The Good Lie

by Robin Brande

  She waited for Georgia to hand her the copies and close the door so we were alone once more before saying, “It’s not strictly ethical for me to tell you to do this, Lizzie, but I’ve always been straight with you. Let me put it this way: it would be most helpful to your case if you could get your father on tape. Get him to talk to you—get him to confess.”

  A splash of fear hit my spine. “How am I going to do that?”

  “You talk to him. Tell him, ‘Daddy, thanks so much for your letter. It really helped. But why did you do it? I thought you loved me.’”

  “But he says he didn’t do it.”

  “He says he doesn’t remember.” Angela pointed her cigarette at me. “There’s a difference.”

  “But I can’t just say, ‘Why did you do it?’—he’ll deny it.”

  “So you’ll have to ease into it. Get him talking about it—maybe share what you remember.”

  “Which is nothing.”

  “Make something up.” Angela halted my next objection. “I’m not saying make up a big whopper, but finesse it—know what I mean? Say, ‘I remember things now—things that scare me. I don’t know what to think. I thought you loved me.’ Then let him do the talking. ‘I did love you, sweetheart. I loved you so much. I wanted to love you more—that’s why I touched you that way,’ or whatever his particular brand of bullshit is.”

  “Do people say that?”

  “All the time. You wouldn’t believe the shit I hear. Dads like to kid themselves into thinking this is just one more way they’re showing love to their child. I had a guy once who claimed he was fucking his six-year-old daughter because he wanted her to know what to expect when she got married—he was preparing her, see? Like any good dad.” Angela shook her head and inhaled deeply. “Makes you crazy,” she exhaled, “all these sick fucks in their own little worlds.” She stabbed out her cigarette and leaned back in her chair.

  “How am I supposed to record him?”

  “Voice-activated recorder in your pocket, phone with a built-in recorder—there are lots of ways to do it without the other person knowing. Now remember, I’m not telling you to do that. I was just answering your question about how it’s done.”

  “But what do I say?”

  “You’ll have to practice,” Angela answered. “Get Posie to help you. You have to remember that what he likes is control—they all do. You can’t go in there guns blasting, accusations flying. It’s got to be real low-key—‘Daddy, I’m confused. Why did you hurt me this way?’”

  “That wouldn’t sound real.”

  “Then you’ll figure out what does,” she said. “The key is to let him do most of the talking. Draw him out. Be real clear that you know what happened—what you want to know is why. You’re confused. You want a good relationship with him. You’re not trying to get him in trouble, you just want to understand what happened so you can rebuild your love. Something like that.”

  I wasn’t convinced. “And that really works?”

  “I’ve been doing this twenty years, and it never fails to amaze me how these guys think. They convince themselves it’s not a crime. They pretend they’re not hurting their kids. It’s just ‘love’ or ‘practice’ or whatever bullshit they want to tell themselves. When you come after them it’s almost like you’ve told them they were born a different sex—it doesn’t compute. They’ve lived like this so long they have their own story for making it work. They don’t want to believe when you tell them it’s wrong.”

  “My father knows it’s wrong.”

  “Does he?” Angela challenged. “How do you know that?”

  “Look at his letter. He wants forgiveness.”

  “No, he wants an out. He says he doesn’t remember, but golly, if he really did those things, what a terrible man he was, but God will forgive him some day. Bullshit. Either you did or you didn’t.”

  “What about my brother?”

  “What about him?”

  “Should I bring him up?”

  “Sure. Absolutely. Get your father to admit as much as you can. If you can get him on tape saying he’s been screwing your little brother, I’ll take that straight to the county attorney.”

  My heart sped. “I don’t want that.”

  “It’s probably not going to matter—trust me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They don’t prosecute these cases—they’re too hard. The county attorney’s office is a bunch of weenies. Unless you’ve got the molest on video, they don’t want to touch it.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Look,” Angela said, “if you’ve got hundreds of cases you have to push through, you want winners, right? They’ve got more files than they know what to do with. I’ve brought them taped confessions and they don’t give a shit. They figure the guy will just hire a good defense lawyer and make nothing but trouble for them. They hate when it’s a kid’s word against an adult’s—hate it. Give them a bloody knife or a multiple rapist with DNA or a guy selling weed to a cop. Those are the glory cases. They don’t deal in kids.”

  [2]

  Is it wrong to lie? Proverbs says the Lord detests lying lips, but the evidence doesn’t bear that out. To the contrary, a deception well-executed seems to hold a special place in God’s heart.

  Jacob was the worst of liars. To steal his brother’s blessing from their blind father, Jacob dresses in Esau’s clothes, wraps goat skins around his throat and across his hands to imitate Esau’s hairiness, and carries in Esau’s signature dish to his father’s bedside.

  “Here I am, Father,” Jacob says, “it’s me, your firstborn, Esau. Lay your blessing on me.” And his father does. When Esau finds out, he’s outraged and so are we. Yet what does God do? He makes Jacob the father of a nation and lets Esau slip into obscurity.

  And what about the prophet Elisha? There’s a great scene where the enemy army is about to attack, and Elisha prays that the soldiers will be struck blind. God complies. Elisha then tells the soldiers, “Oh no, you’re going the wrong way. Here, let me lead you to the men you’re looking for.” Instead he leads them into a trap and they’re captured. Do you think God tells us that story to discourage us from similar behavior? No, he’s proud of it and wants to inspire us.

  Face it: under the right circumstances, God blesses the liars.

  At the electronics store Posie and I sampled recorders. There are some so small you can hide them in your cleavage.

  We practiced at her house. “Testing, testing . . .” from different distances, with different background noise. I needed to be sitting close, we decided, somewhere fairly quiet—a park or the house, as opposed to McDonald’s.

  With all the details to work on I tried to push away the thought of what it might actually feel like to have to do this. To talk about what I didn’t want to talk about. To hear him say what I couldn’t bear to hear. It was something to put aside for as long as possible, like a nightmare test you know you have to take at the end of the semester, but you promise yourself not to think about it until then.

  “How are you going to start?” Posie quizzed me. “Pretend I’m him.”

  And we went over it twenty different ways, Posie speaking in baritone, throwing me every curve she could think of to prepare me for the actual interview.

  “I never did that,” she claimed.

  “Yes, you did,” I answered.

  “No, I didn’t.” Posie changed back to her regular voice. “That’s going nowhere. Let’s try again.” And we did, and I think I got better at it over time, but it was still just a game and nothing close to the real thing.

  “Do I really have to do this?” I pleaded.

  “Yes,” Posie said firmly, “you do. Come on, it’s just one hour, maybe a little more. Then it’s over. You never have to talk to him again.”

  “But it’s going to be awful.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m too afraid.”

  “Pray,” she said.

  “I’ll still be afraid.”

&n
bsp; “I’ll be watching nearby.”

  Was I really going to do this?

  May God bless the liar.

  The Christian Real Estate King Makes His Pitch

  I wore jeans and one of Posie’s jackets and my warrior boots and an oversized shirt buttoned almost to the top to hide the digital recorder in my bra. I adjusted the big floppy hat I had borrowed from Posie, tilting the brim lower over my eyes as if that could hide me somehow. Like a little kid thinking he’s invisible if he covers his face with his hands.

  The wind would not stop blowing. It had been carrying on like that for the last five days. It was getting on my nerves.

  I wasn’t the only one. The newspaper said some guy couldn’t take it anymore, so he pulled out his pistol and shot his refrigerator six times. The paper didn’t say how he thought that would help.

  I nervously scanned the park. It was the same one where Jason and I had made out. Boy, were those different times. I couldn’t think about that right now.

  My father wasn’t there yet. We had planned it that way. Posie took up her station on the grass beneath a tree while I took a spot on the bench. It was late Sunday morning, and the park was filled with the usual secular slackers—kids in sweatsuits practicing soccer, a tai chi class, a few guys clonking croquet balls.

  I slouched on the bench and hid beneath my hat. I figured my father would expect me to be shy, and it was no act. I dreaded every word out of my mouth and every syllable out of his. If I could have magically skipped over this hour and arrived at the next with it already behind me and done, I’d be a happy girl. But that’s never how it works. You have to push through the ugly parts, feel them slime over your skin and screech into your ear, and you try to stay aloof about it and look forward to that moment when you can breathe again and say, “Whew! That’s over!”

  Posie jerked her chin up to let me know she had spotted him. I slouched lower on the bench.

  “Hi, Lizzie.” He looked bad—greasy gray hair, food-stained shirt, pants that probably hadn’t been washed since the last time I did laundry. I wondered when he would give in and do a load himself. I wasn’t sure he knew how. He smelled like B.O.

  For a second he looked like he might try to hug me, but thank heavens he didn’t. He sat on the end of the bench a foot away from me and draped his arm over the wooden slats and looked at me with a tight face and creased forehead. “How are you?”

  “Fine.” My tongue felt caked in mud. I couldn’t swallow. Help me, God, this was it. “I wanted to thank you for your letter.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “That really meant a lot to me.”

  “I’m glad.” Did he relax just then? Seemed to. Angela was right.

  Anyone watching would have thought, “How nice, father and daughter sitting together on a sunny fall morning, and look how appropriate he is! Respecting her space like that. All fathers should be that way.”

  I cleared my throat. It felt like clods of dirt washing down. “I’ve been to see a counselor—”

  “You have?”

  I focused on my hands in my lap. “Yes. I needed someone to talk to, you know, someone . . . other than Mom.”

  “I see.”

  I rushed to finish my speech. “So the counselor said I should probably talk to you next, and get some things off my chest—” I flashed on the recorder between my breasts. “—and tell you how I feel so we can, you know, repair the relationship.”

  “Okay,” he answered cautiously, “I’d like that.”

  Here goes. I turned to him and lifted my eyes to meet his, and I swear it was like lifting a Mack truck and holding it above my head. God, I didn’t want to look at him. But Posie and I practiced, and I knew I had to do this.

  “It really hurts me,” I began, and I surprised myself by crying right away. In rehearsal Posie and I thought that might be good toward the end, to emphasize how sorry I was things had gone so badly lately, but here the tears were and I understood they were how my body was dealing with the fear. I couldn’t flee, so why not cry? A little safety valve, that’s all.

  He reached for me.

  I batted his hand away and that felt tremendous. “Don’t.” I sputtered on. “It hurts me that you could do that to me, Dad. I don’t understand. I thought you loved me.” There. It was out. Now the rest was up to him.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  That isn’t your line. “What do mean, what do I mean? Which part?”

  “All of it,” he said, keeping a straight face. “Tell me, Lizzie, what exactly did I do?”

  The wind lifted my hat. I plunked my hand on top of my head and silently cried, Mayday! Mayday! I glanced over at Posie, who knew nothing about what was happening. I jerked my eyes away. I couldn’t blow her cover.

  “You said in your letter—”

  “I was upset,” he said. “Your mother had just told me—”

  “Right. And that’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Okay, so what do want to know?” His forehead creased another inch deeper.

  Now I was getting annoyed. He knew very well what I was talking about, but he was so calm, so rational, and he was making me look foolish. Where was Posie? Start over.

  “Look,” I said strongly now, no tears, “I want to know why you molested me when I was little. Stop playing games.”

  He paused, pretended to collect himself. “I don’t think I did, Lizzie. That’s the truth.”

  “But you said in your letter you couldn’t remember.”

  “That’s right, I don’t. I was trying to be honest.”

  “But you said it wasn’t impossible.”

  “I suppose nothing is.”

  Screw your philosophy. “What about Mikey?”

  His face changed then, and I was glad. A direct hit. His jaw tightened. His eyes widened at first, then narrowed. I had his attention. “What about Mikey?”

  “I’ve seen you with him.”

  “What have you seen?” he tried to ask calmly, but his face gave him away—he was afraid of me.

  “I’ve seen you humping him and—”

  “Humping? What do you—when?”

  “—and taking showers with him, and—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “—and I know you go into his bedroom at night and molest him. He told me.” There. There was all of it.

  “He told you? Lizzie, Lizzie . . . oh, my Lord . . .” He slumped forward. He rested his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. He shook his head back and forth. “God, dear God . . .” It was quite a performance. He gripped a handful of flesh near his heart and pressed his other arm against his gut as if he were going to throw up.

  I leaned back and watched the couple doing tai chi. They were so graceful. The croquet players smacked another ball. My father carried on, moaning like he was sick, and I couldn’t care less. I was tired of his lies.

  “Are you done?” I asked. The wind fluttered the brim of the hat. I tugged it lower on my head. My eyes were nice and hidden now. I could watch him like I was hiding behind a screen.

  He tried to sound like he was crying. “Lizzie, I don’t understand! How can you say these things?”

  “Because they’re true.”

  “None of them are true. You’ve imagined all of it—all of it. Dear God—”

  “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”

  “You hush up!”

  Whoops, broke character, didn’t you? I took pleasure in knowing the tape recorder was capturing all of this. Posie and Angela would love every minute.

  “You’re wrong. You’re confused.” He gripped my shoulder.

  “Don’t touch me.” I wriggled out from under his hand.

  My father clasped his hands together between his knees and closed his eyes. He mumbled something under his breath. His lips continued moving for some time, the words too whispery for me to make out. Then I caught it: “ . . . Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . .” The whole Psalms 23 over and over at ra
pid speed, as if that might help him convince me of his lies.

  “I have to go.” I stood up. I wasn’t sure if I’d gotten everything Angela Peligro needed, but I couldn’t take another minute of this performance—his or mine. I needed to take a shower.

  “Wait.”

  I stood where I was, blocking the sun from his sallow face.

  “Wait. I have to tell you something. Sit down.”

  I glanced over at Posie. I wished I were wearing an earpiece so she could tell me what to do. I sat.

  “I’m worried about you,” he said. “God spoke to me in prayer, and . . .”

  Here it was. The slimeball. Here was the sales pitch.

  He was good. It was how our family lived, after all. He sold more houses than anyone we knew. “I prayed about you this morning,” he’d tell whatever customer he was meeting with that day, “and I know you wanted to look at three bedrooms, but I saw a vision of something else. Will you let me show you?” And soon he was talking some young couple into paying $50,000 more than they planned, or taking the bigger house because “the Lord is good” and surely there would be more children some day, or maybe convincing a widow she needed a ranch house instead of a condo because one day she would be reconciled with her children, and they would want to visit her often. “Where will you put all the grandchildren?” he’d ask with a friendly, wise chuckle. “The Lord is good.”

  Once he told us all over dinner that he’d promised a man if he and his wife bought this particular house this particular day, God would grant the man a job that paid twice what he made now, so they could afford it.

  “And they believed you?” I scoffed.

  My father looked at me with hurt innocence. “Believed? Of course—it was the word of God.”

  That was his schtick—that if you came to him, the Lord had sent you, and this deal was meant to happen, on terms my father would dictate because he heard it straight from above.

  So now it was my turn. The Lord’s own agent was about to speak.

  “. . . and He warned me what will happen if you go on this way.”

  I gathered Posie’s jacket around me as some added bit of protection from everything he was. Then I remembered the recorder and opened the jacket again to leave my cleavage clear. It’s for Angela, I reminded myself. You have to get the proof. All I wanted to do was run.