The Safest Lies

by Megan Miranda

  He raised an eyebrow. Maybe he didn’t know.

  “The thing is,” he said, just as I said, “What did I do?”

  “What?” he asked.

  “I did something wrong.”

  “You didn’t,” he said.

  “It sure seems like it,” I said. “Because we were talking, and it was nice, and then in class you just…stopped. And went back to ignoring me.”

  “I wasn’t ignoring…,” he said, and winced. “Sorry. It’s not you, Kelsey.”

  I was pretty sure that was a line. It’s not you, it’s me. Famous. And final. Like a shrug from Cole. I raised an eyebrow at him in return. I remembered Holly’s adorable dimples.

  He shook his head. “You don’t understand.” He wasn’t whispering anymore, and I didn’t try to stop him. He was working his way up to something, stepping a little closer. “I feel like such a poseur,” he said. “I don’t deserve this. Here. Take it.” He already had the medal for bravery in his hand, and now he was thrusting it at me.

  I laughed, pushed it back toward him. “No way, what am I supposed to do with this? I was terrified.”

  He took a step closer. “I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you.”

  I shook my head. “No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t have been in the car in the first place. I’d be dead….”

  “I was hanging in midair, Kelsey. You held us up with…” His eyes drifted to my hands, and I balled them up. I couldn’t look at the gash across my fingers—raw and starting to scab over—without reliving it all, and now it seemed he couldn’t, either.

  “Look,” I said. “You chose to climb into my car. I held us up because…well, because what was the other choice? It was an instinct.”

  His eyes went wide, and he laughed. “Well, I’m glad your instinct was to not let go.” He was looking at my hands again, but he was smiling.

  “Self-preservation,” I added, half laughing. “Pretty sure it’s what anyone would do.”

  This time, his gaze shifted from my hands to my arms, my neck, my mouth. He lowered his voice, took a step closer. “No, I don’t think so.”

  He shifted his weight from foot to foot, kicking up rocks in the driveway, and it made him seem younger than a man receiving a bravery medal on a podium.

  “So, I want to try something again,” he said, his lips curving up into a smile. God, I loved that look. “Do you want to do something sometime?”

  I smiled back, big and stupid, and didn’t even bother trying to stop it. “Yes. But maybe we should specify this time.”

  “Hang out. Somewhere. Sometime.”

  I heard my heartbeat echo inside my head—not nerves, not quite, but something close. “You mean besides upside down in my car?”

  “Yeah. Definitely besides that. Like…my house. Or the movies. Or the park. Or here, right now.” He gestured to the iron gate in front of us, the house hidden behind it.

  I chewed the inside of my cheek, picturing Ryan filling up my room with that smile. “I’m not allowed to have people over. I’m also not exactly supposed to be out right now. It’s going to be hard enough for me to sneak back in alone.”

  Ryan was eyeing the keypad, the camera, the gate. “Why all the precautions?” he asked.

  “Makes her feel safe,” I said before I could stop myself. This was a trick I had taught myself: act before the fear. And now there was a dare in my words. What kind of person would he be? What would he do with the information?

  He nodded slowly. “My dad has a closet of guns, same reason. I don’t really get why we need more than one. Sometimes I think he’s preparing for the zombie apocalypse.”

  “No guns here. We’re only good with keeping zombies out. If they breach, we’re screwed.”

  I turned to go, my hand connecting with his, leaving the medal with him. He grabbed my elbow as I approached the gate, spinning me back around, his hand trailing from my elbow to my hand. “So there’s no confusion this time,” he said, and his cheeks flushed, “I’m asking you out.”

  Then he backed away, his hands in the pockets of his suit pants. He was smiling, but he was also waiting.

  “And I’m saying yes,” I said.

  He leaned against his car, and before I could talk my way out of it, before I could let all the fears work their way into my head, all the uncertainty, before I could question what I should do or should say, or shouldn’t do or shouldn’t say, I took three quick steps toward him, and I stood on my toes, and he said, “Oh—” in the second before my lips connected with his, and then his hands were around my back, and he was pulling me closer, and I melted—my body sinking into his. I felt his lips curl into a smile as I pulled away.

  “Bye, Ryan,” I said.

  He laughed. “Bye, Kelsey.”

  I turned back to the gate, still smiling. I could see the house lights on in the background. I’d probably be caught. I didn’t even care. Ryan was still watching me from beside his car. And I didn’t wait for him to leave first this time.

  I pressed my thumb to the keypad, but nothing happened. Maybe they were shaking with adrenaline. I tried again, first wiping my hands on the side of my pants. Again, nothing happened. No click.

  Something soured in my stomach, in my mouth—and my hands started shaking again, for a very different reason.

  “What’s the matter?” Ryan called. He started walking toward me. I leaned to the side and looked up at the cameras, where I’d usually see a faint red light—but there was none. I felt the wrongness through every pore of my body. I pushed at the gate, and it opened on its own, and my heart plummeted into my stomach.

  The system was off, and the gate was unlocked.

  “Something’s wrong,” I said.

  Ryan followed me through the gate, which no longer automatically closed behind us. The gate would normally be unlocked only if someone entered the override code to hold it open, or if the electricity was out. But I could see lights on inside.

  “Stay here,” I said, once we got to the porch. “I don’t want her freaking out.”

  Understatement. If she realized I was missing, that would be the least of my concerns.

  I checked the front door handle, but it was unlocked. And when I pushed open the door, there was no beep of the alarm. The air felt different, too. Like the expanse of the world—the vastness, my mom would say—was inside the house. Too much, too unknown.

  “Mom?” I called, and the word echoed off the tiled floors, the white walls. “Are you okay?”

  The first thing I noticed was the silence. The music I’d left running in my room was off. There were no footsteps. No shuffling in the halls. Just the slow drip of a faucet from somewhere beyond.

  I left the front door cracked open for Ryan as I checked each room. She wasn’t in her bedroom, or the office, or the living room. I passed the foyer again on the way down the hall to my room, barely registering Ryan standing in the open doorway.

  My stomach dropped as I approached my room. My door was open, and she’d definitely been in here. I stood in the entrance, assessing the damage. My phone was thrown onto the floor. My desk drawers were pulled open. The floor was a mess of clothes and paper and electronics. I nudged a pile with the side of my foot and picked up my phone, placing it on my desk.

  There was a chill to the room, like her anger lingered. Something had happened to change the taste in the room. Something empty and hollow and unusual. It was no longer safe and known and mine.

  The hairs on my arms stood on end—this was not her typical behavior. This was a version of her I didn’t know.

  “Mom?” I called again, more tentatively.

  The alarm was off, and nobody was here. I picked up the landline phone in the living room, and it clicked, repeatedly—no dial tone.

  I opened the door behind the kitchen—it was also uncharacteristically unlocked—and called her name into the dark of the backyard. Went back to the hall, slid the lock at the top of the basement door, stood in the entrance as the door creaked open. The lights wer
e off and it had been locked, but still, I called her name. Only a chilled gust of air came back.

  I heard footsteps behind me, and turned to find Ryan standing in the foyer, his eyes roaming over the bright rooms, the white walls, the immaculately clean surfaces. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  I stared at him, trying to find the words, terrified of giving voice to them. The thing I had never imagined. Never even so much as feared. It snuck up on me, this one, and I felt myself getting sucked down with it.

  “I can’t find my mom,” I whispered.

  Ryan paced the foyer, picked up a picture of the two of us from the entryway table. He held it close to his face, his eyes shifting from her face to my own. “This is your mom?” he asked.

  My mother was young and beautiful—she was thirty-five, but looked even younger in her casual clothes, long hair, makeup-free face. She looked perfect, in that picture. We looked perfect together. Big smiles, windows behind us, sunlight streaming through. “Yes,” I said.

  “So give her a call,” he said. “See where she is if you’re that worried.”

  If I was that worried…

  I took a deep breath. Took the picture from his hand, felt a tug in my chest as my eyes searched her frozen face. Tried to tamp down the panic, steady my hands, steady my voice.

  “She hasn’t left the house in seventeen years,” I said.

  —

  Ryan held my gaze as the words settled in, and I noticed him processing, refitting everything he thought he understood about me and my family. He opened his mouth, closed it again. Seemed to reconsider everything he was thinking. “Okay,” he said, “so let’s double-check.”

  And even in this moment of terror—even as this emptiness was clawing at the inside of my skull, and the uncertainty turned into panic, my breath coming too fast—I found myself falling further for Ryan. That he could just take it in stride, and do what needed to be done. He walked down the hall, and I could imagine him doing this in his uniform, assessing the threats, trying to calm those inside. He projected calm and confidence, and I wished I could do the same. At the moment, I wished I could be anyone other than me.

  “Mrs. Thomas?” Ryan called, walking back into the kitchen with me, opening the closest door, which was her office.

  “Mandy,” I said. Nobody called her Mrs. Thomas, and anyway, she wasn’t a Mrs. She went by Mandy, or she went by Mom.

  “Mandy?” he repeated, stepping inside the office. He checked under the desk, and I opened the closet, and it suddenly occurred to me what we were looking for. My mom, shut down from the fear. Or worse, unresponsive.

  I led him down to her bedroom, where her door was open and her bed still unmade. The bathroom, bright from the LED lightbulbs. The shower door, clear. No place to hide. Everything about the house was out in the open. Even as a child playing hide-and-seek, there weren’t many good hiding spots, besides sliding under the bed, stealing myself away in the dark corner of a closet, or curling up in a ball inside the cabinets.

  There was the basement, but the basement was off-limits.

  I opened the bathroom cabinets now, even though it made no sense, just to get a whiff of everything that was her—the lotion and mouthwash and the soaps stored in mega-packs near the back.

  Ryan kept calling her name.

  The kitchen still had the scent of dinner; the pan was soaking in the deep sink. The faucet was faintly dripping, and I reached out to hit the handle, turning it all the way off.

  “Mom?” I called again. The room itself seemed to echo. I pulled back the curtains, caught our reflection in the windows that faced the mountains.

  I led Ryan down the other hall to my room, which was the only place in disarray. I gestured toward the mess on the floor, the drawers left ajar. “I didn’t do this,” I said. “She must’ve known I snuck out.”

  “So maybe she went looking for you,” he said.

  “Even if that were possible, she would’ve left a note, don’t you think? Left the alarm on?” My throat was tightening. “Ryan, she couldn’t come to the hospital after the crash. What could’ve been so worrisome that she’d actually leave?”

  He touched my elbow gently. “Maybe she called someone first.”

  I nodded. Yes. Too bad the landline was down and I couldn’t just hit Redial on it to find out. I’d have to call on my cell. But first, there was one more place to check. I didn’t want to have to call Jan unless I was sure. I opened the door in the hall, just before the kitchen, and stood at the top of the basement steps again. Neither of us ever went down here much—it had a secondary lock near the top, from back when I was a kid who might go wandering. To keep me out of the darkness.

  The basement had always terrified me. The dark corners, the absence of windows. I pictured my mother tied up in one for over a year, with nobody around who could hear her scream. I pictured burns on her shoulders, and spiders crawling over her on the damp floor. Neither of us went in the basement alone.

  Mom kept everything from my childhood down there. All my artwork, all my old baby clothes, stored in plastic bins and labeled with permanent marker. Boxes of chemistry kits and electronics we used to do homemade projects with, back when she homeschooled me—a volcano bubbling over on the kitchen counter, colorful smoke I’d dance around in the backyard while she watched from the window, smiling.

  “Mom?” I called.

  Maybe she came down here, and maybe she slipped and fell. Maybe she was looking for something. Maybe the fears overwhelmed her—me gone, the alarm off—and she locked herself down here. But the lights were off….

  I used to imagine monsters sneaking up from the basement at night, that that was the reason for the lock at the top of the door. I used to think my mother knew about the monsters, but didn’t want me to worry.

  A silly thought. The lock worked from the inside too—a precautionary measure, so we could never be trapped. And she didn’t think of my own worrying much. She raised me on it, taught me to look for it, to find it. To live with it.

  I ran my fingers against the wall until I found the switch, then started down the steps. The basement was still unfinished, with bulbs hanging directly from the ceiling. We searched around the stacks of bins, but there was no sign of my mother.

  One more thing. One more possibility…

  I stood in front of the far wall, staring at the subtle lines that marked the door. As far as I knew, it hadn’t been opened in years.

  The door wasn’t hidden, but it did blend in to the natural delineations in the stone wall. I flipped open the compartment that looked like a circuit breaker, exposing the dial, like a safe.

  “What’s that?” Ryan asked.

  The panic room. “One more place to check,” I said.

  Jan was the only one who called it the panic room. Mom told me it was the safe room. The room that, regardless of what was happening in the world around us, we would always be safe in. Jan twisted it around, made it into the place we would only go in a panic. I used to see it like my mother did—a last resort. Reinforced walls, safe against acts of God, that could withstand even a tornado. Fireproof walls that would last until help could arrive. A radio so we could hear about what was happening outside, and food and supplies to last us the duration. This was a room I should always feel safe in.

  But the way Jan asked me about it, years later, twisted it around in my head, turned it into something dark and ugly and full of shame. “Tell me about the panic room, Kelsey,” she’d said, sitting across the couch from me. “How often does your mother close herself up in there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, even though I did. Rarely. Very rarely. But suddenly I didn’t know if that was a safe answer.

  “Does she ever bring you in there with her?”

  With this, I knew the answer wasn’t safe. “No,” I said. I was ten years old, and I had just learned the power of a lie. Jan smiled.

  Mom used to bring cards to play in there. Once, we had dinner out of dehydrated food and stored bottles of
water, blankets rolled up like sleeping bags on the blue carpet. It was an adventure, she’d said, and I’d believed her.

  But it was also a drill. If the alarm sounded, the protocol was to come down here immediately. No matter what. This was the safest plan.

  There were only two people in the world who knew the code. It didn’t matter how many times Jan had said it was safer to have a backup, or to be sure to write it down—What if we got locked inside, knocked unconscious? How would someone get us out?

  That fear, apparently, didn’t measure up to the other. Only my mother and I knew the code. Meaningless, and therefore unbreakable, she had said. As far as I knew, my mother hadn’t been in there in years—not since Jan came into our lives. She was getting better. She was.

  But. If the alarm shorted, somehow taking the gate offline with it, and she didn’t feel safe, she could’ve locked herself down in the basement, and then inside the room. She could’ve gone to my room first, trying to bring me there with her. But there were limitations to her bravery. It all made sense. And when she couldn’t find me, maybe she left the front door open for my return.

  My mother in the panic room would be a setback. My mother in the panic room might be a reason to have our living arrangement reassessed. My mother in the panic room would be reason to lie.

  Hope and dread, swirling in the pit of my stomach.

  Ryan narrowed his eyes at the dial.

  “Turn around,” I said to Ryan. Not because I didn’t trust him, but because my mother would want it this way. If she was in here…If she was in here, it was a problem.

  I spun the wheel three times, in a way that was second nature even though I hadn’t tried it in years. As the locks clicked open and the door unlatched, I pushed gently on the door and said, “Mom? It’s me. I’m coming in.”

  The door was thick and the room dark and stale, and even before I had it open, I knew it was empty. The lights flickered on automatically, a crass fluorescent compared to the rest of the basement. The blue rug that my mom had put down so we could sit comfortably, playing cards. The shelves full of any possible emergency precaution, ordered from every end-of-the-world vendor site. It was, I could see now, nothing more than a sterile closet, with too-close walls, fluorescent lights, bottles of water and food that would keep. A fire extinguisher, fire blankets, and a black-and-white video feed from the security cameras, beside a phone.