Perfect Lies (12 page)

I have something to tell you, Meggie…. Ethan’s dead.

Meg called Abe as soon as she hung up with Lark, but his answering machine informed her that he could be reached upstate that weekend. The radio was delivering severe thunderstorm warnings with gale-force winds throughout the afternoon and into the evening. The air had turned sultry, the sky a dull, ominous green. On the way to pick up her car at the garage on Eighty-eighth Street the wind whipped grit into her eyes, and leaves swirled around her ankles.

The thunderstorm broke again just north of the city and then howled around Meg with a hungry fury almost the entire way up to Red River. Her hands were slick with sweat, her body hunched forward over the wheel straining to see ahead through the sheets of rain and wind. The roads were flooding under the downpour; water slopped against the tires and splashed onto the windshield every time another car passed. She drove as slowly as she dared. She tried to keep her thoughts focused on Ethan and the hell he had created over the past weeks, even as the meaning and extent of the calamity that had overtaken them all washed over her in an enormous wave. Feverish, she felt chilled to the bone and flushed at the same time.

Meg found herself at one point trying to pray, the words swimming unbidden into her consciousness:
Our father who art in heaven.
A few miles later, she heard herself crying “No, oh, please, God, no.” Tears streamed unchecked down her cheeks. She was aware of a pain in her chest that wouldn’t cease, as though some heavy object were pressing on her diaphragm and interfering with her breathing. It took her a while to realize that there wasn’t anything physically wrong with her. Simply put, she was feeling guilt. She’d been weak. She’d been afraid to tell Lark about Ethan’s problems. In her attempt to protect her younger sister and let her think that all was right with the world, she’d allowed the very life she hoped to shelter to become disorganized, chaotic.

She had long disliked Ethan’s controlling, egotistical tendencies, and yet, looking back over the past long weeks, she realized how closely her own behavior had resembled his. Where had her loyalties been? Her trust? Her respect for her younger sister? From the beginning of Ethan’s onslaught, Meg had simply decided that Lark didn’t have to know the facts—even worse, perhaps, couldn’t handle them. Instead, she’d allowed Ethan to set the pace and control the situation, while they both left the woman who stood most to lose by their actions totally in the dark. Ethan never should have lied to Lark, this was true. On the other hand, Meg should never have allowed him to do so.

How much, even now, did Lark know about the man she’d married? Had Ethan finally told his wife about his feelings for Meg? Had he discussed the emotional whirlwind that had been driving him to extreme behavior over the past few weeks? It was this force, this madness that Ethan had unleashed, that had swept Meg up in its ugly path, and that Meg now believed had pushed Lucinda into an act of blind fury.

Lucinda. Angry, frightened, needy. Lucinda, who saw Meg as a friend and perhaps something of a mentor. Almost from the moment Meg had met Lucinda over a year ago, they’d shared a special rapport. Meg had sensed that the teenager, who frequently complained about having to live out in the sticks, admired Meg’s stylish Manhattan wardrobe, her expensive haircut, the overall gloss of city life. After slowly circling Meg for a few weekends, Lucinda had begun to draw closer.

“Cool car,” Lucinda had said last summer when Meg drove up in her newly leased Acura. She’d chosen it primarily for its reputation as a safe, well-built car, and she’d been able to write off half its monthly cost as a company expense.

“Hop in,” Meg had invited her. “I’ve got thirty-six thousand miles to spend.” Lucinda had opened up to her for the first time that afternoon, though Meg still wasn’t sure why. Perhaps Lucinda thought that Meg’s more sophisticated lifestyle would make her a more forgiving listener. Or, more likely, the lonely teenager desperately needed an older woman in whom to confide.

“So, do you have a man friend or anything in the city?” Lucinda had asked after complaining about the idiot geeks who passed for boys in the Red River area. Glancing at the overweight teenager, Meg suspected that Lucinda’s difficulty in finding a boyfriend might not be entirely the fault of the male population. Her badly cut dyed hair and poor complexion would no doubt put her somewhere near the bottom of the social food chain.

“I’ve just broken up with someone,” Meg confided in return. This was a month or two before Paul Stokes appeared on her horizon, and she was in her own desperate state about men.

“I bet you get asked out a lot, though,” Lucinda replied.

“Oh, I keep busy. But, honestly, I haven’t had much luck in the love department.”

“Like, you’re probably too good for most of them,” Lucinda had replied, and Meg felt touched by the younger woman’s uncritical support.

“Not necessarily,” Meg had said, trying to be truthful and also hoping to give Lucinda some honest advice. “I really believe that a lot about love is a matter of luck. You know, being in the right place at the right time.”

“Yeah, but that’s the problem,” Lucinda said. “In Red River, like, I’m in the wrong fucking place all the time.”

That had been the first of many such conversations between Lucinda and Meg. Gradually, Meg began to notice Lucinda’s defenses come down and her honesty quotient shoot up.

“You know, it’s because I’m fat that no one likes me,” she told Meg earlier that past summer. “But I eat because it makes me feel good. Sometimes I can do a whole box of Oreo cookies in one sitting. ”

“And that takes—what?—about twenty minutes? That’s not a lot of time to feel good, as far as I’m concerned. But I think you’re right, Luce. Lose a little weight—you’re nice and tall—and the boys will come around.”

“I’m not saying that the boys don’t, like, come around, Meg,” Lucinda said slyly. “There’s other ways of attracting attention, if you know what I mean.”

Meg made a policy of not lecturing Lucinda directly; she knew the teenager wouldn’t listen if she tried. Instead, she tried to make her points by speaking in generalities. Lucinda was smart enough to draw her own conclusions.

“You know, I’ve always thought that no one’s going to like you if you make it clear that you don’t much like yourself. Giving it away for free is a mighty clear sign that you’re discounting the merchandise.”

Whether Lucinda ever acted on her advice, Meg didn’t know. She did keep tagging along behind her on weekends when she visited. Lark pointed out that, unlike other Saturdays nights, Lucinda always made a point of sticking around for dinner if Meg was there. Meg was well aware that Lucinda’s behavior when she wasn’t around was far from stellar: her drinking and delinquency at school were only worsening with time. But Meg knew that Lucinda trusted her, probably more than she did anyone else in Red River. Trusted and liked her. And by not stopping Ethan weeks before, by allowing his feelings to spiral so out of control, she had exposed Lucinda to something the girl never should have witnessed. Afterward, when Lucinda ran away, it was Meg she ultimately sought out. Looking for a haven. And it was Meg who had allowed Lucinda to open the door to the girl’s worst nightmare: Ethan.

Like an avenging angel, Lucinda had performed the act that Meg should have done weeks ago herself—she stopped Ethan from doing any further harm. Lucinda’s impulsive deed, however, had been fatal. Whether or not she intended to kill her stepfather, she had surely destroyed her own chances. And, right now, as far as Meg could tell, no one but Meg really knew why.

The rain began to ease by the time she turned off the highway. When she finally drove through Red River, Meg allowed herself a moment of wild disbelief. The town looked the same; it had all been a bad dream. Ethan would be waiting at the house—clomping across the front hall as he flung open the front door. Lark and the girls would be behind him, laughing and welcoming. Lucinda would be skulking somewhere close by, unable to suppress her welcoming smile. But the illusion lasted only as long as it took her to turn into the McGowan’s drive and see how many people had already come to console the bereaved family.

Meg recognized Francine’s Chevy pickup, parked at the top of the hill by the house behind Abe’s black Saab; a dozen or so other cars and trucks were pulled off along the driveway. Meg had to park near the studio, which, flanked now by police cruisers, was lit up against the slowly clearing sky. The rain had finally stopped, but Meg had to slog through mud to reach the front steps to the porch.

The house felt empty and cold—as if no one had bothered to turn the heat up that morning. Meg added her dripping boots to the jumble outside the front door, her parka to the pile of coats on the chair in the front hall. Generally, when Lark was entertaining, she cleared the downstairs coat closet for the guests. She liked to give the house at least a semblance of order, a center of gravity amidst the pandemonium created by the children. Meg had once seen Lark carefully align a pile of magazines on the coffee table when the entire living room looked like an uncharted sea of Barbies, Scrabble pieces, and abandoned homework assignments.

Meg followed the murmur of voices down the long hallway past the living room to the sun porch that ran the length of the house at the back and overlooked the river below. Though Ethan and Lark had wanted to keep the nineteenth-century farmhouse essentially true to its original function and design, they’d both felt that the downstairs rooms were dark and the low ceilings claustrophobic, especially during the long winter months. The sun porch had been Lark’s idea, but it had quickly turned into one of Ethan’s elaborate projects. The room was his design. It was two stories high and almost all windows; facing the river was a wall of diamond-shaped panes of the palest green cast that he had handmade in his studio. Many panes contained stained-glass murals of a flower, leaf, hummingbird, or frog. When the sun streamed through the bare trees as it did that afternoon, the room swirled with pinpoints of brilliant refracted color. Meg stopped at the door, her view slightly blocked by the broad shoulders of a man she didn’t know.

Lark, her face blotchy from crying, sat next to Francine on the low-slung red corduroy couch. Phoebe was nestled next to Lark and sucking noisily on her thumb. Brook was perched beside Phoebe, her back very straight; her red-rimmed eyes traveled from adult to adult with the conversation.

Janine rocked in the wicker rocker kitty-corner to the couch, sniffling into a wad of tissues. Abe stood next to a man Meg recognized as the town’s retired postmaster, nodding emphatically to something the older man was saying. Though Meg didn’t know all their names, she recognized most of the other dozen or so adults, neighbors and friends, whose casseroles, breads, and cookies cluttered the long French picnic table. An aluminum twenty-four-cup electric coffee urn—Meg thought she recognized it from Francine’s chicken roasts and bake sales—stood in the middle of the table. Hot paper cups and matching napkins printed with smiling teddy bears were stacked next to it.

“Well, as far as I’m concerned you went above and beyond,” Meg heard Paula Yoder say as she entered the room. Paula who, with her husband Mike, ran the general store, knew everybody’s business and possessed a wide-ranging and frequently enumerated inventory of opinions. Her dislike for Lucinda, who had twice been caught stealing cartons of Marlboros from the storeroom, was well-known. “Way, way beyond.”

“I think we all agree on that,” Francine added with finality. In the past, Paula had not been above declaring that Lark let Lucinda run wild, that she didn’t know how to discipline the teenager. After the second petty theft incident, Paula had filed a formal complaint with Tom Huddleson and refused to allow Lucinda in the store.

“Some people are just … sometimes there’s just nothing…” Ivar Dyson, who ran a goat farm that abutted Ethan and Lark’s property to the north, had been a longtime friend of Ethan’s. The two men could not have been less alike: Ivar was terse and politically conservative, a card-carrying member of the NRA. Though Ethan often poked fun at the straitlaced dairyman, it was obvious that he also respected Ivar. And the girls loved the rolling pastures of Dyson Farms and its ever-growing herd. When Ivar was shorthanded, Ethan would help with the milking. Afterward, under the fluorescent lights in the milking shed, the two men would play chess. They were an evenly matched pair and sometimes the games would go on for hours.

“We know, we know,” Francine said comfortingly when it was clear that Ivar was choking up. “It’s unfair. It appears to be unjust, terribly so. But we’ll never fully comprehend why things happen as they must, what makes people turn out the way they do.”

A sudden wave of dislike for the minister swept over Meg; Francine, Meg thought, was definitely in her element. Her arm draped protectively around Lark’s shoulders, her more-than-ample body weighing down the lumpy couch, she was the stolid center of the situation. Death, misery—this was
her
business, her longsuffering expression seemed to say. Francine Werling was the expert, dispensing advice and comfort as needed to the poor, stunned amateurs in her midst. What bothered Meg was the sense—and today was not the first time she’d felt it—that Francine secretly enjoyed these times of tragedy. She gloried in her power to comfort, her ability to be articulate and wise when those around her were struck dumb with grief.

“Meg, when did you get here?” Abe saw her hesitating at the door and called to her over the hubbub.

Lark called to her. “Meggie …” Meg walked across the room and knelt in front of the couch as Lark leaned forward to embrace her. “Oh, Meggie… What will become of us?” Lark whispered as Meg tried to pull her closer. Though it looked as though the two sisters were holding each other warmly, Meg could feel the resistance in Lark’s body. Her muscles were so taut they seemed to vibrate with tension. After a few moments, Meg tried to look her younger sister in the eye, tried to gauge the depths of what she knew, but Lark’s gaze kept skittering away. Her eyes had an overexcited glitter, darting around the room, not focusing, and her smile was fixed.