Holding Lies

by John Larison

  Only two of the houses were occupied now, pickups parked beside forsaken stoves and overturned refrigerators and sun-faded mattresses. A shirtless boy threw a rock at them as they passed. His shorter sidekick pointed a toy rifle and yelled, “You’re dead!”

  “You lived here?” Annie said. “I lived here?”

  “It didn’t look like this then,” Hank said. “These weren’t our neighbors.” He explained that the houses had been built in the late sixties by a group of hippies from Eugene. They’d pooled their money and come to grow soybeans and live the highest life, one focused on equal quantities of art, farming, and community. They’d never thought to check how soybeans did in the Ipsyniho’s rocky loam.

  “Your mom and I moved up here after the hippies left. This was where a bunch of our friends lived, raft guides mostly. That one was ours.” Hank pointed to the slanted box beside a cluster of feral apple trees, the one with broken windows and weathered gray planks for siding. The grass out front was waist high and flashing in the breeze, and the open doorway glared back at them, black as deep space. Hank stopped and shut down the truck. “Your mom kept a garden over there and our latrine was down where those blackberries are growing now.”

  “Latrine?”

  “There was no plumbing in the houses. We passed the communal well on the way in. That metal sea horse thing.”

  “Was there electricity?”

  “A diesel generator. We dreamed of solar.”

  Annie waded through the grass, her arms outstretched and sweeping through the tops. She spun once, like she’d done so often as a two-year-old. And Hank was taken with a sparkling recollection of her, leaning over a purple iris, struggling to touch her nose to the fragrant petals—then falling forward into the flower and coming up laughing. “You don’t remember this place?”

  She shook her head no.

  They walked to the house and peeked through the window frames. It was too dark to see much at first, until their eyes adjusted. Hank was the first to step inside, testing the floor to ensure it would hold their weight.

  “You’re going inside?” Annie seemed surprised.

  He gestured for her to follow. “It’s solid.”

  Annie felt the width of the doorway as she entered. She seemed so enormous there, a silhouette against the blinding day. He remembered her sitting there as a toddler, against the shut door. Nighttime or evening maybe. She’d been drawing, and Rosemary looked and asked what it was. A girl, Riffle had said. A happy girl. Why is she happy? Because her daddy is home.

  Annie now fingered a hole in the wall at her waist. “I remember this. I put this here with a hammer. Why did Mom let me play with a hammer?” She walked a few paces, pointing at the room’s corner. “There was a stove somewhere here, right? You used to boil water on it. Once I spilled it and burned myself. I remember that.”

  Now only the chimney’s ceiling hole remained. He’d stacked each day’s wood along that wall, where it could dry before being put to use. Heating this place had been a lesson in futility. During windstorms, gusts flowed across the room, little breaths against your cheek, lifting loose papers from the kitchen table. During heavy rains, an occasional splatter would find its way to your brow. He might as well have been heating the open sky. How young he’d been then. How sure of himself. Sure of his family—and of his place within it.

  “This place is making me dizzy.” Annie kept a hand on the wall for balance. Years of autumn leaves lay piled in the corners, and mouse turds littered the floor. But it was the tilt that was most disconcerting. Like the whole house might at any moment slide off the ridge and into the Ipsyniho.

  Hank gestured toward the back. “Do you remember the bedroom?” He guided her over a black hole in the floor, and they stepped through the narrow doorframe.

  “There was no door here,” Annie said. “It was a red sheet or something.”

  “A tapestry. Good memory.”

  “And the three of us would sleep on a bed right there.” She pointed to the corner. “It was on the ground, right?”

  “It was.” As a little girl, she’d been the world’s finest cuddler, like she’d known some secret about snuggling only taught in the womb. Those had been the best nights of his life, her curled into him, burrowing her little face against his neck. A oneness with another being he’d never achieved before or since. A oneness, he now realized, he would forever be chasing.

  “You used to read by candlelight,” she said. “I remember climbing on your chest and making you read to me. It’s all coming back.”

  He didn’t remember that, but he did remember so much. “You were born right there. Your mom hung from my neck in a squatting position and she was working so hard. She was a thousand miles away in her own body. She kept shaking her head and saying, ‘Come on little baby, come to your momma.’ And you were coming, coming fast, but then you just stopped. You stopped with your head out and nothing else. Mom was pushing and Rita was working down there but you weren’t coming. It was like you had decided the outside world wasn’t what you’d been promised and you wanted back into that watery place.”

  Annie looked horrified. “Poor Mom.”

  “Things got kind of scary for couple minutes. The pain was getting to your mom, and Rita whispered for her to get on her hands and knees. Finally, Rita held your head and neck and did this kind of motion”—Hank demonstrated with his hands—“and you slipped right out and into her arms.”

  Annie was looking at the spot on the floor. “You remember it so well.”

  “How could I forget?” That moment, the Big Bang of his adulthood. “You went right to the boob. We were so sure you were a boy, your mom just had this feeling—she’d had dozens of dreams about you as a boy—that nobody even looked to see. There was a warm blanket fresh from the oven and it was covering you. I think we all thought that someone else had looked, but nobody had. The placenta was born, the cord cut, and still we were saying, ‘Our little boy. Look at our little boy.’ Finally, it was like five minutes later, your mom passed you to me and I saw you were a girl. And that’s when you opened your eyes for the first time. Little celestial blueberries.” Even now, thirty years later, he got a little misty thinking about it. Those eyes had leveled on him the weight of a thousand generations; fuck this up and it’s all been for naught.

  Every other moment in this life was but a coarse photocopy compared to that one night of glistening clarity.

  “Were you disappointed? Be honest. Maybe just a little?”

  “Disappointed by what?”

  “Me being a girl.”

  He laughed. “Are you kidding? I’ve never felt so lucky in my entire life. I always wanted a little girl. Some guys are naturally boy-daddies, others naturally girl-daddies. I’ve always been sure.”

  “But didn’t you want a little boy you could teach to fish and row and, you know, be you?”

  “No.”

  “Dads, you know, are always so interested in teaching their boys that stuff.” She looked away, and he realized this was about something bigger.

  “I taught you everything. Teaching you … those are my most cherished memories, you and me and the river. Do you remember the time you hooked that steelhead and dropped the rod? I had to swim for it?”

  She nodded. “Sure.”

  He smiled to himself. The pinnacle of all his angling memories. “You didn’t want me to land your fish. So you jumped in too.”

  “I can’t believe you let me do that.”

  “I didn’t. You just did it. But we landed that fish. Out on a rock in the middle of the river.”

  “It was an island, wasn’t it?”

  “No, darling. Center Punch Rock in the tailout of Governor.” If she wanted proof, he would have shown her the journal entry detailing that day. It sprawled onto three pages in the blue composition book on the top right shelf in his living room. “About five feet across, but maybe it felt like an island to your little feet.”

  For a moment they were quiet, holding their br
eath in the sacred space of that room. He wanted to embrace her, to feel her forehead against his neck, but she reached a hand to the wall for balance—she was looking for the door.

  And that’s when he realized what she had really been asking when she asked if he wanted a boy.

  “Just so you know,” he said, “just so there’s no confusion, I wanted you back every second of every day after your mom moved you away. I fought for you.”

  “Oh,” Annie said and walked the two steps out of the room.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  WHEN THEY ARRIVED back home that night, a note hung from the door. Carter. He’d stopped by and repeated his request that Hank contact him immediately. “There’s a few contradictions I’d like to hash out.”

  They hadn’t been home long when the phone rang. Annie answered, and said, “Hey, sweetie.” It was Thad and she was taking the phone to her bedroom.

  Her voice carried through the thin walls, so he turned up Cornell ’77 and tried to focus on the book he was reading—she deserved privacy. But then she walked into the kitchen, the phone to her ear, and searched for something to eat in the refrigerator.

  “Really?” she said. “And what did he say?”

  “——”

  “Who’s his attorney?”

  “——”

  “Well, they only have sixty days to file that.”

  “——”

  “I know, babe, but you’ll do fine. You don’t need me there for that.”

  “——”

  “Just be confident. Keep thinking to yourself, ‘I own this room.’ You’re gonna be fine. Trust me. These deps are standard procedure. Billy’s right.”

  “——”

  “Yeah, I’ll keep the phone nearby. Call whenever.”

  After hanging up, she cracked a beer and called to Hank, “You want one?”

  “Sure.”

  She came over to the couch where he was lying on his back and he made room for her. The beer was sweating in his hand. “Again with this show?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “It’s Cornell ’77.”

  “Were you there?”

  He’d already been guiding for years by then. “This one is just, well, it’s damn good.”

  “They all sound the same to me.”

  He hadn’t rediscovered Cornell until about a year before, when a friend passed on an archival website, and he was able to replace the tape version he’d worn through in the eighties. He’d listened to this show often enough then that it became, in a way, the sound track of that period in his life, of Annie’s childhood. Now he kept a copy in the truck and another in the home stereo. “How’s Thad?”

  “But it’s repetitive, isn’t it, listening to the same show?”

  Maybe, but what was wrong with a little repetition in life? And in truth, he wasn’t listening to the same recording. He’d found three different bootlegs, each recorded from a different place within the audience. The music might have been the same, but the sound was different. He liked to think that by listening to these three, he was triangulating some truth of that show. “Does it sound familiar to you?” he asked. “There’s a picture of you dancing to it.”

  She shook her head. “Where’s the picture?”

  It was with twenty-one others in the top drawer of his dresser, the pictures he took with him to sleep on the loneliest nights. “Around somewhere.” She didn’t need to know how much time he’d spent with them, how much time he’d spent thinking of the past.

  Annie seemed lost in a memory of her own. “No, the only music I remember from kidhood is that bearded guy.”

  “Everybody had beards then.”

  “The guy you and Mom took me to see when he came to Eugene. I was like four, maybe.”

  “Oh. Raffi. Jesus. You were always begging to listen to Raffi.”

  She hummed a riff. From “Baby Beluga.”

  “Don’t remind me.” He glugged some beer, took a chance. “Thad is a little clingy, huh?”

  “Clingy? Maybe. He’s a great doctor,” she said. “He has a glowing reputation. And he’s smart and he’s articulate and he’s capable. But yeah, maybe he has some dependency issues. I mean, he needs constant support. A housekeeper for his ego. But don’t we all?”

  She sipped her beer, and Hank knew enough to wait.

  “I should’ve known what I was getting into. He’s a serial monogamist. And you should see his relationship with his mother. They talk for hours on the phone. For the two years he lived alone, he dabbled in Catholicism. I mean, to each his own, but the pope?” She shook her head. “I should have seen what was coming.” Then a moment later, “I shouldn’t talk about him like this. He’s my husband.”

  “I’m your dad.”

  “So says my birth certificate.”

  He didn’t want to know what she meant by that. “Why stay with him if this is how you feel?” So says my birth certificate. If only she knew how hard he’d tried.

  “I guess I haven’t always felt this way. It didn’t used to be so suffocating. I used to like the attention. He needed me, and I liked being needed.”

  He remembered that feeling, the clarity of purpose that came with being a necessary component of another’s life. In hindsight, he’d relished that part of parenting—the help in the bathtub, the help overcoming a nightmare—even if at the time it had been overwhelming. In fact, that had been the most difficult adjustment after Annie and Rosemary left: transitioning from being needed to simply being. Maybe he was still transitioning. “Thad wants children, I bet.”

  Annie turned. “Good guess.”

  “And you don’t?”

  She sipped her beer. “I don’t think I do. I mean, I’m pretty sure I don’t. At least not now.”

  Rosemary hadn’t wanted children either. A memory resurfaced: Rosemary in the passenger seat of his truck, the window down and her hair tossing wildly. They’d just learned that she was pregnant. She said, “Maybe I should make an appointment.” She’d never mentioned the idea again, thank god. What would he have said to convince her otherwise?

  “But there’s a lot of pressure. From Thad. From Thad’s mother. You’d be amazed how forward she is about the whole thing. Like I have some public responsibility to the family, so public that they can talk about my reproduction at the dinner table.”

  He imagined a wealthy Southern family’s dinner: crystal, silver, china, and well-dressed but never acknowledged servers pouring drinks and removing dirty dishes. It was these worldly experiences that left him slightly awestruck of the person little Riffle had become. She would never have had these experiences if she’d stayed in Ipsyniho, if she’d become the person he’d imagined.

  “What does your mom say about all this?” he asked.

  Annie shrugged. “Mom’s kind of in her own world right now.”

  He pressed her to explain.

  “I think she’s having a little midlife thing. She’s postmenopausal now, you know. She tells me, ‘Just leave him already,’ as if Thad is an apartment or something.”

  And then the resentment—no, the hatred—he’d felt the moment Rosemary climbed in her car and drove five-year-old Riffle away from him forever was fresh and new and bloody again. Just leave him already. As if Thad was trivial, as if his desires and hopes and passions took a distant second to her own.

  Annie must have noticed Hank’s spike in blood pressure. “It’s not that she’s indifferent. It’s just that to her, these problems have simple and unavoidable solutions. Might as well hurry them along and get on with life.” Annie sipped her beer, then barely contained a belch. “Mom always kept men pretty peripheral. At least since you. She’s still like that with her new beau, but he’s too dense to notice.”

  “Since me what?” His tone surprised even him.

  Annie shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s just, your leaving left some scars I think.”

  Hank sat up, and his beer spilled onto the carpet. He righted the bottle, but it tipped again, and he left it. “I didn’t lea
ve.”

  “Whatever.” Annie waved a hand. “I don’t mean to bring that up. I just mean that to her, a relationship is just a relationship. She forgets that they develop their own inertia. Commitment, legacy, you know what I mean.”

  Hank caught himself. This was Annie’s conversation, one about her relationship with Thad, not about his relationship with Rosemary. But then he said it anyway: “I didn’t leave anybody, just for the record.”

  Annie looked at a spot on the floor. “I misspoke.” A moment passed as he searched for something better to say. She stood. “I should get some sleep. Thad is going to call first th—”

  “Wait,” he grabbed her hand. “I didn’t leave anybody. I didn’t. You have to know that. I fought for you, Annie.”

  She turned her arm free of his grip. “As you said.” She righted the now-empty bottle, and disappeared down the hallway and into her room.

  There on the carpet, in the room’s half-light, was a sopping, dark oval.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  HANK HAD A trip the next day, one he’d scheduled long before Annie called and asked to come out. The client was a regular from Denver, a suit in some major insurance firm there. He could cast and he understood that steelhead weren’t always willing, and so the day should have gone smoothly. Hank often found himself on a bluff supposedly looking for fish but instead thinking about Annie, about “his leaving.”

  Clearly, the facts of how Hank came to stay in Ipsyniho had not been presented in his favor. She’d be leaving again in three days, which pinned him in a corner: Should he dare to set the history straight, or should he focus on building the present? Could he do one without the other?

  If he broached the subject and the discussion swirled out of control as it had before, he might lose her forever. He’d been lucky to have her return as it was, a second chance, and an undeserved one. He couldn’t risk making the same error again; he might lose her for good. But if he didn’t broach the subject, she would forever see him as something he wasn’t, a quitter. She couldn’t respect a quitter.