Perfect Lies (7 page)

“Hot? That’s really how you boys talk?” Meg asked, though she felt relieved. “I didn’t tell you because, well… it was nothing really. Just some guy not understanding what ‘no’ means.”

“You okay?” Abe asked, the gentleness in his tone surprising her. Though keenly observant and quick to judgment, Abe had never been particularly solicitous of Meg’s feelings. He’d seen her operate in the business arena and knew her to be tough and demanding, and he gave her the same treatment in return. Which was, Meg had observed over the years, very different from the gentlemanly, almost gallant way he treated Becca, or even Lark. She sensed that Abe mentally categorized her as a guy—a grown-up kind of tomboy—and that they both enjoyed their bantering camaraderie.

“Oh, sure. I’ve been here before.”

“I don’t know why this one seems different to me,” Abe said, the Saab grumbling as he downshifted for the exit that would lead them, through curving back roads, up to Red River. “Maybe because you didn’t say anything to me about it.”

“Oh, puh-leeze, Abe! From now on I promise to tell you the minute I so much as look at a man.”

But as they made their way in silence along the glistening black river, a full moon following them shyly through the trees, the question Abe had initially asked remained unanswered—hanging delicately in the air between them: Who?

* * *

The smell of wood smoke and mulching leaves. The sound of the river, swollen by a midweek rain, roaring through the culvert. The last of the cicadas singing its thin, sad song. The air was so dry and clear that the whispering voices Meg heard ahead could be a dozen steps from her—or a quarter mile away. Abe had left Meg at the bottom of the drive, and she was walking up the curving graveled roadway to the house when she stumbled on an exposed tree root and fell, her left elbow taking most of the punishment.

“Damn!” she cried out.

“Who’s there?” Meg recognized Lucinda’s whiny voice, followed by a hurried exchange, and the sound of someone running away.

“Meg? You okay?” Lucinda crouched down beside Meg as she pulled herself to her feet and rubbed her elbow. The joint hurt like hell but didn’t seem seriously damaged.

“I think so.” Meg took in Lucinda’s glazed expression and realized with dismay that the teenager had been drinking.

Lucinda McGowan, Ethan’s stepdaughter from his short-lived first marriage was, according to the last bluntly worded report from the local high school, “Seriously Troubled.” She should have been graduating this year but, at eighteen, had been so truant and inattentive that she was now flunking out of junior-year courses. Five feet nine, thirty pounds overweight with scraggly burgundy-dyed hair and a pasty, uneven complexion, Lucinda had been nicknamed “Bozo” by the local tightly knit teenage crowd.

She’d reentered Ethan’s life—and invaded Lark’s—a little over a year ago when the state of Pennsylvania notified Ethan that Lucinda’s mother was to be institutionalized. Mimi’s alcohol and drug abuse had reached life-threatening proportions, her real father had deserted the family years before, and Lucinda would have gone into foster care if Ethan and Lark hadn’t taken her in. It had been a disaster from the moment the foul-mouthed, hostile, beer-drinking Lucinda belligerently unpacked her dirty duffel bag.

Over the course of the last twelve months Meg received Lark’s regular reports on the teenager’s progress. The bottom line: There wasn’t any. Her room was always a mess. She sneaked out at night. She skipped school. She was nasty to the little kids. Talked back to Lark. Hung out with a bad crowd from Montville, the neighboring town that was big enough to have two movie theaters and a mall—a magnet for teenagers all over the mostly rural county. Lucinda had been picked up late one night by Tom Huddleson, Red River’s police chief, for peeing at the base of the VFW monument in the center of town. But the worst of her behavior, the distilled potent essence of her anger, was directed at Ethan.

“It’s horrifying,” Lark confided to Meg after one particularly bad fight between father and daughter. “It’s like she’s possessed or something. She’s totally irrational when it comes to Ethan—screaming out the most vile things. And poor Ethan, he tries to reason with her. He’s so patient. I know he feels guilty, guilty for leaving her with Mimi all those years, but what else could he have done? Mimi won custody and, in the beginning at least, she made a stab at being a decent mother. It went downhill after Brook was born and we moved to Red River. I think, until then, Mimi believed she could somehow win him back.”

Meg remembered all too vividly what it was like to be raised by irresponsible parents. She could imagine the pain and confusion of a childhood marred by a single mother’s downward slide into addiction. Perhaps it was this innate empathy that Lucinda sensed. Whatever the reason, where Ethan and Lark had failed to make the least impression on Lucinda when it came to discipline, the troubled girl would—and often did—listen to Meg. Six weeks ago when Meg had been visiting, she thought she’d persuaded Lucinda to stop drinking, promising to
have
her down to visit in Manhattan over the Christmas holidays if she could stay the course. Since then, though the teenager remained impossible on every other front, Lark had been giving Lucinda good marks for sobriety. But now Meg was detecting the unmistakable odor of beer on Lucinda’s breath.

“You’ve been drinking, Luce. I’m really disappointed.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Yes, you have.” Meg tried to avoid losing her temper with Lucinda. “You’re fucking wrong.”

“You reek of beer,” Meg said. She slung her overnight bag over her shoulder and started back up the drive. Off to the right she could see a glimmer of lights through the trees from Clint and Janine Lindbergh’s small, shingled Cape house. Years ago, when the property operated as a mill and large, prosperous farm, their home had served as the hired hand’s cottage. For the last decade, the Lindberghs had lived there and helped Ethan in the studio, doing the dirty work while Ethan turned out his award-winning stemware and paperweights. In the afternoons, while Ethan concentrated on his sculptures, Clint handled the studio’s paperwork and shipping and Janine helped Lark at what everyone called “the big house.”

“Don’t, Meg, please,” Lucinda whined, following her. “Don’t count this. It was just this one time because … because Ethan got me so fucking mad I couldn’t take it.”

“Here, help me with these pies, though I bet that fall ruined them,” Meg said, handing her the plastic shopping bag to carry so she could rub her sore elbow. “What did Ethan do?”

“He won’t let me go to the basketball game in Montville Monday night.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s fucking irrational, that’s why. Just because I got into some trouble with some Montville kids, suddenly anything having to do with Montville is off limits. I mean, like, Meg, it’s a fucking
basketball
game, okay?”

Though Lark tried constantly to force Lucinda to clean up her language, Meg had only once pointed out to Lucinda that to substitute the word “fucking” for all the millions of adjectives available showed a certain paucity of imagination, and she then gave up on the subject. It was obvious to her that almost of all Lucinda’s bad behavior was used for shock value, and to overreact was just playing into her impossibly needy hand.

“There’s more to it than that, I suspect,” Meg said as they made their way past Ethan’s looming darkened studio and then up the final slope to the house. With its long, latticed white porch and double brick chimneys, its picket fence around the vegetable gardens in the back, and the vine-covered well, Ethan and Lark’s home was the epitome of the picture-perfect New England farmhouse. The fact that, on closer inspection, it wasn’t at all perfect—the front steps needed repair, a porch railing was missing, the entire interior could use a fresh coat of paint—made the place all the more endearing to Meg. She had always loved this house that Lark had so fondly reworked over the years into a real home. Though Meg owned her two bedroom co-op in the city, this in many ways was where her heart resided. Five pumpkins and a basket of Mums stood sentinel up the front steps. She was glad that she had already made her decision to tell Lark about Ethan. It would have been utterly impossible, she realized now, to enter this house with the question still unresolved. Then she heard his voice as he opened the front door.

“Meg? Is that you? This damned front porch light is out again.”

“Yes. Me and Lucinda.” Ethan leaned in to kiss her on the forehead. She almost stumbled as she took a step back, and he grabbed her arm.

“Let go!” she cried, pulling away from him. “I fell on my way up the drive.”

“Are you okay? Let me see. Lucinda, take her bags upstairs and ask Lark to come down.”

“Don’t order me around,” Lucinda said, but she did as she was told, stomping up the stairs with Meg’s two weekend totes slung over her shoulder, just as Lark was hurrying down.

“Meggie? What happened?” She was an inch shorter than Meg and, after three children, a little plumper. But the five pounds she had put on with each of the girls had gone primarily to her breasts and hips, giving her at last the kind of sexy curves the slender and underendowed Hardwick sisters had longed for as teenagers. (“Breast-feeding,” she had confided to Meg. “If those Hollywood starlets only knew—plastic surgeons would go out of business overnight.”)

Though Lark’s features were less finely drawn than Meg’s—her nose slightly smaller, her lips a bit larger and fuller—and though Meg’s eyes were a deep hazel tinged with gold and Lark’s were the blue of October skies, there was no question that the two women were sisters. If you didn’t notice the similarity of their postures (a tilt of the chin, the arms crossed below their breasts), or failed to hear the same inflections in their voices (a quick delivery, high and slightly twangy), their laugh would have given them dead away.

“For heavens’ sakes,” Meg said, pushing Ethan aside to hug Lark and hoping that in the confusion of the moment her sister wouldn’t notice her husband’s concentrated gaze. “Will you all stop hovering! I just took a spill on your damned driveway. I really don’t think it’s life-threatening.”

“But you should put a little something on it,” Lark said, after examining Meg’s elbow. “Some arnica or comfrey leaves. Let’s see what I’ve got.” With her arm around Meg’s waist, Lark led her sister into the pantry where she kept an old pie cupboard full of oils and ointments, infusions and tinctures. Drying flowers and herbs that she’d grown or collected hung in garlands and bouquets from the ceiling. Lark was a committed homeopath and her growing understanding of natural medicines had turned her kitchen into a kind of free local out-clinic for the town’s various aches and pains. Meg’s initial skepticism of Lark’s healing techniques had been overcome one summer afternoon when Lark had rubbed crushed garlic onto a nasty wasp sting on Meg’s neck and the swelling pain had—within two minutes—subsided.

“That’ll do it,” Lark said stepping back after she’d wound gauze around Meg’s elbow to keep the compress in place. Ethan had gone upstairs to help his three younger daughters finish up their bath. Lark and Meg were alone.

“Well, you look okay,” Lark said.

“Yes.” Meg moved her elbow back and forth. “Feels better already.”

“Actually, you look kind of fabulous. Meggie—it
is
a man, isn’t it?”

“Lark, I—listen …” Meg felt her heart pounding. After everything she’d promised herself and despite her resolutions, Meg was now facing Lark unable to find the words that would indict Ethan. The familiar pantry, her sister’s smiling face, the delicious promise of dinner wafting in from the kitchen—everything felt so normal, so loved, so safe. It seemed impossible suddenly that the man clomping around upstairs singing silly songs to his daughters could be the person who’d been stalking her the last few weeks. She felt blood rush to her cheeks as she tried to regain her resolve and sense of urgency.

“Meg—I can’t believe it—you’re actually blushing! It
is
somebody. And it’s serious, isn’t it?”

Meg felt her sister’s eyes upon her. Lark was able to read Meg’s emotional terrain like a map. She knew where each hidden heartbreak lay. Where each romantic triumph took place. She had been there for every high and every low. And, always, she’d been on Meg’s side. Whispering instructions. Suggesting alternate battle plans. She’d always been so eager to help, so hopeful that Meg would find the same kind of happiness Lark shared with Ethan. Or thought she shared. Meg felt her eyes misting.

“Okay.” Meg sighed, looking down at the cracked tiled floor. “Yes, yes, there is someone. But it’s very weird and confusing.”

“I’m happy for you!” Lark hugged her and then stepped back to look at her. “But why do you seem so upset? Tell me about him—is he …”

“Please, Lark.” Meg swallowed hard, cursing herself inwardly for her cowardice. She had all weekend, she reminded herself. This was just not the right time or place to tell Lark what was really happening.

“Damn, I bet he’s married. Am I right?” Lark tucked in a stray hair behind Meg’s ear. Her mothering instincts came flowing out whenever someone she loved was in danger of being hurt. “Kids?”

Meg, trying to clear her thoughts, shook her head and took a deep breath. “I’m … I’m not really ready to talk about it yet, baby. Even with you. Can you believe it?” Without warning, she felt her eyes spill over with tears.

“Oh—I hate to see you in any kind of pain,” Lark said, pulling her sister close again. “But I understand. Really I do. Just know that I’m here when you
are
ready. And you know what? Speaking from experience, if two people are meant for each other, nothing—not even a marriage—is going to be able to stand in their way.”

“I feel so egotistical, throwing a party for myself.” Lark remarked over that evening’s dinner of homemade spinach linguine with roasted eggplant and bell pepper. She was feeding Fern, in the high chair beside her, little spoonfuls of mashed spinach. The dinner party that Lark had been planning for weeks to celebrate the sale of her children’s book was to be held the following night. “But, hey, Ethan got a party for his opening. I think I deserve a little something, too.”