The Liars

by Jennifer Mathieu

  Shit. “Why not the later service?”

  She turns, and I realize this is the most she’s spoken to me since The Incident after church last Sunday. Staring at me coldly, she waits a beat before responding. “We’re going to eight o’clock Mass because I want to go to eight o’clock Mass.”

  Then she walks into her room and shuts the door.

  I spend the next few hours staring at various spaces in my bedroom, my stomach in knots, wondering how Amy and Elena are faring. Finally, a little before six o’clock in the morning while it’s still dark out, I creep out of the house to the Honda and drive to Amy’s place, stopping to get a dozen donuts at Shipley Do-Nuts. (Thanks for taking care of my fucked-up sister, Amy, here are some donuts. Please don’t break up with me.)

  I knock on Amy’s front door and she greets me with a yawn, dressed in her ratty pajamas.

  “I brought you donuts,” I manage, holding forth the red-and-white box like an asshole.

  “You didn’t have to,” she says, yawning again, then raising an eyebrow. “Okay, wait. I guess you did.” She takes the box from me.

  Inside, Elena is sleeping on the same couch she was on when I left, only now she’s wearing one of Amy’s old Black Flag T-shirts. For a moment, the situation strikes me as hilarious—my sister in my girlfriend’s T-shirt promoting a band she has almost certainly never heard of, much less listened to, me standing with my hands limply at my sides while Amy holds a box of donuts.

  “She passed out, like, thirty minutes ago,” Amy whispers, setting the donuts on the kitchen counter. “Did you know the bathroom tiles in my house are super-fucking fascinating? We spent about an hour in there discussing them.”

  I rub at my face, exhausted and embarrassed. “I’m so sorry, Amy.”

  “It’s cool,” she says, “but I really need to sleep.”

  I attempt to rouse Elena for two or three minutes before she finally sits up, blinks a few times, and then looks at me. The wild, manic expression is gone, replaced by tired, confused eyes.

  “Hey,” she croaks. “We’re at your girlfriend’s, yeah?”

  And now I’m pissed. The situation isn’t funny. And I don’t need to feel bad for Elena. I need to be waking up with Amy or at the very least waking up alone in my own bed after a decent night’s sleep.

  “We gotta go. Mami wants us to go to eight o’clock Mass.”

  Elena rubs her eyes. “Fuck,” she exhales, shaking her head. “Wait, you went home?”

  “I’ll explain it in the car,” I say, hoping she’s picking up on the curtness in my voice. Hoping she’s feeling at least a little bit guilty. “Let’s go. I’m serious.”

  Elena frowns at me, but she must be clearheaded enough by now to know she shouldn’t push it. She glances down at Amy’s shirt, confused.

  “I’ll bring your shirt to work,” I say to Amy, who is eating a chocolate-glazed donut and watching us from the kitchen.

  “No rush,” Amy says, and I can’t tell if her voice is tight like she’s ready to dump me, or tired like she just needs some sleep.

  “I’m really sorry,” Elena says to Amy as we head for the front door. At least she apologizes.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Amy says. But I can tell she’s ready for us to leave.

  “I’ll call you?” I ask, my eyebrows popping up along with the uncertainty of my voice.

  Amy nods, offers a half smile. “But not for the next, like, five to seven hours. I’m about to pass out. Thank God I’m not working today.”

  “Yeah,” I answer, and I leave without kissing her or touching her at all, which sort of crushes me.

  On the drive home I fill Elena in on what she needs to know

  (Mami thinks you were sleeping the whole time, she woke up in the middle of the night, yes, I covered for you), and then silence consumes us. When we pull into the driveway, the sun is just starting to pink up the sky. Finally, Elena opens her mouth to speak.

  “Joaquin—”

  “Not now,” I say, holding my hand up. “I can’t right now.”

  “Okay,” Elena responds, wounded, shrinking back into her seat.

  “I just want to know one thing,” I say, unable to stop myself. “Do you understand that J.C. just let you go last night? Just abandoned you while you were on acid, and he didn’t even make sure you got home okay?” My face is flushed with rage.

  Elena crumbles a little, her eyes immediately glossing over with tears. She doesn’t say anything, just looks at me like a scared toddler.

  “You could have been really hurt,” I spit, all my resentment from the past few hours forcing its way out. “And I suppose you won’t care because he’s not fucking cool or whatever, but it was Miguel who called Amy and me to come get you.” I think this would make for a good dramatic moment to get out of the car, slam the door, and stride into the house, but we have to be quiet, so I don’t. I just sit there, fuming, and Elena says nothing for the longest time until finally, at last, she whispers, “I’m sorry.” Then she puts her face in her hands and cries. She cries so hard her shoulders shake in her borrowed Black Flag T-shirt.

  Shit.

  “Hey,” I say, still pissed but now guilty, too. Shit shit shit.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says into her hands, her voice muffled. “I didn’t even know what acid would be like. J.C. just said it would be fun. I’m sorry.”

  Tentatively, I rest my hand on her back, trying not to imagine the scuzzy apartment where J.C. plied my kid sister to drop acid, trying not to hear whatever surfer-dude-hippie-dippie-Grateful-Dead-bullshit-language he used to convince her. And I just wait there with her until she finally stops crying and stares at the house. She sniffs and takes a deep breath and wipes her tears from her cheeks with her fingertips.

  After a few beats she turns to look at me, game face on, her expression neutral and her mouth set in a firm line. It’s wild to me how quickly she can transform when she needs to.

  “She seriously said eight o’clock Mass?” she asks. “That early?”

  I nod, and soon I’m checking the front room as usual, reporting back that all is safe. We each take a quick hot shower, get dressed for church, and tiptoe around the place nervously waiting for Mami to exit her bedroom. At seven thirty we debate waking her but decide against it. I make us scrambled eggs and toast, and we sit on the couch eating and watching a boring Sunday morning news programs since there’s nothing else on.

  Eventually, at around quarter to nine, Mami finally emerges, yawning. She walks into the den and studies us closely.

  “How are you feeling, Elena?”

  Damn. I never told Elena that I’d lied about her head hurting.

  Without skipping a beat or taking her eyes off the television, Elena says, “I’m fine. I took some Tylenol.”

  I exhale, hoping Mami can’t read the relief on my face. I’m not sure if she does or not because her only response is “What are you doing all dressed up?”

  “You told me we were going to eight o’clock Mass,” I say, turning to look at her, confused.

  Mami stares at me as if I’m stupid, then rolls her eyes. “When in my life have I ever made us go to church that early? We’ll go at nine thirty as usual. Now I’m going to take a shower.”

  Elena and I turn and give each other looks—the kind of looks only siblings can give, when not a sentence needs to be spoken.

  Not even a word.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ELENA IS GOING TO BREAK THE DAMN PHONE stretching the cord like she does.

  “Hey,” I say, rapping my knuckles on her bedroom door as hard as I can. “I told you to stop pulling the phone in there so tight. And there are other people in this house who need to use it, in case you forgot.”

  Elena bangs three times in response to let me know she’s heard me, but she doesn’t hang up. Mami’s at work, so she’s talking to J.C., I’m sure of it. I sigh. Last week’s debacle hasn’t changed anything. Two days after I found her manic on the beach, she left me a homemade apology
card on my pillow (You’re the very best brother a dumb girl like me could ever ask for!), but I haven’t had the heart or the energy to bring up that night. She’s still playing it fast and loose, sneaking out after Mami is asleep or passed out, coming home reeking of smoke of all kinds, and dreaming up increasingly lazy reasons why she needs to babysit for the Callahans at the last minute. The other afternoon she insisted that Mrs. Callahan had a last-minute tennis lesson. Who the hell has a last-minute tennis lesson? But Mami fell for it, I guess, scowling at Elena over her tumbler of rum and Coke and then saying something about those poor, lonely children and their rich, absent mother.

  I wait one more minute.

  “Elena, come on!”

  Finally, exasperated, my little sister pulls open the door with a saucy look on her face. She hands me the receiver.

  “Here you go, your majesty.”

  But then she smiles so big her cheeks dimple. She’s happy because I’m staying. I broke the news to her and Mami the night before during dinner. Poking around Mami’s sad excuse for meat loaf, I’d managed to mutter that my plan was to stick around the island for a year, taking classes at MICC and then maybe applying to UT.

  “Well, we don’t have the money for UT,” Mami had said definitively, taking a bird-sized bite of her meat loaf and a sailor-sized swig of her drink. “But I suppose you can save up over the next year. And MICC isn’t that expensive. It’s the right decision to make. And it shows you have some character, at least. Unlike your father.” This was the most validation Mami had given me since telling me I looked nice the morning of my First Communion.

  Elena had just clapped like a kid, grinning widely.

  “I knew you’d decide to stick around,” she’d said, giddy. “I knew it!”

  “Fine, fine, let’s not make a big thing of it,” I’d told her, clearing the plates while Mami retired to the den to watch television and Elena went and got ready for a “babysitting job.” I acted annoyed, but really I wanted to hold my breath and crystallize the weird moment when everything in my family seemed almost normal. Almost nice.

  Almost.

  I’m glad Elena’s happy, but it was actually Amy who prompted my decision to stay. I thought she might not want to see me again after I’d dumped Elena on her, so I was shocked when she’d walked up and bumped me with her hip and said hello at our next shift at El Mirador.

  “You aren’t … pissed?” I’d asked, half grateful and half confused.

  Amy had shrugged. “Well, I wasn’t wild about what happened, but jeez, Joaquin, it’s not like it was your fault.” My face must have looked really stricken because she reached out and lightly touched my cheek. “You need to have a little more faith in people.”

  Right.

  That afternoon after our shift we’d slept together while her parents were at work and her little brother was at Vacation Bible School. In the groggy, post-sex haze, I said out loud, “I think I’m going to stick around for a while.” Amy propped herself up on her elbow and smiled at me, but I could tell she was trying to stay cool.

  “Good,” she’d said, her grin wide. “I like you. Stay. Stay one more year and then come with me to UT.”

  “What would I even study?” I asked. “Actually, I don’t even think I could get into UT.”

  Amy shrugged. “I bet you could, but does it matter? Just come with me and we’ll figure it out. In the meantime, just take, like, English Comp at MICC or something to keep yourself occupied and your mother off your back.”

  And that was that.

  So here I am, dialing the admissions office at MICC to find out how I can register for intro classes. A woman with a tight twang informs me that I’ll need my birth certificate and my high school transcript. I scribble that down on a piece of paper before I hang up.

  “What are you doing?” Elena asks as she slides into the kitchen and starts hunting around the refrigerator for something to eat. She finally settles on a piece of cheese, shutting the fridge with her foot and leaning up against the counter.

  “Just finding out what I need to enroll at MICC,” I tell her, shoving the paper into my back jeans pocket. I’m not sure where Mami would keep things like my birth certificate. The high school transcript I can get from LBJ High.

  “Any idea where Mami keeps our birth certificates?” I ask Elena, as she finishes her cheese and starts unloading the dish drainer, making sure to wipe each dish extra dry with the red-and-white dish towel hanging from the oven handle.

  Elena pauses to think, carefully handling a pale peach cereal bowl. “No,” she decides. “You could check her room.” She shoots me an uncertain look, her eyebrows raised. Mami’s room is an unknown world that smells of Arpège and budget detergent. Of mid-shelf rum sweated out through pores caked in mid-shelf makeup, carefully applied. Elena goes into Mami’s room more often than I do. The straightening of her bed sheets and the folding of her clothes feels too intimate for a guy—and better suited for the child that Mami likes best. Or at least tolerates more.

  “Where in her room?” I ask, glancing at the clock. It’s at least two hours until Mami comes home from work.

  Elena shrugs. “Her closet? Or why don’t you just wait until she gets home and ask her.”

  “I like to keep my conversations with her to a minimum,” I say. “You know that.”

  Elena rolls her eyes and puts the last dish away. “Yes, Mr. Drama. I know. Go ahead and look, then. I’m going to watch television.”

  “No babysitting job?” I ask.

  “Maybe later,” Elena answers, her back to me. I can’t tell if I’ve ticked her off with that question.

  I turn the doorknob to Mami’s bedroom, half expecting her to jump out from behind the door. She’s never told us not to go in there without permission. It’s just that I’ve never wanted to do it.

  I hear Elena turn on the television to some dumb game show. Over the din of cheering and bells ringing and forced applause I make my way to Mami’s closet, my eyes passing over her bed, the bedspread drawn up tight, the books on her nightstand in a little pyramid. On the wall opposite the door hang black-and-white photographs of her parents from Cuba, looking like Hollywood starlets in cocktail attire. Other than the photos and the image of the Virgin Mary that Elena gave her, the walls are bare.

  It’s almost like I’m in someone else’s house, I’m in here so rarely. My heart starts to pump faster even though I know there’s no chance of Mami coming home early. In all her years of working for Dr. Sanders she’s left early exactly once, when she came down with the flu. I tug open the sliding closet door, wiggly in its tracks. Mami’s clothes are organized by color and spaced out evenly on plastic hangers. Her shoes are lined up neatly like they’re about to go off marching in formation. My eyes alight on the shelf above. There are a few photo albums and three shoeboxes stacked one on top of the other.

  I don’t know why but my throat tightens up. Elena and Mami and I have lived in this house since before I can even remember, and every corner of it is known to me—the musty smell of my own closet, the stain on the Formica counter, the wonky showerhead in the bathroom. But this could be the closet of some stranger in Dallas or San Antonio.

  I reach for the top box—it’s the easiest. I don’t dare sit on Mami’s bed and wrinkle the blankets, so I kneel on the worn carpet. Cautiously, I lift the lid. I take out old checkbook registers and canceled checks with Mami’s loopy, over-the-top signature, careful to leave everything just as I found it.

  I set this shoebox aside—making a mental note that it was resting on top—and I tease the next box off the pile. It’s old tax returns plus Mami’s naturalization papers. I know she became a citizen just before she married our father. In the black-and-white photograph attached to her paperwork she is staring out at nothing, unsmiling, her face unlined, her expression even. I stare and stare at it, trying to find evidence of the mother I live with now, but the picture is one of a stranger. Caridad Serafina de la Guardia. What a roller coaster of syllables. I whisper
it to myself before I place everything back in just as I found it. I hear an explosion of applause from the other side of the wall. The phone rings. I pause, listening as the television volume is lowered and the muffled sounds of Elena talking start up. No doubt it’s Mami calling to check on her, making sure she’s home where she’s supposed to be. Soon the television noise is louder again, and I open the third box.

  It’s my old report cards, and Elena’s, too, in order going all the way back to kindergarten. I feel a brief fondness for Mami, for the fact that she saved anything belonging to us. Unlike Amy’s house, ours has never been a place where nursery-school finger-paint creations stay pinned proudly to the refrigerator for years.

  I flip over my eighth-grade report card, the year I had Ms. Gardner. She was my favorite because she always had us do fun stuff, like analyze Beatles’ songs instead of boring old poetry. In the space for end-of-the-year comments, Ms. Gardner’s careful, dark black script reads: Joaquin has a clever mind for one so young. He asks good questions, which will no doubt take him far in life. I read and reread Ms. Gardner’s words, even bringing the report card up to my nose to breathe in the old paper smell. I vaguely remember eighth grade, back when I still raised my hand in class. By the end of senior year I was strictly a second-from-the-back-row guy, never talking, always turning in my work on time, and pulling a steady B average without trying too hard.

  I sift carefully through the box until I reach the bottom. Only report cards—no birth certificate and no social security card. I resign myself to the fact that I’ll have to ask Mami where she put them as I place the shoeboxes back in the right order, then lift the stack back onto the closet shelf.

  That’s when I spot it, shoved all the way back in the shadowed corner of the top shelf behind the shoeboxes. A flat box like the type dress shirts come in at Foley’s. I peer at it carefully, like I need to be totally sure I’m seeing it. I lift the three shoeboxes back out onto the carpet, and then, checking over my shoulder for some reason, I reach up and back as far as I can. Despite being a few inches over six feet tall I can only touch the box with my fingertips. I pull the box forward, centimeter by centimeter, and finally grasp it, dragging it out and leaving fingerprints in the fine coating of dust on the lid.