How We Learned to Lie

by Meredith Miller

  “The quiet lady is Deborah?”

  “She was my best friend, growing up. So don’t think I don’t understand about Daisy McNamara. I just want you to be prepared for when the world gets between you.”

  “Is she crazy?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t used to be quiet. She used to sing like an angel.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Her sister got married and her parents died, and I guess I left too. She just started crumbling into herself. When I go to see her now, there are just pieces of who she used to be, kind of jumbled up inside her mind.”

  “Mom! Maybe she needs a doctor? If she’s your friend, you should help her. There should be a diagnosis. They could put her on medication.”

  “You’re saying that because you’ve never been to a psychiatric ward. I wouldn’t do that to Deborah just because her feelings are different than other people’s.”

  “All you people and your feelings. Could somebody draw me a map?”

  We went quiet again, but her breathing didn’t change. She lay with her hands folded on her chest like the corpse at a wake. Maybe if you have a brain like hers it never lets you sleep. If I hadn’t been there, she’d have been alone in the single bed down the hall. Eight hours a day, a third of her life, breathing into the dark with no one to hear her.

  “Are you ever coming back, Mom? Are things gonna go back to normal?”

  “For the record”—her voice was soft and tired—“I wanted to bring you up here with me.”

  “What?”

  “I wanted to move up here with you and Andre. Put you in school.”

  “You never asked me.”

  “I wanted to get you away from that house. No matter how much people try to scare ’em off, they won’t budge from there. Even your father now, too. They’re like barnacles.”

  “What do you mean, scare them off?”

  “You think all those white people in Highbone are happy we live there? Twice your Gram and Gramps had to go to court to keep that house, even though our family have been in it over a hundred years and own it outright. My question is, why? Why do they want to be there?”

  “Because it’s ours!”

  “Well, your life would be better here. That house is like a sickness.”

  “Where would we live?”

  “I don’t know. Your father and your grandfather talked me out of it. They think every black kid that grows up in the city turns into a junkie hooker before the end of high school.”

  “Did you tell them we have junkies in Highbone, too?”

  “I could have gotten you into School Without Walls. It would have been so good for you.”

  I didn’t sleep much that night. It took hours to run through all the different possibilities, to split my life off at seventh grade, eighth, ninth, and follow it forward into a time without Daisy or Nick or even Teresa. No tides, no dogfish, no back steps. Empty cathedral subway stations instead. Classes in the Museum of Natural History and anyway that house haunting my dreams, even in Manhattan. Me and my mother together and that house never letting us go.

  I fell half asleep and saw picture of the city and all its caverns full of dead things. All its specimens and dissections. Its underground rooms full of bones and switchboards. All the wires and train tracks and connections. When I finally fell all the way asleep I dreamed of phone booths on every corner with Daisy’s voice in them.

  Joan

  I GUESS IT was toward the end of winter the day I went up to Daisy’s attic window with Thompson’s translation of the Historia animalium. No one was home and the house was so quiet. I liked reading up there. If I finished the book, I could go over Nick’s apartment and tell him.

  Things outside were melting. Snow and ice were sliding off the trees, and the whole world smelled like damp laundry. There were piles of slushy snow along the edges of Jensen Road. The quiet lady—Deborah—was climbing between the trees at the edge of Carter’s Bay. She had on fisherman’s boots and a parka. I could see the orange lining from where I was. I thought, Why doesn’t she zip up? I thought, How did my mother leave her?

  The McNamaras’ house was so quiet I could hear the kitchen fans at the Narragansett. Suspiciously quiet. I only noticed right then. That seems crazy, looking back, but everybody was distracted. It wasn’t just me. There was so much missing, so much empty space that the world was like one of those pictures with the two faces that are really a wine glass. Where the stuff that’s not there seems like the stuff that is there.

  Where was Daisy? I kept thinking I’d see him coming, but Jensen Road was empty. The wall was throwing a thin shadow toward me, and I could see the melt seeping through it. Every once in a while a car would curve around, heading for Highbone, but none of them carried anything I needed or knew. None of them spilled out Daisy, or Robbie, Ray Velker or Nick Tomaszewski or my mother. None of them stopped to carry me away into whatever my future was supposed to be.

  I looked out at the piles of plowed snow. There was pathetic yellow light laid across it, and I knew everything would freeze overnight. Before the sun rose, the water lying on the curve of Jensen Road would turn to glass and we’d be a death trap. Again.

  I’m trying to put myself back into the moment just before I opened Mrs. McNamara’s bedroom door. Before everything changed shape one more time. There were no towels in the bathroom and she used to keep them in a closet in her room, so I went to get one.

  I knocked first, even though I knew there was no one else in the house. There was no light at all, not even a pale edge around the curtains. It took me a while to find the switch; I’d never been in there in the dark before. When my fingers found it and I pushed it up, a man’s voice said, “Hello, Daisy. Come on in. Relax.” I turned around and nearly ran away before I realized it was a tape. Daisy had it wired to the switch. When I looked back inside the room I saw the lights.

  The bed was shoved to one wall, and the reason it was so dark was that someone—Daisy—had taped the edges of the curtains. There were wires stretching around on boards and tables, and even some on the walls. Some of the boards had light switches embedded in them, regular ones and some dimmers, too. Above the head of Mrs. McNamara’s bed, there was a map of North America, made sort of like a blueprint. A satellite picture, maybe. Anyway, it was the biggest single piece of paper I’d ever seen. Where did he get it? Little red and white bulbs were twinkling inside Washington State and Chicago and Idaho. One in Tennessee and one in Utah.

  Walking over to it, I tripped over a guitar pedal and a string of dry-cell batteries. When I got up close, I could see the map had more wires and more bulbs, they just weren’t lit up.

  You’re probably thinking, What the fuck? Well, so was I. Right now, you know exactly as much as I did when I turned all the way around in a circle in the middle of Rita McNamara’s bedroom, trying to understand what I was looking at.

  I turned on the light in the bathroom and the mirror came alive. All around it were different colored bulbs and little fans and pinwheels. Something made a sound like whistling. It was complicated and beautiful, and it made me furious. I was so mad I nearly smashed it before I even knew why. I stood looking at myself in the kind of crazy light that happens at the firemen’s fair and thought, He’s gonna start a fire. He’s gonna overload the circuits. I thought, Jesus, who’s paying the electric bill?

  Then I stopped looking at the lights and the wires and saw the obvious. Whatever was happening in that bedroom, Rita McNamara wasn’t living in it. Right then I was pretty sure Robbie wasn’t either. Daisy was alone. Daisy was living in that house all by himself. Things started playing over in my head, taking on different meanings. Someone was there the night of the hurricane, because I heard the door. Was Daisy alone on Christmas Day? Did he know how to cook? Who the hell was washing his clothes?

  You ever see a cat trying to touch the cat inside the mirror that’s really their own image? I was the opposite, looking from the inside of my life into the inside of his, expec
ting a reflection. Expecting the other me. What I saw were two completely different landscapes full of mad science and nightmares. Fears and secrets and questions without answers, echoing back at each other in two separate languages.

  I was mad because I was scared. Because I’d opened a door in my best friend’s house and found out he lived inside Pandora’s fucking box and he hadn’t even told me.

  How long had Daisy been building an electric map of America in the place where his mother was supposed to be?

  Daisy

  TONIGHT, WHEN I stood in Aunt Regina’s doorway and watched Joan walk away into the streets of Rockaway, I thought, I should have told her everything. The secrets worked their way into our lives and just took us over. I keep telling myself if I hadn’t lied to her she wouldn’t be walking away, but that probably isn’t true. The world is full of hurricanes and riptides and lies. How long would we have been able to hold on to each other anyway?

  On the first day of March, we went to Hatchet Mary’s because Joan wanted to poke a frozen carp. She knocked on my door at eight on Saturday morning with a rasp and a thermometer and a thermos of coffee. I made her an English muffin and she took it, then I asked her how mad she was, on a scale of one to ten.

  “Let’s go. I want to be there if the sun melts the ice.” I couldn’t get another word out of her.

  The temperature had dropped the night before, and all the liquid in the world was stopped dead. Every individual hexagon in the chicken wire on the Abbates’ front gate was encased in ice. When we ducked under the trees into Hatchet Mary’s, all the little branches tinkled against each other. The leaves under our feet cracked and snapped.

  “Joan, you have to talk to me. I’m sorry, okay. If anyone finds out, they’ll put me in custody.”

  I expected her to yell at me. I expected her to say, “It’s me, Daisy! You don’t trust me?” or something. Because really, didn’t I? Why hadn’t I told her? I’m still trying to figure that out now.

  I crunched over the ground in Hatchet Mary’s and bent over to read a gravestone through its coating of ice. The cuffs of my jeans were stiff. In a few minutes the heat from my body would melt them and freezing water would drip down into my shoes. I couldn’t look at her.

  “They don’t really know what happens to their brains.”

  “What?”

  “Everything stops, but they don’t die.”

  I turned around and then felt tricked. She just kept digging, asking the world questions.

  “Is it like what bears do? Is it like when other fish sleep on the bottom? The temperature of the carp is the same as the water. They freeze completely solid. And then five months later, they just wiggle out and swim away. What the hell?”

  “You know what? I don’t fucking care, Joan.”

  I turned away and ducked under the branches. The top pond was frozen like black marble. I climbed up past it and through into the open meadow. The woods stretched along all around, each individual branch coated with ice. There was nothing living in there, no possible movement except mine.

  How close did I come to it? To him? I wasn’t really looking around. Ever since the day we found out what happened at Hatchet Mary’s that winter I’ve been wondering, did I pass right by it? Was it coated in ice, like the branches and the gravestones? How long had it been there by that point? Would I have even been able to recognize what it was? There must have been footprints and broken branches, a pathway leading to that rolled-up piece of tarp, because everyone said later that Scottie took kids up to see it.

  At the time I was so mad at Joan the steamy breath was coming out of my mouth in big, quick puffs. I looked at my feet and stomped through the frozen grass thinking the only other person in there with me was her. We went in that day, digging up fish and fighting with each other like we’d been doing our whole lives. No idea what was lying next to us in the trees.

  The weight of the ice had dragged the tall grasses down into clumps and the blades whipped against my legs when I pushed through them. I went back to Joan, because I always will. Of course she was mad at me; I was an asshole. I didn’t trust her and she was still worried enough about me to get mad.

  I sat down on the wall at the edge of the pond and started talking.

  “I was ashamed, okay? Everyone loves you.”

  That got her attention. She snorted and then turned her head to glare at me.

  “Okay, I’m sorry. I know it’s fucked-up for you, too. But I mean, there are people who love you who aren’t crazy or junkies, or both. Who aren’t in jail or unpredictably violent. One day, they’ll find out about my family and you’ll never be allowed to hang out with me again.”

  “I’m wondering if we’d hurt the carp if we warmed up the ice.”

  “I don’t know. You’re sleeping with a teacher.”

  “We might hurt it.” She went on trying to wear a hole in the ice with the rasp.

  “Well, I’m worried about you even if you aren’t.”

  “Shut up now, Daisy. I’m done trying to get the truth from people. I’m going back to fish.”

  “No, actually. I’m not gonna shut up.”

  “Stick to talking about yourself then, because I will leave and not come back if you keep passing judgment on me.”

  I thought that was true. I never doubted it because I didn’t trust her completely. I should have.

  “Okay, so my mother and Robbie have never been there, really. It’s not like anything changed. Except the bills. The bills are kind of intense, but I mean my life isn’t really more complicated without them. The thing is, you know a guidance counselor wouldn’t see it that way.”

  My ass had melted the ice and snow underneath it and now it was freezing and wet.

  “So you actually think I’d tell a guidance counselor your problems?” She didn’t turn around, which was good because she would have seen the smile I couldn’t keep off my face when she decided to get into the same conversation as me.

  “No! I don’t think that. When she left and Robbie was still there, I was scared for you. Robbie got weird. Weirder than usual. And then Ray never came back and . . . I don’t know. I didn’t want you to be around it.”

  “And?”

  “And then Robbie left, too. I didn’t know how to pay for anything, and I was embarrassed, and then I thought people would come and take me away.”

  “You’re not answering the real question. Why didn’t you trust me, Daisy?”

  “I trust you. I just panicked. Joan, I can’t live anywhere else.”

  I guess we both knew what I really meant. Joan was lifting out of my life and I was clinging on to her like we were on a rooftop at the fall of Saigon. Lying to her and wanting her to be there for me anyway. When I felt myself tumbling into the chaos, I forgot about trust. I wasn’t going to let go, even if I pulled her down with me.

  “And what the hell is going on in that bedroom?”

  “Oh, that’s my map and stuff. I started in my room, but then I moved in there. See, one thing is there’s plenty of room at my house now.”

  “Yeah, clocked the map. What is it?”

  “It’s all the inward operators I’ve tried and which ones work and where I got to so far. The lights are just for fun. They’re on a series circuit. The one in the bathroom mirror is parallel.”

  “What the fuck is an inward operator, Daisy?”

  I explained it again. She kept digging down to her carp. When she got down to the fish, she poked the thermometer into one of the gills and left it there while she made some notes. When we were ready to go, she packed the hole up with snow like she was putting the fish back to sleep.

  We walked away from all the dead things sleeping under the ice in Hatchet Mary’s, and I felt happier than I had in weeks.

  I looked up at the bare branches and thought about spring. I thought about another summer with Joan. The space between us would close, the leaves would come back, and the melted tide would carry our boat out into the Sound. Joan and I would look up and se
e the same pictures in the sky. I forgot to be scared for a minute and believed everything would fall together again.

  Then I remembered Robbie. There were new kinds of emptiness between us now, wounds that would never close up.

  Daisy

  AT THE END of the winter I rode in Arthur’s car without Joan for the first time in my life. All the snow was melted, but the trees were still bare. First we just drove up to Head of the Harbor. Arthur swung around the curve with Black Uhuru playing on the tape deck and me rolling a joint on the door of the glove compartment.

  “So, what did you think of The Street?” He turned the car off and looked at me.

  “Bleak, man. Like everything’s inevitable. Like America’s a big ugly machine, and we’re all trapped inside it.”

  We got out and looked over the edge. In the wind it was still winter. My hands turned red and I could hardly feel them. Arthur had gloves with no fingers.

  “Right,” he said. “I’m gonna drive you down to the beach. You can talk to somebody if you want, but be careful. Then you’re going to forget it. Seen?”

  I looked down past the trees sticking out over the cliff. For a minute I saw Robbie’s blackened car sitting on that sand, then falling through the air, burning. The air opened up and the ground was so far away it looked like a map. I had that feeling you get, like I might throw myself off even though I didn’t want to.

  I pictured Robbie sloping along in his satin jacket, falling asleep in the chair, dropping through the water until the stabbing sunlight no longer reached him. I looked at Arthur and wished he was my brother. I’m sorry, but I did.

  “Okay. What if no one tells me anything?”

  “Then we’re done, Daisy. Then you have to let it go, because you promised you would.”

  “Would you be able to do that if you were me?”

  He put a hand on my shoulder and turned me toward him.

  “Let go of this or you let go of my sister. You decide.”

  I smiled up at him. I don’t know why. I guess it had been a long time since anyone touched me at all. I registered that steadying hand and not the words, at first.