Tell Me No Lies

by Adele Griffin

  I could claim, sum total, about twenty hours of driving experience, mostly via hoagie runs to Wawa. I’d hardly practiced highways, right-hand turns, backing up, and parallel parking. This would be my first real test. North Wayne Avenue to Lancaster, a slow zipper all the way in. Nothing scary about it. It wasn’t until I crossed the first traffic light into Lower Merion that my doubts caught up. I pushed through. The halfway mark. And then, twenty minutes later, the natural turn at the dead end.

  I’d never learned the name of this bar. “Around the corner from Moriarty’s” wasn’t much to go on. But Moriarty’s was a well-known Philly landmark, and when I’d looked up the address in the Donnelly Directory, it mentioned the nearby street parking.

  At least it was Sunday. At least it wasn’t rush hour.

  At least, at least . . . and when I turned onto Walnut, at least there it was. Moriarty’s. All lit up, right on the corner. Down the block, there weren’t any cars to interfere with my parking attempt.

  I backed the Corolla inch by inch and parallel to the curb. Cut the engine. Took that courage breath, then slammed outside. Okay. Yes. I was doing this, I was really doing this. My car keys were jangling in my pocket like I was a real adult, alone in my hometown city. So far, so good.

  Quince Street was a one-way cobblestone, darker than Walnut, lined with skinny trees and carriage houses. At the corner blinked a ground-floor Coors Light sign, with a flickering hint of activity behind the smoked glass. I pushed through the thick wooden door and into the surround stereo’s INXS “Don’t Change.” Good song, good omen. It was crowded, too. I squinted through the burnt haze of cigarette smoke. I could feel the unnerved flicker in the men’s glances up and over at me. I wasn’t the usual.

  As dives went, it wasn’t that dive-y. Bicycles were bolted onto the walls as a kind of loose theme, a male theme, and most of the guys wore heavy outdoor clothes, boots, and leather jackets. Masculine enough that I felt my difference. A couple of focused bartenders pulled beers on tap and served the busy wraparound bar. Up front were a pair of pinball machines, and in a back corner, I saw them immediately, tight-knit in conversation, a perfect triangle of closeness, as if there’d never been a time when they weren’t best friends.

  It was probably a trick of the eye, because how could the moon be in view through that grimy window? And yet, the way I saw it, the light bathed Claire’s face with the same radiance of that very first night when I’d stayed over. I’d never forgotten how she looked in the library window seat, like a moonlit magic version of Claire. A bright-eyed girl I’d rediscovered tonight, with Matt, my Matt, except that he wasn’t mine, because he was with Claire, and he was also with Dave.

  It wasn’t so much that I saw anything as that I understood everything. I’d always been looking so hard for the realest Matt, the most private Matt. But I’d never counted on what I’d feel when I finally did find him, so unguarded and at ease in the company he trusted, that it extinguished anything I’d ever told myself about him. All those lies I’d told myself. Now I saw him. Facing Claire. But next to Dave, their shoulders just touching.

  Here he was. And what I felt—more than anything else in that red, roaring moment—was totally betrayed.

  forty-four

  I wish that I could remember everything, but this is what comes next.

  It begins in the dark pocket of that room. I’m the black shadow flat against the wall, and I see what I see.

  My feet are numb, and then so are my hands.

  “Hey,” I call over to them, but my voice is softened to nothing under the din of jukebox music and the bar crowd, the wall-mounted television. I try again. “Hey.”

  Magnetic waves of memory. Gage was chewing gum that afternoon; she always chewed gum in music class because she was paranoid about her singing breath. It’s with me again, a waft of sweet spearmint.

  Lizzy, stop it why are you being so weird everyone’s looking

  A warm afternoon. The first day we’d cracked open the windows to invite the green spring air. Our singing voices and Mr. Hock’s plinking piano, drifting outside to the playing fields.

  “Nobody but meeee . . .”

  A tingling in my fingers and the back of my short-circuiting brain, a rush of heat.

  Oh my God, she’s spazzing out.

  Four years later, no time at all.

  Sometimes seizures just happen.

  Claire catches sight of me as clouds burst apart into peppery fluttering, tiny flecks spattering across my vision, along with a deep sharp twist of panic that I can’t stop any of this, not even one second of it.

  And now Matt is calling to me, but my own voice isn’t coming out, everything is seized up inside me and the noise expelled from my lungs isn’t right and isn’t mine, there’s a sound in my ears that’s not me, either, a screaming tuneless tune. Every muscle is contracting, overcharged, I can’t hold on to my limbs, myself, I’m not here, I’m not me, I’m not . . .

  forty-five

  I try to make time lines and sequences, but I never remember much better than an approximate mess of that night. Some of it is gone completely. Shock and sedatives will do that, Dr. Neumann told me. Memory loss is to be expected.

  But I clung to what I could, resurfing those moments as they endlessly crashed to shore in my brain—even as they got rippled by distortion.

  What I recalled best and most in the emergency room: the pain.

  I throbbed bone deep with it, from the back of my skull, behind my eyes, between my ribs. Bruises that darkened along my leg from where I fell, heavily and onto one side. Sore and pulsing even in my mouth, along with an iron taste of blood.

  At some point, I spoke. “My tongue hurts.”

  “You bit it!” My nurse was warm brown eyes and kindness in her South Philly accent. “We’re going down for the EEG next. You need wooder?”

  I imagined myself like a primitive stick figure, a Keith Haring–shaped body, my center marked by a red X. Everything I needed to do, think, feel, and understand was pulling at me in opposite directions, all at once.

  The lights were too bright. A technician came and attached a few dozen electrodes to my scalp. A whisper of the recording machine as my brain waves were turned to patterns and stored. My eyes closed. I could hear hurrying feet in soft-soled shoes, jangling phones and garbled intercoms, pinging bells, and buzzers.

  At some point, Claire was a strange angel hovering over me.

  My eyes closed.

  The nurse again. “Memba comin’ in? Talk to me. I took your blood?”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay, so you got a small concussion. Is all you need to know, so rest.”

  Resting. Claire again. “Lizzy? I sent Dave and Matt back to the apartment. I said I’d be your guardian and I’d sign the release because I figured you didn’t—”

  “You should have gone with them.” Was that my voice? “I have other people to help me. I don’t need you.” I began coughing, which made me feel stupid and weak, as Claire waited for me to get my breath back. “You lied.”

  “No, I just didn’t tell. That’s different. We didn’t think you were coming.”

  “What’s it all about? That bar. Is that the type of bar you all hang out at, now that I’m not around? Is Matt in love with Dave? How long did you know about it?”

  “No, he’s not. It’s not like that. It’s not that simple.”

  “It looked pretty simple.”

  “Nobody’s gone behind your back, Lizzy.”

  “That’s what you three always say when you go behind my back.”

  “Lizzy, nothing’s going on behind your back except for honest conversation.”

  The thing I couldn’t give them. “You hid it from me.” A rebel tear spilled, my sore throat constricted. “All these secrets.”

  “I knew about your seizures already, it was one of the first things W
endy—”

  “Stop it. I don’t want to hear—”

  “—and I figured if I had a secret, and you had one, too, maybe they canceled each other out and you’d respect—”

  “Shut up, Claire!” Rising up on my elbows, my headache splitting me in half. “Just go already.”

  My eyes closed. My body had turned to liquid melting pain.

  The nurse. A cup of water. My question, How did I get here? Her answer, In an ambulance with all your friends.

  Maybe that happened first?

  At some point, a paunchy doctor who looked like Uncle Ron, but sterner. He took my vitals and told me I was free to leave in the company of an adult. “You aren’t wearing tags. It’s lucky your friends knew about your epilepsy.”

  Epilepsy, the X that marked me.

  I was given a brown bag, stapled. Prescriptions. The nurse. “Arncha gonna leave? You gotta friend out there, she’s been waiting and waiting.”

  “No, I want to leave with my family.”

  “What’s the name?”

  I said it. My eyes closed.

  At some point, I stood. Testing my legs, I walked carefully out to the main desk, where that same gray-fedora man from Lonnie’s diner all those weeks ago was slumped, exhausted, in one of the orange molded chairs. No fedora this time, and he was weaker than I remembered. His skin stretched too thin over the gaunt bones of his face. And then I saw him again, in a hospital gown and wheeling a drip—and when I saw him a third time, now with his mother, I realized none of these men were the gray-fedora man, they were all different men. It was just that they were all dying the same way.

  “I need to make a phone call.”

  At some point, a phone call. This must have happened first.

  The Kims kept one phone in the living room, another in Mr. Kim’s upstairs office. Mr. and Mrs. Kim both slept soundly. Mimi was my best bet at calm in a crisis.

  “Hello?”

  “Theo?” I could hear the TV in the background.

  “Hello? Who is this?” Mimi sounded sleep blunted.

  “I got it.” Using his most unbothered, older brother voice. “Jump off, Meems.”

  “Can you tell Violetta please not to call after eleven? Jeez!” The phone slammed.

  Theo waited a moment anyway, to ensure Mimi wouldn’t pick up again to deliver a few more lecturing words. “What’s wrong, Blizzard?”

  My voice, croaking out facts. “I’m at the emergency room at Drexel. I don’t want to go home with the people I came here with.”

  “You’re injured or just shitfaced?”

  “I had a seizure. Because of, you know, my epilepsy.” There it was, the word. Out. And I was saying it to Theo, of all people. “Why are you home?”

  “Martin Luther King Day’s on Monday, I’m here for the long weekend. Okay, listen, I’m hanging up now. I’m coming in. Sit tight.”

  My eyes closed.

  Later Claire told me that she’d stayed in the waiting room until Theo came through and gave my name at the desk. Of course I hated thinking about that, too. Claire introducing herself and explaining what had happened. The two of them discussing me. All that jarring knowledge of me between them.

  By the time Theo arrived, I’d moved to a chair. Brown paper bag on my lap.

  Theo was wearing what I knew were basically his pj’s—his faded lounge-around Lincoln Academy sweatpants and a Union Jack T-shirt he’d had since he was a skinny ninth grader that now hugged his chest and biceps. He hadn’t even wasted a moment to change. But he was his same Theo self, and I felt lucky he’d picked up the phone. Before we left, we agreed on the story before he called my worried parents from the hospital. He explained that we’d met up at the movies, that I’d gone with him to an alcohol-free party all the way in Overbrook, and that when I had the seizure, we were close enough to Philly that he’d driven me in for an X-ray and EEG. And that now he was bringing me home.

  I could hear Dad thanking him, over and over.

  Theo also found out where I’d parked, and he drove back into the city with a friend early the next morning and returned the Corolla to my trusting parents. To this day, they don’t know the whole story. Not every single secret will ruin your life.

  forty-six

  2/14

  Dear Lizzy,

  Since you’ve spent the past couple of weeks not calling me back, I hope you might go for a note. Even if I’m not as good with words as you. But when you wrote me that apology back in December, I read it plenty of times. It was honest and from your heart, but I didn’t trust it. I’ve been burned by words before. Once upon a time, Jay wrote me thousands of them and I ate them up like popcorn, and as it turned out, he was the worst possible kind of person, and his words were worth less than nothing. So I didn’t know what to think about yours, because I’d made such a stupid bet on him. Want to know something? After you took his letters, I kept hoping you’d come back to me with an opinion about them, and then I’d know he’d tricked you, too, and you thought he was amazing, and you’d been just as fooled as I’d been, because there was no way to see that he was a horrible lying bastard kind of a person.

  The second thing I wanted to tell you, what I tried to tell you in the ER that night, and I still think you should know it, was that Wendy Palmer told me everything that first week. How Angela Ertel’s parents are swingers and Lindsey’s dad is in the mob, and that Jill de la Reyes’s brother has spina bifida, and that Becky Schultz’s dad ran off with the babysitter and Deenie Herring’s brother’s a fag and Maggie Farthington was at some special camp for kids with eating disorders, and that you’d had a major epileptic seizure a few years ago and almost choked on your own tongue.

  Palmer didn’t exactly win me over with any of that, but I guess I felt this connection to you, as a person who didn’t like sharing things that made you feel worse instead of better. Or you didn’t mind being partly hidden. I get that. I know how much I needed to hide when I left Strickland. I still think of myself as a girl who disappeared. But here’s the other thing, I’d figured it out early with Dave. Not Matt, at first, but Dave. That night after the Bank, he told me about this older guy who came into his life and pretty much destroyed his trust. So we had that in common. It was a story Matt knew. Matt has his own stories. It’d be wrong of me to print them here, but the three of us bonded that night, and I realized that as much as I respect kept secrets, it’s also a relief to share them.

  I never talk about Jay at school, and if you’re not doing anything Friday night, you could maybe come over? Lizzy, I don’t know what else. I’m not good at this stuff, and the card’s running out of room.

  Just this: we know you’re our fourth.

  You know you are, too.

  Be our Valentine.

  Claire

  forty-seven

  That afternoon, with Claire’s card in my book bag and a toasted bagel in my hand, I headed for the art room. All I wanted was to free my mind to make art. My heart was throbbing with everything Claire had written. Most of it wasn’t any shock. Some secrets are obvious, like every scandal that Wendy had offered up. All of those stories had been passed around our classroom for years, like grubby show-and-tell objects. Of course my story was part of it.

  As for Matt and Dave, what I mostly wanted on that was time. Maybe this was why I hadn’t taken Claire’s phone calls—or Matt’s. Every new feeling kept catching me by the throat.

  In the art room, the sound of laughter stopped me, and when Mrs. Custis-Brown peeked around the corner, she looked so flushed and out of breath I glanced away, even though she was fully clothed.

  “Lizzy!” she called. “You’re just who we wanted to see! Phil is in here, too. Can you come into the office for a chat?”

  “Okay.” I set my bagel on the table and dragged in.

  This couldn’t be good.

  The art room office was more
like an ambitious cubby, and so cluttered I felt like I knew what the Custis-Browns’ apartment must look like. Mr. Custis-Brown, behind the desk, pointed me to the only empty seat as Mrs. C-B moved some papers to perch up on the desk corner. I sat heavily. Dr. Neumann was still making adjustments to my medications, and I’d been foggy these past days, a sluggish beat behind everything. I knew the meds were necessary, but I disliked the way time moved in slow motion, and how my impulses and reactions felt coated in wax.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked into their expectant smiles.

  “Yes, yes. Better than okay. In fact, Phil and I have been looking together at the AP portfolios. Yours is very promising, Lizzy, and we wanted to ask you if you’d applied to any art schools?”

  “Not really. I guess I’m hoping for Princeton? Where I’m a legacy.”

  “We think your AP portfolio is pretty unusual.” Mr. Custis-Brown clasped his hands behind his large woolly head, tipping it back to regard me through turtled eyes. “You have a lot going on in this concentration, don’t you think?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a real vision here, wouldn’t you say? Take Kidnapped. Where the hand is tied up in elastic and twine. And then there’s Drowned, where these fingers appear waterlogged and you’ve twisted a bath stopper’s chain to your middle finger. And the—”

  “The clothespins one,” Mrs. Custis-Brown broke in. “What’s it called?”

  “Out to Dry.” I’d done that piece after meeting Mrs. Ashley. I’d clipped each of my fingers with a clothespin, resulting in a drawing that looked strange and dangerous. “I hope you don’t think they’re, like, really dark or anything.” I didn’t like the intensity of this conversation. “That I have some mental problems.”

  “We aren’t labeling your work. We’re mostly intrigued by it. And we did show it to a friend of ours, an art critic that Jeanie and I both respect. He wrote this”—he picked a piece of paper off his desk—“In each piece of art, the hand is its own entity. It exists violent, helpless, and apart from the rest of the body, as if seized by a private undercurrent of deep conflict.” Mr. Custis-Brown looked up and raised his eyebrows.