Monday's Lie

by Jamie Mason

  She lasted eight months, four days. I held her dry, three-fingered hand in both of mine as she slipped away.

  8

  Friday

  I’m watching the road, but I’m driving on autopilot. It’s a bit crowded in my head just now. But it’s not as if Patrick and my mother have never been juxtaposed in my thoughts before. They’ve sprung to mind at crossed purposes from the beginning, and in no small part by my own design. I loved my mother and I loved Patrick and both of them the better because they were as unalike as two people could be.

  It turns out, though, that the joke is on me. The only thing they had in common was cause to hide in plain sight. It’s been quite a lesson. Now I realize that everything you need for measuring a person can be found in the nature of what he chooses to hide from everyone else. That’s all you need to know to gauge his goodness.

  My mother’s secrets were a professional necessity, kept close and tightly so, to let her work with any hope of success. But the secrets were also to safeguard our life together as separate and protected from her work.

  My husband’s secrets, or the biggest one anyway, is still ahead of me, just a few miles down the road.

  • • •

  Patrick had courted us both, my mother and me. It sounds awful—even perhaps perverse. But it was neither of those things, because I would only ever have had the choice between two kinds of people: those who wouldn’t understand my mother and would be fine with that, and those who wouldn’t understand her but would be helpless to resist trying. Patrick and I snuggled together in second category. All my favorite people were there.

  She was a wonderful barometer. You could test the climate of a stranger just by his or her reaction to Annette Vess. She knew this, but somehow didn’t mind being a tool for us to use. If her essential solitude was a curse, it didn’t look like one. That was the hurdle I never managed to vault—it made me sad that her isolation didn’t make her sad. That bit of tail-chasing irritated my brother, but Patrick alone seemed to understand the fragility of the anchor line that kept her from drifting away from me, from all of us. I loved him for loving her, and it certainly felt safer to adore my mother by proxy.

  He chased the attention of those flashing black eyes and the reward of her laughter, the inherent approval of her casual conversation. I could hardly pretend I didn’t understand that. She always checked my reaction to his incandescent performances with a steady, piercing look over a closed-lip smile, to see if I was okay with it. I always was. I didn’t feel jealous of his efforts. His wit and charm bloomed in his bids to impress her. It was sweet, if a little manic, and Patrick was never better than when he was playing sweet. He was the very picture of all it should look like. I was proud that I drew out his calm, his normal, despite my upbringing. Without her, our regular days were long, but pleasant, a bustle of manageable to-do that faded into a routine of cuddle, drowse, and then deep, undisturbed sleep.

  And if there was ever lightning and thunder in the dark, I’d pull his arm over me to pin me to my place and remind me that I need not venture out into it.

  • • •

  As much as he admired my mother, Patrick never understood what she’d done for Simon and me by all that she’d done to us with her games and with her outlook on life. He resented our oddness without the rest of the equation. He felt left out even though he knew the stories of origin. By the transitive property, he shouldn’t have liked her since he didn’t like her handiwork, but somehow he stubbornly never did that math. He wanted what he wanted of it, and to hell with the rest.

  The first Tuesday of each month, Patrick had a standing work meeting downtown, which we’d steered into the habit of meeting for a monthly date night on restaurant row. One Tuesday I remember, I didn’t recognize Patrick as I walked toward him. He sat at the table under the awning, two-thirds turned away from me, watching the course of people and traffic on Derby Street. I saw that it was him, of course. There were no surprises left in the way we looked to each other. I knew his face from every angle, the tilt of his shoulders, the certain blend of browns that made it only Patrick’s hair. But I didn’t recognize him.

  Every now and again, I’d turn a corner—in my office, in my neighborhood, in the grocery store, or even sometimes in the mirror—and find myself pitched into the exact opposite of déjà vu. For a disorienting set of seconds, nothing rang true. Nothing looked right. None of it felt in any way mine.

  This happened at the crosswalk behind Patrick. I knew the smell of cars idling in their own exhaust as they waited, tailpipe to grill, waiting to gain a few yards down the street only to stop and wait again, but the sensation felt more like catalog than actual memory—as if I’d been schooled in a laboratory to identify the throat-tickling fog of it rather than that I’d been steeped in it daily when I had worked downtown a few years earlier.

  The leaves that spun on their stems in the storm-front wind looked painted on. The sun glowed hard white from behind the cloud cover. Where I fit into this alien landscape, I couldn’t feel—and I couldn’t recall when I’d lost track of it. The endless second of lunatic doubt that I was possibly a figment of my own imagination was an open space in my empty head, and the lightness of it was the precursor to both fear and bliss.

  In these short-circuited moments, pinned between outlander and full-on Martian, I was compelled to run a full inventory of my entire life in the span of a few heartbeats in order to reclaim reality. It was Tuesday and Patrick was in the center of the picture, both in fact and in practice.

  The fence of my world drew its bold line around me again, my husband at the hub. I remembered that I had made it so, and all of it very much on purpose. Relief reattached itself to me as life came back online.

  I was always reborn after these little episodes, once I’d tightened the straps back down and shoved the bundle of my life firmly into its slot. All the colors were deeper, the blood in me keen and ready. It was probably epilepsy’s cousin, but it came with a dump of endorphins. I felt like Joan of Arc.

  Patrick must have sensed me behind him, tickled with a psychic flutter to feel me watching him. He straightened up and turned to find me in the flow of early-evening hustle. He waved me over and dragged the metal chair beside him away from the table in invitation. “Hey.”

  “Hi.” I tucked my bag under the table and worked a horrible metal scream out of getting the chair, and myself in it, wedged under the table. “Simon is on his way. Hope that’s okay. He was supposed to be out of town for something, but he got back early. It’s his birthday. I thought we could buy him dinner.”

  “Yeah. Okay. That’s good.”

  Simon didn’t keep us waiting long.

  The waitress set down a basket of bread and a plate of dipping oil in the center of the table.

  Simon caught my eye as she moved out of our street view and back into the restaurant. “Are you seeing this?”

  “Yep,” I answered.

  “Seeing what?” asked Patrick.

  “Those two people, across the street.” I nodded that way, but didn’t look over. “They’re trying to get into that apartment building.” I dragged a hunk of bread through the oil and kept my voice low to corral the information to just our table.

  “So?” asked Patrick.

  “Do they look like they belong in that particular apartment building to you?” said Simon.

  I was glad Simon had gone there and not me.

  Patrick replied, a step friendlier to Simon than what I would likely have got, “That’s kind of harsh, don’t you think?”

  The young guy looked like a composite, like in one of those children’s books that flipped in thirds to show you a tyrannosaur swinging a bat in a baseball jersey and cowboy boots. Turn the top segment and T. rex was an otter or a duck in the same getup.

  The result here had a baseball theme, too, but only up top. The guy wore a billed cap with a team logo I didn’t recognize, and his too-large golf shirt had a vivid newness. A dark block of tattooed letters to the le
ft of his Adam’s apple glowered against the prim baby blue of the collar, which sported a starchy perk that wouldn’t stand up to even one laundering. I looked for dangling tags, but didn’t find any. His pleated work pants weren’t his own. The cuffs backed up in a short fabric jam at his ankles, and the worn bends in the knees were clearly from a taller set of joints than this guy boasted. His ragged high-tops suited him just fine, though.

  The young girl with him was pale, with chapped lips and dark circles under her eyes, but at least her clothes were her own.

  The front entrance of the building was around the corner and had a desk just inside an elaborately etched glass door with something more than a doorman and less than a security guard manning it. The deep portico rested on granite-tiled columns that projected out into the sidewalk to serve as both decoration and as a notice that this was where the money went when it didn’t feel like driving to the suburbs for grass and fireflies.

  The side entry that faced our vantage point from the bistro’s outdoor dining tables had a call-up access intercom and a code entry panel for residents. This pair of ragged not-quite-twentysomethings had parked themselves against the wall, fifteen feet from this side door directly across from us.

  “Maybe they’re waiting for someone who lives there,” Patrick offered with a stubborn shrug. “Or maybe they live there.”

  “She’s carrying stuff in a Walmart bag,” I said into my plate.

  Patrick’s annoyance dialed up a notch for me. “Even rich people go shopping, Dee. Sometimes even at Walmart.”

  “It’s not a new bag.”

  The bottom of the girl’s plastic bag sagged and the sides bulged, but the total weight didn’t strain overmuch against the loop handles. Clothing, unfolded, was my guess. The logo and printed slogan were heat-faded as if the bags had been closed up in a hot car for a time.

  “And they’re both jumpy as hell,” Simon added.

  Their tandem stiffness thrummed a sour note over the entire corner. They were blaring their attempt at invisibility. The boy in the ball cap was flipping a loose key through his fingers, rolling it surely over and through his knuckles in a sinuous wave of motion. The girl kept raking her long, dark blond hair down over her forehead, a limp curtain of anonymity.

  “Well, maybe they get the feeling they’re being watched and judged all the time,” said Patrick.

  So instead, we all watched and judged our appetites through the bread and the salads. The waitress refilled our water glasses.

  “Ah!” I said.

  “Yep,” said Simon. “There he goes.”

  It was dinnertime and a battered hatchback with a pizza-delivery prism on its roof slid to the curb and set its flashers strobing. Ball-cap boy slipped in right behind him as he was buzzed into the building.

  “Damnit,” I said.

  “Are you going over there?” asked Simon.

  “What?” Patrick was nearly offended. “Why would she do that?”

  “Look at her,” I said. “What is she, seventeen? She’s pitiful.”

  “What about him?” Simon asked me mildly, watching the girl, who had gone rigid with sentry duty. “Don’t you feel bad for him?”

  “What about him? He’s toast. He’s in there. He’s doing it. Nobody can do anything about that now.”

  Patrick abandoned his fork with a clatter against his plate. “I mean, not to point out the obvious, but none of this is our business, you know.”

  “Well, it’s kind of my business.” Simon wiped his mouth and unclipped his phone and set it beside his plate. “I can’t just ignore a possible burglary in progress.”

  “If that’s what it is,” said Patrick.

  “True,” said Simon.

  “But she’s stuck,” I said. “If this is what it looks like it is, and if she’s just waiting for him, she’ll get caught up in the net.”

  “So you’ve decided she’s completely innocent?” asked Patrick.

  “I have no idea, but she’s the one standing on the sidewalk while he’s burglarizing some hotshot’s apartment.”

  “You don’t know that’s what he’s doing.” It wasn’t that Patrick didn’t have a point. There were too many intangibles to explain over dinner why Simon and I saw what we did in the drama across the street.

  “Maybe she drove him to it,” said Simon, needling me.

  “Oh, get real,” I said.

  “What, you don’t think people can be driven to a life of crime?”

  Patrick leaned out of our conversation, back into spectator stance in his cast-iron chair, both fascinated and horrified.

  “I think everyone is responsible for his or her own actions,” I said.

  “Oh, boy. That’ll come back to haunt you,” said Simon.

  “Simon, come on. What are you going to do?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to either go back in time and make us not know that this is happening or I want you to fix it.”

  “Great. Will do,” he said. “And I’ll tell the Easter bunny you said hi when the unicorn drops me off at home afterwards.”

  I sucked in my cheeks. “We really should do something.”

  “Then I’ll knock it back over the net to you,” Simon said. “What are you going to do about it, Sissy? If you go over there, I definitely have to call it in.”

  “I’m not going over there. That would be weird. And I know you’re going to call it in anyway. I just think she should at least have a chance.”

  “What about him?”

  “He went in. There’s nothing that can be done about that. Clearly, she doesn’t want to be here.”

  “Clearly.” Simon smiled at me.

  “Don’t mock me. There’s no way they could have known they’d be right in front of a cop.”

  “So I’m the bogeyman? How’s that again? They were probably going to get caught one way or the other.” He stared me down, daring and teasing. “Go fix it, Sissy. I’ll give her a head start, if you can get her to take it.”

  “You’re making fun of me. Our mother wouldn’t do it. You know she wouldn’t. We’re not in the business of other people’s business.”

  “Well,” said Simon, “I kinda am.”

  “Right. But you’re not going to scare off a material witness to a crime, so you don’t count. And I don’t know enough to go barging into this situation. Patrick’s right.”

  Patrick nodded and uncrimped his scowl a little. “Thank you.”

  “But you still want to do something.” Simon smirked at me and took his phone off the table. “If you’re going to do it, whatever it is, it’s gonna have to be now.”

  “Hang on,” I said.

  A street musician, a violinist, was setting up shop under a lamppost just in front of the restaurant. His white shirt had ruffles and his jacket was cut modern, but out of purple velveteen, so I wasn’t worried that he was shy.

  I actually did the pssst thing and waved him over to the rope barrier of the café tables. “Hey. Hi. Can I ask a favor?” I rummaged through my bag for my wallet and pulled out a bill. “Will you take this to that girl across the street? She’s in trouble.”

  He looked from the money in his hand to the girl. She was craning a long-range look down the street, gnawing on the cuticle of her thumb.

  “Be a hero for me and I’ll put some seed money in your case when you get back,” I said. It was incentive enough. He shrugged and loped to the crosswalk.

  “Twenty dollars?” asked Simon. “What is twenty dollars going to do?”

  “It’s not twenty dollars,” I said, watching my proxy Good Samaritan.

  Simon nodded his head. “I’m pretty sure it was twenty dollars.”

  Patrick also nodded at me in agreement. I was a rose between two head-bobbing thorns.

  “Nope,” I said. “What it is, much more than twenty dollars, is proof positive that she’s being watched. Make your call, lawman. You do your thing. I’ll do mine.” I smiled at my brother. “Let’s see what she doe
s with this.”

  Simon dialed as the minstrel reached the tattered girl. Both of her feet cleared the ground in her startle as he touched her shoulder. He extended the money. She shook her head. A second’s more conversation and she took the bill.

  The girl looked up into his face, and I could read the question in her expression and posture even as it was washed vague by the distance between us. The violinist turned and the girl’s gaze followed his finger pointing back to me. My heart reared up and pounded a wild drumroll. I looked away.

  Simon whispered to me, “If she walks over here, do not tell her your name. Unless you’d like this to be the gift that never stops giving. Be the Lone Ranger, not her best friend. Got it?”

  I swatted away the advice I didn’t need. “She’s not coming over here. Look.” The girl was reining in her retreat to a rigid walk-trot that was way more obvious than if she’d just gone ahead and sprinted down the sidewalk. I thought at her hard not to run. Just walk, I said under my breath. The girl tripped up and stumbled, catching on to the brick wall at her right side to steady herself. Her head swiveled, scanning the crowd to see who saw her blunder. She looked back to me. It seemed our eyes met, but I couldn’t be sure. She pulled the Walmart bag in front of her body, a sad, belated shielding of her crumpled dignity. But she pulled away from the wall and set off out of sight.

  The waitress brought our dinners.

  “Satisfied?” asked Simon.

  “I guess I’ll never know,” I said.