The Liar's Girl

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  My mother pulled at her shirt’s collar, admonished.

  Then she said, “I didn’t tell that man anything.”

  There was a flicker of panic before I realized she was talking about back then. After Will had been arrested but before he’d been formally charged, a reporter had door-stepped my mother at the house in Cork. The property was on a lonely country road just outside the city and at first this reporter, a man, had pretended to be lost and looking for directions. Somehow he steered the conversation onto “that awful business up in Dublin” and my mother inadvertently revealed—or rather confirmed—that she was a bit-player in it. By the time he left, she’d told him that she and I were very close, that Will was a lovely boy, and that she was convinced this “silly business” was a misunderstanding that would all be sorted out very soon.

  we stand by the canal killer, they went with on that one.

  Remember how, back in the playground, some bullish girl would come up to you and say, “Angela knows you hate her,” and you’d instantly get that sick feeling, the sudden descent of a cold, hard stone of dread into the pit of your stomach that would sit there until the lies, misunderstanding, rumor—whatever it was—could be corrected, until you’d found Angela and made it clear that that’s not something you’d have ever, ever said? Well, times that by the readership of an Irish national newspaper. People you can’t contact to clarify. And add your mother, the person responsible, dismissing your hot shame, telling you that you’re being silly, that it doesn’t matter, it’ll all be forgotten in a few days and, anyway, who cares what people think?

  “You haven’t talked to anyone already,” I said. “Have you?”

  “Like who?”

  “Like your friend Jackie. How much does she know?’

  My mother muttered something under her breath.

  I asked her to repeat it.

  “I said she knows a lot more than I do.”

  A pounding was starting at the front of my head.

  “You don’t talk to us,” my mother went on. “About this. You never have.”

  Here it came then, approaching like a freight train while I lay, helpless, tied to the tracks. The Conversation. The one that had been hanging over our heads for the last ten years. Their visits to the Netherlands, our holidays abroad: they came with an unspoken agreement that there’d be a reprieve from the threat of this, and plenty of conversation topics—the sights, the food, how sullen that waiter was—to help us honor it.

  But there could be no reprieve here. Sitting at my mother’s kitchen table in Dublin, I knew I was facing it head-on.

  And I couldn’t face it.

  Just the mere threat of it felt like walking through a hammering shower of sharp glass shards.

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Mam.”

  “But you’ll go see that boy in prison and have a grand old chat with him, will you?”

  “I was in there for all of ten minutes.”

  “You came back for those ten minutes. You’ve said no anytime we asked you to come back for us.”

  “The Gardaí made me.”

  “Oh, come off it, Alison. How could they make you? Surely that’d be illegal.”

  I rolled my eyes; my nineteen-year-old self, a muscle memory waking up. “You know what I mean, Mam.”

  “Alison,” she said, leaning her elbows on the table, “for the love of God. Something awful happened to you, yes. Awful things happen all the time. People deal with them. People deal with a lot worse. They recover. They put it behind them. They move on. But you just ran off, ran away. And I understood that, at the time. You were only nineteen. When you’re that age, you’ve no perspective on things. You can’t be expected to, you haven’t been around long enough. So I’m sure it did feel like the end of the world to you. We let you go for that reason, because we understood that. But I thought that a few months down the line, or maybe after you’d finished your degree, you’d realize that what happened didn’t quite warrant your reaction to it.”

  I blinked at her.

  When I spoke again, it took some effort to keep my voice even.

  “Will murdered five girls, Mam. One of whom was my best friend – and you’re accusing me now of being melodramatic?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying at all. You’re taking me up wrong.”

  “You’re making it easy to.”

  “You’re making sure you do.” My mother clasped her hands in front of her, set them on the table. “Look, love, I understood back then. I did. But not now, ten years later. What are you holding on to all this for? We only do what works for us. What are you getting out of this?”

  We only do what works for us.

  She hadn’t come up with that one by herself, that was for sure. That was her daytime-TV-talk-show habit rearing its ugly head.

  “I’m not holding on to anything,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “But you don’t come home.”

  “Breda is my home.”

  “And then you come back for him.”

  “Not for him, Mam. That’s not what happened.”

  “And I don’t hear anything about boyfriends or, you know, maybe getting married one of these d—”

  “Jesus Christ.” I stood up and started making a loop around the table, just because I couldn’t stay still anymore. “Are you serious? Your big concern here is that I don’t have a boyfriend? Not everyone wants the same things, Mam. And guess what? It’s not the fucking fifties.”

  “Language, Alison, please.” My mother stood up too, to take her cup of tea into the kitchen and wash it out in the sink. “My only concern, always, is you. I don’t know whether or not you have what you want because I don’t know what you want. I don’t know how you are or what you’re thinking or what kind of pain you might be in. I don’t know anything at all because you don’t tell me. You tell me about what happened at work and what you did last weekend and how much the carpet cleaning cost you, but you never ever tell me how you feel.”

  Tears sprung to my eyes and I hated my body for betraying me. I swallowed them back.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “When did we ever talk about how I felt? I didn’t even like Liz half the time, did you know that?”

  “Did you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Alison, if you think I didn’t see what that girl was really like, how she treated you—”

  “I guess I must have blanked out all our cozy mother–daughter fireside chats about it.”

  My mother swung around to face me. “The problem with you, Alison, is that you had your teenage years too late. You were no trouble to us at all until you went off to college. You decided to have all your adolescent angst then. But then … Then Will happened and you got stuck there. You’ve never moved past this thing that happened then, so you don’t let yourself get past that age. You’ve never given yourself a proper chance to.” She paused. “And I don’t just mean with me, love. I mean in your life in general. In all things. And there’s just no need for it. No one blames you for anything. No one even remembers it, at this stage.”

  “I’m on the front page of a newspaper today, Mam.”

  “Yes, well. If you had talked to me or your father before deciding to do this, to see that … To see him, we may have been able to help you make a better decision.”

  “A better …? You just said …” I pointed at her. “That’s blaming me. Right there. You’re doing it, right now.”

  “Oh, Alison, that’s not what—”

  “Look, I don’t want to talk about this, okay?” I moved toward the door that led to the hall. “That’s not why I came here. I’m looking for my photo albums. Where are they? Are they here?”

  My mother said nothing for a long moment. I didn’t like the look on her face, the hurt in it. I couldn’t look at it.

  I looked
away, out toward the back garden, instead.

  “Everything of yours is upstairs,” she said then. “The back bedroom.”

  I went to leave the room.

  “I’m done with this, Alison,” she said. “Just so you know.” I stopped, but didn’t turn around. “I’m done with pretending this didn’t happen. With not talking about it. With not talking about anything that means something. I’m not going to let you do it anymore. We all need to change. I’ve already let this go on for way too long. And yes, it’ll be hard and it’ll hurt and you won’t like it, but you’re just going to have to suck it up and push through to the other side.” She paused, took a breath, exhaled slowly. “Now—are you hungry? I was going to have my lunch out but I can go pick us up something. Any requests?”

  I shook my head. “Whatever you’re having.”

  “Right so.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s all right.”

  I left the kitchen and went into the hall, climbed the stairs to the first-floor landing. The door at the top of it looked to lead into a small, narrow bedroom that faced the back of the house.

  I made it inside and managed to close the door behind me—just—before I burst into tears.

  alison, then

  Until I went to college, I’d never had a boyfriend. Liz and I were on the same page there, although for different reasons. She seemed wholly unimpressed with the boys our age, rolling her eyes at what she saw as their pathetic attempts to impress us, and the desperate fumbling that ensued if they managed to. Meanwhile, I didn’t know how to actually go about getting a boyfriend, or how anyone did. The meet-cutes of Hollywood movies, Ross and Rachel, the Sex and the City box set I’d snuck past my mother—what relevance did they have to a not-very-confident all-girls secondary school student growing up in Cork? Even glossy magazines produced closer to home had features like “101 Date Moves Guaranteed to Get His Attention,” but no disclaimer that, actually, this life may not apply to you. Ever, or maybe just not yet. For now, you were seventeen and still lived with your parents, and so even though it felt like everything was running behind, it was actually all going to arrive right on schedule. Until then, I was left to worry about how I never found myself talking to nice guys in queues, or felt a spark as I brushed hands with someone else reaching for the last pair of gloves, or met some tall, dark, handsome stranger’s eyes across a crowded room.

  But then, drunk and in a club, someone drunker tried to untie my top and someone slightly less drunk came to my rescue.

  And just like that, Will and I had met.

  He was in St. John’s too, studying law but not sure he really wanted to. He was also living in Halls. His parents lived in Dublin but out on the coast, in a place he made sound very far away. That first night, we’d walked back to campus via Leeson Street, then down along the canal.

  When he kissed me goodnight in the shadow of Block A, it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. He looked into my eyes, caressed my cheek with his hand and then kissed me once, gently, slowly, deliberately, on the lips.

  And I thought, So that’s what all the fuss is about.

  All the songs, they weren’t about the desperate fumbles. They were about moments like this.

  He left me there, walking away into the night with a hand raised in a wave, and when I woke up the next morning with his name on my lips, I wasn’t entirely sure I hadn’t just dreamed the whole thing.

  It would be five days before I ran into him again, in a café in the village of Ranelagh, where I was hiding out. Liz, Claire, and I had had more than a fair share of fun during Freshers’ Week, but my energy stores for other people were depleted to a critical level, and I knew I needed some alone time before a second weekend’s activities kicked off. I’d snuck out early and just kept walking—past Baggot Street, through leafy suburban streets, trying to keep the canal on my right and my expanding virtual map in my head so that I wouldn’t get completely lost. I’d happened upon a stretch of trendy cafés and restaurants with a village feel, and picked the one that had cushy armchairs visible through the front window.

  I was sitting there, curled up with a book I had a class on in the coming days, not draining the end of my coffee because I didn’t want to leave and I really couldn’t afford to buy another one, when I heard my name and I looked up and he was there.

  “Well, this is weird,” I said.

  He smiled. “And hello to you too.”

  I closed my book. “You live in the block next to me, but I see you in here?”

  “I saw you come in,” he admitted. “In a non-stalker way. I was across the street.” He pointed to his head. “Haircut.”

  Now that he’d said it, it did look a bit less unruly than it had on Sunday night.

  “Nice,” I said. “There isn’t a place closer to campus?”

  “That put vouchers in the student union welcome packs for 50 percent off? No.”

  “Ah.”

  “What are you doing this far from home?”

  “Hiding,” I admitted. “It’s been a long week.”

  “You just needed some time off campus?”

  “And away from everybody, yeah.”

  “Oh, okay then.” He turned to go.

  “No …” I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean.”

  A grin. “So I don’t have to go?”

  “You don’t have to go,” I said. “No.”

  “Here’s an idea,” he said. “Why don’t we both go?”

  * * * * *

  Will had a car with him and, as I sat into it, it occurred to me that this was exactly the kind of thing my mother had warned me not to do. No one knew where I was, no one knew who I was with. Even I didn’t really know who I was with. I felt an undercurrent of nerves, and not just because I’d been daydreaming about him for the last five days straight, building a “him” out of the scant information I had, and now to be faced with the reality was both thrilling and terrifying.

  “Where are we going?”

  He shrugged. “I was thinking the beach?”

  “Is there one near?”

  “Sandymount.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Close. You can actually walk there from St. John’s.”

  I hadn’t realized. All my Dublin fantasies took me from campus in the other direction, into town. But here was a massive stretch of sand, extending so far out that the water’s edge looked like it could be a mirage, an end of a rainbow you could start toward but might never reach. Two enormous chimney stacks extended into the sky on a peninsula on the north end, while off in the distance, on the southern tip of the bay, a cluster of buildings dominated by a church spire suggested a seaside town.

  Poolbeg and Dun Laoghaire, he told me.

  “I think I came to look at a place near here,” I said. “I didn’t even realize it was near a beach.”

  Will looked at me. “You didn’t want to be in Halls?”

  “I somehow ended up on their waiting list.”

  We walked down onto the sand and then southward, parallel to the shore.

  “You have to be careful here,” Will said, “the tide comes in really fast. People are always getting stranded.”

  “It’s lovely, though,” I said.

  “Everywhere is lovely when the sun shines.”

  We’d covered all the basics on our walk back to campus in the early hours of Monday morning: siblings, aspirations, likes/dislikes. Now as we walked the beach, we talked about how we’d ended up in St. John’s, why we’d chosen the courses we had, and what we planned on doing with our degrees once we had them.

  While he talked, I studied him, logging details in my mind for later daydreams. The fine hairs on his forearms, bleached white by the sun. How the knot of hair in the depression at the base of his neck was much darker. Blue-gray eyes. The wind picked up and he turned agains
t it, letting it blow the thin cotton of his loose T-shirt against his skin, revealing sharp shoulder blades, a narrow waist.

  I longed to step forward and wrap my arms around him and, as if reading my thoughts, he reached out his hand and took mine, and then pulled me into him for a long, deep kiss.

  Right in the middle of the beach, where we had an audience of dog-walkers and Yummy Mummies jogging in pairs.

  How can this be my life? I wondered.

  So much had changed in the space of a week. It seemed like I’d been waiting for years and years for something to happen and now everything was, changes coming as fast as falling dominos, one after the other, with not enough time in between to make an individual sound. I was breathless and scared and exhilarated and certain, all at the same time.

  And then Will and I were rudely interrupted by a gust of wind that blew every strand of hair I had into the space between us.

  “God,” I said, pulling away.

  “Sorry. That’s my fault. I thought beaches were supposed to be romantic.”

  “Is that why you brought me here?”

  “No, I just love the feel of sand in my shoes.” He smiled and dipped his head to kiss me again.

  We started back toward the car soon afterward. On the way, I felt a buzz in my pocket: a text message from Liz.

  Where the hell are you?!

  * * * * *

  Claire and Liz were waiting for me outside our block. I said I’d walked as far as Ranelagh and left it at that. “I just needed to get off campus for a couple of hours.”

  Liz said she would’ve come with me.

  “I woke up really early,” I said. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Jesus.” Liz rolled her eyes. “Do you think I spend half the day in bed or something?”

  I realized I’d used the exact same excuse when I’d gone for coffee with Claire.

  We all had a library tour at four o’clock. The library was stuffy and hot, and the librarian taking us around spoke in a dreary monotone. After half an hour, Liz and I bailed. Claire said she’d stick it out, so we were down to two again.