Liar & Spy

by Rebecca Stead

  “Touched up?” Bob asks. “What for?”

  “We’re keeping them, aren’t we?” She puts one hand on her hip. “Isn’t that the point? That we’re all like—whatever? A team?”

  “Yeah,” I say, while Bob finds his blue Sharpie. “That’s exactly what it means.”

  “Blue Team!” Paul says. “It’s what’s for breakfast!”

  We all watch Bob fill in Chad’s blue dot, and I know that something has changed after all.

  Knock, Knock

  When I get to our building, Safer is sitting cross-legged in one of the lobby chairs, reading a book. He doesn’t look up when I come in, so I pretend not to see him. I go over to the elevator and push the button.

  “Hi,” I hear him say.

  I turn around. “Hey.”

  “I was thinking—I never did tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “About my name.”

  I shrug. “Whatever. It’s none of my business.”

  He unfolds his legs and stands up. “I want to.”

  I look him in the eye. “So tell me.”

  “You remember Pigeon’s story, and Candy’s—and my parents’ whole weird name thing.”

  “Yeah. I remember. You named yourselves.”

  “Not really. It’s more like they named us after getting to know us a little.” He gets quiet. “It’s not the same thing.”

  “Look, you don’t have to tell me the story,” I say, punching the elevator button a few more times.

  “No, I do.”

  The elevator comes. I look at Safer.

  “So the first part is that when I was a kid, I worried a lot.”

  “About what?”

  “About a lot of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Bugs,” Safer says. “Lightning. Elevators. Strangers. Airplanes. Green food. Buses. Germs. Blood. Losing teeth.”

  “Okay. I get the idea.”

  “And most of all,” he says, talking fast, “I was afraid of the dark. So bedtime was like this really big deal for me. I always made my mom read me like seventeen books, and sing five songs, and bring me two glasses of water. And after all that she would say goodnight. And she always said it the same way.”

  “Yeah?”

  He takes a long breath. “Yeah. She’d say, ‘Good night, sleep tight, you’re safe.’ And then she’d go in the other room to read or whatever, and a minute later I’d call out, ‘Safer! Safer!’ ”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, so that’s the story.” Safer looks exhausted. “Now you know the truth.”

  “Now I know what truth?”

  “That I’m afraid of everything.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “And I always have been.”

  “Safer?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is that the real reason you don’t take the elevator? Because you’re afraid of it?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been scared of elevators forever.”

  “And that’s why you don’t—go out much? Like to DeMarco’s, even?”

  “Yeah. I’m kind of an inside person, mostly. I mean, I do go outside, when I have to. I just prefer it inside.”

  “Don’t your parents make you go out?”

  “My parents are a little unusual, Georges. My mom is into table manners. But other than that, they’re not very bossy.”

  I push the elevator button again, and the door slides open in front of us. Safer steps back. “I should probably go,” I say, and I get in and watch the door close.

  But when the elevator opens on the third floor, Safer is waiting there.

  I go to our door and slide my key into the lock—smooth as silk.

  “Safer?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is there anything you aren’t afraid of?”

  “Yeah, a few things.” He smiles. “I’m not afraid of dogs.”

  “Or dog slobber,” I say. “Or avian flu.”

  “Right.” He looks at me. “What about you, Georges? Is there anything you’re afraid of? Or like, worried about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said. Are you afraid of anything?”

  Am I afraid of anything? Yes, I am afraid of something.

  There is one thing I am horribly, disgustingly afraid of. Something that I think could never heal. Something that would not stop hurting no matter how old I get or how big my big picture is.

  “I have to go,” I tell Safer.

  “Wait,” Safer says. “I know about your—”

  I shut the door on him and walk straight into the bathroom, where I lie on the floor. I hike up the back of my shirt so that I can feel the cold tiles against my skin and I stare at the light fixture on the ceiling. There is a way in which I don’t exist while I’m lying here. My brain thinks about the cold and the light and nothing else, and not one person on the planet knows exactly where I am.

  There’s a knock at the door.

  Not the apartment door.

  The bathroom door.

  “I know you’re in there,” Safer says.

  I stay where I am. “Don’t you know you aren’t supposed to barge in through people’s front doors?” Of course he doesn’t. This is Safer I’m talking to.

  “I didn’t come through the door,” he tells me. “I came through the window.”

  Figures.

  “I went through Dan’s apartment—upstairs, I mean. Out onto his fire escape and down a flight into your bedroom. That’s how I left you that note under your pillow the first night.”

  “Dan?” I say. “Don’t you mean ‘Mr. X, the mysterious killer’? Who wears black and has sharp knives and probably carts dead people around in suitcases? And doesn’t own a baseball cap with a fish on it? Or have a dog?”

  “I’m his dog walker. I have his keys because I was watering his plants and getting his mail while he was out of town.”

  “Good to know,” I say to the bathroom ceiling.

  “I’m sorry,” Safer says. “I thought we were having fun.”

  “Because it’s fun to be lied to?”

  “It was a game, Georges. It was your idea, kind of.”

  “My idea?”

  “The Spy Club. You left a note on that old sign in the basement. Pigeon put that up there like five years ago. He always has these ideas for clubs. He used to, anyway. But the Spy Club never took off, until you came. I went down to put our laundry in the dryer and there was this note, out of nowhere. Remember? You wrote, What time?”

  “That was my dad.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know that. And then you came to the meeting. I was glad.”

  “Well, I’m happy I could help you out by being your idiot.”

  “I never thought you were an idiot. I thought you kind of knew. The whole body-in-a-suitcase thing? I stole that from an old Alfred Hitchcock movie I saw with my dad. My dad is really into movies.”

  “Thanks for clueing me in. Better late than never.”

  There’s no sound for a minute, and I wonder whether he’s left. But then he says, “My mom says if your dad has to go to the hospital, you can come for dinner if you want. Just, you know, to be with people.”

  “People who lie?”

  “Okay. Should I just go?”

  “Feel free to use the front door.”

  Safer has completely messed up the nonexistent feeling I was going for. After I hear the front door close, I head out to the television for some America’s Funniest Home Videos. I go to the refrigerator for a string cheese, and I see Dad’s note next to the Post-it with the telephone number at the hospital:

  Visiting Mom. Call my cell for dinner plan.

  I’m staring at the note for a weirdly long time, and then I get this taste in my mouth, a horrible taste of something much worse than Mr. Landau’s chemical ribbon.

  I drink a ton of water from the kitchen faucet, but the taste won’t go away. I unwrap a string cheese but I can’t eat it. I hold on to it and watch my videos, which aren’t that
funny anymore because I’ve seen them so many times. I know exactly who is about to roll down a hill or fall off a slide or get scared by a fake rat and start screaming. I know whose cat accidentally plays three seconds of Beethoven on the piano.

  I go to the machine and push the Eject button. Instantly, all of it is gone: the clapping, the laughing, the host who smiles literally every second of the show. The DVD slides toward me, and I take it with two fingers and stare at Mom’s writing:

  Smile, Pickle. I love you.

  That taste is still in my mouth. I know what it is. It’s the taste of pretending. It’s the taste of lying. It’s the taste of a game that is over.

  The muscle at the back of my throat flexes, again and again, and I can’t stop it. For a second I think I might throw up, and then I realize that no, I’m going to cry.

  I cry on my bed that is Dad’s old bed. At first the taste in my mouth gets even worse; it’s something thick and awful, like tar all inside my mouth and down my throat and up my nose. I cry right through it because I have no choice, and it’s like choking.

  But then the taste changes. Something is washing the tar away. I’m disappeared into the crying, and I’m trying to stay that way, because it feels so good to disappear, to just lie there on the bed letting my body take over and get rid of every part of that awful taste.

  I don’t want to think, I don’t want to hear my thoughts. Instead, I’m feeding myself images, sad and sadder—Mom kissing me and pushing the hair out of my eyes, Dallas Llewellyn’s foot in my stomach, Mom’s suitcase by the front door and Dad running back to the bedroom for her pillow, the look on his face with that pillow tucked under his arm—and it’s like striking match after match, each one bursting into flame and sending a sharp smell straight up my nose into my brain. The pictures are making me heave and rock until they slow down and then I can’t come up with any more pictures, and the taste of my crying is light and clear and makes me think of the ocean at Cape Cod. I want to keep it going and going—Keep going, I tell myself. But just those two words, that one half-thought, breaks the spell, and I can tell that it’ll be over soon, and then I’m suddenly just me again for the first moment since I stood in front of the television wondering if I was going to puke or what.

  Mom fainted in the kitchen of our house two weeks ago while she was packing our cookbooks for the move. Her head made a horrible sound when it hit the floor.

  Dad ran over and yelled, “She’s burning up, she’s burning up!” like he was shouting it to the whole house.

  Mom woke up and told Dad to stay calm. No ambulance, she told him. We were going to drive to the hospital. She’d need some things. And she wanted a pillow, her own pillow. She was saying all the things Mom would say, in a shaky voice that sounded like anything but Mom.

  At the hospital, they took her away and the nurses brought us into a special room to wait. Then Dad disappeared, and I waited and waited while nurses buzzed around. Every time one of them came near me I thought it was bad news and my heart started busting its way up through my throat, but it was always a paper cup of ice and ginger ale, or a little bag of pretzels dropped into my lap with a wink, and no answer to the question I was too scared to ask.

  Finally, finally, Dad showed up to tell me that the doctors said Mom had a serious infection, and she caught it from one of her patients in intensive care. They had medicine for it, Dad said, but the medicine was at the hospital, and it was the kind that went from a bag through a tube into the bloodstream, so Mom would have to stay here. They needed to watch her. For a week. Or maybe two.

  Mom would have told me the actual exact name of it, I remember thinking. She would have said something like “Georges, I’ve got the X virus, strain Z. It’s a bad one, but there’s medicine for it, and I won’t die on you.” But no one said any of that.

  “It won’t be so bad,” Dad told me. “It’ll be just like when she’s working a lot of double shifts. And before we know it, she’ll be back home. Okay?”

  I nodded, squeezing three little bags of pretzels.

  A nurse came in and said I could see Mom now. She was in her own room right down the hall.

  We started walking.

  And that’s when I freaked out.

  I lie on the bed holding the string cheese and the DVD with Mom’s words on it, just breathing. Then I go to the bathroom and wash my face. I look at myself in the mirror but I don’t ask myself to smile.

  I get the phone and call Dad. I don’t need to look at that note on the fridge because I have memorized Mom’s number at the hospital from all the times I decided not to call it.

  Dad answers the phone. “I want to come with you tomorrow,” I tell him. “I’m spending the day with you guys. At the hospital.”

  There’s a silence. “Really?” he says. “That’s wonderful. I’ll call school in the morning, and we’ll go first thing.”

  “Can I talk to her? Can she talk?”

  “Of course she can talk. She’s doing great. But she’s sleeping now. Let me see if I can get her up.”

  “No, don’t. Don’t wake her up.”

  “Georges? How was school?”

  “Better,” I tell him. “It was better.”

  Dad says he’ll leave the hospital in an hour and we’ll have dinner together, but I tell him to stay where he is, that I’m fine. He says he’ll be home before bedtime. I think about making some eggs. But the next thing I know my feet are taking me out the door and up the stairs and my hand is pushing Safer’s doorbell.

  I hear footsteps. “Hello?” It’s Safer’s voice, through the door.

  “Where’s Candy?” I ask. “Did your doorman go on vacation?”

  “Did I hear a ‘knock, knock’?”

  “Safer, I know it’s you.”

  But he just says it again: “Did I hear a ‘knock, knock’?”

  Fine. I’ll play. “Knock, knock,” I say.

  “Who’s there?” Safer says.

  “Interrupting cow.” And I start sucking in air, because I’m going to blow Safer away. When he starts to say “Interrupting cow, who?” I’m going to give him the longest, loudest MOO in the history of the planet.

  But Safer doesn’t say “Interrupting cow, who?” Instead, the door opens, and there he is. “Come in, interrupting cow,” he says. “Come on in.”

  How to Land a Plane

  In our house, up on my fire escape, my mom used to tell me bedtime stories when I was little.

  A lot of the time it was this one:

  My mother went to England when she was sixteen years old—her one and only trip to Europe. It was part of a youth group trip, and she was super-excited. She sat by the window on the airplane—it was her first time on a plane—and she watched the earth pull away, watched the cars, the houses, and the buildings shrink until they were dots of color, part of a giant mosaic that she would not have recognized as her own city.

  “I’d seen my world close up, but never from a distance. It’s like the paintings.” She would nudge me with an elbow. “By the painter who painted the little dots that made beautiful pictures.”

  “I know,” I would say.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Sir Ott,” I would say, because I wanted her to go on with the story.

  “What’s his first name?”

  “Georges.” She always kissed my forehead when I said that.

  The mosaic of my mother’s city gave way to blue water that darkened as they flew toward night, until everything outside turned black and all she could see in the window was her own reflection. They brought food but she couldn’t eat. She was too excited. She stared at her face in the window and thought, Here is me, going to England; here is me, crossing the ocean; here is me, a dot in the sky.

  “How was it?” I asked her once.

  “How was what?”

  “How was it to be a dot in the sky? Like a nothing.”

  “I didn’t feel like a nothing. I felt—full.”

  “But you just said you couldn’t e
at.”

  She said she felt full of whatever it was that was about to happen to her.

  After a long time, she saw something else through the window. She saw lights. Not big bright lights like in Times Square, but a million tiny lights that glowed.

  She would close her eyes when she told this part.

  “It was as if heavy clothes, embroidered with glowing threads of gold and red, had been tossed down by a giant or a god, and were just floating there, on top of the water.”

  And it was beautiful, flying over that.

  But as the plane flew lower and the pressure built in her ears, she found that she did not want to land. She wanted to stay above all of it, partly because it was beautiful, and partly because she understood that all the time she had been in the air, her connection to home had been stretching like a rubber band. It had stretched very far, so far that she was afraid that when the plane touched down, the rubber band would break, and a part of her life would be over.

  “Isn’t that silly?” she’d say. “Where did I get that idea?”

  My mother’s bedtime stories were not like other people’s.

  And that’s how it was for me that night two weeks ago, when the nurse finally came to the waiting room and said I could see Mom. Walking down the hospital hallway, matching my steps to Dad’s, I suddenly did not want to see her, to actually arrive at the door to her room, because as long as I did not get there, I was still in the part of my life when she was not sick. And that’s why I refused to go into her room, why I started crying and ran to the elevators, and why I said I would never go back. I decided to do exactly what Dad said, to pretend that she was just at work, that none of it was happening.

  But obviously Mom had left on that plane, a long time before it landed in London, the same way I had left the place where Mom was not sick the very second that she fainted in our kitchen.

  The last part of Mom’s plane trip was a long moment when the plane was gliding over the runway in London, just barely off the ground. The sun was up, and the world was normal-size again, but the wheels had not yet touched the earth. She suddenly knew everything would be all right. And that, she said, was a beautiful feeling.