Extraordinary Lies
Jennifer Alsever
Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Alsever
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
“If you were born as long as fifty years ago, you can remember a time when the test of a sound, commonsense mind was refusing to fool with ‘new-fangled notions.’ Without exactly putting it into a formula, people took it for granted that truth was known and familiar, and anything that was not known and familiar was nonsense.”
—Upton Sinclair Mental Radio
Part I
Truth
JULIA
1971
For years, I didn’t do trust. I’d given trust, a gift, only to see it get smashed. Broken. Crushed. Do you trust your heart? Your mind? Your eyes?
I knew better.
So how, by the summer of 1971, had I found myself in the midst of a tangle of trust and mistrust—truth and lies and everything in between? How had I found myself a prisoner in an underground complex in searing pain with blood dripping from my right ear? The words swirled in my head like a hurricane. Lies. Truth. Trust. Betrayal.
I actually laughed out loud—the kind of wicked guffaw reserved for someone inside a padded cell. I’d thought I had a radar for fakes. I was wrong.
If only I could have gone back in time a couple weeks and made a different choice.
If only I had remembered that people are shit. That no one, and nothing, is worthy of my trust.
Sound cynical? Hey, I’m just being honest. Don’t you trust me?
1
Charley
God, it was hot in here. Sweat dripped down my temples, and in my mind, I started cussing out Mom for making me do this again. Out of habit, my fingers rubbed the silky black tablecloth that hid the enormous divots and cuts in the card table—remnants of one of Dad’s all-night binges.
The stupid fan had stopped working a week earlier. I thought I was going to pass out. It had to be at least a hundred degrees in here.
Focus, Charley. I gazed at the oil-stained palm of the man sitting across the table from me. Mid-fifties with a grizzled face. I’d seen him around the neighborhood and knew his wife was locked up. I could actually smell him too: egg salad. The smell made me feel like I might barf, and I opened my eyes.
The “Seeing Room” was really the storeroom in the back of the diner. Me at a table, surrounded by metal shelves stacked with extra boxes of toilet paper, plastic silverware, pasta, and cans of vegetables. Mom had tried to dress it up with a lamp draped with a sheer pink cloth and some hippie beads hanging from the window. She’d even asked me to wear a ridiculous silk head scarf and thick eye makeup.
“A fortune teller,” she had said.
But uh, yeah, no. I’d rolled my eyes because there was no way I was going to look that stupid. Eventually, after I didn’t answer, Mom had put away the scarf and I went on slicing pie for customers out front.
Now, with Egg Salad’s palm in my hand, I played the part. I squinted at his hand, but really, it was all for show. I was so tired of looking at palms. I wasn’t a real palm reader. I saw absolutely nothing in those lines that crisscrossed their hands, slicing and dicing their skin and traveling from forefinger to wrist. They all looked the same.
But I felt something in their skin. Somehow, I could taste their personal energy. Sometimes it was kind of like a light switch, and sometimes it scared the bejesus out of me, giving me a jolt that sailed through my muscles as if I’d just touched my tongue to a light socket. Other times, it was just painful. Right this moment, with Egg Salad, I felt his energy whip through me like a dust devil. It left me with the most awful feeling, the most awful knowing. Another wave of nausea rippled through me, and heat rose to my cheeks.
“What?” His voice was scratchy.
“Mmmmm.” I gazed at a cardboard box to my left, studying the word Bounty, trying to think of what to say next.
“Tell me, girl.” His tone bit the air.
I stalled. The feeling I got was clear as day: the guy was going to drop dead the very next day. This I knew. Seriously, what was I supposed to say to him? Keep on truckin’?
Egg Salad’s breath rattled in his throat as he gazed expectantly at me. I couldn’t look at him. Finally, I said, “Looks good. I’d go across the street there to the prison, visit your wife, tell her you love her.”
“Why’d you say this?” he grumbled, jerking his hand away. He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hand, as if I was the one who was dirty. “I paid you. You need to tell me my future. That’s what your mom promised me. And it’s what your goddamn billboard promised.” He threw a thumb at the door leading back to the restaurant’s dining room.
I bit my lip and gazed at the boxes piled high next to the table, the tin platters and stacked Styrofoam paper plates, a Tinkertoy tower ready to tumble over. “Just go have a good day. Eat whatever you want. Tell people how you feel. You know, just be nice.”
He leaned forward, clenching the sides of the table with his meaty, oily hands. I finally met his eyes, dark like rocks. Though he was a short man, he made up for it with grit. He was not about to take any shit from a teenager.
“Listen here, little lady, I paid my money, and I want a reading. A real reading. Unless you’re a fraud, I’ll have you arrested in a second for pulling this kind of garbage.”
A dark, ominous feeling swirled inside me. I looked at this man, this dying man, then took stock of my so-called life: this pink, beaded closet masquerading as a palm reader’s office. The sweat clinging to my underarms and the stifling hot air. The egg-salad smell of this man and his beady eyes demanding that I tell him the truth. I wanted to scream. This life, this town, this schtick, this diner—it would eventually eat all the years of my life. I’d be like all the other people in this diner. Here. Stuck. Forever. I’d go home and dodge plates flying through the air as Mom and Dad tried to beat the living daylights out of each other.
Screw this. I stood up, gazed down at Egg Salad, and said, “Okay. You’re gonna kick it tomorrow.”
“Kick it?”
“Croak. Die! Cease to live!”
The blood drained from his face, his complexion fading from angry pink to pasty yellow. He froze, and for a moment, I wondered if I’d been wrong. Maybe he was going to drop dead right then and there.
Egg Salad got to his feet. He leaned over, placing one palm on the table, and with a heavy breath raised the other hand to point a finger an inch from my face. “If I don’t die tomorrow, then I’m coming looking for you. You’ll pay.”
A bolt of laughter threatened to explode from my chest. As soon as he left, slamming the door behind him, I let loose with loud cackles. If he didn’t die, he was gonna be pissed? I continued to laugh, sitting down to recover, kicking a foot up on the table, until Mom stormed through the door.
“Charlotte Marie! You can be heard all the way to table ten!” Mom put her fists on her invisible hips. She was as wide as she was short and wore a powder-blue dress with a tiny white apron and white collar.
“Sorry.” Still, I giggled.
“What on earth did you say to that man?”
“I told him he was gonna die.” I began to tidy up, pushing the table to the corner of the room.
“You what?”
I folded the metal chair without looking at her. “He pressured me to tell him the truth, and I did. He told me he’d come after me if he was still alive. That’s what’s so funny.”
Mom stood stock-still in the doorway. “He’s a customer. You d
on’t tell him garbage like that; you tell him he’ll win the goddamn lottery so at least he passes in peace. And you do not laugh. Do. Not. Laugh.”
I took the stack of money from the coffee can on the shelf and began counting the bills. Ignoring. That always pissed her off.
“Charlotte.” The sound of my name from my mother’s lips, the tone, had done something to me over the years. It actually made me hate my own name. I looked up and scowled.
“What?”
Mom answered with raised eyebrows.
I took a couple steps to leave the room, but she didn’t move. She stood there, blocking my way, hands on hips, elbows protruding like barbed wire.
“You will do better than this.” Something in the way she stood there, taking up the entirety of the doorway, blocking the exit, made me snap.
“Maybe I don’t want to do this anymore. Maybe … maybe I quit.”
Mom gave me an incredulous look and a little headshake. She chuckled, amused. “Dear, this is your job. You want college? You want to leave this place? This is your ticket. Your only true asset. Because you’re sure as hell not getting very far with that brain or those looks.”
I didn’t flinch. I’d heard it before, but this time I wasn’t going to believe this squat woman who manned the stove in a podunk diner and put up with nightly blows from her alcoholic rage-case of a husband. Who shrugged it off and snorted lines of coke with him while we were in bed.
But at eighteen, I didn’t have much cash for a new life. I had no dreams of where to go, who to become. I’d thought about college, but how would I pay for it? Like Mom said, I probably couldn’t even get in. This was how I’d pay for it. Saving my pennies in that coffee can. Giving Mom eighty percent for rent and advertising and keeping twenty percent for the future.
I exhaled deeply. “Fine.”
“No more laughter. No more death sentences.”
I nodded, feeling like I was trapped in a sauna. “Just… Can you please let me out of this room?”
Mom stepped aside and I dashed out. Fresh air swirled around me, and I could breathe. That guy better die tomorrow. Otherwise, I was screwed.
2
Julia
My house held no secrets. That was a benefit of living in an old mansion with massive air ducts. I sat over the grate on the floor, my chest rising and falling. I ducked my head to my knees and listened.
“They’re going to sue, Edward,” Mother said.
“They don’t have proof.” Father didn’t sound certain.
“Kristi is in the hospital,” Mother argued. “And Steve has dreadful gashes. There were witnesses, for God’s sake. What more proof do you need? And with what people already know about Sabrina…” Her voice climbed an octave, and the sound of it caused me to grit my teeth. “She’s just like her.”
“No…” His objection floated limply on the air. “We should learn the whole story—”
“We know the story. Daddy worries, you know.”
Father didn’t respond.
The clink of glass. Mother continued. “If Julia loses her temper again, who’s to say what will happen? What if she kills someone? What would that do to Daddy’s legacy? Our place at the head of this community? He won’t have it.”
The sound of liquid pouring into a glass. My parents were in the kitchen. I assumed Mother was pacing, waving one hand and holding a glass of bourbon in the other. Father probably sat patiently, as always, in the red vinyl chair, nodding and pressing his hands toward the ground as if he could physically dampen her anxiety.
“After the police left, a man approached me and gave me this,” Mother said.
“Who?”
“A government type.”
“Walter Strong.” Father sounded like he was reading the name.
“He wants to take Julia to California for some testing,” Mother said.
My body tensed, and I leaned closer to the vent. Suddenly this was a much bigger deal, and my pulse raced.
“Testing? What kind of testing?” Father asked.
Mother’s footsteps tapped across the floor, followed by the clinking sound of a glass being set in the sink. This was mom’s signal that their conversation was nearly over.
“Psychic testing. Which makes sense. This is beyond the other things we’ve seen. She could go to jail, for God’s sake.” Mother’s voice had spikes.
“Did you ask Julia? Ask her if this is really what happened?”
Had Mother asked me? No. No one had. But unfortunately, for once, she was telling the truth.
“When they found her, she just sat there in the forest and rocked back and forth. I was horrified,” Mother said.
“Well, maybe she’s holding a lot inside, and we need to talk to her about it. Maybe she witnessed something terrible.”
“No,” she said. “She needs to go. Let things die down. Let the Andersons forget about all this.”
“That’s what your father wants, you mean.”
“It will be like a summer camp. Plus, it’ll be a way to prove our little girl is fine. That she isn’t a threat, that she isn’t really psychic. And we can go back to normal.”
“What if they find otherwise? Find out that she’s like your sister? Then what? Will she be—”
“I won’t talk about it anymore. My decision is final.” Mother’s voice was granite, falling on Father with a weight he couldn’t hold.
It felt like all the oxygen in my room had been sucked down into the vent. My pulse pounded in my temples. Anxiety. I had read about it in books.
Mom was punishing me. I thought of my summer plans. Tennis and hanging out at the club. Shopping on Michigan Avenue. Boating on Lake Michigan. Reading mystery novels. It was all being wiped away faster than rain by a windshield wiper.
There was some lab testing people like me? Why would they do that?
All this because I let my emotions get the best of me, let my secret get out, let a dark force take over me. The thought of Steve made my stomach curdle. I had liked him, and losing him and my summer felt as if I’d stepped off a cliff and was tumbling, weightless, through the air.
I inhaled deeply. Footsteps and muffled voices told me Father was climbing the stairs to my room. Those stars sparked on the edge of my vision again. The books and porcelain doll figurines on the shelf began to tremble. I couldn’t let another outburst happen.
I tiptoed to the padded bench by the bay window. Outside I could see the edge of the brick house where Aunt Sabrina had once lived. Perfectly symmetrical with columns and balconies, it attempted to emulate the rest of the compound. But it was new. Built when I was nine, just one year after the fire. Gardeners toiled on the grounds but somehow nothing ever grew. The gardens around the house stood barren, with patches of brown, while the rest of the family’s estate flourished with bright orange daylilies and green leafy hostas. Lonely Parisian antiques adorned the impeccably designed house. No one lived there. No one even dared venture inside.
Father knocked on the door. When I didn’t respond, he cracked open the door, then stuck in his head. “Julia, dear.” Receiving no response, he took three mechanical steps into my room.
I looked at him sidelong, keeping my chin buried into my neck.
“You’ll spend the summer in San Francisco.” His words hit my chest like bricks, even though they were expected.
“What?” I asked, feigning ignorance. I knew arguing was pointless. Father would bend to Mother’s will as usual. Just like he’d discarded his own surname of Wolfe and changed it to hers: Cavanaugh. Just like he let Mother tell him what shoes to wear to dinner (the leather saddle shoes that hurt his bunions) and acquiesced when she insisted he learn to play tennis and golf and give up basketball (she hated that it made him sweaty). Now Mother was making him choose again: his daughter or his wife’s desire to save face, to preserve the family reputation, to serve Grandfather.
What if they drug me at this lab? Torture me? Doesn’t he care about me? I envisioned myself strapped to a gurney and wheeled d
own dark corridors, where shadowy faces peered down at me, hoisting large needles, covering my screams with gauze. The thought sucked all the air from my lungs.
I couldn’t see his eyes clearly in the dim room, but it looked as if Father’s lips pouted and his thick eyebrows were furrowed. He felt for me, I knew that. I could feel that.
Still, I felt wired, as if I could light up the entire house.
“Your mother. She’s…” He paused and took a deep inhale, but then stopped mid-thought.
She’s what? My thoughts were cutting, a cat’s claw on a fine leather sofa. A self-centered fraud of a mother? A merciless woman who’d ship off her own daughter? I screamed the words inside my head. My voice lodged in my throat, unable to make its way to my lips.
“She’s dead set on it,” he said.
And what if they did decide, when I got to this laboratory, that I really was psychic? What then? That might have been my worst fear. I couldn’t be like her. Of course, that’s why they were sending me away, taking precautions, making sure I didn’t do anything like my aunt did.
“Your mother thinks it’s best just to let everything settle,” he said.
I didn’t know exactly how she’d prove I wasn’t psychic. Because I was. My parents knew it. I knew it. I had some strange sixth sense, some ability to move things with the energy of my emotions. I didn’t even know how I did it, how to control it, but it was there.
Father shrugged. “You will leave in two days. After classes end.”
I pulled my hair across my nose and mouth, as if I could smother myself, erase myself.
Father sat on the edge of my bed, placed a hand on the intricately carved wooden post. “Do you want to talk about what happened today?”
“How’s Steve? Kristi?”
“Steve is fine. Cuts and bruises. Kristi is in the hospital. The car nearly cut her in half. They had to use the jaws of life to remove her from the vehicle.”
Extraordinary Lies Page 1
