The Safest Lies (6 page)

I wondered if anyone had recovered my phone, my bag, my key ring with the purple clip that I’d hook through my belt loop for safekeeping. If it was all still at the bottom of the cliff, inside the car, wedged between crushed metal and deflated air bags.

I dreamed the same thing whether I was sleeping or awake—an endless fall, with no bottom. The car too slick, or my fingers too slow, and the air rushing up as I plummeted into darkness.

I’d just read a short story for English about a man sentenced to death by hanging over a bridge, and as he fell, the rope broke, and he escaped—falling into the river, swimming to evade capture, making his way home—only to feel the noose tighten when he finally arrived. The whole escape a fabrication of his mind. A slow and inevitable demise. That whole time, he’d just been falling in slow motion.

I sat in the dim light of my room and stared at my fingers, at the red line and the swollen skin, like proof.

I wasn’t falling. I’d held on. I’d made it home.

I was in my bed, surrounded by my four walls, with the sound of my mom banging pots and pans around in the kitchen, which was yet another stress-relief strategy via Jan. And one of my least favorites. She’d serve up casseroles big enough for eight people, and we’d have to eat them for an entire week, and she’d apologize, knowing it was terrible, but eating it anyway.

To be fair, cooking did tend to relax her—keeping her hands busy, her mind occupied with a list of ingredients, a simple task to focus on. If it worked, if she broke free of whatever was haunting her, she’d eventually cave and let me order pizza or Chinese for delivery.

This was not one of those times.

For two days, she called me out for meals—the casserole crisp where it should be soft, soggy where it should be crisp—and I slunk back to my room after. She didn’t argue. I wondered, if I went to her office, if I’d find the pictures from the accident up on the computer screen. Or if this time it would be something worse.

She had a bad habit of seeking them out, robberies and kidnappings, missing children and acts of violence. Even before her kidnapping, her life had been a struggle. It must’ve been so easy for her to only see the dangers. This was something I didn’t tell Jan about. I didn’t know if it was making her worse—more fearful of the world beyond our walls—or whether it might help. If it reminded her: she had escaped, when so many did not.

I stared at my fingers again. I had lived. And so had she.

—

Mom knocked on the bedroom door as I was waking on what I thought was Saturday morning, but when I checked the clock, it was already after noon. “Jan’s here,” she said. Code:
Get out of bed. Look alive.

It was a big deal if Jan was here for a session on a weekend. Her husband worked as some sort of consultant and traveled during the week, so they tried to keep weekends free, for family time. If Jan was here on a weekend, there must’ve been a reason, and that made me nervous.

The last few days had blurred together—I’d been in the same pajamas for at least a day and a half. I opened the windows to air out the room, but left the outside metal window grate closed. I had a key so I could swing the bars open, also for safety reasons (in the event of a fire), but for now the locked bars were what I needed. I changed out of my pajamas and splashed water on my face.

Jan had brownish-gray hair cut in a mom-bob, and she was dressed in her work slacks and blouse, even though it was the weekend. “Kelsey, my dear,” she said when I emerged from the room—hair in a bun to hide the fact it hadn’t been washed, foundation to hide the dark circles, smile to hide the fact that I still hadn’t shaken the moment, the one that circled and dug and made itself at home: one second, one muscle cramp, between here and gone.

“Hi, Jan,” I said, taking the package from her outstretched hand. The new phone my mom had requested, in a box that must’ve been sitting outside the gate since yesterday—I hoped Jan hadn’t noticed. “Oh, I didn’t know it had arrived yet,” I said.

“Same number,” my mom said. “Just need to program it again.”

“Kelsey,” Jan said, taking her normal seat in the living room, in the loveseat across from the couch. “Sit, please. Let’s talk.” Beside her on the floor was a brown box with no lid, filled with my missing things. My backpack, dirty and singed, my purse, the strap dangling from a single side, the red umbrella that used to be in the backseat, the spokes bent at unnatural angles, the handle either crushed or melted.

It all smelled faintly chemical, like gasoline. I pressed my lips together, tasting it in the air, and wondered if Mom could sense it, too. But she was looking beyond Jan, through the large windows at the back of the living room, her head tilted slightly to the side. I followed her gaze and saw a girl sitting on the stone wall past the gate, kicking her legs.

An exit, thank God. “It’s Annika,” I said. “I was just on my way out,” I added.

My mom raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

Jan twisted around on the couch, squinting. “How can you even see that far?”

Annika was an easily identifiable blur, even from the distance: her hair exceeded normal volume by at least three hundred percent, she was always wearing colors that would somehow catch the eye, and she had the inability to sit still. Besides, this was where she’d always wait for me. It was as close as she ever got.

The stone wall at the edge of the property was our first line of defense, though it was more of a deterrent than an official barrier. There was an open gap in the front of the wall, a makeshift driveway where I used to park my car. Then came the high metal fence, with a discreet electrical cable lining the top and a locked gate toward the back, and another in the front, encircling the yard. There was a small stand-alone booth with a door and a window just inside the gated entrance, to the left, I guess in case someone actually hired a security guard to man the gate.

But between the fence and the outer wall the weeds ran wild, vegetation climbing up the stone, thick and unruly. “It looks like the perfect place for snakes,” Annika had complained, and I had to agree. She never came any closer. Her side of the wall was all mowed and landscaped with shrubbery and a pond with a constantly running fountain.

“It’s her,” I said, with one more glance to the box at Jan’s feet. “I have to go. Can we talk later?” Because I couldn’t completely brush Jan off. There were lines to walk, after all.

“All right,” Jan said. “Listen, I’ve spoken to the school. It’s too late to add on to the bus route, so Cole and Emma will be picking you up Monday morning. At least until you get the car situation taken care of.”

I considered it one of my greater accomplishments that I kept my face passive and my thoughts unvoiced. “That would be great,” I said, because of all the things I’d either inherited or learned from my mother, the art of the lie was the most useful.

—

Annika swung her legs like a little kid, the heels of her shoes bouncing against the wall. She wore gray tights and black Mary Janes and a purple skirt so short it was a good thing the tights were opaque.

“I’ve been calling you all day,” she said once I got close enough to hear.

“I’m sorry, I lost my phone.” I leaned against the wall beside her.

“Oh, I was starting to wonder,” she said, leaning closer, her eyes roaming over me from head to toe. She scrunched up her nose at my bun. “I
heard.
”

The scream of metal, the rush of air, the scent of burning rubber, and my nails skimming metal—

I placed my hands flat against the stone wall, trying to ground myself.
You made it. You’re here.

She patted the spot beside her on the ledge, and I used the grooves between the uneven stones for footing.

To me, Annika always seemed like she came from a different world. She layered her clothes, unmatching: bright tights under plaid skirts, or the other way around, boho tops and jewelry that chimed like music when she walked, and long, wavy hair she’d coil around ribbons or push back from her face with a scarf or bandanna.

She also had this vaguely unplaceable accent, not quite European, but something deliberate and alluring.

“It’s from all the travel,” she’d told me once. A year of school in France as a child, another in England, before her mom divorced her State Department husband and settled here with Annika and her older brother, who was off at college now.

“I cannot believe,” she was saying as I hauled myself up beside her, “that I had to hear about this from my mother, of all people. Normal people tend to call their friends when they nearly die, you know.” Annika looked at me the way I imagined I must look at her: like she was caught between being captivated and confused. I thought it was probably why we remained good friends, despite the long stretches of silence, the distance, and the differences. She was foreign, and interesting, and unplaceable, like her accent. And I was the same to her. Our worlds were so far from each other that they circled back around and almost touched again.

“I didn’t nearly die,” I said. I felt her gaze on the side of my face, wondered if she could read the lie in my expression. Wondered what normal people tended to say, or not say, to their friends. “I had a car crash. And I wasn’t really in the mood to relive it.”

“That’s not what the papers say,” she said, the corners of her lips tipping down. They were shiny, covered in a pink gloss that might’ve even had sparkles, and it was hard to take anything she said too seriously.

“The papers?”

“Mm,” she said, turning sideways, her hands on the stone between us, her nails painted electric blue. “According to Thursday’s paper,” she began, using some faux-official voice, “thanks to classmate and volunteer firefighter Ryan Something-or-other, Kelsey Thomas, the young woman miraculously pulled from the car over Benjamin’s Cliff, walks away without a scratch.” Her fingers circled my wrist, warm in the autumn chill. “Someone took a picture of your car after it fell. Quite the sight, Kels.” She paused, and in that gap, I pictured it—the car, falling. Me, still clinging to the edge. “So don’t tell me you didn’t nearly die. A reporter showed up last night, hoping us neighbors might have a status update for them. Nosy bastards.”

I felt my shoulders deflate, my back slumping. “Ugh,” I said. My name. In the newspaper. My mom was going to flip. She was big on privacy—so big, in fact, that I was probably the only student not on one of the vast assortment of social networking sites. I only had an email account because it was required from school so teachers could send us assignments. I was sure she wouldn’t have gotten me a phone if it didn’t also double as a GPS. “Isn’t that illegal to print my name? I’m a minor.”

“Apparently not,” she said. “Or else someone missed that memo.” I decided this was something best kept from my mother, for her own peace of mind.

“You home for a while?” I asked, itching to change the subject.

“Fall break. Just the week.” Annika’s newest boarding school worked on some nontraditional schedule, not really adhering to typical holidays, and I could never remember when she was supposed to be home. “I emailed you when I got home last night, when I couldn’t reach you.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. I’d never made it to Mom’s office and the computer. I was used to using my phone for email, and I wasn’t working on any school projects. I had barely made it out of my room at all—mostly on autopilot, to the kitchen and back again—until the fear of Jan seeing me this way knocked me out of my stupor.

“I even tried your home line,” Annika said. “Busy signal. All day.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I just tried it again before I came out here.”

“Huh. I’ll check it.” Maybe it had been knocked off the cradle. I hadn’t heard it ring since the accident, now that she mentioned it.

“So, listen, you want to come over tomorrow? I’m sentenced to
family time
today with Brett home from college for the weekend, but he’s going out tomorrow, so I should be free at least part of the day.”

“I can’t come over,” I said, shaking my head. “Maybe later next week but…not now.” Not when it took three days to leave the house. Not when I already felt the vastness, as my mom called it, of the open air. The feeling of all the things that could go wrong the farther I walked from my door.

“Sure. Later, then,” she said. This was another reason I thought we got along so well. We didn’t ask too many questions. I never asked why she kept changing schools, and she never asked why I lived behind bars and gates and wires.

I slid off the wall, back to my side of the property, an invisible tether—the promise of safe, and predictable. She stared at the weeds, squeezed her eyes shut, and dropped down after me. “Hey,” she said, hand on my arm. “You’re okay, right?”

I wasn’t sure if Annika knew about my mom, or what she suspected, but she must’ve known something. The leash I was kept on, the things I couldn’t do, the fact that we always went to her house instead of my own.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m okay.”
The darkness over the edge, the grip of my fingers…

I felt an ache in the bruise on my shoulder, my elbows, and the line across my hands.

Annika shuddered and picked her feet up, one exaggerated step at a time, like there might really be snakes in the grass. I uncurled my hand, overwhelmed with the sudden impulse to show her the line across my fingers—that maybe she would understand—

“Annika?” A woman’s voice, from the other side of the wall.

Annika rolled her eyes. “Gotta run.” But before she climbed back over the wall, she pulled me toward her, squeezed me tight, the ribbons in her hair tickling my neck. “I’m glad you’re okay, Kelsey darling.” Then she air-kissed my cheek, which was something only Annika could get away with, before finding a foothold in the stone wall.