Monday's Lie (31 page)

Patrick had hurtled unheeding through the maze of sheds and pallets with Brian's tires eating up the road behind him. They hadn't got far from the hub when Patrick had tried a tricky right turn, sharp and too fast.

The movable platform at the top of the turn is slightly less than a barge on wheels. Its payload of concrete blocks and wooden slats is also bristling with a haul of long metal struts. Patrick has plowed the nose of his car up under the base, between the wheels. Smoke is billowing from under the crumpled hood. A bundle of rods has speared through the windshield.

The accident has sheared off most of Patrick's jaw and troweled a spurting, red furrow from the side of his neck. A few of the rails must have been launched off their pile, and they struck wider, nailing him to his seat through his chest and shoulder. His life is raining down from every spear.

•  •  •

Brian is already tearing at the caved-in door of Patrick's car.

“Brian, be careful!” I run to his side. “Oh, God. Oh, look at him. My God. It's too late.”

“Oh, shit.” Brian grips the door handle and the bent door and shakes it with all his strength, but he thrashes with no payoff. Patrick's car rocks mildly, mockingly, under Brian's desperate pulling. But the door won't let go.

“I'm so sorry. Dee, he cut that turn so hard. He couldn't control it. What the hell was that? What is going on?” Brian looks at Patrick, but I look only to Brian and leave my husband in the peripheral vision, a red-and-white blur at the corner of my eye. So much howling red.

The meat state of him is a bland fact, a sudden, plain subtraction from the universe. No shrieking whirlwind marks the rip in the bubble of my little world. The supply yard is quiet now and golden, all the same as it was only a few minutes ago. The same, minus one. Birds are chattering on the wire overhead in the quickly cooling vanguard breeze of twilight. And my husband is gone, lifeless in seconds when he'd been seething with every human desperation only a handful of minutes ago, over the short, but vastly deep chasm of the time in between.

“We have to get some help,” Brian says.

“No one can help.” My numbed lips barely work. “You know that. You can see it, same as me. There's nothing anyone can do.”

Brian ignores me and rocks the door into its bent frame again, yanking the door handle to force it to release the latch.

“Don't touch him,” I scream, and startle up a flock of sparrows that had taken up the balcony seats for the show. Patrick is dead, immediately and permanently in the past tense. I am alive, but everything I was, or insisted that I was, has slipped away into the same past tense. So what am I, if not Patrick's wife or Jim's target?

That Patrick wasn't wrong isn't the same thing as his being right, but the shame still burns. He flayed the lie off me with all that he'd said, everything recorded for whoever will hear it. It will damn me right along with him. They'll put the blame on him, he'll be the bad guy. But they'll still know about me, that I had never been straight with him, that I had never been straight with myself. What kind of person does that? And what does she deserve?

But I am alive.
Breath and hope go together, baby girl.

I have to get out of this day.

“You can't be here,” I say to Brian.

The horror rolls over me. My knees go soft. Brian catches me up.

“What is going on? I'm so sorry, Dee. I didn't mean for him—”

“You don't need to be sorry. Everything's ruined. He did it to himself.”

“What just happened?”

“Why are you even here?”

“You called me!”

“But how did you get here so fast?”

“You have no idea where I was,” he says.

“But—” No fully formed question is there. Not a quick one at least. “You have to get out of here.” I shove him back toward his car.

“Dee, what the hell is happening?”

“I can't, Brian. There's no time.”

“You have to tell me at least this—what have I done?”

“There's no time. They must have sent someone by now. They'll be here any minute. Will you trust me?”

“I don't know what that means.” He searches my face, working his stare deep into my eyes.

“Are you looking for my mother in there?”

“No. Not at all.” He decides something about me that I don't have time to decode.

I'm surprised that anything can add to the tidal ache in me. He has to leave now. “Brian, can you get to 911 records?”

“Sure.”

“Do that, then. I called them. Just before you came. Find the call. Then you'll see. I'm so sorry. Go, hurry.”

The first distant wail of sirens floats from far away through the dusty air.

“But, there's a guy in that other car. . . . What are you going to do? Are you okay?”

“Brian, unless you want your early retirement blown all to hell and your whole life to be about this mess for the foreseeable future, just go. Go now. I've got this. I'll talk to you soon. I'll explain everything. It's fine. I promise. You didn't do anything wrong. Go!”

He does. I run back to Jim.

•  •  •

“Ma'am! Ma'am!” The emergency dispatcher calls to me from the open line as I jam my thumb against the speaker volume.

“I'm here!” I let the power of the last few minutes surge into my throat and carry my voice up into the manic ranges. Method acting, for sure. “He drove into some beams! Oh, God! His face. It's Patrick. He's killed himself.”

“Ma'am, emergency services are en route. And an ambulance. Stay where you—”

“The guy is here with me. The guy he hired to kill me. The hit man.”

Jim's eyes blaze with terror and questions.

“Wha—” The dispatcher sounds as confused as Jim looks.

“I can hear the sirens. Thank you!”

“No! Ma'am, stay on the line. Keep this li—”

I disconnect the call and drop out of hot drama into ice-cold anger. I scrabble over Jim, yanking at his bindings. “They're going to catch you. I'm going to tell them that you ran, but they'll be right on you. I don't think you've got even that snowball's chance in hell, but if you've got one, it's right now.” I pull the knotted socks from his mouth and lower my face into his, gritting my teeth over having to talk to him at all. “And you might remember that I'm the one that gave it to you, you son of a bitch.”

“What the hell is this? What are you doing?”

“You have no idea how much I'd rather shoot you in the face until you're all the way stupid and ugly”—I snatch up the paintball pistol from the seat and toss it through the still open driver's-side window, into the shrubs—“but I don't feel like being arrested for kidnapping today. Patrick's dead. So is your contract. No payday for you. You've got a head start of maybe two minutes. Merry fucking Christmas. I suggest you get your ass in gear.”

Jim rubs at the chafed corners of his mouth. “Thank you.”

“Don't thank me, you asshole. You'd just better be glad I'm not my mother.”

I scramble out of the car. The other door opens and closes, then another. Then Jim's car roars to life and runs over my long shadow as I sprint for the front gate, scripting my story with the wind dragging the sound of sirens over me.

I
almost
had Patrick cremated, even though I knew he had wanted to be buried. With Jim on the run and a tinny 911 recording that is only slightly better than flimsy evidence, and not nearly as much of a smoking gun as I would have liked, I feel cheated. On the heels of that, I feel vengeful and mean. But Patrick's parents have always been kind to me. I changed my mind at the ragged end of the window for him to be embalmed and left a check and a note under my mother-in-law's windshield wiper instead.

The news coverage of the showdown at Carlisle Inc. isn't what I'd braced myself for. The story has been downplayed, almost grayed out for maximum blandness. I waver between grateful and suspicious.

Our friends have been artless in their comforting, dancing with the two left feet of curiosity and unease. I have enough frozen casseroles to get me through an apocalypse, but they all came in disposable pans. No one wants any jinxed thing back from me. I can hardly blame them. My brother is furious with me. The neighbors stare while trying to look like they aren't staring. I float through a life I don't recognize.

Today, I've come to lunch at the food court. I've come every day for a week, scanning the crowd while trying hard to be like my normal neighbors and not look overmuch as if I am scanning the crowd. I've held a book the whole time, each time, and have got not a lot of words off the page and not a lot of food down my throat either. Wavy, dark hair always tugs at my peripheral vision. So do well-cut jackets and tall men in jeans.

It's Tuesday and chilly. I get up from my chair, annoyed with myself in a way that is growing less vague. I've lost weight that I can't afford to. I'm not sleeping well. I flick my long sweater from off the back of the chair and notice an envelope sticking up from the gaping front pocket of my purse.

It's unaddressed and nearly flat. A single sheet of paper is tri-folded inside.

I heard the recording. You didn't do anything wrong either. Well played. And thank you. If you ever need anything . . .

•  •  •

Then along came a spider. Most literally. A light brown spider just rappelled from the ceiling and landed on my desk next to my right hand. I'd listlessly been clicking through this and that on the Internet with no direction beyond the stupid pull of whatever caught my eye next. I meant to be here for fifteen minutes. I've been scrolling for an hour and fifty. That spider just scared the hell out of me.

I clap my empty teacup over it and fish out one of the sturdier card-stock flyers from the recycle bin to slide under the whole works. I take my catch to the door, balancing it in my less than reliable left hand, and imagining the cascade of wobble-crash-scream that is going to send this harmless creature running up my arm and probably to its death by flail.

“Freer than me,” I say, crouched on the stoop. Predictably, I burst into tears. The spider flees.

My mother's phrase plays through my mind in some of the languages she'd taught us to recognize.
Freier als ich. Plus libre que moi. Friare än mig. Svobodnejší než jsem já.

Back at the computer, a new tab brings up an appealingly empty search bar. There is no need to type her name. I've done that before, so many times, and all I've ever got in return was a lovely pain in the ass from the past, who also happened to be a hero.

Why not this
?

I type,
Freer than me.
Google coughs up nearly 7 million hits of, as far as I can tell, nothing I care about.

I put quotation marks around it and scan a narrowed-down list for a few pages. Still, it goes on forever. That phrase was particular to my mother and to our family, and in more ways than I had known just a few short weeks ago, but “freer than me” isn't an impossibly unusual concept. Other people sigh over what is fair between the haves and the have-nots in everything, surely also in the freedom department.

Everyone weighs everything in the scales of covet, sometimes most particularly the idea of being free. There is certainly freedom in all the things that everyone wants, all the things they tell us we should be. Who is smarter than me, who is prettier than me, faster than me, richer than me? And then my peculiar jealous question: Who is more normal than me?

But not all that many people were ever balancing themselves against a spider.

So I slide the arrow up to the search field and roll it to the inside of the end quotation mark. Click. I type,
+ Spider.

I hit Enter.

There's one result.

I read the preview on the search page and break into a cool sweat.

Once upon a time . . .

The website is an anonymous, leave-a-message, confessional bulletin board, a place to purge a secret or to declare a truth—a love, a fault, an apology. It's a forum to make any of these things feel a little more real than it did when it was only a silent something jailed inside your head. It's an ocean of electronic letters in bottles.

The link on the search page zips to a post, a quarter of the way down the screen, buried in the pages upon pages that make up the site. The username was simply AV. Annette Vess. I close my eyes. The message is a few paragraphs long. I don't want to start it because I don't want it to be over. Whatever it says, I can only read it for the first time once.

I open my eyes.

Once upon a time . . .

There was a girl of pluck and a boy of sixes who grew up to be extraordinary people. If either of them ever reads this, then it means they've gone looking.

And if you've come looking, either of you or both, I hope it doesn't mean you're troubled, but I'm thinking that you might be. And if so, I'm sorry for that. I'm sorry if whatever is wrong has you thinking of me because I'm the cause of your concern. But, I'm even sorrier if it has nothing to do with me at all, and that you've come looking for me out here in the pixels only because I'm not there with you now.

Sadly, I know that there is plenty in this world that you can't handle. But it's really not all that sad, because if you can't handle it, then nobody could have. I lasted long enough to know that. You are both so capable and beautiful, you made it easy to do the best I could. If you could know how grateful I am for that . . .

For the problem at hand, try this: You know what to do, my darlings. And if you don't, do what you think you'd do if you were exactly the person you wanted to be.

Take care of each other and be happy, not sad, when you set a spider freer than me. My love for you is here, it's there, it's everywhere. . . .