The Best Lies

by Sarah Lyu

  “That’s not true!” I said. Sometimes I thought about breaking my promise to Elise just so he’d understand, but I couldn’t.

  “Isn’t it, though?” Jack said, the frustration in his voice growing.

  “It isn’t,” I insisted.

  “Then prove it,” he said, challenging me. “You know she’s going to text you soon, then call with some emergency.”

  I couldn’t deny it. I glanced at my phone, checking the time. We had forty-five minutes before the first text came, maybe an hour if we were lucky.

  “When she does, don’t answer,” he said. “Prove to me, to her, to yourself, that you can say no to her.” Jack was angry, and I couldn’t blame him. We’d hardly seen each other in the last few weeks. But more than that, I’d never seen Jack angry. He was at his limit, and maybe I was too.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “No matter what she says?” he said.

  “No matter what she says. I won’t go. I’ll stay,” I promised.

  Jack’s face flooded with relief and my chest tightened with guilt.

  The first message came when we sat down to eat. The first call came when we snuggled with Lola on the couch and started a movie. I silenced my phone, tried not to check my messages.

  Elise: Remy, why aren’t you picking up?

  Elise: Are you mad? Did I do something wrong?

  I picked up my phone to answer and Jack sighed.

  “What? I’m not leaving, I’m just texting her back to tell her that.”

  He didn’t look convinced.

  Me: No, I’m not mad, just busy. I’ll talk to you when I’m home later.

  Elise: I need to talk to you

  Elise: I’m scared

  Elise: My dad’s really angry tonight, I’ve never seen him like this

  Elise: Remy? Are you there?

  Elise: I think he went to see The Realtor and it didn’t go well

  Her texts were familiar, the same ones she always sent on nights I was with Jack. I ignored them, flipped my phone facedown, and rested my hand on Jack’s shoulder, the scent of his peppermint shampoo warm and comforting. I relaxed against him. It felt good to be alone just the two of us—actually alone.

  Elise: Remy please

  Elise: This is an emergency.

  My phone buzzed with another call. I bumped it away and it slid between the cushions, lost. Our kisses grew heated, our skin on fire.

  We moved into his bedroom. I wrapped my arms around Jack’s neck, my fingers in his hair, pulling him closer.

  My phone buzzed and buzzed in the living room, buried in the couch, and I ignored it. Elise was calling and calling for help, but I didn’t answer.

  SUNDAY // AUGUST 6 // DAY 331

  45.

  I called you, but you never picked up. I called you a million times, she whispered to me inside an ambulance what feels like an entire lifetime ago.

  When I finally checked my phone after midnight, I saw the missed calls and skimmed her texts.

  I called her on the drive back to my house but she didn’t pick up. She was giving me the silent treatment, I thought.

  I tried her again once I got home, and then after I got into bed.

  Me: Look, I’m sorry I didn’t pick up

  Me: Are you just going to ignore me?

  Me: Okay, I guess this is what we’re doing now

  Her silence was deafening and I started getting worried. I sat up, scrolled through her texts, reading them carefully this time. The last five stopped me cold.

  Elise: Oh my god, my dad’s outside my room

  Elise: Remy, he’s pounding on the door

  Elise: Rem what do I do

  Elise: I need you

  Elise: Rem

  After calling her one more time, uneasiness settled in the pit of my stomach and I ran to the car, keys slipping from my hands in my growing panic. I ran a red light and blew past a stop sign, but the truth was, I was already too late.

  I was too late the moment I got into the car. I was too late when I checked my phone before leaving Jack’s house. I was too late, and no amount of time will ever make up for those crucial hours I missed.

  46.

  The door to the Pink Mansion was cracked open, light escaping from the house, disappearing into the dark of night.

  I found her almost immediately.

  “Oh my God. Elise, oh my God.” I called 9-1-1, told them to hurry.

  She was lying on the steps, limp, one arm stretched up toward the second floor, a set of bloody fingerprints, the ghost of a hand clawing for freedom.

  I collapsed beside her, felt sobs being ripped from my chest. Afraid I’d hurt her, make it worse, I held back, not touching her.

  “Remy?” she asked, voice weak, barely audible. When she reached for me, I held her hand gently, scared I might break her. My breath caught at the sight of her, a map of blues and greens, a map of entire territories lost in battle. Her right eye was swollen almost completely shut. A river of blood ran along her collarbone, down her shoulder. Her hair was matted with blood, her neck was coated in blood from a torn earring.

  “Where were you?” she said, struggling with the words, her voice hoarse and barely audible.

  I needed you.

  Why weren’t you there to save me?

  Love is to need and to be needed. Elise needed me and I wasn’t there, it’s as simple as that.

  • • •

  I sat with her in the ambulance. The bright white lights bleached every surface inside the truck and cast a harsh, ghostly glow on Elise’s skin.

  “I called you, but you never picked up,” she said weakly. “I called you a million times.”

  I couldn’t look her in the eye.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, slipping my hand in hers, a prayer in my heart for her forgiveness.

  She took a deep breath and winced from the pain.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” I said, and vowed to make it up to her, spend the rest of my life doing it if that’s what it took.

  47.

  The emergency room of Emory Lyndens Creek was almost completely empty when they rolled her in from the ambulance bay around midnight. I sat alone in the waiting room, called Dad. When he didn’t pick up after three tries, I cried and clutched my phone to my chest, scared, lost.

  Finally, I called my mother. She picked up like she always did—a doctor’s habit—and fifteen minutes later, she swept into the hospital in jeans and an old T-shirt, hair tied back in a messy ponytail. Whatever her shortcomings were as a mother, she was the best at handling real emergencies.

  “What happened?” she asked, no anger or recrimination in her voice.

  I told her how I found Elise curled up on the stairs. I told her what I’d known about Elise’s father. I confessed my sins and asked for absolution.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” she said, a mix of shock and anger flashing across her face.

  “I didn’t think anyone would believe me—believe us.” I stared at my shoes and watched my tears fall to the ground. I promised I wouldn’t.

  She paused, the outrage draining from her expression. “I’m sorry, you’re right. It’s not your fault. It’s not Elise’s fault either.” She never apologized, never said I was right, leaving me speechless. Then she surprised me again, this time with a tight hug, and for a moment she wasn’t the enemy. For a moment she wasn’t my awful mother who played favorites, who was perpetually disappointed in me, who wished I was never born. She was just my mom, and I needed her. She held me and let me cry.

  Mom spoke to the doctors, saw Elise, called doctor friends who worked at the hospital, woke up a plastic surgeon to come in and sew up Elise’s cuts.

  “Make sure you don’t leave any scars,” she directed.

  The police came, asked Elise questions about her father. He’d driven back to The Realtor’s house after leaving the Pink Mansion, but she’d refused to let him in. Undeterred, he pounded on The Realtor’s door until she called the police, and that’s how they found
him. He was at the station now, asking for a lawyer.

  “What happened, exactly?” one of the officers asked Elise.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” she said, tears running down her face. With her permission, they took pictures of her in her underwear: the cuts, the bruises, the taped-up ribs, the swollen eye and bloody scalp.

  In the early hours of Sunday morning, after the officers left and my mom was out in the hallway talking to Elise’s doctors, we were finally alone.

  “Hey,” I said softly, resting a light hand on her wrist, still afraid to touch her.

  “Hey,” Elise said, turning her head toward me, a faint smile on her lips.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “I know,” she said with a kindness I did not deserve. The guilt grew within my heart, all hard metal and sharp edges, gutting me from the inside.

  I pulled away just when Elise needed me. And I’d been so wrapped up in Jack and so busy falling in love that I didn’t see how badly she truly needed help.

  Maybe it was all too easy to dismiss every call, every cry for help. Even the ones I answered, because this—her father’s violence—had become such a routine part of our lives. It was strange and awful, how given enough time anything could start to feel normal. As pedestrian as going to school, as mundane as breathing.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Elise shrugged and then winced from the movement. “What always happens. He was on the warpath and I was in the way. I wish I—” She broke off, looked away. I felt like there was something she wasn’t telling me. It terrified me: Elise’s secrets were unmapped mines that exploded when discovered.

  She tried to take a deep breath, but then her eyes watered from the pain of expanding lungs pushing against fractured ribs. She coughed, which only made it worse. I dropped her hand, reaching for the pitcher of water by her bed. She shook her head, refusing the cup I poured.

  “But how did it happen?” I asked. “Did he and The Realtor break up again?”

  Her head tilted in the slightest nod.

  “I don’t know. All I know is he came back home from her place angry and ready to take it out on me. It’s what he does, finds something to be mad about. This time he came home and started screaming about how I’d left a mess in the kitchen. Dragged me out of my room to clean it up.” Her voice sounded so far away, like she was lost in a memory—like she was still in the Pink Mansion trying to escape.

  I wanted to keep her from going under. I wanted to save her from drowning in the past, but I was helpless. I didn’t know what to do. Elise had always been the one with all the answers, and this time she had none.

  “He said I was ungrateful after all the things he’d done for me. After all the sacrifices he’d made for me. The same stuff he always says.” She was trying to hold back tears, like she didn’t want his words to matter, to hurt her. “The kitchen wasn’t even that messy. But I guess that wasn’t really the point.” I remembered what Elise told me: If he was having a bad day, he’d make sure I’d have one too.

  “Remy?” she said, finally turning toward me.

  “I’m here.” And I’ll never leave, I thought. Ever.

  “Am I a burden?”

  “What? No,” I said. Elise didn’t look convinced and I didn’t blame her, not after the way I’d treated her. I promised myself then and there that I’d never, ever let her feel like she was a burden.

  “No one wants me around. No one ever wants me around. Not my mom, not my dad. I don’t have anyone,” she said, tears running down her face, clinging to the curve of her chin. “Not even you.” The words cut me up.

  I touched my own face, felt tears on my cheeks as well. I couldn’t remember when I started crying. Maybe I had never stopped.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I want you. I need you. I love you.” Before Elise, I spent my days on boys who never loved me—distractions that granted me temporary escape from my parents, my life. Then Elise burst into my world, filling it with searing color, and for a while it’d been just the two of us. Elise x Remy.

  “No.” She shook her head. “You don’t. Not like I need you.”

  “What are you talking about? Of course I do.” Even then I knew it was a lie. But it didn’t have to be. We were Elise x Remy once, and we could be that again.

  “You don’t need me. You have Jack, you have your parents.”

  “I don’t have my parents. You know what they’re like, never there, and when they’re actually there, they don’t give a shit. Or worse, they blow up at each other and drag everyone into it. They throw around divorce like it means nothing.”

  Elise glanced out at the hallway, where my mother was, and my face flushed with embarrassment. I knew what she was saying with that simple flick of her eye. There my mother was, here when I called.

  “You’re right,” I said quietly. “It’s not the same, you’re right.”

  She turned away, staring out of the window at the hospital parking lot.

  “But I do need you, Elise,” I said, touching her wrist softly, trying to pull her back toward me. “Just as much as you need me.” We were soulmates, we were forever, and somehow I’d wandered off that path.

  “That’s just not true,” she said, voice growing distressed. “Don’t lie to me, Remy. Don’t ever lie to me. You’re never around. I have to beg, really beg, to get a glimpse of you. School’s one week away and you didn’t have time for me all summer.” Her voice cracked with anger, with pain. “Bottom line, you don’t need me.”

  “I do,” I said desperately. “I do.”

  “You won’t even answer when I call.”

  Her words landed like a punch to the stomach and I could no longer breathe. Her eyes cut into me, revealing the terrible truth. I’d failed her, I’d failed us.

  “I’m sorry,” I cried. “I’m so sorry.”

  I knew the words weren’t enough, could never be enough.

  • • •

  Trauma has a gravity of its own and it’ll never, ever let you go. In some ways we are still trapped in the orbit of that night. In some ways, that night is the real beginning to this story.

  MONDAY // AUGUST 28 // DAY 353

  48.

  So there it is. The truth about that night. My failure to keep her safe. The night that haunts me, the one captured in Elise’s police file.

  I’m sorry, Elise, I think.

  Detective Ward seems to examine me carefully. She had all the facts of the case in that folder, but never the entire story. Not until now. Only me, Elise, and Jack ever knew the truth about that night—that I was with him when she called, that I purposefully ignored her cries for help. Just thinking about it makes me want to throw up.

  “I can’t even begin to imagine what she went through. What her father did is absolutely despicable,” Detective Ward says. “It’s clear that you’re devastated too, that you feel responsible in some way, but I want you to know that it wasn’t your fault.”

  “I’m her best friend,” I say, looking at her like she’s lost her mind. “I’m the only one she has.”

  “The person responsible for what happened is her father and her father alone. Not her. And not you.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “What exactly could you’ve done?” she asks. “Okay, say you picked up the phone on the first call and drove over immediately. Who’s to say he wouldn’t have hurt you too? It’s not your fault.”

  It is, I want to argue, but she doesn’t understand. For all of Elise’s bravado, she’s just a terrified young girl, as lost as anyone else. And for once, she needed me to be the strong one. She needed me to save her and I didn’t show up.

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Detective Ward continues. “These things don’t always have a pattern that makes sense. It’s not like a roller coaster, there isn’t always an escalation. People always worry that they missed some sign, and sometimes that’s true, but it doesn’t work like that every time. Things could be going perfectly all right
for them for a while, maybe they don’t seem violent or they’ve never even been violent with a loved one. Sometimes people just snap. Violence isn’t logical—it doesn’t follow rules or care about your expectations.”

  I regard her with suspicion. Why is she saying any of this? Why is she trying to comfort me? I don’t trust her. I don’t know what she’s thinking, what games she might be playing. Worst of all, I don’t know what she’s told Elise, what she’ll say after talking to me here.

  “Remy,” she says. “Sometimes people are in a holding pattern until they’re not. You couldn’t have predicted any of it.”

  “I didn’t have to predict any of it,” I tell her. “I just had to pick up the phone, but I didn’t.” I think about the photos of Elise in her case file—every cut, every bruise evidence of my failure as her friend.

  I think about all she’s done for me, about the moments she’s protected me when I needed shelter from the storm. I think about the promises I made to her, that I’d never leave her, that I’d always love her.

  I failed to protect her then, but never again.

  “You couldn’t have known,” Detective Ward repeats. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  I don’t answer this time, exhausted by her insistence.

  “Did she ever say it was your fault?” she asks.

  “No,” I say. “If anything, she told me it wasn’t my fault.” But unlike Ward, Elise didn’t think the only person to blame was her father.

  SUNDAY // AUGUST 13 // DAY 338

  49.

  Elise was discharged that Wednesday, with less than a week to the start of school. She moved into our house, staying in my room as the legal proceedings moved forward. Criminal charges were filed against her father, and an immediate protective order was issued for her safety. A social worker spoke to her at the hospital and saw that Elise was situated in our home. She told us she’d be checking in regularly.

  I never left her side. We spent every minute together, watching movies in the basement all day, going for long drives at night when she couldn’t sleep, which was pretty much every night. We’d smoke and talk, or we’d fall into a steady silence, stare at the dark sky.