Little Black Lies (21 page)

I set my alarm for 6:45 Saturday morning, so early the streetlights are still on. It doesn't matter that I didn't get four hours' sleep. Dad is going to see a few VW buses out in Brookline today, and I'm going to shock him by coming along. Not because I'm excited about choosing yet another vehicle that makes us look as if we solve Scooby-Doo mysteries on the side. But because I can't erase from my mind the look of Dad's eyes from the other day. The ache that I thought might bring him to his knees right there on the terrazzo tile of Anton's halls. That ache is the last thing I see before falling asleep. The first thing I see when I wake.

Without bothering to wash my face—I just washed it four hours ago—I pile my tangled hair into a high ponytail, pull a pair of old sweatpants over bare legs, and head into the kitchen in the same gray turtleneck I wore to bed.

Dad, sitting at the breakfast table in his Anton High custodian jacket, looks me up and down as he stirs his coffee. “You're up early.”

“That's because we have to leave soon if we're going to get to Brookline by eight. Buses don't run too often on Saturday mornings.” I pour myself a cup of coffee, black, and hoist myself up on the counter across from him, thumping my heels against the cupboard doors below.

“Sweetheart, go back to bed and catch up on your sleep. You don't have to accompany me.”

“I don't have to but I
want
to. You and I don't get to spend enough time together.”

“Sara, it'll be nothing but peering under hoods at carburetors and distributor wires.”

“Sounds delish.”

“Seriously, hon. It will be hours of car talk at three different locations. You don't have to do this for me.”

I drain my coffee cup and bang it on the counter, shooting him a teasing grin. “For you? Dream on, big guy. I'm doing this for me. You never know when I might want to dazzle my friends with my knowledge of air-cooled, four-cylinder boxcar engines.”

He doesn't say anything right away, but his face softens. It's the kind of face that is trying to say nothing at all on the outside while it processes something sad and significant on the inside. It's the curtain that comes down on a stage—heavy and draping, soft and velvety—that blocks the audience from seeing the actors regrouping on the other side. “Boxer engines. Not boxcar.”

I hop off the counter, lean down, and kiss his cheek. “Let's go, Dad. I don't want to miss our appointment.”

By the time I stand up, the curtain has lifted and the actors are back onstage. He tugs on the leg of my grubby sweatpants. “You didn't have to go to so much trouble getting dolled up.”

“Dude, at least I'm not wearing an Anton High jacket. You look like you're the oldest guy on the school bowling team.”

He smiles, flipping up his collar. “We'll do a great job of convincing them we're penniless. It's the oldest buyer's tactic in the book.”

We get off the bus on a street called Dresden Road. In spite of our forty-five-minute trek, it's still so early all the streets are empty. We walk up a slight hill on a sidewalk bordered on one side by a low stone wall with grass poking out from between the rocks.

Dad stops in front of a large, pale gray clapboard house—mansion, really—that looms over us. Not only is it set up on a grassy hill, but it's three stories high, with an actual turret on the right side. Shaggy bushes line the base of the house, parting only long enough to allow a steep set of steps to lead to the covered verandah.

He squints at a scrap of paper, then back up at the number above the front door. “We're here.”

A balding man named Alex, dressed in old boat shoes, khakis, and a worn denim shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows, leads us to a four-car garage out back and opens the door. As he and Dad examine his collection of vehicles, a smiling, drooling, wiggling golden retriever races across the lawn and drops to the ground at my feet, rolling over and begging me to scratch his belly.

“This one's my baby,” says Alex, walking straight past the VW bus, which I can already tell is too new for Dad, and motioning toward a small white car shaped like a bubble.

“Porsche 356 A-Coupe. Is it a '59?”

“Fifty-eight.”

Dad whistles as he bends over and inspects the chrome bumper. “Not a whisper of rust. You keep her in excellent condition.”

“I don't drive this one in winter. Not with all the salt on the roads. I own a car-parts company and maintain a rather large vintage division through which we buy and sell antique cars.” Alex laughs. “Though I have to admit we buy often and sell rarely. We brought this one up from Santa Barbara about ten years ago and I took her home with me.”

“Can't blame you. A car this special shouldn't sit unloved in a showroom.”

“I can see you and I think alike.” Alex unlocks the door to the Porsche and Dad climbs inside like a kid clambering onto Santa's lap.

Alex wanders over to where I am, sitting cross-legged on the smooth cement floor petting the dog. “You like dogs?”

“Sure.”

“My wife breeds goldens. We typically sell all the pups, but Boomerang here kept running away from his new owners and finding his way back here. Eventually we stopped fighting him. Gave the owners another pup and let him stay. There's just something about this place he wasn't willing to give up.”

I let my eyes wander around the property—across the overgrown bushes with leaves so scarlet they almost hurt to look at, the enormous tree branches that lean over the house and wrap around the roof as if embracing a child, the basketball hoop partway down the driveway. A woman pushes open an upstairs window. Her blondish gray hair is messy but pulled back, and she's wearing a white T-shirt. She looks sort of worn and comfy, just like Alex. This is no house of trial separations and envelopes full of divorce papers. This is a real family home, like you see on made-for-TV movies. I scratch Boomerang's ear and look up at Alex. “I can see why he likes it.”

Dad and Alex are already acting like old friends, laughing and smiling, bonding over mid-engine tubular chassis. At one point Alex even pats Dad on the back. They're chatting about impossible-to-find antique parts—turns out Alex has never heard of this obscure vintage-parts Web site in Austria that feeds Dad parts for less. Alex writes the URL on a pad of paper beside the phone on his beautifully organized workbench, then the conversation shifts to our VW. Alex has been looking for an old van like ours to restore because he had a VW camper bus as a surf-loving teen out in San Diego, and they might work out some sort of a swap for one of the cars. While they bond with their heads buried under the hood of an ancient-looking convertible, I watch Dad lean against a dirty bumper with no concern about the microbes that might be jumping onto his palm like hardcores diving into a mosh pit.

It isn't until this moment I realize something. Cars, especially crappy old heaps, are his panacea, like the sun is to Superman. Cleaning is his kryptonite. As much as it temporarily soothes him, it ultimately destroys him.

Deep in a discussion about engine parts, Dad asks Alex about the last time the blue convertible was in the shop and does Alex have the invoice so he can see what repairs were made. Alex isn't sure and walks over to an intercom on the wall. “Honey? Is the prince out of bed yet? Ask him to drag his weary bones off the mattress and come out to the garage.” He smiles at Dad. “This one belongs to my son, actually, so he's the best one to answer your questions. As much as I'd love to tinker with his car, I'm a big believer in my children making their own mistakes. He bought the car, he makes all his own maintenance decisions, and he pays for every decision he makes. It's the only way with kids….”

As Alex's voice trails off, a horrified tingle spreads from my unwashed hair, along the ribbing of the turtleneck I slept in, across the fraying, secondhand threads of my Finmory sweatpants, across the gleaming cement floor to my father's overly ironed custodian jacket. It's too big a coincidence.

As I sit frozen to the concrete, Alex asks Charlie what he does. Dad's response sounds so far away, I almost believe I've floated out of the garage and am hovering somewhere up above the weathervane on the roof. “I'm the custodian at Anton High School,” Charlie says before launching into an explanation involving words like refuse, toilet tanks, and HVAC system.

“Really?” says Alex. “Maybe you know my son….”

A barefooted teenage boy in rumpled black T-shirt and low-slung plaid pajama bottoms pads into the garage, yawning and rubbing sleep from his eyes. With a big stretch, he blinks and looks right at me.

I don't move. I don't breathe. I don't speak. The boy standing in front of me is Leo Reiser.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, stunned and mute, was how my mother found me when she came home the day I found the boxes. She just breezed straight past the cartons and packed bags and into my room as if bursting with good news. She took one look at me in my green prom dress, trying to make sense out of this afternoon, and asked why I was home so early. I pointed out it was four thirty and that she'd promised to help me pick a hairstyle for prom. She'd lost track of time, she said. Hadn't realized it was so late. Time does that, doesn't it? Vanishes. But here's the slap—it only happens when you're happy. My mother's apparent mathematical formula? Her - (Dad + me) = Time Flying.

She squished her mouth into an appropriate family-busting frown as she sat down on the rug beside me, put her arm across my shoulder. “Darling,” she said, “you know I love you.”

It always starts that way, doesn't it? Six words like this, seeping from down-turned lips. As soon as they hit the air, they rush around and get busy ending your world.

“But your father and I … you
know
it's been wrong for a long time. You
know
how he thinks. He's stagnant. I just want so much more out of life. Like I want for you. I'm at the point where staying is suffocating.” She stopped and gathered my hair off my face.

I knew the answer, but it was my turn to speak. “You're leaving.”

“Yes, sweetheart. But I'm not leaving you. Never leaving you.”

“But I live in this house. So you sort of are.”

“Don't look at it that way, Sara. You're a big girl now. You can hop on a plane and come see me—”

“A plane? How far are you
not
going? And is Mr. Nathan not going with you?”

She was quiet for a moment. “You know?”

I nodded.

She pulled me to my feet. “Come into my room and talk to me while I change. I think you'll understand what I'm about to tell you.”

“Sure,” I said, following her across the hall. “I don't want you to be late.”

Love brings out the stupid in people. It traps fluid in the inner ear and blots out sound. My mother actually smiled at me as if she appreciated my concern for her timing. The sarcasm in my voice didn't even register.

I folded my arms across my chest, leaned against the wall connecting my parents' room to their bathroom, and watched as she tugged off her T-shirt and slipped into a pink silky sleeveless blouse. Her arms were tanned, muscular. As she kicked off her jeans and stepped into a skirt, I looked away, angered by her matching pink silky underwear. I'd never seen this bra or these panties in the laundry before.

“When I met Michael, it was as if I had a chance at life again, you know? You'll understand this when you're older, I promise. My God, you're going into eleventh grade. You're almost an adult yourself.”

Keeping my eyes focused on the bathroom, I tried to blot out her words by staring at a little pile of gold by the sink. The bracelet Dad and I gave her for her birthday two years ago, her gold Wal-Mart watch from her sister. And something else. I leaned to the right and picked up a plain gold ring. It was too shiny, not a scratch or a mark on it. I turned it over in my hands and noticed something was inscribed on the inside. Holding it closer, I read the words
Mon amour
.

“Do you understand, sweetheart?” Mom asked.

She was at the doorway and I nodded, hiding the ring behind my back.

Taking my shoulders, she looked into my eyes. “Are you sure, Sara? I want us to be really open with this. And I want you to learn from my mistakes. I've given almost a quarter of my life to a man I never should have married. When I met Michael, I felt I had a chance again. Like I'd found my reason for living.”

Her reason for living. Her freaking reason for living. Because she hadn't found one yet. She didn't have one living across the hall from her bedroom. Tears pierced my eyes like burning needles and I stepped back. “Could you excuse me, Mom? I need to pee.”

Closing the door behind me, I dropped the ring into the toilet bowl and flushed.

The ring wasn't the only thing that vanished that day. Nor was my mother.