “Will told me his father died when he was a baby,” I say. “He said he had no memory of him.”

  “Wishful thinking, probably. Mr. Griffith was a mean old drunk. But it was his mother who died, as I recall sometime during our junior year.”

  I think back to the first time Will told me of her death, the only time I ever saw him cry. Malignant melanoma, he said, caught after it had already metastasized to her brain, liver and lungs. An awful, painful death. “Cancer?”

  As soon as I say it, I wish I could go back and fix my tone, make it sound less gullible wife, more certain. Surely, Will couldn’t have faked a tale that emotional. No one is that good an actor.

  But Coach Miller barks a laugh. “Hardly. She died in a fire.”

  “Oh, my God,” Dave says. “That poor woman. Poor Will.”

  Coach Miller leans back in his chair, his weight bouncing it around a few times before it finds stillness. “Poor Billy, huh? Let me tell you something. Every kid in our neighborhood was dealing with some kind of crap at home—addictions, arrests, deadbeat dads all over the place—but we were finding a way to deal with them. Billy didn’t even try. He just got angry and mean.”

  Dave and I exchange a frown, and I can tell he’s thinking what I am. How does a drug-dealing street punk become a college-educated, loving husband?

  I clear my throat against a sudden onslaught of emotions leapfrogging up my chest. Sadness for Will’s lonely childhood and his mother’s violent death. Resentment for parents who couldn’t stop slinging fists long enough to love on their son. Indignation at whatever higher power dealt Will such a crappy hand. Fury I’m only finding out about it now.

  “What ever happened to his father?” I somehow manage.

  “I heard rumors he’s sick, something needing full-time care, but...” Coach Miller lifts both hands, lets them fall with a thunk to the desk. “My mom used to keep me updated on neighborhood gossip, but she died a couple years ago.”

  Dave and I fall silent. When we were young, Mom always told us there were three sides to every argument. Our side, the other side and, somewhere in the middle, the truth. Maybe this is what Dave meant when he asked if I was sure I wanted to know about Will. Without him h
ere to defend himself from Coach Miller’s tale, I can’t gauge where the middle falls.

  But that doesn’t mean I’m about to swallow this story whole. Coach Miller is clearly holding on to his grudge with both gigantic fists, and for events that went down almost two decades ago.

  He takes in our doubtful expressions and grunts, shoving away from the desk. “Believe me. Don’t believe me. Doesn’t change the fact that Billy Griffith was a spiteful, sneaky thug who could come up behind you, stab you with a knife and leave before you even noticed the blood. Ask around. I’m sure you’ll have a hard time finding anybody to say otherwise. Now I gotta get to practice before those punks destroy my diamond.” He stands and stalks past us, forgetting all about the baskets of equipment in his hurry to get to the door. He stops himself halfway into the hall, his big hand gripping the doorjamb. “Do you believe in karma? Because that’s the first thing I thought when I heard what happened to Billy.”

  * * *

  Dave and I backtrack our way through the corridors of Hancock High, both of us trying to make sense of Coach Miller’s story. I wanted a toe-dip into my husband’s life. What I got was more like a full-body dunking into arctic waters, and it’s left me shell-shocked and numb.

  “Did you believe him?” I say as we turn the corner onto a wall of dingy and dented lockers under a giant banner. Go, Wildcats! Stay Fierce!

  Dave lifts a shoulder, and his mouth scrunches into a tight squiggle I know all too well. He doesn’t want to, but he believes at least part of what we heard. “We could check with the local police station. If Will really was dealing drugs, maybe he got into trouble. The police might have it on record.”

  “I guess.” I sigh, my shoulders sagging toward the dingy floor. “And I get that Will wouldn’t want to talk about his mother’s death. I get it. But that story he fed me about her dying of cancer? I cried, Dave. Real tears. He had all the medical jargon down, too. Knew all the symptoms and details of how the cancer progressed. You can’t just make something like that up. He must have spent weeks researching melanoma on the web. I mean, you have to really commit to a lie like that one.”

  At the stairwell, Dave shoves open the door, stepping aside to let me pass. “I’d imagine so.”

  “And, okay, so his father wasn’t the nicest person. That’s not something he would have liked to talk about, either. But why not just say they were estranged? Why lie and tell me he never knew him?”

  “You’re the psychologist here. What would make a person fictionalize the first eighteen years of their life?”

  “Or more. After these past few days, I’m no longer assuming anything from the time before I met him. I’m not saying I believe everything Coach Miller said, but he described a deeply troubled kid, and even if only part of his story was true, you don’t bounce back from something like that—if at all—without serious therapy. Which is why I need more than just one eyewitness account. I need to talk to their old neighbors, find some more teachers and classmates. Coach Miller can’t be the only one who remembers him.”

  Dave nods his agreement, and we emerge from the stairwell at the front of the building. From his spot by the entrance, the guard gives us a chin lift. “You find what you needed?”

  “Yes,” Dave says, at the same time I hook a thumb back into the belly of the building, in the direction of the library. “Let’s go take another look at the yearbook. Better yet, let’s make some copies.”

  “No need.”

  “What? Why?”

  He flashes me a zip it look, leaning in close and talking through gritted teeth. “I’ll fill you in in the car.”

  The guard grunts like he couldn’t care either way. “Sign out before you go.”

  Dave signs us out, and we head out the front door into a biting cold. Sometime while we were inside, steel-colored clouds rolled in on a front that dropped the temperature a good ten degrees. I shiver and tug my coat higher around my neck, but Dave unzips his, pulling the 1999 yearbook from behind his back with a cocky smile.

  My eyes go wide. “You stole it?”

  He purses his lips. “I prefer to think of it as borrowing.”

  “India won’t see it that way. And when she notices it missing, she’ll know exactly who took it, too. Our names are on the visitors’ log, Dave.”

  “Stop worrying. Borrowing implies giving it back, as soon as we’ve made ourselves a copy. We’ll put it back before India even notices it’s gone.”

  “You don’t know that. What if she does? What if she tracks me back to Lake Forrest?”

  He rolls his eyes. “Isn’t it difficult, walking around with your panties in such a wad?”

  I love my brother, but here’s where we’re different. I live in a world where rules are meant to be followed, whereas he thinks rules are mostly an inconvenience. Especially the ones that inconvenience him. Dave puts his feet up on chairs and cuts through parking lots and brings his own snacks into movie theaters, all without ever getting caught. It’s all about attitude, he would say, and he’s not wrong. Dave has a boldness tucked inside him that draws people in and makes them forget he just stepped on their toes in order to push to the front of the line.

  At the top of the stairs, the school doors slam open, and a throng of teenagers spills out. They hit the steps and scatter, moving at us with a speed and energy that can only come after being cooped up in a classroom for over eight hours.

  Dave grabs my wrist, drags me in the direction of the street. “Come on, before we get trampled.”

  We’re a block away, stepping into the rental, when my phone rings with a number I don’t recognize. I press it to my ear. “Hello?”

  A woman’s voice, high and brisk, greets me. “Iris Griffith?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Leslie Thomas. I’m calling from the Family Assistance Center—”

  “What happened to Margaret Ann?”

  “Ann Margaret,” Dave whispers. He starts the car but doesn’t shift it into gear.

  On the other end of the line, the caller doesn’t miss a beat. “Margaret Ann is currently unavailable, but I was hoping I could ask you a few questions.”

  My attention snags, just for a second, on the name. Ann Margaret or Margaret Ann? Either way, this woman has caught me off guard. “Oh, I... Sorry, I’m not really in a place to talk right now.”

  “This won’t take more than a minute or two. I understand that a number of families have banded together and are bringing a wrongful death lawsuit against Liberty Air. Are you one of them?”

  Both her question and her tone, high-strung and almost manic, send all sorts of warning bells ringing in my head. Why would anyone at the FAC, an organization that exists under the Liberty Air umbrella, ask such a thing? I frown at Dave, whose brows shoot skyward. What? he mouths.

  “I...I don’t know,” I say into the phone.

  “You don’t know if you’re one of the families suing Liberty Air?”

  “No, I don’t know anything about the lawsuit. Who did you say you were again?”

  “My name is Leslie Thomas. This morning the Miami Herald reported that the pilot was coming off a three-day bachelor party in South Beach and was functioning on only one hour of sleep. If that’s true, will you and the other families be charging Liberty Air with manslaughter?”

  Something icy steals around my heart, racking my torso with a chill that’s not from the cold. The pilot was half-asleep, possibly hungover? The blood drains from my cheeks, and I press a palm to my churning stomach.

  Dave frowns. “What’s wrong?”

  But wait. Why would someone at the Family Assistance Center be telling me this? Aren’t they supposed to be protecting the interests of Liberty Air?

  “Who are you again?”

  “My name is Leslie Thomas.”

  “And you’re calling from the FAC
?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Then why are you questioning me like a journalist?”

  Silence. I hear her gearing up for another pitch, but it’s too late. I already have her number.

  “Because you are a journalist,” I say in an angry hiss. “Which means you’re also a liar.”

  I punch End on my screen and begin filling Dave in, but almost immediately, my phone rings again and from the same number. “Do you know how to block this person?”

  Dave takes the phone from my fingers. He’s fiddling with the screen when it lights up with a text. I lean across the middle console and frown at the message on my screen.

  Go home, Iris.

  “Who sent that?” I say.

  Dave tries to pull up the number, but it’s blocked. His thumbs type out a quick reply.

  Who is this?

  He hits Send, and we watch my screen for a reply, waking it up with a fingertip whenever it starts to fade to black.

  “Why would somebody be telling you to go home?” Dave says.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who else knows you’re here?”

  “Our parents and James, full stop. I haven’t talked to any of my girlfriends since the memorial, and I didn’t tell Ted or anyone at school I was leaving, only that I was taking a week or two off.”

  Dave thinks for a moment. “Well, if it’s somebody back in Atlanta, wouldn’t they have said come home instead?”

  I nod, right as another text pings my phone.

  Someone who knows what you’re looking for, and it’s not in Seattle.

  14

  Across the lake in Bellevue, Dave and I begin at a Best Buy, our best shot of tracing the blocked number on my phone. After that second text came in—Someone who knows what you’re looking for, and it’s not in Seattle—the errand shimmied up to top priority. Neither of us misses the irony. If Will were here, he’d unearth the number in thirty seconds flat.