Why We Lie

by Amy Impellizzeri

  Each night, lying next to Jude, my mind would spin and jog and keep me up and if by chance I fell asleep, it would quickly wake me up again.

  I sat on the couch for an hour with Jude that night instead of taking a bath. I felt the space between us closing in and instead of relief, I felt panic.

  “Jude, do you want some dinner yet?” I asked hopefully.

  “No,” he shook his head and still we sat for what felt like hours more.

  Eventually, I lost the energy to even walk upstairs and bathe. I felt like crying all over again, but instead of making up excuses to leave the house and drive around the block again, I lay my head on Jude’s shoulder, and silently wondered if I’d ever truly learn to live this way.

  How could I live with only truth from here on out?

  With so many lies still left between us?

  The outcome of the day’s Dr. Drake appointment was that Jude now knew he had lost his ability to lie, but other follow- up appointments had revealed more residual effects of the shooting. Migraines. Temporary hearing loss that resolved itself relatively quickly. Memory loss that had not yet resolved itself. And perhaps never would.

  Jude seemed to have lost some memories. Not all of them. Just some. He never talked about the night of the shooting or the weeks leading up to it. I wasn’t sure whether he couldn’t really remember the night or whether he didn’t want to talk about it. And now, with the knowledge that he couldn’t lie about any of it, I didn’t dare ask.

  Contrary to what Mr. Treese had said, I didn’t think Jude’s shooting was random at all. And that meant that we were both still in danger.

  Which is why I’d made a deal to save us both.

  The rub was—it required both of us to be able to lie.

  During Jude’s session with his evening caregiver, I finally got my hot shower, and returned a few emails. Jude agreed to go to bed a little earlier than usual, and I made up excuses why I had to sleep in the guest room for the first time since the shooting. I was feeling stifled and panicked, but I told him that I was feeling achy and I didn’t want to risk getting him sick if I was coming down with something.

  “That’s a good idea, Aby. I don’t want to fight off any germs on top of everything else,” he said truthfully and without putting up much of a fight.

  I tried not to complicate my feeling of relief that he didn’t fight me on the issue, with a feeling of disappointment.

  After Jude went to sleep, I paced around the house in the dim light. The house seemed so small before with me and Jude filling it up with stuff and papers and bodies and heat. We’d both given up our small apartments to move in together the year before, but our lives expanded quickly in that Brookland house, and it often felt small before the shooting. But now it seemed enormous.

  Before I went to bed finally, I doubled back to the alarm panel by the front door to punch in numbers setting the alarm for the evening—the address of Little Miss Whiskey’s was still our pin number and alarm code and the prefix to most of our computer and other passcodes as well. Everything started with that night. Even though sometimes, looking back, I felt as though I had lived several entire lifetimes before I met Jude, still everything for me started with Jude.

  I headed to the guest room, tucked myself under the covers, and let my mind wander. The wandering led to the boat.

  I first saw the boat in two dimensions. Jude pulled a photograph off the home office printer and handed it to me with a smirk. “Here, put this in a frame. Isn’t she gorgeous? I’m going to call it Front Runner. What do you think?”

  Front Runner was a modest 24-foot Sea Ray Sundancer that Jude had bought at auction shortly after we moved in together. I had thought he was crazy, sinking fifty grand into a boat, but he’d assured me that it was a bargain and a necessary one at that.

  “With our crazy life—we need a place to escape to. A place away from D.C. And politics. And campaigns. And our circles. In D.C. politics, there are few places you can really escape to,” he had laughed, “but the Chesapeake Bay is certainly one of them.”

  I had reluctantly given my blessing without actually being asked for it. Front Runner didn’t seem like such a sound investment, and indeed it meant that weekend getaways were usually spent on the boat or in harbor marinas, where showers were communal and breakfast was all you can eat, instead of the more luxurious accommodations that I would have preferred. But still, I had quickly come to find the Bay was a unique find. Sometimes we went hours with no viable signal and it turned out the salt spraying off the water was good for my skin, and the time on the boat felt like time that was uniquely all our own.

  We loved to get on the boat without a plan. We’d travel down the channel and dock at one of the bayside towns, forage for food at nearby cafes and shop for antiques and other trinkets. There was something primal about these weekends. Shopping at farm stands and drinking our coffee from an antique pot plugged into the harbor’s electricity rather than braving the nearest Starbucks. It was about finding each other’s rhythm. About listening and lying. About loving and eating and shopping and touching. Days and weeks of little physical contact would bubble over underneath the deck of the boat where we’d lay sticky and sweet and salty, licking the long absences off each other hungrily. Marking each other the way only we could. Remembering what we knew about each other that no one else did. Sharing secrets and plans. Even though Jude always described it as escaping out of our life for a few blissful days, I thought it felt miraculously like the only time we actually burrowed into a real life. There was promise in those weekends.

  Promise that I might finally be able to tell Jude the truth. All of it.

  It wasn’t that I was afraid of revealing the lies. I was afraid of revealing the reasons why.

  Most of my lies had been told for reasons of safety, security, and even helping others.

  A lot had been told for no reason at all.

  One lie had been told because I’d simply broken in half.

  But the worst lie? That had been told for the worst reason of all.

  Revenge.

  In the guest room, I remembered that July weekend—a few months before the election when my stress and emotions were sky high. The emotions returned just with the memory. I felt my heart speed up and my pulse rocket into my throat. I almost called out for Jude. I tried breathing, trying some of my tricks from the yoga classes I’d given up after Jude’s shooting. I closed my eyes and thought about my happy place: Front Runner. A memory surfaced like a warm hug.

  In my memory I was dizzy. Whether it was from the third gin and tonic, the restless motion of the boat, or the sex, I couldn’t be sure.

  Jude was drowsily humming along to Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” playing in the background, but I put my finger to his lips, because the song was too fast, Jude’s humming was too fast, and I was trying to slow my heart and my breathing down to a pace that would match the boat’s soft rocking.

  We were lying on the deck. Later we’d sleep down below, but we weren’t ready to give up the stars yet. They were slowly retreating behind clouds. There would be a storm. That night was dry and warm, but the tilt of the boat was giving a telltale warning about rain and wind the next day, and so we had decided to can our planned trip across the bay to St. Michael’s, and stay moored in the channel at Annapolis instead until the storm passed.

  Jude and I were on a three-day getaway. No one was expecting us to return emails or weigh in on google documents for at least 48 hours. I had packed a small overnight bag with a cold bottle of Tanqueray and enough limes to constitute an actual food group.

  As I lay on Jude my body felt light against his. He’d fallen asleep quickly after I’d shushed his humming and now his chest rose and dropped with a light snore. I’d convinced him to get a couples massage with me earlier in the day before we headed to the boat and his skin smelled musky and faintly of lavender oil. His chest felt like velvet against mine. I stroked him carefully, not wanting to startle him, or disturb him. I wanted him to
stay under me so I could rest. Could enjoy him. My body rhythm slowed down and then plateaued with the pace of the boat. It always took a little while for my body to adjust to the boat.

  Put your sea legs on, Jude commanded whenever we stepped onboard.

  When we stayed in place, instead of taking the boat out for a ride, it tended to take longer for me to put on those sea legs. A ride was out of the question for this small vessel that weekend—the water was promising to be too choppy—the waves lapping against the side of the boat were proof the weather commentator had not been overreacting.

  I felt Jude start to rouse underneath me. He stroked my hair and I turned my head up on his chest to see his face.

  “Hey,” I whispered.

  “Hey you. What’s a beauty like you doing with a guy like me, hunh?”

  My breath caught. Jude was so beautiful. Sometimes I forgot that. In the midst of all the ambition and hard work, and all we were doing and accomplishing together, sometimes I forgot that he was beautiful to look at. He was always self-deprecating, but I knew we weren’t a mismatched couple. We were an “of course” couple. If a woman met Jude and even flirted a bit, when I walked in, she would think “of course.” And the same with any reasonable man when the situation was reversed. No one would look at either of us and wonder how we “got” the other one. We fit together in the planning room and in the bedroom. But sometimes, in all the complexity of our lives, I could forget just how easy it was to be with Jude. How he knew me. Knew what I needed. Silence or noise. Thai or vegetarian. Chardonnay or beer. Top or bottom.

  He knew. And maybe the familiarity would get old one day. But it wasn’t old yet.

  I raised up and sat on top of Jude curling my legs behind me and caressing his lavender infused chest hairs as I looked over him toward the shore. All was still silent. As were the boats surrounding us. We hadn’t noticed anyone getting on the boats. The rich loved to sit on their boats instead of gassing them up and taking them out. But on a night like that night, as a storm rolled in from far out, we were alone with the quietly rocking boats.

  Names of boats nearby with descriptions as if they took on the characteristics of their owners.

  Ambitious at Bay

  Easily Amused

  Lazy Lady

  I remained seated on Jude and he pulled his hands off me and tucked them under his head, smirking. “You look beautiful in this light. Like a mermaid. Scratch that. Like a sea siren. I’m trapped. Sing to me.”

  I laughed and crooned along with Ed Sheeran. Jude growled and dropped his head back, tracing my hips deliberately and familiarly with his fingertips. “I’ve missed you, Baby,” Jude was hoarse from hard work and want. I settled into him, matching his want with my rhythm. “I hope old Man Romeo isn’t on the Juliet tonight.” Jude waved drunkenly over his head toward an august bayliner with Juliet scrolled across the white fiberglass in navy letters. “He’ll have his binoculars trained on you Miss Thing, for sure. Probably sell the pictures to People Magazine.”

  I laughed and stopped rising and falling on Jude long enough to reach over for my gin and tonic that had been sitting in the cup holder next to the seat cushion above Jude’s head. I laughed again at his panicked look that I might be leaving my perch. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not afraid of Old Man Romeo.”

  I drained my gin and tonic and pulled a lime piece out with my fingers, biting into its tartness before offering it to Jude who shook his head and pulled me down to him instead. My heart met his and I felt the familiar blending of beats. It was extraordinary how our hearts knew how to do this. Gather up and meld into one beat only. “Aby,” Jude murmured. And I nodded. Moments like this were why I kept up the charade. Because it didn’t feel false. It felt true.

  I let Jude kiss my citrusy lips tenderly, and then I straightened up again and looked down at Jude with a smile. I bit my lip and tasted gin and Jude and sea salt as I tossed my hair in the direction of the Juliet and reminded him: “Don’t joke about that. Nude pictures of us would command a pretty hefty price tag, and you know it.”

  I laced my words with a tease as I straightened up taller, facing the direction of the Juliet, and sucked in my belly so my ribs and breasts puffed out seductively. I moved my hands down my body from my breasts to my hips, inside my thighs, and landing on Jude’s perfect abdomen where I felt him tremble gratifyingly under my touch.

  “Aby, We need to be more careful, Sweetheart.”

  I nodded. He was right, of course. I lay back down on him out of eyesight of Old Man Romeo and anyone else.

  “I know. I wouldn’t mind some pictures of these days. For posterity sake. We’re going to miss these bodies in 50 years. If you can even put up with me for 50 years, Jude Birch.”

  There was a catch in my voice. Jude might have heard it as fear that Jude would grow sick of me if I changed. Became someone different than I was now. But that wasn’t my fear.

  Jude untucked one of his hands, reaching up carefully to trace my breast painted silver by the moonlight. I closed my eyes and sighed. Jude untucked the other hand and drew soft proprietary lines down my back, I fell into the boat’s rhythm on top of him and moaned and yelled recklessly. Jude didn’t shush me.

  I started to roll off of him and reached for a discarded robe on the boat deck, but he stopped me. “Let me look at you. Don’t get dressed yet.”

  And I didn’t because, “Really,” I wondered out loud, “how many more naked years do you think we have left?”

  Jude ran his hand down my side softly, as he whispered: “All of them.”

  And when we lay together afterward, Jude whispered in my ear. “I’ll be happy to put up with you for 50 years and more, Aby. Wild horses couldn’t drag us apart.”

  And I was afraid then, not that I would grow old, and Jude would become sick of me, but rather that Jude wouldn’t be there.

  That—when all the truths came to light–he’d be gone.

  I sat up in bed and turned a light on. I reached under the mass of papers for my bright orange journal hidden at the bottom of the drawer. I traced the letters on the cover. “Be the Sunshine in Your Own Day.”

  In recent years, I’d taken to writing my stories online, in what felt like a much safer, more anonymous venue, but every once in a while, it helped to pull out this ugly book, and write in its pages. It had been five years since my therapist had given it to me in the wake of my mother’s death—in another life altogether—and I was still pulling it out and writing in it occasionally. It helped me distinguish what was true and what was not. Now that my mother was no longer here to help me do that.

  After a day filled with a bizarre diagnosis and an eerie warning from a man I certainly didn’t trust, the memory of being with Jude away from the world out on Front Runner helped soothe my agitated spirit. I longed to be with him out at sea—far from the worries and people on land who were trying to hurt both of us. It was part of my plan, in fact. His love for our time on Front Runner helped fuel my fervent desire that he’d go along with the seemingly crazy plan I’d cooked up for us.

  Some day soon. I scrolled these words at the bottom of the newest passage in the orange journal.

  Thinking about it, and indeed, writing about it, helped. And as I drifted off to sleep down the hall from Jude who could no longer lie, I dreamt about rocking boats and limes.

  And wild horses.

  The Washington Truth, dated August 21, 2017

  Excerpt from the Op Ed piece, by Nate Essuzare

  ….I have a dear friend who has always said people are their truest selves in airports.

  I usually ignore her, but sometimes I challenge her.

  “Don’t you mean Church?”

  She laughed hard at that suggestion.

  And I realized how ridiculous that answer was anyway.

  “How about therapy?” I offered as a consolation prize for my prior ignorance.

  “God, no. Airports.”

  She went on to point out that:

&nb
sp; “In an airport, you will see who is helpful. Who is impatient. Who is solo. Who is brave.”

  I argued that everyone in the airport is actually putting on their best, sweetest, bravest face in case the worst happened, but my friend insisted that fear was exactly what lowered people’s resolves and inhibitions.

  So then yesterday, for the first time, I realized the flaw in my friend’s argument. Because if everyone is the most truthful when they are afraid, when they are really in fear of what is about to happen, when they are facing the unknown—then why in the hell isn’t everyone truthful every damn day of their life?

  Because God knows, there’s nothing more frightening than life.

  I called my friend with my aha moment. She dismissed me by saying these were two totally different fears–fear of living and fear of dying.

  I conceded her point.

  And then I told her I wasn’t at all sure which one was worse.

  Chapter 5

  After the new diagnosis, I felt as though Jude and I were stuck in some sort of odd new dance. I recognized that I was avoiding him, but I tried to deny it. Even to myself.

  I shared the caregiving for Jude with trained professionals who came in and out of the house. That Jude’s government salary and more importantly, federal insurance benefits, covered so much help, both gratified and embarrassed me.

  When the caregivers showed up, I tag-teamed them to head into my office at the Foundation. I was going into work most days each week, and I welcomed the distraction work provided from Jude’s condition.

  In the weeks just before the shooting, work had provided a necessary distraction from something else altogether—or someone, rather.

  Laila Rogers.

  A few months after the car break-down “incident” outside Little Miss Whiskey’s, I found myself back at the bar with Jude meeting his friends for real. We were already inseparable by then, he and I. That was not part of the plan.