We Were Liars (21 page)

I could not save them.

There was nowhere

nowhere

nowhere

nowhere now to go but down.

I REMEMBER THIS
like I am living it as I sit on the steps of Windemere, still staring at the spot where Gat disappeared into the night. The realization of what I have done comes as a fog in my chest, cold, dark, and spreading. I grimace and hunch over. The icy fog runs from my chest through my back and up my neck. It shoots through my head and down my spine.

Cold, cold, remorse.

I shouldn’t have soaked the kitchen first. I shouldn’t have lit the fire in the study.

How stupid to wet the books so thoroughly. Anyone might have predicted how they would burn. Anyone.

We should have had a set time to light our kindling.

I might have insisted we stay together.

I should never have checked the boathouse.

Should never have run to Cuddledown.

If only I’d gone back to Clairmont faster, maybe I could have gotten Johnny out. Or warned Gat before the basement caught. Maybe I could have found the fire extinguishers and stopped the flames somehow.

Maybe, maybe.

If only, if only.

I wanted so much for us: a life free of constriction and prejudice. A life free to love and be loved.

And here, I have killed them.

My Liars, my darlings.

Killed them. My Mirren, my Johnny, my Gat.

This knowledge goes from my spine down my shoulders and through my fingertips. It turns them to ice. They chip and break, tiny pieces shattering on the Windemere steps. Cracks splinter up my arms and through my shoulders and the front of my neck. My face is frozen and fractured in a witch’s snarl of grief. My throat is closed. I cannot make a sound.

Here I am frozen, when I deserve to burn.

I should have shut up about taking things into our own hands. I could have stayed silent. Compromised. Talking on the phone would have been fine. Soon we’d have driver’s licenses. Soon we’d go to college and the beautiful Sinclair houses would seem far away and unimportant.

We could have been patient.

I could have been a voice of reason.

Maybe then, when we drank the aunties’ wine, we’d have forgotten our ambitions. The drink would have made us sleepy. We’d have dozed off in front of the television set, angry and impotent, perhaps, but without setting fire to anything.

I can’t take any of it back.

I crawl indoors and up to my bedroom on hands of cracked ice, trailing shards of my frozen body behind me. My heels, my kneecaps. Beneath the blankets, I shiver convulsively, pieces of me breaking off onto my pillow. Fingers. Teeth. Jawbone. Collarbone.

Finally, finally, the shivering stops. I begin to warm and melt.

I cry for my aunts, who lost their firstborn children.

For Will, who lost his brother.

For Liberty, Bonnie, and Taft, who lost their sister.

For Granddad, who saw not just his palace burn to the ground, but his grandchildren perish.

For the dogs, the poor naughty dogs.

I cry for the vain, thoughtless complaints I’ve made all summer. For my shameful self-pity. For my plans for the future.

I cry for all my possessions, given away. I miss my pillow, my books, my photographs. I shudder at my delusions of charity, at my shame masquerading as virtue, at lies I’ve told myself, punishments I’ve inflicted on myself, and punishments I’ve inflicted on my mother.

I cry with horror that all the family has been burdened by me, and even more with being the cause of so much grief.

We did not, after all, save the idyll. That is gone forever, if it ever existed. We have lost the innocence of it, of those days before we knew the extent of the aunts’ rage, before Gran’s death and Granddad’s deterioration.

Before we became criminals. Before we became ghosts.

The aunties hug one another not because they are freed of the weight of Clairmont house and all it symbolized, but out of tragedy and empathy. Not because we freed them, but because we wrecked them, and they clung to one another in the face of horror.

Johnny. Johnny wanted to run a marathon. He wanted to go mile upon mile, proving his lungs would not give out. Proving he was the man Granddad wanted him to be, proving his strength, though he was so small.

His lungs filled with smoke. He has nothing to prove now. There is nothing to run for.

He wanted to own a car and eat fancy cakes he saw in bakery widows. He wanted to laugh big and own art and wear
beautifully made clothes. Sweaters, scarves, wooly items with stripes. He wanted to make a tuna fish of Lego and hang it like a piece of taxidermy. He refused to be serious, he was infuriatingly unserious, but he was as committed to the things that mattered to him as anyone could possibly be. The running. Will and Carrie. The Liars. His sense of what was right. He gave up his college fund without a second thought, to stand up for his principles.

I think of Johnny’s strong arms, the stripe of white sunblock on his nose, the time we were sick together from poison ivy and lay next to each other in the hammock, scratching. The time he built me and Mirren a dollhouse of cardboard and stones he’d found on the beach.

Jonathan Sinclair Dennis, you would have been a light in the dark for so many people.

You
have
been one. You have.

And I have let you down the worst possible way.

I cry for Mirren, who wanted to see the Congo. She didn’t know how she wanted to live or what she believed yet; she was searching and knew she was drawn to that place. It will never be real to her now, never anything more than photographs and films and stories published for people’s entertainment.

Mirren talked a lot about sexual intercourse but never had it. When we were younger, she and I would stay up late, sleeping together on the Windemere porch in sleeping bags, laughing and eating fudge. We fought over Barbie dolls and did each other’s makeup and dreamed of love. Mirren will never have a wedding with yellow roses or a groom who loves her enough to wear a stupid yellow cummerbund.

She was irritable. And bossy. But always funny about it. It was easy to make her mad, and she was nearly always cross
with Bess and annoyed with the twins—but then she’d fill with regret, moaning in agony over her own sharp tongue. She did love her family, loved all of them, and would read them books or help them make ice cream or give them pretty shells she had found.

She cannot make amends anymore.

She did not want to be like her mother. Not a princess, no. An explorer, a businesswoman, a Good Samaritan, an ice cream maker—something.

Something she will never be, because of me.

Mirren, I can’t even say sorry. There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.

And Gat, my Gat.

He will never go to college. He had that hungry mind, constantly turning things over, looking not for answers but for understanding. He will never satisfy his curiosity, never finish the hundred best novels ever written, never be the great man he might have been.

He wanted to stop evil. He wanted to express his anger. He lived big, my brave Gat. He didn’t shut up when people wanted him to, he made them listen—and then he listened in return. He refused to take things lightly, though he was always quick to laugh.

Oh, he made me laugh. And made me think, even when I didn’t feel like thinking, even when I was too lazy to pay attention.

Gat let me bleed on him and bleed on him and bleed on him. He never minded. He wanted to know why I was bleeding. He wondered what he could do to heal the wound.

He will never eat chocolate again.

I loved him. I love him. As best I could. But he was right. I
did not know him all the way. I will never see his apartment, eat his mother’s cooking, meet his friends from school. I will never see the bedspread on his bed or the posters on his walls. I’ll never know the diner where he got egg sandwiches in the morning or the corner where he double-locked his bike.

I don’t even know if he bought egg sandwiches or hung posters. I don’t know if he owned a bike or had a bedspread. I am only imagining the corner bike racks and the double locks, because I never went home with him, never saw his life, never knew that person Gat was when not on Beechwood Island.

His room must be empty by now. He has been dead two years.

We might have been.

We might have been.

I have lost you, Gat, because of how desperately, desperately I fell in love.

I think of my Liars burning, in their last few minutes, breathing smoke, their skin alight. How much it must have hurt.

Mirren’s hair in flames. Johnny’s body on the floor. Gat’s hands, his fingertips burnt, his arms shriveling with fire.

On the backs of his hands, words. Left:
Gat
. Right:
Cadence
.

My handwriting.

I cry because I am the only one of us still alive. Because I will have to go through life without the Liars. Because they will have to go through whatever awaits them, without me.

Me, Gat, Johnny, and Mirren.

Mirren, Gat, Johnny, and me.

We have been here, this summer.

And we have not been here.

Yes, and no.

It is my fault, my fault, my fault—and yet they love me anyway. Despite the poor dogs, despite my stupidity and grandiosity, despite our crime. Despite my selfishness, despite my whining, despite my stupid dumb luck in being the only one left and my inability to appreciate it, when they—they have nothing. Nothing, anymore, but this last summer together.

They have said they love me.

I have felt it in Gat’s kiss.

In Johnny’s laugh.

Mirren shouted it across the sea, even.

I GUESS THAT
is why they’ve been here.

I needed them.

MUMMY BANGS ON
my door and calls my name.

I do not answer.

An hour later, she bangs again.

“Let me in, won’t you?”

“Go away.”

“Is it a migraine? Just tell me that.”

“It isn’t a migraine,” I say. “It’s something else.”

“I love you, Cady,” she says.

She says it all the time since I got sick, but only now do I see that what Mummy means is,

I love you in spite of my grief. Even though you are crazy
.

I love you in spite of what I suspect you have done
.

“You know we
all
love you, right?” she calls through the door. “Aunt Bess and Aunt Carrie and Granddad and everyone? Bess is making the blueberry pie you like. It’ll be out in half an hour. You could have it for breakfast. I asked her.”

I stand. Go to the door and open it a crack. “Tell Bess I say thank you,” I say. “I just can’t come right now.”

“You’ve been crying,” Mummy says.

“A little.”

“I see.”

“Sorry. I know you want me at the house for breakfast.”

“You don’t need to say you’re sorry,” Mummy tells me. “Really, you don’t ever have to say it, Cady.”

AS USUAL, NO
one is visible at Cuddledown until my feet make sounds on the steps. Then Johnny appears at the door, stepping gingerly over the crushed glass. When he sees my face, he stops.

“You’ve remembered,” he says.

I nod.

“You’ve remembered everything?”

“I didn’t know if you would still be here,” I say.

He reaches out to hold my hand. He feels warm and substantial, though he looks pale, washed out, bags under his eyes. And young.

He is only fifteen.

“We can’t stay much longer,” Johnny says. “It’s getting harder and harder.”

I nod.

“Mirren’s got it the worst, but Gat and I are feeling it, too.”

“Where will you go?”

“When we leave?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Same place as when you’re not here. Same place as we’ve been. It’s like—” Johnny pauses, scratches his head. “It’s like a rest. It’s like nothing, in a way. And honestly, Cady, I love you, but I’m fucking tired. I just want to lie down and be done. All this happened a very long time ago, for me.”

I look at him. “I’m so, so sorry, my dear old Johnny,” I say, feeling the tears well behind my eyes.

“Not your fault,” says Johnny. “I mean, we all did it, we all went crazy, we have to take responsibility. You shouldn’t carry the weight of it,” he says. “Be sad, be sorry—but don’t shoulder it.”

We go into the house and Mirren comes out of her bedroom. I realize she probably wasn’t there until moments before I walked through the door. She hugs me. Her honey hair is dim and the edges of her mouth look dry and cracked. “I’m sorry I didn’t do all of this better, Cady,” she says. “I got one chance to be here, and I don’t know, I drew it out, told so many lies.”

“It’s all right.”

“I want to be an accepting person, but I am so full of leftover rage. I imagined I’d be saintly and wise, but instead I’ve been jealous of you, mad at the rest of my family. It’s just messed up and now it’s done,” she says, burying her face in my shoulder.

I put my arms around her. “You were yourself, Mirren,” I say. “I don’t want anything else.”

“I have to go now,” she says. “I can’t be here any longer. I’m going down to the sea.”

No. Please.

Don’t go. Don’t leave me, Mirren, Mirren.

I need you.

That is what I want to say, to shout. But I do not.

And part of me wants to bleed across the great room floor or melt into a puddle of grief.

But I do not do that, either. I do not complain or ask for pity.

I cry instead. I cry and squeeze Mirren and kiss her on her warm cheek and try to memorize her face.

We hold hands as the three of us walk down to the tiny beach.

Gat is there, waiting for us. His profile against the lit sky. I will see it forever like that. He turns and smiles at me. Runs and picks me up, swinging me around as if there’s something to celebrate. As if we are a happy couple, in love on the beach.

I am not sobbing anymore, but tears stream from my eyes without cease. Johnny takes off his button-down and hands it to me. “Wipe your snotface,” he says kindly.