Generation of Liars (40 page)

I wiped my eyes because I felt the
hotness of tears fill the rims as I began to cry. I missed it too. I missed
everything. I missed Thanksgiving. I missed my mom, and the way she made
cranberry at Thanksgiving. Then I wondered how Heather Gilmore’s family
celebrated Thanksgiving. Did her mom make cranberry and put an extra setting on
the table? The terror of all my guilt and fear was crashing around me like hail
and lightning. I could barely catch my breath. I did big heaving sobs and
collapsed between Ben’s shoulders.

“Alice. Oh, Alice,” said Ben. He
scooped me in his arms and carried me to the couch, where he bended to his
knees and made his lips dance along my cheeks. “What’s bothering you?”

“It’s nothing, Ben. I didn’t sleep
last night. I’m probably just overly tired.” I didn’t want him to see me cry
because I knew he would worry, so I looked away. I looked up at the girl in the
yellow painting on the wall, the one Ben had said I reminded him of. Alabaster
skin and angel-wisp hair surrounded by yellow flowers. She looked like she was
crying too. I rested my head on Ben’s shoulder. “What’s her name?” I asked.
“The girl in the painting, I mean.”

Ben stroked the hair from my eyes.
“You don’t know it? It’s a very famous painting.”

I didn’t want to tell him that I
had only gotten as far as freshman year art history before I ran away from my
real life, so I shook my head and told him, “I like Andy Warhol, mostly.”

He smiled. “Her name is Ophelia.”

“Ophelia?” I asked. My posture
edged up. It had been a while since I had thought of the name, since I had
thought of Ophelia Le Fur. Even longer since I had endured a nasty encounter
with her, the ruthless disgraced blond Olympian.

“Yes, it’s a very famous print by
the artist John Everett Millais. It’s a depiction of the character Ophelia as
she tragically drowns herself in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
. It’s my favorite
painting in the world.”

I tensed up and repeated the fated
name. “Ophelia?”

“Yes, but is something the matter,
Alice? You’ve gone a little pale.” 

He pressed his hand to my clammy
cheek, and I stared up at him, into his dreamy mocha eyes. I asked myself what
the odds were of my buxom, Olympian arch nemesis, someone who I had a suspicion
could be Motley’s ex-wife, having the same name as Ben’s favorite painting. I
turned my neck and looked at him, though I was not quite sure what I was hoping
to see. He was calm, cool, casual Ben. My Ben. Why was I getting worried over
this? It was a famous painting; probably millions of prints had been sold and
were hanging in living rooms around the world. There was such a thing as
coincidence, I reminded myself.

“No, Ben, nothing is wrong. I’m
fine.” I faked a smile.

“Surely you have heard of the play
Hamlet
before? I thought everyone read it in tenth grade back home.”

“I – I think I remember reading
it.”

“Well, it certainly is one of my
favorites.” He brushed his thumb over my chin. “I never knew that about you,
that you liked Andy Warhol. I suppose I should have asked about your taste in
art sooner.”

“It’s just a passing affinity that
I have for him.”

“Are there any other artists that
capture your heart, Alice?”

“To be honest, I don’t really know
a lot about art. I really only like Andy Warhol because one time, in the eighth
grade, my class took a day trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and I
saw this giant neon print of a beautiful woman’s face hanging up on the wall.
Her eyelids were painted like acrylic rose petals and her teeth were white as
chalk. And when I looked down at the accompanying plaque, I saw Andy Warhol’s
name.”

“Hmm.” Ben’s eyebrows were
scrunching.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s just, well, wasn’t it a bit
far for your class to take a day trip to New York City, when you grew up in the
Midwest? You said it was some little town in Nebraska, that day in the coffee
shop. Benny, Nebraska.”

“I did,” I stammered, “I mean, for
part of my childhood. I did. We moved around a lot for my dad’s work.” I let my
eyes float to the kitchen, where our plates sat abandoned at the table. “Guess
what? I have dessert.”

He reluctantly let his eyebrows
unbend and he forced a smile. “Dessert sounds great, Alice. You’re just full of
surprises.” I pulled out the pumpkin pie and we ate it out of the tin without
ever slicing it onto plates.

Maybe I can hang up a print of
something by Andy Warhol in the apartment, too,” Ben said through a mouth full
of pumpkin pie.

“I would love it, Ben. Then we
could hang up Andy right alongside Ophelia.” Just saying the name out loud
nearly caused me to want to choke on my pie crust. Ben was completely
unfazed. 

“Good idea, Alice. It might cheer
you up a bit, really make the apartment feel like home for once.”

Chapter Forty-one: Lights

T
HEN
CAME THE illumination.

Bright lights. Sparkling Christmas
lights, in a winter carnival of electric ice, draping like jewelry from every
building and tree branch within city limits. When December arrived, like it did
every year, little by little, Paris transformed into a vibrant universe of
cosmic sparkles.

There were red ribbons and sparkling
bulbs lining the streets, and all the apartment windows that lined Ben’s block
seemed to have tiny little wreaths in them. At least this was the impression
that I gathered from the view behind the windows inside Ben’s apartment. It had
been nearly two months and I still hadn’t left the apartment. It’s what I
remember most about this dull mid-winter period of my life, the icy lights.

From my cloistered spot on Ben’s
couch, I thought a lot about my old life, and the sins I had committed to land
myself in such a desolate existence. I hoped the people I had hurt were faring
better than I was; that Rabbit and Vivienne were still together, living
somewhere in a little apartment, one with a clean crumb tray inside their
toaster oven and all the computers you could ever dream of playing World of
Warcraft on. And I hoped that Rabbit wasn’t driving himself crazy over the
money that had gone to pot. The money I promised to get back, but had failed
to.

Before I knew it, it was Christmas
Eve. Ben was scheduled for a shift at the hospital that morning. After he woke
up and drank his coffee, he dropped his cup in the sink and canvassed his
drawers for warm clothes to line beneath his scrubs, on account of the frost
that had formed over everything the night before. I sat on the edge of the bed
and hummed
jingle bells
to him as he layered his scrubs over his
thermals.

When he left I crawled back into
bed and sobbed. I cried all morning like that.

There was nothing left of me.

I was flat broke.

I was depressed.

I was constantly lying to Ben.

I had no real identity here in
Paris, and I couldn’t go back home, not as far as the words on my confession
note were concerned. Plus, Motley had knives out after me, and if I ever so
much as stepped back onto my hometown soil, he would probably be waiting to
make good on his promise to harm Margaux Fix and her family. I thought of him
and Cleopatra plotting my demise, that million-dollar key around her neck
gyrating as she let cold, calculated laughs rupture inside her throat.

When noon hit, the streak of sun
casting in from the window made it impossible to hide in the darkness. I rolled
the covers off, grabbed a cigarette from the nightstand, and padded to the
window to look out onto the busy street. My depression was black and thick like
tar. I pulled one of Ben’s heavy fleece zip-ups over my head and opened the
bedroom window.

The frigid air blasted over me like
cold smoke stinging my face. The disorientating traffic below me roared and I
heard a car horn beep sixteen stories down, as though I was trapped in a
dizzying funnel. The sun was climbing in the gray sky and turning the city
windows into mirrors.

I slid one leg out the window,
balancing myself as I crawled out to the ledge. The surface was thinner than I
anticipated, so I had to flatten my body against the building, and when I
looked out over the busy street below, I experienced vertigo that made me grip
the edges of the windows. I thought of my training with David Xad in Tokyo
three years earlier when he had put me through the rigors of survival testing
and gave me the arrogant motto
Kitto Katsu
. I thought back to the
lantern-lit raft crashing against salty waves and to scaling the Sky Tree, so
much higher than this ledge I was trembling on now, running on nothing by adrenaline
and fear. It seemed like a lifetime ago now. A time when I thought I could
actually scheme my way out of the trouble I had rained down upon myself. Back
when I thought, if only I could control my world, I could save myself. How
wrong I was.
Kitto Katsu, I will surely win.
Except that I had lost. I
had lost at everything. I tiptoed a few inches across the ledge away from the
window and I dangled my toe over the edge, like I was testing a body of water
before plunging.

“Alice!” I heard a voice call from
the street below.

My knees buckled and I had to brace
my palms flat against the side of the building to avoid falling. I looked down,
scanning the sidewalk, ready to dismiss hearing my name as a delusion, and
that’s when I saw Pressley Connard waving his arms and shouting, “Alice!” He
was wearing a black trench coat and his hair was hidden beneath a black skull
cap.

“What do you want?” I shouted down
to him. I patted myself down looking for my Zippo lighter before lighting the
cigarette dangling from my lips.

“Don’t jump!” he screamed.

“Why not? Would you prefer I wait
until you climb up sixteen stories so you can push me yourself?”

“Don’t be stupid. Killing yourself
isn’t the answer.”

“I’m in trouble, Pressley. You were
right about everything. I’m just a stupid girl who lies, and now all the lies
have caught up to me. I just wish your aim had been better on the Eiffel Tower
so I would be dead already.”

“I told you already, the reason I
shot you up there was to save you from my partner doing worse, not to kill you.
Dang it, Margaux Grace Fix, why do you have to be so dense?”

“I guess we will see just how dense
I am when I go splat down there in a second.”

“It’s not too late. I can still
help you.”

“It is too late.”

“I know you’re in trouble. That’s
what I came here to tell you. Operation: Boom has moved into a new territory
since the last time I saw you. The United States Government has been preparing
to negotiate with Motley for months.”

“I already know about that. Motley
decided to cash in and screw me over. That’s why I’m on the ledge.”

“Motley has been stalling with the
negotiations. The government is concerned that he is bluffing about having the
disk.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think he ran into a little snag
along the way.”

“You think I’m that snag. You came
here because you think I have the disk and you want to take it from me so you
can run back home to your bosses at the CIA and be a hero?”

I could make out the detail of his
face, and that his eyes were squinting, battling through the sun’s splicing
rays in order to get a good look at me. “Alice, your hair is blond again.”

My trembling hand tapped the ashes
from my cigarette, dispersing them into the cyclone wind. “It’s not my real
color, it’s a bottle job and the shade is called Sun-Kissed Switchblade
,
if you want your next girlfriend to use it after I’m dead.”

He was cupping his hand over his
eyes to block out the sun mirroring off the building’s windows. “It looks just
like how you used to wear it. That’s how I remember it, just like the last time
I saw you back home. Your hair was all around your face that day too, whisking
all around against the emerald grass, after you led me out to the lawn. You
said you had something important to tell me that day. What was the big thing
you had to tell me that day, Alice? I’ve wondered ever since. It’s killing me.”

I took a big gulp and looked down
at my bare toes. My toenails were painted pink, and the skin around them was
battered from three years of running in impractical high heels. They barely
balanced on the building’s thin ledge. I made myself tilt forward a little.

Pressley screamed, “
Noooo
Alice! No!” A small crowd was forming on the sidewalk. They all wanted to see
what the man in the black trench coat was screaming about.

“You just don’t want me to die
before you figure out where the dynamite stick is, is that it?”

“That’s not true. Alice, come on, I
don’t want to see you all gushed up on the sidewalk. I want to talk to you.
Please don’t die without tying up the loose ends in your life.”

The words hit me like a cannon
ball.
Loose ends
. So many tattered loose ends, writhing and grabbing
like vicious octopus tentacles. “You’re right, Pressley, there is something I
need to do before I fall sixteen stories, panty up, and end my life.”

Pressley made a face and threw his
hands up into the air in confusion. I skittered across the ledge to the window
and popped back inside before slamming the window shut with a thud. I shot to
the bathroom, where I drew warm water, and sat naked in a tepid bath chain
smoking cigarettes until I lost count of how many I had gone through. I was
trying to summon courage for my next move.

My eyes roved panoramically around
Ben’s bathroom, which was drab blue and the tile grout was moldy. I tilted my
head back into the water and let it float all around my face. Just like it had
that day lying in the grass with Pressley, and just like the painting of
Ophelia drowning herself on Ben’s wall.