The Good Liar

by Catherine McKenzie

  When she’d come back, she felt the stares of several of her fellow travelers. As if they could see through her hood. Like she was wearing a big red A on her breast. A for Abandonment. Despite her best efforts, she knew she’d be recognizable to them now. There was no helping it. The half dozen people in the bus station who had nowhere else to go were all becoming familiar to one another.

  By the second day, Kate felt as if she were unraveling. Being pulled apart thread by thread. She thought again about leaving, but she didn’t know where she could go. She couldn’t book into a hotel, both for the money it would take and the ID they’d demand. It was one thing using her Canadian passport once at this poky bus station, and then again at the border crossing far from here. But she couldn’t take up life as a new person in Chicago. Though she’d been lucky up until then, at some point she was sure to run into someone she knew. Despite the vastness of the city, it happened all the time. And as for going somewhere else in America, that, too, was impossible. Working would require her Social Security number. And given the attention this tragedy was getting, more chances to be recognized.

  The only option was Canada. Nothing connected to her life now. Leaving without a trace.

  She stayed put. The TV moved on to other families, other grief. She limited herself to two meals a day. Five dollars for a banana and a granola bar in the morning. Another five for a cheeseburger with as many condiments as she could get on it in the evening. Her dress pants already felt looser. The Runaway Diet, she thought. Perhaps she could market it someday. And then she hated herself even more for having the thought.

  She’d spent a few more precious dollars on a travel pillow. Then a garish shawl that was the closest thing to a blanket the store sold. Soap, deodorant, and aspirin for the near-constant headache she couldn’t seem to shake. The store didn’t sell shoes or underwear—the two things she needed most. So she walked around in her socks and washed out her underwear in the sink, drying it with the hand dryer as best as she could.

  On the afternoon of the third day, she shifted uncomfortably in her seat as she looked around from within the folds of her hood. Each of the permanent travelers, as she’d come to think of them, had their own section of the station. A space that was respected as if it had curtains around it. As night crept in, she placed her backpack on the floor with the pillow on top and wrapped herself in the shawl. The floor was uncomfortable and cold. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could stand it, but eventually, she fell asleep.

  She dreamed of her family. Not the way it was but the way it could’ve been if she hadn’t screwed so many things up.

  And then someone shook her awake.

  “You’re on that Montreal bus, right?” It was one of the older women who’d been there the whole time. She was missing a few teeth, and her hair was thinned out like a man’s.

  Kate sat up. “That’s right. Why?”

  “It’s leaving in ten minutes.”

  Kate’s heart accelerated. Her head spun to the television. There it was on the ticker. The travel ban had been lifted. There had been no other incidents. The explosion was definitely the result of a gas leak. They were safe. For now.

  She hastily shoved her new belongings into her backpack. She had a brief moment of panic when she couldn’t find her ticket. Then remembered she’d put it inside her sweatshirt pouch along with her money in order to keep it safe. The woman who’d woken her eyed the bills Kate was unable to hide when she pulled the ticket out.

  She stuffed them away again. “Do you know what gate?”

  “Twenty, I think.” The woman pointed with a grizzled hand. She smelled vaguely of sweat and pee. But Kate likely smelled the same. Who was she to judge?

  “Thank you for waking me.”

  “You’d better hurry.”

  Kate turned to rush to the exit, but something held her back. Did this woman actually know who she was? Was her next call going to be to the police? Or was she just starving? For attention, for food, for somewhere to go herself?

  Kate reached into her pouch. She touched a bill, crisper than the others. One of the fifties she’d promised herself she wouldn’t break until it was absolutely necessary. Before she could talk herself out of it, she handed it to the woman and pressed it into her scratchy hand.

  “What’s that for?”

  “To thank you for waking me. I’ve got to go.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tell.”

  Kate thought about stopping, trying to extract some greater promise. But the bus driver was looking around to see if anyone else was coming. She turned to the woman and said, “Thank you,” then crossed the station just in time to catch her bus.

  The Triple-Tenner You’ve Never Heard Of

  by TED BORENSTEIN

  Special to VANITY FAIR

  Published on OCTOBER 29

  After a year of covering the Triple Ten tragedy, I thought I’d heard it all. That I knew it all. Every name. Every story. I’d literally helped write the (memorial) book, after all, and had spent the last six months of my life reliving each of their stories, cataloging the grief.

  Then, shortly after the six-month anniversary, a new name began to circulate around the survivor community. That name was Franny Maycombe.

  I first heard of her at a fund-raising event for the Compensation Initiative, the organization that was established to dole out the donations that poured in from around the world for the victims. Its goal is something they call “total compensation”—they want to make sure every victim’s family receives the money they would have had but for the tragedy. A formal, legal way of saying they want to do right by everyone.

  What that means in practical terms is that more money is always required.

  “When you add everything up,” says Jenny Chang to me one night, “we’re talking about as many as twenty thousand people who’ve been affected. Not just those who died and their families but the thousands who were injured and their families. Total compensation means you make everyone whole again. Everyone.”

  Jenny Chang is a twenty-three-year-old whose life was already marked by tragedy before she lost her father on October 10. Jenny’s mother died of breast cancer when she was sixteen. An only child, she and her father were close. Though she was accepted to several prestigious schools with a full scholarship, she decided to attend the University of Chicago to stay close to home.

  Midterms were approaching in her senior year when her father died. Since then, Jenny has completed her degree in astrophysics and put off the many internships she’s been offered to work full-time raising money for other victims’ families. She’s one of six people who sit on the Compensation Committee, an ultrasecret wing of the Initiative that has recommending power to the board regarding claims that have been turned down or held over by the adjudicator.

  “It’s a lot of responsibility,” Jenny says while sipping on a glass of prosecco in the Initiative’s stunning boardroom. “But it’s important.”

  The Compensation Committee is celebrating surpassing another fund-raising goal, and the room is thick with men in Brionis and women in Louboutins. Jenny, incredibly thin and wearing a spangled dress, is younger than most of those involved, but she’s one of those who’s been hardest hit by the tragedy, though she doesn’t agree with that label.

  “I think that honor goes to Franny. You must’ve heard of Franny? Her story is ah-mazing.”

  I haven’t, and she gladly fills me in. Ten minutes later, my head is spinning—Franny’s story is amazing, unique. Adopted twenty-four years ago, she’d recently met her birth mother, only to lose her soon after when the building fell. Initially reluctant to get involved, she’s turned into a tireless advocate for the cause and is now the cochair of the Compensation Committee.

  “You must talk to Franny,” Jenny says, looking around the room. “I thought she’d be here by now.”

  Jenny promises to bring her to me but returns with a fresh glass, a canapé, and no Franny.

  “I’m sure she’ll show
up soon. I can’t wait for you to meet her.”

  That proves more difficult than I could’ve imagined.

  19

  POSTER WHAT?

  CECILY

  Kaitlyn’s funeral was a hard day for me. Joshua was a mess, and her daughters were inconsolable. I know, sometimes, Kaitlyn felt like the kids were closer to Joshua than to her, that they remembered the time when she was postpartum after they were born or the echoes she felt after that, and had never bonded with her properly, but it wasn’t true. I often told Kaitlyn that she had a kind of dysmorphic disorder about motherhood. She saw herself in a completely different light than her children did, or anyone else who was watching. Those girls doted on her, emulated her, looked to her first when they said or did something they were unsure of. Joshua was a good father, patient and kind, but it was Kaitlyn who was the star of their everyday life.

  Sitting on the hard church pew that was starting to feel too familiar, we clung to one another, Henry and Cassie and the girls and Joshua, as the service went on and on. We rode together in the limousine to the house, Kaitlyn’s daughters shuddering on either side of me, Cassie and Henry still brittle from Tom’s funeral two days before. A car full of broken people; how were we ever going to be made whole again?

  Joshua’s cousins had stayed behind to get the catering ready, to make sure the canapés were hot and the crudités were cold, that there was enough booze to go around. I heard someone remark, as I went in the front door, that she’d been subsisting on cheap wine and spanakopita for a week, that she’d lost two pounds already. Then they saw me, and one of them turned red and the other said, “Sorry,” and I just shook my head because what did I care? They were right. If I hadn’t lost Tom and Kaitlyn, I might be one of those women, annoyed that I had to wear black for weeks on end, tired of the sadness, the endless parade of receptions and sermons, and happy that my clothes were fitting looser than they had in years.

  Hell, I was one of those women. I would’ve given anything to avoid it all, to throw out every black thing I owned and never wear anything but bright colors again. But I couldn’t forget that if things had been different by a couple of inches, in the grand scheme of things, then I would’ve been on the other side of it and might not be there at all.

  The cousins had forgotten to open the windows, so it was stuffy in the house. I settled the younger children in the basement with a video, then went to the kitchen to do just that. As I pried open the window over the sink, I noticed a group of women standing in the backyard, smoking cigarettes. It had been a while since I’d seen that. It felt illicit even watching them, like my first hidden puffs taken in a clearing with my girlfriends up behind our high school, worried a teacher would find us.

  Only these women weren’t furtive; they weren’t hiding their sins; they were shaking their heads as if they couldn’t believe the story they were hearing. One of them kept glancing over her shoulder at the house. Something was off. People were acting strangely. Not just sad but upset.

  No, that’s not the right word. Disturbed.

  I walked around the first floor. The furniture had been pushed back against the walls, and there must’ve been more than a hundred people in the house, pushed up against one another because the house wasn’t that big. I’m not sure what I was looking for, but when I saw her, I approached with a sense of foreboding. She was at least fifteen years younger than the other women, early twenties, overweight, with dark-brown hair that had suffered a bad perm a few months earlier (did people still get perms?). I searched the brain tape, but I’d never seen her, though there was something familiar about her. She was wearing a black dress that didn’t fit her very well, falling to an awkward place below her knee that made it difficult for her to walk.

  She was the only person standing alone, and despite the lack of space, there was a clearing around her, as if it was dangerous to stand too close to her.

  “Hi, I’m Cecily.”

  She held out her hand limply. We shook. Her hand was clammy, like a damp fish. It didn’t feel as if it had the right number of bones in it.

  “Nice to meet you, Cecily.”

  “Are you a friend of the family?”

  “No.”

  I felt annoyed. I’d heard about this, strangers coming to the funerals of the Triple-Tenners so they could be in on the action, walk past the fence of media, feel a part of it all. Or maybe she was trolling for free booze and food, another person on the funeral diet those women out front were talking about, only this time, she’s happy to be eating it because she doesn’t have anywhere else to go. I’d heard about that, too.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, what are you doing here?”

  She looked at me for a moment, sizing me up.

  “Were you a friend of Kaitlyn’s?” Her voice was strangely flat, as if she was masking an accent.

  “She was one of my best friends.”

  “And she never mentioned me? Not even once?”

  This woman whose name I didn’t know started tearing up. I had an odd reflex to comfort her, even though I knew she was about to tell me something that would change my life again, like Tom’s errant texts.

  “I . . . Who are you?”

  “I’m Franny. I’m Kaitlyn’s daughter.”

  • • •

  A small part of why I’m up so early sifting through the contents of Tom’s office is so I can hear it when it happens, that slap of the newspaper as it hits our front door. Call me old-fashioned, but I still love the smell of newsprint in the morning. And since it was a family tradition, dividing up the paper into our individual interests, I still do it with the kids. It’s usually Henry who collects it, my early riser, the way he’s been since he was a baby, but I can’t let that occur today.

  When I hear it happen, I’m already waiting behind the front door, and I have it open to grab the paper before Henry can get to it.

  I needn’t have worried; there’s nothing there. I must be getting full of myself, thinking I might be in the real paper because I kissed a man. I watch the kid who’s delivered our newspapers for years ride away on his ten-speed, unsure of what to do. The photograph is online, and someone’s sure to point it out to at least one of the kids. How will I explain this to them? Although Cassie knows something about the date, that’s not enough. I didn’t say enough last night to make this okay.

  The pavement beneath my bare feet is cold, but I can’t seem to make myself move. Then I hear the click, click, click of a camera, rapid-fire like the paparazzi use. It takes me a moment to spot him, because he’s across the street, leaning up against the Hendersons’ tree. I throw the paper down and run toward him.

  “Stop it! Go away!”

  He lowers his camera for a moment, then lifts it again. And even though I know this means that now he has even better shots of me coming after him like a madwoman in my pajamas, I don’t care.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  He lowers his camera again. He’s young, midtwenties, wearing an oversize hoodie with the words Don’t Criticize What You Can’t Understand written across it.

  “Hey, lady. Calm down.”

  “Don’t you tell me to calm down, Bob Dylan. I want you to erase those photos.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way. What do you want, money? Is that what this is about?”

  “I’m just doing my job.”

  “Bullshit. This isn’t a story. Me in my bathrobe is not a story.”

  “Of course it is. You might not like it, but it is. Why else do you think they sent me here?”

  “Were you here last night?”

  “What?”

  His surprise seems genuine. While his shape is similar to the man I saw through the window, jumping over my hedge as he ran away, I’m guessing he’s not stupid enough to come back here after escaping the cops.

  “Give me your card.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to buy the photos.”

  He gives me that look again, the one that t
ells me I’m completely naive.

  “Come on,” I say. “What’s the harm?”

  He fumbles for a moment, then hands me a card. Carl Hilton. Photography for All Occasions.

  “You should leave it,” he says.

  “We’ll see. Now get, will you?”

  “Mom!” Cassie calls from across the street. “What the hell?”

  I turn around. Cassie’s holding her phone straight out from her body like an accusation, a look of shock and hurt on her face.

  Carl snaps another picture.

  • • •

  “Okay,” I say twenty minutes later, after I’ve gotten Carl to delete the picture of Cassie after pointing out that she’s underage and barely dressed. “Family meeting.”

  Henry groans. Cassie’s still clutching her phone to her chest like she used to hold her special blanket.

  “Why does it have to be a ‘meeting’?” Cassie asks. “Why can’t we just have a conversation like a normal family?”

  Family meetings were always Tom’s thing. I thought they were a bit corny, but he took them seriously, so eventually I did, too.

  “Come on,” I say. “You know the rule.”

  “If someone calls a family meeting, we all have to attend!” Henry says. His voice is on the verge of cracking, and I wonder if he’ll end up sounding like Tom. He already stands and walks like him; from behind, he’s a carbon copy except for his hair color. It’s disconcerting, sometimes, when I see him suddenly, when I’m not concentrating. A bit of rage rises up without my being able to stop it. Another thing to hate Tom for, a list that’s too long.

  “That’s right. Let’s go.”

  They follow me into the living room. We each have our assigned seats. Henry’s is the wingback chair Tom and I found on one of our first furniture outings. It’s covered in a green chintz fabric whose hues match the modern striped rug we found several years later. Cassie’s is the love seat I brought with me from college, re-covered in a dark gray. I take the sectional, making sure to place myself squarely in the middle, using my body to fill the void Tom left.