Monday's Lie (19 page)

“That's it?”

“Well, that was my part of it. I can tell you that she was absolutely furious with Paul Rowland and miserable to be leaving her children.”

“The fight in the house. It was bad, wasn't it?” Having her send us out into the rain was terrifying. But coming home to a house full of charged air and broken things was the first mile marker in the distance between my mother and me. “It was like I could feel it still echoing off the walls. Did she kill somebody that night?”

Brian hesitated. “She wasn't an assassin.”

“That isn't what I asked.”

“The simple answer is yes. The full answer is not as harsh as all that, but it's more than I can go into.”

“I knew it. I swear to God, I always knew it.”

“She had to do it.”

“What about you? Where were you? Why didn't you stop it? Or why didn't you help her?”

“Dee, it was all over, start to finish, in less than three minutes. But it was a hell of a long three minutes. A lot happened and
I'm
not an assassin either. I can only tell you that she didn't have a choice. Let's just say that sometimes people hire someone to do something, but there's no way to guarantee that the type of person who'll do one thing for money might not be prone to do other things as well.”

“Someone hired out to kill her?”

“Not at all. That was the ‘other things' I was talking about. It's just kind of hard to trust people who will do stuff for money that other people won't. They aren't what you'd call ‘stable.' ”

“Where did she go? What was the—I don't even know what you people call it. Mission?”

“I don't know where she was headed or what she ended up doing for all that time. But it's always been that way. I'm more useful the less I know. I got over being offended by it a long time ago and made a career out of being a clueless errand boy. I'm about as in-the-know as a Swiss Army knife. What I can tell you is that her trip was fallout from a project from years before. A lot of that stuff is declassified now. You could probably read up on it yourself if you wanted to sift through a ton of bureaucracy first and then two tons of old paperwork after that.

“But I know it was some sort of loose end from her big show. It's the one that made her famous. It was called Operation Little Miss Muffet.”

It stung. Of all that I knew of her and all that I suspected of her throughout the years, there was no doubt that my mother was a force. The reckoning kind, wickedly smart and endlessly capable. I welled up with a pride for her and a belated protectiveness, and a disgust for the rampant sexism that allowed them to tack a cute, dismissive tag on her best work.

“Unreal,” I said. “Were they really that small? Were they that threatened by her? It's so petty. It's disgusting is what it is.”

“Huh?”

“With as good as she was—and you know that she was—the code name they gave her was Little Miss Muffet? Really? You actually think that's okay?”

“What? I don't— Wait.” Then, Brian burst out laughing. “Oh, God. She wasn't— Oh, no. That's not what they called her. As if! No, no, no. Her handle was always Spider.”

Along came a spider who sat down beside her . . .

My chin dropped, and the perpetually thirteen-year-old girl inside me, the one stubbornly bereft for the mother who had tried so hard to prove that she was there all along, that girl swooned away.

My mother had always been particular about spiders. She'd sift a fly's guts through the mesh of a swatter or squeeze a millipede into a crumpled Kleenex without fanfare. I even once saw her whip a wasp clean in two with the flick of a dish towel. The antennaed head and foresegment fell at her feet, and its striped, barbed back end, still throbbing, hit the linoleum a full two yards away at my feet as the whip snap echoed off the kitchen walls. She and I split a root beer in celebration of the coolness of that one.

But spiders were left alone in high corners or caught under drinking glasses to be turned loose in the front yard if they ever dangled inconveniently in our way or insisted on menacing my brother or me.

“Freer than me,” she always said while sliding away the postcard she had clapped over the rim of the glass. The postcard was actually the Postcard; the one I had shown Patrick so recently from the stack of keepsakes in the spare room.

She kept it in between the cookbooks on the kitchen counter specifically for spider-wrangling. When called for, one of us would fetch a glass and the Postcard, a race that was always worth a point to the winner. Whichever of us hadn't got the postcard ended up serving as doorman for the spider, hoping for a chance at a bonus point.

My mother would often say “freer than me” in one of the many languages she had learned the phrase. The point on offer was earned for correctly naming the language.

The summer Simon was ten, he packed cheerfully enough for two weeks away at Adventure Indian Camp. Five days in, a glossy postcard arrived in our mailbox. The picture was of the log-and-chinking camp store, authentically inauthentic with a split-rail perimeter, a carved wooden Indian chief, and a row of fiberglass canoes leaning against the sunlit wall. My brother's widely spaced handwriting decorated the back—
Freer Than Me
was all he'd written.

My mother was not a crier, and by the time I found her howling and clutching Simon's card, it was difficult to tell how much of the noise and the tears were from laughing and what percentage was just in sympathy and love for Simon. She was ruined and wrung-out at the end of the fit. She rescued him from camp the next day.

It became one of our little family codes then, another in-joke to bind us close. Wherever and whenever we traveled apart, all throughout our lives, we'd send home a
freer than me
postcard, regardless of whether the truth of the trip was that we were having a great time or slogging through a fraught disaster. Each postcard was slotted into place with the others, between the cookbooks, ready for the next rescue mission.

My mother was Spider. Spider was her. Whether the name came before the reverence for the creature or because of it, I couldn't know.

“Are you okay?” Brian asked.

“I'm fine. My mother just had a thing about spiders. I didn't know that it meant anything. I guess I still don't know what it means. But it's at least something to know that there was anything more to it at all.”

“I didn't mean to upset you.”

“You didn't. Anyway, I asked. Thank you.”

“I did get to work with her again after that. But just little stuff. I ran some documents for a couple of different projects; facilitated a few interviews for her over the years. That sort of thing.”

“Why does that sound like you nabbed guys into white vans and dumped them on a warehouse floor at my mother's feet?”

“Because I'm sexy and dangerous and I belong in the movies?”

“That must be it.”

“Then it was years and years before I saw her again. I was the last one who got to work with her, though, right before she died.”

“When did you see her last?”

“Just a few days before—” He hesitated. “Before she passed away.”

“Huh? You saw her then? Where? Did my mother meet you somewhere?” My mother, as far as I knew, had almost never left the house at all in the months she'd lived with us. She dug in, curled up in bed, or on the sofa, or on the porch swing, all day every day. She set to battle with an intimidating stack of books, and a catalog of films and television shows. She said she'd seen enough of the real world and wanted to wallow in fiction at the end. I bought comic books to add to the pile and brought her coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, and a nip of nightcap in the evening that she shouldn't have mixed with her medicine, but did anyway.

“No, I came out to the house to talk with her a couple of times.”

“The house? You mean
my
house?”

“To be fair, it was her house, too, at the time. I mean, that's where she lived.”

This was another of their shared traits. Both Brian Menary and my mother had the uncanny ability to deliver uncomfortable, even offensive, lines without squirming. My brother could do it, too. It was as if nothing, no matter how awkward, ever made any of them uncomfortable. The freedom was so breathtaking it leapt right over being obnoxious.

“You've been in my house? When I wasn't there?”

“I promise I didn't look in the medicine cabinets.”

“Okay, that's more than a little unnerving.”

“You have no idea. They wanted transcripted interviews to close out her files. Actually, what they wanted—what
Paul Rowland
wanted—was for her to move into an agency-approved hospice facility. It would have been first-class care for sure. I mean, not that she didn't get that with you. That's not what I meant. It's just that her comfort was more of a secondary concern for him.

“He sent me in to wheedle her about it at first, to try to convince her to go to one of these places when she first found out she was terminal. But she wanted to live with you. She was adamant. He was really annoyed with her. Those places are like the Ritz Carlton, only with doctors. And everybody from the janitor to the chef to the accounting manager has top-secret or better security clearance. They spare no luxurious expense in exchange for getting the drop on any deathbed confessions. But your mother refused.

“So instead of the Ritz, she got me nagging at her for the interviews. It was all so cold. I felt terrible about it, taping her when she was so weak. But she was utterly gracious. So patient with all the boring questions and the pointless prying. I would never have forgotten her anyway, but the grace she showed in those last interviews . . .”

“Paul punished her for not doing his bidding. Even at the very end?”

“Hey, I don't know that I was her punishment exactly. I'm not
that
bad.”

“No, of course not. That's not what I meant.”

“She was a great storyteller.”

“She really was.”

An empty space opened in the conversation. Empty of words, anyway, but more than full enough of unspoken questions.

“Is it always like this, do you think?” I asked.

“Like what?” He was already smiling.

“Like the more you know, all you really know is that you don't know anything.”

Brian gasped. “Are you trying to steal my job?”

Brian had a plane to catch and I had my life, such as the state of it was, to catch. I dragged my attention out of the past, through the present and pleasant company across from me, and into the start of the rest of the day still ahead, anchored in an evening with Patrick. There was melancholy in the equation. My husband was less friendly by the hour, it seemed.

Brian double-checked that I had his card. I did. I double-checked that he wouldn't have to lurk after me to get information about my curiosities anymore. He didn't.

P
atrick
started leaving the lights on and having nightmares. In that order. He had always kept track of the utility bills in one brand of spreadsheet or another, and we had negotiated over the finer details of household maintenance. Mild debate on things like the merits of turning up the temperature on the hot-water heater versus its effect on the bottom line were what we used to have for nuts-and-bolts conversations instead of the thorny small talk we'd had to cultivate to fill up the echoing silences.

Growing up, the Aldrich family, with one income and six kids, had kept steadily (if only just barely) in the black with a tight hold over the little leaks in the budget. It was in Patrick's blood to keep score on such things as gas mileage and credit-card points. I didn't mind cutting coupons or stalking the sale racks for bargains. They were such easy brownie points to win with my husband. Such simple things to do to put him at ease. He appreciated it. It was responsible, and mature, an easy way for me to be like them. And it was my favorite: it was normal.

The first time I asked him about the lights, Patrick flinched and said that he'd run to get the phone and must have forgotten to switch off the lamp after the call. That didn't quite work unless he'd run a zigzag through the house to do it. Lights were left on in three different rooms.

Even with the hallelujah of wattage lighting up every corner of the place, day and night, Patrick wasn't seeing all that much. He regularly escaped our overbright rooms to the length of his thousand-yard stare. He went missing, more and more often, into the unfocused middle distance, overshooting his barely touched dinner plate, the television, or my face as I tried to stitch together a chat about anything.

“I'm just tired,” he said, and conjured up a self-fulfilling prophecy. His gritting teeth and midnight mumblings left the both of us groggy and dull in the mornings.

But he wasn't too tired to drag us to baseball games and barbecues and any number of things offered up by the office and neighborhood cultures that, until recently, we'd never bothered with. He would say that it would be fun, but he'd say it without smiling. He would scrub at the dark circles under his eyes with the heels of his hands, then sigh and say that we needed to get out more. I couldn't help but think that what he felt we actually needed was a stage.

He was courting approval. He always had in his own way, but over the years he had, just like me, lapsed into our hermited, comfortable routine, endorsed enough by his day-to-day successes to get from sunup to lights out without expecting a trophy for managing it. But now he was back, head up and keeping track of who was watching, and making up for lost time by all accounts. An anticipation was crackling in him, a nearly electric hum that buzzed under his forced chatter and big, un-Patrick-like laugh. He seemed to be pulling out of his usual patterns in a showy stride so as to be found far ahead of where everyone was used to seeing him if they ever bothered to stop and note his progress.