Beautiful Lies Read online

  He and my aunt are watching The Muppets Take Manhattan, which means that, even though I don’t see my cousin Charlie in the room anywhere, he can’t be far away. Charlie loves the Muppets. He’s nineteen years old. When he was born, his umbilical cord got wrapped around his neck during delivery, cutting off his oxygen for a few minutes. So Charlie is different from other men his age. But it’s good-different. As worried as I am about my sister, when I see my cousin walking into the living room, carefully holding a full glass of iced tea in one hand, his other arm curled around a bowl of popcorn, it occurs to me that he’s going to love the peach-pit monkey. Maybe I’ll give it to him.

  The three of them stare at me when I step inside.

  Almost immediately, my aunt’s lips form a stiff line. She’d be pretty, maybe even beautiful, if she weren’t pissed off so much of the time. Sometimes she gets mad at my uncle too, but she almost never gets upset with Charlie. She’s always stayed home with him. He can’t be left alone for too long. When she has time, my aunt volunteers as a docent for the Greensburg art museum a few afternoons a week. She’s like a tour guide, but for paintings. She was an art history major in college, before she had Charlie. My mom had an interest in art, but she didn’t just study art, she created it.

  “Where’s Alice?” my aunt demands. It’s like the sound of the name alone—Alice—makes her blood boil.

  The wheeze persists. Can they hear it? I squeeze the monkey in my hand, trying to stay calm. Charlie crunches on his popcorn, his eyes fixed on the television. We’d wanted to bring him with us tonight, but my aunt said no. She didn’t have a good reason. She can be overprotective.

  “She isn’t here.” It’s not a question.

  “No, she isn’t.” My aunt crosses her arms. “Why isn’t she with you?”

  I take a deep breath before I launch into my plea. “Aunt Sharon, Uncle Jeff, please listen. I was riding the Ferris wheel, and all of a sudden Alice was gone. I couldn’t find her anywhere. I think something’s wrong. She wouldn’t have left without telling me.”

  My aunt nods slowly. “Jeff? Are you hearing this?”

  His gaze is fixed on the television. “I sure am.”

  “Who were you with?” she asks.

  “A few people. Kimber and Holly and Nicholas. They said they would call me if they saw her, but that was over half an hour ago.” My voice begins to rise. “You know she wouldn’t leave without telling me. You know that.”

  My aunt presses her hands to her face. Her engagement ring, which is big and round, sparkles beside her wedding band, beneath the light of the living room’s brass chandelier. “Rachel, your uncle and I have had a very long evening. I can’t do this right now. You don’t have any clue where she might have gone?”

  “No! She just disappeared. Aunt Sharon, please. She would have told me if she were going somewhere. Listen to me.” I’m almost yelling at them. I have everyone’s attention now, including Charlie’s.

  “I found a cat, Rachel,” my cousin interrupts, as though the news will calm me.

  “Your cousin found a cat,” my aunt confirms, staring upward at the light. “The cat is pregnant. She’s in the kitchen.”

  My uncle appears to be thinking, looking at me now. His index finger is pressed to the tip of his nose. When we make eye contact, he shrugs. He’s obviously not too upset by the idea that my sister is missing. “We named it Linda,” he offers.

  I look at the three of them. My wheeze has subsided, but now I can feel my heart beating quickly in my chest. Holly’s pills are kicking in. I shouldn’t have taken so many. “What?”

  “The cat,” my uncle clarifies. “We named the cat Linda.” The information seems to cheer him. He adds, as though I care, “After Paul McCartney’s first wife.” Charlie loves the Beatles.

  “Jeff, wait. She’s worried about her sister. Rachel,” my aunt says, scooting over on the wide sofa, making room for me. “Come here.”

  I shake my head. “No. You need to call the police.”

  “The police?” She stares at me. “She’s been gone less than an hour. Sweetie, come on. What are the police going to do? Alice is eighteen.” But my aunt can see how upset I am. “Jeff?” she asks. “What do you think? Should we go look for her?”

  My uncle is eating a handful of Charlie’s popcorn now, chewing while he speaks. “If Alice can figure out how to turn back the odometer on my sports car, then I’m sure she can take care of herself for an evening.”

  I’m almost crying. “Uncle Jeff, this isn’t funny. Please listen. I know something happened.”

  Charlie blinks at me. “How do you know, Rachel?”

  “I know because … because I just do. I can feel it. It’s like one second she was there, and then she was gone. I mean gone. Please,” I beg, “call the police. Tell them she’s missing. Say we can’t find her. They’ll know what to do. They can put out a bulletin, or search the fair, or—”

  “Rachel, your sister has a criminal record. Honey, the police won’t look for her yet. You need to calm down.” My aunt’s gaze flickers back to the Muppets.

  Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, my heart thumps. I’m sweating. “If you won’t call the police, then I will.”

  “What?” She seems alarmed by the idea. “Rachel, please don’t do that. Think about this for a minute. Alice disappears. It’s what she does.” My aunt has little patience for behavior that is anything besides orderly and whatever she considers “normal.” Her own mother—my grandma—is certifiably crazy, which made for a miserable childhood for my aunt and mother; my grandma had a hard time functioning from day to day, and she’s had more than a few stints in institutions, even when her daughters were young. My mom got over it eventually, but Aunt Sharon never has.

  “Alice didn’t run away this time.” I can’t explain to them how I know, though. They wouldn’t understand any of it. Even I don’t understand it, not completely. All I know is that I can’t feel her anymore. Our connection has been replaced by a messy sense of dread that fills my whole body, seeping into the space around me.

  My aunt and uncle exchange a look, communicating with their eyes, the way people who have been married for a long time can do.

  “Okay, Rach,” my uncle finally says, “if Alice doesn’t come home tonight, we’ll call the police in the morning. In the meantime, why don’t you get in touch with a few of your friends? See if any of them ran into her.”

  “Fine.” My voice trembles. My fingertips are numb. “I’m going upstairs.”

  In our room on the third floor, I sit cross-legged on my bed, staring at my phone for a long time, willing it to ring. Willing it to be her, calling to say she’s all right.

  Alone in the room, I look around, trying to take some comfort in the familiar surroundings. My sister’s bed, against the back wall of the house, is unmade as usual. Heaps of our clothing litter the floor. An easel sits beside the front window, holding a work in progress. It’s a charcoal drawing of Robin, started weeks ago, abandoned when the relationship got messy. The walls are covered with sketches. Some of them are random objects—books and buildings and household things, studies from long hours spent after school in the art room. Lots of them are of Charlie, who is an excellent model. A few others depict a smiling young girl with a small gap between her top front teeth. I don’t know her name or who she is, but there must be at least a dozen sketches of her in our room alone. In the lower-right corner of every drawing, so small you could barely see them, are the initials A.E.F. A talent for art is one of the few things my sister and I don’t have in common.

  After almost twenty minutes of sitting in near silence, listening to the sound of blood rushing behind my ears, trying to calm myself without any success, I know I have to do something. I can’t sit here all night, waiting.

  What I really want to do is call Robin. If he’s around, maybe there’s a chance he saw my sister at the fair and tried to talk to her. It seems unlikely, and he wouldn’t have gotten very far with her if they did run into each other. But I
can’t call him. Robin is the only person I know who has never owned a cell phone. At least, he always claimed he didn’t have one. No cell, no house line, no way whatsoever for anybody to get in touch with him unless he reached out first.

  I sit, staring at my phone, trying to will it to ring.

  It does. The sound makes me jump. I look at the screen to see who’s calling, but it only says UNKNOWN NUMBER. It could be him. It must be him. It rings four times before I answer.

  “Hello?” I ask tentatively.

  Silence on the other end.

  “Hello?” I repeat. “Who is this?”

  “Hi.” It’s him. There’s no background noise. Even though he’s only said one word, I can sense that he sounds tired, or maybe sad. Where is he? What is he doing tonight? Who is he with?

  “Robin,” I say. “Where are you?” He tends to come and go as he pleases, showing up out of nowhere sometimes.

  “I’m here,” he says. “I’m talking to you.”

  “You have to tell me something,” I continue. “It’s important. Promise you’ll tell me the truth, okay?”

  Another pause. “Sure.”

  “Were you at Hollick Park tonight? There’s a fair. You must have seen it.” He lives on the opposite side of town, but everybody knows about the autumn festival.

  I can hear him smiling. I can picture exactly what he looks like in my mind. “Nope,” he says, “I’ve been here all night.”

  “Where are you?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Robin,” I say, “it is important. Why did you call me, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I just felt like it, okay?”

  “You haven’t been around lately. What have you been doing?”

  He ignores the question. “I’ve gotta go. Sorry. Listen, though—you know where to find me if you need anything, right?”

  I stare at his portrait, which is so lifelike that it almost seems like he’s right here in the room with me.

  There’s a pause in our conversation that seems to stretch forever. I can hear his thick breath. He’s smoking a cigarette. I imagine the room he might be in, all alone in his cheap apartment on the east end of town.

  I squeeze my eyes shut in frustration. He is always like this, so nebulous. So difficult to pin down. “Right,” I say weakly. “Fine. Thanks a lot.”

  I don’t wait long for him to respond. After a few seconds, I take the phone away from my ear, press end, and toss it onto the bed.

  Minutes pass, and he doesn’t call back. But I continue to stare at his half-finished portrait near the window, trying to imagine what he’s doing at this moment. I lay in bed, on top of my sheets, listening to my heart beating in my chest. I can feel my eyes moving in their sockets. My sweat dampens my clothing, and I get so chilly that I can’t stand it anymore, so I finally get up and change into a pair of pajamas. Around two in the morning, I cross the room and climb into my sister’s bed. I lay there for what feels like forever, until I can’t hold my eyes open any longer. Downstairs, I hear Linda the cat meowing in the kitchen, all by herself, afraid of the dark night.

  Chapter Three

  We were four the first time. We had a baby pool in our backyard. I was in the pool, playing with a plastic teacup set. My sister went inside to use the bathroom. My mother let her go in all by herself. The bathroom was right inside the back door, next to the kitchen.

  My mother had dark red hair that she used to wear in a messy ponytail. She’d sit in her lawn chair beside the pool, keeping an eye on us while she read a book, smoking her cigarettes. She smoked all the time. I didn’t realize until I was much older that it wasn’t socially acceptable to smoke, much less around your children. My mom never finished college; instead, she had us. She married my father when she was only twenty-one. But this was a long time ago—back when it wasn’t so unusual for people to get married so young.

  Back then, to me, my mom always seemed happy. She laughed a lot, and some days when we were finished playing in the baby pool, she’d take us inside and we’d make microwave brownies together. She always let us crack the eggs. I remember her smell—it wasn’t perfume or soap or anything like that. It was just the way she smelled, like cigarettes and teaberry chewing gum.

  My sister was in the house using the bathroom that day, and I was in the pool. I sat with my legs folded underneath me, bent at the knees. It was a hot day, the kind of heat where you can see the sunlight shimmering in the air. The grass kept turning brown and was starting to die underneath the baby pool because it didn’t get any sun, so my parents would move the pool around the yard to help the grass grow back, and finally we had all these big brown circles in the yard, like a map of every place the pool had been that summer.

  My mother wore big, round sunglasses with pink frames. She was reclined in her chair, reading her book. All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe.

  I tried. I put my hands to my throat and struggled for air, but it felt like I’d swallowed a rock. I didn’t cough. I gagged. I panicked, splashing around in the water, trying to breathe.

  “Baby?” My mother put her book down. I shook my head at her. I couldn’t speak or cry or do anything but work for air that wasn’t coming.

  “Sweetie, say something!” My mother rushed to me, picked me up from the pool, and lay me down on the lawn. She shook me hard. She screamed my name over and over. She slapped me across the face.

  But no matter how I tried, I could not manage to take a breath. My mother picked me up like I weighed next to nothing and threw me over her shoulder, hitting me on the back as she carried me inside.

  There, in the kitchen, lay my sister. She was on the ceramic tile floor. She wasn’t breathing. She was bluish, her wispy red hair across her face, her little mouth wide open. I remember it all so vividly. I remember looking down at her and thinking, “That’s me down there.” Because I felt exactly what she was feeling.

  My mother knelt beside my sister. She shook her hard. She screamed her name over and over. She slapped her across the face. Still, my sister did not breathe. Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t looking at us. It was like she wasn’t there.

  My mother lay me down on the floor, her gaze filled with horror as she tried to help both of us at the same time. She struggled to lift up my sister and pound on her back. “Steven!” she screamed, calling for my father. Then she put her arms around my sister’s stomach, hands clasped together against her small tummy like a knot, and pushed.

  My sister spit something out. She coughed and coughed. Then she threw up all over the floor.

  My mother gazed at the mess. With her thumb and index finger, she reached into it and picked something up. She stared at it, then she looked at me.

  I was breathing again. It all happened in an instant. I felt fine.

  My mother, though, did not seem fine. Her face was white. I looked at what she was holding. It was a big wad of pink teaberry gum.

  That was the first time.

  I dream of my sister all night long. At least that’s how it feels; I read somewhere that dreams only last a few seconds, even though it might seem like they go on for hours.

  We are standing on the running path, walking side by side with our fingers laced together gently, our arms swinging as we stroll along.

  In the dream, I feel worried. There is a strong, cool breeze that whips my hair into my line of vision, obscuring my surroundings. I grip my sister’s hand more tightly. “We should go home,” I tell her.

  She stops. She reaches toward me and brushes the hair from my eyes. “You go ahead. I have to stay behind.”

  “Why?” I ask, still holding her hand. I feel certain that I can’t let go, or she might slip away forever.

  She doesn’t answer me. She looks up at the sky, which is overcast, thick with dark, puffy cumulus clouds. “It might rain soon.”

  “I don’t want to leave you here,” I say.

  She smiles at me. “You don’t have a choice.”

  Then the oddest t
hing happens. It’s like she starts to fade, her form growing translucent, her hand slipping away from mine even as I struggle to maintain my grasp. The wind picks up, and she begins to blur around the edges. It’s like an invisible hand is taking an eraser to her figure.

  I want to lunge after her, to save her, but I can’t move. I am frozen in place. All I can do is watch as she grows fainter by the minute. I open my mouth to scream her name, but I can’t make a sound.

  Just before she disappears, she speaks to me one last time. Her voice is strong and firm, so different from her appearance. “Don’t. Tell. Anyone. Not a soul.”

  I find my voice, shouting her name even as she vanishes into thin air. I feel incredibly cold all of a sudden, unable to move, shivering, waiting for her to reappear. I stare at the empty space for what feels like hours, but she doesn’t return.

  I wake up with my legs tangled in her sheets, sunlight leaking through the cracks in our window’s wooden shutters. It’s 9:13 in the morning. I feel something in my hand; looking down, I see that I’m still clutching the carved monkey. I’ve been holding on to it all night.

  Beside me, resting on the fitted sheet, is my phone. Its tiny message light is off. No missed calls. No texts. Nothing.

  But the panic is still here; almost immediately, I realize that I’m sweating. The sheets are all wet. My sister, I know, did not come home last night. She isn’t downstairs watching cartoons with Charlie. She isn’t making herself some cinnamon toast in the kitchen. She isn’t anywhere.

  I put my feet on the floor. I stare at the monkey again, holding it up to the sunlight, noticing its precise detail. For some reason, I don’t want to put it down. Each individual finger is visible against the tree trunk. Its mouth is an almost-perfect tiny heart shape. I’ve never seen anything like it.