Two Truths and a Lie

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  22.

  Sherri

  Sherri climbed the stairs to Katie’s room carrying a basket of laundry that she’d just dried at, yes, the Laundromat.

  The door to Katie’s room was closed, and Sherri put down the basket of laundry to open it. They weren’t a doors-closed sort of household, especially now that it was just the two of them. Sherri had always prided herself on her openness with Katie, on using the anatomically correct terms when referring to body parts, both male and female, and if Katie should ask her any questions about sex, Sherri was going to tell her everything she knew. Which, admittedly, was far less than you could find out online these days. But Sherri would do her best.

  “What are you doing up here, sweetheart?” she asked, as she was opening the door.

  “Mom!” cried Katie, and almost immediately after that, “Nothing!” She was lying on the bed, holding something, and whatever it was she was holding she shuttled swiftly under her bottom. She lay there stiffly, staring at the ceiling, like a corpse awaiting the attentions of an undertaker.

  Out of nowhere Sherri was angry. The rage came upon her so quickly that it carried with it its own personal heat, like a sudden sunburn. She was angry at Bobby, and she was angry at the adjustment counselor, with her pantsuits and her work pumps and her gentle smile and her freaking advice. She was angry at the cheap cotton comforter on Katie’s twin bed, and she was angry at this town, where she and Katie, who had been somebodys where they came from, now had to prove themselves worthy, like college girls pledging a sorority. She was angry at her stupid ugly shirt and her sensible shoes and her hair color and her short, ugly nails. She pulled at the thing that was sticking out from under Katie, and Katie said, “Mom! Don’t!” Katie grabbed part of the comforter in each hand and pressed her back down, trying not to surrender her treasure. But Sherri was motivated, and she was stronger, and she pulled and pulled until she had it in her hands.

  It was a notebook, one of those black-and-white composition books sometimes required for school.

  Sherri hadn’t bought this notebook for her daughter.

  She started to open it and Katie reared up, grabbing the notebook out of Sherri’s hands. “Don’t,” she hissed. (Katie never hissed. They were not hissing people, just as they were not closed-door people.) “It’s mine,” Katie said. “It’s private.” She held the book close to her chest, wrapping her arms around it.

  “What is it?” Sherri demanded.

  “It’s just a notebook.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Morgan gave it to me.”

  “Morgan? Why was Morgan giving you a notebook?”

  “No reason,” said Katie. “She has like ten of them. It was never even used.” Morgan had told Katie that her mom kept buying her the notebooks for her to write about her feelings after her dad died.

  Katie stuck out her bottom lip in a way that reminded Sherri of what she’d been like as a little girl—breezy and self-possessed, until you crossed her—and Sherri’s rage left her as quickly as it had come. None of it was Katie’s fault, not Bobby or Madison or any of the rest of it, not the cheap bedding or Sherri’s ugly nails. She sat on the edge of the bed, nearly panting with the exertion of having been so angry and of trying to hide it. “I’m sorry, Katie-kins,” she said. “I overreacted.”

  “That’s okay,” said Katie. She stared at the ceiling, back to her self-contained, unflappable self. She was waiting for Sherri to leave so she could continue writing in Morgan Coleman’s cast-off notebook; eventually Sherri did leave. So what if it was a diary? Shouldn’t all young girls be allowed to keep a diary? In fact, wasn’t a diary actually a refreshing change from all of their iScreens, and shouldn’t this behavior be encouraged? What could be the harm in it, really? Katie didn’t know a lot of the specifics—Sherri had been very careful to shield her from the worst of it, and the counselor had declared her remarkably well-adjusted, considering.

  And yet. What if Sherri was mistaken about that? What if Katie knew more than she was letting on? What if Katie put secrets in that notebook? Not little-girl secrets like who had a crush on whom but big, bad, grown-up secrets, the kind that nobody could ever, ever, ever read.

  What then?

  Did Bobby remember the night they met the way Sherri did? She’d never know, now. They were at a bar in Jersey City. She was with two of her girlfriends, the same friends she’d had in high school. The three of them were twenty-one, fresh-faced and innocent. Sherri was alone in the world. Alone! Her mother had died when she was seventeen, and her father started drinking and never stopped. She had no place she belonged. No siblings, not even a cousin nearby.

  At the bar that night Bobby smiled at her. He bought her a mudslide. That’s how young she was, she thought mudslides were sophisticated! He tipped the bartender with a twenty and she was agog.

  Sherri fell for Bobby Giordano from that first minute. She fell and she fell and she fell.

  Typically Bobby conducted his business outside the house, but every now and then the guys came over and they all met in his office. Who, Sherri always wondered, was sitting closest to the register that held all of the secrets? Did the guys know about it? Did each of them have a similar hiding place in their homes, and did the wives know about those hiding places?

  The guys coming over was a signal to Katie and Sherri that they should disappear. Sometimes they watched a movie from the comfort of Sherri’s king-size bed. Sherri brought up snacks: big bowls of popcorn, apple juice for Katie, a glass of wine for herself. No more mudslides; she’d learned about good wine. She never minded those nights. If she was being honest with herself she looked forward to them, with Katie and her curled up together like puppies. Katie often fell asleep partway through the movie and Sherri would listen to her rhythmic breathing and feel a tremendous sense of peace. She didn’t think about what was going on downstairs. It wasn’t her business. When Bobby came to bed he never woke them. He climbed in on the other side of Katie and that’s how they slept. Like a tableau of the perfect family.

  But one night the guys were over and Katie had a sleepover to go to. A birthday party. It was a Friday. Without Katie there Sherri was at loose ends. She wandered around the kitchen, wiping counters that were already spotless. Then she had the idea to put together a snack for Bobby and the guys. She never did that; he had made it clear that he didn’t want to be bothered. But surely they were all getting hungry in there. They had their rolling bar cart, their glasses and ice, but no food. Sherri put together a plate of cheese and crackers, a little of that nice prosciutto, sliced as thin as a cell slide, that came from the local deli, some dark chocolate caramels dotted with sea salt. She made it look so nice.

  She stood outside the office, trying to decide if she should somehow knock with her shoulder or call out for Bobby to open the door, when something stopped her. Maybe it was the word girl that snagged her attention; maybe it was the tone of the conversation, which was low and urgent. Something made her put the tray down on the little table in the alcove outside the office and lean closer to the door until her ear was pressed up against it.

  The girl, they kept saying. The girl wasn’t going to keep quiet, the situation with the girl would have to be addressed. It was a shame, she had seen something she shouldn’t have seen, but there was nothing they could do about it, except what had to be done.

  “Wrong place at the wrong time.” That was Bobby’s voice.

  “We’ll have to get rid of her,” said one of the other guys.

  The words were like ice water poured down Sherri’s spine. She froze for a moment. Then she carried the tray back to the kitchen, put the cheese and prosciutto in the refrigerator, the crackers in the pantry. She poured herself a shot of vodka to calm her shaking nerves. Then another, then another. She should do something. She couldn’t do anything. She should warn the girl. But she didn’t know who the girl was. She didn’t know what the girl had seen. She should, she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, she didn’t. Maybe she’d hea
rd wrong. She’d been on the other side of a heavy door. It would have been easy to imagine hearing things that nobody had said.

  After a time, she put it out of her mind. What other choice did she have, with no proof of anything? Even if she’d wanted to talk to anybody about what she thought she heard, she had nobody. Bobby and Katie were her family. They were her entire world.

  And didn’t she love that world? Didn’t she love the glitz and the glamour of living with money? She didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that, and she had nowhere to go if she’d wanted to leave: no job, no resources. She had grown up without any money at all. They never had extra for school supplies or nice shampoo or even a gift to go to a birthday party, should she be invited, which she never was. Unless the whole class was invited, and that was always obvious and somehow even worse than not being included at all.

  When Sherri was in fourth grade a girl in her class accused her of smelling like garbage because her mother worked in the kitchen of a restaurant and somebody had spotted her one afternoon taking the food scraps to the Dumpster in a big white bucket. The worst part was that the girl was right. Sherri’s mother did sometimes smell like garbage.

  Once she married Bobby Sherri bought the most expensive shampoo money could buy, the kind you could only buy at a salon. She bought nail polish in every color, and gorgeous blouses made of silk, and designer bags, and shoes, and shoes, and shoes. When they bought the house with the pool, they also got the guy who came twice a week to balance it. She never had to touch any of the pool chemicals or the skimmer baskets. When they threw a party, which they did all the time, she never had to take a step into that top-of-the-line kitchen, because two hours before the party started an army of caterers showed up with their beautiful food and their beautiful cocktails for all of the beautiful guests to enjoy. All Sherri had to do was choose from her beautiful dresses and match the dress with a fabulous pair of heels and attach herself to Bobby’s arm.

  Eye candy, she believed that was called.

  Nobody would call her eye candy now. They’d call her practical looking, a mom with a reliable part-time job, struggling, like a lot of other people in the world, to pay the rent.

  She knew the money wasn’t clean. But honestly she never imagined people getting really hurt over it. She never imagined anyone dying.

  23.

  Alexa

  “Hampton Beach?” said Alexa when Cam called her later to solidify the plans. She thought she might have heard wrong. Hampton Beach was not a place she typically hung out. North of Salisbury, south of Rye, there was a certain . . . well, for lack of a better word, a certain element there. The beaches themselves were beautiful, and there was supposed to be phenomenal surfing by the Wall, but. It was a little biker-y, a little weed-and-Miller-Lite-ish, and when the sun went down the freaks came out. When Alexa thought of Hampton Beach, she thought of tattoos. And not tasteful little hip tattoos (Alexa herself sported one of a starfish that she got when she turned sixteen) but dark, heavy, sleeve tattoos.

  Alexa could practically hear Cam grinning over the phone. “Yup,” he said. “I scored two tickets to see a Dave Matthews cover band at the casino. And tonight is your lucky night, because one of those tickets has your name on it.”

  “Dave Matthews?” said Alexa. “The Hampton Beach Casino?” The casino, though storied, was where the has-beens played, and where the old people went to get drunk and reminisce. What she was supposed to be doing tonight was saying good-bye to Tyler before he left for Silver Lake, but she had conveniently left his texts unanswered. When she thought of what Caitlin told her, she didn’t feel an ounce of guilt about this.

  “The one and only,” said Cam. “Well, not the one and only because that would be the real Dave Matthews. But close enough!” Dave Matthews was one of Alexa’s mother’s favorite artists. When she had more than one glass of Cabernet, she’d been known to play “Crash Into Me” on repeat at an excessively loud volume. Since Peter’s death she did that a little more often than she used to. Rebecca and Peter had seen Dave Matthews together live three times. Even Morgan liked Dave Matthews! Somehow the gene for that had skipped Alexa. Maybe the Dave Matthews gene was recessive and her biological father hadn’t passed it on to her: another reason to feel left out. Maybe it was the same as the nice gene.

  “Um,” she said. “I don’t know . . .” She scoured her mind for an excuse but came up empty. The truth was, Caitlin’s tidbit about Tyler had put her in a tailspin. Her mother was going out “with the ladies,” which probably meant early cocktails and fish tacos at the Deck. Even Morgan had plans—she was sleeping over at Katie’s house.

  “I will brook no refusal,” Cam said. “And I’ll have you home before you turn into a pumpkin. I’m the lector at the seven am mass tomorrow at the IC. I need to get my beauty sleep.”

  Was. This. Guy. For. Real. A church lector at Immaculate Conception? “Okay,” she said. “I guess if you’re not brooking refusal I can’t refuse.”

  “It’s a date!” he said. “Where should I pick you up? Home, or work?”

  “Home,” she said. “I’m off today.” She would wear her new Ramy Brook tank top in bright blue, which brought out the color of her eyes. She’d bought it for two hundred and eighty-five dollars at Neiman Marcus online. When her mother complimented her on it, she claimed that she got it at Marshalls, marked down 75 percent, even though anybody who knew anything knew that you would never find Ramy Brook at Marshalls.

  She would have only one drink. Maybe two drinks. She would behave herself even though her mind was full of chaotic, unsettling thoughts.

  When they were in the minivan, driving up 1A (Cam had chosen the coastal route, which Alexa appreciated even though the highway would have been faster), Alexa broached the subject of Shelby McIntyre. As it turned out, Shelby had left two days earlier on a service trip to Kenya with Newburyport Youth Services. “This will be the fourth year in a row she’s done it,” said Cam. He shook his head and smiled, as if he could not believe the marvel that was Shelby.

  “Oh,” said Alexa. “Wow. That’s really amazing. Good for Shelby. Those service trips are supposed to be incredible.” Alexa had zero interest in a service trip, where you went like six days without showering and had to eat things like goat meat and gruel. Clearly Shelby McIntyre was on the fast track to Heaven. “Will she mind?” she asked. “That you’re doing this, with me?”

  Was it Alexa’s imagination, or did Cam’s hold on the steering wheel tighten?

  “We’re not exclusive anymore,” he said. “That’s over.”

  “I see,” said Alexa. “I’m sorry?”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” said Cam. He pressed his lips together and kept his eyes on the road. Alexa looked off to the right, where the sun was just beginning to lower over the Atlantic. The strips of beach that whizzed by them were nearly empty.

  Alexa couldn’t resist her next question. “Whose idea was it? Not to be exclusive?”

  “Both,” said Cam. He stopped at a crosswalk and they watched a sandy family—two parents, a stroller, and a kid on a scooter—make their way across. It’s never both, thought Alexa, it’s never both, but she let it slide. Then Cam said, “We agreed it was better for her to go back to UVM unencumbered.” Alexa took that to mean that Shelby decided it was better for Shelby to go back to UVM unencumbered.

  “What about you?” Cam asked.

  Tyler was on a 7:35 a.m. flight the next day, which meant he would leave for the airport at 4:30. If Alexa wasn’t seeing him right now, she wasn’t going to see him until he returned from Silver Lake in three weeks. She thought again about Tyler and Zoe Butler-Gray getting out of Tyler’s car at Blue Inn, and her blood boiled.

  Alexa said, “Unencumbered.”

  24.

  Rebecca

  Morgan had been invited to stay the night at Katie’s house, and Alexa was out with Tyler, who was leaving the next day for Silver Lake. Rebecca was happy that Morgan wanted to spend the night somewhere—since th
e sleeping bag incident she’d turned down all sleepover invitations.

  Rebecca checked the 360 app and saw that Alexa was at the Hampton Casino. The Hampton Casino? She opened her laptop, checked the casino’s Web site for the schedule, and saw that tonight there was a Dave Matthews cover band. That didn’t seem very Tyler-like, or very Alexa-like. Come to think of it, Rebecca didn’t really know Tyler’s musical taste. She knew he liked Cap’n Crunch cereal, and that he was a good lacrosse player and a solid C student in non-honors classes, and that Alexa had to get a ride home with someone else from junior prom because Tyler had had too much to drink at one of the after parties. She knew that Alexa could do better than Tyler. She knew that a mom, even a loving one, even a grieving one, couldn’t interfere too much in her teenage daughter’s romantic life as the daughter was learning to make her own decisions. She knew that Alexa had sprouted some protective edges since Peter’s death that, like the quills of a porcupine, hurt more coming out than they did going in. She knew enough to be careful.

  She was supposed to go to the Deck with the ladies, but she was dragging her feet. She’d go in a few minutes. Or never. She checked her e-mail. There was a message with the title Holiday House Tour Initial Meeting from Patricia Stone, who was the head of the committee. Rebecca had volunteered to help with the house tour five years in a row, but last year, after Peter, she dropped out. Gina had temporarily taken her place on the committee. Now Patricia probably wanted to know if Rebecca wanted her spot back. The idea of it all made her feel tired. She closed her computer. As she was contemplating how much she didn’t feel like getting dressed to go out, a rogue wave of nostalgia hit her, probably brought on by the thought of Dave Matthews. Peter had loved Dave Matthews. They had loved Dave Matthews together through various live shows in various venues.