Girl of Lies (Rachel's Peril)

by Charles Sheehan-Miles

Sarah shook her head. “You’re fooling yourself, Dylan.”

  He closed his eyes and sighed, then took another drag off his cigarette. The breeze up here felt cool. Calming. He remembered the first time he’d been on this balcony. Just over a year ago, after he and Alex had rushed to take an overnight train to DC in response to Carrie’s call. Staff Sergeant Martin had testified at the preliminary hearing, and then called Ray that night, threatening suicide. Then he shot himself while still on the phone with Ray.

  They stood outside, right here on this balcony, Ray’s eyes still red, dark circles under his haunted eyes. They’re talking bridesmaid’s dresses, he had said. Thank God you woke up.

  I’m not so good at asking for help, Ray had said.

  Sometimes you have to, Dylan had responded. You’re the one who taught me that.

  The problem was, you could know something, and you could tell other people, but still not believe it in your soul. And sometimes Dylan just couldn’t get his mind around the fact that his two best friends were dead in two years.

  He looked back at Sarah. “Sarah, thanks for your concern. I promise, I’ll be okay.” The words felt hollow, brittle as he said them.

  3. Andrea. April 29

  Andrea looked out the sliding glass door. Dylan was slumped in his seat, smoking a cigarette. Sarah was out there with him, gesticulating as she spoke. It was a beautiful spring day. She could tell a breeze was blowing outside, because every few seconds Sarah and Dylan’s hair blew in the wind.

  She turned. Alexandra looked unhappy as she and Carrie exchanged small talk. Small talk. Final exams. Train and plane schedules. What was Columbia University like now versus ten years ago. Pretty soon they were going to start talking about the weather or something.

  Their voices were like buzz buzz buzz in her ear, and for a second Andrea wanted to just throw some heavy object across the room. Something serious was obviously going on between Dylan and Alexandra—normally they were two of the most affectionate people she’d ever seen. Now they didn’t look at each other? They didn’t touch? Carrie was on the verge of falling apart every moment, and the help she got from a part-time nanny was wholly inadequate. Their mother and father were among the missing, Jessica was who-knew-where and there were armed guards right outside the condo to protect them from terrorists or kidnappers or whatever.

  Yet, they sat here engaged in small talk.

  She wanted to scream just to get their attention. Instead, she sat down on the couch across from them. Back straight, shoulders back, and legs crossed at the ankle, just as their bitchy mother taught her all those years ago before outsourcing Andrea’s upbringing. Then she stared at Carrie. She didn’t say a word. She just stared.

  It took about 40 seconds before Carrie broke off her sentence and looked from Alexandra to Andrea.

  “Are you all right?”

  Andrea shrugged. She tilted her head, looked toward Alexandra, and took a deep breath. Even though she’d brought on the question, she felt suddenly frozen. A tightness in her chest, her throat closed up.

  Alexandra’s eyebrows pushed together, and she sat forward in her seat, leaning toward Andrea. “Hey… are you okay, hun?”

  Andrea started to speak, and found her hands suddenly flapping, the words colliding in her mouth like a ten car pileup on a two-lane highway.

  “Breathe,” Carrie said, reaching out and taking her hand.

  “When do I get tested?” Andrea blurted.

  “Tomorrow morning,” Carrie replied.

  “Why…” She stared at her sisters, her face going pale. Then she said, “Never mind,” and started to pull away.

  “Whoa,” Carrie said. “Wait.”

  “No, really, never mind,” Andrea said.

  “Stop,” Alexandra replied. “Tell us. Whatever it is. You’re safe here. We’re your sisters.”

  Andrea stood up, her eyes swiveling back and forth between the two of them. Then she voiced the words. The words she’d never said out loud, the words that expressed every doubt and fear and insecurity she’d ever had.

  “Are we?”

  “What?” Alexandra asked.

  “Are we sisters?”

  Alexandra visibly recoiled a few inches. “Of course we are,” she said.

  Andrea shook her head. “I know we are,” she said, gesturing between herself and Carrie. “That’s obvious to anyone. But… why else would they send me away? Why?”

  Carrie said, “I thought you wanted to go.”

  “What?” Andrea said.

  Dylan and Sarah, both sitting on the balcony outside, slid open the sliding glass door. “Is everything okay?” Dylan asked.

  “I said, I always thought you wanted to live with Abuelita. I mean… you started spending summers over there when I was at Columbia… and… I don’t know… I guess I assumed…”

  She assumed. That’s what you did when you didn’t even really care. But then Andrea felt her heart almost stop.

  “Mom said, Andrea doesn’t want to come home.” Carrie frowned as she spoke. “I asked her why, and she said not to pry. She said… I didn’t want to get into it. That you’d be happier if I didn’t dig into it… and… she said there was nothing but grief there.”

  Andrea sank into her seat. “I don’t know how she could possibly know that. We’ve barely spoken a word to each other in the last five years. She won’t even speak with Abuelita or Luis.” She thought back. Trying to remember. Anything. Details.

  She shook her head. “I kind of took it for granted. I mean, I started spending summers there when I was five? Six?”

  “Something like that. It was the summer after Julia left for Harvard.”

  “That far back?” Andrea asked. “I don’t remember Julia living with us.”

  “She finished high school in 2000 I think… you’d have been… two? Anyway… you didn’t go to Spain for the first time until June 2002.”

  “You remember the timing pretty well,” Andrea said.

  “That’s because I went with you.”

  Andrea’s eyes widened. “You went with me the first time? I don’t remember that.”

  “I’m not surprised, you were only four.”

  Sarah approached closely. Her eyes were on Andrea. “Carrie, do you have any pictures from that trip?”

  Alexandra shook her head. “This is bullshit. We are sisters. Andrea, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch much the last year or two… college has just been… insane. And… well, you know. But we’re sisters.”

  Sarah said, “Get the photos, Carrie.”

  Carrie nodded. Andrea sat and watched her go, feeling dread in her stomach. Why would it be her and Carrie alone who went to Spain? The two sisters who looked different. The two of them who were more than six feet tall and looked almost like twins and nothing like their father?

  Why did they go to Spain?

  Carrie returned to the room a few minutes later. She had a well worn photo album. It had a canvas cover decorated with the word Spain in purple letters. Framed on the front cover was a photo.

  She flushed a little when she put the book in front of them, and said, “I was a little more girly when I was seventeen.”

  Andrea felt a chill looking at it. The photograph, taken nearly twelve years before, looked exactly like Andrea, holding hands with a four year old. Except, of course, it was Carrie, holding hands with her. Both of them had smiles on their faces, huge smiles. Andrea’s four-year-old face was smeared with what looked like chocolate ice cream.

  Andrea, of course, recognized the location. They were standing on Calella Beach… unmistakable, because of the lighthouse above their shoulders and the word CALELLA in twelve-foot high rock letters on the hillside behind them. That would be near the Hotel Esplai. Javier worked there as a busboy in the summer time.

  Carrie slid into the seat next to Andrea.

  Andrea took a deep breath. “Was this the only time you went?” she asked.

  Carrie nodded. “Mother wanted me to go in 2003, after I graduated
high school, but we had a huge fight about it, because I was planning on spending my summer with my friends here.”

  “What happened?”

  “I won the argument. I remember Dad was never around much that summer, and at the end, I drove to Columbia.”

  “You drove?” Andrea said.

  “Yeah, with Julia and Crank and Sean. It was fun. I started college a few weeks later. And… well… I think you started first grade in September.”

  Andrea couldn’t keep her eyes off the album. She didn’t have many memories of their home in San Francisco when she was younger. She knew she’d attended her first few years of school in San Francisco, but with the exception of a few early memories, everything before ten years old was hazy. By then, she was spending her summers in California and the school year in Spain.

  She reached out and touched the book. The fabric felt well used. Loved, even. She almost felt guilty. She loved Luis and Abuelita. Her family. Somehow, wanting to open that album, wanting to open that can of worms of her past, made her feel disloyal.

  But Abuelita would understand. Luis would understand. And even if they didn’t… she needed to know, didn’t she? She needed to know. She needed to know her history. She needed to know who she was. Who her family was. She needed to know why.

  Andrea reached out and took the album in her hands and flipped it open to the first page.

  1. Andrea. April 29

  THE FIRST PHOTO in the album showed two sisters, one seventeen, and the other four, flanking their mother. Carrie was frozen in time in that photo. She had braces on her teeth and wore a vintage blue dress with matching heels. She wore a huge smile on her face, and towered over Adelina Thompson.

  “You look so happy,” Andrea said.

  “We were just leaving for the airport. It was my first trip without Mom and Dad.”

  “Do you remember how the trip came about? Why it was just the two of us?”

  Carrie nodded. “Sort of. I had sort of hinted for a long time that I was hoping to take a trip to Europe sometime. I mean, it’s not like we hadn’t traveled. I remember living in Brussels, more or less, and I was in middle school most of the time we were in China. You were born there.”

  “In China,” Andrea said. She knew that. But somehow hearing it, now, felt different.

  “Right. The twins too.”

  A cloud fell over Carrie’s face. Then she said, “Julia knows more about China, of course. She was in high school then.”

  Andrea sighed. She flipped the page. The first inside pages showed Carrie and Andrea arriving at the airport in Barcelona. Hugs with family members who must have been unfamiliar to Carrie at the time, but who looked very familiar to Andrea: Abuelita, Miguel and Maria Carmen, Luis. Her family, or at least the part of her family that had been a significant part of her life the last several years.

  Carrie looked at her for a few seconds, and then she moved, wordlessly, onto the couch next to Andrea.

  Andrea shifted position just a little. She knew she should be more open to her sister. Carrie, of all people. But something held her back. She shifted so that their bodies weren’t touching.

  Carrie said nothing about the shift. Instead, she pointed at the album. “How are Luis and Miguel?”

  Andrea shrugged. “Miguel constantly complains about how his wife nags him to death. But you can tell he loves her.”

  Carrie smiled, nodding. “That sounds right.”

  “Luis started his own advertising firm in Barcelona… three years ago? Four? He loves it. Lately he’s busy all the time, I don’t get to see him very often.”

  Andrea flipped the page slowly. A smile spread across her face. The photograph showed Carrie, lying on the beach sunbathing. Luis was in the photo, lying on a towel a few feet away from Carrie, and his eyes were on her. “Oh, my God,” Andrea said, laughter in her voice. “He is so checking you out in that picture.”

  Carrie chuckled. “He’s not that much older than me. Six or seven years? That’s still kind of creepy.”

  Not far from Luis and Carrie, half covered in sand, holding a shovel in one hand and a pair of goggles in the other, was Andrea. Four years old. Huge smile on her face.

  Andrea swallowed. In the photo she looked so happy. No sign of the empty gaping loneliness she’d felt in later years.

  After that, a series of beach photos. Abuelita in a bathing suit! Andrea gasped and laughed. A photo of a crowd of family members around a picnic table. In the foreground, Andrea played with two other children, three or four or five years old. Carrie sat on a picnic table, in avid conversation with a boy who looked remarkably like Javier. His older brother? Andrea supposed it was possible. Aunts and uncles and cousins were in the photo. In the background, near the edge of a picture, stood two men. One of them dark skinned, Spanish. The other, pale skinned, towered over him. Andrea didn’t recognize either of the men.

  The next several pages showed Andrea and Carrie out and about in Calella. She recognized the front of the Chapel of Santa Maria in one of the photos and smiled. In the photo, Miguel and his wife Maria Carmen were exiting the chapel. He wore a tuxedo, and she wore a garish wedding dress with entirely too much cleavage.

  Andrea shook her head. “We were at Miguel and Maria Carmen’s wedding?”

  Carrie nodded. “Yes. It was a beautiful ceremony.”

  “She’s a complete witch,” Andrea whispered.

  Carrie snickered. “Yeah. She is.”

  And that’s when Andrea froze. She picked the album up and held it closer to her face.

  In the wedding photo, a large crowd was near the plaza and the chapel. The beginning of the market was right there, and hundreds of people shopped there throughout the week.

  Standing in the shade, barely visible in the photo, was a very tall, pale man. He stood next to a shorter, darker skinned man. Both of them were maddeningly out of focus. But it was the same man, she was sure of it.

  “Andrea?” Carrie said.

  “Wait…” Andrea whispered.

  She set the album down, and flipped back to the beach photo. She studied the too fuzzy features on the man’s face. Then she flipped forward to the wedding picture.

  It was the same man, she thought.

  From the photo, he was probably six foot five. Dark hair. Pale eyes, possibly green. Long, aquiline nose, she thought, but it was impossibly difficult to tell with the photo out of focus. But if she squinted her eyes enough, she imagined that the man might just resemble Carrie.

  She reached out and pointed one shaking finger at the photo.

  “Do you recognize that man?”

  Carrie shook her head. “No… should I?”

  “What about…” She flipped the album back to the beach photo. “Here.”

  “That’s odd,” Carrie said. Her eyebrows scrunched together. She flipped back and forth between one photo and the other.

  Andrea looked up and met Carrie’s eyes. Both of them stopped breathing.

  “Do you think it’s possible?” Carrie asked.

  Andrea swallowed. “It would explain… a lot.”

  “But… Dad would have said something. When I started to get blood tests.”

  “If he knew,” Andrea said.

  Carrie swallowed. “But Mom…”

  “Where is she?”

  “Mom? Well… it’s a long story.”

  Alexandra said, “I can’t wait to hear this.”

  Sarah rolled her eyes. “It’s not that long a story. Mom thinks Jessica’s gay or something and took her off to a rehab camp.”

  “What?” Andrea said.

  Carrie shook her head. “I don’t think so. Andrea, you didn’t see Jessica at Christmas this year. She was stoned out of her mind. That’s why Mom decided to go back to San Francisco.”

  Sarah shrugged. “I can’t figure Mom out.”

  “No one can,” Carrie said. “She’s never treated any of us decently. Especially Julia.”

  Andrea followed the discussion with a peculiar sense of confusi
on. For reasons she couldn’t fathom, she felt the urge to defend her mother. Because even though over the years Andrea had spent increasing amounts of time overseas, even though she’d seen less and less of her parents, what memories she did have of her mother were warm.

  That was part of what made her rejection hurt so much.

  “So no one actually knows where she is?” Andrea asked.

  She looked at her sisters. Carrie. Alexandra. Sarah. They looked mystified.

  “Okay, does anyone know where Jessica is?”

  Carrie shook her head. She swallowed and said, “Between you and her, sometimes I feel like such a failure.”

  Andrea and the other sisters sat there, stunned. Finally, Andrea jumped in and said, “What? What the hell are you talking about?”

  Carrie closed her eyes. Then she said, “It was… ten years ago? Longer? Julia and I made a pact. That… our mom couldn’t take care of us. She was too crazy. But we agreed that none of you would ever feel that loneliness. That we’d take care of you.”

  A tear ran down Carrie’s face. Then another. She sniffed then said, “But we didn’t. I couldn’t.”

  “You did!” Sarah said. “You took care of us. Even after you left for college, you called me every week, and I always knew I could call you.”

  Confusion roiled through Andrea. She remembered the weekly calls from Julia. Every single week, without fail. The visits, every time Julia was in Europe, and sometimes just for the hell of it.

  Had they been watching out for her all along, and she just didn’t know?

  “I couldn’t though, after I left. I tried, but I wasn’t enough.”

  Alexandra looked mortified. She stared at Carrie, an oddly resentful expression on her face, but she said nothing. Andrea saw it and took note.

  “Oh, all of you be quiet,” Sarah said. “Nobody’s perfect. But you know what? The biggest hero I ever knew would have said we all do the best we can, and we have to live with that best. So don’t beat yourselves up for not being perfect.”

  Carrie gasped at Sarah’s words, and Andrea sat there. Who was she talking about? Ray, Carrie’s husband? Dylan, who had remained silent throughout the long exchange between the sisters, swayed on his feet a little, then said, “He said something like that to me more than once.”