The Lies About Truth (15 page)

Max didn’t respond to calls, texts, or emails.

The next morning, he wasn’t in the hammock with a book and he didn’t come to his window when I pecked on the glass.

I made a blanket fort in my bedroom, reread
Peter and the Starcatcher
, and prayed my phone would buzz. He’d said he’d call.

He didn’t.

He’d felt closer when he was in El Salvador.

There was still no word from Max the next day as Mom and I cleared away the breakfast dishes. I’d tried everything I could, short of banging on his door and demanding that Sonia tell me where he was. Silence was the price of keeping secrets.

Mine piled up like dirty laundry.

At Mom’s insistence, our little family planted ourselves like spokes on a wheel around the kitchen table. This talk smelled of pancake syrup and Clorox.

I groaned as Mom slid another envelope across the table and into my hands.

“Open it,” she instructed.

“Here?”

Her eyes nearly bugged out of her head.

I prayed as I tore the end of the envelope and took out the
paper.
Please don’t be about sex. Please don’t be about sex
. I had a feeling God wasn’t listening to that request. Not that God is smug, but I pictured Him sitting back on a beautiful golden throne, steepling his fingers, and saying, “Sorry, Sister Sadie, you got yourself into this one.”

Dad leaned toward me, prepared to read over my shoulder.

“Stop stalling,” Mom said.

Our kitchen was her courtroom.

I unfolded the letter and read aloud:

The five of us broke into the community center tonight because Trent decided we needed a dance-off. I came in dead last, Max won, and I laughed until I cried. I’m really lucky to have my friends.

There was no sweet
From a friend
closing. Since I’d narrowed the culprit to Gray or Max, that made sense. Neither of them was talking to me.

“What does that mean?” Dad asked. He checked with Mom instead of me.

Just then my parents seemed young and unsure. Maybe no one put this type of crap in the parenting magazines and books they scoured. Or maybe, thirty-eight equaled wise on most things, but not wise on all things.

I lifted my shoulders in a half shrug. “No idea, Dad. I’ve been getting these things since the beginning of June.”

My shrug was worth a wooden nickel to my mother. “You know more than you’re saying.”

“Mom, I
don’t
know.” I wasn’t about to accuse Gray or Max in front of them.

“You don’t have a clue who wrote that?” Dad asked.

I bit my bottom lip and proceeded cautiously. “Well, yeah. They’re my words, but I sure as heck didn’t send this to myself.”

“You wrote that?” Mom repeated the words as a question, even though she already knew the answer.

“It’s one of the things I put in Big.” I explained that every envelope contained something I’d previously written and stuffed in Big, and I had no idea how anyone had access, much less why they were sending me these things.

Also, that I wasn’t worried.

Right. That last part was a whale of a lie, but after the weekend, I needed to de-escalate Mom and Dad’s anxieties.

“I don’t even know what to say,” Mom said, eyeing the paper as if it were a snake.

“Me either,” I said.

Dad examined the envelope and found exactly what I had. Nothing.

“You broke into the community center,” he stated again, massaging his forehead.

I tempered my reply. “Well, sort of. Someone left the alley window wide open, and we crawled through. Just . . . you know, for fun. We didn’t hurt anything.”

“Sadie.” Dad’s voice came with a warning.

“Dad, Trent volunteered there all the time,” I said, hoping to calm him down.

Mom was on the same wavelength. “Tony.” She patted the air, a warning to both of us.

He chewed his thumbnail and searched for a response. Mom put her head on the table as if the whole thing were too much to handle. They were in a delicate catch-22. Battling me on the content of the note might push me into an emotional hole, which they didn’t want to do. Not battling me meant I might engage in stupid behavior again, which they didn’t want me to do.

“It was a long time ago,” I said.

“And these other envelopes you’ve gotten, do they have other such . . . frivolity?” Dad asked.

“Tony,” Mom said again.

Frivolity? I exhaled at his use of vocabulary, but his eyes sliced into me.

“Yes, Dad. I believe before Pirates and Paintball you referred to it as spunk.”

“I’m all for spunk, but not so much for the
criminal behavior
,” he said.

It was Mom’s turn to roll her eyes. “Tony, you’re the one who used to steal street signs at her age.”

I put my head down so I wouldn’t laugh at Mom busting his chops. Dad stood up, wagged his finger at Mom, and said, “This one is all yours.”

In the end, Mom folded the envelope, put it in her pocket,
and announced we were going to be late for therapy. “Talk to Dr. Glasson about all this,” she said.

Family meeting over and done . . . with slightly more syrup than Clorox.

Ten minutes later, Mom pulled up to the curb at Fletcher’s office and said, “Text when you’re finished.”

There was no need to text; she never left the parking lot. She was like one of those Little League parents who stayed for practice.

Dr. Fletcher Glasson kept an office in the basement of a large law firm. Right after my first surgery, Dad found Fletcher through my plastic surgeon. He said Dr. Glasson specialized in visual life transitions, and I might benefit from a few sessions.

Benefit was an understatement.

Fletcher was infected with genuine happiness—the kind that couldn’t be faked. Which wasn’t all that strange except the man had zero reasons for smiles.

He listened to a shit-storm of stories from people like me for a living.

He’d been severely burned in a fire.

Every session gave me hope that maybe someday I’d come out on the other side of my own shit-storm with a smile too.

I clung to that hope. Mondays clearly weren’t a busy day at the office. I sat alone with a
People
magazine from a year ago and a
Reader’s Digest
from the nineties—both of which I’d already scoured—while the receptionist scrolled through Facebook. Fletcher came around the corner in a matter of moments, smoothing his shirt and stroking his bald head. “Sadie girl,” he said, eyes lit with anticipation. “You ready to chat?”

I dropped the magazines and followed.

Seeing the couch opened the portal. His cozy office was as good as an altar and better than a confessional. Fletcher didn’t wear a robe or a cross around his neck. In fact, most of the time, he wore faded jeans, deeply colored polo shirts, and a pair of broken-in boots. I had a crush on the boots. And in a very non-crushy way, for the middle-aged man who wore them. Poor bastard, I didn’t envy him; his clients walked in and spilled their guts. And Fletcher’s job, like a school janitor’s, was to spread that sawdust-like absorbent over the guts and sweep them into a pan. Unlike the janitor, Fletcher examined the guts.

One of Fletcher’s contagious smiles burned into my eyes as he swiveled his chair away from the desk and faced me. “Sit.”
He indicated the couch, as he always did. “Tell me about life.”

This was our MO.

I sat. He observed. I talked. He listened.

Then, he questioned me. Gently. Like a nurse who distracts you with stories and lollipops while she gives you a shot in the ass.

I began. “Life’s been . . .”

Guts spilled out.

Fletcher spread the vomit-sawdust-stuff over everything between my last visit and now. Gray and Gina’s lie. Trent and Callahan. The paintball game. The anniversary. Mom catching me with Sharpies. My fear that Max was the one behind Big’s messages. My fear that I was losing Max altogether, messages or not. The incredible shrinking list of impossible things.

When I finally stopped talking, Fletcher leaned forward and rested his hands on his knees. “Well, wasn’t that just an emotional enema? I’ll bet you feel better already.”

“Gross.”

He laughed, but it was a serious sort of laugh. “You told me what happened, but not how you feel. You know the rules, Sadie. Go deeper.”

I knew the rules because I always tried to break them.

“I’m feeling . . . worried.”

“And?”

“Scared.”

“And?”

The man was good with his
and
s.

“I don’t want to lose Max.”

Fletcher passed me the box of tissues he kept on the edge of his desk. I set them down without taking one.

“He feels unreachable,” I said. “I screwed up, Fletcher, and . . .”

Worry burrowed under my skin. It had taken me a year to even think about forgiving Gina and Gray; how long would it take Max to forgive me?

I punched the pillow on the couch. “I. Hate. Screwing. Up. I
hate
hurting them. All I wanted to do was put this thing in the past, and now . . . it’s messier than ever.”

Fletcher examined these guts and forced me to do the same through a series of questions. Always with a smile. Always with compassion. Then, he made a suggestion.

“Sadie, this might be unorthodox, but here’s an idea for some common ground. You talked to Gina about the Fountain trip. Why not talk to all of them?”

“You mean ask them to go?”

“Well, it might knock out more than one thing on that list of yours,” he said.

“Fletcher, Max isn’t answering his phone, and Gray’s not going to ride to St. Augustine with me after the paintball fiasco.” I shot the guy in the chest at close range.

“You sure about that?”

“Pretty damn.”

“Maybe so, but”—Fletcher drummed his fingers on the desk and pushed another button—“if nothing changes, nothing changes. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to keep getting what you’re getting. You want change, make some.”

He made change sound like a Nike slogan.
Just do it.

It wasn’t that easy.

“You seriously want me to ask all three of them to go to the Fountain of Youth?” I asked.

“I
seriously want
you to take a gigantic leap forward. And honestly, when you talk about everything that’s happened with your friends over the past week, do you know what I hear?”

“What?”

“Relief.” Fletcher whispered the word until it shouted at me. “It’s tiny and small, but it’s there in your voice for the first time in nearly a year. And you know what, that relief will grow even more when you stop hiding from which
friend
sent the envelopes. Talk to them.”

“Who?”

“All of them,” he said. “You’re strong enough to ask.”

Fletcher stared hard at the tissue box, and I surrendered and took one.

“Strength. What a joke. That’s what really gets me about this Big thing.” I paused to dab my eyes. “This is
someone else
who thinks I’m so frickin’ precious that I can’t handle the
truth. Anonymous letters? Gina and Gray and the Jeep? Dammit, just tell me.”

“You say that, but you didn’t tell them about Trent. And you don’t want to confront Max about Big.”

The shovel hit the root.

I tugged the couch pillow into my lap and squeezed it against my chest. “What if I ask, and Max never forgives me? Or, what if I ask, and I never forgive him?”

“Sadie, forgiveness isn’t always returning to the old thing. Sometimes forgiveness is making an entirely new thing.” Fletcher’s watch buzzed that our time was up. “Think about that this week.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that on my road trip to St. Augustine,” I joked.

“You laugh, but it just might happen.”

“Yeah, and I might be Miss America.”

“You
might
. Lots of cool people have scars.”

“Like you,” I said, trying to pay him a compliment.

“Like Seal, and Tina Fey, and . . . Jesus.”

“That sounds like a really good episode of
Saturday Night Live
.”

“I’d watch it.” He smiled as I walked to the door. “Last thing before you go.” He closed out every session with the same advice. It was his personal mantra, and I loved hearing it. “Scars tell a story, but this week, you decide what that story’s going to be.”

I hugged the door frame and leaned back into the office. “Hey, Fletcher?”

He stopped fiddling with my folder, where he scratched notes from our session. “Yes, ma’am.”

“I want my story to be good.”

Dr. Fletcher Glasson smiled a smile worthy of an art exhibit at the Met. “It already is.”

Therapy days were good and bad.

Every time I left Fletcher’s I felt like a freshly plowed field. The blades of his words turned soil in my mind, and the process exhausted me. Mom knew. She turned on some folk music and told me to rest. I fell asleep on the five-minute drive.

At home, I showered, stomached a few spoonfuls of peanut butter, and tumbled into bed as if I’d run a marathon rather than spent fifty minutes talking about my life.

Mom and Dad took my naptime by force. The two of them crawled into my king bed in their afternoon sweats. I should have anticipated this. I’d heard Dad call his boss this morning and ask for a personal day. Mom must have canceled all her appointments. They clearly weren’t taking any chances I’d emotionally crash after therapy or that I’d located some more Sharpies.

“Seriously?” I said through a curtain of damp hair. “I just got here.”

“Scoot over, Sade. You gave us a save-the-date for a movie.”

“Don’t you two have something better to do?” I teased Dad. “Netflix? Street-sign theft? Or, you know, work?”

“Nope,” Mom said. “You want to call Max? We’ll move to the living room and make it a party.”

I glanced at my phone, which had zero texts or missed calls, and said, “He’s doing his own thing today.”

Mom parted my hair. “You want me to brush your hair while we watch?”

This offer was a ticket to my soul.

I laid my head on her lap. “What movie did you pick?” Her fingers needled through my hair, and I practically purred.

“Your choice,” Dad said. “We’ve got
Jurassic Park
,
The Breakfast Club
, and
The Empire Strikes Back
.”

“Those are all old. I thought we were going to watch something funny.”

“Old, schmold, and I beg to differ with your opinions on humor.” Dad popped me on the head with the DVD case. “If you make it through any one of them without smiling, I’ll grill shrimp for supper.”

“Deal.
Jurassic Park
.” I snuggled deeper into the bed and Mom’s leg. Dad grilled the best shrimp in the world. This was easy eating.

They started the movie. I fell asleep before the first casualty.

My dreams were made of dinosaur-people. A T. rex the
color of Big sat in the middle of the island, granting life-saving advice through a hole in his claw. He told me I had to drive a car in a tank top or be eaten alive. I ripped the sleeves off my shirt, but when I combed the island for a vehicle, my safari Jeep was a Barbie car with a battery problem. I woke up as the T. rex teeth came at my head.

I noticed the TV was off, Dad was sound asleep, and Mom still fiddled with my hair even though her eyes were closed.

“Bad dream?” she asked as I stirred.

Sleepy me had no filter. I told her all about it.

Her thigh muscles tightened beneath me as she stretched. Her fingers stopped while she yawned.

“Tomorrow, I say, you’re going to wear a T-shirt and drive a car.”

I lifted my head off her leg.
“Mo-om.”

She just smiled. Our features were similar—full upper lips, wavy blond hair with identical widow’s peaks that pointed to crooked button noses, and blue eyes that were occasionally gray. She was beautiful. The way I might have been with some age, had my face not gone through a window.

“Tomorrow. I really believe tomorrow is the day,” she said.

“And if I don’t?”

“It’s not a threat, baby doll. It’s a hope.”

I relaxed again and she said, “Did you know I’ve been to El Salvador?”

I didn’t. Not once in the entire time the McCalls were gone had she mentioned a visit to Central America. Considering her
idea of roughing it was the Hilton, I was shocked she’d even gotten on the plane. If the rest of El Salvador looked like Max’s video of the nunnery, my mother had been miserable.

Mom registered my disbelief. “Sonia talked me into it.” Huge eye-roll. “It was . . . awful.”

We both giggled, but not loud enough to wake Dad. “I mean . . . awful,” she continued. “Hot as Hades. I hated the food. Black beans for breakfast. Watered-down beer. It took me thirty minutes to decide I hated it and one day to decide I wanted to go home.”

“What’d you do?”

“What do you mean?” she said playfully. “I called my parents, and they changed my plane ticket to the next day.”

“For real?”

“Baby, why would I stay somewhere I hated?”

It was such a simple, true statement. I heard it about my life.

If nothing changes, nothing changes.

“You hear me?” she asked.

“Loud and clear.”

Mom zippered the conversation closed. “Hey, wake up that bear beside you, and tell him to make us some shrimp.”

“But I fell asleep.”

“Oh, honey, he was always going to make you shrimp.”

After the world’s best shrimp, I went for a long run. Eight o’clock. In shorts. Sand kicked up behind me as I rushed mile one and then mile two. Twilight painted the sky purple and
orange and gorgeous. I sweated through the layers of my clothes, wishing the last of the sun would fall below the curve, and also that it would stay sunset forever.

I longed to pick a point in the future and transport myself there without having to live all the hard moments in between. I wanted to call my parents and ask them to switch my ticket to a different life.

There wasn’t a different ticket, but there were choices. I thought about my conversations with Mom and Fletcher. They, whoever
they
are, say it takes seven times to hear something before it sinks in. For me, it took about seventy billion.

I was finally listening.

I hated this shitty spot with my friends. And why would I stay somewhere I hated?

I wouldn’t. Not anymore.

First things first, I sat down in the sand, and rather than write a list, I emailed Max from my phone.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: June 26

Subject: I’m SO

Sorry.

I’m sitting out here on the beach thinking about everything that’s happened. I’ll give you one guess which of these things matters to me most.

A) Trent being gay

B) Gray driving the Jeep

C) Something being off between us

Pick C. I pick C.

Max, I should have told you about Trent a long time ago.

Above me is a sky full of stars. In front of me is an ocean full of waves. Beneath me are a million grains of sand that used to be rock. That ocean I love so much beat rocks into sand. I’m afraid that’s what I’ve done to you. Can you ever forgive me?

I love you, Maxwell Lincoln McCall.

Sadie

He fired an email back almost instantly.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: June 26

Subject: It took

Millions of years for that ocean to beat rocks into sand.

We’re not that broken.

I love you too, Sadie (May) Elizabeth Kingston.

Max

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: June 26

Subject: Will you

come over tonight?

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: June 26

Subject: Of

course.

At eleven that night, Max tapped on my window.

“You’re wearing my T-shirt?” he said as he crawled inside.

Tennessee blazed at him, but I willed myself to keep my thoughts elsewhere. Which wasn’t hard. Max was shirtless and in a pair of athletic shorts.

“I’m glad you came,” I whispered.

“I’m glad you asked.”

My eyes drifted to my phone. “Where’ve you been?”

He faced me. “With Callahan.”

Max sat down on the edge of my bed. “Wanna play a game?” he asked, without a hint of play in his voice.

“Something you’ve never told me?”

He nodded and handed me a creased and grainy photo of a
chalk drawing. The work, if you could call it that, was clearly mine. Before they dismissed me from the hospital, one of the nurses gave me a bucket of sidewalk chalk and told me to use it all before my follow-up appointment. She told me to draw and then hose, draw and then hose—she repeated that more than twice—that the water would wash away more than chalk. She also mentioned, more than twice, that I should trust her.

“I’ve been giving away chalk buckets for longer than they’ve made chalk buckets,” she’d claimed.

That first week, I had slipped out our back door after midnight and drawn dozens of elementary school–level drawings—emotional outbursts—on our back patio by moon- and streetlight.

“How did you get this?” I asked.

Max didn’t answer, and I examined the photo again.

In the middle, there was a crudely drawn caricature of me, lying on my side, a brown-and-gray cape covering me. I’d written
Superhero down
in green chalk. There was a string tied around my pinkie toe that stretched toward a huge peach-colored hand.

Below the hand was another line.
Don’t let me go.

“I love this drawing,” Max said, taking it from me and holding it like a talisman. “I snapped a picture before you hosed it off.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I was in the hammock when you drew it. You kept repeating a phrase. Do you remember what it was?” he asked.

I didn’t remember, but I knew.

“‘Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.’”

“That’s right,” he said. “When you were drawing that, you had steel in your eyes. You had . . . mettle.”

“I didn’t have a clue.”

“You did to me.”

“I don’t even remember this moment,” I admitted.

“You don’t have to, because I do. That’s when I knew you had pain that looked like mine. We were in that car together. We lost Trent together. I didn’t have to go through the rest of life alone.”

“You’ve always seemed like you were okay. Sad, but okay.”

“Sadie, I was a thousand miles away. You can’t say everything in an email.” Max folded his body in half, practically burying his forehead in his knees as he spoke. “There are things I never told you, too. Like . . . I woke up one day in El Salvador, and I couldn’t breathe.”

He exhaled so hard that it felt as if it bounced off all the walls. “I just lost myself. I took off running, and I ran until I collapsed. I couldn’t get back up. My dad found me lying in a street. He carried me back to the compound in his arms.”

We were months past this pain in his life, and it sounded as if it had occurred today.

“You could have told me,” I whispered.

“I wanted what I gave you to be the good stuff. That’s why I disappeared this weekend. Stupid. I was angry and hurt and . . .” He stood up and looked at me and then focused again
on the photo. “I forgot how strong you were. I’ve been forgetting for a while. The picture reminded me.”

I wanted to ask about Big. If that’s what he meant when he said he’d been forgetting for a while, but I didn’t want to ruin this moment.

I chose to say, “You can just be you.”

His voice was on the brink and he went back to minimal answers.

“I know.”

“How was Callahan?” I asked.

“Happy I knew.” Max’s eyes misted over. “He loved my brother.”

“We all did,” I said.

Max pointed to the blanket fort I’d made in the corner of the room, put a finger to his lips, and said, “Let’s not talk about Trent right now.”

I followed him to the floor and through the entrance.

“You want me to read to you?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“You want me to tell you something?”

“Nope,” he said. “I want you to tell me everything . . . tomorrow.”

I imagined him grinning. I imagined me grinning. I didn’t have to imagine us happy, because we already were.