Real Life & Liars (18 page)

IRINA BOUNCES ON HER TIPTOES, PACES THE ROOM, STOPS TO
bounce again, hugging herself. Her shadow slices back and forth along the wood floor in the light of a single candle on a bookcase, the flame bouncing around in a draft.

Darius sits on the bed, leaning back against the headboard, long legs stretched out in front of him. He’d given up trying to hold her.

“I want a drink so bad.”

“You can’t have one.”

She shoots him a glare from behind her hair, which has gone all askew from raking her fingers through it. “One can’t hurt.”

“We’re not taking any chances with my baby.”

“It’s not just your baby.”

“You’re just upset. It will pass.”

Irina stamps her foot. “It will not pass. My mother will not suddenly get cured. I can’t believe she didn’t tell us. If I’d only known…”

“If you’d only known…then what? What, Irina?”

“I can’t do this alone.”

“Who said you’re alone?” Darius stands up next to the bed. “Why are you acting like this is only on you?”

“Because it’s only
in
me. It’s my problem.”

He steps forward with his arms out. “It’s not a problem, it’s a baby. Our baby. Son or daughter.”

“Don’t touch me.”

He stops short. “What did I do? I’m just trying to help you.”

“You shouldn’t be here, I shouldn’t be pregnant, none of this is right.”

Darius’s voice grows tight and strained. “But I am here, you are pregnant, and you married me.”

“That can change.”

“No, you’re not doing this. You’re not doing what I think you’re thinking about doing.”

Irina turns her back to him, facing the weather outside. “I made a mistake. Mistakes can be fixed.”

The hairs on Irina’s neck stand up when she hears Darius’s footfalls on the wooden floor. His voice comes from high above her, right behind her. “You will not abort my baby.”

Irina flinches and closes her eyes. How can he think her capable of that? Of doing that to him?

“No. But I don’t want it. You can have it. I’ll file for divorce on Monday, and you can have the baby as soon as I push it out.”

“You silly little bitch.”

Irina sneers into the glass, her reflection flickering with the candlelight. “Yes, go ahead, Darius. Let it out.”

“I should have known you were too much of a child for this.”

Irina doesn’t turn around, but she hears his feet stomp toward the bedroom door. “Why did you even marry me?” he shouts from the doorway.

“Why did you ask?”

She closes her eyes against her reflection, and listens to his steps, now less sure in the darkness of an unfamiliar house. His hands smack against the hallway as he feels his way along.

Van was right. She should have listened to him after that night and stopped dating for a while, even as long as a year. Clean herself out, he said. Give her heart a rest. And her vagina, she added, laughing, though there was nothing at all funny going on.

It was easy for Van to say, though. He’s probably never had a real connection in his life. So how could he know what it feels like to connect to man after man, then try to live without one?

Irina drags herself over to the bed and crawls in, wincing because the sheets still smell like sex. Was it just a few hours ago that she and Darius made love before returning to the party?

Irina fingers her wedding ring. Darius is probably right; she is a silly bitch. And he reached that amazing conclusion without even knowing about Alex.

She was living at her parents’ house, between jobs and apartments. Also between men. She was getting bored with the same few Charlevoix bars, so when she drove by a wedding party arriving in three limousines at Castle Farms, she decided to crash. She ran home to change into a silky sundress and spiky heels, and turned up prepared to pass herself off as a cousin, if anyone asked.

No one did.

A few sauced groomsmen chatted her up, but none of them lit her pilot light. They all seemed to be mere varietals of the same species of pub rat that she’d been dallying with since she’d been living back at home.

So when Alex sidled up to her in the courtyard, she was ready for a change.

“You’re far too beautiful a woman to be alone,” he said, lighting a cigarette.

“You’re far too smart to be using a tired old line like that,” she replied, grateful for the cloudy night hiding her smile. She got a charge out of that in spite of herself, probably because he’d said it with such cool reserve, like he was simply reading off the bus schedule.

“Oh, I’m not that smart at all,” he said. “Or I wouldn’t be smoking these things.”

He was not handsome exactly, but he was interesting to look at. His face was craggy and lined, his hair graying but still mostly there. Not the first older man to proposition her, not the first one to attract her attention, but the first one who was so arresting. She tried to convince herself to go back inside and find someone her own age, but he’d quirk an eyebrow at her, and she’d stay a little longer.

He had a condo on the lake, and they screwed all night long.

Alex was a Chicago businessman, but he came up to Charlevoix every weekend he could, and every time he did, he’d call Irina. She never said much about him. Though it wasn’t her parents’ business whom she slept with, and Mira was open-minded enough to accept almost any pairing, something about this relationship felt naughty and illicit, and Irina liked it that way.

She even liked it the first time he started talking nasty to her. Not dirty, she was used to dirty and could dredge up a phone-sex dialogue at a moment’s notice. Nasty. Mean. He called her horrible names, and once he grabbed her hair in his fist and yanked her face to his lips. Then yanked her face somewhere else.

It scared her. It also thrilled her. She didn’t tell him to stop.

Afterward, he would be his usual laconic, cool self. No hint of genuine meanness. It was all play, Irina decided. She could play with the best of them.

Irina scrunches herself farther down in the sheets as she remembers that one night.
Was it almost a year ago, now? A little more
than that.
Van was home visiting on his school’s spring break. Fortunately, as it turned out.

She couldn’t pinpoint a single thing that had started to make her uneasy with Alex. The last few times they’d met, she would vow to herself never to see him again, but then he’d call, and she didn’t know what to tell him. “I can’t see you because you slap me and call me a whore” didn’t make sense, because he’d been doing that for weeks, and in fact, she’d been enthusiastic in her response to him.

That night was much the same. They had a candlelight dinner on his balcony, then retreated inside. He grabbed her dress and yanked the shoulder strap apart. He would always send her two more dresses for each one he ruined, always with a thin strap at the shoulder. He started to toss her around, kissing her hard, pushing her up against walls. He grabbed her chin and pushed her head back against the headboard of his bed and kissed her so hard she thought she’d suffocate.

“Let’s cool it a little, hey?” she finally said, the first time she’d ever asked him anything.

That time, his slap left her with a bloody nose.

“Bitch,” he said, throwing her off the bed and onto the floor. He pinned her down, and bit her shoulder. She cried out again, and he hit her again.

“Stop!” she cried, but whether he thought she was playing, or just didn’t care, Irina would never be sure. But he stopped nothing.

He stood up and growled, “Wait here,” and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Irina was trying to piece together her clothing when she heard a funny rattling outside the door. She ran up to yank the handle, and it stuck. He’d locked her in.

She searched his room for a phone but couldn’t find one. She
was contemplating how to get through the window—and then, how to survive a drop from three stories up—when she remembered she’d had her bag still in her hand when he dragged her through the door. She scrabbled on the floor until she found it under his bed.

She didn’t dial 911. She sent Van a text message that read: “HELP. COME GET ME” followed by the address of Alex’s condo, praying Ivan would understand, wouldn’t question, wouldn’t call back, he would just come right away.

Irina was starting to panic about what would happen if Alex came back in the room before Van got the message—wait for what exactly, she wondered—when she heard a pounding on the outside door. Then muffled voices growing louder, and then a thwack sound, like a fiercely served tennis ball.

She was cowering in the corner when the door to the room burst open and Van stood there, sweaty and red.

“Come on, Reenie.”

Alex was in his kitchenette, a hand over his eye, which was turning several unhealthy shades of yellow and purple already. Irina stumbled out clutching Van’s arm.

She refused to let him take her to the police. Refused to let him tell their parents what had happened. Refused, also, to explain how complicit she was in Alex’s behavior, at least at first. She only said that it was a game, and he had taken the game too far.

She told her parents a story about falling down the stairs, and they wouldn’t have believed her except Van backed her up.

After Alex, she’d reverted to her usual quarry of men her own age who only wanted a simple screw and a “call you sometime,” which meant never. Until Darius came along, who wanted more than the simple screw but never raised a hand to her in play or any other way.

Maybe she’d been so thirsty for kindness after Alex and all the
empty fucks after him that it was all too easy for her to marry Darius.

So Darius is right about her. Van was right.

Irina turns her head to find a spot on the pillow that’s not wet.

Even Alex was right.

I HATE OUR BASEMENT. HOUSES LIKE MINE DON’T HAVE BASEMENTS
so much as they do cellars. Dark, windowless, and thick with spiders and dust. At least we put in a cement floor, so we wouldn’t all be perched on dirt and potentially sharing our storm shelter with a groundhog.

So I volunteered to go hunt for Reenie and Darius, to keep myself out as long as possible.

Max and Katya are in a frenzy of worry and hand-wringing, made worse because Kat can’t get a cell signal to check her weather reports. It’s nonsense. We’ve lived through countless tornado warnings and never had more than a few tree limbs down. It would probably dissipate before it reached civilization. Or veer out over the lake. Or maybe it wasn’t even there, and some hysterical weather spotter was just trying to get on TV.

I hear pounding feet on the steps in front of me so I call out,
“Darius?” mainly to alert him to my presence so he doesn’t run me down.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Z,” he says as he pushes past me.

“There’s a tornado warning, we need to…” But he’s off somewhere in the house. He doesn’t know where the cellar is, and he doesn’t have a candle or light. He’s stumbling like a drunken man.

First, I have to check on Reenie.

I knock with one knuckle, tapping out “Shave and a haircut…” It was cute when she was little, and she’d call out, “Two bits!” or rap the side of her dresser twice.

As a teenager she would say “Go away!” and once chanted a two-syllable obscenity in response. I gave up that charming little tradition.

At no response, I push the door open slowly. The candle is jittery on the dresser across the room. All I can see of Reenie is a rounded shape under the covers.

“Reenie, sweetheart. There’s a tornado warning. We should all get downstairs.”

The lump under the covers is impossibly small for an adult woman. She’s curled herself so tight.

“I don’t care,” she finally murmurs. “It won’t hit us anyway, they never do.”

“C’mon, it’s not safe to be in this room with all these windows.”

“What do you care? You’re killing yourself anyway.”

Some days, on the receiving end of my children’s ire, I can shrug it off. Realize it’s their issue, not mine, just like when they were toddlers having breathless screaming tantrums on the floor, and I’d know it had nothing to do with me, or whether they wanted jelly on their bread, and was just a kid thing. I’d count to ten and carry on with my day.

Then there are times, like now, when it’s like an ice pick right in the heart.

“Haven’t you ever felt something that didn’t make logical sense?”

Irina sits upright in bed. Her hair is all over her head, and the candlelight glints on a face wet with tears.

“Don’t you feel obligated? I mean, you have kids.”

“Look, it’s not like I have total control over this, like I flip a switch between life or death. None of us can control our fates.”

“You didn’t answer my question. Don’t you care about your new grandchild? Or is it, ‘been there, done that’ because you’ve already got three. Just like when I came along and you were barely ever there because whoops! Didn’t plan on Irina.”

“No one ever said that; it’s not true.”

“Right. Fine. Anyway, we have to go downstairs, do we? If I can find my husband, I’ll bring him down and we can all sing ‘Kum Ba Ya’ and hold hands.”

Reenie yanks a sheet off the bed and wraps it around herself like a shawl.

The insults that sting the most are the ones with a ring of truth. We weren’t prepared for Reenie.

I was forty-four years old. Kat was sixteen and well into those fraught teen years. Ivan was eleven and doing well in school, even though he didn’t make friends easily. I was reveling in full nights of sleep and no training pants or pacifiers.

Irregular periods weren’t so strange for me, so it was a while before I thought to question why I was so tired all the time, and why my normally favorite foods made my stomach turn.

I remind myself that it’s impossible for Irina to know that I cried all day after the doctor told me I was pregnant. That I briefly considered terminating the pregnancy. That Max was so alarmed by my state, he actually considered letting me do it.

But maybe somehow in the womb she felt it. Maybe my uterus bathed her in ambivalence. A polluted atmosphere.

She came out over a week late, feet first. As if unwilling, as if she knew.

I loved her, though. After my initial panic, I settled into acceptance, and when she actually was born, after that grueling, horrid labor, I looked into her tiny dark eyes under that swirl of black hair, and thought,
Well! How did I ever think I could live without you?

It’s true she spent more time in her baby swing than the other kids, and Katya was pressed into service as a babysitter more than was healthy for either of them, I’m sure. But I had just been elected president of the faculty union, had taken on a big load of classes, and Max’s career was taking off, and his editors were always leaning on him to hurry up and finish the next book.

When I did get time with her, I tried to love her extra hard. Did she notice? Did it matter?

Did anything I ever did for the kids make a slightest difference in how they turned out?

If I go ahead and put myself under the knife and pump myself full of chemicals in an effort to extend my life, will it matter? The kids think they will feel better, but will they? Watching me get sick in order to get well, if I even do? What if my last years are marked by side effects and medical treatments, the good times left long behind?

I should have told them right before they left to go home, when they could have digested the news in their own environments. Now we’re all shut up here together like inmates.

The screen door clatters downstairs, and a voice calls, “Mom? Hello? Where is everyone?”

I grab the candle and get downstairs as fast as my knees will let me, shielding the flame from this drafty house.

“I’m here, Van!”

I approach them with the candle and the circle of flame expands
on them to reveal a couple of soaking-wet kids. Jenny in particular looks like a shipwreck survivor.

“Oh goodness, let me get you some dry clothes. My stuff will be too big, but maybe you can borrow some from Irina…”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ve got something that will do. I’m sure she only brought a couple things for the weekend.”

“As long as you don’t mind old flower-child clothes.”

Jenny looks down at herself and grins, then I chuckle, because of course she doesn’t mind.

“I take it you’re OK?”

Van answers, “Yes, we’re fine. She’s fine. Everyone’s fine.” He looks like his father suddenly, his eyes unfocused ahead of him, his mind gone traveling somewhere.

“We have to get downstairs, there’s a tornado warning, and your father and sister are in a tizzy.”

As if on command, Katya comes storming up the stairs. The running is uneven and frantic.

“Funnel cloud!” She’s breathless at the top of the stairs, and her flashlight beam bounces all over the place. “The radio! They think they spotted a funnel cloud outside Charlevoix!” Funnel cloud. If it touches down, it’s a tornado.

Reenie comes out of the downstairs hall. “Where’s Darius? I can’t find him!”

“Get downstairs, now!” Katya yells in her demanding-mother voice.

“Darius!” Irina flies past us, still dragging that sheet behind her like a cape, and she runs toward the back door, clattering against a chair and cursing on the way. She peers through the dark. “He’s out in the car!” She sheds her bedsheet then and darts out into the maelstrom. Van shoots out behind her, and we all follow to the doorway. Darius is slumped in the seat, illuminated by the dome light. In a moment, he sits up, and the trio runs back to the house.

The screaming gale chases them into the house, and Max slams the door on it.

“Mira, grab some clothes for the girls, and I’ll get everyone downstairs.”

The wind picks up faster, and, finally, their urgency affects me. Maybe it really is happening this time. “But my mother’s clock, we should get it downstairs.”

“There’s no time!”

Max tosses me an extra flashlight from a drawer, and he and Katya lead the troops to the cellar. I dash up the stairs as best I can, going by memory as well as by the meager yellow light. I have a mental image of this lovely old house ripped from the ground, with me still clinging to the stair railing, and it’s a picture both frightening and oddly exhilarating.

In my room, I yank open my wardrobe doors and grab a couple of big old dresses and sweaters, then stop by the bathroom long enough to seize a couple of towels. I wonder if Katya’s children are terrified, and if the boys have come down from their high enough to know what’s going on. Kit probably has Bartleby by now. She wouldn’t stand for leaving her upstairs in a tornado, though Bartleby is probably yowling in protest at being held there.

Now I come to the cellar door, and I hold my breath before descending.

It’s cold down there, despite the heat that has wrapped itself around the house all day, even in the night with the windows all shut against the storm. I don’t want to go, but I have to.

“Mom! Hurry!” I’m not sure which girl said that, Katya or Irina. Doesn’t matter.

I pick my way down the old wooden stairs, closing the door to the kitchen behind me. I duck under the low ceiling, though I’m short enough it doesn’t really matter. I shine my beam around, and there’s my family, sitting on an old red-plaid blanket we always used for picnics at the beach, at the far corner of the cellar, well
away from the tool bench with the screwdrivers and saws. An old mattress is propped up behind them. In the center glows a Coleman lantern that I can’t believe still works, from the days when I used to drag Max out camping, after he’d made a deadline and could finally be pried out of his office. The result is a greenish glow resembling the moon on a spooky autumn evening.

“We can put this over us if a tornado hits the house, so we’re not injured by debris,” Katya explains as she sees my gaze light on the mattress. I nod, unable to shake this wistful desire I have to go back upstairs, like a captain going down with the ship. Would it be so bad, to just fly up into the air?

I hand the clothes down to Irina and Jenny, who are huddled on either side of Van. I give him a towel, and he towels off his hair. The radio crackles in the center of the blanket, repeating its entreaties to get to an interior room, into a cellar, or a bathroom, clutching the bathroom pipes.

The grandchildren cluster around their parents. Kit curls up in her mother’s lap, twirling a piece of hair. Tay has his head on her shoulder, and even Chip is sitting as close as he can without actually being in her lap. Charles sits cross-legged behind the three of them, talking in a low voice to Chip.

“Where’s Bartleby?” I ask, trying to ignore the keening wind outside, the trees raking the wood exterior, as if it’s even too much for them, and they’re begging to be let inside.

“Stalking spiders,” answers Katya, nodding to indicate she’s behind me, in the dark outside the circle of lanternlight.

Katya looks older than I’ve ever seen her, and she keeps wincing. No wonder, with all the booze she’s had tonight. Looks like she’ll be having her hangover without the benefit of sleep.

We should have grabbed pillows and blankets, or at least a measly deck of cards. We could be up all night long, waiting for the tornado that might never come, Max’s anxiety slowly dissipating like air out of a leaky tire.

“Mom, sit down.”

Max and Darius are holding the mattress up as a privacy screen, and Jenny and Irina are taking turns changing. Irina comes out first in one of my old dresses, the sweater wrapped around her shoulders.

I fold myself to the floor, and Jenny emerges wearing a tie-dyed number I chose for her. I’ll let her take it home; it suits her. She curls on the floor next to Van, but they don’t touch. They don’t look at each other. I wonder what happened on that drive back from her car? What was said?

Because the studious way they avoid each other’s eyes reminds me of how Paul and I have maintained for years a steadfast professionalism. At such great effort.

But what a wasted effort for Van and this nice girl, who have no other attachments or obligations so far as I know.

“It’s so quiet,” Kit says. “Wish I had my iPod. Oh, Mom, what if it all blows away?”

“It won’t. And even if it does, we’ll replace it.”

“But all my music!”

“Dipwad,” jumps in Chip, “it’s all saved on your hard drive. You can just download it again.”

“Shut up, pothead.”

All faces jerk toward Kit. She answers our unspoken question. “You reek like pot. Duh.”

“Be quiet, Kit.”

“But Mom, he…”

“Katherine! You will shut up, for once in your life, shut up.”

The radio static surges and swamps the voices, and Max shuts it off. The wind outside sounds preternatural. Lightning goes off around us, flashing through the high, dusty basement windows.

Kit whimpers. Darius murmurs to Irina. Max scuttles to my side and wraps his arms tightly around me. I look around at my family, take them in. Van and Jenny are holding hands. Charles
has his arms around Chip and Katya, Katya holds Tay and Kit. Reenie clutches Darius, who looks expectantly at the ceiling. One large brown hand covers her belly.

Even Bartleby has joined our circle, mewling lightly, circling on the blanket.

Then there’s a fearsome crack, a creaking, and a thunderous vibration runs through all of us, from the floor to our skulls.

My house, my house.

My family.

My life.

I can’t tell if the scream is from a person, or crashing metal, or just inside my head.