Unbecoming: A Novel

by Rebecca Scherm

  He knew Greg was going to be disappointed, he said.

  “Disappointed.”

  “Yeah,” Riley said. “Disappointed.”

  He was a coward, she thought, too addicted to positive attention to risk any other kind. His parents had loved him too much. The accusations coiled up inside her, rearing back to strike, but she felt the change in pressure and fled. She ran upstairs and yanked on her sports bra and laced up her running shoes. She was out the door and sprinting down the block before she had time to answer him.

  He was a good person, she chanted in time with her stride. A good person. She was a very lucky girl to have him. She was a very lucky girl. A very lucky girl. A very lucky girl.

  She hadn’t brought any water, so when she got too thirsty to go on, she went into the drugstore to use the fountain. Alls had been home when she left. She never went there when he was working. Gasping for breath, Grace went down the makeup aisle toward the pharmacy, eyes down at her knees, pink from the cold, and almost walked into the two women standing at the end of the aisle, waiting to pick up their prescriptions and quietly talking with each other.

  “Gracie,” Mrs. Graham said, smiling apprehensively.

  The other woman turned toward her. It was her mother.

  Grace stumbled back. They didn’t look a thing alike, but at that moment, their two faces appeared as a nightmarish replication. “Excuse me,” she said.

  She turned around and ran home.

  • • •

  Riley’s father lent him the money to pay his taxes, and Riley used it to buy Grace an open-ended plane ticket and admission to an eight-week summer study abroad program in Prague. He didn’t want them leaving Garland at the same time, he said. He wanted it to look like he was going to visit his girlfriend during her summer study abroad, and when the program was over, they would travel around together for a while. She was wholly relieved to see him focusing, cautiously, on these details of presentation. He was thinking like her, finally. To account for the windfall that would later allow him to go to Europe, he told his parents he had sold three dog portraits on commission, payment upon delivery, to an out-of-towner who had seen his work at Anne Findlay when she passed through over the holidays visiting family. Grace regretted only that he’d lied so self-deprecatingly. He needed to hang on to some of his arrogance to get them through this.

  He was just as cautious about the forgery taking shape in the basement. She wished he would pick up the pace a little bit. It was almost May—she was leaving in just six weeks, and she didn’t want them to rush the switch. They needed to choose their day carefully. Riley would take the Wynne tour alone, as Grace had, and once he was upstairs with the docent, Grace would come in behind him with her big purse containing Riley’s painting, stretched around a thin frame; the quiet pneumatic staple gun she would use to secure the canvas; and a knife to cut out the Bosschaert.

  At night, she and Riley lay in bed facing each other, talking quietly about the secret life that awaited them. “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” they said again and again, as if they were having an affair. The dull pink roses and rust-tipped tulips blooming in the basement had begun to look very sweet and beautiful to her, and Grace felt a greater potential for happiness, or for the relief she had decided was happiness, than she had in a very long time.

  22

  Three weeks before she was supposed to leave Garland forever, Grace was spending the day in the public library looking at back issues of Architectural Digest, compiling a list of European dealers from the advertisements. Riley had gone to his parents’ for dinner.

  His mother had called him to arrange it, after leaving a tentative message on Grace’s phone and receiving no response. When Riley called her, Grace said she had too much of a headache from reading to talk to anyone tonight, but to please give everyone a hug for her.

  “You haven’t been over there in months,” Riley had realized then.

  “I know,” Grace had said. “I don’t know how it happened.”

  “We should go next week. In case it’s a while before we see them again.”

  Now she worried what they were saying at the Grahams’ house without her there.

  Riley texted her at eight. “You need to be gone when I get home,” the message said. “I’ll meet you at the arboretum as soon as I can, but please wait for me there. Will explain.”

  Her fears leapt: Something had gone horrifically wrong. The Grahams were having her arrested. Her mother had told them that Grace was not to be trusted and now—what? Riley had let something slip. Lana’s video of her sobbing meltdown had gone viral.

  She sat shivering in the arboretum. She and Riley used to sneak in at night for fun and debauchery. Her thighs were cold and wet from the deep damp of the concrete benches. She stared at the outlines of the bushes against the sky until it was too dark to make anything out.

  Riley came at ten. He kissed her, and she was relieved. Whatever the catastrophe was, it was not that.

  “Your lips are freezing,” he said.

  “I’ve been here since the library closed. What is it?”

  “So, this afternoon, I told Greg I was out of the plan. Really out, totally out. The plan is nuts, he’s nuts to do it, too much risk for not enough money, all that. And, you know, he wasn’t pleased.”

  “Okay,” Grace said.

  “But I thought it was settled, and I went downstairs to paint.”

  She swallowed.

  “And he came downstairs about an hour later to argue with me. I heard him coming, and I moved the courthouse in front of the painting. But as he was talking, he was looking at the paint.”

  “The paint.”

  “The pink fucking paint on my palette. He saw it, Grace. He saw the paint, saw the courthouse, saw that it was bone dry, and pulled it forward and saw the other thing.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Tell him? I didn’t have to tell him anything. He knew. He knew I’d never painted any bowls of flowers before. He knew it didn’t look like my stuff at all. He just knew.”

  “Exactly what did you tell him?”

  “He told me that I was copying something from the Wynne House, and he knew—guessed—that it was your idea.”

  Greg. She wanted to choke him with his own hubris, just ball it up and shove it into his throat.

  Riley swallowed. “So I told him we broke up. Are breaking up.”

  “What?”

  “He said he’s never trusted you, and that you had brainwashed me, and I can’t just fuck everyone else over, and I—I told him the painting was my idea, that I’d been working on it, and then I showed it to you and you freaked out, and we had a big fight, and we’d been having a lot of problems anyway, and this just made it clear that we weren’t—that you were moving out.”

  “What the fuck, Riley? Why would you say that?”

  “He caught me off guard. I said the first thing that—”

  “That was the first thing?”

  “You’ve never made up something stupid when you got cornered? Look, I fucked up. I shouldn’t have been working when they were home. I should have had something to say in case this happened. But it’s going to be fine, okay? We just have to pretend we broke up. It’s three weeks, Grace. Three weeks. Then the rest of our lives.”

  “Why can’t we just switch the paintings now and get out of here?”

  “I’m not finished yet,” he said. “Jesus, it’s not a coloring book.”

  “You’re the worst liar,” she said, and then she realized he might be lying to her. He never had before, but then, how would she know?

  “Yeah,” Riley said. “But Greg believed me.”

  • • •

  Grace could not bear to ask her parents if she could come back home, or even to tell them. She sneaked into her childhood bedroom to sleep that night. “Riley and I are going through some stuff,” she told her mother the next morning, after she’d clutched her chest and yelped in fright at the sight of Grace coming ou
t of the bathroom. “It’s just a few weeks, until I go to Prague.”

  The next day, she went back to collect her things. Riley was at school. Greg leered at her on the stairs, and she swore she saw in his eyes some perverse triumph. Grace’s disgust with Riley made her role as his bitter ex easier to play.

  The storm door slammed on her ankles as she shoved her big wheeled suitcase out the front door. She could almost feel the neighbors watching. When she was nearly to the corner, the suitcase lurching over the fat cracks in the sidewalk, she heard the door slam again. Alls ran up behind her.

  “We broke up,” she spat. “Ask him.” She yanked her suitcase forward.

  Riley called her that night and she didn’t answer. His messages pleaded with her to talk to him and promised that everything could still work out. But that was impossible. She’d collapsed every possibility except the one in which she and Riley ran away alone, and now she and Riley could not run away. They could never rely on Greg to keep the painting a secret. She thought of the plan as she had made it, as they had made it just between the two of them, and how simple and clean it had been, and theirs alone. And then he had passed it around—twice!—to his friends, and now it was ruined, a soggy, dirty blunt that she wouldn’t touch with anything but a bleach rag. They could have it.

  She had never thought about splitting up, but he had, obviously. Why else would that have been the first story to leap to his mind?

  By the end of the second day, her voice mail was full and he couldn’t leave her any more messages. He showed up at her parents’ house and banged on the door, first demanding, then pleading, and then demanding again. She sat in her desk chair with her arms crossed and let him talk. Her mother knocked on the door and asked them to keep it down; the boys were trying to go to bed. She said that was fine, Riley was just leaving.

  She had come to despise his arrogant halo. He was a youngest child, accustomed to forgiveness. In the face of Grace’s doubt, he did not reassure; he condescended, as if her agreement was something he owned outright.

  • • •

  Grace’s twin brothers, now ten, regarded her suspiciously, like a cousin visiting from the branch of the family with a different religion. Aiden accidentally kicked a ball into her room and retrieved it as if he’d kicked it into the neighbor’s yard and Grace were the Doberman on the chain. Her mother offered her a stack of clean towels with a tight smile that seemed to say she had predicted this. Grace’s mother probably thought Riley had dumped her. Grace hadn’t known she could feel so livid and so limp with defeat at the same time.

  That afternoon, after she had run and showered, she was eating yogurt alone at her parents’ kitchen table, doing the newspaper crossword and watching her wet hair drip on the comics, when Alls drove up in his old blue Buick. The weather was warm enough now to have the windows open, and she heard the sound of the motor idling at the curb, and then the engine shutting off.

  He’d never been to her parents’ house. She met him at the front door.

  “Hey,” he said. “A minute?”

  “Hi, yeah.” Her voice was off pitch. She didn’t want to let him in, but he stood there, waiting. She stepped back and he came in and stood with his hands in his front pockets.

  “How are you?” he asked, too casually, and then he looked at the floor. “I just meant how are you, how’s it going, you know.”

  “It’s hard,” she said flatly. She wanted him with her whole self, from the prickly hot soles of her feet up to her temples.

  “You’ll be fine. I know it. He knows it.”

  “How is he?” she asked.

  “Depends on who you ask,” he said. “He acts like he’s been born again.”

  “Ah,” she said, vaguely stung.

  “I mean that in the lunatic sense,” he added quickly. “He’s like a hyper kid, tearing around, can’t slow down.”

  “That doesn’t sound like him.”

  “He’s in shock. He’s headed for a crash.” Alls chewed his lip and stared down at the potted shrub in front of him. “That’s why I’m here, to talk to you about that. This Wynne bullshit.”

  No one was home. “You want anything to drink?”

  “Water.”

  She led him into the kitchen, pushing aside the tent the twins had pitched on the carpet to catch their soccer balls when it was raining outside. She poured him a glass of water and sat down behind her yogurt and newspaper.

  “You weren’t really going to do it,” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  “I didn’t think it would go this far,” he said, and for a lost moment, Grace forgot that he was talking about the Wynne House.

  “Greg always does the dumbest shit he can think of,” he went on, “and we all laugh about it. But Riley’s usually smarter.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s going on in his head.”

  “He thinks this is going to work. He thinks he had a perfect idea. Stealing paperweights and selling them for millions of dollars.”

  The fork in the road: Play dumb or don’t. She hadn’t thought Alls would come to her. She’d thought they had both chosen Riley, his good opinion.

  “He said it would be a good project for me,” she said. “Identifying them, since I was so bored. I thought he was just trying to get me out of his hair.”

  “And then he said you guys should rob the place? The both of you?”

  “Well, I thought he was joking at first,” she said. “We all did.”

  “Right.”

  “But then, this painting thing.” She shook her head. “I mean, he’s really doing it.”

  Her parents’ cuckoo clock whistled. “Excuse me a sec.”

  Grace went into the bathroom and turned the water on. She put her hands on her hips. She just needed to get away from him for a moment and think. Her chest felt like it was going to crack open. He was here, in her house, alone with her. She had to get him out of there. She’d promise to talk Riley out of the forgery, and tonight, she would. That was all there was to do.

  She came out and sat down across from him again. “He thinks he can get away with anything, just because he always has.”

  “Is this really why you left him?”

  Grace swallowed. Did he want her to have left Riley?

  “Would it make a difference?” she asked. She looked at him, sitting in the sticky oak Windsor chair, elbows on his knees. Her hand slipped down the condensation on her water glass and she wiped it on her bare leg.

  “What are you saying?” he asked quietly, watching her hand.

  She saw then the narrowest chance that she had misread him, that he might be as torn up as she was, that he wanted her as much as she wanted him. “I thought you—I thought—”

  But she didn’t want to say what she had thought. She wanted to have been wrong.

  Grace knew that she couldn’t be both the good girl and the bad one anymore, but she was less and less sure which was which, and she had failed at good already, and she desperately wanted to fail at good again.

  “I can’t be what he needs me to be,” she said. “Or I don’t want to anymore.”

  “You’ll get back together. You’ll see.” He wasn’t trying to comfort her.

  “The reason he shouldn’t rob the Wynne House,” she said, “is that it isn’t worth the risk. The antiques money wouldn’t last longer than a few years, not split like that. I tried to tell him, but he doesn’t do the math.”

  “I bet he thinks he’s going to win you back or something. He thinks that way, you know.”

  “I know.”

  They hadn’t hurt Riley yet, she thought. She and Alls were just miserable, alone.

  “What I didn’t tell him,” she said then, “is that his fake painting is a great idea, only there’s no way he can pull it off. He can paint well enough, I have no doubt.” She swallowed. “But Greg is going to fuck up and get them both caught.”

  He nodded, intent on a plate of crumbs leftover from breakfast.

&nb
sp; “The original is in the back, in the study. Reframed, easy to cut out and roll up. I can promise you that no one has looked at that painting since the day it went up. No one would ever notice, unless they hired a Dutch Masters scholar to do the dusting. But Riley and Greg, together—” She paused. “They don’t know how to keep a secret. Not like we do.”

  Alls tapped his fingers on the table for what felt like hours. Did he know what she had meant to say? Would she have to say it more, worse, louder?

  “I always knew you weren’t who they thought you were,” he said, finally raising his eyes. “But I guess I don’t know either.”

  What they did he mean? It didn’t matter. “Join the club,” she said.

  “He trusts you, even now.” He stood up.

  She’d overplayed her hand. He didn’t want her as badly as she wanted him. She tried to think of something to say to undo it, to be just kidding.

  He hesitated, standing behind her. She could feel him, but she didn’t move.

  “Don’t tell him—” she started.

  Don’t tell him what? She didn’t know how to finish.

  He let the door slam behind him. She listened, but she didn’t hear his car engine turn. She went to the window and saw him sitting in his car, his head back. Finally, the engine turned, and he left.

  How had she been so sure in that moment that he was hers for the taking? He had come to her as a friend—to Riley. She’d thought he’d known how wrong a person she was, hiding behind all that nice-girl hair that Kendall and Lana had dismissed so easily, under all those pastel sweaters Mrs. Graham had dressed her in, but she had been wrong. He’d thought she was a good person who’d made one awful mistake, the way he was a good person who’d made one awful mistake. But now he knew. She had told him herself.

  23

  That night, Riley begged her to meet him at the playground.