Tell Me Lies

by Carola Lovering

  CJ wasn’t like that before she met my father and became an Albright. She used to rough it in hostels as a teenager; she stayed in ashrams and teepees with Marilyn over the course of their third-world adventures. Marilyn was the kind of wealthy woman who understood that money couldn’t buy experience; that, in fact, it often worked against it.

  I brought the subject up to Georgia once. “Why don’t CJ and Dad ever go anywhere cool?”

  I could tell that she knew exactly what I meant but she’d just sighed and said, “Lucy, let them do their thing.”

  So I was sitting on the stoop of the football house, fuming after my phone call with CJ. The anger always hits me deep and hard and out of nowhere, like a migraine. I rarely feel actively angry about the Unforgivable Thing anymore—time has helped with that—but every once in a while something will set me off. I think this time it was the enthusiasm in CJ’s voice as she was going on and on about the pros and cons of each Waspy destination. All I could see was my father’s face upon receipt of the trip, thrilled and grateful for his wife’s devotion. I told CJ I had to call her back. The tears were already falling by the time I made it out the back door and buried my head in my lap. I pulled out the cigarette I had stolen from a pack lying on a table inside the football house.

  Stephen noticed me crying on the stoop. He was wearing a funny sweater with Rudolph on the front, and he came over and sat beside me. I didn’t want to just sit there, so we went for a walk and he kept asking me to tell him what was the matter. He started talking about his mother’s mood disorder and how it wrecked his family, and there was this empathetic quality in his voice, and suddenly I couldn’t think of one good reason why I shouldn’t tell somebody the real reason why I was crying, and then I was explaining the Unforgiveable Thing to Stephen DeMarco, a practical stranger, which shocked me even as the words spilled out.

  I remember every detail of that day, the day of the Unforgivable Thing, all the smells and sounds and textures. They’ll never go away. I was wearing Georgia’s corduroy skirt, a white collared shirt, and my green Dansko clogs, all well within the parameters of the Friends Academy school dress code. That September in Nassau County it still felt like summer; the midday air was warm enough for swimming, and the maple tree in our front yard was green and brimming with life. Not a speck of fall was in sight, which is the worst time to go to school because you’re as far from the promise of summer as you’ll ever be. Ahead lie red leaves and pumpkins and homework and turkey and Christmas carols and snowplows and Valentines and mud and painted eggs and daffodil buds pushing their way up out of the thawing earth. And not that any of it’s bad, but none of it’s as good as summer, which is why I always feel a little down those first couple of weeks of September, especially when the weather’s nice.

  Georgia was at field hockey practice, and I would’ve been at soccer except that it got canceled because Coach Meyers had to take her five-year-old daughter to the emergency room after she fell off the swings at kindergarten recess. She got thirteen stitches above her left eyebrow.

  Lydia called her mom to come pick us up, because we live down the street from each other. That was why I didn’t bother calling CJ. I didn’t even think she was home, because she taught double Pilates on Thursdays. By the time Mrs. Montgomery dropped me off, a wash of gray clouds had rolled over the sun, and the air smelled chalky, like it was going to rain. I was surprised to see CJ’s black Lexus parked in the driveway.

  The house appeared empty when I walked inside. I kicked off my shoes and called for CJ. The TV was on in the kitchen, playing a Tide laundry detergent commercial. Hickory lay sleeping on her bed. I knew something was wrong when I saw the half-unpacked grocery bags sitting on the counter. A new carton of milk was sitting out, and a brown paper package from the butcher. A quick stab of fear ran through me because it was so unlike CJ—she normally sprinted into the house to put away the dairy and produce after she’d been out doing errands.

  Two near-empty glasses of white wine sat on the counter next to the milk, one of the rims smudged with pink lip gloss.

  At this point I wasn’t thinking entirely rationally; I wasn’t running all possible scenarios through my head. I just wanted to find out where CJ was, because all signs told me she was in the house.

  I ran up the stairs. There was a noise coming from the end of the hall, near my parents’ room. I don’t remember what I thought the noise was or what I expected to discover. I just kept moving forward, farther down the hall until I cracked open the door.

  I would give anything to not have seen what I saw, to scrub the image from my memory. My mother’s bare back, gleaming with sweat, her thighs hooked around a man with thick brown hair. His eyes were pinched closed as he grasped CJ’s hips, but I would’ve recognized that face in a crowd of thousands. It was Gabe Petersen.

  I backed down the hallway as quietly as I could, my feet silent on the soft Italian wool carpet, a force blocking the air from my lungs. My head felt like a tornado, too many reactions pooling at once. Gabe was my first thought. My Gabe. And then my father. Where was my dad? He was in London for a trial, and he wouldn’t be back until the following night. He’d been gone for more than a week, and CJ was supposed to be cooking his favorite dinner, filet mignon. I thought of the wrapped brown package of meat, spoiling on the kitchen counter.

  I felt a kind of sickness that I’d never known before, like someone was stabbing me in the gut with a thousand knives, over and over again. Half of me wanted to fling the bedroom door open and scream, demand an explanation, but the other half of me was so terrified that all I could think to do was run down the stairs and out the front door and down the driveway at lightning speed. It had started to rain hard, and I was barefoot, still in my skirt and polo shirt. I closed my eyes, but all I could see was the arch of CJ’s back and her sweaty mop of hair and the white skin above Gabe’s midthigh tan line, his perfect body on top of the white monogrammed duvet my father slept under every night, and I was crying so hard that when I opened my eyes again I could barely see, my hair soaking wet with rain.

  I ran down the street with my head ducked, heading for Lydia’s house, but stopped myself before I got there. I needed to tell Lydia—she had always been my rock, my other sister—but I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell anyone. I was suddenly terrified of what would happen if I said it out loud.

  I didn’t have anywhere to go and I was almost at the Montgomerys’, so I snuck into their backyard and climbed up into the covered compartment of the swing set for shelter from the rain. I hugged my knees into my chest and wailed silently, praying no one had noticed me. I must’ve fallen asleep, and hours later when I woke up it was dark, and the rain had stopped, and I was shivering. As I crept down from the swing set and back along the road, different pieces of reality continued to shatter. I thought I would never get used to the shock; it flooded every cell of my body in excruciating waves.

  Because it was Gabe Petersen, twenty-three-year-old Gabe Petersen, whom I loved unbearably. And it was Mom, my mother, the one who brought me warm milk and scratched my back when I was little and couldn’t sleep; who read me A Wrinkle in Time and all the Narnia books and did all the characters’ voices; who kissed me every time she saw me, even if I’d been in the other room for only ten minutes. Why are you kissing me again, Mom? I’d ask, annoyed, wiping off her slobber. ’Cause I love you, Sass! she’d say always, picking me up in her arms and twirling us in circles.

  My bare feet were freezing against the pavement as I walked home. I willed myself not to cry again, because it would be only a matter of minutes until I saw CJ. Every single thought, every feeling, every experience I’d ever had—all of it had been a lie.

  My parents had always had the kind of relationship that made me confident they were lucky. I had noticed that the Montgomerys never kissed in public, and Mrs. Montgomery always went to bed much earlier than Mr. Montgomery. My parents did everything on the same schedule. Even if my dad had to work late and wouldn’t be home until ten thirty,
CJ waited for him to eat dinner. Sometimes they ate close to midnight, sharing a blanket on the couch. My mother swore on Hickory that they would never get divorced; that she loved my father as much as she loved Georgia and me, which, as it turned out, was a questionable amount of love.

  When I reached our house, all the lights were on. I stared at the brightly illuminated windows, which normally looked cheerful and comforting in the dark. If I went inside, nothing would ever be the same. But I had nowhere else to go.

  When I walked in the front door, a soaked, cold mess, CJ rushed into the foyer and pulled me into her, squeezing me tight, screaming at me for worrying her, asking frantically where I’d been. She was wearing her bathrobe and lots of her fragrant lotion. I fidgeted out of her grip. I didn’t know what would happen if I looked at her face. I mumbled something about having gotten out of soccer practice late and walking home from school. CJ was still shouting questions at me as I dragged myself upstairs. I found Georgia in the playroom.

  “Luce? What happened to you?” Georgia knew I had been crying. Georgia knows everything.

  I looked at my sister. She was plopped on the red beanbag in front of the television, her bright eyes brimming with concern. The words were on the tip of my tongue; I could almost hear them escaping from my mouth in one quick breath. I felt how much better I’d feel if told her, if we could be in it together. Georgia was only eleven months older, my Irish twin, and she would know exactly what to do. But as I scanned her worried face I knew that I would never be able to tell her. There was no point in ruining her life, too. So I lied and said I’d had a fight with Lydia—the first of so many lies.

  When my dad arrived home the next night, I watched from the top of the staircase as CJ handed him a cold gin and tonic and pressed her face into his neck. “Filet mignon por vous ce soir,” she purred in broken French.

  I ran to the bathroom and threw up. My parents thought I had the flu and let me go to sleep without questions. I put in my headphones and turned on Fleetwood Mac as loud as it would go. I wrapped myself up in Marilyn’s sweater and decided that Marilyn would’ve hated CJ if she’d known who she really was. I had nightmares that woke me in a full sweat. They lasted for months.

  Macy Petersen died in a car accident almost two years later, the summer after my sophomore year. She was driving Gabe’s Jeep, alone, and slid off the road. I watched CJ bawl her eyes out. She tried to make me go to the funeral, but I said I was sick. I watched CJ doll herself up in a sleek black dress and Marilyn’s pearls, with a fresh blowout and too much makeup, Georgia and my father in tow. I was devastated by what happened to Macy—everyone was—but there was no way I was going to go to the funeral and watch my mother flirt with her ex-lover, the brother of the dead girl, while my own father stood there like a clueless puppy.

  When I finally finished telling Stephen about the Unforgivable Thing, what I loved was that he didn’t take it too seriously. He didn’t freak out like most people would’ve. He was perfectly nice about it—he just didn’t dwell on it or look at me like what I’d said was inconceivable. He even made a couple of lighthearted jokes, but there was a genuine sense of compassion in the way he responded to me.

  By the end of my conversation with Stephen the sickness in my stomach had subsided. I felt better than I had in ages. For so long, the Unforgivable Thing had been a living part of me, something I felt I had to handle, an event I subconsciously weighed against each of my experiences. But talking to Stephen about it was the first time I realized that I was making it harder than it had to be. That maybe it didn’t have to be something I had to bear. That CJ didn’t have to be my problem. Maybe I still cared, but maybe I could also just forget about it.

  I felt calm sitting next to Stephen on his couch, grateful for his sensitivity as the wine softened my limbs, but there was also something enthralling about being around him. Most boys, when they interact with you, seem sort of distracted or like they don’t fully care about what you’re saying. Parker was always like that—one eye on the TV or fumbling around with his phone. But when Stephen looked at me, he really saw me. He didn’t look past me to the dozens of other things going on in his life. He listened, really listened, and I could see that it made him genuinely happy. Nobody listened like that.

  A feeling of immense gratitude toward him warmed my chest. I wanted him to care about me, to protect me and be my friend, and his eyes told me that he would be.

  “I’m so tired.” I yawned.

  “I can walk you home.”

  But the thought of going back to my empty dorm room depressed me. Maybe if Jackie was there it would’ve been different, but it was the weekend, and she would definitely be sleeping at Stuart’s.

  “Maybe I could stay here,” I said. “Just to sleep.”

  “Sure. You want a T-shirt?”

  “Thanks.”

  He handed me a New York Giants T-shirt. “Here you go.”

  “Eli Manning. Number ten.” I smiled.

  “I knew you’d like that one.”

  The shirt smelled good, like laundry soap. I climbed underneath his sheets, sleepy from the wine but mostly sober. I heard Stephen click off the light and climb into the bed next to me. I felt him face the other direction and I suddenly, desperately, wanted him to turn around. Even though we had kissed before, nothing about our interaction that night had felt sexual; it had just felt like friendship. I’d said I was staying over only to sleep, which was my intention. Stephen was probably just being respectful. Or maybe he didn’t like me that way anymore. Maybe he was annoyed to have me there, taking up space in his bed.

  I watched the back of his neck face away from me, the tender part between the collar of his T-shirt and hairline. The shift in my feelings for Stephen, the way I remember it, occurred that night while I was watching the back of his neck. The way the muscles slid as he breathed; how his hair seemed to perfectly part the concave hollow that formed.

  I smelled his Old Spice. I wanted him to roll over and kiss me so badly that I couldn’t sleep. The feeling swallowed me whole; I couldn’t think about anything else. I became very aware of my tossing and turning under the sheets, the noise it made when I moved. At some point in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I wrapped my arms around his torso and pulled him over to my side of the bed. He felt thick and warm.

  When I woke up in the morning the room was filled with a lemon-colored light, and Stephen’s arms were around me, the pads of his fingers pressing lightly against my stomach. I felt inexplicably complete and content. We started kissing easily, like waking up together was something we’d done a thousand times. He slid the Eli Manning shirt over my head, and it was something I wanted him to be doing—the way I’d felt when Gabe touched me that day in his car. I’d waited so long to feel that again, I thought it might not be possible. I was so relieved and surprised I wanted to laugh out loud. We got naked. His body hovered above mine, his green eyes heavy, full of hunger. The attraction was so palpable and strange; it scared and intoxicated me at once. Every part of my body trembled with lust.

  “Are you sure you want to do this, Lucy?” His whisper was hot and damp in my ear. “Because we don’t have to.”

  “Yes.” I nodded into his shoulder. I’d only slept with one person, ever, but I needed more of whatever was happening. “But do you have a condom?”

  He reached toward the nightstand and fumbled around until he found one. I watched him roll it on, felt him wedge my thighs farther apart with his knees. He buried his face in my collarbone and when I felt him inside me, I almost lost my breath.

  I wasn’t expecting to come—I never had from sex with Parker—but it happened anyway, his deep groans intensifying my own arousal, his final cry sending me over the edge. It felt so good that for minutes after I couldn’t move or think or speak. I collapsed onto Stephen’s chest, my heart pounding, and he ran the tips of his fingers up and down my spine.

  “You are fucking incredible, Lucy.”

  I felt exhilar
ated and stunned. The sex was amazing, but that wasn’t half of it. I liked him. I liked him. When had that happened? The best feelings are unexpected like that. I woke up and they were there, like snow.

  12

  STEPHEN

  DECEMBER 2010

  The problem with juggling girls on a small college campus, even for someone like me who is good at it, is the geographical parameters. There isn’t a lot of space, and you never know who might be lurking in a window across the street or who might happen to walk by a specific place at an unfortunate time.

  Keaton Banks, one of Diana’s best friends, happened to be strolling along Carroll Street when she noticed Lucy and me leaving the dorm. I gave Lucy a quick kiss on the front stoop—rookie mistake, but Lucy is pretty, and it’s hard not to want to kiss her all the time. Plus, I knew she was the kind of girl who expected a goodbye kiss from the guy she’d just fucked.

  That evening, an outraged Diana stormed into my bedroom with that crazy look in her eyes like she wanted to castrate me. She screamed and screamed about what Keaton had told her. The poor guy in the single room next to mine—the number of times Diana has gone on a screaming rant in here, I didn’t even want to know what he thought.

  I took a beer out of the mini fridge and cracked it open. I refused to let her win this argument.

  “Diana,” I started calmly. “You and I are not together. You have made it very clear that you don’t want to be with me.” I sat down on one end of the couch, hoping she’d pipe down and take a seat herself.

  But she remained standing, her hands flailing in front of her face. “Yes, because I don’t trust you. But we’re still sleeping together. And you keep telling me you want me back, and now you’re sleeping with some freshman?”

  “Diana, you and I have slept together three times since September, and always on your terms. I want to be with you. I keep on saying it, but if you’re not willing to give me another chance, then I’m allowed to see other people. Christmas break starts in a couple of days. Why don’t you take some time to think about it and we’ll talk in January?”