TellMeNoLies

by Delphine Dryden

  The town was so deeply ingrained in her, she’d even written it into her first book. Not that anybody knew. The first book still sat in a file on her hard drive, because she’d been a big-time journalist and didn’t want to demote herself to a cozy small-town crime novelist. The second one—in which her detective struck out and took on the big city—was the one she’d had published to such great success. The book Jake could tell she’d phoned in. Because even before yesterday, he’d known her.

  “Your brother texted me,” her dad offered, breaking the silence. “Said I should cut you some slack. He skip class to talk to you?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “I thought the Tarrants pulled that old house down a few years back. What kinda shape’s it in? You warm enough out there? You need anything?”

  “I think they renovated it instead of tearing it down. It’s good. Solid. The water heater works fine and everything.” She traced a line in the condensation on her glass. “So much for surprising everybody with the news.”

  Her father frowned. “If I’d thought that’s why you didn’t tell anyone, I wouldn’t have been all that put out, you know.”

  “Dad, what happened to you after Mom died?” she blurted. No preamble, because she couldn’t think of one. She’d already used up all her thoughts for the day, it felt like. And because he seemed to expect it anyway. She’d called him at his store, asked him to meet her at the house to talk. He knew she was in town and hadn’t told anyone. She knew they’d all been worried, talking about her behind her back. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out some things were coming to a head. “I really needed you. Lindy and Mikey did too. And you weren’t there.”

  He nodded again, rolling with the abrupt subject change. “It’s true. I wasn’t there, Tess. And don’t think I haven’t regretted it. I have, every day. Even at the time. You know, I tried to talk to you about it a long time ago, before you left for college. You were so angry though. I didn’t blame you. Still don’t. But I didn’t know how to get through.”

  “I remember that.”

  Her father had been waiting for her after school one day and they’d stared one another down at the kitchen table, Tess greeting his attempts to apologize and explain with the kind of vicious, silent contempt only a teenage girl can muster. He’d tried again a few days later, and she’d walked out of the house. She’d ignored the few letters he’d sent her in college and ignored his questions about whether or not she’d gotten them when she came home for holidays to see her siblings. “I was awful.”

  “No. You were a kid, trying to protect yourself. Protect your sister and brother. From me. You should never have had to feel that way, no child should. Like losing both of us, not just your mother. I did that to you. And if you’re finally ready to hear it now, I can never say I’m sorry enough, Punkin.”

  He hadn’t called her that in over a decade. It should have sounded silly, but it didn’t. She agreed with him though. He could never say he was sorry enough. He could never be sorry enough. Intellectually, she knew the grief excused him, and that he had surely paid whatever penance he owed the universe many times over since then. In her gut, though, she still carried a hot lump of blame and betrayal that burned when she least expected.

  She didn’t want it. She’d never wanted it to begin with, and she’d long since passed the age at which she could excuse herself for feeling that way. But the lump remained, nevertheless.

  “So why then? What happened?” she asked again.

  Her father’s gaze grew distant, troubled. It was a look she’d seen on him so many times and dismissed as weakness. It still made her angry, seeing him like that. She had to clamp down on the impulse to lash out before he finally spoke.

  “It was a bad spell. A real bad spell. Started when your mother was in the hospital that last time, but I’d had them before. After she died, something happened. Up here.” He pressed his fingertips to his temples. “Switched off. I felt like there was this fog between me and everybody else. Dark, bad fog, almost all the time. And when your mother wasn’t there to help me find my way out of it, like she always had before, I got lost.

  “I wanted to get through it, I tried, but it was all I could do some days to make it to the store and back. Some days I didn’t even manage that much. Business went to hell. If it weren’t for savings I’d have lost the whole thing. Money I’d meant for you kids to go to college on. By the time I woke up again, it was too late.”

  He sounded like he’d thought about this for a long time, and could express it now only because he’d managed to distill those three years to their essence in his mind, making them into something manageable. He knew this metaphor like an ancient, bitter rival.

  Tess knew it like a new one. His dark fog, her deep well.

  Her resentment hit a new low, digging into her as sharply as the tears had the day before. She begrudged him the possibility of being the person who might understand her best. It wasn’t fair. She didn’t want it to be true, but she knew it was. It resonated. They had this awful thing in common.

  Suddenly she missed Jake, missed the feeling of comfort she’d found with him despite all the distinct discomfort he’d inflicted on her. She wanted to find him, wrap herself around him, curl up in a ball at his feet, just be near him. Nothing else seemed quite as easy or good as her time with him had been.

  But even that comfort, she acknowledged, hadn’t kept her darkness completely at bay. And now she knew it would be harder the next time, when she had to face it alone again, get through it alone. What would it be like to depend on Jake then lose him? How well would she hold up if that happened? Better to end it before she built up those expectations.

  Better to be her own support system. Or she’d end up exactly like her dad.

  “You were exhausted just getting through the day,” she said slowly. Every word felt like an absolution, when she wasn’t sure she was ready to give him one. “You felt like nothing would ever make you happy again. And when something did, even for a while, it was almost a curse because it made it that much harder when it went away again. Sometimes things seemed to be rolling along like normal and the next second you felt like you were about to up and die.”

  He studied her face a long time before answering. “That’s right.”

  “No light at the end of the tunnel.”

  A nod, thoughtful and wary.

  “It still doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t undo anything. There’s no retroactive pardon.” She knew she sounded like a petulant child, but she couldn’t help it. Once she’d started saying all this stuff out loud, she couldn’t turn it off so easily. It all had to come out. The blame-lump, twisted and hideous, outside her for all to see.

  “I know that.” He scowled, the first flash of serious temper she’d seen from him in years. “I’ve never asked you for one. You’re a grownup, Tess, you know we can’t change the past. You had to grow up too fast, and I blame myself for that. That’s mine to live with. But I didn’t even know there was such a thing as help for it then. And staying so angry about it doesn’t help anyone now.”

  “That’s easy for you to say, Dad. I can’t change how I feel.” Angry, sad, betrayed. Like she had a pocket of defiance where her trust should be.

  “No. And neither could I back then. You can change what you do about it going forward though. Wait here a minute.”

  He rummaged in his desk for a few seconds then brought her a business card.

  “A psychiatrist?”

  “There’s no shame in it. Took me awhile to learn that. Your brother made me go when he was about thirteen or so. A one-kid intervention. I’d taken a downward turn for the first time in a long time. Little shit diagnosed me with clinical depression from off the internet, made an appointment under my name, and told me he was going to see this doctor with or without me because if I didn’t get help, he was gonna need some himself. Jesus,” he said, cracking a broad smile. “He sounded so much like your mother, I started bawli
ng. Thought I might lose him too, like I’d lost you, and for the same reasons. That was a bad few days.”

  “He’s a great kid,” she said, still looking from the card to her father and trying to connect the two in her mind. They simply didn’t go together. She couldn’t picture it, her father in a psychiatrist’s office, talking about his problems. Because Mikey had made him go, strong-armed him into it. She’d chided Mikey for being thoughtless and carefree at thirteen. Did she really know him at all? She wondered if she knew any of them, gave any of her family the credit they deserved.

  “You’re all great kids. Not my doing, so much. Lindy and Mikey take after your mother. You got the short end of the stick, favoring me, but you’ve done pretty damn well anyway. This would help,” he said, leaning over and tapping the card. “She’s good. Not a quack. You should give it a whirl.”

  “You actually see this person?”

  Dr. Sharon Wallace, the card read. General Psychiatry and Grief Counseling.

  “Every six months, whether I need it or not. She tells me I need it even if I don’t think I do. Won’t keep prescribing me medication if I don’t go flirt with her for an hour twice a year.”

  “You take medication?” Now she was in the Twilight Zone. There was no other possible explanation. “Is everybody in this town on some kind of drug for mental illness?”

  “Judging by the number of cars I have to pretend not to recognize in Doctor Wallace’s parking lot, I’d say a fair percentage. Not all of them the ones you’d expect either.”

  “And you think I need to go too? That’s your answer to all this?” Was she ready to let him off the hook?

  “I don’t know if it’s my answer, and I don’t know if it’ll be yours. But yes, I think you need to go too. There’s a long family history of this, you know. They didn’t always have the same names for these things that they do now, but the signs are there if you look for them. You shouldn’t wait, because it’s not like it’ll get better on its own, and just talking to somebody isn’t likely to help much either. I should’ve seen it in you a long time ago too, Punkin. Another thing for me to be sorry about, I guess.” He shook his head. “Too much of me in you for me to have any kind of perspective. And we haven’t been what you’d call close these past few years.”

  They snorted in unison at the understatement, and their eyes met in amusement. Sympathy. They each knew what the other was thinking. And everything wasn’t all right at the moment, but she saw how it could be right if she wanted it to be. She did.

  “It also explains a lot about your personality, Teresa, if you don’t mind my saying so. Really. You should go.”

  “Gee, don’t pull your punches, Dad.”

  “I’ve been pulling them for way too long. I never should’ve started.” He nodded firmly and squared his shoulders. “With that in mind, there’s something else we need to discuss. About you and Jake Hogan…”

  Chapter Twelve

  When she pulled up to the cottage, Jake was sitting on her minuscule porch in the folding chair, a blanket over his shoulders and a bottle of beer in his hand. Waiting for her, like he did. He was the best thing she’d ever seen in her life.

  Getting out of the car, she felt her spirits lighten—then sink as she recalled what she was about to do. Up until that moment she’d been convinced she could muscle her way through this encounter, put Jake aside and move on with her life with no damage to herself. Once she saw him, all that conviction evaporated.

  “Hi, honey,” he called with mock cheer, “how was your day?”

  “My day was spent in bizarro town!” She matched his tone. “How was your day, sweetheart?”

  “My day was from hell.”

  “Shitstorm?”

  “Reaped the fucking whirlwind,” he confirmed.

  “Yep. The gossip shit hit the rumor mill fan, for sure. Is there another one of those for me?” She pointed at his beer hopefully.

  From somewhere beneath the blanket he produced a wine bottle and thrust it toward her as she mounted the steps. She swiped it from his hand as she unlocked the door.

  “This is perfect, and I love you.”

  “Really?” His voice cracked and he shot up out of the chair as the door swung open.

  She bit her lip and tried not to curse out loud. How the hell had that popped out of her mouth?

  “Uh, sure, yeah?” Probably she did. It didn’t change anything if she didn’t let it.

  “Didn’t really mean to say it right then though, did you?”

  “Fuck no.” So much for trying not to curse.

  “Right. I’ll forget I heard anything. ‘Wow, you have furniture,’ he said, awkwardly changing the subject. And look, boxes. Lots of boxes. And I have this blanket. We could build a fort.”

  This conversation was going to suck. Tess went to find a wineglass in the box marked “barware”. She found a corkscrew first and figured she’d searched long enough.

  She toed her shoes off and took a big swig from the bottle as she joined Jake on the floor, cross-legged under the blanket he’d draped between the couch and a stack of boxes. He grinned and clinked his beer against her wine.

  “So how did the thing with your dad go?”

  “This is awesome. We are so damn grownup and classy I can hardly stand it. The thing with my dad was…interesting. Good too, I guess. We didn’t really resolve anything, but we talked about stuff we should’ve talked about a long time ago. I think it was therapeutic for both of us. Speaking of therapeutic, he thinks I need a psychiatrist. People keep telling me that lately. Does everybody think I need professional help? Is that, like, the official position on me?”

  Jake drank and looked thoughtful. “Maybe what matters is whether you feel like you need it.”

  “Of course I do. If I could take a pill to not be the way I am, you think I wouldn’t jump at that chance?”

  “I don’t think it’s quite that simple.”

  “Anything’s better than this. Well, not this.” She squeezed his thigh, leaning into him, trying to convey her lingering fondness. “This was great. But you know what I mean.”

  “I do, yes. What do you mean ‘was’?”

  Tess looked down at the wine label, examining the colors as though they held the secrets of the universe. She didn’t want to shrug him off, but didn’t have words for what she wanted to say.

  No, not wanted, because what she wanted was Jake. What she needed was to see the back of him and figure out her shit.

  “You mean is great,” Jake said firmly after a few seconds of taut silence. His voice grew louder as he went on. “Will continue to be great. And you were not about to give me some hackneyed line about how you’re not in a good place right now or you can’t let yourself have nice things or we were just getting it out of our systems. Because that. Is. Bullshit.”

  So angry. She’d never heard him like that. Risking a peek, she saw his eyes, stormy and dark in the gloom of the fort. His jaw looked hard enough to cut glass. But she wasn’t frightened of him; she wanted to comfort him. Soothe his troubled brow. Be in accord with him. Forever.

  Doomed. I’m doomed.

  “At this time, I can neither confirm nor deny that I was planning to say some or all of those things.”

  She sucked at comforting, obviously. Tiny muscles appeared along the side of Jake’s jaw, below his ears.

  “Do you think I give a flying fuck if you’re in a good place, Tess? I’ve seen you in a good place, I’ve seen you in bad places, I can tell you’re at an all-time low right now and I don’t care. None of that changes how I feel about you. None of that changes how you feel about me either, and I’m done pretending I don’t know that. Let me help. Let me be there for you. Trust me.”

  His speech had sucked all the air from the cramped space under the blanket, leaving none for Tess. No air, no words. He’d used up the ones she’d intended to use, the ones that sounded so empty and ridiculous now.

  She couldn’t possibly describe the feelings racing through her,
the collision of need and want, hope and despair. It was too hard. Tess knew a lot of words, but not the right ones for this. She closed her eyes and sucked in a single, painfully deep breath, then released it over a count of ten.

  When she opened them again, Jake was still watching her. Not angry anymore, but tense, wary. Wanting. Needing. And words no longer seemed to matter. She didn’t need them to tell him how she really felt.

  Tess climbed over his extended legs and onto his lap, draping herself over his chest and clinging like a vine. His arms wrapped around her immediately, and he buried his face in her hair. For long moments they sat, silently speaking volumes, until Jake finally pulled back and smiled, sniffling discreetly.

  “That’s better. Don’t do that to me again. Now tell me some more about how great I am.”

  “Don’t push your luck, Hogan, it’s been a really weird day.”

  “Tell me about it. Your brother was in tears in my office this afternoon. Up until just now, that was peak weirdness for me.”

  “What?” She reared back to see if he was joking, but his face was grim.

  “Something about not knowing you’d changed his diapers. He was pretty upset. He used up a whole box of tissue. Then he said he’d beat me up if I ever hurt you. I opted not to explain about the nature of our sexual relationship.”

  “Wise decision.”

  “I thought so. You did a terrible job teaching that guy how to blow his nose, by the way.”

  They both drank, and Tess was entranced by the movement of Jake’s jaw, the long line of his throat as he tipped his head back to empty the bottle. The look he gave when he finished and found her watching him was devastating. Tess wanted to strip naked and spread her legs for him right then and there, like some wanton sex-crazed floozy.

  Jake would probably like that quite a lot, she realized after a few seconds. That was kind of his thing. She was beginning to suspect it was her thing too. But more testing was in order before she came to any final conclusions.