How We Learned to Lie

by Meredith Miller

  “All one thing, how?”

  “Ray was dealing for Robbie. You said so. Patrick too, right? Otherwise why did he keep asking about him? Then suddenly Ray’s dead and Robbie tries to steal a stash off some smugglers. They owed somebody, Daisy! We might be the only ones who know why Ray died.”

  Daisy took a big breath and pulled his skinny arms up into his T-shirt sleeves. He looked at his feet and said, “I saw, Joan.”

  “Saw what?”

  “That cop, this morning.”

  See? He couldn’t even say it.

  Half the stuff that was happening to me wasn’t even speakable. How was I supposed to tell anyone about it without changing how they saw me? Without getting them killed? Last year the world took all its weird, fucked-up silence and shoved it down our throats. We were choking on it and nightmares were falling down on us out of nowhere and in the middle of all that we were supposed to decide whether to save each other or save ourselves.

  “You’re not coming in with me,” Daisy said, “and you’re not telling anyone about what you saw at Fiddler’s Cove.”

  “What I saw at Fiddler’s Cove is the whole point!”

  “If you try, I’ll go get Arthur. I’m gonna go in there and tell them it was my brother in that car in Queens. I’ll tell them Ray and Robbie were dealing together. You’re going to stay here and wait.”

  “Fuck you. I’ll wait outside the station, but I’m coming.”

  I went out Daisy’s back door and up the hill, but it took him a while to catch up. The reason for that is, he was calling Arthur. I didn’t know it at the time. One last lie.

  Once we got to the top where we could see the police station parking lot through the trees, we leaned over with our hands on our knees, panting. There was a moon throwing light down through the branches and I could smell the harbor in the breeze.

  “I might not come back out,” Daisy said.

  “Yes, you will. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re just the grief-stricken relative.”

  “I’m the grief-stricken relative who’s been listening to the cops from pay phones while his dad’s in the big house on conspiracy fraud charges. They probably already have a file on me. What if they connect the dots?”

  “So it’s complicated. They’re still not gonna arrest you. You’re fifteen.”

  “I’m sixteen, Joan.”

  “Shit. Yeah.”

  We started down the hill, sliding in the leaves and holding on to the young trees to keep from falling.

  “They could keep me in there. I’m just saying, if I take more than an hour don’t wait for me. I’ll meet you at home.”

  “Shhhh! We’re almost there.”

  “Any of us could disappear any day,” he whispered. “You know that, right?”

  We sat and slid down the slope into the shadow between the parking lot lights. I could hear “Tangled Up in Blue” coming from the jukebox in Flannagan’s and people slamming car doors down Main Street. One of the windows at the back of the cop shop was open, and Officer Kemp’s car was parked under it.

  Let me tell you about when you live in an incorporated village full of people who spend all day at Junior League meetings and art gallery openings, feeling protected by their own cute little police force. First of all, the cops are useless. They work in an incorporated village because they couldn’t pass the physical for the county force. Second of all, they’re arrogant. They don’t even lock their car doors. One time in ninth grade, they picked up Patrick Jervis and put him in the back seat of a cop car. He was carrying half an ounce and they didn’t even search him. He just stuffed it in the crack of the back seat and went back and got it out later that night. No lie.

  When I looked at Officer Kemp’s car I felt sick and then I felt rage. Daisy though, he opened the car door and looked in.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  He took a big breath, then leaned down and ripped the wires out of the back of the radio.

  “Hold these for me, will you?”

  I just looked at him. “You vandalize police cars now? Who are you?”

  “Put them in your pocket. Also, I’m hugging you. Deal with it.”

  And he did. Then he wove his way through the cars and disappeared around the corner of the building.

  And I let him go. I smoked two cigarettes and walked around behind Flannagan’s to look at the crates of empties and the broken benches rotting in the back lot. After a while I got worried. It might have been about half an hour, but I didn’t have a watch.

  I thought about all the things I wanted to say. That I should have told him about Robbie. That Nick didn’t want to talk to me anymore. I wanted to tell him all about seeing my mother’s theater, what she had to say for herself and what she wouldn’t say. That I was done trying to figure people out. I wanted to explain why maybe I should go to Woods Hole, why I wanted to spend the summer thinking about nothing but fish.

  Then I thought about him, in there standing under the strip lights, trying to tell half the truth and make it sound innocent. Maybe it was easy. His brother was dead. All he had to do was reach inside himself and strip away whatever it was that had been keeping him from crying and pissing his pants and throwing himself against walls the whole year. Maybe there was another Daisy right under the surface. One he showed Arthur and even the cops, but not me. Because I hadn’t even been looking.

  I climbed up onto the hood of Officer Kemp’s car and tried to reach the open window. I could get my hands on the sill, but I wasn’t tall enough to see in. I stretched up and strained my ears for Daisy’s voice. We couldn’t be more than thirty feet from each other, with just the bricks between us. If only we’d thought to bring two paper cups and some string. I almost laughed. That night when he walked around the corner and into the station, I suddenly knew how much distance there was in the world.

  “Hey!”

  My lungs stopped moving and my vision blacked out for a minute.

  “Nice and slow,” Officer Kemp said.

  I let go of the windowsill and put my hands in my pockets before I turned around. One pocket was full of wires, and in the other was my scalpel. My fingers closed around the scalpel and I leaned back against the wall.

  “They said you were a good girl. I told them they don’t make good girls in your kind of family.”

  When I was climbing down off the car I cut my hand on the scalpel. Bad.

  “Just nature, isn’t it?” Officer Kemp said.

  “My friend is inside. I was worried.” I said it like it might actually matter to him.

  Officer Kemp took a step forward and I had to lean back against the car. He leaned into my space and smiled while my stomach started to burn and my lungs stopped working. My hand was bleeding inside my pocket, but I didn’t let go of the scalpel.

  Ever since I was about ten, when me and Daisy clubbed a sea bass so we could dissect it, I swore I’d never cut a living thing again. That night I changed my mind. There were two possibilities in front of me. Either one would ruin my life, why should I choose the one where I got hurt?

  My pocket was filling up with blood. The jukebox in Flannagan’s went quiet for a minute and then started playing Pat Benatar.

  That was when Arthur came tearing down Main Street with the third possibility. He skidded past and his lights swept over the parking lot, throwing Officer Kemp’s shadow onto me and then away again. In front of Davis Marine, Arthur slammed in the clutch and downshifted. He hit the brakes, the car spun around, and he zoomed back past us and down toward the harbor.

  “Move.” Officer Kemp shoved me out of the way and jumped into his car.

  I pulled the scalpel out of my pocket and looked at it. Waves of nausea and loose electricity came up through my nerves. I stood there shaking with drops of blood scattering down off my hand, while Arthur disappeared around the corner onto Bay-water Avenue with Officer Kemp wailing along behind him.

  I sat right down on the asphalt and then stood up again and went into the woods. Once I was
in the shadows I turned and looked down into the parking lot lights. Nothing moved and all the sound was far away. I was all alone for what seemed like the first time in years.

  For months, people had been trying to rescue me. Nick was trying to make sure I didn’t waste my mind. My mother and father were trying to stop Daisy from breaking my heart, and Arthur was trying to keep us both from getting arrested or dead. Right then, he was probably in the process of getting himself killed. The only brother me and Daisy would have left between us would be Andre. Now I knew none of that rescuing was necessary. That night I realized I was perfectly capable of rescuing myself, whatever it took. I still don’t want to live with that fact, but I have to.

  Up on that hill was the stone ruin where we’d nearly run into Patrick and Matt the summer before. Before we knew who they really were. Before we knew what our world was really like. The ruin is half a dome with a cross-shaped window in it and stone blocks scattered all around. When I was little, I thought it was so old pilgrims must have built it. I guess really it was some nineteenth-century church that we all wrapped in spooky myths and stories. People said a witches’ coven met there, that Kieran Johnson and his friends held satanic rituals there. The second one was probably true, but that night it was empty. I stopped next to the cross-shaped piece of moon on the leaves and lit a cigarette.

  The world stayed quiet for a while and so did I. There were no sounds from Main Street, no owls or bats or night things crawling through the leaves. No streetlights or fireflies up that high to interrupt the moonlight. I heard the drops of my blood hitting the leaves and thought about Robbie, bleeding on my front porch the summer before. What was the difference between us?

  I knew right then that I’d go to Woods Hole, and even UC San Diego if I could get in. If there was a world where I didn’t have to choose between those two possibilities, between getting destroyed or destroying someone else, I needed to get to it. I couldn’t let anyone stop me, not even Daisy.

  After a while I went over the hill and out above the McNamaras’ house. I was at the top of Daisy’s yard when I heard the siren. I ran through the bushes, thinking the cops still had Daisy and maybe they had Arthur now, too. There were blackberry vines everywhere and I was already scratched all up my arms. The cut on my hand was still bleeding, too. I was wiping blood on my jeans when the wailing and the spinning red light came up through the trees. I could see the new leaves on the maples, looking a weird sickly yellow, and the shadows of light poles striping across the side of Daisy’s house.

  From the driveway I heard the crash. I swear it was so big I felt it, too. A shock went through the ground under me and I thought the retaining wall would go crashing down onto Jensen Road. The trees and the earth and the houses all tumbling down onto the mud and smashing through the deck behind the Narragansett.

  None of that happened. Everything just went quiet. I could smell gasoline and the red light was still spinning in the trees, but all of a sudden there was no sound in the world.

  When I got inside, Daisy wasn’t back yet. I was afraid to turn on any lights, so I felt my way to the sink and ran the cold water. The water running into the pain was all I needed to tell where I was cut open. The blood soaked into a paper towel while I got a hurricane candle from the junk drawer in the kitchen and lit it on the hearth. I sat on the bricks with my back to the chimney wall and wondered who was dead this time. All I could do was stay there, hanging over that unknown absence until the next thing happened. I’d just have to wait until whoever was still alive came through Daisy’s door to tell me what the next crushing emptiness was going to be.

  I don’t know how long it was before the phone rang. I almost didn’t answer it. After ten rings I picked it up and held it to my ear without saying anything.

  “You there, Daisy?” It took me a minute to make sense of the fact that Arthur’s voice was coming out of Daisy’s phone.

  “It’s Joan. Where are you? Where’s Daisy? There was a car crash. There’s cops down on the road. Somebody died again, Arthur.”

  “Nothing you need to worry about, Joan.”

  “Why did you do that? You could have died!” I guess I was crying a little.

  “It’s okay. Dad and Gramps think you’re with me. I’m going out to campus. I need to stay away for a while. When you go home, tell them I dropped you off and went to Shirley’s.”

  “Daisy’s not back, Arthur. What if they arrested him?”

  “After tonight, this needs to stop, Joan.”

  “What? I didn’t do anything!” I felt the pain in my hand and thought about the scalpel. I thought about the other reality, the one where Arthur didn’t zoom down Main Street with the third possibility.

  “Wake up, Joan! You live in America. The fact that you didn’t do anything doesn’t matter. You know I like little McNamara, but his family are gangsters. You can’t get mixed up with that.”

  “I can’t help it, Arthur. I just am mixed up in it.”

  “Just this one time, pretend that me being your older brother means you listen to me. Find new friends. Or at least more friends.”

  “You know what? I don’t need you or anybody to tell me what to do. I can take care of myself. You have no idea.”

  “Okay, take care of yourself. Just stop taking care of Daisy. Stay there till he gets back; say what you need to say.”

  “He’s been living alone for months, Arthur. He didn’t even tell me.”

  “Yeah, I think we need to do something about that, too.”

  “Where’s he gonna go?”

  “Somewhere people are responsible. You’re kids.”

  “You can’t report him, Arthur! I won’t let you. They’ll put him in some care home where people lock him in basements and never feed him.”

  Daisy came through the door right then and started waving his arms at me and mouthing words. I said goodbye and hung up.

  “Turn on the light if you want me to read your lips, Daisy.”

  He hit the lightswitch and then almost fell over. I hadn’t realized the front of me was covered in blood.

  “Fuck! What happened to you? Sit down!”

  “It’s okay. I cut my hand on the scalpel.”

  “Jesus! You lost like a quart of blood, Joan. Let me make you some tea with sugar.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Did you look down there?” He pointed out to Jensen Road.

  “What the hell took you so long, Daisy? I thought they arrested you.”

  “Joan! Did you look down there? A cop crashed into the wall! There’s an ambulance and two county cars down there.”

  Long story short, that’s how they found Officer Kemp. With his front end crushed and burning and his radio ruined. He wasn’t dead, but it’s been four months now and he still hasn’t said anything about Arthur. Maybe he can’t remember. Maybe we’ll never know. He doesn’t work in Highbone anymore.

  “Why was Arthur calling? Where is he?”

  “He said he’s going out to campus. He said he has to stay away for a while. What the hell?”

  “You should have seen him, Joan.”

  “Seen who?”

  “Arthur! When I came out onto the steps of the cop shop, he was grinding up Main Street, going about fifty in second gear. I could smell his engine burning from where I was standing. Then he fishtailed around and took off. That cop went wailing after him.”

  “I did see. I was in the parking lot, remember? What happened to you?”

  “They made me wait forever. Then they wrote some stuff down and told me to go home. They seemed like they didn’t even care, Joan.”

  “Do you think they knew already?”

  “The county cops have Scottie Hall. I heard them talking about it. They think Scottie killed Ray. They never said Ray’s name, but I could tell.”

  “Scottie? Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe everything you said was right, but they didn’t seem interested in Robbie at all. Even if you were right, is that really why? Is the
re a why for stuff like that?”

  There isn’t, is there? I mean, you can look through people’s stuff and follow them around. You can put together the story of what happened and what happened next. But can you say why someone ended someone else?

  The only solid fact that came out of that night was that I could be that person. When it was him or me, I could have put my scalpel into Officer Kemp. Whatever I would have felt later, sick or crazy or glad or just dead inside, wouldn’t matter. Arthur saved me, but I could have saved myself. That was the last thing I didn’t tell Daisy.

  Joan

  WE WERE UP in the attic the next day when Daisy’s aunt Regina pulled into the driveway. In theory, we were studying for the English final.

  “You don’t have to dissect it, Joan. It’s a metaphor. You just kind of feel it.”

  “You sound like my mother.”

  “Well, I bet she passed the English final. Just write what you think in the essay part and make sure it has an introduction and a conclusion.”

  “You know what Mr. Driscoll said? ‘Tell ’em what you’re gonna say, say it, then tell ’em what you just said.’ What is the point of that?”

  “Who cares what the point is? We need the English credit. Just go through the motions.”

  “How can you say that right now? We can’t just push everything under the surface. There isn’t even any surface anymore. It’s all just ripped open.”

  “Kind of like Coriolanus, then. Why don’t you say that in the essay? Bet you’d get an A.”

  “If I tell you something, don’t laugh, okay?”

  “Hmmm . . .” Daisy was reading through his notes, color-coding things with his two-ended blue-and-red pen.

  “When we were in junior high, I used to wish we could be like everybody else. I used to just want to be into the whole cheerleading and football and making out behind the lacrosse building shit.”

  “That’s not true, Joan. You had a choice and you chose to be friends with me. You obviously weren’t that committed to normal.”