Beautiful Lies (13 page)

“I know what Occam’s razor is,” I tell Officer Balest. “It’s the theory that the most obvious answer is usually the correct one.”

He nods. “That’s right.”

I glance at Officer Martin, if only to avoid having to look Balest in the eye for a moment. Martin is looking at me with an intense expression, his brow wrinkled in thought. He seems unaware of the stray lock of blond hair that has fallen over his right eye. He’s chewing gum, working it slowly with his jaw as he studies me.

“Alice has run away before,” Balest continues. “What seems most likely to me, at least for now, is that she’s done it again.” He pauses. “Unless there’s some other reason—aside from having a bad feeling—that makes you so convinced your sister is in danger? Maybe there’s something you aren’t telling us?”

I’m still looking at Officer Martin. I imagine that he would be understanding and receptive if I told him the truth about everything: who I really am, the money in my book-bag, even how it came into my possession. He would be concerned about Rachel. He would help me. For an instant, I consider blurting out the whole story. I imagine how different things would be once I’d explained everything to everyone, how light and relieved I would feel once the burden of all my secrets had been lifted away.

Don’t. Tell. Anyone.

I shake my head. “No. There’s nothing I’m not telling you.”

All five of us are silent as my words dissolve and sink in. For just a moment, I think I see a flicker of doubt in Officer Balest’s eyes. But it vanishes almost immediately, replaced by what seems like barely subdued relief at the fact that he finally gets to leave, to forget about the silly matter of my sister’s disappearance that has taken up so much of his afternoon.

I go upstairs as my aunt and uncle walk the policemen to the door. As she passes Charlie, my aunt reaches out to muss his hair in a tiny, quick gesture of love that makes it impossible for me to hate her.

Upstairs in my room, I stare out the window as Officers Balest and Martin climb into their car. I’m startled to see that its blue-and-red lights have been flashing silently this whole time, as though alerting everyone who happens to pass by that something in our house has gone so wrong that we needed to reach out to complete strangers for help.

When I open the box that I keep beneath my bed, my intention is to replace the bundle of money without looking at any of the photographs. Sometimes I wonder why I keep them so close to me—they’d be just as safe somewhere else in the house, and maybe I wouldn’t be tempted to take them out so often. Looking at the photos always hurts with a sharpness that can take my breath away, like I’m twisting the knife that’s lodged in my heart, tearing open wounds that are almost healed. But sometimes I can’t help myself.

Today is one of those times. I put the money back, and then I shut my eyes, trying to will myself to close the lid and slide the box under my bed. It’s a weak effort; after a few seconds, I grab a stack of photos and settle into a cross-legged position on the floor.

Carefully, I spread out the photos, trying to look at all of them at once. Here we are: remnants of my long-gone family
arranged in a semicircle, our glossy faces smiling, our bodies arranged in easy, candid poses as we gaze at the camera.

As I make my way through the pile, I come across one of my favorite snapshots, taken at my parents’ wedding. I’ve looked at it so many times that the edges are bent and smeared with fingerprints. My mom and dad were married on a hilltop at my grandma’s farm. It was a small, inexpensive wedding. My mom wore a dress that she’d sewn herself. My dad didn’t even wear a suit—just a collared shirt and tie with khaki pants. In the photo, he’s sitting at a picnic table, my mom on his lap, her arm slung around his neck. They’re surrounded by friends, but they’re looking only at each other in that moment, oblivious to everyone else. Both of them seem to be suppressing smiles, like they’re sharing a secret, which they were: my mom was pregnant. I turn the photo over and trace her pretty cursive handwriting on the back with my fingertip, feeling the depressions from the ink on the paper, the words serving as evidence of her existence.
Wedding day, May 24.

I still think about the day of the accident all the time, but not for the reasons a person might assume. I think about it because, up until the moment when everything went wrong, it was a lovely day. The four of us were happy together. And then, all of a sudden, it was over.

My parents died on March 15—the ides of March. Spring came early that year; the day was warm and sunny. In the afternoon, my dad got the Slip’N Slide out of the basement
and set it up in our backyard. For hours, my sister and I played in our bathing suits while my parents stayed nearby. But they didn’t pay much attention to us. We were nine years old, capable of playing in the yard without constant supervision. My mother sat in a reclining lawn chair, sipped a tall glass of Kool-Aid, and worked on a piece of macramé that she was weaving. My dad stayed mostly inside. We could see him through the sliding glass doors that led from the living-room to the yard. Like my mother, he was an artist. A few weeks earlier, he’d stripped the old wallpaper from the living-room walls, and now he was painting a mural on the one closest to the hallway that led to our bedrooms. He hadn’t made much progress yet. His sketches showed plans to paint our house, my sister and me climbing a tree in the yard, my mother hanging laundry on the clothesline, and our cat, Nelly, sleeping in the shade. But so far he was only working on the sky above us, painting the clouds that blocked the sun. Our house, our family—we were only the lightest of pencil drawings, easily changed or erased.

It happened like this: Rachel was sitting in the grass, her wet swimsuit clinging to her skinny body. The grass had been cut recently, and the bright-green trimmings were caked onto her legs and feet.

“I’m too hot,” she announced, shading her eyes as she squinted toward the bright sun.

“So go inside.” I stood in front of her. We wore matching swimsuits covered in pink-and-white stripes. I could already
see the beginnings of a sunburn on her fair shoulders, and knew that I would have one too. We weren’t wearing sunscreen. My mother thought it was silly, that people took caution about sun exposure to such a ridiculous extent. She’d always ask, “How can something that feels so damn good possibly be bad for you?”

Rachel peered up at me. “You come inside too.”

I shrugged. “Okay.” When we walked past my mother, she didn’t even glance up at us. She was absorbed in her task, her fingers working the yarn with careful precision, slipping beads into place wherever she thought they belonged. She was using brown-and-yellow yarn, and as we walked by, I remember glancing down and thinking how ugly the project was, how the colors almost made me wince.

Inside, our dad was just as distracted. He stood on the highest rung of his stepladder—the one that says THIS IS NOT A STEP—and squinted as he drew careful, light outlines of the clouds. They were big and puffy—cumulus clouds. We were studying condensation in science class, and I knew all the different formations: cirrus, stratus, altostratus, and cumulus.

Nelly lay curled in a ball on a pile of my dad’s sketches for the mural, purring as she slept. My dad wore paint-spattered jeans and a filthy white T-shirt. He was so young—only thirty-two years old, the same age as my mom. He had a silver stud in his left ear. On his upper right arm, he had a heart tattoo with my mother’s name—
Anna
—on a banner going across it.

My mother had a similar tattoo on her right shoulder blade, except it was smaller, and it said my dad’s name:
Steven.
Our parents had told us the story countless times. They’d met in college when they were eighteen years old. They hadn’t even shared their first kiss when, a few weeks later, they got their tattoos. When my grandmother—my mom’s mom—saw what her oldest daughter had done, she only laughed. She wasn’t upset at all. The first time she’d met my dad, she shook his hand, smiled, and said, “Welcome back to the family.” She was off her meds at the time.

My parents got married after their junior year ended; my sister and I were born a little over six months later. They never talked about it much, but I imagine having twins must have been overwhelming at the time. My dad finished college; my mom didn’t. Even as a child, though, I remember being aware that she was the more talented one, despite her lack of a degree. She could do almost anything when it came to the visual arts: painting, sculpting, pastel drawing, pen and ink. My dad was strictly a painter, mainly with oils. He worked a day job as a high school art teacher. We were poor, but I never realized that fact when I was a kid. There were other things that never dawned on me then too—things I only understood once I grew older and got a better glimpse of how most other families function. My parents loved me and my sister, I know, but they often seemed far more absorbed in their own developments. It makes sense when you think about it; they were more or less still kids when we were born.

“Hot enough for you girls out there?” My dad wiped his forehead with a sleeve, leaning back to look at his work. The sliding glass doors leading to the yard were still open, and I heard the hiss of my mother’s lighter as she lit a cigarette. She tossed the macramé onto the lawn and took a sip of her drink. It was her usual midafternoon cocktail: vodka and lime seltzer with plenty of ice, topped with three maraschino cherries. I remember her drinking all the time, but I don’t remember ever seeing her drunk.

“Can I get a Popsicle?” Rachel asked.

“Did you ask your mom?”

“She won’t care,” I said. It was true too. My mom rarely cooked actual meals; domesticity wasn’t really her thing. Even though she didn’t have a paying job, she spent most of her time at home making art, leaving my sister and me pretty much to our own devices when we weren’t in school. By the time I was eight, I was a pro at making any number of simple dinners: grilled cheese, tabouleh, homemade hummus with pita strips and black olives. My parents were strict vegetarians; I didn’t taste meat for the first nine years of my life.

“Tell you what.” My dad stepped down from the ladder and grinned at us. “How about we go for ice cream?”

“Yes!” I shouted.

“Yes!” Rachel echoed.

“Anna?” my dad called into the yard. “I’m going to take the girls for ice cream. You coming?”

I would replay the next words of conversation over and
over again in my mind for years. If only my dad had told my sister to get a Popsicle instead. If only my mom hadn’t come with us. If only she’d been the kind of mother who kept the kitchen stocked with goodies for her kids, like ice cream. If, if, if. It can make you crazy after a while.

My parents only had one car, an old Ford Taurus with a rusty paint job and beat-up brown cloth interior. It was so ugly that, even at age nine, my sister and I were embarrassed to give our friends rides.

We lived in the middle of nowhere; the ice cream stand was along the side of a windy two-lane road, a good ten-minute drive from our house.

My sister and I were buckled into the backseat. We wore jean shorts over our bathing suits and plastic flip-flops on our feet. We put our windows down halfway, which was as far as they would go, and held out our hands to feel the warm wind rushing past. My mom turned up the radio and started singing along with “Me and Bobby McGee.” A few wispy cirrus clouds hung in the late afternoon sky.

The ice cream stand—called, appropriately enough, “Mr. Ice Cream”—was crowded on such a warm day. As we stood in line, my sister and I read the menu out loud to each other. Going for ice cream was a rare treat. Like I said, even though I wasn’t really aware of it at the time, my parents didn’t have much money. Sometimes my mom would buy plastic gallon tubs of Neapolitan from the grocery warehouse in the nearest city. Within a week, all the chocolate ice cream would
get eaten, leaving two dull stripes of vanilla and strawberry that would sit in the freezer for months, until it grew freezer burned and barely edible. Eventually, my mom would scoop out what was left and put it in a bowl for our cat. Ice cream always made Nelly sick; she’d spend the next few days throwing up gross, foamy piles of pink and white all over the house.

I think about things like that now, when I remember my mom. Why did she continue to buy Neapolitan, when she knew we only wanted chocolate? And why would she give the leftovers to Nelly, when she knew it would make her so sick? She could be careless like that. But what does it matter? She was my mother, imperfect and flighty. There was so much to love about her. She would often get up very early in the mornings, before my sister and I went to school, to put our hair into careful fishtail braids. She volunteered at the Humane Society one Sunday a month, changing kitty litter and walking dogs. She had a soft spot for the older animals and the ones with health problems, whose chances of getting adopted were low. Now and then she’d come home from the shelter in a bad mood—she’d be quiet and somber and spend more time than usual sitting on our patio, smoking cigarettes and staring at the woods like it had answers for her—and we’d know that one of the older, sicker animals had been euthanized since the last time she’d been there. She put salt on
everything,
even grapefruit and watermelon. She could sing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” in Latin—but she’d only do it once a year, on Christmas Eve.

As we stood in line at Mr. Ice Cream, a trio of older girls approached my family. All three of them sipped from tall, sweaty plastic cups that I guessed were filled with diet soda. Teenage girls, I knew, were always watching their figures. When my mom noticed them standing only a few feet away, giggling as they watched us, she nudged my dad.

“Hey, Mr. Foster,” one of them said, her voice high and fluttery as they came right up to us in line. I realized that she must have been one of his students. The idea that my dad was in charge of so many kids during the day always struck me as somewhat ridiculous. It was like he had an entirely different life at work, where he had to act serious and wear clothes that weren’t covered in paint stains and be a real grown-up.