Little Lies

by Cherie Bennett

  The quiet continued. Then something astonishing happened. My mother started to cry. After a moment or two, my father went to her, but I saw tears in his eyes, too.

  “I am so sorry, Natalie.” She managed to choke the words out between her humble sobs. “I’m so sorry for you, and I’m so sorry for how I’ve been acting.”

  “Marsha? I’m just that sorry. We have three amazing children, trying their best to grow up. We need to always put them first.” My father put his hands on my mom’s shoulders as my siblings and I sat in disbelief and awe.

  For once, my mother had nothing to say. Instead, she nodded over and over and cried as hard as I had the night before.

  Those tears meant more to my siblings and me than any words ever could.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Do you have any idea who did it?” Brett did a quick two-step up the beach, away from an incoming wavelet.

  “Someone who hates me, duh.” I kicked aside a few fronds of kelp that had washed ashore.

  “Who could that be?”

  “Besides Brooke and the gang? No one I can think of. Plus, Brooke wants to be my new best friend.”

  It was very late that same Sunday afternoon. Practically sunset. The Groundhog Day theme of the day was continuing. I’d found myself back in my mother’s office the morning after she’d lambasted me in that very same place. Now Brett and I were at Will Rogers State Beach in Pacific Palisades, the wide, sprawling beach where my family had convened a few weeks earlier to take a vote on whether to return to Minnesota. That evening, mine had been the deciding vote to stay.

  Why had I voted to stay when all the facts were screaming “go”? Because of something Mia had said when I’d run into her in the chapel after I’d made an unplanned stop there to pray.

  “I suppose faith never makes sense, really. It’s something your heart tells you is true. You can’t prove it, but you believe anyway. And sometimes, Natalie? Sometimes faith is all we’ve got.”

  Sometimes faith is all we’ve got. Not that faith is infallible. Icarus had faith that his wax-fixed wings would work just fine when he flew too close to the sun, and look how far that got him. He forgot his life vest, plunged into the Aegean Sea, and the rest is myth.

  In any case, when Brett had proposed that we take a sunset walk on the beach, I was ready, as long as he didn’t mind my being on the quiet side. After an afternoon on Skype and on my phone, I was talked out.

  I’d talked with Mia and Alex, apart and then together. Each had pledged her undying friendship, no matter what was ahead. I was pathetically grateful.

  I’d talked with Sean, whom I reached at Burbank airport. I thanked him again for his exceptional grace in coming to church that morning. He said he’d looked back at our time together and decided that there was way more that had been good than had been bad; no way would he turn away at a time when he could help. Then his flight was called, and he clicked off.

  I talked with Sandra, in Washington, D.C. That was an awful conversation. I asked after her aunt and apologized, but she went on the attack anyway, saying her instincts about me for being friends with Alex had been right after all.

  “You didn’t belong in Wait/Great from the start, Nat. Do us all a favor and don’t come back. That is, if there’s still a Wait/Great.”

  She hung up on me. Her anger left me breathless.

  I talked with Shelby, in Mankato, who confirmed what Sean had said. Yes, there was an iZon in that bedroom, but she had no idea how the video could have made its way to California. She’d do anything to help solve the mystery.

  I spoke with Brett, who’d proposed this sunset walk on the beach.

  I’d also talked with my brother and sister. I don’t have to tell you how much I praised them for what they’d said in my mom’s office. All they did was remind me of four or five different things I’d done for them that I’d completely forgotten about. Then Chad went to hang at Babak’s house, and Gemma went back to the children’s museum for more training. She’d loved it the first day, and looked forward to starting as an official volunteer. I told her I loved her whether she did it or not.

  My parents and I settled down on the back deck, with mourning doves cooing in the arroyo and a pair of red-tailed hawks circling high overhead. They talked to me about what they were going to do to be better parents, and then we tried to focus on the future. The future of my mom’s ministry, the future of Wait/Great, and my own future if this tape went viral. Before I joined them there, I’d had the non-pleasure of searching Google and Bing with all filters off, for such terms as “minister’s daughter sex tape” and “Minister Marsha’s daughter sex tape.” So far I’d been lucky. Nothing of me had been uploaded yet. I couldn’t imagine that my luck would hold forever.

  All we could agree on was that more would be revealed.

  Brett had picked me up at five-thirty. We were at the beach by six-fifteen. The drive had been mostly quiet; the first half of our walk was in companionable silence along the water’s edge heading south toward Santa Monica. We could see the pier with its Ferris wheel in the distance. The evening sky was crystalline, the ocean as glassy as Lake Washington on a still summer evening. With no surfers to compete with, dozens of parents had brought their toddlers to the beach. The happy cries of waddling children blended with the calls of terns and the rumble of traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway.

  After a half hour, we turned back. I was finally ready to talk. I told Brett everything that had happened since the night before. I left nothing out. He focused, like Chad had, on who had done this to me, and why.

  “How about back home? No one there hates you enough?” Brett pressed.

  “No. I can’t think of anyone.…”

  Hold on.

  I suddenly remembered something Alex had told me soon after I’d come to Los Angeles. I’d Googled Alex at Sandra’s urging. That was how I’d learned that Alex had once been a notorious Hollywood club kid, but I’d been more upset by the fact I was Googling her than by what I’d found.

  Alex had scoffed at my chagrin. Everyone out here Googles everyone else, she’d said. In fact, she’d Googled me. “Not much out there,” she’d related. “Lots of church-mission pictures. And someone on Facebook doesn’t like you.”

  I hadn’t pursued it then. Maybe I should have.

  I told Brett about that conversation with Alex, put my iPhone on speaker, and called her.

  “Alex? It’s me. I’m with Brett on speaker, and we’re talking about last night. Remember a few weeks ago, when you told me that someone on Facebook didn’t like me? Who was it? Do you remember?”

  “It’s about time! I’ve been waiting for you to ask. It was on some Mankato kid’s page. Someone was definitely all over your case,” she recalled. “Want me to look it up? I’ve got my MacBook.”

  I gritted my teeth. “Please.”

  She found it in about five seconds.

  “Here you go. The page is called Mankato Dirt—how original! It’s by someone named Allison Tribble. She really hates your guts. Calls you a hypocrite and a poser.”

  “Allison Tribble?” I gasped. “No way!”

  Allison was a cheerleader who’d had a crush on Sean in ninth grade, but Sean hadn’t reciprocated. She’d always been polite to me, but we’d never been friends. She and Shelby, though, were pretty close. Her family had belonged to my mother’s church but had moved on to a mainstream Lutheran congregation a year earlier. She’d been at the going-away party at the lake where Sean and I had done it.

  Was it possible that Allison was the first link in the chain that led to the previous night’s horror show? If she was the first, who was the second?

  “She’s your first lead,” Alex acknowledged. “If you can find someone she talked to who has access to the church AV equipment? There’s your second.”

  We clicked off.

  “Alex is right,” I declared. “She had to have help on this end.”

  “Who doesn’t like you here?” Brett asked. He took my
hand; we continued north along the water. The tide was reversing, each wavelet just a touch less far up the beach than the one before it.

  “Brooke.” I picked up a white stone and skimmed it out over the water. “She got me fired. You have a better explanation?”

  “Actually, she didn’t get you fired,” Brett said, and then seemed to hesitate. “I talked to her this morning.”

  “So she told me.”

  “Whitehall is privately owned.”

  I nodded. “I know that. What difference does it make?”

  “My dad’s one of the stockholders. I can’t tell you who the others are—I don’t even know. I talked to him about you this morning. He says at least one of the other big stockholders goes to your mom’s church. And this guy didn’t like the idea of having his minister’s daughter working at his restaurant and reporting to your mom. Natalie, it had nothing to do with Brooke. This other guy wanted you gone.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” I erupted. “What could I possibly report to my mother? That he raids the cash register or something?”

  “Doesn’t matter. But that’s the real story. By the way, if you’re still looking for a job, call Gabi. He really does want to help you.”

  “It wasn’t Brooke, then.”

  He shook his head. “Nope, it wasn’t Brooke. Who else here hates you?”

  “The church girls now,” I told him. “Sandra especially.”

  “Maybe you ought to see if any of them ever talked to this girl Allison,” Brett advised.

  “Come on.” I chided him. “They wouldn’t destroy their own organization for a chance to destroy me.”

  “Welcome to Hollywood,” was all Brett said.

  Was that possible? I didn’t know. But the first thing I was going to do the next day was find out.

  He slipped an arm around my shoulder. I put one of mine around his waist. We walked quietly for a few hundred yards. Then, as the sun was getting low on the horizon, Brett stopped and turned me to him. He looked at me, his dark chocolate eyes embracing me as tenderly as arms ever could. He kissed me. Slowly at first, then with more urgency, and then slowly again.

  For the first time in two days, I relaxed, feeling the anchor of his embrace, the rock of his being. I kissed him back with all I had, until everything else seemed to melt away.

  I was under no illusions. My life was still there. The nightmare of the night before. The difficulties ahead for me, my family, and our church. Yet I had to believe that there were good people in our church who would stand with my family despite the daughter’s failings.

  Who knew? If Wait/Great survived, maybe I could even speak at a meeting.

  As Brett kissed me again, I thought about what I’d read that morning in my Bible. About how Job brought on so much anguish in his effort to defy the task God had assigned him. Yet when Job went to wicked Nineveh as God had commanded, and told the people there to repent, they did.

  What God asks of us may not be as scary as we imagine. Maybe not as scary as our parents.

  Parents. Why did I have to think of parents? Not mine. Brett’s.

  “Can I ask you something?” I asked Brett when our lips finally separated.

  “Yeah, sure, of course.” His arms were still behind my neck.

  “Would—okay, this might be stupid—do you think your parents would be upset with you kissing me? Because you’re Jewish and I’m not?”

  I couldn’t help it. I was remembering what Mia had said to me after we’d gone to Menchie’s, about how some Jewish parents wanted their kids to marry only other Jews. I know. That I would make that particular leap at that particular time confirms that my mind is a scary place.

  Brett looked at me cockeyed. “Are you asking me to marry you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then I think they’d be just fine.”

  He kissed me again. I kissed him back.

  “It’s almost sunset,” I whispered. “Time to watch for the green flash.”

  Brett smiled. “I remember. From the observatory. The green flash that you’ve never seen, and Morten’s never seen.”

  I nodded. “There’s always a first time. Do not even consider a virginity joke.”

  “No jokes,” he promised. “I’m game. What do we have to do?”

  I plopped down onto the sand, wrapped my arms around my knees, and gazed out toward the setting sun. I tapped the sand to my right, indicating that Brett should sit next to me. “We wait. Watch. Hope.”

  He sat down and assumed the same position as me. “You realize this is a lost cause.”

  “Probably. But if we don’t look for it? We definitely won’t see it.”

  It was calm there on the beach. It was lovely. I was with a boy I adored. But as the sun slipped toward the horizon, all the terrible things that Brett’s kisses had banished from my mind roared back in a tsunami of overwhelming shame.

  I shuddered. One tear rolled down my left cheek.

  “Stop it,” Brett said as the base of the sun neared the horizon.

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop thinking. Your only job for the next three minutes is to wait. Watch. And hope.”

  It’s astonishing how quickly the sun actually sets. We barely waited a half minute for the orb to touch the horizon. We watched as the heavier air and curvature of the earth distorted its shape. It sank lower, so only the top quarter remained. Then the top eighth.

  We hoped.

  Oh my God. There it was!

  A split second of brilliant green, like a single human heartbeat against the vast enormity of time. Then it was gone, and the sun with it.

  “Did you see it?” I exclaimed.

  “See what?” Brett asked, blasé.

  “Come on, Brett! Don’t tell me you missed it! The green flash!”

  He stood and hollered out to sea. “I saw it! We saw it!”

  “Thank God, thank God, thank God,” I shouted.

  Here I was, on the edge of the world, with the Pacific at my feet, on the night I finally saw the green flash. It made me want to do something crazy, something I hadn’t done since I was a little girl, in the waters of the Blue Earth River near Mankato. I’d been too young then to understand the religious significance. Now I got it. Big-time.

  I jumped to my feet, ran into the frigid surf fully clothed, and doused myself under an incoming swell.

  When I popped up, Brett cheered for me. “Well done, Natalie. Well done. Nice baptism.”

  “Come on in,” I urged him. “You too.”

  “Umm, we don’t really do that,” Brett protested.

  I jumped above an incoming swell. “Brett? I think you guys invented it.”

  He hesitated a brief second, then sprang to his feet and ran to the water. A few moments later, we ducked under the surface together.

  I’d like to say that when we popped up together and hugged each other in the chest-deep ocean, all our sins were gone. Ha. I can’t speak for Brett, but mine were still there. The next day was going to be hard. And the day after that, and the day after that. Normal felt like a long way away.

  Yet I’d just seen the green flash, and I’d seen it with Brett Goldstein. If it hadn’t been for the night before, with all its pain, this moment never would have happened. The sun would have flashed green, and we wouldn’t have been on this beach to wait, watch, and hope.

  They say God works in mysterious ways. They’re right.

  About the Authors

  Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld have collaborated on projects in fiction, film, television, and theater. Their previous Random House novels include A Heart Divided and Amen, L.A. Amen, L.A., is their first Random House series.

  Don’t miss the first Amen, L.A. novel.

 

 

 
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