The Comfort of Lies (24 page)

In a matter of weeks, days—Tia could barely remember—after she’d been fired, Bobby had become her ever-patient steady boyfriend. If she had his old football jacket, she’d wrap herself in it. Tia wanted to be back in high school, except this time it would be Bobby whom she’d make out with at the Sugar Bowl. She’d sleep with him, marry him, and have his babies. When the babies became children, she’d send them off to school with carefully packed nutritious lunches. Then Tia would have returned to school and become a professor, or a doctor, or a lawyer.

Five rings went by, and then Nathan’s voice filled the room like a shot to her central nervous system.

“Tia. It’s Nathan.”

As though there were any chance that she wouldn’t recognize his voice.

“We need to talk.”

Now? She’d sent the letter so long ago.

“It’s about . . . the child.”

Tia clutched the blanket.

“I . . . my wife. For God’s sake, Tia, how could you have just sent that to my house like that? Did you even think of the possibilities?”

Tia shrank from his accusation. Guilt shamed her. Then anger followed.

Did you even consider what happened to me after having your baby? Did you think about that baby even once?

What was it like going through the world not even knowing if you’d had a boy or a girl?

“Call me. On my cell. I have a new number,” his disembodied voice announced.

Tia already knew that. His old one didn’t work. She’d wondered if he’d changed it so she couldn’t call. Nathan said his number twice, and Tia scribbled it down. Then she saved the message in case she’d written the number wrong.

In case she wanted to hear his message again.

Stupid!
She reminded herself that he’d called to berate her, not love her.

Still, he’d called. The last time Tia had heard Nathan’s voice, she’d been five months pregnant, when she’d made her final attempt to convince Nathan to include her in his life, pleading, “But you love me! I know you do.”

It had been like that with Nathan too many times. She’d plan long, rational speeches and end up pleading, “I know that you love me. I know it. I know it. I know it.”

Eventually Tia forced herself to face the probability that she’d projected onto Nathan her own obsessed madness. For too long, she’d assumed his love for her was genuine, like the words he used to describe his feelings: “Oh, Tia, you are so unlike anyone else—so real, so authentic. I love you.”

Perhaps Nathan’s “I love you” was really “Love ya, babe!” Or perhaps it was “Hot for ya, baby, but I’m too civilized to say that.”

Could he love her and also love his wife?

Could he love her and turn his back on all knowledge about their child?

Tia prayed that a ghostly film of her presence hovered over him, as his did over her. She wanted to haunt him.

Each time something awful happened, the silver lining had been the same: Didn’t her desperate need for comfort provide dispensation? Wasn’t she now allowed to call Nathan? Hadn’t their closeness during their year together earned her that right? After her mother died:
I could call Nathan!
When she fell and broke three ribs:
Nathan will help me!
Even after she’d been fired, her first thought had been to call Nathan.

But she never did. Honest moments made her recognize that she was an infrequent presence in Nathan’s mind, while he was just moments from her thoughts at any given moment. Robin was the one she called for help, allowing herself to fantasize about having Nathan’s comfort only while waiting for sleep.

Tia splashed cold water on her face. She considered a shower,
wanting to be alert and ready for whatever Nathan might offer, but she feared that even a few minutes’ delay could take him away forever. Just taking the time to fill a coffee cup could be dangerous. What if, in those moments, he changed his mind about talking to her? What if, at the very moment Tia watched hot coffee splash into a mug, his wife used her purity and beauty to beckon him away from the phone?

First she read the number she’d written down, then she scribbled it larger. Only then did she dial Nathan.

“Tia?”

“Caller ID ruins the surprise, doesn’t it?” she said.

His voice, oh damn, his voice ran through her.

“Hardly a surprise, considering I called you a few minutes ago,” he said.

She squeezed herself in concentration, trying to establish his mood. Reading Nathan had once been her talent. The pitch of his voice told Tia how playful she could be. At the time their affair hit the final notes, Tia found herself adjusting every word to Nathan’s frame of mind. Today he sounded cautious.

Still, she detected a note—a small note, but still a note—of curiosity. Tia the Nathan scholar could detect interest in his voice, no matter how minute.

“I was surprised to hear from you,” Tia said.

“That hardly makes sense, considering what you sent.”

“I mailed those pictures almost two months ago.”

“I didn’t get them until quite recently.” Nathan used his sincerity voice. “Juliette intercepted them.”

“What do you mean, intercepted?”

“I moved, you know,” he said.

Nathan excelled at changing subjects. “No,” she said. “I didn’t. How would I?”

A sticky silence hung for a moment.

“Good question,” he answered. “How would you? Anyway, it’s not important. Listen. Truly, I only recently found out about the pictures.
Juliette opened the envelope, but she didn’t tell me until now.”

His words unfolded a million questions. Tia froze, unsure what part of his statement to address first.

“She looks like us,” he said into the quiet. “The child.”

Tia clutched the phone. Us. They were still an “us.” She opened her top drawer and took out the picture of Honor. Yes, Nathan was right. They’d finally merged. In their daughter.

“She’s striking,” Nathan said.

“What does
striking
mean?”

“Unusual. Her looks sort of—”

“I know what the word means.” Nathan, the eternal professor. “What do
you
mean by that? Are you saying she’s not pretty? Not cute?”

Had his princess-pretty blonde wife said that? “Oh, she’s not very pretty, but she’s striking, Nathan.”

“No, I meant
striking
as in she struck me. Floored me, in fact.”

“How?”

“She looks so much like Max, my younger son,” Nathan said. “Juliette couldn’t stop talking about it.”

Coffee curdled in Tia’s stomach, imagining Juliette studying Honor’s picture. Thinking about her. Commenting on her. “What else did Juliette have to say?” Tia worked at not putting verbal quotation marks around the word
Juliette
.

“Tia, this is difficult for everyone.”

“It’s only difficult for you because I opened your eyes. If I’d never sent those pictures, you’d have gone your entire life without knowing whether or not your daughter was striking.”

Now he was quiet.

“Did you care at all? Did you wonder if you had a son or a daughter? Were you ever going to call?”

“Are you asking if I ever cared about the child or about you?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Tia held on to thoughts of Bobby. He’d held her after she’d been fired, even when she’d been so drunk that she’d puked on her own shoes. She wouldn’t let Nathan confuse her with
his I’m-the-real-person-here-with-my-wife-and-family bullshit. “Because you never did call, did you?”

“Juliette thinks I should see her.”

 • • • 

Tia and Nathan met the next morning in an anonymous coffee shop in Quincy, a city close enough by miles but far removed from either Jamaica Plain or Wellesley. Chosen by Nathan, of course, who offered to pay for a cab.

Tia took the Red line train.

He waited in a leather booth. Tia tried to hide the intensity of her reaction, how she caught her breath, how the blood rushed to her head. He looked good. Older, but still as desirable. Maybe a bit heavier. Solid. She itched to run her thumb over the top of his hand.

“Does your wife know we’re meeting?” Her voice shook.

“Not really.” Nathan took her hand and squeezed. She recognized the feel of his skin too well. “I got you coffee and a scone.”

“Not really” meant no. Reluctantly, she pulled her hand from his. She shifted her weight on the leather banquette. The booths were built too high. Tia hated having her legs dangle; hated being unable to feel the ground beneath her feet. She wore heels and a sundress with a cardigan thrown over her shoulders. “Nathan clothes”: the sort of girly stuff he liked.

Nathan pushed the scone toward her. “Try it. My muffin is actually pretty good.”

“Why so surprised? Decent things exist outside of Starbucks and Whole Foods,” Tia said.

Nathan put down his muffin and smiled. “Don’t you love to pigeonhole me? Nothing changes, eh? Still my girl from the ’hood, aren’t you?”

“Who’s pigeonholing now? And I’m not your girl from anywhere anymore, am I?” Tia broke her scone into a pieces. She wondered how to seem more intelligent, less “girl from the ’hood.” It bothered her then and still did today: she played his bad girl, and he represented
her good man. “I’ll assume the answer is no, she doesn’t know you’re here.”

“I need to know what you want, Tia. Why you sent those pictures. Juliette, well, you can only imagine how this affected her. It was terrifying when she found out.”

Juliette. Juliette.
Tia whispered it in her mind using soft French-sounding
J
s.

She hated hearing “Juliette” from Nathan’s lips: so sweet, so pure and elegant. Soon she’d hate all words that began with the letter
J
.

Jonquil.

Je t’aime.

Joy.

Tia
sounded too hard, starting with
T. Truck. Trouble. Tether.

“Juliette wants to know about these people—the adoptive family,” Nathan said. “And so do I. Now that you broke the silence, we want to know the entire picture.”

Nathan wore a crisp blue shirt so perfectly ironed that Tia wondered how it was done. Tia never could get those paper-sharp creases or crisp, smooth fronts. Did other people have better irons than she could find? Perhaps women like Juliette had access to tools that only upper-class women could get: beauty weapons sold on secret Web sites and irons you needed a password to buy.

“Why would
J-Juliette,
” Tia stumbled on the name. “
Juliette,”
she repeated, “want to know anything, much less everything?”

“She feels connected. The girl is my daughter, after all.”

“Your daughter?” Tia gripped the edge of the table. “She may be your biological material, but she’s not your daughter. And—how can I emphasize this enough—she is nothing,
nothing
, to your wife.”

“You say
wife
as though you’re describing something awful,” Nathan said. This was the most directly he’d ever spoken about Juliette; Tia’s words were the most straightforward he’d ever heard from her. “Why are you angry at her? Shouldn’t it be me who gets your fury?”

Tia had no adequate answer. He was right.

“Juliette sounds the same way when she speaks of you.”

“Maybe that’s our problem,” Tia said. “We haven’t yet figured out how to truly hate you, so we turn it on each other.”

Nathan rose and walked around the table. They’d been facing each other. Now he took the seat next to her, so they were hip to hip in the booth. Tia felt his heat. Their thighs touched, and she wondered if it was an accident.

He put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer. He gave her the kiss hello that hadn’t come before. It was brief, their lips barely brushed. But it was a kiss.

She blinked at the rush of feeling his arm, a weight she thought she’d never feel again. Why on God’s earth would she feel comfortable and safe with him? She tried to squeeze the foolishness away.

“We’ll figure this out,” he said. “I promise.”

Before this morning, Tia hadn’t known they had something to figure out, or that she and Nathan constituted a “they.” Now, suddenly, they were parents together.

“Juliette wants to go with me to see her.”

Tia took calming breaths. She traced the swirl of white marbleizing the black counter. “We’re the ones who should see her. We should be the ones to judge how she’s doing.”

Nathan took her hand. “Perhaps you’re right.”

Nathan’s sincerity couldn’t be trusted.

“Yes. Perhaps you’re right,” he repeated. “I’ll be in touch.”

CHAPTER 23

Tia

Tia crackled with energy when she returned home from Quincy. Even before entering her apartment, she began cleaning, clearing the umbrellas, shoes, and junk mail cluttering the table and shelves in the hall. Orphaned gloves, cloth supermarket bags, and a chewed-up ice scraper were immediately consigned to a throwaway pile.

She supposed the scraper was a ghost of a tenant past, some lost item she forgot to throw out when she moved in. Perhaps she’d been hopeful then and had thought that she’d soon buy a car.

After grabbing trash bags and the vacuum, Tia returned to the hall. She shoved everything into the bags without looking, ran the Hoover quickly over the worn oriental runner, and then brought the bulging bags to the garbage cans outside.

Mess, she’d made a humiliating mess. Despite having nothing but time since being fired, she’d barely spent a moment with a broom or dust cloth. Before, she’d straighten up each morning before leaving for work. She’d deep cleaned each weekend, even if only for herself. “There’s no excuse for dirty,” her mother said every time she’d put a dust cloth in Tia’s hands. These words first surfaced when they’d lived in the projects. Tia’s mother had nothing but contempt for those who chose beer over Pine-Sol.

Tia could hear exactly what her mother would say if she saw her daughter’s apartment at the moment.

“No excuse, Tia. There’s no excuse for living like this.”

And why was she coming to Jesus now? She tried to pretend the rush of energy racing through her wasn’t inspired by thoughts of Nathan visiting.