1 Once Upon a Lie

by Maggie Barbieri

  “I think I like you,” Jack said, considering himself retired from a “real police job.”

  Maeve wanted information, but it seemed that Marcy only had eyes for what was going on on the field, where MIRANDA!!! was setting up midfield, Rebecca across from her on the far side. Maeve decided to give her a little prod before the game started. “So what goes on next door?”

  Marcy rolled her eyes. “You don’t want to know.”

  Yes, I do, Maeve thought, but she could tell she wasn’t going to get anywhere. Marcy took a lipstick out of her pocketbook and applied it expertly, even without the benefit of Maeve’s toaster. The game started and they turned their attention to the field. The Farringville girls scored two goals almost immediately, which sent Marcy into paroxysms of glee. It didn’t help that Miranda scored the second goal and looked to be on her way to scoring the third when the whistle for the first quarter was blown and she lost her last chance for glory.

  Maeve tried to reopen the conversation during half time. “So your neighbors. Lots of problems there?”

  Marcy was loud, but she wasn’t stupid. She put a hand on her hip and gave Maeve a look that shot a frisson of terror through her; she didn’t want to get on Marcy’s bad side after seeing that look. She wondered what was behind it. “Why are you so interested in my neighbors?”

  Maeve decided to come clean. “They had a birthday party at the bakery for their little girl and I felt like something was ‘off’ with them.”

  “Yeah, something’s off,” she said, turning her attention back to the field. “They fight like cats and dogs.”

  Maeve already knew that, but she wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Maybe she was more interested in hearing how the children fit into the cycle of abuse or what, if anything, Mrs. Lorenzo did to protect them. But the subject was closed if Marcy’s body language was any indication. The last thing anyone wanted in this village was to have their name printed in the blotter, and Maeve knew that. She had touched a nerve and needed to let it go before she turned Marcy off completely.

  Maeve had almost forgotten about Jack and realized with alarm that he wasn’t by her side any longer. She scanned the small crowd that had assembled, not seeing him in the stands. Finally she spotted him by the fence at the edge of the field, talking animatedly to Rebecca, who had left the sidelines to greet her grandfather. Maeve excused herself, but Marcy didn’t seem to care; she’d taken up a new conversation with a person on her right whom Maeve didn’t know, discussing Miranda’s college application essay topic, which was, not surprisingly, soccer.

  Original.

  Maeve headed down the bleacher steps and reached Jack just as his impassioned plea for Rebecca’s team to adjust to a man-to-man defense was coming to a close. Rather than the glassy-eyed look she usually got when talking to adults, Rebecca seemed rapt, hanging on his every word. She barely gave her mother a glance before running back out to the field. Maeve was accustomed to that kind of treatment. With her girls, she was on a need-to-know and speak-only-when-spoken-to basis. Rebecca was the better of the two, but even she had her limits, and apparently they included not talking to her mother in public.

  “Man-to-man defense, Dad?” Maeve asked. “These days, we prefer to call it person-to-person.”

  “Why are you so interested in that insufferable woman’s neighbors?” Jack asked, hanging over the fence that separated the spectators from the players, his eyes never leaving the field.

  I’ll tell him everything, she thought, right here, right now, and I won’t leave anything out. He’ll forget by dinnertime anyway. He’ll tell me why he beat Sean, why he broke his nose. I’ll tell him that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I knew that another little girl was being hurt and I had done nothing to stop it. She stared at his wide-open face, the one with the blue eyes that looked like hers, now guileless and filled with an innocence that stemmed from a lack of memories, the ones that made her own eyes look so sad. Something made her hesitate, though, and that’s when she saw that he remembered something, though he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was, judging from the look on his face. She decided that that’s the way she wanted to leave it, a distant memory for a guy who had done his best with nobody to help him do it.

  They were in the midst of the fourth quarter, still standing by the fence, when Jack announced he had to “see a man about a horse.” Maeve threw a thumb over her shoulder, telling him that the Porta Potties were right beyond the entrance to the field and that after he used the facilities, he should come right back. No wandering. No walking about. It was just void and return.

  He gave her his patented salute and took off, climbing the steep hill toward the entrance. She watched him enter the portable john and then turned back to watch the game, which was not quite the runaway it had seemed it was going to be in the first half.

  Five minutes passed and then ten, and her exasperation turned to worry as she saw not one but two people who weren’t Jack exit the big blue structure and return to the game. She looked around, but as she knew would be the case, he was nowhere to be found. She started up the hill herself, feeling her calves burn as she raced toward the entrance, her heart starting to pound.

  If she found him, she would kill him.

  But she knew that was just her worry talking. She wouldn’t kill him. She wouldn’t even reprimand him. He didn’t know where he was or that he was supposed to return to her or why he was at a soccer field at a school unfamiliar to him. A lump lodged in her throat and stayed there. She wondered how far he had gotten.

  She crested the hill and turned the corner toward the parking lot, people jockeying for spots so that they could see whatever sporting event was taking place at a distant field. To her left was a playground that she knew was right outside the kindergarten wing of the elementary school that the fields surrounded, and from it, she could hear voices, including one like hers and one her dad’s.

  Jack was sitting on a bench beside Tina Lorenzo. The baby was on her lap, sucking enthusiastically from a bottle of juice while Tiffany dallied on the jungle gym, the arm in the sling holding her back from playing with reckless abandon. They were the only family in the playground, and Tina was talking animatedly to Jack, who was listening eagerly. It looked as though they were old friends.

  Maeve approached cautiously; she wasn’t sure why. As she got closer, she heard Jack bellow, “And there she is now!”

  Tina looked at her and smiled tentatively. Tiffany jumped off the jungle gym and ran toward her.

  “Do you have any cupcakes?” she asked.

  “Dad, I was worried,” she said after saying hello to Tina and telling Tiffany that no, she didn’t have any cupcakes. “I thought you were going to come right back.”

  “Right back where?” he asked, the smile on his face masking his uncertainty.

  She waved it off. “It doesn’t matter. The soccer game is almost over,” she said.

  “I was walking along and I saw this little girl. Doesn’t she look just like you did when you were little, Maeve?” he asked, beaming at the little girl, her face bringing back some memory from Maeve’s childhood that made him happy. “When I saw her, I thought to myself, Why, it’s my little Mavy! But then I remembered that you’re old now.” He slapped his knee and let out a big guffaw. “I mean, not old like me, but older than this little beauty.” He gave Tina Lorenzo a winning grin, and she was charmed. “I’m seventy-three years old,” he said, flexing his bicep. “I bet you find that hard to believe.”

  Tina smiled genuinely, not the look of someone who was humoring an old man. Jack’s openness had that effect on people.

  Tiffany pulled at the hem of Maeve’s shirt. “This is where I’m going to go to school next year,” she said.

  “Kindergarten?” Maeve asked.

  She smiled and Maeve could see two teeth missing from her bottom row.

  “Kindergarten was the best year of my life,” Maeve said, and it was the truth. She still had her mother, and the torture ha
dn’t started yet.

  “You look just like my Maeve,” Jack said again. “The spitting image.” He got that faraway look in his eyes, the one that told Maeve he was thinking about the past. It was the look of someone grasping for the string at the end of a kite, just out of reach. He looked at his daughter and smiled. “Just like you.”

  CHAPTER 31

  New day, new recipe.

  Take a dash of nosiness, a sprinkle of annoyance, a cup of concern, and a layer of consternation, and bake for an hour. When you’re done, you’ve got a woman who should mind her own business instead of sticking her nose where others would not dare to tread.

  Maeve had missed the dam. Seems that she and Michael Lorenzo both had Saturdays free, but for different reasons. That was the night her daughters went to their father’s house and one of the nights that Lorenzo exited the giant house in the new part of town to meet Julie Morelli, she of the big and apparently talented mouth, in the vacant parking lot adjacent to one of the county’s man-made wonders. Maeve wondered why it was Saturday and wondered if Julie had divorced the Mute or vice versa. It seemed too serendipitous to think that Maeve could continue her stealth missions on one of the only nights that she ever had free, but there you had it. Sometimes life hands you the lemonade first instead of the lemons.

  She didn’t know why, but her mother was on her mind more and more. She’d thought that once Sean was dead she would have some peace; that she would stop thinking about her all the time. But the opposite was true. The red car, the contents of the purse strewn across the avenue, the lifeless body sprawled on the double yellow line … the thoughts stayed in her head, fighting for prominence in the little space she had left to think and feel. She had compiled the images from bits and pieces of conversations overheard throughout the years, snippets she had read in newspapers that had been left around, which had created what she was sure were imperfect memories of what had happened and what other people had seen. She slid down in her seat and closed her eyes, hoping to get rid of the tattered remnants of the thoughts of her mother, a person who, in Maeve’s mind, was rapidly becoming both larger than life and a distant memory all at the same time.

  What was she accomplishing by sitting in the dark, a light rain falling once again, watching a man she had little knowledge of beyond what she had witnessed at the birthday party and the two nights she had confronted him? She wasn’t sure. Was it to let him know that someone was watching, even though she tried to stay as hidden as possible? Or was it to make sure that he was evil, as she suspected? A lot of men cheated on their wives, but his adultery just added to the specter of his menace and increased the sleazy factor tenfold. She went farther down in her seat and ruminated on the practical logistics of this tryst. Was Julie Morelli so hard up for a roll in the hay that she was content doing it in a minivan with an incredibly disgusting guy? Maeve shuddered to think that she would ever get to that point, happy that although it wasn’t necessarily her choice, she was now a practiced celibate who hadn’t really had a sexual thought in close to three years.

  Except for the night of the speed-dating event.

  Like the memory of her mother, which was faulty and skewed, her lingering impression of Detective Poole was not what it should have been, based on his occupation and the frumpiness that he since had exhibited in the execution of his job. That night, the night in which she had tried to steer romance in the direction of her lovelorn friend, he was someone different, someone who had a heartbeat underneath his pilled sweater and rumpled sport coat.

  She wondered why he had let that—the heartbeat—show itself to her. Maybe the save-your-marriage baby hadn’t been as successful as he had hoped.

  As the rain fell, Maeve watched the minivan from the safety of her Prius, which she realized was starting to smell like Rebecca’s soccer togs, the ones she left in the backseat after Maeve drove her home from the game yesterday and that wouldn’t be removed until Maeve had had enough of the odor of pungent teenage girl. Julie did what she did every other night when her interlude with Lorenzo was done. She got out of the minivan, climbed back in her sports car, and began talking on her phone, the time it took to execute whatever sexual task she had been charged with using up precious minutes when she could have been talking. Maeve waited until Julie drove past before starting the Prius, deciding that this was not the night to be confronting Michael Lorenzo.

  Lorenzo, however, had other ideas.

  Although she was at the far end of the parking lot and as hidden as one could be in the open air of a village park, he had spotted her. She wasn’t sure when or how, but he knew she was there; maybe his conscience had alerted him to the fact that what he was doing was wrong. Now someone besides Julie Morelli—a woman whose moral compass could be considered faulty at best—knew what he was doing with his spare time. Maeve saw him striding across the lot, his destination clear, so she began to accelerate, slowly at first and then flooring it when it became apparent that Michael Lorenzo was going to chase her on foot and that he had a baseball bat.

  He was screaming at her, but she could discern only the curse words, of which there were many. She drove in toward him, hoping to scare him as he charged her like an angry bull, veering to the right at the last second to avoid the baseball bat coming down on her windshield and shattering it. As she drove past, he caught her right taillight with the bat and smashed it, the pieces scattering around the parking lot. She hit a large pothole and winced as the Prius listed to one side, half of it seemingly being swallowed up by the hole. She looked in her rearview window and saw him bent over at the waist, the exertion of chasing her sensible hybrid catching up with him. The bat was resting across his knees.

  She angled out of the parking lot and up the ramp toward the main road, the only thing stopping her hands from shaking being her grip on the steering wheel. She decided, for safety’s sake, to take a detour through the back roads of the village just in case Lorenzo had gotten his wits about him and had plans to follow her home. She took a right and headed toward another town, making a quick left just before she got to the edge of the village proper and wended her way through the windy road that anchored her little burg on one side. When she realized she was hyperventilating, she pulled off onto a small dirt road where only two houses were set, turned off the car, and rested her head on the steering wheel.

  For perhaps the hundredth time that month, she asked herself what she was doing, but she still didn’t have an answer. Tonight’s escapade underscored that she was way out of her league and things were getting to a point where she could get hurt if she kept it up. She needed to mind her own business. She needed to stay home and attend to her own affairs, the ones of a noncarnal nature. It was time to hang up her avenging angel persona and go back to the business of being a mother and a daughter.

  But still. Something inside her had snapped, she felt, and she was using these nocturnal recon missions to fuel something inside of her, although she wasn’t attuned enough to her feelings to know what it was. Sean had seen to it that she’d never really be able to figure out what she thought, what was true, and what was a lie. She hadn’t been able to trust her feelings—her gut—for as long as she could remember.

  Until now.

  Her gut was telling her that what she was doing was not only right but necessary. Crucial. Important. She was making sure, in her own small way, that someone who was preying on the weak would be taught a lesson. She wasn’t sure what that lesson was, but she would figure it out in time.

  She had rubbed the skin on her arm raw without realizing it, her sleeve pushed up over her elbow and the scar where the bone had poked out all those years before. These days, an arm broken like hers would have been set and then subjected to weeks of painful physical therapy, but back then the plaster cast was fitted, worn, and then sawn off a few weeks later. She pulled the sleeve down and lifted her head off the steering wheel. In front of her car was the mother of one of Heather’s classmates, a nice woman she had served pizza with at a basketball gam
e two seasons ago and who rarely frequented the shop. She was holding a garbage bag and was ready to throw it into the shed at the foot of her driveway, the heft of it making the muscles in her bony arm stand out in a kind of strange, fleshy bas-relief. Instead of throwing the bag away and going back into the house, she stared at Maeve through the rain-slicked windshield of the Prius. Maeve saw her mouth her name.

  She left the bag by the shed and started toward the car, her first name escaping Maeve’s memory even as she racked her brain to try to summon it. Maeve rolled down the window of the car. “Hi!” she said cheerfully to cover her overall panic at what had transpired at the dam and her inability to come up with the woman’s name.

  “Maeve?” the woman asked.

  Jane.

  Joanna.

  Jessica.

  Jolene? That wasn’t it. “Hi,” Maeve repeated. “I was just going. I realized I had forgotten something and was going to turn around.”

  “You’ve been here for a while,” the woman said. “I noticed you about fifteen minutes ago. Is everything all right?” The rain, now heavier than earlier, was soaking her blond bob, and Maeve felt bad at seeing it go from perfectly coiffed to sodden and droopy.

  “I’m fine,” Maeve said. “Just forgot something.”

  The woman put a hand over her head as if that would protect her head from the pelting rain. “It’s funny seeing you, because you know what I forgot?” she said, laughing. “I forgot to place an order for a cake next weekend.”

  Maeve waited. She knew what was coming. The woman would give her an elaborate set of directions for what she wanted and never follow up with a phone call. She’d end up with a Batman cake instead of a bat mitzvah cake, or something equally ludicrous, and whisper all around town that Maeve was losing her edge. Instead of telling her to call her in the store, because she knew she wouldn’t, Maeve rustled around in her purse for a pen and a piece of paper, her fingers grazing the cool metal of the gun, the one that clearly wasn’t safe being stashed in a cheap knockoff with ripped lining but which inexplicably stayed in her possession at all times. “Shoot.” No pun intended, she thought.