We Were Liars (12 page)

Still, Granddad’s face is glowing as he talks about me, and at least today he knows I am not Mirren.

“She looks like you,” says Thatcher.

“Doesn’t she? Except she’s good-looking.”

“Thank you,” I say. “But if you want the full resemblance I have to tuft up my hair.”

This makes Granddad smile. “It’s from the boat,” he says to Thatcher. “Didn’t bring a hat.”

“It’s always tufty,” I tell Thatcher.

“I know,” he says.

The men shake hands and Granddad hooks his arm through mine as we leave the gallery. “He’s taken good care of you,” he tells me.

“Mr. Thatcher?”

He nods. “But don’t tell your mother. She’ll stir up trouble again.”

ON THE WAY
home, a memory comes.

Summer fifteen, a morning in early July. Granddad was making espresso in the Clairmont kitchen. I was eating jam and baguette toast at the table. It was just the two of us.

“I love that goose,” I said, pointing. A cream goose statue sat on the sideboard.

“It’s been there since you, Johnny, and Mirren were three,” said Granddad. “That’s the year Tipper and I took that trip to China.” He chuckled. “She bought a lot of art there. We had a guide, an art specialist.” He came over to the toaster and popped the piece of bread I had in there for myself.

“Hey!” I objected.

“Shush, I’m the granddad. I can take the toast when I want to.” He sat down with his espresso and spread butter on the baguette. “This art specialist girl took us to antiques shops and helped us navigate the auction houses,” he said. “She spoke four languages. You wouldn’t think to look at her. Little slip of a China girl.”

“Don’t say
China girl
. Hello?”

He ignored me. “Tipper bought jewelry and had the idea of buying animal sculptures for the houses here.”

“Does that include the toad in Cuddledown?”

“Sure, the ivory toad,” said Granddad. “And we bought two elephants, I know.”

“Those are in Windemere.”

“And monkeys in Red Gate. There were four monkeys.”

“Isn’t ivory illegal?” I asked.

“Oh, some places. But you can get it. Your gran loved ivory. She traveled to China when she was a child.”

“Is it elephant tusks?”

“That or rhino.”

There he was, Granddad. His white hair still thick, the lines on his face deep from all those days on the sailboat. His heavy jaw like an old film star.

You can get it, he said, about the ivory.

One of his mottos: Don’t take no for an answer.

It had always seemed a heroic way to live. He would say it when advising us to pursue our ambitions. When encouraging Johnny to try training for a marathon, or when I failed to win the reading prize in seventh grade. It was something he said when talking about his business strategies, and how he got Gran to marry him. “I asked her four times before she said yes,” he’d always say, retelling one of his favorite Sinclair family legends. “I wore her down. She said yes to shut me up.”

Now, at the breakfast table, watching him eat my toast, “Don’t take no for an answer” seemed like the attitude of a privileged guy who didn’t care who got hurt, so long as his wife had the cute statues she wanted to display in her summer-houses.

I walked over and picked up the goose. “People shouldn’t
buy ivory,” I said. “It’s illegal for a reason. Gat was reading the other day about—”

“Don’t tell me what that boy is reading,” snapped Granddad. “I’m informed. I get all the papers.”

“Sorry. But he’s made me think about—”

“Cadence.”

“You could put the statues up for auction and then donate the money to wildlife conservation.”

“Then I wouldn’t have the statues. They were very dear to Tipper.”

“But—”

Granddad barked, “Do not tell me what to do with my money, Cady. That money is not yours.”

“Okay.”

“You are not to tell me how to dispose of what is mine, is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“Not ever.”

“Yes, Granddad.”

I had the urge to snatch the goose and fling it across the room.

Would it break when it hit the fireplace? Would it shatter?

I balled my hands into fists.

It was the first time we’d talked about Granny Tipper since her death.

GRANDDAD DOCKS THE
boat and ties it up.

“Do you still miss Gran?” I ask him as we head toward New Clairmont. “Because I miss her. We never talk about her.”

“A part of me died,” he says. “And it was the best part.”

“You think so?” I ask.

“That is all there is to say about it,” says Granddad.

I FIND THE
Liars in the Cuddledown yard. The grass is littered with tennis racquets and drink bottles, food wrappers and beach towels. The three of them lie on cotton blankets, wearing sunglasses and eating potato chips.

“Feeling better?” asks Mirren.

I nod.

“We missed you.”

They have baby oil spread on their bodies. Two bottles of it lie on the grass. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll get burned?” I ask.

“I don’t believe in sunblock anymore,” says Johnny.

“He’s decided the scientists are corrupt and the whole sunblock industry is a moneymaking fraud,” says Mirren.

“Have you ever seen sun poisoning?” I ask. “The skin literally bubbles.”

“It’s a dumb idea,” says Mirren. “We’re just bored out of our minds, that’s all.” But she slathers baby oil on her arms as she’s speaking.

I lie down next to Johnny.

I open a bag of barbeque potato chips.

I stare at Gat’s chest.

Mirren reads aloud a bit of a book about Jane Goodall.

We listen to some music off my iPhone, the speaker tinny.

“Why don’t you believe in sunblock again?” I ask Johnny.

“It’s a conspiracy,” he says. “To sell a lot of lotion that nobody needs.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I won’t burn,” he says. “You’ll see.”

“But why are you putting on baby oil?”

“Oh, that’s not part of the experiment,” Johnny says. “I just like to be as greasy as possible at all times.”

GAT CATCHES ME
in the kitchen, looking for food. There isn’t much. “Last time I saw you was again suboptimal,” he says. “In the hallway a couple nights ago.”

“Yeah.” My hands are shaking.

“Sorry.”

“All right.”

“Can we start over?”

“We can’t start over every day, Gat.”

“Why not?” He jumps to sit on the counter. “Maybe this is a summer of second chances.”

“Second, sure. But after that it gets ridiculous.”

“So just be normal,” he says, “at least for today. Let’s pretend I’m not a mess, let’s pretend you’re not angry. Let’s act like we’re friends and forget what happened.”

I don’t want to pretend.

I don’t want to be friends.

I don’t want to forget. I am trying to remember.

“Just for a day or two, until things start to seem all right again,” says Gat, seeing my hesitation. “We’ll just hang out until it all stops being such a big deal.”

I want to know everything, understand everything; I want to hold Gat close and run my hands over him and never let him go. But perhaps this is the only way we can start.

Be normal, now. Right now
.

Because you are. Because you can be
.

“I’ve learned how to do that,” I say.

I hand him the bag of fudge Granddad and I bought in Edgartown, and the way his face lights up at the chocolate tugs at my heart.

NEXT DAY MIRREN
and I take the small motorboat to Edgartown without permission.

The boys don’t want to come. They are going kayaking.

I drive and Mirren trails her hand in the wake.

Mirren isn’t wearing much: a daisy-print bikini top and a denim miniskirt. She walks down the cobblestone sidewalks of Edgartown talking about Drake Loggerhead and how it feels to have “sexual intercourse” with him. That’s what she calls it every time; her answer about how it feels has to do with the scent of beach roses mixed with roller coasters and fireworks.

She also talks about what clothes she wants to buy for freshman year at Pomona and movies she wants to see and projects she wants to do this summer, like find a place on the Vineyard to ride horses and start making ice cream again. Honestly, she doesn’t stop chattering for half an hour.

I wish I had her life. A boyfriend, plans, college in California.
Mirren is going off into her sunshine future, whereas I am going back to Dickinson Academy to another year of snow and suffocation.

I buy a small bag of fudge at Murdick’s, even though there’s some left from yesterday. We sit on a shady bench, Mirren still talking.

Another memory comes.

SUMMER FIFTEEN, MIRREN
sat next to Taft and Will on the steps of our favorite Edgartown clam shack. The boys had plastic rainbow pinwheels. Taft’s face was smeared with fudge he’d eaten earlier. We were waiting for Bess, because she had Mirren’s shoes. We couldn’t go indoors without them.

Mirren’s feet were dirty and her toenails painted blue.

We had been waiting a while when Gat came out of the shop down the block. He had a stack of books under his arm. He ran toward us at top speed, as if in a ridiculous hurry to catch us, even though we were sitting still.

Then he stopped short. The book on top was
Being and Nothingness
by Sartre. He still had the words written on the backs of his hands. A recommendation from Granddad.

Gat bowed, foolishly, clownishly, and presented me with the book at the bottom of the pile: it was a novel by Jaclyn Moriarty. I’d been reading her all summer.

I opened the book to the title page. It was inscribed.
For Cady with everything, everything. Gat
.

“I REMEMBER WAITING
for your shoes so we could go into the clam shack,” I tell Mirren. She has stopped talking now and
looks at me expectantly. “Pinwheels,” I say. “Gat giving me a book.”

“So your memories are coming back,” Mirren says. “That’s great!”

“The aunties fought about the estate.”

She shrugs. “A bit.”

“And Granddad and I, we had this argument about his ivory statues.”

“Yeah. We talked about it at the time.”

“Tell me something.”

“What?”

“Why did Gat disappear after my accident?”

Mirren twists a strand of her hair. “I don’t know.”

“Did he go back with Raquel?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did we fight? Did I do something wrong?”

“I don’t
know
, Cady.”

“He got upset at me a few nights back. About not knowing the names of the staff. About not having seen his apartment in New York.”

There is a silence. “He has good reasons to be mad,” says Mirren finally.

“What did I do?”

Mirren sighs. “You can’t fix it.”

“Why not?

Suddenly Mirren starts choking. Gagging, like she might vomit. Bending over at the waist, her skin damp and pale.

“You okay?”

“No.”

“Can I help?”

She doesn’t answer.

I offer her a bottle of water. She takes it. Drinks slowly. “I did too much. I need to get back to Cuddledown. Now.”

Her eyes are glassy. I hold out my hand. Her skin feels wet and she seems unsteady on her feet. We walk in silence to the harbor where the small motorboat is docked.

MUMMY NEVER NOTICED
the motorboat was missing, but she sees the bag of fudge when I give it to Taft and Will.

On and on, natter natter. Her lecture isn’t interesting.

I may not leave the island without permission from her.

I may not leave the island without adult supervision.

I may not operate a motor vehicle on medication.

I can’t be as stupid as I’m acting, can I?

I say the “Sorry” my mother wants to hear. Then I run down to Windemere and write everything I remembered—the clam shack, the pinwheel, Mirren’s dirty feet on the wooden steps, the book Gat gave me—on the graph paper above my bed.

START OF MY
second week on Beechwood, we discover the roof of Cuddledown. It’s easy to climb up there; we just never did it before because it involves going through Aunt Bess’s bedroom window.

The roof is cold as hell in the nighttime, but in the day there’s a great view of the island and the sea beyond it. I can see over the trees that cluster around Cuddledown to New Clairmont
and its garden. I can even see into the house, which has floor-to-ceiling windows in many of the ground-floor rooms. You can see a bit of Red Gate, too, and the other direction, across to Windemere, then out to the bay.

That first afternoon we spread out food on an old picnic blanket. We eat Portuguese sweet bread and runny cheeses in small wooden boxes. Berries in green cardboard. Cold bottles of fizzy lemonade.

We resolve to come here every day. All summer. This roof is the best place in the world.

“If I die,” I say as we look at the view, “I mean,
when
I die, throw my ashes in the water of the tiny beach. Then when you miss me, you can climb up here, look down, and think how awesome I was.”

“Or we could go down and swim in you,” says Johnny. “If we missed you really badly.”

“Ew.”

“You’re the one who wanted to be in the water of the tiny beach.”

“I just meant, I love it here. It’d be a grand place to have my ashes.”

“Yeah,” says Johnny. “It would be.”

Mirren and Gat have been silent, eating chocolate-covered hazelnuts out of a blue ceramic bowl. “This is a bad conversation,” Mirren says.

“It’s okay,” says Johnny.

“I don’t want my ashes here,” says Gat.

“Why not?” I say. “We could all be together in the tiny beach.”

“And the littles will swim in us!” yells Johnny.

“You’re grossing me out,” snaps Mirren.

“It’s not actually that different from all the times I’ve peed in there,” says Johnny.

“Gack.”

“Oh, come on, everyone pees in there.”

“I don’t,” says Mirren.

“Yes, you do,” he says. “If the tiny beach water isn’t made of pee now, after all these years of us peeing in it, a few ashes aren’t going to ruin it.”