The Things We Wish Were True

by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen

  After breakfast, we did our chores. I cleaned the dishes, and Cutter swept the floor, though mostly he just hit the floor with the broom until I told him to stop. Then we vacuumed or cleaned the bathroom or did something to make the house look nice inside. When we first moved in, I went outside and looked around for something I could do to make the outside of the house look nice, but I didn’t have any money for paint or flowers or anything like that, so I decided to stick to the inside. I learned to just walk really fast inside the house so I didn’t have to see how ugly it was on the outside.

  I knew what people said about our house. I listened to the conversations at the pool when they thought I wasn’t listening. They called it “the eyesore,” and they talked about how that house should not be in their neighborhood. Truth be told, I’d had the same thought the first time I saw it. Driving past all the pretty houses had filled me with hope that maybe this time things would be different and we’d have the better life that Mom was always dreaming about. But that wasn’t to be. Instead, we had to walk into that house, the one people looked at like a black tooth in the middle of a mouthful of pearly whites.

  Our house probably used to be gray, but it looked kind of white now since most of the paint was gone. It was basically no color at all. The bushes (if you could call them that—they were more like trees by then) had grown up so high they covered half the windows in the front of the house. Other than the overgrown bushes, there were no trees in the front yard, just scrubby grass, where there was any grass at all. And to top it all off, there were some shutters missing, and the mailbox leaned like it was thinking about falling over any second.

  The neighbors hated that house; they wanted to knock it down. And they weren’t too happy about us living in it, either, on account of how they could knock it down if folks would just stop renting it. The people at the pool said stuff about the kind of people who would rent a house like that. They said that we were white trash and how they’d heard me and Cutter’s daddy was in prison. (But they were wrong about that. Cutter’s daddy was in prison. I don’t have a daddy. At least, not one I’ve ever seen.) Our new neighbors didn’t like us even though they’d never met us, never came over and brought us a casserole and introduced themselves like people do on TV. The sign on the entrance to the pool said WE’RE ALL FAMILY HERE. But that was just not true.

  I tried to tell Mom what people were saying, but Mom said it was a better life for us and that we’d just have to learn how to get along. She told me to stop eavesdropping if it was going to upset me so much. “My little snoop,” she said, ruffling my hair. “This is a good place.” But she also said to keep the door locked and reminded me about a hundred times not to talk to strangers. A girl disappeared from nearby right before we moved in, and my mom was all freaked out about it. So, since all our neighbors were strangers, and that didn’t seem like it would ever change, we didn’t talk to anyone at all.

  After we finished our chores, we did our reading. I made a rule: we had to read for thirty minutes every day. Mom took us to the library when she could so we would have books to choose from. I would get as many as my arms could hold, and Mom would say it was too many, but I would promise to read them all. And I did. Cutter always got picture books, and I told him he should get harder books, but Cutter didn’t like to read. Sometimes when it was reading time, he would argue with me and say he wouldn’t do it. I told him that if he didn’t, he wouldn’t get TV time. And he knew I meant it. So he usually went in his room and looked at the pictures, which made me happy because I got to be alone in my room with no Cutter to pester me for thirty whole minutes.

  A good thing about the new house: we each had our own room. At our old apartment, Cutter and I slept in the bedroom, and Mom slept on a pull-out sofa in the den. Sometimes her boyfriend, Joe, slept with her on the pull-out sofa, and if I needed something from the kitchen, I had to walk past his sleeping self. I didn’t like the way he smelled up our den with his oily man smell. I was glad when Joe went away. The best part about the house in Sycamore Glen—eyesore or not—was there was no Joe.

  After reading time was over, we turned on the TV. We alternated days of who got to pick what we watched. Cutter liked animal shows, and I liked reality TV. We were both happy with animal reality TV, like the ones where they catch wild animals that get in people’s houses or the ones where they wrestle alligators. Sometimes we’d just watch cartoons. The TV company made a mistake and gave us more channels than we signed up for, so there was a lot to choose from, more than we’d ever had before. I told Mom we should probably tell them they made a mistake, but Mom said what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them and that sometimes life just works out. That had not been my experience, though. When I told her that, she laughed and laughed. I liked it when my mother laughed.

  After TV time, it was time to eat again. Mom said Cutter and I were eating machines, so I tried not to eat too much. But Cutter didn’t give it a second thought. He scarfed down food, and he usually didn’t care what kind. Mom said he had a hollow leg. At lunch, I made him eat some fruit, even if it was just canned fruit cocktail. Sometimes we had chips to go with our sandwiches, and once in a while, we had cookies. I like homemade chocolate-chip cookies, but we only had those if Mom was in the mood to bake, which was hardly ever because she was always so tired from working. Mom worked one job during the weekdays and one on the weekends, so she was at work pretty much all the time. She had to do that, she said, so we could have the kind of life we had. Sometimes when I saw people with their fancy cars and their nice houses, I wondered how many jobs they must have had to work to have that kind of life.

  After lunch, it was finally time to go to the pool. Cutter was not a very good swimmer, so I made him wait as long as I could to go to the pool, even though he started begging to go as soon as his eyes popped open in the morning. He made me nervous in the water, and it was hard to watch him all the time. I knew there was a lifeguard there who could save him if he started to drown, but Cutter was my responsibility. That’s what Mom said every night when she kissed me good night. She said the same thing: “I’ll be gone when you get up. Be good, be smart, and watch out for your brother.” Then she said, “I love you more than life itself.” And even though she couldn’t be home as much as I wanted her to be, I knew she meant it.

  I didn’t like it when people said bad things about my mother. Her old boyfriend, Joe, said a lot of mean things about her, and about Cutter and me, too. He was not very nice to her, and that night after he’d said the worst things ever, I gave her a hug and told her not to listen to him. I felt bad because he’d caught me snooping in his wallet, and that’s what caused their fight. But she said it wasn’t my fault, even though I shouldn’t snoop in people’s stuff. (I was still working on that.) Then she hugged me and made me promise I’d grow up and have a better life than she did. She wouldn’t stop crying until I pinkie-swore I would. The trouble was, I wasn’t real sure how to get a better life or even what she had in mind.

  At the pool, the moms and dads didn’t talk to me and Cutter. I didn’t really expect them to. They were parents, and parents usually don’t talk to kids unless it’s to their own. But it was more than that. They looked at us as if we were sand that got in their bathing suits. When I told Mom about it, she said, “Well, then, just don’t go up there, Cailey.” She had her tired voice when she said it, the one that told me I should just drop it.

  But even though Cutter couldn’t swim very well and the people ignored us, I liked being there. I liked the water and the sunshine and the sound of people laughing. Even though we didn’t talk to each other, we—Cutter and I and all the moms and kids—were all there together. It was our pool. And so Cutter and I went up there every day after lunch. We walked a long way to get there, we swam, and we walked a long way back home. And then we did it all over again the next day. And that was, I expected, the way we’d spend that whole summer of my eleventh year and Cutter’s sixth. I was, of course, as wrong as could be.

  JENC
EY

  Their days had settled into a routine, every day much the same as the one before it. Jencey had taken to going on walks after dinner, leaving the girls to play cards with her mother on the screened-in porch as the day ended and the first lightning bugs began to emerge. The girls loved the time with her mother. She watched the three of them, hunched over their cards at the rickety little table they’d set up on the porch. Pilar liked winning. Zara liked being included. Her mother, for her part, just seemed ecstatic to have the girls with her in any capacity and patiently reexplained the rules of rummy and spades and crazy eights night after night.

  Every night Jencey told herself she’d stay and play with them, yet every night by the time dinner was over and another day was gotten through, she felt the pull to escape the confines of home and family, the magnet in her chest tugging her back to the streets of her youth. She wandered those streets looking for the childhood she’d forgotten, the good parts from before the hearts started showing up.

  She’d been desperate to forget this place when she’d left at eighteen. Now she forced herself to remember, if only in an effort to forget the more recent past. She quizzed herself as she walked: Didn’t that house used to be gray? Was that the house that always smelled like curry? What was the name of the girl who lived in that yellow house, the one who was so crazy about horses? Was that the house that was always decorated so outlandishly for Halloween? She wondered if the same people still lived there, if the woman still sat on the porch dressed as a witch, scaring kids.

  She would find out in October if she was still there. But she couldn’t still be here by then. She would dry up and blow away like the leaves, crunchy and brown and lifeless. She had to find a way out. She’d told herself this was just a visit, a stopping-off place en route to somewhere else. But where? She had no idea. For the first time in her life, she didn’t have a plan. Even when she’d run from here, she’d had a plan of what to do, forming it as she and her father drove north.

  It took her more than a week to work up the courage to find out if the hideaway was still there. She took the path around the neighborhood lake, telling herself she didn’t have to veer from it, coaxing herself along with internal promises that chances were the little offshoot path wouldn’t be there any longer. It had been so long ago. Things had changed; progress had happened even there, in the neighborhood that time seemed to have forgotten. Her path along the lake was nothing more than a walk like any other night, she reasoned. And yet her eyes were already betraying her, scanning the landscape for the path with a kind of hope. She needed, she realized, to get back to it.

  Walking along, she felt like a time traveler. With each step, she was closer to the young girl she’d once been. It came back to her a little more, the feeling that the future was something to be run toward, that good things were possible. There, on that dirt path, she was younger, brighter, more innocent. She didn’t know that life could end with the arrival of black SUVs containing agents in dark suits and sunglasses, that someone you loved could lie to you so completely, that everything you worked for could go up in smoke as surely as if someone had struck a match and set it all on fire.

  As she stepped off the beaten path onto the less-traveled one that was right where she remembered, she felt special again. She was the girl who could do anything. She was the sophomore nominated to homecoming court, then improbably elected queen. The girl who still didn’t know that the next day the hearts would start arriving. This path was her looking glass, her wardrobe, her yellow brick road.

  She pushed through brush and brambles, her shins and ankles brushing up against prickles with barely registered pain. She kept her eyes peeled around every corner as she wound her way deeper into the woods. When doubts about her safety began playing in her mind, she banished them, letting herself enter fully into her memories of past visits, of what it was to be here, of whom she used to meet there and the things they used to say to each other. There were the dreams and the whispers, the fights and the surrenders, the truths and the lies. She had been herself then, with him, but was that self a shadow of her actual self or the more realized version? Did life add to or take away from who we are at sixteen?

  The path took her to the little ring of trees waiting there for her like old friends, their branches waving her over as if they’d been waiting all these years for her inevitable return. The breeze through their branches sounded like a sigh of relief. She slipped through the leaves to enter into a world apart, the place of shelter she’d run to so many times before. Their world, they claimed, hers and Everett’s. It existed just for them, and no matter what happened, they could always get back to it, hide inside it. She turned around, hugging herself as she looked up at the bit of sky visible from the center, the leaves otherwise blocking the visibility out or in.

  That is what they’d loved about it, how utterly hidden they’d felt. At a time when they’d had no space of their own, this had been exactly what they needed: a place to slip from sight, to hole up and disappear together. In that space they could—and did—do anything they wanted. She’d lied to her parents so many times. She was going to Bryte’s, to the movies, to a party, to the library. But she came here. This place was the one place she’d always, always felt safe. Until she didn’t feel safe anywhere.

  She shivered in the gathering dark, sensibility returning as she reached for her phone in her pocket just to be sure. She held it up to check the reception and thought of the news report she’d seen on the television her mother kept on in the kitchen all day. There was an interview with the lead detective on the case of a young girl who’d disappeared nearby. She’d started watching it with the concern of a parent before realizing the girls were there, both watching the same thing, their eyes round with horror. Pilar had looked at her as though she was uncertain why their mother had brought them to a place where little girls could disappear. She’d snapped the TV off despite her mother’s protests that the weather report was up next.

  Now standing in the woods with darkness coming on fast, she thought about how far she’d ventured from earshot. No one could hear her if she screamed. Anyone could be in these woods. She wrapped her arms around herself and listened for danger. But all she could hear was wind, birds, and the rustle of the branches. What had happened before was over; she had nothing to be afraid of anymore. She forced herself to stand there a few seconds longer, and then she let herself leave, her steps out of the woods quicker than her steps in.

  She returned home to find her mother alone on the porch, waiting for her but trying not to look like she was. Jencey folded her arms across her chest and waited for whatever she was going to say. She saw the concern her mother was unable to mask. Jencey held back from saying what she wanted to say, which was, I love you, and I’m sorry I stayed gone so long.

  “Are you OK?” her mother asked. In the light from the bare bulb hanging from the rickety ceiling fan, she could see that her mother’s eyes had filled with tears. She blinked them away, but it was too late.

  Jencey waved her hand in the air, reassuringly. “We’re OK.”

  “Well, you know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you need. The girls could even enroll in school.” She smiled. “I hear the schools around here are good.” The sentence seemed to have a question mark attached to the end of it, as if she were asking Jencey if what she’d heard was accurate. “I don’t know much about the schools anymore, now that I don’t have kids that age. Of course I guess they could’ve gone downhill. They’re always changing things around. Seems like something’s in the news every day about it.”

  “I’m sure the schools are fine, Mom. Bryte wouldn’t have moved here if they weren’t top-notch.” She thought of the way Bryte looked at her son, like she was watching a continual miracle. “Trust me,” she added with a laugh.

  “So you’ve seen Bryte?” her mom asked, trying—and failing—to sound casual.

  “Yep,” she answered.

  “That must be nice for you girls, together again,” he
r mom pressed.

  “Sure,” she said. “We’ve talked some, at the pool.” Anxious to change the subject, she added, “The girls sure do enjoy having the pool. It’s made these three weeks go by fast.”

  Her mother ignored Jencey’s attempt at a segue. “And it isn’t strange? With her married to Everett now?” Jencey thought of serious, intent Everett, begging her not to leave as if he could change anything that had happened, as if her father wasn’t already at the wheel of the car and her things weren’t already packed. For a while, even Everett hadn’t known where she’d gone, because he could have inadvertently let on where she was to the wrong person, a person who’d been growing increasingly bold and dangerous. She’d only had to look at Everett to confirm that.

  “It’s fine, Mom. We’ve all grown up. Things change.” The way she said it, it sounded so simple.

  Her mother was silent, thinking this over. Jencey rested her head against the knotty wood and listened to the crickets, cicadas, and tree frogs croaking out a summer serenade. In their previous neighborhood, there hadn’t been the sounds of nature, at least not that she could recall. They’d drowned out those noises with their sound system, their waterfall, their man-made ambience. Standing there listening, she thought that perhaps in attempting to give them everything, she and Arch had cheated their girls. She heard a shriek from inside the house, followed by a belly laugh.

  “They seem good,” her mom said.

  “They are,” she replied a little too quickly. “We all are.”

  Her mother sniffed the air, and Jencey wondered what scent she was detecting. Her father’s pipe smoke? The charcoal grill down the street? The jasmine in the hanging basket or the magnolia tree in the yard or the gardenias in her garden? Maybe it was the baby shampoo her youngest daughter still used, innocence bottled. She didn’t ask, though.