Two Truths and a Lie

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  “Yes,” she said. “Fine. Just going inside.” It was then that she remembered the reason Zoe Butler-Gray always brought out the IPA at parties—not the pilsner—was because it had an alcohol content of about a million percent. She remembered that just about the same time she remembered that she had eaten neither lunch nor dinner before the vodka. She felt herself beginning to fall.

  6.

  The Squad

  We took the center table at Plum Island Grille, the only one long enough to accommodate us. Some of us, arriving early, had met beforehand in the bar on the other side of the restaurant, from which you could see the famous Plum Island salt marshes and the turnpike (a grand name for a short stretch of road) we had just driven over to get there. Except for Esther, who lived on the island and had walked down. It was the only time of year it was in any way convenient to be Esther.

  In the distance, if we squinted, we could see, or imagined we could see, the Pink House, long empty, much speculated about, which sits in the center of the marsh, paint peeling, roof leaking, cupola choked with birds’ nests. The Pink House was built in 1925 as part of a divorce settlement by a disgruntled husband for his ex-wife. You want your own house? the husband is rumored to have said. I’ll build you a house! And, bam, he built a house, in beautiful isolation.

  After a time we repaired to our table to meet those who had just arrived. One of us couldn’t make it, and we were somewhat surprised to find that Brooke Kearney had taken it upon herself (without consulting the rest of us) to invite the new woman, Katie’s mother, to fill the spot. Sherri. With an i. Sherri from the beach.

  We were surprised, but we weren’t going to be rude about it. We are nothing if not welcoming. Even though the look Esther shot Brooke when she realized what had happened . . . some of us agreed after the fact that that was borderline impolite.

  It was a birthday! We started out with tequila shots, twelve of them, with twelve slices of lime and four salt shakers to share. That is how we always do birthdays. It was a good tequila, a Clase Azul, which had just come on the scene for us, and was so smooth you didn’t really need the lime. Then appetizers: tempura oysters, shrimp cocktail, crab cakes.

  Sherri didn’t seem to have any compunction about ordering the surf and turf, we all noted. The rest of us stuck to the grill board with swordfish and pineapple salsa. It was bathing suit season, after all.

  With the tequila, and the cocktails that followed, Sherri became a little more animated. Her clothing choices were just this side of okay—when one of us tucked in the label to her dress for her (It was sticking out! We weren’t snooping!), we noticed that it said Ann Taylor Loft. That’s just an observation, not a judgment. She’d worn lipstick, which was brighter than the rest of ours, and mascara, though studying her some of us thought that eyelash extensions would do wonders. Her mascara was clumping. It was hard to put a finger specifically on the rest of what was wrong. Well, nothing was wrong. But something was off. That’s the best way to put it. Something desperate in her laugh? Yes, that’s just it, that’s what it was. Something desperate.

  7.

  Rebecca

  Rebecca took a bite of her scallops and thought, I don’t even know these women. She thought, These people are strangers to me. We were thrown together by happenstance, that’s all. Happenstance and geography. These were thoughts she’d been having more and more often lately. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her friends anymore, that wasn’t exactly right—it was that nobody here knew what to do with her sadness after Peter. Immediately after, sure: there was the food and the offers to take over carpools and so forth. But after a time, Rebecca could tell that secretly they thought (and maybe sometimes talked among themselves) that it was about time for Rebecca to get on with it. They wanted the old Rebecca back, the one who planned trips and organized sleepovers. They didn’t understand that that Rebecca was gone forever.

  Brooke had invited an outsider to Esther’s birthday dinner, which was clearly vexing Esther, though she was trying her best not to show it. Rebecca considered the new woman, who was sitting next to her. She had seen her on the beach at surf camp, but Rebecca had been on the phone with Daniel for a lot of the morning. Daniel’s brother-in-law was having problems with his daughter, who was thirteen, and Daniel was trying to help him by having her stay with him while his brother-in-law went on a business trip to Cincinnati. Now Daniel himself was having trouble with the girl.

  The woman was Sherri “with an i” (that was how she introduced herself, as though the i were of particular value, a bonus). All Rebecca knew about her was that she had a daughter the same age as all of the girls and that she had moved from somewhere (Illinois?) after a divorce.

  “Nice to meet you,” Rebecca had said automatically, even though it wasn’t, not really. She’d been reared on a steady diet of politeness—thank-you notes for every gift, a kind word for any person she ran across—and she’d carried many of these habits into adulthood and tried to instill them in her own children. But manners were thing number 758 that no longer mattered to Rebecca after Peter.

  “Oh, hey!” said Esther, who sat on Rebecca’s other side. Alcohol always made Esther’s fair skin flush the color of a spring radish. “I’ve been meaning to say, it’s really too bad, what happened with Alexa and her friends. I heard the three of them don’t hang out anymore.”

  Rebecca, startled out of her reverie, was surprised into showing her surprise. “Destiny and Caitlin?” she asked. (Rebecca had been wondering for months what had happened between Alexa and those two, but the answer was somewhere in Alexa’s vault, locked away, unattainable.) “Nothing happened,” she added.

  Esther assessed Rebecca’s ignorance too quickly. “Of course not,” she said.

  “Why?” Faced with Esther’s knowing look Rebecca had no choice but to ask. “What did you hear happened?”

  “Oh my gosh, nothing!” said Esther. “I didn’t hear anything.” She put a hand nervously to her earlobe as if checking for a lost earring. “I just meant—I mean, I heard it had something to do with Alexa’s plans for next year. But you know what? I could be totally off-base. I’m not even sure who I heard that from, now that I think about it. I’m probably thinking of someone else entirely.”

  Rebecca concentrated for a moment on the buzzing of the other conversations going on around her. She heard Georgia cry out, with a loud laugh, “We’ll have to get rid of her!”

  “Alexa’s plan for next year is to go to Colby.” Rebecca didn’t say as you know, and she didn’t say, obviously, but both were implied. Rebecca would not get caught up in the wasp’s nest of competing agendas. She would finish her scallops, and she would go home, and she would call Daniel to say good night, and she would be asleep by ten thirty.

  Then she noticed that the woman on the other side of her, Sherri with an i, didn’t look quite right. Rebecca laid a hand on her arm and said, “Are you okay?”

  “Completely fine,” said Sherri. “Really. It’s just a little warm in here, that’s all. Do you feel warm?”

  “I do,” said Rebecca (she didn’t). She didn’t believe that it was the temperature. The woman looked to be in some distress. Her dress was droopy and her eyes were droopy and Rebecca could bet that underneath it all her soul was droopy. A divorce was a loss of a high order: not the death of a person, but the death of a union. Esther had turned away from Rebecca to talk to Dawn, and Rebecca leaned closer to the poor broken creature on her right.

  “Tequila does that to me too,” she whispered. “I always have seltzer as my second drink. Sometimes I just can’t keep up.”

  Sherri with an i said, “Smart,” and gave Rebecca a grateful glance, and Rebecca felt a small, empathetic, recently underused part of herself begin to unfurl.

  8.

  Sherri

  She shouldn’t have ordered the second cocktail. After all, she’d already had the wine at Brooke’s house in the afternoon. But the first one had gone down so easily, especially after the shot, and everybody else was h
aving another one, and the old Sherri could hold a lot of liquor. (She was thinner now, from the stress of the move, less curvy, more of a lightweight.)

  Also, she shouldn’t have ordered the surf and turf. She’d been one of the first women to order, and for a moment she forgot where she was, who she was now. She’d never looked at menu prices before; she’d never said no to the best dish in whatever restaurant she was in. By the time she remembered, it was too late.

  There were so many different conversations going on—the women had broken off into twos or threes, beautiful heads bent toward one another. She caught little snippets here and there, individual words—camp and horrendous and contractor and eyelashes—but couldn’t find her entrance into any single discussion. She heard someone at the far end of the table say, “We’ll have to get rid of her!” and her blood ran cold.

  Only the woman next to her had spoken to her, and it was with such kindness that she felt tears unexpectedly prick her eyes.

  She picked up her steak knife and looked at her plate: an eight-inch filet for the turf, and shrimp scampi for the surf. It had been Bobby who introduced her to good steak; when she met him she was familiar only with the cheap cuts: the chucks, the flanks. Bobby taught her about Kobe and tenderloin and porterhouse. He took her to Mastro’s on Sixth Avenue.

  “Get whatever you want,” he said to her anytime they went out. It had given him great pride to be able to say that. He beamed like a little boy who’d just tied his shoes for the first time. Mastro’s was the first restaurant, but not the last, that Sherri had been to without prices on the menu. It struck her like a swift blow that she’d have to look at prices, and very carefully, for the rest of her life. She never should have ordered this dish. She had lost her appetite anyway. She cut into an asparagus spear.

  We’ll have to get rid of her. No mirth when Bobby said that. Madison Miller was a piece of business that must be attended to, like filling out invoices and managing the fleet of trucks.

  Eventually Sherri managed to eat her meal, and the good meat and the good shrimp got to work soaking up the alcohol, and so by the time she was driving the Acura back across the causeway she felt almost normal. (Many of the ladies seemed to have carpooled, so it was a lonely business, climbing into the Acura all on her own, though she did manage a quick good-bye to her savior.) The moon, almost full, was winking above the salt marshes, and she lowered the window to take in the very particular briny smell of the summer evening. She began to feel almost peaceful, and when she parked in front of the half-house on Olive Street she was looking forward to telling Katie all about the restaurant. Maybe they could go there one evening soon and sit on the more casual side, near the bar, and share two of the small plates. (The flatbread had looked very good.)

  She called Katie’s name as she unlocked the door and entered the house. Every light in the house was on, and the living room, where she thought Katie would be watching television, was empty. Her pulse started to race. She called Katie’s name again, then again, and she heard some reply—as quiet as the mewing of a kitten—from upstairs. The hall light was on too, and the lights in her bedroom and Katie’s as well.

  “Katie-kins?” Instantly Sherri was 100 percent sober, with every hair, every pore and fiber of her body, on high alert. Katie was sitting cross-legged in the very corner of her very bright bedroom, her knees drawn up and into her chest. She had pulled the comforter from her bed to cover herself. Sherri rushed to Katie’s side.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened,” said Katie. “I just got scared.”

  We’ll have to get rid of her, came the fragment of memory, floating along on the summer evening, and Sherri felt all of her collective terror gather itself and sluice through her.

  “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have gone out. I shouldn’t have left you alone. I shouldn’t—”

  “Mommy,” said Katie. Sherri opened her arms and Katie uncurled her body and fell into them. Sherri felt her tears leak out into Katie’s beautiful hair and they stayed for some time, rocking back and forth in the too-bright room, with Katie’s sobs getting louder, until, without any warning, she threw up all over her comforter.

  9.

  Alexa

  When Alexa woke up the next morning she was lying in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room, under an unfamiliar comforter. She was alone. Ohgodohgodohgod. She was alone in a strange bed. On a chair next to the bed she saw her O’Neill dress folded neatly. Oh God. She lifted up the covers and peeked down, afraid she would find that she was naked. No. She was wearing a pair of sweatpants (Sweatpants! Surely this was a first.) and—she felt behind her neck—a hooded sweatshirt. She pulled the sweatshirt away from her body to examine it. It was purple, and it said knights on it in gold. Where had she just seen a sweatshirt with gold writing? Fragments from the night before began to filter back into her brain. She was drinking cranberry juice and vodka. She was angry with Tyler. She was looking at the moon. She was spinning.

  There was a soft knocking at the door, and when she said, “Yes?” her voice cracked, as if it hadn’t been used in a long time. Into the room walked a boy, and the rest of the puzzle pieces clicked into place. She’d drunk two drinks on an empty stomach, and then she’d fallen onto this boy’s sweatshirt. She remembered him guiding her gently around the side of the house, and into a car.

  “I’m Cameron,” he said. “Hartwell. Cam. In case you don’t remember. I brought you tea.” She noticed that before putting down the tea he laid down a coaster. There was a matching coaster underneath a half-empty (half-full?) water glass, which triggered a memory of two Advils proffered to her.

  “Is this your house?”

  “Yup. This is the guest room. I slept in my room.” That grin again. “It was all very proper. You were shaking in that dress, so I gave you some clothes to put on. Which you did by yourself. In the bathroom.”

  “Thanks,” she said warily. “But where are we?”

  “Off Turkey Hill.”

  Turkey Hill was the neighborhood on the other side of the highway from downtown, where many of the houses were bigger, newer, with yards and driveways and garages. Alexa never had reason to go out to Turkey Hill. Turkey Hill was exactly as far from Plum Island as you could get while still being in Newburyport. What the hell was she doing on Turkey Hill?

  “Why were you at Zoe’s party?”

  “Shelby wanted to go. My, um, girlfriend. You know Shelby?” Alexa nodded. “She and Zoe ran cross country together, they’re close.” He shrugged.

  “What happened to Shelby last night?” Alexa wanted to know, and she also didn’t.

  “She went home,” Cam said. (Was that a grin playing at the corners of his mouth?) “She got a ride with someone else.”

  Most likely, thought Alexa, Shelby had to get to bed on time. She probably had the early shift handing out breakfast to homeless people in Lowell, or she was organizing a charity walk on Boston Common.

  “She was mad,” added Cam.

  “Mad?”

  Now the grin was full-on. “She didn’t like it that I said I would take you home.”

  “So why did you?”

  “You looked like you could use the help.”

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  “Well, you begged me not to take you home.”

  “I did?”

  He nodded. “You wouldn’t even give me your address.” This sounded plausible; Alexa sort of remembered shaking her head and making a motion like she was zipping her lips. “I asked you if you wanted to come here for a little while. We watched some Samantha Bee, and you fell asleep. I thought it was best if I just got you to bed instead of trying to get you back in the car and having a whole situation with your parents.”

  “My mom,” she corrected. Then: “Samantha Bee? You’re so woke.” She was teasing, and also not.

  “I try.”

  “How come I don’t know you? Have you always lived here?”

  “Since I was three.”
<
br />   “You didn’t go to Newburyport High.”

  “Immaculate Conception through eighth grade.” (The Catholic school. Alexa hadn’t known many of the IC kids, except for a few girls she played town soccer with in elementary and middle school.) “Then St. John’s Prep. I go to school in Vermont now.” He pointed to his T-shirt, which was gray. In purple letters were the words saint michael’s college and in the middle of the shirt was a drawing of a knighthead.

  That explained it. “Wow. I’m so sorry. I have no idea how I got so drunk.” Even though she did know: it was simply a terrible mix of liquor and a strong beer and an extremely empty stomach. “What time is it?”

  “Just after eight,” said Cam. “I’m an early riser. Do you need to call someone? Tell them where you are?”

  Just after eight was good. In her house, nobody would expect her to be up before ten o’clock, and since Tyler had picked her up for last night’s party, her Jeep was still in the driveway. Even so, precautionary measures were in order.

  Alexa picked up her phone, which was on the nightstand, plugged into a charger: a thoughtful bonus. There were five texts and two voice mails from Tyler, which she didn’t feel like listening to or reading yet. Her best bet was Morgan. She sent her a text. Soooo tired. Can u tell mom I got up and went back to bed? She knew that she had left the door to her bedroom closed, as she always did, and she knew that Morgan wouldn’t question her whereabouts and that her mother had read a long book last year about the power and necessity of sleep for the development of the teenage brain and since then had never judged Alexa for sleeping too much. Alexa could use the 360 app to ascertain when her mom and Morgan left the house, and then she would ask Cam to drive her home.