by Paula McLain
“Listen,” Bub said. “On Saturday night Penny and Paula and Tina all had the flu,” (as if we had forgotten the flat ginger ale and saltines, the lying around musing about how gross it would be if we all barfed at the same time) “and Hilde’s back was out, remember?” (When Hilde’s back went, she slept flat-out, beached in the middle of the living-room floor. She drank out of hospital cups with built-in straws, peed into a yellow plastic bedpan, which Bub had to empty, and generally moaned like she was going to die. Yes, we remembered.) “Any one of you girls in the living room could have gotten up in the middle of the night.”
Hilde made a throat-clearing noise that sounded like she was scratching her tonsils with a wooden spoon.
“What honey? Do you have something to say?”
“They were sick.”
“Yes, the girls were sick. I just said that.”
“They were sick. They wouldn’t have gotten up.”
“So what, are you saying Teresa must have done it?”
“I’m not saying that.” Her voice cracked. (She was saying exactly that.)
“What, then? What?”
“Nothing. I’m not saying anything.”
Bub shifted his weight on the sofa and sighed, the sound of patience leaking. “I’m giving you girls until tomorrow night. If you don’t have the guts to come to me on your own, I don’t want you in my house. There’s nothing worse than a liar.” He stood up disgustedly and walked down the hall to the master bedroom. Hilde followed, tugging on the hem of her blouse.
“This is so unfair,” I said, when their door was shut.
“Yeah, whatever,” said Teresa. “They don’t think you did it.” She looked around the living room as if she was thinking about burning it down, then went into the kitchen and got on the phone. Was she calling her friend Stephanie? Sascha? Maybe it was Kenny. I thought about the way Teresa and Kenny had been on her bed in the cabin, their bodies knotted like pipe cleaners. They were having sex, they had to be, but I knew it would never occur to Teresa to share that information with me. Somehow, we’d fallen into ourselves over the years, into privateness and silence. Or maybe we’d always been separate, my bubble and hers and Penny’s bobbing side by side through all the homes and harms. Why had I never said anything to my sisters about Mr. Clapp and his chair? He had never called it a secret, but I had made it one anyway.
And what were the odds that Mr. Clapp had targeted me alone? After Becky Bodette left, Teresa was by herself in the back bedroom. How easy it would have been for Mr. Clapp to go to her there. And he had, of course. It was suddenly as clear to me as the puzzle of Kenny and Teresa’s bodies on the cabin bed. Teresa was as much a bed-wetter as I was in those years with the Clapps, as nervous and as numb. Was Mr. Clapp the reason she wanted to run away that time?
I wouldn’t ask. Just like I wouldn’t ask if she had stolen the ten dollars. I went to bed and lay there in the dark while Teresa crouched in the kitchen with the phone. I could hear the murmur, pause, murmur of phone talk, but nothing specific. She could have been confessing. She could have been crying or spitting with rage, ready to walk out the door that very night. How was I to know? I lay as still as I could, straining to make out a single word, and heard only my breath, my busy heart, my listening.
“I CAN’T TELL YOU how disappointed lam that it’s come to this,” Bub said the next night after dinner. On the table next to his plate was a sheet of notebook paper folded twice, clipped closed with a ballpoint pen. He placed his right hand on top of the paper like one does a Bible.
“Everyone outside but Penny,” he said.
Penny looked alarmed — did he know something she didn’t? — pinned to her chair like a bug, expecting anything. The rest of us bolted. We threw ourselves onto the lawn, picked at tufts of clover and waited for the verdict. Over in our concrete pond, the dogs were fishing. They crouched down and walked back and forth through the shallow water with their mouths open. When a goldfish swam in, they chomped their teeth together and then swung their big heads to one side. The little fish flew into the grass to shrivel like apricots. You’d think the dogs would have eaten the goldfish, they were carnivores after all, but they seemed more interested in the hunt.
Ten minutes later, Penny came out of the house looking unscarred. We asked her what happened, but she just pointed to Tina. “Your turn,” she said, and then deflated onto the grass. “Sorry. Dad says I have to zip my lip.”
All Teresa and I could do was wait — too cruel — while the dogs chomped and flung, chomped and flung. Finally I was up. Bub still sat at the table, with the dishes pushed back and piled all around. He had the notebook paper open and the pen uncapped, and his watch was off and lying next to them.
“Sit down,” he said. “This is a lie-detector test. If you’re lying I’ll know.”
He took my hand in his and put two fingers on my wrist at the pulse point. “Did you take the money in Hilde’s purse?”
“No,” I said. He wasn’t looking at me but at the watch. He was counting.
“Do you know who did take the money?”
“No,”
The Timex ticked on. I could feel my blood under his pressing fingers.
“Did Teresa take the money?”
“No. I don’t know.”
He wrote something down on the paper and then told me I could go.
The only one left was Teresa, and although I wasn’t there for her test, we soon found out she failed miserably. Her pulse raced and raced when Bub asked her the questions. It was so obvious she was the one. I heard her screaming in her room when I came back into the house. She had been grounded for a month and Bub had taken away her ugly-ass dumpling car, the one she didn’t want in the first place.
“Let this be a lesson to you,” Bub said to Penny and me as we tried to watch Mork and Mindy over Teresa’s screeching. “Lying is the worst thing you can do. How can I ever trust anything that comes out of her mouth now? Tell me that.”
TWO DAYS LATER, WHEN the Avon lady rang the bell to deliver an order, Hilde suddenly “remembered” what happened to the ten dollars. It bought cologne for Bub in a bottle shaped like a roadster, and a cake of green eye shadow. Nobody stole anything.
This should be good. I thought, and waited for the apology that was sure to come, for Hilde’s shamed face at the dinner table. But she wasn’t sorry, apparently, and Bub wasn’t sorry. They didn’t take anything back. The Cadet keys made their way back onto Teresa’s dresser, and she was wordlessly ungrounded. She didn’t even seem mad about it, no madder than usual, anyway. She was as cold as something metal, biding her time in the unlaunched rocket of her room. In two months she would turn eighteen, and in that time, no one would be sorry enough to make her want to stay. No one would speak the true, verifiable fact: a liar is not the worst thing you can be.
WHEN PENNY AND I went to visit our cousin Keith at St. Agnes, we shared an elevator with an orderly who was escorting a metal gurney from the second floor to the ninth, so we got a good long look at him. He wore scrubs the color of smog and paper shoes and was chewing something small — a sliver of toothpick? a button? — that made his mouth do a kisslike twisty thing. Penny met my eyes, rolled hers, and that’s all it took. We were hijacked by a fit of snorting. After a minute, we had the sense to turn away from each other and were able to gain a thin composure. Then Penny emitted a postlaugh sigh that was half leaking bicycle tire, half hoot owl, and we were off again, laughing loudly as the orderly glowered. The doors opened with a ding at nine. He tried to exit with a maturity that would shame us, but one rubber wheel stuck in the door crack and the gurney spun sideways like a grocery cart possessed. He started to swear quietly at it, forcing it forward with his weight, and a small blob of drool dropped from his mouth to the silver platter of the gurney.
He drooled!
When the orderly finally got the cart unstuck and rushed away, paper shoes whooshing along the corridor, Penny and I were alone in the elevator, red-faced and wet-eyed, sighing. I looke
d up at the twinkling numbers and said, “You know we passed our floor, right?”
“Yeah, I know.”
KEITH WAS IN INTENSIVE care, having barely survived an electrocution accident. He was a field-worker for the phone company — one of those men who go up in hydraulic lifts to check the lines, tool belts jangling from their hips like giant charm bracelets. Keith was up in the lift when he grabbed hold of a power line that was supposed to be shut off. The voltage traveled through his left arm like blood through a vein, then split, shooting down through both legs and feet, and out the top of his head. The jolt sent him flying right out of the basket and down some twenty feet to the hard ground. His partner had been sitting in the truck for the ordeal, which had taken only seconds, and ran out to find Keith crumpled on the side of the road, looking dead, dead, dead.
“It’s a miracle he’s still with us,” Granny said when she called us at the Lindberghs’ to give us the news. Her voice sounded lispy and strange, the s’s rushed together wetly. I thought it was because she had been crying, but when I asked, Granny had said no, it was because of the stroke she’d had the month before. A stroke? I barely had time to process this when Granny started in about Keith. He’d been in critical condition for several days, but was out of the ICU now and could have a few visitors. It would mean a lot to him, she said, if we girls would go down there.
When I got off the phone, Penny and I sat at the kitchen table for a while, feeling stunned and ashamed. How was it that Granny could be so sick without our even knowing it? When was the last time we’d seen her? Or Keith and Tanya? If we were fifteen and sixteen, Tanya must be thirteen already — could that be? — and Keith nineteen. The last time I remembered going over to Vera’s with Granny, Keith had just started eighth grade at Cooper Intermediate. While Granny and Vera did some catching up over weak coffee, we went outside with Tanya’s Chinese jump rope and started playing in the driveway. Keith didn’t join us in the game, of course — he was way too cool for that — but he sat with us, sprawled on the lawn, tugging at tufts of grass. As I waited for my turn, I plopped down next to Keith and started attacking the grass too, building up a little pile of cuttings between my feet. It wasn’t until Keith went to scatter my pile, teasing me, that I noticed his hands. The knuckles were raw and purplish, with nicks and one long scrape on his right ring finger.
“What’s that from?” I reached over, happy for an excuse to touch him.
“Fight.” He didn’t pull away.
“A fight? Someone beat you up?”
“Maybe I did the beating up. Did you ever think of that?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head quickly. “You wouldn’t. You’re too good.” I went back to my grass nest, raking up the strays.
“Good, huh?” The smirk was in his voice as well as on his face. I looked up to see his blue eyes narrowing as he studied me like some two-headed thing in a jar.
My blush was tidal, blood moving from my neck to the tips of my ears and back. I couldn’t even look at Keith and so pretended to be very interested, suddenly, in the Chinese jump rope game. Tanya was at the part where she had to leap up and come down on both sides of the elastic, pinning them down, but she missed. “Dang,” she yelped. “Do-overs.”
“No way,” Teresa said, stepping out from her side. “My jumps.”
Keith stood silently and wandered inside, and we left shortly after that. He came out to the porch with Vera and Tanya, and they all waved us down the street. As we passed the abandoned airport, its runway cracked like an eggshell, every third window of its blue control tower blown out, I thought about that Easter morning when we learned of Deedee’s death, how only moments before, we had been singing in Granny’s car and Keith the loudest, the best — his voice all angels and atmosphere.
WHEN TERESA GOT HOME from track practice, Penny and I went into her room together to tell her about Keith. She was still in her running shorts and a gray T-shirt with the neck cut out that said Wild Woman. “What?” she said from the floor where she sat cradling her albums in her lap. She owned only five and was as possessive of them as a dog with half a bone, putting them in order, going through them over and over for signs of our tampering.
We told her the part about Granny first, about her lispy voice and how she had said she couldn’t drive anymore, that ladies from the Gospel Lighthouse were doing her grocery shopping and coming to pick her up for meetings.
“When did that happen?”
“A few months ago,” I said. “July.” In July, Teresa had been up at Gloria’s resort. That was her excuse, but what about Penny and me? We’d been doing our usual summer thing, spending most of our time over at the Swensons’, forgetting the Lindberghs for as long as they would let us. Sometimes Bub would call over there and say, “Come home. Can’t you see you’ve outstayed your welcome?” But that was only once a week or so. In between, we were free, free, free.
Although we hadn’t been forgetting Granny for the same reasons, she’d been forgotten nonetheless, pressed into a scrapbook like a newspaper clipping. We didn’t think ill of her; we just didn’t think of her at all. When I put my mind to it, I could easily picture Granny in her kitchen, whistling as she battered chicken for frying, could see her dark shoes and old-lady stockings and smell her White Shoulders. But these memories were as old as I was. I didn’t have any new ones for her, didn’t have a context for her in this life, which was whizzing forward with crushes and pizza parties and long looks in the mirror to see just what could be done about my hair.
“That’s sad,” Teresa said, petting the album on top: Rod Stewart in a black leather jumpsuit and boots, his hair looking, well, electrocuted.
Penny fidgeted as she described Keith’s accident, unclipping and reclipping her silver barrette. “We should go to see him, don’t you think?” The question was for both of us, but she was looking at Teresa. “Granny said he would like it.”
“Absolutely,” I said.
Teresa shrugged. “You guys can go if you want. I’m busy.” “You’re busy when?” I asked. “We haven’t told you when we’re going.”
“I’m always busy.” She tipped Leather Rod to the side and the album slid out. Holding it gingerly, she blew on it several times, then placed it on the turntable. Lowered the needle. “Tonight’s the Night” started up, clearly our sign to leave, but Penny and I couldn’t stop looking at her incredulously.
“What?” she finally barked. “What?” She put her hands on her knees and set her chin. “Listen, I just don’t want to go. You guys can make up your own minds, but leave me out of it.”
PENNY DRIED HER FACE on her sweater as we left the elevator after our spastic laugh attack. “Do I look normal?” she said, turning her attention to her stick-straight hair.
“No. Do I?”
“Nope.”
The sixth floor was tiled in white and a yellow-orange Penny said was technically called “baby shit,” you know, in decorator’s terms. We wandered around lost for a while, but I wasn’t in a hurry. I needed the time to prepare myself for Keith’s injuries. Granny had warned us that he looked bad, and though I tried to call up versions of bad, the only thing coming in clearly was Keith at eight, feet wide, hands on hips, calling out, “To the Batmobile, Robin!”
Our Hall of Justice was a tangle of rusted car parts and sheet metal in one corner of Granny’s backyard. Now you kids stay away from there, Granny would warn, shaking a finger. You’ll get lockjaw! Okay, okay, we sang back in unison, and headed right for it. In those days, Keith was always Batman and would select a Robin to keep me and my sisters from drawing blood trying to settle it ourselves. Sometimes he picked a number or did Eeny Meeny Miney Moe, but usually he lined us up against the fence, held his chin for a moment, as if deep in thought, then pointed. I preferred this method because it had nothing to do with luck; he was choosing, and when he chose me, the sun seemed to shoot off like a bottle rocket.
Somehow, Penny and I got all the way around to the bank of elevators again before a nurse
spotted us and led us to Keith’s room. Through the door was a single bed spewing tubes, banked by machines that blinked and hummed. There was no one else in the room, so it had to be him, the exploded thing above the sheet. His head was at least twice its size, a black basketball, burned and hairless.
“Look who’s here,” said the basketball. “Granny said you might come. Get over here where I can see you.” It didn’t sound like my Keith, my Batman, but it wouldn’t: Keith was a grownup now.
We sidled nearer, Penny half a step behind me. From where we had stood at the door, it had looked like all of Keith’s beautiful white-blond hair was gone, but no. There were still frizzles of it over his ears and in spots along his forehead and the back of his neck, like tufts remaining after a carpet has been ripped out.
Keith watched us expectantly as we approached the bed, and the eyes were his own, wide and sky blue inside the char of his face.
“Hey you,” I said, and found myself talking through a wad of my own hair. Without thinking, I had pulled a section around in front of my mouth. I laughed nervously and dropped my hands. “How’s it going?”
“Sucky. How does it look like it’s going?” The words were hard, but his voice wasn’t. “Where’s Terry?”
“Teresa,” I corrected him. “No one has called her Terry since we were kids.”
“She’s too good now, huh? Miss Prissy Pants.” One heavily bandaged arm pawed the sheet.
“No, that’s not it. She just doesn’t like Terry.” I walked over to the window, where the view was all parking lot. It looked like a board game, one where you could roll dice and maybe end up on the free space.
“Uh-huh. Where is she?”
“At home, studying,” Penny piped up, speaking for the first time. “She wanted to come but had this really big test.”
“Yeah,” I added, “big,” but I was thinking, Who knew Penny was such a great liar?