by Richard Cox
Lying a second time was much easier than the first.
“Okay, well . . . I was playing with the knife, trying to see how hard you had to push to make the knife puncture the chair. I didn’t mean to tear it. I thought it would just make a tiny hole.”
“So you had to push pretty hard, then?”
“Yeah,” Jonathan said. “Real hard. That Naugahyde is strong.”
“Well, can you tell me something, then?”
“What?”
“Why’d you lie to me about it? Why didn’t you tell me this the other day?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you don’t know,” his mother said, “who does?”
“I guess I didn’t want you to know how it happened.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. I promised if you were honest, you wouldn’t get in trouble.”
No shit, he wanted to tell her. It makes no sense because I invented it to get you off my case.
But instead he said, “I guess I didn’t want you to know I did it on purpose.”
“Even though I gave you the perfect opportunity to finally be honest with me? Even though I promised everything would be okay if you just told the truth?”
The whole chair scenario was like a bad joke, like someone was intentionally messing with him. His mother seemed obsessed with the telling of truth and yet the last thing she welcomed was genuine honesty. What she really wanted, whether she knew it or not, was a story that fit her version of reality. In this reality the source of all problems in the household was Jonathan, her only child. Any event that did not support this controlling idea did not belong and was thus rejected. When Jonathan had “admitted” cutting the chair by accident, this initially had seemed like an acceptable answer. But further consideration had led his mother to believe only intentional fault could match her reality. And so he was forced to lie again, further incriminating himself, and God only knew what penalty he would face this time.
“It was pretty dumb of me,” he said.
His mother smiled at this, that calm, monster smile, and sent him back to his room. Once he had settled himself, Jonathan went to work on the climax, where Paul throws the heavy typewriter at Annie’s head and then shoves handfuls of burning paper into her mouth. But she was an imposing woman, strong in will and heart, and did not go away easily. Several times he stopped to rest his hand, which had cramped from gripping the pen so tightly. Hours sailed by unnoticed.
It was late afternoon when he reached the story’s final lines. By then his right hand was so sore it would barely hold the pen. Something else Jonathan had just realized about storytelling was how neat you could make your artificial world, how in the hands of a grand designer the ending could be satisfying in a way that rarely happened in the real world. It seemed like most books and stories ended like this, with everything tied up perfectly, all questions answered, all desires fulfilled.
But wouldn’t it be more interesting to end his story in an honest way, where maybe you never understood exactly why Annie behaved the way she did? What if the reason you would never understand her motivations was because you couldn’t summon the nerve to simply ask?
And for whatever reason, the words this late in the day had stopped flowing as clearly as they had before. He forced out the story’s final lines with pure will.
41
David was off work, cruising around Tanglewood on his Mongoose. Cicadas buzzed and the wind blew and the sun hammered him without mercy. He made frequent stops in the shade as he traced a route along the curvy streets, but the heat was cleansing somehow, as sweat beaded on his brow and stung his eyes. He pumped the pedals as if he were going somewhere important, as if he were making progress toward some lifetime goal. You couldn’t just sit around and expect the world to come to you, after all. You had to get off your butt and do something.
And when he finally saw Alicia in the front yard, helping her mom pull weeds, David tried to tell himself that he hadn’t sought her out on purpose, but that was a lie.
It was obvious Jonathan would never summon the balls to put the moves on Alicia, which meant eventually some other guy would, if some other guy hadn’t already. At least this was what David told himself as Alicia stood up from the flowerbed, rubbed dirt out of her hands, and waved.
“Hey, Alicia,” he said. She approached him across the lawn, wearing a light blue T-shirt that didn’t quite reach her pink shorts. Her skin was brown and shiny with sweat, and her bellybutton was there where anyone could see it. A pair of sunglasses pinned her hair back. She was wearing pink jelly shoes. David blinked, and for a moment he imagined he wasn’t even standing here, that he was in bed dreaming this, or maybe it was a scene in a movie someone was watching. Because wasn’t this too familiar to be real? Didn’t it feel exactly like that song Todd had written?
“Hey, David. What’s up?”
“Just cruising around. Jonathan isn’t home, and Todd’s mom says he’s not feeling well.”
“If you’re bored, you can help me pull weeds.”
David opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out.
“I’m just kidding. But why don’t you come inside for lemonade? I was about to get some myself.”
When David hesitated, she reached forward and tugged playfully on his handlebars.
“Come on. You look like you’re about to have a sunstroke.”
They stopped briefly and spoke to Alicia’s mother, and then Alicia opened the Plexiglas storm door. Her hair was wavy, shoulder length, somewhere between blonde and brown.
In the kitchen she poured two tall glasses of yellow-green lemonade. The ice clinked and popped. Her shirt pulled tight as she held the pitcher, and David noticed her boobs were coming along nicely.
“What do you think of Todd?” she asked him. “It’s so weird that he was asleep, like, forever.”
“I don’t know what to think. You would expect him to be all kinds of messed up, and I guess he is in a way. He definitely doesn’t act like a normal kid.”
“What does he act like?”
“Like a grownup. We all expected him to be kind of slow, you know? He basically missed four years of his life. But instead of being dumb it’s like he was away at college all that time. On top of that I think he’s some kind of musical genius. He writes songs that sound like they should be on the radio.”
“Well, maybe he’s super smart, but I still don’t like him very much. He creeped me out the other day.”
“He did? How?”
“I was on my bike, heading over to Simone’s house, when I saw Todd standing in his front yard. He gestured and got me to stop.”
“He did?”
“I’d seen him around, I think everyone has, especially since he’s been on the news and all that.”
David nodded.
“When I pull over he says, ‘Hi Alicia, I’m Todd.’ Like it was totally obvious we should know each other already. I guess someone must have told him about me. Maybe Jonathan.”
David nodded knowingly, as if it were obvious why Jonathan might have done such a thing.
“He was smiling the whole time, but it wasn’t a very nice smile. And he looked at me with these faraway eyes, like I was down the street instead of standing right in front of him.
“That’s odd,” David said. He tried not to let his own eyes fall to her T-shirt, or that strip of tanned skin above the waist of her shorts.
“Yeah, but here’s the weirdest thing. He said I shouldn’t give up on Jonathan. He said we would have a second chance after the fires.”
“Fires? What is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. I asked him which fires he meant, but he said he wasn’t allowed to tell me that.’”
David set his lemonade glass on the counter. “That’s really weird.”
“Yeah. I guess he must know Jonathan asked me to go with him.”
It was amazing how quickly a balloon could deflate. How fast the pressure could bleed away. David was a balloon, a popped ba
lloon.
“Jonathan asked you?”
“Yeah. He called me up one night and asked, but I haven’t heard a word since. I thought we were going to be, you know, a couple.”
“When was this?”
“Five days ago.”
“You agreed to go with him and he hasn’t called you for five days?”
Alicia drank the last of her lemonade. “Yeah. It’s kind of embarrassing. Todd said to not give up on him, so Jonathan must have told him the whole thing. I don’t get it.”
“You haven’t talked to him at all?”
“Nope.”
“I know he likes you a lot,” David admitted. “When you said ‘yes,’ I figured he would have been calling you left and right. He’s been trying to get up the nerve forever.”
“I wish he would call. But he won’t. So here I am, pulling weeds with my mom.”
She smiled, and David noticed for the first time her eyes were blue, the light blue of a summer sky.
“And here you are, drinking lemonade in my kitchen.”
“Here I am, all right,” he said.
“You were like a little corporation in school this year, huh? All your gum and cinnamon toothpicks.”
David smiled proudly.
“Did you make a lot of money?”
“Enough,” he admitted. “I’m working at my dad’s restaurant this summer, too, but he’s making me save half of it for college.”
“Bummer. But that’s pretty productive of you. You must be able to buy whatever you want.”
“I guess. I’d like to move away from here someday. Live in Colorado or California or someplace in the mountains. Wichita is pretty boring.”
“Tell me about it,” Alicia said. “If there’s a bright center of the universe, this is the city it’s farthest from.”
“You think you’ll ever leave?”
“I think maybe I’ll become a doctor. Houston is like this Mecca for hospitals.”
“They have hospitals in California, too,” David said impulsively.
“Oh really?” Alicia smiled and moved subtly closer to him. “Why would I want to live in California?”
“Because,” he said, and honestly it was like there was a robot in his mouth, moving his jaw and tongue and lips without consent. “I’ll be there, too. You can come over and I’ll pour you lemonade.”
Alicia’s smile could have powered an FM radio station. One hundred thousand watts of delight. And though her mother had seen him walk in here, and though she might enter the house at any moment, David reached forward and took Alicia’s hand anyway. He knew it was wrong, advancing on this girl who was the object of Jonathan’s dreams, but the guy didn’t own her. And now, standing in this kitchen not twelve inches from her tanned skin and wavy hair and blue eyes, could Jonathan blame David for reaching for Alicia when he had given away any chance to do so himself?
He pulled her closer, and her skin was so warm it could have been on fire. David had never kissed a girl before, but he’d seen it on TV many times, and he tried to replicate exactly what he remembered. Leaned forward. Tilted his head. Pressed his lips against hers, first lightly and then with more pressure. Her tongue, a wet and marbled muscle, slipped out of her mouth and tickled his lips. He laughed a little when she did it. So did Alicia. Eventually he pulled back from her, still holding her hand, smiling, and she smiled back, and the sun was a lake of fire on the breakfast room table, and somewhere nearby he could hear the hollow drone of a lawn mower, but it was muted by the sound of blood pulsing in his ears, by the electric beat of his overwhelmed heart.
42
“You see this?” Kenny said. “You worked hard to build this, didn’t you?”
It had been David’s idea to build swords for use in live-action Dungeons & Dragons. When you mounted yard stakes as blades to wooden closet poles as handles, when you coated the assembled product with metallic paints, you found yourself with a realistic looking weapon. Jonathan had improved on the original idea by devoting much of a weekend to sanding and carving intricate patterns into the handle and hilt, and yesterday David had been so impressed with the finished product that he offered fifteen dollars for it. Jonathan turned him down because ten hours of work at minimum wage totaled more like thirty-five bucks. David had laughed at this counteroffer, but his desire for the sword was obvious, and Jonathan had a feeling he would eventually come up with the cash.
Now the sword lay across the step that separated the kitchen from the sunken dining room. His mom stood behind Kenny, her expression grim, and Jonathan wished she were dead.
“When your mom told me about the chair the other day, how you accidentally made that cut, I wasn’t mad. Accidents happen, right?”
Jonathan just stood there. His mother had promised from the beginning not to say anything to Kenny.
“But now I find out you did it on purpose. For fun. Do you think money grows on trees? Do you think your mother’s property is less important than yours?”
Jonathan stood there looking at Kenny, looking at the sword, and now he wished he could go back to the real truth. The actual truth. All he had to do was explain how his mother had coerced the confession out of him, how she forced him to lie.
The problem was Jonathan had told those lies like they were the truth and he couldn’t take them back. No one would ever believe him. The new truth was the story he had made up to placate his mother, who was the actual liar here, who promised she wouldn’t tell Kenny but had done so anyway.
“How long did it take you to build this?” Kenny asked.
“A whole weekend.”
“So if I broke this, you would understand what it feels like for someone else to destroy your property, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, I would understand. But I think I understand already. Destroying stuff on purpose is wrong.”
Kenny was quiet for a moment. He looked at Jonathan’s mom.
“Maybe I don’t want to break this thing after all.”
The silence was complete. No one said anything. Jonathan was afraid even to move, as if the smallest distraction might shatter the man’s fragile mercy.
“Go to your room,” Kenny said. “Get that spiral notebook.”
Comprehension was a willful thing. You could reject it if you wanted.
“That story you showed me. ‘Misery.’ Go get it.”
Jonathan didn’t move. His feet simply refused.
“Now.”
On the way to his room Jonathan began to imagine his pleas, began to pray for some sort of reprieve, tried to think of a way he could sidestep this travesty. Could he somehow fool Kenny into destroying some other story? Probably not when Kenny knew the title and had read the first three pages.
Jonathan grabbed the notebook and flipped through it on the way back to the dining room, trying desperately to commit whole paragraphs to memory. This story was far more important to him than any sword. Encoded in the sentences and paragraphs of this piece of fiction was the very essence of Jonathan as a human being, even though the characters in the story went by different names and lived different experiences. To hand them over would be, with no exaggeration, like handing over a part of his soul.
“Hurry up,” Kenny commanded from the dining room.
Jonathan rounded the corner and walked back to where Kenny and his mother were standing. He could not bring himself to make eye contact with either of them. He wondered what Todd would do in this situation: Beg for mercy or bare his teeth in defiance?
“Your kid showed me this story the other day,” Kenny said, holding the notebook out for Jonathan’s mother to see. “He’s worked hard on this, and it’s pretty good.”
Jonathan saw his mother lean forward to look at the notebook.
“So that’s what you’ve been doing in your room all the time,” she said. “You never stop lying, do you?”
“I think your son has a future in this,” Kenny continued. “But if we’re going to teach him a lesson, we’ve got to hit him where it hurts.”
Jonathan knew the choice to lie had been his. He could hear the sound of Todd’s voice, the truth that couldn’t be denied: All of this was Jonathan’s fault.
And further, if Kenny destroyed a story that contained a scene about a fictional story being destroyed, did that mean Jonathan had somehow willed it to happen? Was it possible, in a way, to write your own destiny?
“I’m sorry,” Kenny said. “But Jonathan, you gotta learn how to respect other people’s things.”
He ripped pages from the notebook. Bits of connective paper fell to the ground like snow.
And then the real tearing began.
43
David was at the restaurant, bored out of his mind. His dishes had been finished for twenty minutes, the restaurant had been closed for an hour, and he’d asked his dad twice if they could leave. But a big catering job tomorrow meant extra work for the kitchen manager, Julie, and they couldn’t lock up the restaurant until she was finished.
Finally David could wait no longer. He trudged into the business office, ready to ask again, but this time his dad stopped him.
“Tell you what,” Freddy Clark said, holding up a ring of keys. “Since you’re stuck here with me, and since you’ve been doing such a good job lately, I’ll make you a deal. You let me work on these ledgers, while we wait on Julie to finish, and I’ll let you drive the delivery truck for a little while.”
“By myself?” David asked, reaching for the keys. “You mean now?”
His dad jerked the keys away. “You remember the last time you drove, how we just circled through the neighborhood?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“Stay nearby. Do not go where there are any stoplights. You got it?”
“Sure, Dad. No problem.”
“You remember how to start it?”
“Definitely.”
The keys exchanged hands.
“Stay under the speed limit,” his dad said as David bent around the corner, headed for the back door. “Use your signals! Come back in half an hour!”