Girl of Lies (25 page)

Julia had just left a lunch meeting in Canberra. Alexandra didn’t kid around, quickly briefing her.

“Do you think he’s drinking again?” Julia had asked.

The question haunted Alexandra. Less because of any inherent concern about alcohol—she’d never known or had to live with a practicing alcoholic—but more because of the implication that Dylan might be keeping secrets from her. Because if he was hiding that from her, then she had no idea what he might be doing.

So she kept an eye out. She paid attention. When he came home late from class, she watched him. She surreptitiously smelled his breath, and sometimes her eyes fell on a receipt in the trash that she wouldn’t have noticed or paid any attention to. Without being consciously aware of it, she’d slipped into the role of the suspicious or concerned wife. And she hated that. She hated even the idea of that role. For her entire life she’d seen her mother and father manipulate each other to the point where it was impossible to know what was truth and what was a lie.

Sometimes, even though she loved Dylan with all her heart, she asked herself if she’d really screwed up by marrying someone with an admitted drinking problem, someone with post-traumatic stress, someone who was the child of alcoholics. She loved Dylan. But sometimes, when he was sitting and looking out the window a million miles away from her, she was scared of him.

The one thing she never did was ask him directly if he was drinking. She wanted him to come clean on his own. She wanted him to ask for help. She wanted him to finally do what he needed to take care of himself and of her. So she didn’t put him in a position where he’d lie. And, at this point, she knew if she pressed him on it, he would lie to her.

So they went to Atlanta for Thanksgiving to see his mother, and she let things slide. One night in early December he stumbled home. Not drunk, but not sober either. And his breath smelled of fresh mouthwash.

She let it go. She held him, even when he pushed away. She loved him.

But it was hard.

On December 23
rd
they took the train from Penn Station to Washington, DC for their third trip to the city after Ray’s death. This time they’d be crowded in—the entire Thompson clan would be in town, with the exception of Andrea.

“Why isn’t Andrea coming?” she’d asked Julia.

Julia just sighed. “I tried to persuade her. But can you blame her? She doesn’t believe Mom and Dad want her.”

Alexandra had difficulty fathoming that. She knew her father was cold and her mother difficult, but so were a million other parents. She never quite understood the level of drama Julia brought to the table when it came to their mother, even though she did remember some horrible confrontations between the two when she was younger.
Of course
Mom and Dad wanted Andrea.

Except… did they?

One day in the summer of 2002 Carrie had sat down with her. They’d taken the trolley to the waterfront and walked along the beach next to the Hyde Street Pier, both of them licking ice cream.

You know I’m leaving for college in a few weeks,
Carrie had said.

Of course I do,
Alexandra replied.

“
I’ve always kind of tried to be… sort of a big sister to you and the twins and Andrea. Almost like a mom when I could. You know, for when Mom’s all crazy.”

Alexandra shrugged.

“The thing is,” Carrie said. “Me and Julia, we made a pact. That we’d always watch out for you guys. That we’d always watch out for each other. Sisters.”

The words were intense, dripping with heavy meaning that Alexandra didn’t completely get. Finally she said, “What about Mom?”

“She’s… not always the best mom she could be. You know? I’m just saying… with me gone… it’s up to you, Alexandra. To watch out for the twins and Andrea. Just to make sure they’re okay, you know?”

Alexandra nodded. “Of course, I’ll watch out for them.”

Carrie had stopped and looked her in the eye.

“Promise me,” she said.

“I promise.”

The thing was, you can’t keep promises like that. You can try, you can do everything you can, but Alexandra was only thirteen years old when Carrie left for college.

Thirteen year olds can try to keep promises, but they can’t keep their younger sisters from being sent away.

She did everything she could. But in the end, it wasn’t enough. Andrea
did
go away, first for a few weeks, then a summer, then eventually for the school year. By the time she was a pre-teen, Andrea only came home for the holidays.

This year, not even that.

Nobody said anything to her. Julia and Carrie didn’t look her in the eye and say,
You failed her.
They didn’t say out loud that they blamed her for not protecting Andrea. But she knew. She’d heard about their promise to each other, to the family, for years. That’s
all
she’d heard about was their sacred fucking promise.

The promise she couldn’t keep. Julia and Carrie had cared for each other, and they’d cared for her. But Alexandra couldn’t manage to watch out for her sisters. She’d left behind a rebellious punk rocker, a pill popping preppie and the sister who went away and wouldn’t even return her phone calls.

Alex’s legacy was failure, but she didn’t intend to keep it that way. She wasn’t going to fail Dylan. No matter what.

So she kept him close. She talked to him every day. She
tried.

When they arrived in Bethesda for Christmas, the family was already in an uproar. Dylan followed Alex into the condo, where they immediately heard Adelina’s voice from a back room. She was shouting. Alex gave Dylan a worried look as they walked in. The first person they saw was Sarah, sitting in her wheelchair near the couch, a book open in front of her. She looked up at them over the top of the book. Her face was shiny with sweat.

“Hey, Alexandra,” Sarah had said.

“Sarah!” Alex rushed over to Sarah, who said she was fine, just running a bit of a fever.

The next four days were chaos. Jessica spent the bulk of her time in her room, because every appearance resulted in another outburst of argument between Richard and Adelina.

“You were supposed to be taking care of our daughter!”
Adelina would shout.

“I’m fine, Mom!”
Jessica replied.

“Have you seen her report card?”
Adelina called out.

Richard, as always, retreated. He hadn’t regularly occupied the office in the Bethesda condo in more than ten years—it was Carrie’s office now—but that didn’t stop him from disappearing into the office and locking the door behind him.

The sisters were torn on how to react. Julia was staying with Crank at the Hyatt Regency a block away. She said, “Mom’s making a crisis out of nothing, as always.”

Carrie was more reserved. “I’m concerned. Dad probably stayed locked in his office the entire fall. God only knows what Jessica’s been up to.”

Alexandra, who had done more than her share of drinking in college, backed her mother.

Sarah, fighting another infection, mostly stayed in bed or parked in her wheelchair near the couch, glassy eyed from painkillers.

It was an incredibly uncomfortable, tense couple of days. Dylan spent a fair amount of it standing out on the balcony, freezing his ass off, smoking.

This time, he didn’t have Crank to keep him company. “Trying to quit, man,” Crank said. “I’m not getting any younger.”

Dylan gave Crank a wry look. “You’re not exactly an old man yet. What are you, thirty?”

“Thirty-three. But that’s not the point. Point is, you gotta grow up some time.”

“Yeah,” Dylan said. “True enough.”

The fussing and yelling between Adelina, Richard and Jessica continued right up until the morning after Christmas. It was a little after 11:30 in the morning, and all of the sisters (except Andrea) were seated around the table with their parents, Crank and Dylan. The family only rarely used the formal dining room in the condo, but with this many people, they were seated around the large table. Platters were piled high with bacon and eggs, pancakes and French toast, all of it carefully laid out by caterers from the Hyatt.

“You’re staying in Washington,” Adelina announced just after breakfast, glowering at Richard. “I will return to San Francisco with Jessica.”

He raised his eyebrows, then took his napkin from his lap, carefully wiped his mouth, and tossed the napkin on the table.

“I think that’s a good idea,” he said. “It appears I need to move back to Washington, anyway, I’ve been asked by the President to come out of retirement.”

With that, he stood and walked out of the room, leaving a stunned silence in his wake.

J
ESSICA THOMPSON LEANED against the wall, her eyes drooping, shivering a little.

“Do you need a break?” The question came from Sister Kiara Langley, her therapist. Sister Kiara was a web of contradictions. An African-American from Los Angeles. A Roman Catholic nun with a PhD in psychology. For the last ten days, she’d been in Jessica’s room three times a day to probe and ask questions. Questions Jessica wasn’t prepared to answer.

For the first several days she’d said as little as possible. A few times she screamed until Kiara left. But by the end of the fifth day, she felt nothing but exhaustion. Her skin and her soul were numb. Everything was numb.

“No,” Jessica said. “I’m just… still tired. So tired.” She closed her eyes.

“Jessica, I need you to stay awake for a while. I told you, you’re going to feel tired for quite a while, and probably depressed. It’s a common side effect.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jessica said. Depressed was an understatement. She couldn’t laugh. She just felt dead inside. The night before, a dozen or so of the residents of the retreat had gathered to watch a movie: a romantic comedy. Her mother had laughed, a lot. So had a lot of the others there. But Jessica just sat there, staring. It wasn’t funny.

“Why couldn’t I laugh?” she asked.

Kiara said, “Well, it’s complicated. You know what dopamine is? In your brain? Basically, that’s what gives you pleasure. The meth makes it so you can’t produce as much of it. And on top of having less of it, the dopamine receptors are… basically burned. There’s less of them functioning. And it’s going to be a long, long time before those function normally again.”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime you stay clean. When you go home, you’ll be in therapy. You’ll go to a long-term treatment program. But it’s mostly up to you. You’re eighteen years old. I can’t keep you here, and your mother can’t keep you here. It’s up to you now.”

Jessica didn’t want it to be up to her. She wanted to just curl up and let someone else take care of her.

“I want to stay clean,” Jessica said.

“So what do you need to do, Jessica?”

She nodded, slowly. “Talk.”

“Right.”

She crossed her arms across her chest. “Can we turn up the heat in here? It’s freezing.”

“Sure,” Sister Kiara said. The nun walked to the door and adjusted the thermostat, then returned to her seat. “Tell me a little about when all this started.”

“The meth? Or the other stuff.”

“All of it.”

Jessica took a deep breath. “It started in the womb, really. My twin got all the personality and smarts and… everything, really.”

“What’s her name?”

“Sarah. She won’t tell you, but Sarah means
Princess
, and that’s just what she is. She likes to dress all shocking—combat boots and black clothes and makeup, but even when we were little girls, it was always Sarah who had the attention. Sarah made friends. Sarah smiled, and—she had it all.”

Jessica shook her head. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming her for all of this. That was just the way it was. Sarah smiled and everyone came running. Sarah got in trouble, said something funny, and everyone laughed. For me it was just—always a little harder. I stayed quiet and in the background and just… did my thing.”

Sister Kiara smiled at her and said, “How did that make you feel?”

Jessica looked away. Then she turned back to Kiara and said, “Sometimes I felt really alone. My oldest sisters were all gone. I used to get along great with Andrea—she’s my youngest sister—but she moved away to Spain to live with our grandmother. I did make some friends at school, and… I dated a girl for a while. But she broke up with me.”

Jessica looked away again. Up until now, Kiara had mostly just asked questions, but she was certain the admission that she was attracted to girls would prompt condemnation from her. After all, Kiara may have a PhD, she might have been dressed in jeans and a button down shirt, but she was a nun.

Kiara, though, only said, “Talk to me about your relationship with your sisters.”

She rolled her eyes. “I have almost no relationship with my sisters. I’m the good one. The quiet one. Besides, can you even
imagine
the pressure I’m under? Julia went to Harvard and runs a multi-million dollar business she built herself. Carrie went to Columbia and Rice and is a scientist at the NIH for Chrissake. Even Alexandra, she’s at Columbia in pre-law and had
perfect
grades and the
perfect
boyfriend and then the
perfect
wedding. Everything’s so
perfect
for all of them I could just puke.”