by Lisa Unger
Charlene, a little girl lost, hiding behind a mask of black eyeliner and vamp red lipstick. She had an aura that somehow managed to be knowing but desperate, fiery yet vulnerable. She was the kind of girl who started wars, at once acquiescent and defiant. She’d spun a web around Maggie’s son without his knowing it, without even perhaps her intention. Spider silk was stronger than chain if you happened to be a fly.
There was something in the pitch of his voice when Ricky had first told her about Charlene that had made her stop what she was doing and listen, something about the look on his face. She knew it was going to be trouble.
Maggie kept waiting for the death knell: Mom, Charlene’s pregnant. We’re getting married. But she was smart enough to keep her mouth shut, to welcome Charlene into their home, into their family as much as Jones would allow. She wasn’t a bad girl. Maggie even saw a little of her younger self in Charlene. A little.
Maggie remembered how she’d railed and rebelled when her parents tried to keep her away from a boy she’d dated from a neighboring high school. Phillip Leblanc—with his punky hair and his paint-stained black clothes (he was an artist, of course), he was everything boys from The Hollows were not: cool, exotic, artistic. She did love him, in that way that teenage girls love, like a lemming. Which is not love, of course. Unfortunately, at seventeen, no one realizes that. And the only thing her parents accomplished with their endless groundings and tirades was to push her into his waiting arms. It was a big mess, from which she’d barely extricated herself. But that was another life. She still thought about him sometimes, wondered what became of him. Her random Google searches over the years had never turned anything up. He was a troubled boy, she realized now, and probably grew into a troubled man.
Even her mother had admitted recently, during one of Maggie’s laments about Charlene, that they’d handled it all wrong. Maggie was surprised, because her mother was generally not one to give an inch. But Mom was long on self-reflection these days—when she wasn’t obsessing about some noise in her attic.
Luckily, Jones recognized that when it came to Charlene, their son was standing on the edge of a cliff. Any sudden movement to help or control might cause a leap. They wouldn’t get him back.
That girl is sleeping with our son, he said to her one night as they sipped wine by the pool.
I know, she said, not without a twinge of something angry or jealous or sad. She’d seen Charlene with her hand on Ricky’s crotch just the day before. Somehow it made her remember changing his diapers and giving him a bath. She’d felt another lash of grief. Sometimes it seemed like that was all it was, motherhood—grief and guilt and fear. You said goodbye a little every day—from the minute they left your body until they left your home. But no, that wasn’t all. There was that love, that wrenching, impossible love. It was all so hard sometimes, hard enough with two careers that they hadn’t wanted another. But it was over so fast.
There’s something not right about that girl.
I know it, she said.
Jones cast her a surprised glance over the table. I thought you liked her.
She gave a slow shrug. I care about her because I care about Ricky. And he loves her.
With a sharp exhale: What does he know about love?
Not enough. That’s why it’s so dangerous.
• • •
“I’ll pay for the tux and the limo,” she said now. Was she begging?
“Come on, Mom.”
“Just think about it. Ask Charlene. Even a girl as hip as Char might harbor secret fantasies about dances and party dresses.” She tried for a smile but suspected she might just seem desperate.
“Okay, okay. I’ll ask her.”
He was humoring her, but she felt a little jolt of excitement just the same. She never thought of herself as that kind of mother. But there she was, pushing her kid to go to the stupid winter formal so she could have the pictures, join in with the other moms as they talked excitedly about gowns and flowers, limo services. It was embarrassing.
She went back to gazing through the catalog in order to appear nonchalant—a sensor alarm for the pool, a ceramic frog that hid a key in his belly, a floating cooler. She felt like buying something. Anything. She noticed her nails. She needed a manicure.
The screen door slammed again. When she looked up, her son was gone; her husband had taken his place, sorting through the mail. If they knew how alike they were in every way, they’d both burst into flames.
“Where’s Johnny Rotten?” asked Jones without heat.
“He was here a minute ago.” She closed the catalog and threw it in the trash.
“Heard me coming,” he said. He opened the phone bill, glanced at it, and put it on the counter.
“Probably,” she said. Then, “No more fighting today, okay?”
“What’s to fight about, Maggie? The war is lost. Nothing left to do but surrender.”
She felt her throat constrict. “It’s not a battle. There aren’t supposed to be winners and losers. He’s our son.”
“Tell that to him.”
She looked over at him, but he was a locked box, staring down at the rest of the mail—more junk. She didn’t know how to comfort him anymore, how to soften him. The years, the job, had made him harder. Not all the time. But his anger used to be hot. He’d yell and storm. Now he folded into himself, shut everyone else out. You didn’t have to be a shrink to know this wasn’t a good thing.
He glanced over at her. A quick up and down. “You look nice. Do something to your hair?”
“I had it trimmed a couple of days ago.”
She tossed her copper curls at him, blinked her eyes in a teasing come-hither.
He moved over to her and wrapped her up in his big arms. She leaned into him, feeling his broad chest through the softness of his denim shirt, then looked into his beloved face.
“I can still drown in those blue eyes, Maggie,” he said with a smile.
The years, parenthood, money worries, all kinds of stresses, had not robbed her of her love for him—though there were times when she feared they had. She still loved the sight of him, the smell of him, the feel of him. But sometimes she felt like they didn’t always look at each other anymore. Like the gold watch his uncle left him, or the diamond earrings in a box that had been her grandmother’s—precious things in the landscape of a life, cherished but barely noticed. Trotted out for special occasions, maybe, but most often taken for granted.
There were worse things. She’d seen her friends’ marriages implode and dissolve, leaving massive emotional wreckage or just disappearing at sea, second marriages no better. She didn’t always like Jones. Sometimes she ached to punch him in the jaw really hard, so hard she could split her own knuckles with the force of it. But she loved him no less totally than she did her own son. It was that complete, that much a part of her. He was half of her, for better or for worse.
“He’s okay,” she said, squeezing his middle. “He’s going to be okay.”
Silence. Jones took a deep breath, which she felt in the rise of his chest against hers.
Because that was what it was, wasn’t it? Not just anger. Not a need to control in the way we most often mean it. Not a lack of love or understanding for their boy. It was fear. Fear that, after all the years of protecting his health, his heart, his mind, setting bedtimes and boundaries, giving warnings about strangers and looking both ways before crossing the street, it wouldn’t be enough. Fear that, as he stood on the threshold of adulthood, forces beyond their control would take him down a path where they could no longer reach him. Fear that he’d be seduced by something ugly and would choose it. And that there would be nothing they could do but let him go. She believed they’d taught him well. Prayed they had. Why did her husband have so little faith?
“I hope so,” he said flatly, like it might already be too late.
She pulled back to look at him, to admonish him, but saw by the clock on the stainless-steel microwave behind him that she had just five minutes
until her next session. She didn’t have time for a throw-down. She saw him notice her eyes drift, and then he moved away from her, unknowingly mimicking Ricky by opening the refrigerator and peering inside.
“Off to save the world,” he said. “One desperate soul at a time. But what about her husband?”
“What about him?” she said, pouring herself a cup of coffee before heading down the hallway that connected her house to the suite of rooms where she saw her patients. “Is he a desperate soul?”
They were kidding around. Weren’t they? When she turned to look at him, he was still gazing into the refrigerator, looking odd—too tired around the eyes.
“Jones?”
He turned to grin at her. “Desperate for some lunch,” he said with a wink. Did it seem forced?
“There’s leftover lasagna and a fresh salad I just made,” she said, feeling a pang of domestic guilt for having eaten quickly without him even though she’d suspected he would pop home for lunch. She quickly quashed it. I’m a wife, not a handmaiden. I’m a mother, not a waitress. How many times had she said those two sentences? Maybe one of these days she’d start to believe it herself.
“My cholesterol?” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“Low-fat cheese? Whole wheat pasta? Ground turkey?”
“Ugh,” he said, finding and reaching for it. “When did we get so healthy?”
“We’re not healthy, Jones. We’re old.”
“Hmm.”
She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and left to meet her patient.
An Interview with Lisa Unger in Crimespree Magazine, by Jen Forbus
1) You always dreamed of writing, but you didn’t pursue a career in it immediately because you’d been raised to believe it wasn’t a “viable” job. So you left college and found a job in publishing. What happened during that time that made you decide to finally ignore the little voice telling you that you couldn’t and just “go for it,” just write your manuscript?
Well, I was always writing. I never stopped doing or being that, even though there were periods of my life where I neglected that dream and that part of myself. But I lacked the confidence, for a lot of reasons, to really make a go of it, to do the work of finding an agent and putting myself out there. But I started my first novel when I was nineteen years old. So all through my twenties I was working on it on and off, even as I worked a growing corporate publishing job.
My years in publishing were invaluable. There I gained a lot of confidence, learned to connect with the more extroverted aspects of my personality (because writers are naturally introverted). I saw people making a living at writing, following their dreams. In a sense, that work gave me permission to be what I was. It showed me that it wasn’t quite as out of reach as I had imagined.
I always think of those years in publishing, when I was working 50 or 60 hours a week and writing in the nooks and crannies of my life, as the years I paid my dues. I got published pretty quickly, once I got serious about the craft, the hours, and the dedication it takes. But I needed those years of learning the industry and learning to believe in myself to get to that place.
2) Having worked in the publishing industry and now as an author in that industry, what are your thoughts on the overall state of publishing? Do you see it as encouraging? Terrifying? Normal? What would you tell the young version of you *today*, who wanted to pursue writing as a full-time career?
This is a difficult question. Certainly the business is changing. But, as long as I have been in publishing, almost twenty years now in one way or another, the industry has been predicting its own demise. But story is life. And it is human nature to narrate existence. So I don’t think the craft, or the pleasure people take in a good story, is going anywhere. People will always read. Will they always read the printed page? I don’t know. Certainly eBook sales have skyrocketed in the last year. But I believe in the industry, in story, in the passion people have for a great book. I am not sure it matters how people are reading, as long as they are.
I guess I’ll go with Darwin on this matter. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor is it the most intelligent that survive. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
The advice I would give myself is the same advice I give to aspiring writers today. Write from your center; write every day. Write only because you cannot do anything else, because you are compelled to put words to the page. Treat publishing your work as if it is incidental to getting better at your craft every day. Publishing should not be the goal. The writing is all that matters.
3. Beautiful Lies and Sliver of Truth both centered around your protagonist Ridley Jones. Following the two Ridley Jones novels, you published two stand alones, Black Out and Die for You. And … you have the third stand alone, Fragile. All five of these books share a common link in that the protagonist has to deal with a major, life-changing deception. And either the protagonist is the one doing the deceiving or it’s a family member deceiving the protagonist. So the dynamics of family are vital to all the novels. Where does that focus originate?
The family is meant to be our foundation, the place where we are safest and most secure. It is also the foundation of our identity, the place where who we are and how we experience the world is formed. When these relationships are flawed (and they often are), or fraught with deception or abuse, the very ground on which we stand can seem like quicksand. I find this idea very intriguing. How do we become who we are? And when the relationships we use to define ourselves are dysfunctional, what does that do to our sense of identity? How do we go on? Who are we then?
When I wrote Beautiful Lies, I was very deep in thought about all of this for a few reasons. Jeffrey and I were talking about having a baby. I was having some struggles with my family. And I was very interested in the idea of what it means to be a parent. What does it mean to be someone’s child? Beautiful Lies and Sliver of Truth are, in part, meditations on that theme. When I wrote Black Out in the year after my daughter was born, the theme evolved. What does it mean to be someone’s mother, how does it change you? How do you balance the self and the person you are for your child? Die for You is in many ways a reflection on marriage. Who are we to each other? Do we ever really share all of ourselves with the people we love? These questions about our lives within our family relationships are universal. And I think it’s in these very personal quests and struggles that the stakes our highest.
Meanwhile, the family is held up as an ideal. But those relationships are often quite painful and difficult. Furthermore, as women, we are often most in danger from the people whose traditional role it is to love and protect us—our fathers, our husbands, our brothers. In our culture, we have an idea of “the other,” the evil stranger who can do us harm. But the truth is, if a woman is injured or killed, it’s often in her home. The perpetrator is often the person with whom she is most intimate; the prime suspect is always her husband. This has always been an idea that frightens and fascinates me. So I suppose that’s why it’s such a central theme in my work.
4. In Beautiful Lies, Sliver of Truth, and Black Out, you chose to write in the first person. Die for You and Fragile, however, you opted for third person point of view. How would you compare your experiences writing in the different formats? Are you more comfortable with one over the other? Does one seem to come more naturally or does it not make even any difference for you?
I hear voices in my head. Some of them have been very intimate, conversations I’ve had. Ridley and Annie were powerful first person voices. I was no less intimate with Isabel (who was also first person, though the other characters were third person) in Die for You or with the central characters in Fragile. But their stories had more moving parts. They were more connected to other people. I knew things about some characters that the other characters didn’t know. And those perspectives were necessary to tell the story well. So the choices all came very naturally, without much thought.
There are tremendous differences to each story tell
ing technique. First person is more immediate, more internal, allows for more observation and reflection. A third person novel is more like a mosaic, with the individual fragments comprising the bigger picture. It allows for greater perspective, more areas of focus. I couldn’t say that I prefer one over the other or that one comes more easily.
5. For those who don’t know, Beautiful Lies was not your first published novel. You published a series under your maiden name. Talk a little about that series. Do you have any plans to revisit it at any time? Any plans to return to Ridley Jones? Or pursue a new series?
I published four novels with St. Martin’s under my maiden name Lisa Miscione. It was a series featuring a true crime writer named Lydia Strong. My first published novel, entitled Angel Fire, was a book I began when I was 19 years old. Those early books and the characters are very special to me. And even though they are out there floating around in the used book ether, I still get mail from readers, asking when some of those characters might return. And some of them have. Dax Chicago, a recurring character in my early series, has a cameo in Black Out. And Jessamyn Breslow in Die for You first showed up in Smoke, the final book in the Lydia Strong series.
I doubt I’ll go back to Lydia. I feel like I left her in a decent place, and many of the demons that had haunted her are held at bay, if not put to rest entirely. She was a character and those were stories that I conceived of when I was very young. And I think of those novels as my education, the place where I learned to be a better writer.
On the other hand, Ridley Jones is still with me. I know there are a lot of unanswered questions for her, a lot of things she still needs to deal with. At the end of Beautiful Lies, I didn’t think I would go on. But I couldn’t stop hearing her voice. So I wrote Sliver of Truth. After that I thought, no, that’s it. There won’t be another Ridley. She’s not in the best place, but she lives to fight another day. And sometimes that’s all we get. But I do still think about her a lot. I get a lot of mail about Ridley (and Jake) from people wanting to know the rest of the story. But, honestly, the other voices in my head have been louder than hers. So I suspect that there will be a third and final Ridley Jones novel. But I don’t know when.