The Real Liddy James

by Anne-Marie Casey

  She did not. She pulled the car to a halt by a rough stone wall bordering the lake. She wound down the window. She threw the phone out.

  It landed in the water with a satisfying splash.

  Matty opened his mouth to speak.

  “Don’t say anything!” she hissed.

  He shrugged and closed his eyes.

  Back at the gate lodge, she sat Cal and Matty in front of the aged television to watch SpongeBob SquarePants dubbed into Irish, and wandered around the house to see what had been left behind that might teach her something about its owner. There was little: three copies of Atlantic magazine from 2010, a dog-eared paperback of Eat, Pray, Love, and two CDs left on top of the stereo—Keith Jarrett’s The Melody at Night, with You and The Art of the Song by Charlie Haden. But there was something about the atmosphere of the house, whether it was the smell of wood and turf or the old-fashioned solidity of the furniture, which Liddy could only describe as kind. Sebastian was a kind man, however much he might pretend not to be, and when Liddy remembered the image of him here with Chloe, two ghosts of Google Earth, and his dream of walking this land with his children, she felt sad for him.

  In the wardrobe hung a few of his shirts, which, if she were the leading actress in the movie about her life, she would have clutched to herself and sniffed. This struck Liddy only as unhygienic, particularly the armpit area, from which she concluded that her feelings for Sebastian were confused—or simply realistic.

  Liddy knew that he would soon find a Chloe 2.0, this time one with functioning ovaries, and in the future Liddy would once again only meet him in court.

  She turned to see the two boys wilting into the sofa, and as it was now late afternoon, she said they could go to bed, and they didn’t argue. She carried Cal into her room, Matty disappeared into his, and she emerged with what was now a medicinal need of alcohol. She grabbed one of the bottles of merlot, untwisted the cap with her teeth, and swigged it straight from the bottle, reveling in the feeling of taboo. Then she filled a tumbler.

  She picked up the CD of The Art of the Song and saw a version of a traditional hymn she had often heard Peter talk about. She put it in the stereo, pressed play, and the room filled with the melancholy beauty of the simple song.

  I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger

  I’m traveling through this world of woe

  Yet there’s no sickness, toil nor danger

  In that bright land to which I go

  I’m going there to see my father

  I’m going there no more to roam

  I’m just a-going over Jordan

  I’m just a-going over home

  I know dark clouds will gather ’round me

  I know my way is rough and steep

  Yet golden fields lie just before me

  Where the redeemed shall ever sleep

  I’m going there to see my mother

  She said she’d meet me when I come

  I’m only going over Jordan

  I’m only going over home.

  Liddy leaned against the wall. She tried to close her eyes and listen, but, without warning, a shivering more violent than that of exhaustion engulfed her, and because she was in the long-lost country of her birth, her mind writhed in the grip of the kind of intense introspection about the past she had designed her city life to avoid.

  For more than half her years, Liddy had been emotionally estranged from her parents. She did not relinquish her responsibilities toward them, she assisted them financially, she called them on occasion, and she visited once a year. But she saw herself as a person effectively orphaned, not by death but by self-betterment. And they made it easy for her. When she spent a day in the condo in Orlando, Patrick sat glued to the TV, and Breda began washing the dishes the moment food had been put on the table. It seemed that her parents did not like her very much. Certainly, they had nothing in common. Liddy always felt that they were punishing her for that.

  She remembered with a shudder how her mother had urged her toward a sensible life: a pensionable job, an appropriate marriage to a nice boy, a ranch house no more than thirty minutes’ drive away, and, above all, no disturbing desire to be different. (After all, Breda used to say, look what happened to Janice McCrea, who went to Los Angeles to be an actress and got pregnant and took drugs and Mrs. Mulvey from church says is now a hooker.) Then how, having ignored all this, when her father lost his job and told her she could no longer continue her undergraduate studies at Yale, she had howled with rage and run outside to a phone booth and called her grandmother, who had been sitting in the tiny kitchen of that house in Blackrock, and asked for ten thousand dollars. And how her grandmother had said yes and not asked why. (When Liddy had got the job at Rosedale and Seldon, she had paid the loan back with interest, and also bought her grandmother a car.) On Sundays, Liddy had worked an unpleasant but highly paid shift in a plastics factory with three ex-convicts and a former US marine. They swore all the time and the marine leered at her. She cleaned houses and waitressed and tutored rich kids all the way through college. She never took a penny from her parents ever again.

  When Peter first met her, he had found her history entirely understandable, even charming. He had pointed out that literature has always needed orphans, from Becky Sharp to Harry Potter, and that it was far harder to create forward momentum for protagonists if they have to get past their parents. But the moment Matty was born Peter’s attitude began to change. It became important to him that his child have a sense of his wider family.

  “What did they do that was so bad?” he would ask, insisting that Liddy was not beaten or starved and that his parents drove him crazy but he would never stop them from seeing their grandchild. He said that the narcissism of youth can feed false memories in anyone, and that Liddy should get over it for the sake of her son. Liddy was horrified. Peter appeared to have forgotten that, while Liddy had abandoned her religion long ago, there was one article of faith to which she was devoted. Of course she had not endured the gothic horrors of others’ experiences, but her childhood was still something she had to survive.

  Tough breeds tough; Liddy had learned that the hard way. She had triumphed against the odds, of that there was no doubt. But this country, and her childhood home, and, yes, Patrick and Breda Murphy, were part of the petri dish in which her aggressively independent nature had been grown. She had come to America from somewhere, and that seemed like an important thing to be reminded of. For hadn’t Peter once shouted that she had spent so much time and effort making herself she had lost herself too?

  “Stop!” she muttered, jumping to her feet. She switched off the CD. It had been years since she had stayed still and listened to a piece of music for its own sake; now she knew why. Music could awaken feelings that she had put to sleep. She had relegated it to a backdrop for meditation, or a motivational tool for exercise, the relentless reinforcing of the awesomeness of everything. To calm herself, she began to recite law cases under her breath, exactly as she had done as a student when she was taking her exams, but it was no good. She began to pace up and down. What the hell had she done? What the hell was she going to do? She had children, responsibilities. She could not throw her life away like her mobile phone, which presumably now lay at the bottom of the lake (the seventy-three messages from Curtis unlistened to), never to rise again like the sword Excalibur.

  And what about the resurrection of her work life, after such a spectacular and public disintegration? In the career game of Snakes and Ladders she had not just fallen down a ladder, an enormous boa constrictor had swallowed her whole. Despite her literary agent’s assurances that “all publicity is good publicity,” there would be no second best-selling book detailing how to break up without fucking your kids up, for, quite clearly, whether ten tips or seven signs, she had been too preoccupied advising others on how to spot them to take any notice herself. And while another woman, humbler or more attuned to
the ironies of life, might take a kind of perverse pleasure in the dark humor of the situation, Liddy felt nothing other than coruscating self-hatred and humiliation.

  In the background, she heard the sound of Matty’s phone ringing. He answered it in his newly gruff stranger’s voice and walked into the hallway to stand by a window. There was a low rumbling of generic conversation—and then she heard what sounded like a book being hurled onto the floor and a shout as the patchy reception went on and then off.

  “Is everything all right?” she called.

  “That was Dad,” he called back.

  Liddy stood up and went to find him.

  “I’m sure you miss him and Rose.”

  “I miss my bedroom!”

  “Oh, Matty—”

  “Leave me alone!”

  And he went back into his room.

  Liddy turned and walked away, but as she reached her bedroom she heard a strange noise from the other end of the house. At first she thought it was the low humming of a harmonica, but as she approached Matty’s room again, she heard him crying. She ran into him and held him in her arms.

  “I’ve been such an idiot,” he sobbed. “I let you and Dad down. I’m so embarrassed. Do you think they’ll ever let me into the camp again?”

  “Matty, don’t worry. Just promise me you’ll never do it again and we’ll work it out. Your dad and I love you so much. We were so scared.”

  “My throat still hurts, Mom. I thought I’d never stop puking. Like, I honestly thought my guts were coming up.” He looked up at her, his face wet and blotchy. “This isn’t how I thought my life would be. I want to be happy.”

  Liddy hugged him harder. Me too, she thought. “Everything’s gonna be okay,” she said. “I promise.”

  “I’m straight edge from now on, Mom. Did you ever take drugs?”

  Oh, the brave new world of parenting a teenager.

  “Once,” she said, completely truthfully, “but it didn’t do anything for me.”

  She had indeed made one attempt to walk on the wild side and had rubbed proffered cocaine onto her gums late at night in a nightclub, where the drumbeat was so loud it seemed to be punching her in the chest. But it failed to have any discernible effect, so she headed home and had a mug of cocoa instead. She had awoken the next morning secure in the knowledge that it was another rite of passage she had passed, or failed, depending on your point of view.

  “Trust me, Matty. There’s a reason we tell you not to do certain things. It’s our job to protect you.” And she lay beside him and stroked his hair until he settled, curled on his side around a pillow.

  Liddy pulled the door closed and hurried outside and down to the shore. The sky was cloudy and streaked with pink, the lake was glassy and gray. Almost in silhouette, a woman passed on a paddleboard with a large dog balanced behind her. She lifted a muscular arm in a cheery wave as she rowed. Liddy limply waved back, and waited for her to pass by. Then Liddy cried, bitterly and resolutely. First, for the loss of the life she had worked so hard to achieve, then for the loss of her marriage to Peter, for which she had never had time to grieve, and (last and most bitterly and resolutely) for the loss of her children, or rather, all the time with them she had given away.

  Liddy had always taken pride in her ability to see the positive in every situation. “If it isn’t terminal, it doesn’t matter,” she would say, and others either marveled or felt a bit scared and stayed out of her way. But there was no positive spin to be wrung from the sight of distraught Matty and no escape from the regrets that filled her now, the worst of which was clear. She did not know her sons, and they did not know her.

  The first drops of a heavy rain splattered on her hair. She ran inside to find Matty still awake and told him to pick up his mattress and put it on the floor of her room. For one night they would all sleep in there together. He obeyed without a word—secretly he found the incessant hammering on the skylight above him far noisier and more disturbing than any air-conditioning unit in the city—and was asleep in minutes.

  Liddy lay quite still next to Cal, her heart pounding, and listened to her sons’ breathing and the deluge outside the windows. Peter would have told his students it was “pathetic fallacy” and said that the weather was mirroring her emotional turmoil.

  All she knew was that it felt like hell.

  The next morning, Liddy was awakened by an unusual buzzing a few inches from her face. She lifted her right hand and swatted back and forth in front of her nose, waiting for her eyelids to open. Only then did she feel the scratchy pain in her throat and the thick stabbing pressure in her ears and across her cheekbones. Her sinuses were bubbling with infection. When her vision settled, she rolled over to see Cal brandishing an object that could only be the hitachi wand.

  “Gimme!” she said gruffly, grabbing it and peering at it to see how to turn it off. At the foot of the bed, Matty surfaced, sitting upright, his hair adorably ruffled, looking about six years old himself.

  “What is that?” he said, and she muttered something about a foot massager, and stuffed it back in the paper bag, secretly thrilled that he was not yet as grown up as he thought. Pale morning light struggled through the window. Liddy swallowed, groaned, and looked at her watch, mentally computing the hour to Irish time. It was nine o’clock in the morning. She closed her eyes. She felt herself drifting into feverish sleep again, and in the distance she heard the sound of some pigeons calling a melodic, comforting coo—

  —when suddenly a dog started barking as another sound, that of some sort of rattling vehicle pounding down the track, reverberated. There was a shriek of brakes as it hurtled to a halt, and then there was a relentless hammering on the wooden front door, which seemed to make the whole house shake. Liddy didn’t move. She had momentarily forgotten that there was no one else around to answer it, and so had the boys. She pulled the duvet over her aching head to see if the noise would just go away. But instead it got louder and more insistent, until she wondered if it might be some intruder with malevolent intent. She grabbed the hitachi wand, although obviously there was little damage a vibrator could do to a violent attacker, and made her way slowly to the kitchen, Cal trailing behind her, his arms wrapped around her pajamaed legs. She peered out the window.

  There in the driveway stood a woman of stocky build and unkempt appearance, in her late thirties or so, her hair an indeterminate shade of gray black and cropped short, nest-like and horizontal, as if she had been dragged through a hedge backward and forward.

  “Hello? Hello?” the woman said, and as she clearly had no intention of leaving, Liddy opened the door on the latch.

  “Hello?” said Liddy, before coughing violently.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?” the woman demanded.

  “Who are you?” gasped Liddy in between gulping breaths.

  “I’m Storm Stackallan. Sebastian’s sister.” (Of course, thought Liddy, blaming the ache in her head for her failure to figure this out immediately. Although through the gap in the door she could only see one eye, the corner of a mouth, and the side profile of Storm’s nose like in a cubist painting, from the window she should have recognized the slope of the woman’s body, which was exactly like her brother’s.)

  There was a pause, and used to the confusion her name often elicited, Storm continued by way of explanation. “My mother named me after her favorite horse.” She paused. “Are you Sebastian’s mistress?”

  “No. I’m Liddy James. I’m staying here for the summer. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “No,” Storm announced assertively. “Sebastian always comes here for the summer.”

  It was clear to Liddy that Storm was not about to blow away.

  “Not this year,” she replied, reluctantly opening the door. “He’s on a remote island in Alaska, fishing.”

  Storm entered. “Alaska? No wonder he hasn’t called me. And of course t
he Internet’s been down for weeks.”

  Matty’s strangled yelp of protest resounded from the bedroom.

  “Who are you?” she said, looking at Cal.

  “Cal,” he replied, holding out his hand. Storm considered, held out her own, and shook.

  “Where do you live?” she said.

  “New York City.”

  “Oh. Are you one of those sad city kids who think milk comes out of a carton?”

  “No! It comes from a cow,” he said, chortling, “who lives on an organic farm in New England.”

  Storm turned back to Liddy. “Of course, Seb’s running away from the divorce. He doesn’t do failure. He used to make the teachers re-mark his exams if he got a B. Mind you, I never liked Chloe. She came here for one night, announced she was allergic to mold spores and that he had to take her to a hotel. It was never going to work out.”

  Liddy walked over to the kitchen area, where she swallowed three acetaminophen, plugged in the antiquated coffeemaker, and improvised a filter with a paper towel.

  “He told Roberta it was horrid. Chloe fleeced him for everything he’d got.”

  “Well,” said Liddy, “in fact, they settled by mutual agreement.”

  Storm looked over, curious, and Liddy leapt at the chance to get rid of her. With her avowed dislike of Chloe, Storm might not wish to spend time with the chief instigator of the “fleecing.”

  “I was Chloe’s divorce lawyer.”

  There was a moment. And then Storm burst out laughing.

  “Really? That’s hilarious! And he invited you? That’s so Sebastian!” She paused. “Good job Roberta’s not here, mind. She’s hopping mad about it all.”

  “Sebastian and I are . . . friends, we’ve known each for years. It wasn’t personal, it was work,” explained Liddy. “It sounds weirder than it was.” Then she thought, Nope, that’s a line you could use in New York, but here, it sounds pretty weird.

  “Mom’s also a writer,” said Matty, who had appeared in the doorway. “She’s been on TV. You should watch her on YouTube. When will the Internet be back on?”