Perfect Lies

by Liza Bennett

  “It’s like a regular, I don’t know…” Lucinda had dropped her backpack on the floor in front of Meg’s desk and was looking around the small, cramped room. A filing cabinet, too full to close properly, stood sentinel to the right of the door. A long, faux-wood covered table sat next to it, stacked with fabric swatches and sample books in plastic binders. Behind that, taking up most of the wall, was a bulletin board pinned with active print ads and storyboards in various stages of production.

  “Like a regular office?” Meg finished for her, closing the door behind them. “You were expecting something more glamorous?”

  “Yeah. Guess so.” Lucinda slumped into the armchair opposite Meg’s desk. “Okay, so go ahead and scream at me. I’m ready now.”

  “Well, I’m not,” Meg replied, sliding into the one luxury piece of office furniture she’d allowed herself: a black leather armchair with more adjustable positions than the bucket seat of a Jaguar. “I’m not one of your parents who, by the way, are totally out their minds with worry. I just got off the phone with Lark.”

  “Lark’s not my mom, okay?”

  “Oh, give it a rest, Luce. She cares about you. She and Ethan are sick with worry. You’ve gotten their absolute attention, all right?”

  “That’s not what I wanted,” Lucinda mumbled, chewing on a thumbnail. “I don’t give a fuck about them or their fucking concern.”

  “Fine. Point registered,” Meg said, picking up a pen and tapping it on the desktop. “Where have you been?”

  “Like … around,” Lucinda said, looking down at the badly chipped polish on her nails with sudden interest. “With some friends.”

  “Okay,” Meg said, trying to keep her patience. In the past, she’d found that pushing Lucinda for a clear explanation of her moods or motives only made her shut down even further. “So, just what exactly are you doing here? As you can see, I’m in a middle of a busy, if not particularly glamorous, workday.”

  “I need a place to stay. I ran out of money,” Lucinda’s words came out in a rush. “And you told me once that I could come stay with you, remember, like, over Christmas? But so, okay, I’m a little early—”

  “That was if you stayed sober. If you pulled yourself together. I’d hardly say—”

  “Fine.” Lucinda lunged for her backpack. “Thought I’d give it a try. But I can see you’re just like the rest of them.”

  “Oh, sit down,” Meg said. “It’s not as if you have a million options. Lord, just look at you, sweetheart. Where the hell are you going to go? Without any money. A shelter? Yes, I suppose, you can spend the night.”

  “Just the night? I was hoping …” Lucinda’s voice trailed off along with the sentence.

  “But we have to call Lark right now,” Meg, added. “Let her and Ethan know you’re here.”

  “Oh, fuck that!” Lucinda said, bolting up again. “I’m not talking to him—that asshole.”

  “I’ll call Lark,” Meg said, picking up the phone. “You sit there and see if you can’t manage to scrounge up a little gratitude for me.”

  *

  The meeting had gone well. Very well. Vincent Goldman turned out to be middle-aged and balding, with a basketball-sized paunch. After some initial posturing as a total company man, he began to vent his true feelings about the new corporate VP who had put the account in review against Vincent’s better judgment.

  Vincent and Meg talked for over an hour about the problems of upper management. About the squeeze so many middle-aged managers were feeling from all these whiz kids with their computers and their MBAs and hot-shot marketing buzzwords. Anyone could sit around yakking about “vertical marketing” and “brand awareness” but it was the Vince Goldmans of this world who actually got the work done. At around four-thirty, Meg was finally able to slide some of the comps across Vincent’s desk, showing the three that most closely resembled the company’s current approach but with a cleaner, more contemporary graphic look. And Vince had responded with obvious enthusiasm and even further confidences: the SportsTech annual advertising budget would edge six million the following year, not including collateral.

  It was past five by the time Vince had wound down enough for Meg to gracefully depart. She settled into the backseat of the livery cab feeling hopeful for the first time all week. An account the size of SportsTech would more than offset Meg’s concerns about Frieda Jarvis. Lucinda had resurfaced, seemingly not too much worse for the wear, and Lark had been relieved to the point of tears by the good news. Now there was just the Ethan problem and, with these other positive events behind her, Meg felt newly confident that she could solve that as well. An hour later, between rush-hour traffic and a tractor-trailer accident on the Triborough Bridge, Meg’s car was still a mile from the entrance ramp to the George Washington Bridge.

  She called Oliver on her cell phone.

  “It doesn’t look like we’re getting back into Manhattan this century. Any fires there that need putting out?”

  “No, just a few messages. Nothing business-wise that can’t wait until Monday. Lucinda called from your place, as you’d asked, said she’s gotten in okay.”

  “Good. I shudder to think what my kitchen looks like about now.”

  “Well, I’d certainly count your silverware before she leaves again,” Oliver suggested with a smile in his voice. Then he added, “Oh yes, and Ethan phoned right after you left. That’s about it.”

  “So close up shop. And thank everyone for me. I have the feeling we’re going to bag this one.”

  “I knew that kid was trouble the minute I saw her.” Salvatore Arigato had been the super at Meg’s apartment for the last fifteen years. Short, burly, and opinionated, Sal had a confrontational macho manner that grated on Meg’s nerves. She’d long sensed that Sal didn’t think any woman should be allowed to live on her own, let alone in one of the best co-op apartments in his building. He accosted Meg by the mailboxes as she came in that evening.

  “Are you referring to my niece?” Meg asked, pulling out the mail and then letting the metal door slam shut. She started back down the hall to the elevators, Sal trailing after her.

  “Kid with the nose ring. Yeah.”

  “Need I tell you she’s my guest here?” Meg said, straightening to her full height, which made her easily a foot taller than Sal. “I invited her to stay.”

  “Well, she’s gone now. Made a hell of a lot of noise doing it, too. Don’t like that kind of craziness around here, Miz Hardwick.”

  Meg tried not to show her concern as she stepped onto the elevator and pushed the button for her floor. She couldn’t imagine what kind of trouble—let alone commotion—Lucinda could make in her apartment. It didn’t occur to her until she was hurrying down the hallway from the elevator that, if Lucinda had indeed taken off with Meg’s keys, she wouldn’t be able to get into her own apartment without having to enlist her insufferable super’s aid. She rang her buzzer anyway, mostly out of irritation, and was relieved to hear movement inside. Sal had to be wrong—Lucinda was still there. The door opened, and Meg found herself confronting Ethan.

  “I needed to see you,” Ethan said. “I tried to call.”

  “But I phoned Lark. Weren’t you still there? Didn’t she tell you?”

  Ethan leaned against the wall and shook his head, his eyes clouded with worry. It was like some bizarre mirror image of the night of his opening—the two of them facing each other in her front hallway. Only this time when she closed the door, she moved quickly past him and he followed her into the living room.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said, looking around the room. The doors to her audio unit were open, a dozen CDs stacked in front of it on the carpet. Something had left a slimy path of brown liquid across Meg’s good Pakistani carpet. It took a moment for her to see that the trail ended with an open can of Diet Coke lying on its side under the coffee table.

  “I had to talk to you. I needed to see you. Lucinda running away like that really threw me. I began to think that maybe it was her the o
ther day in the studio when we heard that noise—maybe she was watching us, hearing me bleating on like some sick ram. I began to see myself through her eyes—objectively, coldly. I hated what I saw, Meg, and I—”

  “What happened today, Ethan,” Meg cut him off, furious that once again Ethan seemed incapable of seeing beyond his own pain and problems. “Here, with Lucinda?”

  “Well…” Ethan began to pace. “I drove down here, figuring you’d still be at work, that I’d wait in the hall until you got home. But I heard music playing in your apartment. I rang the bell.”

  “And Lucinda answered.”

  “Yes. And when she saw me she just went ballistic,” Ethan paused, looking down the hall to Meg’s front door. “She told me to keep my dirty hands off of you. To just leave you—and her—alone. She was seriously nuts. I tried to calm her down.” Ethan tapped nervously on the back of Meg’s couch.

  “So she had been spying on us in the studio?”

  “Yeah, she told me she saw the whole thing. Accused me of trying to rape you. That wasn’t true, I told her. I was just trying to reason with you. To get you to see—”

  “Where did she go?” Meg demanded, the anger ringing so clearly in her voice that Ethan stopped and stared across the room at her.

  “I don’t know. She slammed out of here, that’s all I can tell you. What a mess,” he said, running his hands nervously through his hair. “What a fucking—”

  “Ethan.” Meg stopped him. “We’ve got to tell Lark what happened.”

  Meg made the call.

  “But I don’t understand….” Lark finally replied after she’d heard Meg’s explanation. “Ethan left me a note saying that he had to go down early to the gallery. What was he doing at your place?”

  “He was … there was … there was something he needed to talk to me about.” The hesitancy in Meg’s tone explained far more than she actually said. The silence was a palpable thing, a negative presence, like the dark of night.

  “Oh, Meggie,” Lark said, as she hung up the phone. “Not you, too.”

  11

  OCTOBER 26, 1:15 P.M.

  Meg had debated with herself through a long, restless night after that conversation with Lark. She kept waiting for the phone to ring—for Lark or Ethan to call back and say they’d talked it all through. That the truth was finally out. Instead, she’d heard nothing. She’d woken up feeling nervous and ill and decided that the only thing that could set her right would be a good long run in the park. But the run hadn’t helped, and soon any hope Meg had of averting the crisis was ended for good. The disaster struck.

  I have something to tell you, Meggie…. Ethan’s dead.

  Meg called Abe as soon as she hung up with Lark, but his answering machine informed her that he could be reached upstate that weekend. The radio was delivering severe thunderstorm warnings with gale-force winds throughout the afternoon and into the evening. The air had turned sultry, the sky a dull, ominous green. On the way to pick up her car at the garage on Eighty-eighth Street the wind whipped grit into her eyes, and leaves swirled around her ankles.

  The thunderstorm broke again just north of the city and then howled around Meg with a hungry fury almost the entire way up to Red River. Her hands were slick with sweat, her body hunched forward over the wheel straining to see ahead through the sheets of rain and wind. The roads were flooding under the downpour; water slopped against the tires and splashed onto the windshield every time another car passed. She drove as slowly as she dared. She tried to keep her thoughts focused on Ethan and the hell he had created over the past weeks, even as the meaning and extent of the calamity that had overtaken them all washed over her in an enormous wave. Feverish, she felt chilled to the bone and flushed at the same time.

  Meg found herself at one point trying to pray, the words swimming unbidden into her consciousness: Our father who art in heaven. A few miles later, she heard herself crying “No, oh, please, God, no.” Tears streamed unchecked down her cheeks. She was aware of a pain in her chest that wouldn’t cease, as though some heavy object were pressing on her diaphragm and interfering with her breathing. It took her a while to realize that there wasn’t anything physically wrong with her. Simply put, she was feeling guilt. She’d been weak. She’d been afraid to tell Lark about Ethan’s problems. In her attempt to protect her younger sister and let her think that all was right with the world, she’d allowed the very life she hoped to shelter to become disorganized, chaotic.

  She had long disliked Ethan’s controlling, egotistical tendencies, and yet, looking back over the past long weeks, she realized how closely her own behavior had resembled his. Where had her loyalties been? Her trust? Her respect for her younger sister? From the beginning of Ethan’s onslaught, Meg had simply decided that Lark didn’t have to know the facts—even worse, perhaps, couldn’t handle them. Instead, she’d allowed Ethan to set the pace and control the situation, while they both left the woman who stood most to lose by their actions totally in the dark. Ethan never should have lied to Lark, this was true. On the other hand, Meg should never have allowed him to do so.

  How much, even now, did Lark know about the man she’d married? Had Ethan finally told his wife about his feelings for Meg? Had he discussed the emotional whirlwind that had been driving him to extreme behavior over the past few weeks? It was this force, this madness that Ethan had unleashed, that had swept Meg up in its ugly path, and that Meg now believed had pushed Lucinda into an act of blind fury.

  Lucinda. Angry, frightened, needy. Lucinda, who saw Meg as a friend and perhaps something of a mentor. Almost from the moment Meg had met Lucinda over a year ago, they’d shared a special rapport. Meg had sensed that the teenager, who frequently complained about having to live out in the sticks, admired Meg’s stylish Manhattan wardrobe, her expensive haircut, the overall gloss of city life. After slowly circling Meg for a few weekends, Lucinda had begun to draw closer.

  “Cool car,” Lucinda had said last summer when Meg drove up in her newly leased Acura. She’d chosen it primarily for its reputation as a safe, well-built car, and she’d been able to write off half its monthly cost as a company expense.

  “Hop in,” Meg had invited her. “I’ve got thirty-six thousand miles to spend.” Lucinda had opened up to her for the first time that afternoon, though Meg still wasn’t sure why. Perhaps Lucinda thought that Meg’s more sophisticated lifestyle would make her a more forgiving listener. Or, more likely, the lonely teenager desperately needed an older woman in whom to confide.

  “So, do you have a man friend or anything in the city?” Lucinda had asked after complaining about the idiot geeks who passed for boys in the Red River area. Glancing at the overweight teenager, Meg suspected that Lucinda’s difficulty in finding a boyfriend might not be entirely the fault of the male population. Her badly cut dyed hair and poor complexion would no doubt put her somewhere near the bottom of the social food chain.

  “I’ve just broken up with someone,” Meg confided in return. This was a month or two before Paul Stokes appeared on her horizon, and she was in her own desperate state about men.

  “I bet you get asked out a lot, though,” Lucinda replied.

  “Oh, I keep busy. But, honestly, I haven’t had much luck in the love department.”

  “Like, you’re probably too good for most of them,” Lucinda had replied, and Meg felt touched by the younger woman’s uncritical support.

  “Not necessarily,” Meg had said, trying to be truthful and also hoping to give Lucinda some honest advice. “I really believe that a lot about love is a matter of luck. You know, being in the right place at the right time.”

  “Yeah, but that’s the problem,” Lucinda said. “In Red River, like, I’m in the wrong fucking place all the time.”

  That had been the first of many such conversations between Lucinda and Meg. Gradually, Meg began to notice Lucinda’s defenses come down and her honesty quotient shoot up.

  “You know, it’s because I’m fat that no one likes me,” s
he told Meg earlier that past summer. “But I eat because it makes me feel good. Sometimes I can do a whole box of Oreo cookies in one sitting. ”

  “And that takes—what?—about twenty minutes? That’s not a lot of time to feel good, as far as I’m concerned. But I think you’re right, Luce. Lose a little weight—you’re nice and tall—and the boys will come around.”

  “I’m not saying that the boys don’t, like, come around, Meg,” Lucinda said slyly. “There’s other ways of attracting attention, if you know what I mean.”

  Meg made a policy of not lecturing Lucinda directly; she knew the teenager wouldn’t listen if she tried. Instead, she tried to make her points by speaking in generalities. Lucinda was smart enough to draw her own conclusions.

  “You know, I’ve always thought that no one’s going to like you if you make it clear that you don’t much like yourself. Giving it away for free is a mighty clear sign that you’re discounting the merchandise.”

  Whether Lucinda ever acted on her advice, Meg didn’t know. She did keep tagging along behind her on weekends when she visited. Lark pointed out that, unlike other Saturdays nights, Lucinda always made a point of sticking around for dinner if Meg was there. Meg was well aware that Lucinda’s behavior when she wasn’t around was far from stellar: her drinking and delinquency at school were only worsening with time. But Meg knew that Lucinda trusted her, probably more than she did anyone else in Red River. Trusted and liked her. And by not stopping Ethan weeks before, by allowing his feelings to spiral so out of control, she had exposed Lucinda to something the girl never should have witnessed. Afterward, when Lucinda ran away, it was Meg she ultimately sought out. Looking for a haven. And it was Meg who had allowed Lucinda to open the door to the girl’s worst nightmare: Ethan.

  Like an avenging angel, Lucinda had performed the act that Meg should have done weeks ago herself—she stopped Ethan from doing any further harm. Lucinda’s impulsive deed, however, had been fatal. Whether or not she intended to kill her stepfather, she had surely destroyed her own chances. And, right now, as far as Meg could tell, no one but Meg really knew why.