Another Life

by Robert Haller

  It wasn’t just books. Kim was supposed to be a journalist, and I didn’t know enough about politics or current events. I’d never traveled anywhere. After a few days of conversations with Martin, I knew I would have to end it. There was no way I could continue to lie believably. What did it really matter, anyway? It wasn’t as if I would ever meet the man. It wasn’t as if his relationship with Kim could go anywhere. I could delete my account, and that would be that. No one would ever know. But still I didn’t want to. For one thing, I didn’t want to hurt him. Martin seemed genuinely nice, unlike most of the other guys I’d met on this site, and it felt wrong to play with him just to disappear afterward. I felt I owed him an explanation. For another thing, I had started to look forward to our evening online chats. They had become the highlight of my otherwise dull September.

  But since I couldn’t keep up this deception any longer, I had to make a choice. So the next time he messaged me, in my room one evening after dinner, I didn’t hesitate. I wrote, Martin, I have been lying to you.

  What about?

  I stared at my blinking cursor for a long while, then typed, I’m not who I say I am. I’m not a twenty-five-year-old journalist. I’m almost forty. I’m a mom. Divorced. Two kids. I’m a high school math teacher. That is my picture, but it’s old. I don’t look like that anymore.

  I held my breath and waited, my heart thumping away.

  Martin wrote, Okay.

  Then, How old are your kids?

  He didn’t end it with me. If anything, he became more interested. I continued to lie about my identity. But now the lies came easier because I knew what I was talking about. All I had to do was draw from my mom’s life, which I did liberally though without giving away too many specifics. My mom didn’t read novels. Except for Canada, she had never been in another country. It was much easier to lie when the lies were true. I told Martin the reason I’d been dishonest on my profile was that since my divorce, I’d become terrified of meeting people. I had created this profile to try to ease myself back into the dating scene, but as soon as I began talking to Martin, I knew I couldn’t continue in the lie. I would understand if he was angry with me and wanted to stop corresponding. I told him I wasn’t ready for a real relationship. I wasn’t ready to actually meet anyone, and I knew this wasn’t fair to him. But he told me he understood. He told me it was okay if we put off meeting for a while, but he would like to continue talking to me. We could just be friends. Friends who never saw each other. Friends who had never met.

  So we were. We continued to talk, and more and more, Kim became a real person to me. She wasn’t my mom, although I’d based her life on my mom’s. She was more like a rogue extension of myself. It was almost as if I had another life. And sometimes, even when I wasn’t online talking to Martin, I caught myself thinking like Kim.

  More than once, I’d tried to tell Bethany about Martin, but I could never bring myself to do it. It was too complicated. I was scared she wouldn’t understand. Why would she? Why would anybody? I knew that the moment I said out loud what I was doing online, I would have to stop doing it, because there was no way to defend or justify the thing. So I kept silent.

  But now it was July. Almost an entire year had gone by since I first began talking to Martin. It wasn’t completely regular. There would be breaks. He would be offline for a few weeks, saying he’d be traveling, or I would say I was taking some time off, and not log in for a while. But always, we returned to each other. And now, as was inevitable, Martin was beginning to talk about meeting. I told myself this was a sign that enough was enough. I had to get rid of the profile. But I kept putting it off. I hadn’t logged on in over a week, and with the VBS and Paul Frazier and everything else, I’d been able to keep Martin shoved to the back of my mind. But now, with the prospect of going next month to Albany, where he lived, I couldn’t help but think about him and what I was going to do.

  Beside me on the bed, Bethany snapped her fingers in my face. “Hey, girl, you okay?”

  I shook myself. “Yeah, sorry.”

  “Thinking about Paul again?”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m over that guy.”

  We both laughed at this—how could you be over Paul Frazier? More than anything, it was Paul who kept thoughts of Martin at bay. It was Paul—the possibility that he might look at me, smile at me, maybe even speak to me—who made working at the VBS halfway bearable. I was still in love with him, and unlike Martin, he was real. I saw him almost every day. Every morning, getting ready for “work” (that was how I thought of the VBS, although I wasn’t getting paid), I would agonize over what to wear, whether my hair looked okay, whether my face was too round.

  Paul’s presence at New Life was intermittent. He wasn’t there all day, and when he was, he usually had some task to keep him busy. And although he didn’t really talk to anyone and seemed disinterested in everything except doing his job, still, every morning, I hoped that today would be the day something happened between us, that some sequence of events would push us together, like that first night of summer, and that we would find ourselves alone again. This prospect both excited and terrified me, and I would stay up at night concocting possible scenarios. Always, I would think back to that kiss, which was becoming harder and harder to remember in all its brilliance with every day that went by. Lying in bed on my stomach, I would press my lips against my pillow and think of his face, one hand clutching the edge of the pillowcase and the other resting between my legs.

  It had been two weeks since the beginning of VBS. There was only one week left, and so far, I’d had only one interaction with Paul. This consisted of his asking me to plug a wire into an amplifier while he fiddled with something on the mixing board. “Laura,” he had called to me as I walked past, “could you do me a favor?” And afterward, he’d smiled and thanked me, and that was it. Nothing really. But also something. He had remembered my name, and he asked me, out of everyone, to help him. And he had smiled at me. He smiled so beautifully.

  “Do you think he’s sleeping with anyone right now?” I blurted.

  Bethany shrugged. “Don’t know. You’d think we would have heard about it. This town is so small.” She looked at the wall. “I need to paint this room,” she said after a moment.

  Bethany’s bedroom walls were a light Easter-egg yellow and had been as long as I’d known her. “I’ll help,” I said.

  She gave me a side hug, squeezing my shoulder. Then her mother’s voice called up from downstairs. “Girls? Come on down! Dinner’s almost ready.”

  “Okay, Mom,” Bethany called back, and we sat there on her bed for just one more moment, our feet dangling off the sides but not quite reaching the floor.

  After my mom lifted my grounding sentence, I was so eager to get out of the house that even somewhere as familiar as the Moyers’ felt almost exciting. Bethany’s house was like my second home. Every Saturday night, I went to her house for dinner and spent the night, or she came to mine. It was a tradition as set in stone as presents on Christmas and fireworks on the Fourth of July.

  When we came downstairs, Pastor Eric was sitting with Jon Newman at the dining room table, discussing Jon’s idea for creating a permanent recording studio in the church.

  “We could record Christian artists,” John was saying. “Get local talent. It would be a really great way to spread the gospel.”

  Pastor Eric nodded. “I think it’s a really interesting idea, Jon. Let me think and pray about it, and we’ll see.” He turned and smiled as Bethany and I came into the room. “Hello, girls.”

  “Hi, Laura.” Jon glanced at me for a second before shifting his eyes to Bethany and leaving them there. “Hi, Bethany.”

  Bethany gave him a quick smile and wave. “Girls,” Mrs. Moyer called from the kitchen, “would you two be angels and help set the table?”

  As we went into the kitchen, I whispered in Bethany’s ear, “Jon was looking at you like
you were a piece of ripening fruit.”

  “So creepy,” Bethany muttered. “It’s bad enough I have to spend all day with him at church. Does he really have to be over here on Saturday?”

  Jon was good friends with Bethany’s older brother, Daniel. But with Daniel off on a mission trip in Uganda this summer, and away most of the year at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, we didn’t understand why he still hung around the Moyers’ house so much. We had begun to suspect that Jon had an interest in Bethany that wasn’t strictly pastoral. Anyone (except maybe Bethany’s parents) could see it in the way he looked at her.

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Moyer was pulling a dish out of the oven. Bethany sniffed the air. “Lasagna?” she asked her mom.

  Mrs. Moyer put the pot on the counter and said, “You don’t sound too excited.”

  Bethany went to the cupboard above the counter to get the plates. “I didn’t say that.”

  Bethany and I both agreed that her mother’s lasagna left a lot to be desired, but we would never tell her this. I don’t know that she would have cared too much, though. With no job, Linda Moyer proudly called herself a “homemaker,” but she was away from home almost as much as a working woman. Whether it was directing a women’s retreat, attending a bridal shower, or leading a book study group, she was quite a busy person. And the quality of her lasagna probably didn’t rank high on her list of priorities.

  Mrs. Moyer looked at me. She was the sort of person I couldn’t imagine ever having been young. Not that she wasn’t pretty, but it was the sort of stately, elegant beauty that seemed suited for an older woman. I couldn’t see how it would work on a young person. She raised her eyebrows and tilted her head at her daughter, whose back was turned. “You like my lasagna, don’t you, Laura?”

  I nodded. “That’s why I’m here, Mrs. Moyer. You think I come over all the time to hang out with Bethany?”

  Mrs. Moyer threw back her head and laughed as if my joke had been legitimately funny. I could never tell whether she was merely humoring me when she did this or was just that easily given to laughter.

  “Laura, you’re hysterical,” she said, taking off her oven mitts. “Has your mom given any more thought to my offer?”

  There was a long-standing joke that the Moyers would buy me from my mom. I had yet to pass the joke on to her, though. I shook my head. “No, she’s still bent on subjecting me to her tyranny for at least another few years.”

  Mrs. Moyer howled again. “Oh, but you must be such a blessing to her right now, with Bible school and everything. I tell Eric all the time, I don’t know how that woman does it. The VBS gets better every year, and it’s all because of her. Your mom’s an extraordinary woman.”

  I nodded and began gathering up the silverware to bring out to the dining room. Ladies at church were always saying things like that to me about my mom, but I couldn’t help but notice that none of them really talked to her—not for any extended period, anyway. I was never sure whose fault this was. It was true that in public my mom had this way of giving off an aura of coldness that could make her feel unapproachable, but I also suspected that most women in church were more comfortable around other married women like themselves, who they didn’t have to feel sorry for. Even Mrs. Moyer, while always friendly around my mom, never went much further than the usual pleasantries.

  Bethany had a stack of plates in her hands, and I was about to bring out the silverware when the front doorbell rang. “Oh, Laura, would you mind getting that?” Mrs. Moyer said. “I don’t know who would be coming over right now.”

  I walked down the hall to the front door. My smile died the moment I opened the door and saw who was standing on the Moyers’ porch.

  “Laura” she said, looking surprised to see me. How dare Nola Sternson, who had known Bethany for just a few months, be surprised to see me at Bethany’s house! We’d been best friends since we were five!

  Last Sunday, Nola had shown up unannounced at church after Bethany texted her about Paul. But then, on Friday afternoon, while I was at my tent going over what verses everyone in my tribe was going to memorize (in that moment, telling some smart-ass he couldn’t do Song of Songs), I had looked up across the field to see Nola, heading over to where Bethany sat with her tribe. She stayed the entire day, doing nothing in particular from what I could tell, just hanging around with Bethany and helping out when she could.

  On Monday, she was there again, and every other day of the week. I didn’t understand it. Why would someone like Nola, who smoked weed and drove around with boys at night listening to punk rock, choose to spend her summer days loafing around a church green filled with wild children in robes and togas, helping with pottery projects or refereeing a kick-ball game? I was there only because I was forced to be, and my mom ran the dumb thing. And since I had to oversee my tribe all day, I could only watch from a distance while this interloper and my best friend spent the week together, talking, laughing, throwing water balloons at each other. During lunch or after dismissal, when I was free of my responsibilities, they would always find me, but by then they would have so many inside jokes and stories I hadn’t been a part of that I felt annoyed and displaced. By Wednesday, I started heading straight to the car after dismissal. But I wasn’t sure the girls even noticed my snub; they were too busy enjoying each other’s company.

  Yesterday, Friday, Bethany had texted me in the morning and said she and Nola were going to see a movie that night, and she asked whether I wanted to come. It was a movie I wanted to see, but I was so annoyed that Bethany had made plans with Nola before inviting me, I told her I didn’t feel like it.

  “You sure you don’t want to come?” Bethany asked me that evening after dismissal, when she and Nola caught up with me in the parking lot of the church.

  I had thought Bethany would have picked up on the latent resentment in my texts, but she seemed completely oblivious. I felt stupid then but stuck to my decision. I planned on spending the rest of the night online, listening to music and talking to Martin. “Yeah, I’m tired,” I said.

  Bethany gave a mock pout, but I could tell she wasn’t overly disappointed.

  I was waiting by the car for my mom when I looked up to see a familiar car pull into the church lot—Ian. I hadn’t seen him or Joey since the bath-salts night. I watched as Ian stopped at the church’s front steps, and Bethany and Nola climbed into the back seat. Then the car pulled around the lot toward me, and I felt my familiar and paradoxical desires to be invisible, but also not to be ignored. The car sped past, and relief and disappointment washed over me in equal measure. A second later, I heard the chirp of tires on pavement, and the car gunned in reverse and skidded to a halt right in front of me. Ian poked his head out the driver’s-side window. I could see Joey beside him in the passenger seat, and the girls in the back, laughing and berating Ian for his manic driving.

  He ignored them and pointed at me. “Hey,” he said, “why isn’t she coming?”

  “She is being lame,” said Bethany from the back seat, “but why don’t you ask her yourself?”

  Ian grinned at me. “Seriously, Laura, you should come. I promise, no Walmart tonight.”

  I felt myself blushing, but at the same time I was shaking my head and saying, “No thanks, not tonight.” I didn’t think my mother, who knew I’d been with these three the night I came home at three in the morning, would be keen on letting me go out with them again, but even if she had, I think I still would have declined—not because I wanted to, but because it was easier.

  I was surprised when Ian looked genuinely disappointed and gave me a sad smile and wave before hitting the gas and pulling away. Immediately, I felt lonely and sad, standing there by myself in the parking lot as the sun started to set. And with a logic not completely clear to me, I blamed it all on Nola.

  Now here she was, standing in front of me on the Moyers’ doorstep.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

/>   I shrugged. “Fine.” Although it was a warm evening, she was wearing her usual black hooded sweatshirt, unzipped to display a black T-shirt graced with a giant face of Kurt Cobain. It didn’t look like those new shirts you could get at one of the trendy stores at the mall; it looked straight out of 1994. I wondered where she found these things.

  “I was just looking for Bethany,” she said after five seconds or so of me glaring at her.

  “She’s busy. We’re eating dinner.”

  “Wait—do you live here?” Nola asked, and I couldn’t tell whether she was joking. Before I could answer, I heard Mrs. Moyer’s voice behind me. “Who’s there, Laura?” And then “Oh! You’re Bethany’s friend! You’ve been helping at VBS! Nola, right?”

  Nola nodded.

  Ten minutes later, I was sitting next to Jon at the dinner table. I glared at Nola, sitting across from me, next to Bethany, while Pastor Eric said grace.

  “In Jesus’ name, amen,” he said at last, and as we picked up our forks and began eating, Pastor Eric looked at Nola. “So, Nola,” he said, taking a bite of lasagna, “I’ve been meaning to thank you for helping out at VBS so much this past week. It’s very generous of you.”

  Nola smiled awkwardly. “Oh, right. Thanks. I mean, welcome.” Her voice trembled a little. This was the first time I had ever seen her nervous. Bethany looked nervous, too, keeping her eyes fixed on her plate. I knew she was just praying we could get through the meal without anything happening and with no one revealing any incriminating information.