Life After Truth

by Ceridwen Dovey

  Rowan glanced at her over Eva’s head. That single look reflected everything she was feeling. The harrowing night. His own relief – his own euphoria – that their girls were okay, that she was okay. Nothing else matters. Gazing at Eva, Mariam thought suddenly: Is she breathing? Rowan responded telepathically, putting his hand against Eva’s back, testing that it was rising and falling. He nodded at Mariam. She was breathing. She was fine.

  Alexis gave a shout of laughter. One of the Wiggles, the yellow one, Emma, was dancing a jig dressed as a teapot.

  A mom sitting at the opposite side of the waiting area smiled at Mariam. Her toddler was on her knee, also lost to a world of miniature people on her phone. The mom had ordered a coffee so huge she had to use two hands to drink from it. On her shoulder was the canvas tote bag they’d all been given, cream with crimson straps. Class of 2003 was printed on its side, next to a small Harvard insignia.

  Mariam smiled back at her while feeling glad they were both trapped by their daughters and didn’t have to move closer and start speaking about the murder of Fred Reese.

  It was too soon for Mariam to share how she and her family had brushed up against his death. Maybe with time, if Jules made a full recovery, it would become a tale she would one day feel up to telling. Maybe not. It was certainly the closest Mariam had ever been to the machinations of history. If she’d returned to the Harvard campus seeking proof that once she had been at the center of things, she had found it – in the worst sort of way.

  That venerated campus, instead of opening back up at the end of the reunion celebrations, had been shut down, its boundaries sealed off by investigators stalking around in hazmat suits. Bright-orange forensic tents had emerged overnight like toadstools.

  The people in uniform who had taken charge had their own mystifying methods of exclusion, letting only certain people in and out of the gates, with a tilt of the head, a nod, a glance. It had been tough even for Mariam and Rowan to get back into Eloise’s residence to be questioned and collect their things, gathered from their suite by some official and tested in the hazmat tent before being authorized for release.

  Unfortunately the mom sitting opposite her had moved seats, so that she was now within earshot of Mariam.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Class of ’03, right?’

  Mariam nodded.

  ‘I noticed you guys seem pretty shaken up. Were you friends with Fred?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Mariam said. ‘Were you?’

  ‘Not really. We were study partners in organic chemistry our sophomore year. He wasn’t as dumb as everybody thought.’ She stroked her daughter’s hair. ‘It’s scary, that this could happen right under everybody’s noses. Nowhere is safe anymore.’ Her eyes strayed to the screen above them. ‘It’s definitely the Russians,’ she said.

  Mariam made a noncommittal sound.

  ‘Where are you headed today?’ the woman asked.

  ‘New York,’ Mariam said. ‘Home.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ the woman said. ‘When I was younger I always dreamed of living there. We’re in Chicago. But we’re moving to California soon, for my job.’

  ‘What do you do?’ Mariam asked dutifully.

  The woman gave her a conspiratorial look. ‘I’ve invented a robotic, hands-free D-I-L-D-O.’

  Alexis’s ears immediately pricked up. Decoding her parents’ secret language had been a major motivator for her in learning to spell. ‘What’s a dildoo?’ she said loudly.

  Without looking up from her phone, the woman’s daughter, who couldn’t have been older than four, said casually, ‘It’s a tool of female empowerment.’

  Mariam and the other mom laughed.

  ‘I never expected this would be my claim to fame. I studied comp lit as an undergrad,’ the woman said. ‘Now it’s become a crusade, because the you-know-what got banned from a recent tech expo for being obscene. But the booth selling female S-E-X robots didn’t.’

  Mariam was trying to imagine how a hands-free dildo worked. She’d never owned any kind of dildo. And now it would seem kind of rude to whip one out while having sex with Rowan, as if one dick wasn’t enough for her. Anyway, she wasn’t sure she liked the idea of a robotic phallus with a mind of its own, creeping around the house, ready to pounce on her at any moment.

  This woman had a quiet confidence to her, Mariam thought. She didn’t pluck her eyebrows, and she had what looked like a port-wine birthmark on one cheek, uncovered, not touched over with foundation. I’d like to join your tribe, Mariam thought.

  ‘What do you do?’ the woman asked.

  Mariam was about to say what she normally did, about being a stay-at-home mom. Then she stopped herself. ‘I’m a pastry chef,’ she said, the words feeling good coming out of her mouth. ‘Also, I’m writing a book,’ she added. Or lied. Did an idea as yet unacted upon count as the truth?

  Rowan glanced up. He’d heard her. She was about to walk back what she’d blurted out when he spoke up. ‘She’s got this great idea for a recipe book that’s also a retelling of fairytales,’ he said.

  The woman looked back and forth between them. ‘I saw you two on the dance floor last night. At Winthrop House. You were infamous in our class for getting married so young. I don’t know if you knew that. My blocking group used to make fun of your wedding-planning website, our senior year. Mooandroo.com. We made bets on how long your marriage would last.’

  Mariam’s smile faded as she digested what this woman was saying. That she and Rowan had been objects of ridicule.

  ‘But you really do get the last laugh,’ the woman said. ‘The way you were looking at each other last night, I could tell it’s the real deal. True love.’ She smiled regretfully, and Rowan, to his credit, smiled back at her.

  The woman’s train platform was announced and she began putting her daughter’s belongings into her handbag. ‘See you in five years,’ she said, crouching down amid the dropped coffee lids and muffin wrappers so her daughter could climb onto her back, and then they were gone.

  President Reese was on the big screen again. No longer sitting on the steps in a private moment of suffering, he had approached the media pack and was looking down the lens of the cameras, shaking his finger. ‘I will find you,’ he said. ‘Wherever you are, whoever you are, I am coming for you. I will not stop until I have avenged my son’s murder.’

  The way he was staring into the camera made it feel as if he were accusing Mariam herself of the crime.

  There was something she had not shared with the authorities who’d questioned them that morning. She hadn’t even told Rowan, out of an underlying urge to protect him; it would be safer if he had full deniability.

  After their drunken acrobatics at the Spee, happy and tired and ready to get home to bed, she had accidentally been given Jules’s coat by the undergrad working the coat-check room. Her coat was made of a similar brocade fabric, also in black, and Mariam had only realized the mistake when she’d dug in the inner pocket for her lipstick and found, instead, a tortoiseshell hair clip belonging to Jules and a small baggie of white powder, triple-wrapped in clear plastic.

  It had dismayed her to discover that Jules had cocaine on her, only because Mariam had been under the impression it was not something Jules dabbled with. But who was Mariam to judge her old friend by her own embarrassingly prudish standards? So she’d switched back the coats and forgotten all about it as soon as she and Rowan were floating home, loved up and very pleased with themselves for having turned the night around – the whole weekend, in fact.

  The memory of the baggie had only returned when one of the men interviewing her in Eloise’s study had asked if at any stage that weekend she’d seen anything resembling ricin in powder form. ‘It would only take a small amount,’ he’d said.

  She’d already known, from the poison specialist team at the hospital, that Fred and Jules had ingested ricin, the poison of choice for homegrown terrorists because it was relatively easy and cheap to make from castor beans. It was the same stuff that had
been mailed to President Reese at the White House a few months before.

  The fact that it was ricin had been a relief to the doctors who’d been monitoring the girls, Mariam, Rowan, and Jomo for any symptoms of exposure; Novichok would have been much more serious. The medical staff had also become visibly less anxious once it was established that Jules had ingested the ricin dissolved in liquid, not inhaled it. This meant a lower chance of cross-contamination. The CDC had brought in a team to do a final test on everybody’s urine and, after they’d been given the all clear, they’d been allowed – in fact, firmly encouraged – to leave the quarantine facility.

  Jomo had refused to leave, and though the doctors were unhappy about it, they hadn’t been able to talk him out of going straight to Jules’s bedside.

  Mariam and Rowan had been desperate to get the girls out of the hospital. But Mariam had also felt she should go see Jules before they left, even if she was not yet conscious. Rowan had taken the girls down to the cafeteria and made Mariam promise not to get too close to Jules, to keep a precautionary distance.

  Jules had been lying in a bed made with crisp white hospital sheets, a blue stripe threaded through them. Her face was very pale. She was no longer sedated, a nurse was telling Jomo when Mariam arrived at the doorway. Jomo’s mom had called to say she and his dad were on their way to Boston, as were Jules’s parents, and Mariam had seen his face crumple as he heard his mother’s worried, loving voice on the line.

  Disaster makes children of us all, she’d thought.

  And then Jules had opened her eyes.

  Slowly, she had taken in her surroundings, and touched the tube in her arm.

  The nurse had briefly left the room to get the doctors, and Jules had turned to Jomo and asked, ‘Is he dead?’

  In his joy that she was conscious, Jomo did not seem to notice what a strange question this was. How could Jules have known then that Fred had been poisoned?

  Mariam had left the two of them alone soon after, turning back once to see the doctors multiplying in the room, and Jules holding up her hand and turning a ring around and around on her finger, perplexed by it, or checking it was still there.

  There was one more element that Mariam was struggling to comprehend. Something garbled Jomo had said to the doctors after they’d first arrived at the hospital, about Fred offering him and Jules a drink from his hipflask. Why would Jules ever have agreed to a nightcap with Frederick Reese? Jomo had said it was because she felt sorry for him, sitting there on his own in the courtyard, so piteously drunk. And that was like Jules, with her endless compassion, Mariam thought. Yet surely even Jules drew the line somewhere.

  Mariam was too tired. The conspiracy-theory machine in overdrive up on the screen had infected her thoughts. She was mad – insane! – to think for one second that Jules was in any way involved in Fred’s murder.

  Later that morning, after Mariam and her family had left the hospital, Jomo had sent a text to the blocking group:

  Jules is going to be ok. Some temporary damage to her liver. Possible short-term memory loss. She sends love and thanks to you all.

  In his message, Jomo had not alluded to the happier surprise regarding him and Jules, which had been all but forgotten in the turmoil. It was Eloise who had finally brought it up with Mariam, just before they’d left her house for the train station.

  ‘Jules and Jomo, in bed together!’ she’d said to Mariam, and for a while they’d just stared at each other in her kitchen, shaking their heads in amazement. They hadn’t really had time to begin to discuss it before the taxi arrived.

  Mariam was mostly pleased for Jules and Jomo. She hoped they would be good for each other. It would take some time to get used to the idea of them as a couple. Already she felt a nub of selfish concern about the effect on the blocking group if it didn’t work out.

  But then she had a flashback to Jomo kneeling over Jules’s unresponsive body, keening, making animal sounds of grief.

  It had been Rowan who had stayed calm, who had called 911, who had somehow got them all down the stairs to the ambulances. She and the girls had been flung into his gravity well and he had carried them through, to the other side.

  Rowan bent to pick up Eva’s blankie from the floor, and Mariam saw her silver cross dangling from his neck.

  It was almost time for their train to arrive. The platform number would soon appear on the departure tracker and there would be a stampede of New Yorkers trying to get the best seats. She glanced around the waiting crowd, all with their eyes glued to the electronic notice board. Many of them were wearing Harvard caps or sweaters. A few still had their lanyards around their necks. Some were young and some were very old. They were about to scatter across the country, across the world, to step back into their real lives.

  A couple hours earlier, as Mariam and her family were getting into the cab to take them from Kirkland to South Station, Eva had realized that her favorite soft toy, a fluffy green sheep, was missing. The official who’d been tasked with packing their things and testing them for contamination must have overlooked it. Mariam had tried to comfort her daughter by telling her that the students who moved into that suite in the fall would find her sheep and keep it as a good-luck charm.

  But as the cab drove down the narrow street that ran alongside Kirkland, past Eliot, and curved around to Winthrop House, Eva had wailed and wailed, outwardly expressing the same tsunami of sadness engulfing Mariam.

  Their reunion marquee had already been dismantled, she noticed through the car window, leaving ghostly marks on the lawn in the shape of how things had been. In front of the wrought-iron gate, chairs had been stacked and trestle tables folded and flattened. Empty wine bottles awaited recycling in neat clusters and flower arrangements sat wilting on the sidewalk, their best hours behind them.

  For a moment Mariam had imagined returning to that campus for their twentieth reunion. Maybe, by then, she and Rowan and their friends and classmates – those among them who were destined to survive the next five years – would no longer care that their youth had well and truly vanished. Conscious of the gentle consolations of early middle age, they would simply be happy to be there, grateful to have been spared.

  References

  I would like to acknowledge Jennifer Senior’s excellent book about modern parenting, All Joy and No Fun, which was the inspiration for many of the ideas that Eloise writes about in her book, as well as Brené Brown’s classic book The Gifts of Imperfection, for the (slightly adapted) notion of joyful apprehension.

  About the Author

  Ceridwen Dovey is the author of several works of fiction (Blood Kin, Only the Animals, and In the Garden of the Fugitives) and non-fiction (Writers on Writers: On J.M. Coetzee and Inner Worlds Outer Spaces: The working lives of others). She contributes regularly to newyorker.com, WIRED, and The Monthly, and her articles have been selected for The Best Australian Science Writing in 2019 and 2020. She lives in Sydney, but a long time ago she studied at Harvard on a scholarship, and the emotional resonance of returning to that campus for college reunions inspired her to write Life After Truth.

  ALSO BY CERIDWEN DOVEY

  Blood Kin

  Only the Animals

  In the Garden of the Fugitives

  Writers on Writers: On J.M. Coetzee

  Inner Worlds Outer Spaces: The working lives of others

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  Viking is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies, whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  First published by Audible, 2019

  This edition published by Viking, 2020

  Text copyright Ceridwen Dovey © 2019, 2020

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, published, performed in public or communicated to the public in any form or by any means without prior written p
ermission from Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd or its authorised licensees.

  Cover design by Alex Ross © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Cover images: paitoonpati/Getty Images (mortarboards), Shutterstock (background texture)

  ISBN 9781760895372

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Harvard Class of 2003 – Fifteenth Anniversary Report

  Prologue: Mariam

  Chapter 1: Jomo

  Chapter 2: Eloise

  Chapter 3: Rowan

  Chapter 4: Mariam

  Chapter 5: Jomo

  Chapter 6: Mariam

  Chapter 7: Eloise

  Chapter 8: Rowan

  Chapter 9: Mariam

  Chapter 10: Eloise

  Chapter 11: Rowan

  Chapter 12: Jomo

  Epilogue: Mariam

  References

  About the Author

  Also by Ceridwen Dovey

  Imprint

  Read more at Penguin Books Australia