The Girl Who Kissed a Lie (7 page)

We get to the Park Street subway station. The T worker keeping guard at the turnstile frowns at us, so I make sure to make a big show of swiping my card. The T is always freaking out about non-paying riders. Sometimes they’re so strident, you’d think they were fighting a war or something.

“And they’ll just let you look up information about your mother?” Kelsey asks me as we head toward the Red Line platform. The Red Line will take us into Dorchester, where the Registry of Vital Records is, the object of our mission today. I am determined to learn everything I can about my mother. I’ve asked Kelsey along because I don’t want to be alone, and Kelsey is always game for an outing.

Someone steps in front of me, and I have to concentrate on darting around them. This is always happening at Park Street. There are always too many tourists around, all of them lost, all of them wandering around so confusingly aimlessly that they seem to pop up out of nowhere. Walking through Park Street station requires as much concentration as driving a car.

“Well,” I reply, having completed my darting maneuver. “They’re public records. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to see them?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “If it was this easy, why didn’t you ever do it before?”

Frankly, sometimes even I can barely understand my motives for the things I do. This used to frighten my aunts. I learned to cover whenever I found myself doing something inexplicable, like dancing to nonexistent music in my room or trying to read the language of dust motes. This is probably why I haven’t mentioned to them my latest determination to find my mother. Well, that and the fact that my aunts obviously didn’t like my mother.

To Kelsey I say, “I don’t know. I’m seventeen now. I guess it’s time.”

“Seventeen?” exclaims Kelsey in delight. “Did you have a birthday? You should have told me! We could have celebrated!”

I take the Ben route and shrug.

Kelsey is silent a moment before saying, “But…why seventeen? What’s the big deal about seventeen? Sixteen I could see, or eighteen. But seventeen’s just…seventeen. Nothing big, nothing exciting. Just an in-between age.”

I don’t know what to say to that. Seventeen seems like a huge deal to me.

The Red Line gets stalled underground for a bit, which is not at all an unusual occurrence, but we eventually reach Dorchester. Dorchester is a decidedly different part of Boston than where I live. Everything about Boston can seem vaguely faded—it is a very old city by American standards—but Beacon Hill is so faded that it has come full circle to being fashionable again. There was a time period when modernizing Bostonians wanted to tear down Beacon Hill, all the lovely old homes with their lavender windowpanes, in favor of a new residential area with all the conveniences, like places for automobiles and electrical systems that weren’t fire hazards. The less-modernizing Bostonians, Bostonians like my aunts, resisted the entire idea, and Beacon Hill survived its shabbiest era more or less intact, the same as it had been for ages, only the barest concessions to the passage of time, to emerge today as the type of place that gets thrown onto postcards.

Dorchester is at the point in time when modernizing Bostonians wish to tear it down and start from scratch, and Dorchester doesn’t have proper Bostonian inhabitants to insist upon its unchanging preservation, so some of that has happened. In among the older, rundown buildings are gleaming new ones, like the Registry of Vital Records. I don’t like new buildings in Boston; they make you wince, like hearing a sour note in a song. The streets are also wide enough that cars easily fit down them, and you could be anywhere in America with streets like that. I don’t feel at
home
here. I may be only seventeen—already seventeen?—but I’m most at home in the places where seventeen-year-olds were at home, like, two centuries ago.

The accents are at least comfortingly Boston, as proven by the woman at the front desk.

“I’m looking for information about my mother,” I tell her, pushing across my identification.

The woman smiles at me kindly. “Okay. And what was her name?”

“Faye Blaxton,” I say and spell the name for her. I know that much from my birth certificate.

The woman types into her computer. Then she looks back at me. “Was she born in Massachusetts?” she asks me.

“I don’t know,” I admit. “Maybe not.”

The woman does some more typing—and then frowns a bit. “I can’t find anyone by that name. At least, not in the right time period to be your mother. You’re sure it’s the correct name? And the correct spelling?”

I’m sure. But, just in case, I have her look up my birth certificate, and there is my mother’s name on it, plain as day.
Faye
Blaxton.

“It could be a glitch in the system,” says the nice woman at the desk. “A typo maybe. Or something.”

“Yeah,” I agree glumly. I don’t want to sound glum. I want to sound like it’s no big deal that I can’t find my mother. I’ve done okay without her so far, haven’t I? But I’d thought, well, that it’d be simple.
Oh, Faye Blaxton, she lives out in Malden.
And then, maybe, I would know that she’d never bothered to check in on her daughter, but I would also know that she
existed
.

“It’s a dead end, maybe,” says Kelsey when we leave, “but there are other avenues to explore!” Kelsey is all big-picture enthusiasm, which I know is for my benefit. “What do you know about your mother?”

One
day
my
father
walked
into
his
Back
Bay
apartment
to
find
a
blond
woman
asleep
on
his
couch.
I can’t say that. “Not much,” I say. And then, truthfully, after a pause, “My aunts say she was flighty.” I know my aunts mean it as a negative, but when I was little, I always had the impression that it meant my mother could fly, that she had deposited me on that Back Bay doorstep and then soared into the never-ending sky.

“Your aunts knew her, then,” says Kelsey.

“No,” I reply. “Not really. Well, I don’t know, actually. I think to them she’s just a woman who left her baby on a doorstep.”

“Wait, she really
did
that?” Kelsey asks.

I look at her in confusion because I’ve told her at least this much about myself, my family, my past. “Yeah.”

“I thought you meant that
figuratively
. Like, that you just meant your mom gave you up or something. She
literally
left you on a doorstep?”

I nod.
With
a
note
.
A
note
etched
into
a
snowflake, sighed into a gust of wind, rustled through the trees of autumn, rippled over a summer pond.

“Well,” says Kelsey. And then she doesn’t say anything else.

We get on the T. This time there are no delays, but I feel like people watch me the whole way, like it must be common knowledge, written all over me:
I
am
the
girl
who
has
no
mother.

You’re supposed to go to Salem in October. At least, that’s what Kelsey tells me. I go though, because
not
going doesn’t seem like an option—one of those things I do without really knowing why. I don’t particularly want to go to Salem, but I feel like I need to go.

Salem is crowded despite the fact that it’s a cold and misty day. The sidewalks are so jam-packed you can’t walk without stepping on someone’s broomstick. I walk along, picking up dropped coins because you never know when they might come in handy. Mike and Jake are throwing pieces of cotton candy at each other. It’s stupid, because you can’t really effectively throw cotton candy and because it’s causing chaos—people are glaring at us—and I wonder if Mike thinks this is cool and I’m going to be thoroughly smitten with him now. I try to imagine Ben ever throwing cotton candy around. I can’t. It makes me wish Ben were there, but it’s the sort of day Ben avoids like the plague, when he’s dressed in at least one layer more than any normal person would wear and huddles under the meager shelter of the Park Street subway station entrance. I admit I kind of like weather like this. I’ve only started to dislike it because it makes Ben so miserable.

I look at Kelsey. “I’ve had enough,” I tell her.

She looks at her watch. “The next ferry isn’t until—”

“I’m going to go in here,” I say. It’s one of the plethora of witch museums littered all over the town, an old house, well tended, with a silhouette of a stylized witch in the fanlight over the door. There is a pot of bright bronze chrysanthemums in front of the door, but someone’s knocked it over.

“‘The Salem Which Museum,’” reads Kelsey from the dripping black letters on the sign swinging off the house. “They didn’t even spell
witch
correctly.”

I’d noticed, but the Salem Which Museum has the great advantage of, well, being only two steps away from me and so conveniently easy to disappear into. “It’s fine. It’ll be something for me to do until they get tired of…” I look at Mike and Jake. “Throwing things,” I finish, because they’ve now moved on to throwing popcorn at each other. At least that works a little better than the cotton candy had. I decide not to think about where they’d gotten the popcorn.

“Are you sure?” Kelsey asks.

I nod. Now that I’ve seized on the idea, I kind of really want to explore this misnamed museum.

“I think I’ll stick with them,” says Kelsey, blushing. The reason for this blush is clear: Kelsey likes Jake. She thinks I haven’t noticed this. It’s silly because Kelsey has liked Jake for a while now. Maybe that’s why Mike thinks I should like him. Maybe he thinks we should all just couple up.

“Okay,” I agree amiably. “I’ll hang out here and meet you guys at the ferry.” I reach for the door then pause, my hand on the doorknob, and look back at her. “Don’t let Mike come in after me.”

“You got it,” says Kelsey, and then she hurries to catch up with Mike and Jake, who have tired of the popcorn throwing and are looking around for the next thing they can throw. Before they find it—or can spot me—I duck into the museum.

I’m in a tiny room with tiny windows and a short ceiling, typical for a house this age. The house is at least three centuries old, and I feel at home in it immediately. The light is murky, but that’s because there really
is
no light today, more of a non-light. There’s an open shoebox on an old wooden table right next to me, and there’s an index card taped to it with “Donations Appreciated” written on it in the kind of proper Bostonian cursive that my aunts use. Except that the final flourish is a smiley face, and I think my aunts would die before using a smiley face. There is a single dollar bill in the shoebox and several dusty coins. The coins don’t even look American. Next to the table is a softly ticking grandfather clock. As I walk in, it’s just finishing up chiming nine o’clock. Not the right time. Grandfather clocks never tell the right time in my experience. My aunts’ is the same way.

“Oh!” exclaims a voice to my right. The floor creaks in that way old wooden floors do, and I look up, startled. A man is bustling into the room from a doorway on the other side. He’s dressed in gray corduroys and a bright red cable-knit sweater, and he’s possibly in his early fifties, between my father and aunts in age, I’d estimate. He has glasses and graying brown hair that’s sticking up a little, and he makes me think of professors and naps and my father, all at once. I have that feeling I get sometimes, of odd familiarity, instinctive comfort, being in this museum with this man. It’s almost like déjà vu, although surely I’ve never been here before, never met this man before. “I’m Will,” he says. “Welcome to the Salem Which Museum?”

He says it like it’s a question, like he’s not sure whether or not I am, in fact, welcome there. “Thanks,” I say awkwardly, and then, because he looks so thrilled to have a visitor and because I feel bad, I dig my collected coins from the day out of the pocket of my jeans and drop them in the shoebox.

Will absolutely beams. Then he says, “What would you like to hear about?”

“Sorry?” I say because I have no idea what I want to hear about. I thought I’d just be able to wander around the museum, looking at displays.

“Well, here at the Salem Which Museum? The guest decides. Which type of museum are you looking for? That is the type of museum we are.”

“Oh.” I realize slowly. “The Salem
Which
Museum.”

“That’s us,” he affirms, still beaming and now rocking back and forth, heel to toe.

The kind of museum I was looking for was a museum in which I could disappear. I wonder what Will would say to that. I look around the little room, trying to find the most obvious thing to ask about. I could ask about the Salem Witch Trials, of course, but I’ve heard that story a million times.

“Might I suggest,” says Will, “family history?”

I blink, sure I must have misunderstood. I look down. I am wearing the Boston sweatshirt Ben gave me on my birthday. There is no sign around my neck proclaiming my motherlessness. What would make this man say that?

“The history of Boston,” Will continues, “for all Bostonians are family. And you are a Bostonian, are you not?”

Yes, I am wearing the Boston sweatshirt, although how many Bostonians wear Boston sweatshirts? But I just nod.

“Oh, the words I could tell you about the history of Boston,” says Will. “But better you read them for yourself. Written words—that’s where the real power is. And, of course, the history of Boston depends on who has done the writing of it. Come along.”

He scurries out of the room, through the doorway he came in.

I hesitate, then follow.

The room connects to a kitchen that looks as if it was last redone in the 1950s, and there is a huge iguana on the counter. I stare at it. It stares at me, reptilian eyes blinking without interest. Will’s head pops through another door at the other end of the room and he notices my showdown with the creature.

“Oh,” he says. “That’s just Iggy.”

“Iggy,” I repeat dubiously.

“Yes. He’s an
iguana
,” Will points out, like I’m an idiot. “Come here,” he says and disappears into the other room.

The other room turns out to be much bigger than the rooms I’ve been in so far, with a much higher ceiling. Maybe it was the carriage house or something. Whatever it used to be, it is now a storage space for books. They are piled sky high, toward the rafters above. I’m not sure how they’re not toppling over. There are narrow windows way up there, and that’s where all the light is, barely making it to the floor where I’m standing. Something about the room makes me shiver, makes me stand on its threshold, unwilling to step forward, unsure what might happen if I do. The air seems dusty and
different
somehow—difficult to breathe.

Will, in the meantime, is busy impossibly climbing an impossible pile of books. He plucks one off the top of an adjacent pile, shimmies back down, and tosses me the book. “About Boston,” he says helpfully and then runs off to scale another pile of books.

“That doesn’t look safe,” I say.

“What?” he shouts down to me and then throws me another book, which I catch instinctively. “Also about Boston.”

“Oh,” I say, not sure what to make of this, but Will is already down that pile and up the next, and I’m holding two books so dusty that I can’t even see their titles. I try to blow the dust off their covers, but the dust is so thick my breath doesn’t even dislodge it.

“You should go read them,” instructs Will, handing me another book. He has apparently reached the ground safely once again.

I figure I’ve got time to kill. I look at the dusty floor. “Is there somewhere I can sit?”

“Oh!” exclaims Will, as if that never occurred to him. “You want to sit! Oh! Yes! Of course! In the front room!”

I edge back past Iggy and into the front room. There’s a couch in there that doesn’t look like anyone’s sat on it since 1672, but it doesn’t collapse when I sit on it, so that’s something, I suppose. The fragile fabric probably crushes into dust underneath me, but it’s better than the floor in the other room. I keep one ear open for the sound of books tumbling onto Will (
What
will
I
do?
I wonder.
Call
911 and say a mountain of books toppled onto him?
) and flip open my books. The first one is some kind of epic poem about the first winter of the Plymouth Plantation, the second is a more traditional history, and the third, practically crumbling in my grasp, seems like some odd combination of the two, serious stories and anecdotes about kraken all mixed up into one. This is the one I decide to look through, and there, in the middle of it, is a list of Boston’s first settlers. I look for Blaxtons, but there are none there. And then I decide to look for Stewarts. After all, I think, smiling to myself, my aunts have lived in the townhouse on Beacon Street since the beginning of time.

And then their names are there.

True
Stewart

Virtue
Stewart

Etherington
Stewart

My aunts. And my father. Their names. Right there.

I stare at them for a long time.
Coincidence
, I think. The Stewarts
are
an old family, one of Boston’s oldest. And the names True, Virtue, Etherington—not exactly modern ones. Maybe old family ones. Maybe recurring, from generation to generation.

I pick up the history and let it fall open where it wants, to a well-worn page in the middle, and it is a portrait of old, dour-looking people. The date of the portrait is 1753. I study it, wondering how many of these people were still alive when the Revolution broke out twenty years later.

I turn the page, and there are my aunts’ faces, staring out at me. I blink, startled, but there is no mistaking it. It is them—as much them as a portrait can be. Their wide, deep, dark eyes, sorrowful and ageless under perfectly sculpted dark eyebrows. Their dark hair pulled back from their high foreheads. Their pursed, unsmiling lips. Their sharp cheekbones under unlined, olive skin.

I look at the caption.
True
and
Virtue
Stewart
, it reads.
1760.
I look back at them, at their faces.
Family
resemblance
, I try to think.
The
Stewarts
are
an
old
family
, I remind myself.
Their
names
and
features
might
be
recurring
.

I flip through the rest of the portraits in the book. No Etherington Stewart turns up. Just True and Virtue, posed in stiff black dresses, looking exactly like the True and Virtue Stewart in my house, the True and Virtue Stewart who have raised me.

I reach for the epic poem, let it fall open as well, and the first lines on the page are not even a surprise to me at this point.
The
house
of
the
Misses
Stewart
/ Theyre brother late returneth / Frome an excursion to a newe settlement / Fulle of truth and virtue / Befitting of theyre names
.

I look from the poem to the portraits. I can hear Will humming to himself in his weird library place, and following one of my usual spur-of-the-moment impulses, I reach out and rip the portrait out of its book. I do the same for the lines of the epic poem. I pick up the history and thumb through it until I find the list of settlers again, and I rip that out as well. Then I fold the pages up and stick them in the kangaroo pocket of my Boston sweatshirt.

What have I done? I have
ripped
pages
out of old, priceless books belonging to a
museum
. A really strange museum but
still
. And what am I going to
do
with these pages? What am I
doing
?

I’m finished here. I have to be before Will comes back and asks why I’m vandalizing his books of power, his museum’s only exhibits. I get up and walk to Iggy’s kitchen, and I call to Will, “Thanks for letting me look at the books on Boston! I’m leaving now!”

I step out into the mist without waiting for him to reply. Here on the streets of Salem, Halloween is still in full swing, witches roaming around, modern day and centuries old, like the pages of my family’s ancient history tucked in my pocket. I hurry away from the Salem Which Museum, oblivious to the press of the costumed, festive crowds, preoccupied with the words of the pages in my pocket.
Stewarts, Stewarts everywhere
.
And
not
a
single
Blaxton
.

***

My aunts move through our house like ghosts. They always have, for as long as I can remember. They glide silently from room to room, dressed always in long-sleeved black blouses tucked carefully into knee-length black skirts with black boots gleaming underneath them. I find myself wondering now for how many centuries they have done this.