Every Last Lie

by Mary Kubica

  I try hard to ignore the threat—I will fucking kill you, Solberg. I turn away from his bullying eyes, telling Maisie as I grope for the car keys, “Just a second,” when, before I take two steps, I see the Beemer swerve onto the end of my blacktop, the hood aimed momentarily at Maisie. It’s a jerk, a simple tug of the steering wheel. It happens so fast, as Maisie sees the car coming at her full throttle, her skinny legs crumbling at the knee as she drops to the ground facedown, covering her head with her hands. The engine revs, a loud, hostile sound. By now I’m running, and just as quickly as it began, it’s through. Like that, Theo tugs on the steering wheel once more, rerouting the car less than three feet from where Maisie lies, and this time I hear his laugh out the window as he calls out to me, “See? See that, Solberg? How does it feel to be on the receiving end for a change?”

  “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” I carp, muttering under my breath asshole, so that Maisie can’t hear it, though somehow or other Theo does. Or maybe he doesn’t hear the word so much as he sees it form on my lips.

  “What the fuck did you say?” he demands. “What did you fucking call me?” he asks, but I hardly pay any attention to him because already I’m hurrying to lift Maisie from the hot blacktop. I gather her shaking body in my arms as Theo slams on the brake and the car comes to a complete stop. He thrusts the gearshift in Park and steps from the car, towering over Maisie and me on the drive. Maisie clings to me like a baby chimpanzee, fingertips sinking into my skin, confessing, “I’m scared, Daddy,” and though I don’t admit it to her, there’s a part of me that’s scared, too. There’s a threatening look in Theo’s eyes.

  “I’m not the asshole,” Theo says, as I lower Maisie into the car and turn back to look him in the eye. Except that I don’t look him in the eye because Theo is a good three inches taller than me and likely another fifty pounds.

  From behind I hear Maisie wince, and before I can tell her everything is okay, everything is all right, Theo shoves me against the car and tells me, “You’re the asshole, Solberg. You got that? You’re the asshole. Not me.”

  “Not in front of my kid,” I plead, but Theo doesn’t care who’s around to see. His hand forms into a fist and before I can react, he gets me in the lip. Maisie screams out loud, pressing her hands to her eyes so that she can’t see what happens next, which just so happens is a good thing for me because it’s a gut reaction this time when my own hand follows suit, and I jab Theo in the jaw. Three times. With all of my might. He staggers, but comes back at me with a hook and uppercut, putting the weight of his entire body behind the blow so that the car behind me is the only thing that keeps me upright.

  He laughs as I wobble, calling me a sissy, a pansy, and I’m about to hit him again when Maisie cries out, professing loudly this time that she’s scared, and Theo retreats a step, saying to me, “We’re not through here. This isn’t done,” before waltzing away, back toward the car, smug as can be, thinking he’s doing me some favor by not beating the life out of me in front of my kid. I’m transported back to ninth grade when some asshole told me to meet him at the flagpole after school so he could beat the crap out of me, and I let him, unable to put up much of a fight. I’ve never been a fighter. I always had guys around like Connor to do it for me, except that this time Connor isn’t here.

  Theo laughs arrogantly, sure that he’s won this round, but when his back is turned, I consider tackling him, taking him down with a chop drop or an elbow drop, catching him when he isn’t looking and turning the tide in my favor. It’s the only way I could really win, with a cheap shot or a low blow. I have a vision of him lying facedown on the burning concrete like Maisie just a minute ago, bleeding out, crying uncle.

  I start to advance, but as I do, Maisie whispers, “Is he gone, Daddy?” and her words freeze me in my tracks. I can’t move.

  This isn’t something Maisie needs to see.

  Theo gets in the car and slams the door. He steps on the gas and disappears down the street. “It’s okay,” I tell Maisie, stroking her hair, seeing that her pigtails are all out of whack, the knees of her tights smudged with dirt. “You’re okay. He’s gone.” I peer up and down the street to be sure he’s gone, and like magic, Theo and his black car have disappeared from view, the only sign of him the unmistakable smell of burning rubber that lingers in the air.

  “Why did he do that, Daddy?” Maisie asks, her voice shaking, as I secure the straps, wiping the tears from her eyes. I hold tight to Maisie. It was such a close call. Just one more second and Theo would have hit my girl. “Why, Daddy?” she begs with this childlike innocence that reminds me that in Maisie’s world, bad things don’t happen. Bad people don’t exist. Maisie hardly knows Theo. He’s Teddy’s daddy, and yet we don’t let Maisie play with Teddy when Theo is home. Maisie has hardly laid eyes on him, and I plan to keep it that way.

  As soon as I get home, I’ll tell Clara what happened, even though it means I’ll have to come clean about my run-in with Teddy. She should know. Maybe it’s time to activate the home security system, too, just in case there’s a psychopath living across the street. Maybe it’s time to put the house on the market and move somewhere new.

  Three feet. He was less than three feet from hitting Maisie. I could tell her it was an accident. I could make a story up, how a squirrel had darted into the road and he was trying to avoid it, how he didn’t see Maisie. But I don’t.

  He wasn’t going to hit her, I tell myself. It was just a threat. But still…

  “He’s a bad man, Maisie,” I say, because for once I can’t think of anything better to say, some way to sugarcoat this situation for Maisie’s delicate ears. I want her to know. I need her to know. Theo is a bad man, and under no circumstances should she ever be around him. I look her straight in the eye. I need to be sure she hears. “He’s a bad man, Maisie,” I say again, point-blank. “That’s why.”

  And then I close the door and take one more look up and down the street to be sure Theo isn’t around as we take off for ballet. I don’t need him following me there.

  CLARA

  As I pull down the quiet residential road on which my mother and father live, I find only one car in the drive: Izzy’s old wreck of a car, a clunker that must be older than she. It has character, as does she, for it’s a gaudy green with fuzzy purple dice hanging from the rearview mirror. The fender is lined with bumper stickers, one for every single day of the week. One reads Free Spirit and another Dead Head. It’s a used car, a hand-me-down, pre-owned or maybe passed on from another generation, with paint that is chipping and a wheel well corroded with a reddish brown, flaky rust.

  But what matters most to me has nothing to do with Izzy’s car. My father’s car, which he always keeps parked on the south side of the driveway, isn’t here, and, to me, that’s all that matters.

  I park on the street. I leave the children in the car with the windows opened a crack, and take myself to the front door, cutting across the lawn.

  I knock, and Izzy answers. She stands before me in something that’s clearly handmade, a skirt and a shirt and an antiquated fashion vest, all in a hodgepodge of patterns: argyle and damask and polka dots. She radiates panache. Izzy smiles and says to me, “Hello, Clara,” and I reply with a curt, “Hi.”

  There’s a warm, wonderful aroma wafting from inside the home, and she tells me that she’s cooking dinner for when my parents arrive home from the appointment. “It’s a long drive from the city,” she says, “and they’ll be famished by the time they get here. I wanted to be sure I left them something to eat.” She asks if I’d like to come inside and wait. But I say no, for some reason put off by her efficiency and good manners. If I was half the woman as she, I would have thought to bring my own parents dinner, and yet I didn’t.

  I carry my camera. It’s a heavy thing, a Nikon DSLR with a black strap that crisscrosses my frame. “My father wanted me to place a classified ad for my mother’s car online,” I tell her. “I needed to snap a few quick photos of it, if you don’t
mind,” I say, though what I fail to say is that my father already sent photos, that I have more than I need to post the classified ad and that that’s not the reason I came.

  Izzy smiles and says sure and of course, and gives me the green light to let myself into the attached garage and take the photographs. She asks if I could use a hand, but I say no. She asks if I need her to open the garage door for me, but I say no to this, too—I know the code—and we part ways, me heading to the garage by way of my own car parked in the street, where I pass my cell phone to Maisie through the open window to keep her company and take a quick peek at Felix to ensure he’s fast asleep.

  I continue on to the garage door keypad and type the familiar numbers in, four digits that are also my birth date, the very same PIN as for their debit cards, my father’s cell phone, the computer’s log-in. It’s not very safe, having passwords that are all the same, I’d told my father long ago, saying how if someone got access to one, they’d have access to them all. My father pooh-poohed the idea, saying it was easier to remember this way. He’s far too trusting, not disillusioned like me. The only one that varies is the Chase password, on account of the bank’s guidelines and not my father’s intuition.

  The door lifts open, and there it is, my mother’s car, a black Chevy sedan, the bow tie insignia glaring back at me, baiting me. A tease. I was in college when my mother bought this car. I didn’t help her pick it out, nor did I sit idly by, bored out of my mind, while she and my father finagled with the salesman over a deal. I missed out on a test drive. The times I’ve been in it are few and far between, and so long ago that I can no longer remember where or when or why. I’m certainly no car connoisseur; I couldn’t care less what kind of car I drive so long as it’s dependable and safe.

  Is this the car that took my husband’s life?

  I check my watch and wonder how long I have until the HVAC guys phone my father to tell him I skipped out on our appointment and that I wasn’t home when they came to call. How long do I have until my mother and father finish up with the neurologist and hurry home? Already it’s three thirty in the afternoon.

  I hurry. I waste no time.

  I examine the exterior like a dermatologist giving a full-body exam, running my fingers over the burnished steel, searching for signs of damage: a dent or a ding, chipped paint, a missing hubcap. But there are none. I get down on my hands and knees to examine the underside of the vehicle and the tires, all-season tires that look like they’ve seen better days. The depth of the tread is negligible, though still I find fragments of gravel embedded there, and I think of the gravel fringing the sides of Harvey Road, the sand and crushed stone and clay that span four feet or more on either side of the street. I pluck a piece of gravel from the tire with a fingernail and slide it in a back pocket of my jeans like a crime scene investigator collecting soil samples. Where did these rocks come from? I wonder.

  I rise to my feet to continue my search, and I discover a single leaf—the leaf of an oak tree—tucked beneath the blade of a windshield wiper like circulars in a grocery store parking lot. I pluck the leaf from the glass and examine it in my apprehensive hands, a mossy-green leaf mottled with blisters, scaly yellow abscesses that rise from the surface. It’s a fungus, I believe. The white oak tree on the side of Harvey Road was ripe with leaves when I last saw it, some green, some yellow, drooping with thirst. I’ll bring this leaf with me; I’ll compare it to the leaves of Nick’s tree. If it’s a match, then I’ll know. This leaf, I tell myself, along with the gravel, will be all the proof I need to confirm that my mother has done this to me, somehow, in some insoluble way; she has taken Nick from me.

  I find nothing else outside the car.

  In the distance, I’m quite certain I hear a phone ring, and I peer toward the outside world, away from the garage, waiting for Maisie to joyfully answer my phone with a merry, “Hello, Boppy!” But from the car, there is only silence, and I worry now about the children overheating in the car, wondering how long I’ve been in the garage, how long I’ve left them alone. I can see Maisie’s little head through the back window, and there is movement. She’s moving her head. Not much, but a slight sway. Enough that I know she’s okay.

  I set my hand on the car door’s lever and pull swiftly, opening the door. The car beeps as an interior light illuminates the dark cavern of the car. I gaze inside.

  The inside of the car is nearly empty, save for an array of road maps and the casing of a Simon & Garfunkle CD left open on the dash, my mother’s favorite. If I were to put a key in the ignition and start the car, I’d hear “The Sound of Silence” playing through the speaker system, timeless voices filling the space. There isn’t much to see inside the car, but I go through it with a fine-tooth comb, just in case. I open the glove box and rummage around inside, finding nothing. What I’m looking for, I don’t know, though my brain is moving a mile a minute, confused with thoughts of Theo and my mother, images of Kat and Melinda Grey. How in the world could my mother have intentionally pushed Nick from the road? It couldn’t have been her; it just couldn’t have been. My mother doesn’t do anything these days with intent. It’s all random and involuntary.

  But then it strikes me: maybe it wasn’t intentional at all. It was a mistake. The rental property—the home my parents used to own—is a mile or two from Harvey Road. It was just a rotten break that Nick and my mother happened to be driving down the street at the very same time, Nick heading to our house, my mother trying to find the old farmhouse she mistakenly believed was still home. There was nothing calculated about it. It was just bad luck, and I’m afflicted with a sudden pang of sadness, wondering who I feel the most sorry for, Nick or my mother or me.

  But there must be proof. I need something tangible so that I will know. Something conclusive. Because without it, my mind keeps spinning, a montage whereby I see half a dozen different faces behind the wheel of the very same car. My mother. Nick. Even Maisie. Even four-year-old Maisie clutching her hands around a leather steering wheel of a car whose accelerator she can’t reach.

  I have to know for certain. I have to know once and for all.

  I keep searching the car, finding thirty-eight cents forgotten in a cup holder, a wad of chewed gum swaddled in the wrapper beneath a seat, piquing my interest. What else might be hiding beneath the seat?

  I reach my hand as far as it will go under the passenger’s and then the driver’s seats, scratching a forearm on the jagged parts beneath that seat, feeling blindly and coming up empty, or almost empty until a single finger grazes something cold and flat beneath the chair, a thin slice of metal no bigger than a key chain or a pocket mirror. I pinch it awkwardly between my fingertips and pull, coming up with far more than I’d ever expected to discover.

  I gather the item in a hand before stepping out into the dim light of the garage to see, like an archaeologist peeking through a sieve, looking for treasure.

  But this isn’t treasure.

  At the sight of it, my fingers and legs go lame, unable to move. My heart beats its wings inside my chest, in a panic, quickly taking fright, a trapped bird unable to fly as a predator watches on from a distance. The afternoon sunlight smuggles its way into the garage and hits the object square on, refracting its light toward me, and just like that, I am blind. I lose the ability to see. The world around me becomes a shiny, golden yellow before it fades to black.

  My head can no longer think straight, my eyes can no longer see as I realize that the answer to my question lies there, clear as day in the palm of my hand.

  NICK

  BEFORE

  The dance studio is located in an old furniture factory in the town next to ours. It’s a three-story redbrick building that lines the railroad tracks. It’s been refurbished and flaunts all those exposed beams and ductwork that people want these days. The floors are a dark wood, the office spaces bound by glass. The upper floor of the building is loft apartments, but down below are a photographer’s studio, a home decorator, attorneys, dentists and more. And a dan
ce studio, of course. I can’t help but wonder what the lease payment is on a place like this, though I also wonder how much traffic comes and goes through. The building is off the beaten path; without a devoted client base, there’s no chance in the world of ever being found.

  The whole way to ballet, for fifteen miles and nearly thirty minutes, I stared in my rearview mirror, searching for signs of Theo and his Beemer. Nearly every black car I saw scared the daylights out of me, as I was half sure it was Theo coming to get even with Maisie and me in case we weren’t already even. I’m not the only one who’s scared. In the back seat, Maisie sits with her eyes pinned to glass, quiet like Maisie is never quiet. She holds tightly to my hand as we walk inside, peering over her shoulder. I can feel my eye start to swell, a shiner taking form.

  Inside the building, in the common space, there are signs posted—No tap shoes in the hall—and yet a group of girls scurry down the corridor, tapping their toes and giggling. As we walk down the hallway, Maisie becomes giddy with anticipation, forgetting about Theo as she skips along.

  The other mothers eye me as I step inside the lobby of the dance studio, looking me up and down before they smile. They say a soft hello to Maisie as I help her into her ballet slippers, and she disappears with her friends behind a closed door, where I stand and watch through a pane of glass as the teacher, a pretty woman no more than twenty-one or twenty-two years old, leads the ten girls and one boy through their ballet positions. The women make small talk while we wait, asking me how Clara is feeling and whether or not the baby has arrived. I pull up photos on my phone, and they pass it around, oohing and aahing as they gaze at my boy. “He looks just like you,” says one of the women, and another says that he’s a cutie-pie.