A Field Guide to Deception (42 page)

“Is that what I should have done?” Liv asked. “Tell me what I should have done.”

“I don't—”

They heard Simon, on the stairs, his shrill voice asking for hot chocolate. Then they were all in the kitchen: Bailey and Drake hauling groceries, Simon flushed from cold and pleasure, holding out a bag of animal crackers. “Look Mommy, we got these cookies. They're my favorite.”

Bailey brought her tea to the kitchen table. “I'm going to work tomorrow.”

“That's a good idea,” Dennis said.

Susan brushed her fingers through Simon's hair, watched the kitchen door. They didn't know what to do with Liv and the cop outside. What couldn't he say to her in front of them? Hadn't she been through enough?

Without designating anyone in particular, Claire said, “If you need me, I'll be in the office.”

A field guide to skeptics and martyrs: no one suffers like you do. Claire's bruises hidden by her clothes, her cuts by her hair, she'd smuggled herself past them, and they'd never suspected. They'd never noticed. No one stopped her when she left the kitchen.

Forty-one

Suspended like this

That inexhaustible winter, Spokane had snow in May, unusual, even in the Pacific Northwest. Spring flowers would bud and die in a single afternoon, undone by the wet chill; Claire thought Government Way might be laced with snow until mid-summer.

Liv and Kyle had incorporated: Building Blocks, Inc. They ran their business out of the first floor of Kyle's apartment complex on Post Street—contracted a green-building project in Peaceful Valley, a windmill farm on the Palouse, and had half-a-dozen renovations on the bluff lined up for the summer. Liv slept more and more frequently at the office, said the commute to Claire's for four hours of sleep didn't calculate.

At the café, Bailey hired a baker from Seattle, and they finally extended the hours, opened seven days a week from 6 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. Claire worked on the books part-time at the café. Each month, their profits increased.

The last Tuesday in May, Claire wandered outdoors on the property with Simon, down to the river, pacing like one of those zoo animals that cannot pretend the confinement away any longer. Simon paced beside her, stepping from rock to rock, ambling as though his energy would never flag, four now, and protective of his mother.

They walked past the spot where Liv had stored her trailer, strangely deserted now; in March, they had hauled the trailer to the Palouse farm for the builder to use there. Dismantled, item by item, the life they had shared. Claire's closet, the shelves in the bathroom, all the cupboards had seemed bereft, so much less.

And then Claire had had a letter, forwarded by her publisher, from a professor at Cornell. A man known to her from conferences she'd attended with her aunt. He taught at the Department of Plant Pathology, and wanted her to contact him as soon as possible regarding a research project proposal that he had. For a week, she'd kept the letter in the pocket of her coat, reread it until she could see the words as a pathway, and then called Patrick.

“Sure,” he said, “I know a phenomenal agent. I've used her a couple of times now. Why are you asking?”

She told him. Patrick kept quiet for a substantial time, so long that she thought perhaps her cell had gone dead.

“You still there?” she asked.

“Are you sure?” he said. “Certain?”

“Yes.” Though she wasn't. Not of anything. And afterward, when Bailey asked this same question, while Claire packed Simon's toys in the office at the café, Claire could only shake her head.

“What will you do?” Patrick asked.

“I've been offered a research fellowship in New York.”

“Researching?”

“Fungi.”

“Oh,” he said. And then, “You don't just want to rent the place?”

“No.”

The agent had called Claire later the same afternoon, and the house had sold the first day it listed. For an amount that Claire considered absurd—she'd agreed to the list price as a final stall—to a retired couple from San Diego.

They would close in another week, and the movers arrived in the morning. Claire had explained all this to Simon. He'd listened without response, not even a flicker in his eyes.

Along the gravel drive, just before Claire and Simon reached the fence line, Liv's new rust-colored Toyota truck appeared.

“Liv,” Simon hollered, running forward.

She parked, climbed from the cab, caught the boy. Thinner, and taller, he stretched nearly three-quarters of her length now. Liv had come for the last of her things.

Claire waved, but did not step toward her. They had never had another conversation about the accident after the angry abridgment in Drake's kitchen. Weeks would pass before Claire understood. She could never atone. Not for an accident she supposedly had no part of, a tangential death. Liv had re-written the story, and in Liv's version, Claire had no injuries, no guilt, and therefore, no suffering. Claire hadn't been in an accident. Hadn't woken sideways in the cab, disoriented, shaking, thinking,
By the bridge. By the bridge.
And then fought her way out of the truck, crawling and bleeding, through the dark, the forest litter and trees, the slick of snow, her breathing like an ice pick jabbed into her lungs as she searched.

Liv had meddled with the accident, and created a crime, hadn't she? Staged a murder to look like the accident that it always was. And now, they were beyond prosecution for recklessness or negligence. If the police were told, they'd suspect a conspiracy, a cover-up, one lover protecting another. A suspicious death. This silence, this unvoiced, unacknowledged guilt, even the grief, were nothing to Claire, nothing compared to Liv's punishment: Liv's slow, inevitable vanishing.

“Liv,” Simon asked, “want to play trains with me?”

“I have to take some boxes to the truck,” she said. “Do you want to help me?”

“OK.”

Claire kept her eyes on the tree line. At dusk the last several nights, she'd seen a bull moose. He'd walked to the river, then returned to stand at the edge of the meadow, as though he were waiting.

Simon carried something each trip: a small bag, or some towels, a handful of books. Claire stayed on the deck. She could not assist with this anymore. Could not be party to Liv's leave-taking.

When the tailgate slammed shut, the sound shook through her. Several minutes later, their voices nearby, Simon's plaintive, and Liv said that she would. They went indoors.

At four, the moose came. Picking through the meadow as though he'd lost something, and then, on his way back, he stopped in the open, and looked toward Claire. He could not see her, though he probably smelled her.

Liv came out again eventually, lit a cigarette on the deck. Said that Simon had fallen asleep on the couch. Asleep. For him now, Liv's last visit would be a prelude, a dream. Claire stared at the field where the moose had been.

“I liked New York,” Liv said.

Claire nodded, held onto the rail of the deck.

“I hope you and Simon will be happy there.”

“Me too.”

Claire pushed off the deck and walked toward the trees, she could manage no more.

At Bailey's, their last night in town, Claire stayed in the room with Simon until he'd fallen asleep, and then came out for beer, and some pizza Bailey had baked.

“What do you think of the new girl?” Claire asked.

“She's always bitching at me about labeling my receipts. You never did that.”

“I knew what your receipts were for.”

“Yeah. She's not you.”

“Thanks.” Claire picked the mushrooms off the pizza, ate them first. Remembered a trail through the woods, her aunt crouched beside small white parasols of matsutake.

“I've got tickets to visit you next month,” Bailey said.

“Have you?” Claire had never imagined this.

“Enough time for all your boxes to be empty, and your guest room comfortable.” Bailey opened another beer, handed it to Claire. “I'll miss you. You get that, right?”

“I'll miss you too.”

“Julia wants to go to Prague this summer. Does that sound like fun to you?”

“I've never been to Prague.”

“I've been pushing for Holland.”

“I've never been there either.”

“God, Claire, we've got to get out of this town.”

“I am.”

“Right. Maybe Holland and Prague.” She plated another piece of pizza. “Where will I get my kid fix with Simon gone?”

“I guess you'll have to visit a lot.”

“Now you're getting it.”

Claire laughed, patted Bailey's foot rested on the chair beside her.

Liv sat up, pulled from her sleeping bag, and slid her jeans back on. Outside, the rain fell thin and light. A block away, she heard a girl call out a name, and then laugh. The streetlights blinked red through downtown. She walked up Monroe, crossed at Tenth, down toward the bluff, to Bailey's sleeping house. She'd tried, once, to pick up a girl, and had abandoned the scenario the moment the girl responded. She could not bear anyone else's hands.

With four jobs going at once, she'd started to forget to eat, had dropped weight she couldn't afford to lose. In the afternoons, she'd walk down to the river, fling rocks into the water, ache for Simon, for summer, for those nights on the deck drinking wine. While she stood on the sidewalk outside Bailey's house, smoking half a pack of cigarettes: the rain stopped, the sky lightened, the crows squawked.

Kyle had connections, and enough jobs lined up for the summer that she'd need to hire another dozen people to work her crews. She could fill her life with this. She could. She had to. Love like this would ruin her. She'd claimed that girl in the snow without hesitating. She'd meant to save the girl, believed she could, but she hadn't saved either of them—not the girl, or Claire. She'd played savior, and written a story neither could tell—an accident she hadn't experienced, couldn't know, had only judged from its aftermath: a dead woman, and Claire to blame. Crime-spree Claire.

A guy in a suit climbed into his car, two women ran past with their dogs. And then Bailey's door opened and Simon came outside, dragging
his tiger backpack. He waved to Liv.

Behind him, his mother stopped on the stairs, said something to Bailey. Claire followed Simon down, Drake and Bailey behind her. Claire opened the backdoor, stowed the last two bags. Liv hugged Simon, loaded him in his car seat. Bailey and Drake kissed them both goodbye.

Liv held Claire. Stepped back, wiped her face. Claire climbed into the car and started it, rolled down the windows, pulled away; Simon calling, “See you tomorrow.”