Real Life & Liars

by Kristina Riggle

  “I’m not going to apologize for worrying about you! Speaking of romantic pasts, you don’t exactly have a sparkling record yourself.”

  “How dare you bring that up!”

  “You started it!”

  “Oh, very mature. Get the hell out.”

  “You never did answer my question.”

  Irina’s heart flips over when she hears a low voice say, “Answer what?”

  Darius stands in the doorway, his textbook dangling from his hand, his thumb marking a page. His body is angled forward and taut.

  “Nothing,” Van says. “Forget it. Minor sibling squabble. You’ll get used to it if you hang around here long enough.”

  Van hurries past Darius, but there’s not much room in the doorway, and the effort of squeezing by makes his loose tie fall from his shoulders. He keeps going down the hall.

  “If I hang around here?” Darius shouts after him. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  CHAPTER 24

  Mira

  MAX’S HAND PRESSES AGAINST THE SMALL OF MY BACK. HE WANTS to urge me forward, through the double doors into the dining room at the Lighthouse Inn, where 120 of our family and friends await our entrance, to celebrate thirty-five years of marriage.

  Through the frosted glass on the doors, I can see the indistinct forms of the guests. The buzz of party chat rises and falls like the humming of a lullaby.

  I can’t explain my hesitation. I glance at Max, and he’s knitted up his eyebrows, probably wondering if I’m having some sort of attack.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I say, and duck away from his hand and into the ladies’ room to my left.

  I lean against the row of sinks and meet my own eyes in the mirror. I had to wash that ridiculous style out of my hair. All those pins and twists hurt my head, and anyway, when I sneaked off to have a joint before getting dressed, the smell was trapped in my hair, so I needed a shampoo.

  Are those age spots in my décolletage? Or maybe they are tiny skin cancers. That’s it, let’s have a race to see what kills me first. I’d put my money on the melanoma as a long shot. I always had a soft spot for the underdog.

  Katya will have a hissy fit about me washing out my hair. I’ll offer to reimburse her for what she spent at the salon, and that will shut her up. I have an excuse about the dress, though. I accidentally (on purpose) spilled tea all over the front of it when I was getting ready.

  Because after I slid on that ivory-linen frock, so suitable for my age and the occasion—it looked like something they would choose to bury me in. My knees buckled, and I knocked a hand mirror off my dresser trying to grab for something solid.

  I can’t explain that to Katya, though, so I spilled on it, then found my old wedding dress, which looks pretty nice, even with a yellowed champagne stain near the hem.. Now, I look like me.

  Why should I spend one single minute looking like anyone else? Or worse, like a corpse.

  Good thing I had that joint. That vague sense of panic I had this morning has retreated to something like a mild itch in my palms, and I can ignore that readily enough. I have extra provisions in my purse, too.

  I better get out there before Max recruits one of the girls to come in and see if I’ve dropped dead.

  And yes, he does look relieved as I step out. He extends his elbow toward me. Max is wearing a sensible dark suit, much like he did the day we got married, except without that god-awful ruffled shirt.

  I reach up to his head and gently remove his reading glasses from his balding crown. I fold them up and slip them into his inside pocket, patting his jacket over his glasses and his heart. I give him a quick kiss, then a longer one, before I step back so he can open the door.

  And, oh, it is lovely.

  Dozens of family and friends turn at once to the music struck up by a trio of musicians. The singer—a brunette with dynamite legs—is talking into the mic and probably announcing us or something, but I can’t hear her because my ears are stuffed with congratulations and greetings, and I’m gulping in all the happy smiles and delighted waves.

  Over all their heads, past the display of photographs spanning four decades of our lives, beyond the bar, is a huge window that spans nearly the whole west side of the room, framing Lake Michigan, which ripples like an emerald swath of silk. A cottony haze has wrapped itself around the sun, turning its painful midday glow into something like candlelight. Sailboats on the horizon make me think of origami cranes, which mean good luck to the Japanese.

  Paul made me one of those, on my first day as a teaching assistant at the university. It was on my desk when I first arrived, perched in a nest of wadded Kleenex, and I almost threw it away in my distraction. That was years before he became department chair, but only minutes before the genesis of our friendship.

  It’s my night with Max, though. It’s with Max that I’m celebrating thirty-five years of marriage, forty years of couplehood. So I grab Max’s face and mash my lips against him. He’s too surprised for a proper pucker, so it feels like I’m attacking him more than kissing, but he wraps me in his arms anyway, while a tender chorus of “aaaaaah” envelops us.

  CHAPTER 25

  Katya

  KATYA TURNS WITH EVERYONE ELSE WHEN SHE HEARS THE SINGER announce the arrival of Mirabelle and Max Zielinski, “thirty-five years married and still in love like the day they met!” It was a slight derivation from the script Kat had given her, but nothing worth fighting over.

  “Shit.”

  “Oooooh, Mom said a swear.” Taylor had appeared at her elbow, already sporting a mustard stain on his collar.

  “Sorry, Tay.” She pats him on the shoulder—he’s getting too tall already to ruffle his hair like she always used to—and watches him head for the appetizers before turning back to her spectacle of a mother. Of course she would wash out that hairstyle for which Kat paid a ludicrous sum. Of course she wouldn’t wear that tasteful suit that Katya spent weeks hunting down in just the right size.

  No, instead she’s got her hair straggling down her back like she hadn’t even bothered to comb it, and she’s squeezed herself into her old wedding dress, for the love of God. Extra flesh squishes out of the dress at its edges, around the neckline, and armholes. A large stain mars the front of it, presumably a champagne spill never touched in thirty-five years. Mira probably smells of mothballs, unless she doused herself with her hippie oils like she sometimes does. The dress is floor-length, but Kat wouldn’t be surprised if her mother was barefoot underneath it. She can’t be wearing heels because the hem is dragging on the floor in front.

  Why had she expected anything less? Why did Mira ever pretend to go along with her plans in the first place? Ha! Fooled you, Katya. Made you think your opinion mattered.

  Har de har, Mom. Katya turns away, examining the sky outside. The haze gathered all day, and now it’s right down on the ground, wrapping itself around the building, seeping in each time someone opens the balcony door. The Lighthouse Inn’s air conditioner hums nonstop, and still the room gets warmer with each new arrival. At the horizon, Katya detects some darker clouds and bites her lip. The weather forecast had changed throughout the day, each time she checked, the chance of storms grew higher, and the last time she looked, while on Charles’s computer, instead of a cartoon sun partly obscured by cloud, there was a storm cloud with a yellow lightning bolt.

  That’s when she saw that odd e-mail from Tara. She sounded desperate to talk to Charles, and something about the language was overly familiar. Too many slang words, maybe. The way she signed it with only her initial, “T.”

  Once before there was another girl in Charles’s life. They were dating, but temporarily broken up. Over what, she could no longer remember. She was stung by how quickly he took up with another woman, but as he coolly pointed out later, she had dumped him. So that wasn’t even technically cheating.

  Charles touches the small of her back, and the jolt is electric. A bit of her martini sloshes onto her bosom.

  “Nervous?” Charl
es sips an Amstel Light and smiles at someone across the room, handing Kat a handkerchief from his inside pocket without meeting her eyes. Kat recognizes his business face, all smiles and winks and backslapping, his mind all the while calculating the cost-benefit ratio of each conversation.

  “No, just lost in thought, I guess. It’s a big night.” She can’t help herself. “I’m surprised you’re not on the phone.”

  “I didn’t plan a crisis for this weekend, and no, I’m not on the phone. I shut it off.”

  Kat turns to him and raises one brow. “Off?”

  “Vibrate, anyway. And look, I have voice mail. I promise not to interrupt any conversations by answering my phone. Instead, how about a dance?”

  The question flummoxes her so much that she’s briefly stymied about what to do with her drink. Charles takes it from her hand, places it on the nearest table—half-occupied by university types from the English Department—and then pulls her with both his hands toward the dance floor.

  Kat tries to read his face, unable to remember the last time he’d asked her to dance, and it’s been years, even though they usually attend three weddings every summer, and the Peterson Enterprises Christmas party is always a big affair.

  Though he has yet to look her in the eye.

  When they reach the dance floor, he pulls her close, closer than she feels comfortable in such a crowd. She feels jittery at such a display and takes her hand off his shoulder to tug at her dress in case it’s riding up to show that one prominent vein behind her knee. She tries to conjure a view of herself last time she glanced in a mirror.

  As Charles guides her across the floor, her eyes gliss across the crowd.

  The sight of her mother demands her attention. She’s laughing loudly, hanging on to Max’s elbow in that ratty old dress. With only a little more wear and tear, she could be that crazy jilted bride from Great Expectations. She lifts her hem to show off her shoes: Birkenstock sandals. Not even new ones. Katya had last seen them on the back porch, exposed to the elements.

  CHAPTER 26

  Ivan

  IVAN FROWNS INTO HIS BEER. THE MUSIC HAS ALL THE CHARM OF a buzzing mosquito locked in your bedroom at night; someone had the brilliant idea to get the band to play hits from the years around when his parents were married. That someone no doubt was Katya. He can’t imagine his parents enjoying “Close to You,” à la The Carpenters.

  He shouldn’t have borrowed his dad’s computer to check his e-mail before the party. He saw an e-mail from one of the local girl bands, Murkwood. Maybe Kelli liked the demo he thrust into her hand during a break in their show two weeks ago?

  His hope only lasted as long as it took his finger to click the message.

  “hey sorry didnt stop to see u after show song good but not r thing, thx 4 comin out”

  Then he’d turned in his father’s office chair to face the bookshelves, the top row lined with pristine hardback copies of Max’s Dash Hammond thrillers. The oldest ones were faded in the sun, so that their spines grew brighter and more vibrant from left to right. The “reading copies” were the small paperback versions, the kind you would tuck into your pocket or airport carryon. Those were the ones he brought out if a newcomer asked, “Oh, what do you write?” and showed some desperate curiosity about his work. Some of the oldest books were missing in the paperback version, having been given away or loaned out and never returned. They were out of print these days.

  For a time, Van had a poster of his hero taped on his apartment wall. Bob Dylan stared down at him every night and every morning, heavy-lidded, cigarette drooping.

  Then Van got drunk on whiskey and self-pity one night and ripped it down, and in the blazing light of morning, through his hangover fog, he’d noticed that the paint had faded all around where it was taped, so he’d been left with its imprint. It was like a chalk outline around the corpse of his ambition.

  One thing Barbara had said in their last argument was that he had to stop dragging himself to smoky dives every weekend, paying cover charges to cozy up to local bands, then try to talk them into listening to a demo. Van had tried sending his songs to the big music publishers, but he never heard back, and that seemed like the remotest possible path to hearing his music on the radio. So Plan B was to suck up to those local bands who might make it big, like The Verve Pipe did back in the nineties, when everyone went around singing “The Freshmen.”

  ’Course, like The Verve Pipe, most of them wrote their own music. And the rest regarded him as somewhere between desperately annoying and odd enough to be potentially dangerous.

  He’s had to dry-clean his leather jacket constantly to keep the bar stench out of it.

  He slurps down the rest of his beer and gets up from the table with more effort than necessary for someone only thirty-two years old. Barbara is right, he should hang it up. Let his dream dissipate like fog in the dawn.

  Though, “Fog in the Dawn” could be a good refrain.

  Van meanders out to the balcony. Boats stream in from the big lake, headed through the channel toward the harbor. The partygoers are waving down to the people in the boats, who wave up with boozy smiles and sunburned faces. The boats have clever-pants names like Sea You Around and Retirement Fund. Van could silently mock them, but the fact that they have boats while he has a mysterious green mold growing in the corners of his apartment takes some of the zing out of the exercise.

  At the other end of the balcony, Van spies Irina and Darius. His hand looks huge and spidery on her bare upper arm. He turns toward the lighthouse to suppress the urge to knock that hand away. How can he help but be protective? Especially after that one night.

  Van coughs into his fist. The air has thickened through the day, and breathing seems effortful. A trickle of sweat skims down his spine. He wants to go back in before he starts sweating like a line-backer, but the band is probably playing Peter, Paul and Mary or something else ghastly. A sudden wind races down the channel off the lake, shoving the muggy heat into his face.

  Before he goes in, Ivan steals a look at Irina and her groom. Darius is pointing out pieces of scenery, his face open and jovial, that hand still on Irina’s arm. She’s got her head down, so Van can’t see her face behind her hair. She’s fiddling with her wedding band, fingering it, loosening it, putting it back on. He can picture her flinging it into the channel. In her teen years, heck, even last year, such an extravagant gesture would not be out of character. Irina now looks pensive, weighted down somehow.

  Van escapes the balcony, noting that most of the other guests have done so as well. Besides the heat, that wind persists and blows around hair, dresses, cocktail napkins, cigarette smoke.

  The band is on a break, and Van murmurs, “Hallelujah.”

  “I didn’t know you’d found Jesus.” Van startles, and looks down to see Jenny at his elbow. She reaches up—way up, she has to get up on tippy toes—to give him a hug around the neck. She says, “Hey there! Hope I dressed OK. I don’t have much formal wear.”

  Jenny at school was always wearing cargo pants and plain T-shirts, with Birkenstock sandals; technically in the teacher’s dress code, but only just. Off-hours she favors thrift-store Levi’s a size or two bigger than she needs and colorful shirts that are either vintage or secondhand, depending if she bought them downtown or at the mission store.

  Today she looks a little like an Eastern European refugee. She’s got a loose dress in a pattern that makes Van’s eyes hurt, all dark purple and green. She’s wearing black flip-flops and a purple kerchief over her hair. She wears her gold hoop in her eyebrow, which she has to take out for school. Van doesn’t know the rules for face jewelry at anniversary parties, so he doesn’t know if it’s appropriate. Katya would say no, Mira would say yes.

  Jenny beckons him to follow her to the bar, and as she walks away, he notes that the straps on her dress are narrow enough to reveal her tattoo on the back of her shoulder; some symbol she discovered in yoga class.

  Van falls a few steps behind Jenny in the crush o
f people headed toward the bar and snacks, so she doesn’t seem to notice someone calling his name. He hears it, though, and turns to the sound, expecting to see a long-lost cousin.

  A slim figure in a white dress with a long tumble of auburn waves slices through the crowd, headed straight for him.

  It’s Barbara.

  “Hey!” she calls out, finally reaching his hand and pecking his cheek. “I decided to come after all. Oops!” With a giggle, she uses her thumb to rub his face where she’d just kissed. “Got lipstick on you. Well, aren’t you going to say hello?”

  Van has forgotten how to speak.

  CHAPTER 27

  Irina

  IRINA STUDIES THE SLOSHING WATERS OF THE CHANNEL UNTIL SHE begins to feel the balcony is sloshing, and leans into Darius for stability. He’s enjoying Charlevoix so much that she feels sick to her stomach because only she knows that he’ll probably never come back here. After she abandons him with their child and divorces him…or maybe she can get an annulment. Aren’t annulments standard operating procedure in Vegas? Then she would still have left a mistake behind, two mistakes, actually. But she wouldn’t be a divorcee.

  Whatever she is, Darius won’t be coming back here for Christmas parties and birthdays and family weddings. He’ll be no one’s son-in-law.

  Though, he could bring the baby here, Irina realizes. The baby is still Mira and Max’s grandchild, cousin to Katya’s kids, Van’s niece or nephew.

  Her field of vision collapses to a pinprick of jade-colored light where the lake should be, and Irina feels lighter than she’s been in weeks.

  Then there’s shouting, and she feels the scratch of the wooden balcony under her legs, and Darius holding up her torso.

  Irina opens her eyes. Darius’s face is so close he blots out the sun like the moon in an eclipse.