The Good Lie (6 page)

Mistakes

[1]

Saturday.

I lay in bed unwilling to believe
anything that happened the night before.

Maybe I had just imagined I saw my
father humping my brother.  Maybe it was a trick of the light.  Maybe I was so
discombobulated from my breasts being touched by Jason that I hallucinated the
whole thing.  It had to be a mistake.  So I went over it again:  I came in, saw
them, saw THAT—

I moved on to a more pleasant
topic.

Jason.  Had I imagined him?  No
way.  My lips still felt slightly swollen.  I could still taste his mouth. 
Still smell that hint of soap and aftershave on his neck.  God, what a night.

And what a mistake.

That’s the problem with
temptation:  Once it’s right there in front of you, it takes superhuman will to
resist it.  Which is why you can’t let yourself ever get to that point.  You
cut it off way before you’re alone in a car with the boy of your dreams, parked
near a urinating bum.

That was where I went wrong.  I
should have insisted he take me home first.  I could have avoided the whole
mess.

So now what?  Fix it.  You know how
you got into that situation, I told myself, so don’t ever let yourself get
there again.  Easy enough.  Just fix it.

The phone rang at eight-thirty.

“So,” Posie asked, “did Mr. Sleeze
try anything?”

I guess that nod she gave me before
I drove off was not her blessing after all.

“Kind of.”

“So what did you do?”

“You know, just—”

“Hey, guess what’s in the paper?”

I privately blessed God for the
distraction.  “Um, Angela?”

“She just settled some lawsuit over
in California.  Three million dollars—three million!  Of course, she won’t
confirm that, as usual, but that’s what they’re saying.  Good for her.  Another
church gets it in the rear.  So to speak.”

“Great.”

“You coming over?”

“No . . .”  What was a good excuse
to give?  That I wanted to watch my brother all day?  Check him for signs of
trauma?  Ask him to his face if my father was molesting him?

“I think I’ll stick around here
today,” I said.  “The place is a mess.  I need to clean.”

“Then come over tonight.  I’m off.”

And return home to another scene
like last night’s?  No, thank you.

“Uh . . . not tonight, okay?  I’m
really tired.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah.  Maybe it’s just a bug.  I
think I’ll stay in this weekend.”

We hung up and I went back to bed
and pulled the covers over my head.

Really, that fixes anything.

[2]

The phone rang a few hours later.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”  I should have checked Caller
ID.

“How are you?” Jason asked.

“Fine.”

Great.  Was this what we were
reduced to?  Was this what our conversations were going to be like from now
on?  Sex ruins everything.

“Want to grab a bite tonight?” he
asked.

“No.”

“Movie?”

“No.”

“Check out books from the library?”

“Jason—”

“Lizzie.  What’s going on?”

“Nothing.  I just have a lot to do.”

“Like what?”

Like avoid you.

“Just . . . stuff.”

“Well, I’ll come over and help. 
Your dad’ll probably be happy to see me.”

“Very funny.”  One of those deadly
pauses, so uncomfortable.  “So . . .”

“So . . .”

I bit at a hanging cuticle.  This
was torture.  A day before I would have loved to get a phone call like this. 
But somehow that was another girl, another life, and maybe it was superstitious
of me, but I couldn’t help thinking that this thing with Mikey was the direct
result of making out with a guy in his car.

“What if I ask Posie?” Jason
suggested.

“Ask her.  Maybe she’ll go.”

“No,” Jason clarified, “will you
go?  If she chaperones?”

“Look—”  I didn’t really want to
get into it, but didn’t see how I could avoid it.  “What I did was a mistake.”

“No, trust me,” he said cheerfully,
“you did it right.”

“Jason, I’m serious.”

“I am, too.  Look, I like you. 
What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing.”  Like?  I winced
thinking of my declaration of love.  How could I expose myself like that?  “It’s
just not practical.”

He laughed.  “Not practical?  That’s
your argument?”

“You know I’m never going to sleep
with you.”

“So?”

“So I know that’s what you want.”

“Of course it’s what I want.”

“Well?”

“But you and I are friends,” Jason
said.

“Right,” I said.

“So why can’t we hang out?”

Because you touched my breast. 
And I liked it.
  “Because I can’t trust you anymore.”

“I trust you.”

“Great.  That’s because you know I
have morals.”

“No, it’s because I know you’re
smart.”

That one hit me.  Who doesn’t want
to hear a guy tell her she’s smart?

“Lizzie?”

I could feel myself softening.  “Yeah?”

“Tell me the truth.  You liked it.”

Ugh.  Why did he have to ask?  “It’s
really none of your business.”

“Of course it’s my business.”

“It was a mistake,” I repeated.

“What you’re doing right now?” he
answered.  “
This
is the mistake.”

[3]

Saturday night.  So far so good.  I
made meatloaf from my mother’s recipe and my brother ate it like it was the
last meal of a doomed boy.

Which, in a way, it was.

After dinner the two of us retired
to the family room to watch Mikey’s favorite show,
Space Chargers
.

We were half way into it when the
family room door opened.

“Come on,” my father said to Mikey.

Mikey glanced at me and went back
to watching his show.

“Come on,” my father insisted.

“Where?” I asked on behalf of my
brother.

“Time for his shower,” said my
father, defiantly meeting my eye.

Mikey stood, the condemned boy
whose sister did nothing to stop it, and dragged his feet down the hall to my
parents’ bedroom.  My father followed.  I followed.

I listened outside my parents’
door.  I heard the shower come on.  I heard the two of them talking, then the
shower door opening and closing, and from then on their voices were muted.

I stood there frozen by my own
fear.  I stood mute, knowing I should scream or call the police or call my
mother or do something.

When the shower shut off I hurried
back to the family room.  Mikey came in a few minutes later.  His wet hair
stood on end.  He wouldn’t meet my eye.

My little brother depended on me. 
Who else was going to take care of him now?  And I had failed him utterly.

What should I do?  Call 911?  And
then what?  Police here, forcing Mikey to make a confession, forcing me to tell
what I knew, and if all went well, our father being taken away in handcuffs
while Mikey and I sat orphaned trying to figure out how we’d buy our groceries.

I hated my mother so much at that
moment.  None of it would have happened if she had kept her skirt down.  And
now she was off enjoying her new life with her spectacular new lover, secure in
the knowledge that her sixteen-year-old daughter could manage every duty of the
household, including separating the men from the boys.

I hated my father most of all. 
What would he say if I confronted him? 
Sodomy is a word in the Bible—that
means I can use it
.

After a while Mikey put himself to
bed and I should have gone in with him.  I should have sat on his bed next to
him and said, “This is wrong, Mikey.  I’m taking you away.”

But instead I retreated into my own
cowardice.  I hid in my room and slipped a chair under the knob of my door and
lay on my bed knowing I was the worst sister
mankind had ever created.

[4]

I couldn’t tell Posie.  I just
couldn’t.

Either thing.

Not about Jason—I knew she’d be
disappointed in me.  She has such high standards.

And I couldn’t tell her about my
father and Mikey, either.

There are friends you have who you
know are better than you.  They just are.  Maybe they’re better looking or
better at sports, but you know in your heart they’re superior to you in some
way.

Posie is good at morals.  She kicks
my ass at morals.  They come as easily to her as physics comes to Jason.

Posie will never have to worry
about whether she should lie to advance her career or cheat to get a higher
score on a test.  It won’t even enter her mind.  When you’re Posie,  the world
is black and white.  Decisions are easy.  You know what’s right and you go for
it.

And in my case, she’d know exactly
what was right.  You call the police.  No hesitation whatsoever.

In Posie’s world, it would all work
out no matter what.  Those things I was worrying about?  My father going to
jail and how we’d support ourselves and all that?  Not even an issue.  You
start by doing the right thing, Posie would argue, and everything else will
magically fall into place.

And maybe she’s right.  I like to
think she’s right.  But some of us are just too weak and lack her superior
faith.

And so we fudge it.  We try to
manage things ourselves.  And that’s what I was doing.

If I told Posie, I wouldn’t have a
choice anymore.  But if I kept it secret, I could try to handle it myself.

Thinking you can handle it
yourself?  Always—hear me?—ALWAYS a mistake.

The Watchmen Guard In Vain

[1]

Psalms isn’t my favorite book in
the Bible—I want stories, not just poems—but there are lines here and there
that stick with me and that mean something at different times.

Psalm 127 is one of Solomon’s.  It
isn’t sexual, like the Song of Songs, which is quite beautiful in parts
although it was never taught in church because it was so
 scandalous.

Psalm 127 goes like this:

Except the Lord build the house,
they labor in vain that build it.

Except the Lord watch over a
city, the watchmen guard in vain.

In vain do you rise early,
toiling for your food,

For while they sleep the Lord
provides for those he loves.

It means, I think, that whatever
you do needs the blessing of God for it to succeed.  I can struggle and sweat
and burn out every ounce of energy, but if the project isn’t approved, nothing
I do will matter.

It creates a problem.  On the one
hand, you think, “Everything is preordained, so why bother striving for
anything?”  On the other hand, you realize that striving for something might be
exactly the piece that’s needed, and without that you might never know what
good things await you.  In other words, God helps those who help themselves,
and although he knows ahead of time which efforts and which people will
succeed, it is exactly those efforts by those people which cause the thing to
come about as planned.

In other words, I had to do
something, and I prayed that I was right.

[2]

Here was my strategy:

Remember how my mother had used me
as a human chastity belt?  Why couldn’t I do that for Mikey?

So I started hanging out in his
room every night, playing video games with him, doing my homework, generally
keeping watch.

And it seemed to work.  No tandem
showers, no underwear wrestling, nothing out of the ordinary.

And it was actually nice to be with
my brother.  I don’t think we ever spent that much time together.  We brought
out Monopoly and chess and a deck of cards and amused ourselves many nights in
a row.

I kept waiting for him to tell me. 
“Dad’s touching me.  Dad’s scaring me.”
  Whatever it might be.  But he
talked about day camp and his friend Cort’s chameleon and the new
Space
Chargers
movie that was supposed to come out in a few weeks.

My father knocked on Mikey’s door
every night and stuck his head inside.

“Good night, kids.”

“Good night,” I answered with a
smile.  I had him.  It was working.  He wouldn’t get by on my watch.

Silly, silly girl.

[3]

I’ve always found that if your life
is hurtling out of control, it’s best to bake a batch of chocolate chip
cookies.

I’m serious.  I don’t know where I
learned that—probably from my mother when I was little—but it really seems to do
the job.

So that’s what I did.  When I came
home from summer school that Friday, I set up my mixing station and went to
work.

And like a cartoon stream of smoke,
where it turns into a finger and beckons you to follow, the scent of baking
cookies coiled out of the kitchen into Mikey’s room and brought him straight to
me.

He stood in the doorway to the
kitchen and didn’t speak at first.  Then he burst into tears.

“Honey, what’s wrong?” I asked,
dashing to his side.  I hugged him and patted his back while he wept the way he
hadn’t in years.  “Honey, tell me.”

“I miss Mom,” he croaked.

“Oh, honey,” I soothed, “poor
Mikey.”  I hugged him to me like a baby, and it felt good to be close to him.

He continued to cry even when it seemed
he might stop.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.  “Tell me.”

His voice warbled.  “No.”  He
swiped his sleeve over his eyes and pulled
himself together.

I let him go but not entirely.  “You
should tell me,” I encouraged, even though telling was the very thing I was
wrestling with myself.

“No.  Never mind.”  He turned
toward his room.  I let him go.

When the first sheet was cooled I
brought him four warm cookies and a glass of milk.  He sat on his bed working a
handheld video game.  I sat beside him and propped myself against the wall.

“I can kill him if you want,” I
started in, hoping, I think, to make him smile or at least react.

“Who?”

“Dad.”

“Why?” Mikey asked.

I left it alone.  Obviously he didn’t
want to talk to me about it.

Mikey took a cookie from the plate
and dipped it in the milk.

“You want to tell me why you were
crying?” I tried.

Mikey shrugged.

“Come on.  You can tell me.”

Mikey shook his head. 

I was really desperate now.  “Should
I call Mom for you?”

“I don’t care.”  Mikey finished the
last cookie and wiped his hand on his pants.  He picked up his video game
again, but didn’t look at it.  He leaned his head against the wall and closed
his eyes.

A tear slipped out, but just one.  “I
don’t like it here,” Mikey whispered.

I caught my breath.  The moment was
as fragile as a spider’s web.  “Why?”

Mikey shrugged.  The thin filament
snapped.  “I just don’t.”  He went back to his game.

I sat with him a few more minutes
thinking my own part.  Then I patted his leg and stood up and went to the door
without looking back and I said, “Okay.  Thanks for  telling me.”

[4]

It wasn’t Mikey’s fault what
happened.

My father did it out of
frustration, I think, because for over a week I had stood between him and his
boy, and the pressure was building.

“Lizzie, time for bed,” my father
said that night.  “I want to talk to your brother.”

“No.”  I stayed where I was on
Mikey’s bed.

“No?  I told you to get out, young
lady.  Now go.”

I tried not to let him see I was
nervous.  “Why?  What do you want him for?”

“It’s none of your business.  Go to
your room.”

My voice cracked.  “You’re sick. 
Stay away from him.”

My father stiffened, as shocked as
I was that I had spoken so directly.  “I’m sick?”

“Yes.”

And something broke in him.

“I’m sick?” he taunted.  He strode
over to me and poked me in the arm.  Hard.

“Stop it.”

“Is this sick?”  He poked the other
arm, then the first, then one after the other, back and forth, like plucking
out a tune on the piano.

“Stop it!”  I jumped to my feet. 
My father followed me into the hall, prodding me in the back all the while.

“Am I sick?  Am I sick?”

I raced toward my bedroom.  My
father followed fast.  “Sick?” he kept shouting, and there was a cry at the end
of his voice.  “Sick?  Your father’s sick?”

I leapt into my room and tried to
hold the door against him.

“Sick?  Is this sick?”

“Stop it!”

He burst through and I fell back
and he pinned me to the floor.

“Get off me!  Get off!”  I was
white hot with fear, terrified of how far he might go.

He ran his hands wildly,
maniacally, up and down my body, speeding over breasts and face and groin and
legs and every inch of me while I screamed hysterically for him to stop.

He was possessed.  His eyes were
huge and the whites showed around the pupils and his hands flew like a concert
pianist’s and he ran his dry raspy hands all over my face and body and I had to
smell them and feel them and see them touching me and I screamed and screamed
until no sound would come out, and then finally for no reason he stopped.

“Don’t EVER!” he shouted, jabbing
his finger into my chest, “tell me what to do again!  You are MY daughter!” 
His face was crimson, the veins in his neck distended. “You WILL NOT!”  He
grabbed my arm and wrenched it, tearing my flesh with his fingers.  He gaped at
me, spittle glistening in the corners of his mouth.

His face contorted like I had never
seen and he closed his eyes and cried out,  “How can you do this to me?”

Then he jolted to his feet and
stormed out of the room and left me shaking in horror on the floor.

He slammed his own bedroom door. 
Thank God he didn’t go back to Mikey.  I wouldn’t have had the strength to stop
him.

I disintegrated.  I sobbed and
frantically wiped his fingerprints from my face.  I ran to the bathroom to take
a hot washcloth to my skin.  I scrubbed until my face ached.  It still wasn’t
enough.  I rubbed soap into my skin everywhere he had touched and I left it
there to dry before washing it away.  If I could have taken a blow torch to my
skin I would have.  No one had ever touched me like that.  Ever.  And the fact
that it was my father—

A timid knock on the bathroom
door.  I froze.

“Lizzie?”

It was Mikey.  I flung the door
open.

“Are you okay?” he whispered.

I didn’t care if my father heard. 
Screw him.  “No, I’m not okay!  He’s a sick pervert!  Do you understand?  HE
TOUCHED ME!  OH MY GOD HE WOULDN’T STOP TOUCHING ME!”  I screamed—SCREAMED—and
Mikey backed away because he had never seen me this way before, this way that
was finally me and true and honest.  I screamed.  I was possessed.

I slammed the door.  I stood in
front of the mirror and watched myself scream.  And then I cried, high-pitched,
hysterical, not a cry but a sobbing scream.  I thought I would never stop
screaming.  Never stop crying.  I could still feel his hands everywhere—
everywhere
—inside
and out, even places they might not have been.

When I could breathe again I flung
open the door and ran to the phone and dialed:  first 91—then hung up before I
got to the last number.  Then Posie, and hung up.  I laid my head against my
hand and I tried to think what I should do because now my father was crazy and
he would take me there, too.  I could feel the hinges coming loose in my head. 
I didn’t know what I might do.  I might kill him.  I might go crazy.  I might
just cry until I died.

And so I did nothing.  Because that
is who I am.  That is the shame of who I am.  I called no one, told no one, did
nothing, was nothing.

“Are you all right?” Mikey asked me
later that night, when all was quiet again.

“No.”

He sat on the edge of my bed.  “What
happened?”

“I told you.  I don’t want to talk
about it—it makes me sick.”

Mikey picked at a stray thread on
my quilt.  “Do you think . . . should you tell Mom?”

“No.  She won’t care.”

“I’ll tell her if you want,” my
little brother offered.  My abused little brother.

“Oh, my God.  No.”

I couldn’t put it off any longer.

I had to tell her myself.