by Liza Bennett
Perfect Lies
A Novel by
Liza Bennett
Dedication
For my sisters
Kate and Emily
and, as always,
for W.E.B.
Contents
Cover
Title page
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
About the Author
GONE TOO FAR…
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
OCTOBER 26, 11:35 A.M.
Running usually cured just about anything that ailed Meg Hardwick. A new business presentation that wasn’t coming together, say, or a morning alone after another disappointing date, and all she needed was that three-mile run along Riverside Drive and into the park, looping down to the boat basin and along the river. Often, by the time she had returned to her co-op at Eighty-sixth Street and Riverside, sweating, breathing hard, Meg would have to ask herself: What had she been worrying about again?
Not that Meg was ever trying to run away from her problems. One of the main reasons for her success was her determination to face every challenge head-on. She’d seen what self-indulgence could lead to when she was growing up, how her parents lives and dreams had slowly dissolved in a haze of alcohol and denial, and she vowed that she would never end up like that. However, she’d long since realized that life was not going to simply hand over the goods. She’d have to make things happen on her own. Grab the initiative. Seize the moment.
And she had. Created her own good looks. Built up Hardwick and Associates from nothing. Overseen every photo shoot, watched every line of copy. She’d pored over balance sheets, prayed for checks to clear. Pushed for profits. She’d made it all work through sheer force of will and the unstoppable momentum of someone who didn’t register the word “no” as an answer. Meg was all about “yes,” and “now,” and “not a problem.” She was about getting it done right. And in doing so, she’d developed a kind of emotional muscle—a tautness, an alertness, a hunger to keep going. Give Meg Hardwick a challenge—as any one of her fashion accounts would attest—and she would wrestle it to the ground and have it pinned in no time.
But even Meg had to admit that she was a great deal better at handling business concerns than personal ones. And the particular problem troubling her that morning was just about as personal as a problem could get. When it came to matters of the heart, she too-often discovered that her mind—usually so sharp and decisive—simply clouded over. Strong emotions meant big trouble for Meg. And her feelings that morning were at a high-water mark.
As Meg started off slowly on her run, it occurred to her that the weather, at least, was responding sympathetically to her mood. Thunderstorms were forecast for the afternoon; she could feel the air thickening with ozone. The sky had a greenish, underwater cast to it. The leaves of the majestic plane trees that lined the drive, already dry after the long hot summer, rustled like newspapers in the rising wind.
Concentrate, Meg told herself. Think it through, slowly, methodically as you would anything else. She could feel her pulse rate start to pick up as she hit her stride. She heard the even rhythm of her breathing. She was in very good shape, able to pass easily for someone a decade younger than her thirty-seven years. Her looks, her stamina—she worked just as hard at these as she did everything else. She enjoyed the effort of achievement, she loved reaching the goals she set for herself.
But neither hard work nor heavy thinking would solve this problem. This was like a natural disaster, an earthquake. It had hit her without warning. And now, trying to sort through the rubble, she had no idea how to begin to repair the damage. Or what dangerous aftershocks might await her.
Maybe, if it was just her life that was affected, the whole thing would be easier. She’d know what to do, how to end things, put the wrongs right. But when it came to seeing her younger sister Lark get hurt—or her three little nieces—Meg lost her common sense. Her practical instincts deserted her when she felt that those she loved the most in the world were being threatened. Meg realized as she sprinted for a quarter mile that she was just too angry at Ethan to know how to handle the situation. And her decision to keep Lark safely out of it had been well-intentioned but ultimately futile.
Thunder rumbled somewhere to the south over New Jersey. The sky to the west glowed with the greenish purple hues of an unripened eggplant, and the air smelled sulfurous as Meg made her way out of the park. A heavy rain was coming. The run solved nothing, but it solidified a growing unease in Meg. She had no choice, really. She had to tell Lark.
As she got off the elevator at her floor, the Edleson twins nearly mowed her down. In-line skating was her neighbors’ children’s latest craze; a Saturday rarely went by without Meg running into them.
“Sorry!” they cried in unison as they dived past her.
“It’s about to pour out there—” Meg started to tell them, but the door closed before she could finish her warning. Not that it would have stopped them. They were both headstrong and inseparable. In many ways, they reminded Meg of herself and Lark when they were growing up. Loving, dependent. Each other’s best friend. Closest confidantes. Staunchest supporters.
She had been planning to change and shower first, but the Edleson girls and their giggling lightheartedness changed Meg’s mind. She could do nothing to repair the damage, but the emotional crisis wasn’t confined to Meg’s life—it was about to shatter Lark’s as well.
Her hand was reaching for the receiver to call her sister when the phone rang. “Meg?”
“I don’t believe this—I was just going to phone you.” But, there had been something odd about Lark’s greeting. “Is everything… okay?”
“Oh, Meg.” Lark started to gasp as though trying to catch her breath, an indication, Meg knew, of extreme distress. “Meggie.”
“Lark. Baby, come on now. Just tell me. Just talk to me.”
“Meg … It’s Ethan.”
“Yes.” Meg steeled herself for what she knew was coming. Ethan had gotten to Lark first. “He’s dead.” “What?”
“Ethan’s been murdered. This morning. Janine found him in the studio. In front of the ovens. Someone had driven a burning pontil rod …” Lark’s voice started to trail off, but then she added with sudden vehemence: “Into his heart.”
“No—”
“Lucinda was there. She was curled up in the corner of the studio, holding the rod. They’ve taken her into custody.”
“Lark—”
“I’ve got to go now. There’s so much to do.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Meggie,” She started to cry. “I’m scared. I’m just so …”
“I’m leaving right now, baby,” Meg told her, as an angry streak of lightning lanced through the dismal afternoon and, with a clap of thunder, the storm finally broke over Manhattan.
It had always been Meg’s job to protect Lark. Whether the threat was as amorphous as ghosts in the dark, or as real as their parents fighting in the kitchen late at night, Meg was the
one who came up with the comforting words, the calming reassurances. Now, lightheaded with panic and a growing sense of unreality,Meg again promised Lark what she had so often promised during their childhood, “Everything’s going to be all right.”
But even as she said the words Meg knew how flimsy and hopeless they sounded.
2
Meg and Lark’s parents had what was called in the 1960s an “open marriage.” Though Frank and Sara, both from fairly conservative, middle-class families, had met and married at the end of the 1950s, they came of age as a couple in the midst of the sexual revolution, and had joined the counterculture with the whole-hearted, unabashed enthusiasm of religious converts. Meg, who was born in 1963 and whose first memories were hazy fragments from the Summer of Love, could distinctly remember her dad saying, with the rapt seriousness of the true believer: “Let it all hang out.”
For several years after the infamous festival, the family lived in a hippie commune near Woodstock, New York, where Frank designed psychedelic posters and record covers for a small design firm above a head shop in town. The whole area, by that time, had become overrun with dropouts and has-beens and scores of homeless teenagers looking for love and finding mostly lice and sexually transmitted diseases. It was—Meg realized when she was much older—a confusing and demanding time for young parents across the country. The lure of marijuana and the siren song of unrepressed sex must have been potent and easily addictive. But most hippies eventually matured, finished college, and moved out to the suburbs to raise their children. Meg’s parents were never able or willing to outgrow the ‘60s; Frank went to his grave with a peace symbol tattooed on his right bicep.
Growing up, Meg always tried to come to terms with the fact that her family was different. Hers was the only household she knew of that had a hashish bong on the coffee table. Frank was the only father at her junior high school graduation who still wore his hair in a ponytail. That her mother believed in the healing powers of crystals and her refusal to take her daughters to a G.P. for checkups was just one of the many familial quirks Meg learned how to handle emotionally—and sometimes practically. When Lark’s measles turned to mumps and then into a frightening, ongoing listlessness, it was Meg who finally picked up the phone and made an appointment with the local health clinic. And a good thing, too: the doctor diagnosed Lark with severe anemia due to a diet of Sara’s nutritionally unbalanced vegetarian fare. Other than vegetables, the family subsisted on pizza, grilled cheese sandwiches, and ice cream.
Frank and Sara were never intentionally negligent or uncaring. There was a lot of love and humor and good times in whatever run-down house or apartment the family currently occupied. And Meg loved them both, dearly. But, as the years passed and Meg grew up while her parents didn’t, she began to realize that she didn’t approve of them. The mind-bending, culture-changing ideals that had formed Frank and Sara’s thinking when Meg was a baby had, by the time she was in her early teens, deteriorated into feeble excuses for selfish and often self-destructive behavior.
“I’m not stoned,” Sara would irritably inform Meg as she lay in her darkened bedroom at three-thirty in the afternoon, the breakfast dishes still unwashed in the kitchen sink. “I’m meditating.”
Meg learned how to handle the drugs and the alcohol; her parents were sleepy and contented when stoned, boisterous and happy when drunk. They were, really, like children who wanted to be left alone with their playthings. Meg learned to take over the day-to-day running of the house, and she didn’t mind letting them be, so long as they were together. What made her crazy was when one or the other of them drifted back home with a stranger.
“Hey, girls, this is Cheryl,” Frank would announce at the breakfast table with a proud grin the Saturday morning after a long night out carousing. And there, across from them, would be some plump, pasty-faced redhead with smeared eye makeup and an overly revealing tube top. Sara would join them later, smiling and seemingly cordial to Frank’s conquest.
“Wow, you guys really have a good thing going here,” the clueless Cheryl would enthuse. “I’ve never met such a cool couple.”
And though the Edenic atmosphere would last until Cheryl finally pulled herself together and stumbled out the door, the trouble often began before Cheryl got her key into the ignition of her Ford Fairlane. The walls of the rented house were so thin that even from their upstairs bedroom, Meg and Lark could hear their parents fighting.
“Jesus, Frank,” Sara would say. “Where’d you find that? Under the bar at Storey’s?”
“At least I found some. What happened to your cowboy with the silver earring?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know? And let me just point out that I have a little more decency than to bring trash home and make the girls sit down and eat with it at the same table.”
“Oh, fuck you.” And Frank would slam out of the room and out of the house.
Frank and Sara claimed that what they were practicing was free love. What they ended up with, however, as far as Meg was concerned, was nothing more than cheap sex. What did it say about the family—about a marriage—Meg would ask herself, if one had to search outside it for stimulation and approval? She would look around her at the lifestyles of some of her high school friends and long for what she saw there—a placid, churchgoing wholesomeness. She didn’t care that Frank would scoff at her friends’ parents’ conservative politics, or that Sara would call the mothers “Stepford Wives.” Meg would have given anything to live the “boring, straight, repressed, and capitalistic” way that her friends did. Instead, she did what she could—learning how to cook and drive, helping Lark with her homework, shopping and cleaning—to make the household at least look normal. She also did her best to put a good face on their home life for her younger sister.
“Who is that man in Mommy’s room?” Lark would ask Meg during the night as they both lay awake listening to the sounds coming from the bedroom next to theirs.
“He’s a friend. Just go to sleep now.”
“Why was he yelling like that?”
“It’s a grown-up thing. But it means they’re having fun.”
“So he’s not hurting Mommy?”
“Oh no, baby, he’s making her happy.”
Perhaps Meg had sheltered Lark too much from the sordid side of her parents’ lives. She would make Lark go outside and play or go up to her bedroom when her parents fought. Later, she would drive Lark and herself to the movies or just cruise aimlessly down back roads when one of their parents’ “friends” came to visit.
“Why can’t we stay here when Carl comes to play with Mom?” Lark asked Meg once as they headed out to the car.
“Well,” Meg explained, automatically putting a soft spin on their hard reality. “Mommy doesn’t make your friends play with her, right? I mean, they’re your friends. Carl’s her special friend now. It’s just nicer for them if they get to be alone.”
“Is Carl a more special friend than Daddy?”
“No, baby, Daddy and Mommy are very best friends, no matter what. Remember that, okay?”
Meg had sugarcoated it all for Lark, making it palatable, making everything seem okay. Making it easy, natural even, for Lark to believe that what her parents shared was something to be proud of—even to emulate. If Lark had been given the time and opportunity,
Meg believed, she would gradually have come terms with the very real problems in her parents’ marriage. But Lark was only thirteen when Sara and Frank were killed in a car accident and their deaths placed them, in Lark’s mind, forever beyond reproach. For this—as for so many things about her younger sister’s upbringing—Meg felt responsible.
If Meg had often acted as a surrogate parent to Lark when Sara and Frank were alive, she stepped firmly into their shoes after they died. And like many people thrown into roles of responsibility before their time, Meg tended to be personally conservative and overprotective of her charge. With the help of a small nest egg left to her by her late grandmother, Meg put herself through Colu
mbia University. She then insisted that her younger sister attend college as well, though Lark had found even the ultraliberal Bennington “way over-structured and stifling.” When Meg heard that Lark, in her sophomore year, had moved into an apartment off campus with an adjunct professor in the art department, she had been furious. She turned murderous when she learned that he was married and had a young child.
“And you actually believe him when he tells you he’s going to get a divorce?” Meg had screamed into the phone from her office at Y&R. She’d been an up-and-coming junior account executive by that time, fresh out of college and wired for success. The pressurized world of advertising was the perfect conduit for her energies and ambition. She looked and acted smart, knew how to make her points in meetings, and had a knack for pleasing clients. It didn’t matter to her then that she didn’t have much of a social life, not to mention a love life.
“I’m coming up there this weekend,” Meg had announced. “And you both better be prepared to explain a few things.”
Bennington, Vermont, in February was a Currier & Ives print of snow-laden mountains and smoke-plumed chimneys. The New England college town moved at such a slower pace than Manhattan that it seemed to Meg to exist in a different century entirely. By the time Meg finished the three-hour lunch with Ethan and Lark she sensed that what bound them to each other was also of a different time and place. Even Meg, who considered herself the furthest thing from a romantic, could see they were in love. They could hardly take their eyes off each other, let alone their hands. They were constantly touching and kissing as if to reassure themselves that the other was real.
It was more than physical, though Meg at first wanted to write it off as such. No one knew Lark better than Meg—her fierce independence, her artistic yearnings. Lark had always been the “creative one”—making up poems, putting on plays, designing and building elaborate houses for her family of beloved dolls. Since girlhood, she had been determined to be an artist of some kind. She had gone to Bennington to discover her métier. What she seemed to have discovered instead was Ethan and the promise of more than just existing as an artist. She found she could create and sustain an entire artistic existence.
