Two Truths and a Lie

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  Brown’s was a low tan building, unassuming except for the fact that the building extended into the water, so you sort of felt like you were on a moving boat. You ordered at the counter and brought your food to a table. Sherri stood for some time looking at the menu. Katie took her hand and looked very seriously into her eyes and said, “Mom. It’s time.”

  “Time for what?” Sherri felt her heart jump with a familiar terror. Katie was going to say something that would shake Sherri to her core—something about Bobby or the other men, something she’d seen or heard that Sherri thought she had kept her safe from. Something unspeakable.

  But Katie was grinning. “It’s time to eat a whole lobster,” she said.

  The relief that flooded through Sherri felt almost like a warm liquid poured over her head. “It is? No lobster rolls?”

  Katie nodded firmly. “It is. We’ve lived here almost a whole summer, and we haven’t done it yet. No lobster rolls.”

  “Okay,” Sherri said. She was weak with relief, and the relief made her feel silly, almost drunk. “Okay, Katie-kins! Anything you say!” They ordered two lobster dinners with the works, and they found a seat at one of the picnic tables on the outdoor deck.

  The lobsters overran the edges of their paper containers. Around Katie and Sherri the other tables held a low, celebratory hum. Sherri would have ordered a stiff drink but she saw now that people were carrying in wine bottles and cans of beer in paper bags: it was BYOB, which somehow made it seem that much more festive. Truthfully, Sherri didn’t need anything to drink.

  “Did you know they used to feed these to prisoners?” Katie said. She was holding up her whole lobster and considering it.

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know.” Katie shrugged. “People in the olden days.”

  “What olden days?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Google. Or maybe Morgan. I can’t remember which.”

  “I’m not sure what to do from here,” said Sherri. She held up her lobster and looked at its creepy, incomprehensible eyes.

  Katie said, “I got you,” and took out her phone and loaded up a YouTube video on how to crack a lobster. Normally Sherri would not have allowed the phone at dinner, but she needed the help. Katie moved the phone to the center of the table and they both watched, trying to be surreptitious about it so that the other restaurantgoers wouldn’t know what novices they were. Apparently you were supposed to twist the tail off before you did anything else, then the claws. You could use a small fork to reach up into the shell and pull the meat out of the claws; the meat in the tail normally came out in one big piece, and was firmer than the meat in the claws. They dunked the lobster meat in butter and stuffed it into their mouths like it was the first meal they’d had in weeks. They ate corn on the cob and coleslaw and onion rings. They ate all of it.

  Katie hadn’t even finished the last of her lobster when she said, “After dinner can we get ice cream? There’s a place right across the street, Dunlap’s? It’s supposed to be good. Morgan told me it’s good.”

  Sherri hesitated. Now that fall was here, she’d have to cut back on her spending, cook healthy food for her and Katie, maybe find some way to exercise regularly. (Definitely not barre class.) “I don’t know—”

  “Please? It’s the second to last day of summer! It’s the last night of summer, because tomorrow is technically a school night.”

  “Okay,” said Sherri. “Of course we can, sure.”

  The day after tomorrow Katie would walk up Olive Street to High Street, where she would meet up with Morgan and a few other girls from the group to walk to the middle school, and Sherri would clean up from breakfast and take a shower and get in her car and drive to her job, where she would do all of her usual job things, which were boring but not mind-numbingly so, and she would try not to think about the fact that Katie was out of her sight and out of her control, and that, sure, the school had some sort of intercom system or whatever, but was it really safe, was it really secure?

  Would anything ever be secure enough to satisfy Sherri?

  Sherri hoped Katie never knew how close she’d come to real danger in those early days before they’d become safely ensconced in the program. She hoped that in time she’d forget all about the time in the motel and the bad food and the bad television and Louise the counselor with the velvety brown eyes, and also about the life they’d had before that. But not all of it, maybe, because that life was part of Katie’s history, the only one she had.

  The sky was becoming paler as the sun began to drop. It wasn’t sunset yet, it was more like sunset’s appetizer. Sunset’s calamari. Sherri’s favorite part of the day. She breathed in the briny smell of the water.

  She would never not be scared for herself or for Katie. But maybe the fear would become a low thrum in the background of their lives instead of the crashing cymbals in the center of the stage, in the same way that Rebecca had explained to Sherri that her grief for Peter never left, would never leave, even as she fell in love with Daniel.

  They cleared their plates and placed them in the appropriate bins; they walked across the street to Dunlap’s. They were an ordinary mother and daughter on the penultimate night of summer. The line for ice cream was long, so they had a good amount of time to peruse the menu.

  “What are you going to choose?” Katie asked.

  I choose life, thought Sherri. I choose happiness. I choose the light.

  She looked down at Katie, her forthright, strong, vulnerable, invincible, vincible child. She thought about a girl named Madison Miller who had probably gone out for ice cream with her parents dozens of times, never knowing that one day she wouldn’t.

  After Brooke’s party one of the dads to whom Sherri had been talking had asked around for her number. (At the time she hadn’t known he was divorced.) His divorce was new and shiny, just out of its packaging, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. He’d registered on Tinder, but it scared him, so he never used it. He had been impressed, he told Sherri, by her “bravado” at Brooke’s party. Sherri thought what he really meant was that he’d been impressed by her breasts. Or maybe both. She was still deciding whether she was ready to date—whether she’d ever be ready to date. Right now her priority was getting Katie settled in school and doing a bang-up job at Derma-You so she could get more hours. Apparently, with the rapid expansion they’d be seeking a manager for some of their new locations. Jan said she’d told management that Sherri had a solid work ethic and a natural discreetness about her, which was a necessity in their business.

  “Mom?” said Katie. The line was moving up; there was a family of four in front of them, and after that it would be their turn. “What are you getting?”

  “I think I’ll have my usual,” Sherri told Katie. “Chocolate with chocolate sprinkles.”

  Katie rolled her eyes. “They have like four hundred flavors here and you’re getting the same thing you always get? You’re so predictable, Mom.”

  “I know,” Sherri said. “I’m completely predictable.” Sherri tried to look rueful but she couldn’t do it genuinely, because predictable implied safe and safe implied boring and to Sherri Griffin on that evening, on the far edge of summer, on the outer reaches of Katie’s childhood, boring seemed like the most beautiful word in the world.

  She just had one final item on her to-do list.

  89.

  Alexa

  On the very last day of summer, Alexa served, among other things, one Ringer, three sugar cones of Moose Tracks, one cone of chocolate, and one dish of Green Monster. She was in the back, checking on the supplies of paper napkins and spoons, when the “ring for service” bell went off.

  “Amazon!” called Hannah, and Alexa rolled her eyes, because wasn’t it Hannah’s turn to help the next customer? “Someone’s looking for you!” Hannah called again, super chipper.

  Alexa growled, “Coming,” and tugged her apron back into place. She was arranging her face into her bes
t customer service smile when she saw Sherri Griffin. Alexa hadn’t seen Sherri since the night Cam died, since Sherri had taken Morgan and Katie away while Alexa and her mom talked to the police. She’d been waiting for this conversation, though: the text she’d sent that night, then the “false alarm” text after; obviously those wouldn’t go without a follow-up.

  “Hi, Sherri,” said Alexa. She pretended cheer but she knew her uncertainty was showing through.

  “Hello, Alexa,” said Sherri, all business. Her hair, which was pulled into a ponytail, was back to brown; she looked much less arresting than she had the night of the party. No. Not arresting. Bad choice of words. Much less . . . eye-catching. But still, with the right styling, Alexa believed the brown could look pretty. Alexa could show Sherri a few tricks with a super-wide curling iron, if she ever wanted to see.

  “Is Katie with you?” Alexa asked.

  “Katie’s at home,” Sherri said. “Packing her backpack for tomorrow. I came to talk to you.”

  “Here?”

  “Not here. No. Definitely not. Plum Island Grille. I’ll be there at seven.”

  So much for catching the end of the meal with Mr. Bennett. This wasn’t a question. This was an order. “Got it,” said Alexa. “I’ll see you there.”

  “Who was that, Amazon?” asked Hannah after Sherri had departed.

  Alexa smiled as sweetly as she could manage and said, “Just a mom of one of my sister’s friends. And please stop calling me Amazon. It’s really getting tiresome.”

  Alexa got to the Grille at ten minutes to seven and secured a seat at the bar. The bartender was a girl who had graduated a few years ago, Natalie Gallagher. She was really tall and really thin and had freckles and that gingery hair that works on some people and not on others. On Natalie it worked. Alexa had heard Natalie Gallagher had been in a J. Crew modeling shoot the year before. She smiled at Alexa like she knew her, so Alexa didn’t even try to order a drink. She got a seltzer with lime, and she saved the seat next to her—easier said than done; it was crowded. At exactly seven o’clock, Sherri walked in.

  Sherri ordered a tequila shot, which she threw back without blinking.

  Alexa couldn’t help saying, “Wow.”

  “Listen,” said Sherri. “You sent me a text, the night your friend died. And I haven’t been able to talk to you about it, because, well . . . because obviously you were tied up with all of that awfulness, after the accident, and I wanted to respect you, respect your privacy. Respect your friend. And I’m so sorry about all of that. It’s really terrible.”

  “Thank you,” said Alexa, bowing her head, waiting for the “but.”

  “But. I need to know what you meant by the text that you sent me that night. I can’t remember the exact words. I deleted it—I can’t have texts like that on my phone.”

  “Of course you can’t,” murmured Alexa.

  “I know you said false alarm after, but it’s clear that you know something about me.”

  Alexa took a sip of her seltzer. Sherri was watching her, waiting for an explanation. “The thing I said about somebody being after me. That was a misunderstanding. A huge, embarrassing misunderstanding. I’m really sorry. I never should have worried you. I was panicked, and scared, and I was confused about what was going on, and there was somebody knocking on my door. I’m so sorry.”

  Sherri looked at Alexa for a long time, and then she said, “The part about knowing who I am. That part is what I’m concerned about here. I did a thorough search of Katie’s room the day after the party, and I read her diary. I’m assuming that you read it too. That’s the only way I can figure out that you’d know anything.”

  Alexa nodded. “I saw it in her room one day, and I opened it, I don’t even know why I opened it, and once I started reading I couldn’t stop. I just couldn’t. And then I did some googling, and I put everything together. I’m so, so sorry.”

  Around them came the festive, slightly mournful sounds of an evening at the end of summer: the tinkling of ice in glasses, bursts of uproarious laughter, a hint of seize-the-day mania. The bar stools faced the salt marshes, and the windows were open so that the smells of Plum Island came wafting in. Far, far in the distance, if you squinted and tilted your head just right, you could almost see the Pink House, which would be turning luminous and mysterious under the last rays of the setting sun.

  “That’s what I figured,” said Sherri. “This is a really big problem for me, Alexa. Really big.”

  “I know.” Alexa looked around the bar desperately, but nobody could save her from this conversation.

  “You can’t ever, ever say anything that you know about us out loud, do you understand me?” Sherri’s voice was cold—Siberian.

  “I know,” said Alexa. “I won’t. I never will. I swear. And I’m so sorry. I’m so, so, so sorry.” She opened her hands and then closed them into fists. She didn’t know what else she could say.

  “The diary is gone,” Sherri said. “I destroyed it, and then I talked to Katie about never writing anything like that down again. Ever. She simply can’t.”

  “No,” agreed Alexa. “She can’t.”

  “I trusted you,” said Sherri. “In my home, and with my child. I trusted you, when we were new here, and when we were most vulnerable. And we were really vulnerable, Alexa. We still are. We’ll be vulnerable for the rest of our lives.”

  “I know,” said Alexa.

  “Now here’s what I have to ask you,” said Sherri. “And I need you to answer honestly. Does anyone else know? Did you tell anyone?”

  Here Alexa found herself knee-deep in moral muck. She thought of Cam, the most trustworthy, most honest person she’d ever known, who’d wanted to un-know the truth about Katie and Sherri the second he learned it. He wouldn’t have told anyone. She knew that with absolute certainty. If there was anyone who would take a secret like that to the grave, it was Cam.

  Alexa shook her head.

  “I need to hear you say it out loud. If you told anyone, Katie and I are in too much danger to stay here. We’ll have to move away, we’ll have to start all over again. New names, new hair color, new everything. I don’t want to do that to Katie. She finally feels settled here.” Sherri’s voice tripped. “But I’ll do it if I have to. I’ll do anything to keep Katie safe. So I need to know right now, Alexa, if you told anyone else about what you read in that diary.”

  Alexa thought of Dave Matthews and her heart wrenched once again: The wicked lies we tell to keep us safe from the pain.

  There were lies that we tell to save ourselves, and then there were lies that we tell to save other people. In the past Alexa had been a master of the former. Now, she supposed, as the New and Improved Alexa, it was probably about time to learn the latter.

  “Nobody else knows,” she said. “I swear to you, I haven’t told, nor will I ever tell, a soul.”

  “Not your mother, or your sister, or anybody else,” said Sherri. “Swear.”

  “I swear. I haven’t told my mother or my sister.” One truth. “I will never tell a living soul, Sherri, I promise.” Two truths. “I would never share something like that. With anyone.” One lie.

  Sherri’s face relaxed, and Alexa felt that for once she had done the right thing.

  Some years hence, when the celebrity Alexa Thornhill has a child of her own, a little boy named Max who has a cowlick and a freckle on his ear and the biggest brown eyes you could imagine, a boy who is growing up in the dazzling Southern California sun, she will look back on this conversation. One day Max will get in an altercation with a bully at a playground. Alexa Thornhill will feel an innate, unquenchable urge to lift the bully up by the straps of his overalls and throw him into next week.

  She will never do that, of course. It wouldn’t read well on her social media feed, to her fans and followers, which number in the hundreds of thousands. But she will remember the intensity of Sherri Griffin’s eyes as she said, “I’ll do anything to keep Katie safe.” And she gets it. She totally gets it.

>   But that is in the future. In the raw, unpasteurized present, the New and Improved Alexa, the nice Alexa, asked Sherri Griffin, “Is there anything I can do to make it up to you? Anything at all?”

  Sherri thought for a minute. Alexa watched her eyes travel over the marshes of Plum Island, the piece of turnpike visible from the bar, the grasses dancing in the light wind.

  “There is one thing,” Sherri said finally. She looked around the bar, because it was a small town, and you never knew who you might run into.

  “Anything,” said Alexa eagerly. She polished off her seltzer and noticed that the bartenders had changed shifts.

  She told Sherri, “Whatever you say, I’ll do.”

  One truth, no lies.

  90.

  The Squad

  Monica and her husband, who were celebrating their thirteenth wedding anniversary the night before school started, had a seven o’clock reservation at Mission Oak. You’ll never guess who was coming out as they were going in. Well, you might guess. It was Rebecca, Daniel Bennett, and . . . Morgan Coleman! Daniel was holding open the door for Rebecca and Morgan, and Morgan appeared to be giggling at something Daniel Bennett had said.

  We had also heard, from Brooke, via Monica, who heard it from Dawn, who heard it directly from Gina, that Gina was in the process of breaking off her friendship with Daniel’s ex-wife, Veronica the Cheater, out of loyalty to Rebecca.

  On the first day of the new school year the girls had all planned to walk to school together, those who weren’t on the bus route, which is how they’ve always done it. Always. Naturally Morgan was part of this plan. After the dressing-down at Brooke’s party, Katie was too. We made sure of it.

  Then! Early on the first day of school something surprising happened! Morgan texted the rest of the girls on their group chat and said that she and Katie wouldn’t be walking with them after all. No explanation.

  Esther had driven Audrey in from Plum Island. The buses are sometimes late on the first day, getting used to new routes, and Audrey didn’t want to take the chance of being tardy at the beginning of middle school, when there were so many new things to figure out: homerooms and lockers and the changing of classes and all of that. So it was Esther who told us that Alexa drove Morgan and Katie to school in her Jeep. And she didn’t leave them at the drop-off on Low Street the way parents were supposed to. No. She parked in the parking lot and she walked them to the front door of the school, in full view of everyone.