Lies She Told

by Cate Holahan

  Tyler reaches toward me. For a moment, I think he is going to pull me into his side and kiss the top of my head. Make me feel better. When I look at his outstretched hand, I realize he’s holding a box of tissues.

  “Even if you intend to divorce your husband, you need time to feel good about not wanting him anymore. To mourn your marriage.”

  The word “mourn” recalls Colleen’s dead body. I grab a handful of tissues and press them to my face. Tears swell my nose. My mouth can’t close from crying. As I try to wipe my face, tissue sticks to my wet lips and tongue, bits of wafer that won’t dissolve. I cannot be saved.

  “It’s all my fault.” I repeat the phrase, sobbing. “It’s my fault. Something is wrong with me. I don’t deserve to—”

  “No, Beth. No. Don’t say that.” Tyler gives my shoulder a supportive squeeze, reminding me that we can be friends even though it’s clear we will not be lovers again. “The disintegration of your marriage is not your fault. And whatever your husband did or didn’t do to his girlfriend is not your fault either.”

  I wipe the tissue beneath my snotty nose and take shaky breaths, trying to compose myself.

  “You need to be there for Victoria,” Tyler says. “You don’t need to be punished.”

  I nod, though I know he’s wrong. A woman is dead. Punishment is coming.

  LIZA

  It’s dark by the time I reach the Hamptons house. Stars—millions of them, as opposed to the handful visible in Manhattan on a clear night—paint the sky. I see Antares, the heart of the scorpion, glowing red in November’s zodiac constellation. David taught me about that one.

  I’m exhausted from the revelations of the past twelve hours. My legs shake as I exit the car, as though I’d been running a marathon rather than occasionally pressing a gas pedal. Fatigue flows through my blood like too many glasses of red wine. Everything has slowed. I can’t confront Christine like this.

  After entering through the side door, I flop down on the first available reclined surface: the living room couch. I shut my eyes with a foggy intent to rest for a moment and then call my best friend.

  Once my lids lower, the plan dissolves into ether.

  *

  A black screen fills with the sound of the ocean. Waves rush to an unseen shore in a furious crescendo, only to fizzle on the sand. Gazing at the sea are the watery eyes of a young girl. Ten, maybe older. She has the height of a preteen but lacks the telltale signs of puberty. I feel as though I know her or I did once, long ago. She sits, half naked, on a lounge chair. Her flat chest is covered in a poorly tied Hawaiian-print tankini. The bottom is missing. Her trembling fingers clutch a bloody tissue.

  Grunting draws the child’s attention to a pool. The water is tinted like a bruise, blue fading into a purple spot tinged with red. A woman stands waist-deep beside the discoloration, her hands around a handle. Metal slams against concrete.

  I know this person too, though my mind can’t piece together where from. She’s the kind of woman about whom people whisper, “She was a beauty in her day.” Now frown lines frame her mouth. Her eyes are pulled down by dark circles. She wears a sopping button-down shirt. Her hair has been yanked haphazardly from a chignon so that half is still pinned while other sections hang to her shoulders.

  “Mom.” The girl whispers the call. She hugs her arms over her askew bikini top and shivers. “Mommy.” She starts rubbing her forearms. The bloody tissue in her hand shreds from the friction. Bits of paper fall to the floor. “Mom.” Still, she whispers. “Mom.”

  The child drops the tattered tissue and stars clawing her arms. Tracks of blood follow the lines of her jagged nails. Terror fills her dark eyes. “Mom!” She screams. “Mom! Mom!”

  The woman splashes to the steps, running beneath the water. Blue slacks cling to her legs as she emerges onto the deck. The spearhead of a garden shovel hangs beside her knees. It clatters to the ground.

  The mother kneels beside the girl and grasps her hands, stopping the fingers from tearing into any more flesh. “Shh,” she hushes. “I didn’t know. I’m so sorry. I never thought . . .” Though tears fill the woman’s eyes, she doesn’t let them fall. “We found him in there. Okay? He’d been drinking. None of this happened. Okay? Nothing happened. We just found him.”

  The girl considers the woman with a glazed expression and then turns her attention back to the sea. A blank calm erases the terror that had twisted her features.

  The mother slowly releases her daughter’s hands. She watches them, waiting for another attack, but they hang limp at the child’s sides. She runs back to the shovel, picks it up over her shoulder like a musket, and rounds the house to the side yard. The girl stands and follows. Her face still, like the ocean just before dawn.

  Again, there is grunting. The shovel sticks from the earth beside a line of flowering weigela bushes. The woman steps on its head, burying the metal deep in the ground before heaving it upward to dislodge a mound of dirt. She continues digging until a hole, the depth of a forearm, appears beside her feet.

  The shovel goes in. She stands on the blade and then tugs at the handle until it pops out. The stick is tossed to the side. She motions for her daughter. The child crouches beside her. Together, they push back the earth with their hands until there is nothing except a sprawling bush. Wine-colored petals cover the site so that not even the earth looks disturbed.

  *

  I wake, unable to breathe. Panting. Gasping. Drowning. Tears have soaked my pillow. My neck is wet. Instinctively, I reach to where David would lie next to me and claw air. Everything that has happened in the past twenty-four hours returns with dizzying clarity. I have left my husband. I am in my house in Montauk. The woman in my dream was my mom.

  A pale-yellow glow looms outside the patio doors. I stumble from the couch and walk through the dining room to the half bath. My reflection stares at me. Her eyelids look sunburned. I turn on the faucet, splash water on my face.

  “Stupid nightmare,” I tell my mirror image. The woman had been my mother, but I’d cast her in a distorted version of my bestseller, Drowned Secrets. “It was just a bad dream.” My reflection sobs in response. She doesn’t believe me.

  I am still wearing yesterday’s denim shirtdress, now speckled with wet splashes and stinking of hormones. Christine has seen me looking worse. I’ve seen her on day six of the same pajamas. How I look or smell doesn’t matter.

  I reenter the living room and grab my phone from my bag. Chris’s voice mail answers my first call. I dial again. I have to know what role she played in all this. Did she know that Nick and David were seeing each other? Why didn’t she tell me? What did she do when she found out?

  She answers on my third try. “Hey, Lizzie.” She yawns. “What’s up? What time is it?”

  “I’m in Montauk. Please come over.” My voice is raspy. I can barely get the words out.

  “God, Liza, what’s wrong? Are you okay? Is David there?”

  “David’s home. I need to talk to someone. He’s been charged with Nick’s murder.”

  There’s a gasp on the other end. “Okay. It’s all right. Everything will be fine.” She’s awake now. Her voice is sharp. Adrenaline filled. “Are you in the house?”

  “The living room.”

  “Okay. I need you to go to the beach behind the house, where people can see you. Don’t stay in the house. Go where people can see you, okay? I’ll be right there. The beach. Wait for me on the beach.”

  I don’t understand why I can’t be in the privacy of my home. “Okay, but—”

  “Liza, where’s your gun?”

  *

  Chris stays on the phone as she rushes out of her house and drives the ten blocks to mine. Every few seconds, she asks me to reassure her that I don’t have my Ruger and that I am sitting on the beach. She demands to know what the sand feels like, what the waves look like, anything to keep me focused on the present. I tell her that my sandals are going to leave awful tan lines on my feet and that I am concerned about grains ge
tting caught in the stitching of my purse. This makes her feel better.

  Whenever I attempt to discuss David, she tells me that we will talk about him all I want as soon as she gets there and then inquires about the weather. My foul-mouthed friend speaks in the soothing tones of a suicide hotline operator. I have the sense that this isn’t her first time talking someone off a ledge.

  I hear a car stop in front of the house simultaneously through the phone speaker and from somewhere behind me. Chris’s footsteps crunch on the gravel driveway and then slap against the deck boards. I turn as she is clearing the tall grasses at the edge of the house. She slides down the beach, still in her blue-and-white-striped pajamas, ginger hair shining in the morning sun.

  Before she sits beside me, she looks at my hands, scanning for my Ruger. I open my purse in front of her as though she were an airline security agent and then drop the bag back onto the sand and raise my hands in surrender. She smiles weakly at me and settles down on my same dune. Her arms open. I fall inside her embrace and lean my head on her shoulder.

  “What happened?”

  The waterworks are no longer on full blast, but the dial could turn at any moment. I try to share my story in one breath—before I’m sobbing too hard to speak. She gets the facts of the case against David without my opinions. The cops arrested him for Nick’s murder after finding a note with Nick’s blood on it in his suit pocket. Nick had written that he was in love with my husband. They’d been having an affair for months, maybe the better part of a year. On the night Nick disappeared, he’d been seen at a bar with David.

  When I finish, she hugs me tighter and repeats how sorry she is. She says nothing about the bar.

  I peel away from her. “How long did you know?”

  Her chin retreats to her chest. “What?”

  The motion seems too theatrical to be genuine. I can’t watch anyone else that I love lie to my face. Instead, I look at my fingers pressing a print into the sand, the kind hospitals give new mothers of their babies’ palms. “A bartender at the gay bar where Nick and David were seen said a woman came in asking about them.” I grab a handful of sand and watch it slip through my fist like a timer. “She had red hair and freckles.”

  Chris’s tense energy changes beside me. I sense her shoulders lower. Her back curves. She inhales and exhales, preparing for a story.

  “I saw them together. Nick called and said that I should meet up with him at the place we went before.” She scoffs. “I should have known he’d have a motive other than sleeping with me. But the power of wishful thinking, right? I convinced myself that he’d gotten distracted on our first date and wanted to try again.”

  I turn to face my friend. She twists her hair into a coil. In the white sun, it looks like a rose-gold rope. “When I arrived, he was with David. I didn’t assume a date, though. I thought maybe that it was an intervention of sorts for you through me. Nick had said that David wasn’t working hard enough because he was taking care of you. I thought maybe now David was here to tell me that the fertility drugs were making you . . .”

  She trails off, but the word she wants is “insane.” Her political correctness takes me aback. Christine doesn’t have to fear calling me nuts. The only people who can’t be called crazy are crazies. Am I acting loopy? Do sane people even ask that question?

  “I wasn’t about to listen to two men complain about a woman’s hormones,” Chris continues. “So I didn’t go over to them. Though I did have a drink. I’d gone all the way out there, right? It was crowded, and I deliberately stayed in the corner behind some big dude so they didn’t see me.” She releases her hair. It stays wound on her shoulder like a stretched copper spring. “I didn’t suspect that Nick and David were on a date until they left together. They weren’t kissing, but maybe they were walking a bit close. Anyway, I asked the bartender about them and he said that Nick had been bringing David by a lot recently. The way he said it, kind of smirking, made me think something could have been going on.”

  I examine Christine’s guilty posture. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t know for a fact and I didn’t want to upset you. I mean, you were already under so much stress trying to get pregnant.” She looks out at the water and blinks. “I didn’t want it to push you over the edge and have anything happen again.”

  She swallows this last word as though she regrets it.

  “What do you mean, ‘again’?”

  She digs her feet into the sand and tightens the coil of hair on her shoulders. I recognize these behaviors from our childhood. This is Chris at her most nervous and defiant. “‘Again’ like when you got depressed after your dad left.”

  She isn’t looking at me. Reminding me of my brief bout of depression should not be this difficult for her. It’s not as though she’s a stranger to psychiatrists. She saw one after her divorce. I wonder what she’s hiding. Is it that she followed Nick back to his house to talk sense into him and ended up shooting him? Chris has access to her father’s gun. She might have taken it if she’d been heading into a bad area in Brooklyn.

  Unspent tears make Chris’s hazel eyes glow green. My best friend has always looked out for me. If she killed Nick because she believed me too fragile to handle the affair, then I’m responsible. It’s my fault he is dead.

  I grasp her arms. “Please, Chris. What are you not saying? I won’t tell anyone, but I have to know. I just can’t take more lies. I am going crazy from all the secrets. I don’t know what’s true anymore. What’s real. I can’t take it. I can’t live like this.”

  I am on my knees, begging and shaking my best friend. To my right, I can hear the water. I fight the urge to run into it, to bury my head beneath the waves until I can’t breathe anymore.

  Chris looks at me as though she heard my thought. “You tried to kill yourself, Lizzie. In high school, after you found out that you couldn’t have kids because of the abuse.”

  I release my friend and fall back onto my haunches. “No. Why would you say that? I talked to some doctors because I was depressed that my dad left and I’d realized he wasn’t coming back.” An image assails me as I speak. A white bottle with a red label. Over the counter. Generic brand.

  “Your mother killed your father in front of you.” Chris wipes away the tears on her cheeks with sandy fingers. Crystals sparkle like glitter on her spotted skin. For a moment, I don’t think she’s real. She’s a figment of my imagination. I’m inventing what she’s saying.

  She shudders. “He’d been molesting you for years. Since you were eight, I think. You didn’t say anything until the touching became more . . .” She coughs, driving fresh tears from her eyes. “Invasive. He had you convinced that everything was a normal expression of affection until then. You opened up to me about it. I told my mom. She told yours. Your mom came home to confront him. You’d been here alone a lot that summer while your mom was in the office and your dad was, supposedly, selling houses. She caught him in the act and—”

  A sob cuts off her words. I look out over the ocean, trying to make sense of her story. My story. The childhood she describes is a nightmare out of one of my books. It’s not mine. I had an alcoholic father who skipped out on the family and a loving, devoted single mom who died young of cancer. It wasn’t an ideal childhood. But it wasn’t that horror show.

  Tears slick the skin beneath Chris’s nose. She looks at the ground as she wipes them away. “Your mom hit him with something. Knocked him into the pool unconscious. He drowned. She never went to jail for it, but everyone kind of knew she did it. Even the police. No one really wanted her to pay for it, though. Ultimately, the cops bought the line that he must have been drunk and dove into the shallow end. It was plausible enough. There’d been a dent on the bottom of the pool. The police psychologist who talked to you kind of put two and two together, but the cops couldn’t prove it. They couldn’t find any weapon that—”

  “Wait, I know this story.” Anger pulls my legs upright as I realize the source of Chris’s tale. This
is the plot of my first book. My best friend is recounting my own fiction rather than admitting to killing Nick.

  I dust the sand from the back of my bare legs, not caring that the wind is carrying it into Chris’s eyes. “This is what happened in Drowned Secrets. You don’t think I’d know a story that I wrote?”

  She stands and reaches for me. I step back from her, leaving her hands hovering in the air. “You based that on your life, Liza! On suppressed memories.”

  I take another step back. “No. I made it up. I make things up. That’s what I do. I make up—”

  “That story was real.” Chris’s voice has lost its practiced calm. “The doctors said that the trauma of what your father did and then guilt over your mom’s actions made you disassociate from the experiences.” Her hands fall to her thighs. “You probably remember bits and pieces, but you’ve convinced yourself that they’re dreams or things you’ve seen on the television or . . . your fiction.”

  Christine walks forward and grasps my hand. The pressure of her fingers pleads with me to be strong, to remember.

  “Your mom and I didn’t know, at first. When you wouldn’t talk about what happened, we thought it was too painful to discuss. Then when you started to demand that everyone call you Liza rather than Bitsy or Beth, we thought it was because your dad had used those nicknames and you didn’t want to be reminded . . .”

  She trails off, tears tumbling down her cheeks. I can’t look at her. She can’t be telling me the truth. I don’t remember my father touching me.

  But why would she lie?

  I slip my hand from her palm and turn toward the water. The morning mist has burnt off. Sunlight dances across the ocean. It’s surreal that the day is bright and beautiful. I’ve stumbled onto the wrong movie set.

  Chris sniffs loudly. “It wasn’t until high school, when you didn’t get your period and went to see the gynecologist, that we realized you didn’t remember. The doctor told you that you couldn’t have kids from scarring related to the abuse, and your mom had to explain. You tried to overdose on aspirin. If you hadn’t already had such bad headaches and the bottle had been fuller . . .”