Beautiful Lies (21 page)

Kimber has been quiet for the past few minutes. As we approach the turn onto Foxtail Road, she brings the car to a rolling stop at the red light. Then she nods to the left, her eyes narrowing as she stares at the huge brick building complex situated on the hillside. The buildings are surrounded by high metal fencing, topped with shiny loops of barbed wire. It’s the state prison.

“Wave to my daddy,” she murmurs. Her tone is both sad and sarcastic.

“Oh, yeah.” I lower my sunglasses to peer at the structure. If it weren’t for the barbed wire, the gated entrance, the guard-occupied security booth, and the huge sign that reads STATE CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTE, the place could almost be mistaken for something less menacing, like a college or a hospital.

“Has he been there ever since …? I mean—”

“Ever since he tried to kill me and my mother?” she asks, her voice bitter. “Yeah. It’s lovely that we still get to be neighbors, isn’t it?”

She makes the right turn onto Foxtail Road. This is the
first time I’ve ever heard Kimber say anything about her dad. Until now, everything I knew about the incident came from other sources. It happened years ago, but people still talk about it. After the fire, Kimber’s old house was leveled down to the foundation, but nobody has done anything with the lot since then. It’s just
there,
only a few blocks from Kimber’s new house that she shares with her mom, a constant reminder of what happened.

“Have you ever thought about going to visit him?”

She gives me a sharp look. “No.”

“…”

“…”

“Sorry,” I tell her. “I didn’t mean to pry. It’s just … I don’t know … I can’t imagine what it must feel like.”

“It feels fantastic. How do you think it feels?” The prison slips out of sight as we continue down the narrow, curvy road. We are surrounded by tall pine trees on both sides.
Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go …

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

She shakes her head. “It’s okay. It’s funny that you asked, though. I’ll probably see him later this week, as much as I don’t want to.” And she nods toward the floor of the passenger side, where the items that spilled from the glove box a few moments earlier are still in a messy pile. “Can you put that stuff away?”

I lean over and start placing things back inside the compartment. The door has been hanging open all this time. As
I’m doing so, Kimber tells me, “It’s not like I ever stop thinking about him. All I have to do is look in the mirror. Every morning when I get dressed. Every time I take a shower.”

I’ve seen the scars on her back a few times before. They’re horrible. And I know now how she must feel, at least to some extent: every time I look in the mirror, I am reminded of my sister.

“So why are you going to see him now? I mean, after all these years?”

She snorts. “Because the district attorney called my house a few months ago. My dad is up for parole in November—there’s going to be a hearing on Friday. I might have to testify.” She blinks a few times, staring straight ahead. “I’m going to try and keep him in jail.”

And without any warning, she reaches into her shirt, into her bra. In a swift, practiced motion, she tugs at each side of her chest. Then she hands something to me: two flesh-colored, rubbery half moons, which are sticky on one side and warm all over from being so close to her body.

I stare at them in my hands, shocked. Kimber is a private, shy person; never in a million years would I expect her to hand me something from her bra.

“Put those in the glove box, too,” she instructs me. Her voice is cold, but it wavers with the slightest hint of embarrassment, as though even she can’t believe what she’s just done.

I can’t stop looking at them. “What are these?”

She continues to stare straight ahead. “They’re my breasts, Rachel. The fire ruined me. It killed so much tissue that I’ll never have normal ones, so I wear these instead.”

I don’t know what to say. How am I supposed to respond? All I can think to do is rest the inserts carefully on top of the driver’s manual and close the door to the glove box.

We are approaching my grandmother’s long gravel driveway. “Pull in here,” I tell her quietly.

She brings the car to a stop outside the house. She shuts off the engine, turns to me, and places a hand gently on my arm. “Hey. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to freak you out back there. I’m not sure what I was thinking. I didn’t mean to make this about me, either. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“It’s fine. You can tell me whatever you want.”
Oh, Kimber.
I feel a pang of guilt for my recent dismissive attitude toward her.

“Those things—my mom calls them cutlets—they get all hot and sweaty. I hate wearing them every day.” And she shrugs. “I don’t know why I bother, anyway. I guess I just want to look normal, from the outside at least. I’m not trying to attract attention from boys or anyone. I don’t want you to think that.”

I shake my head. “That isn’t what I thought.”

“It’s not like I’m going to fool anybody into thinking I’m beautiful.” She tosses her keys into her purse. “Not that it matters. Nobody wants to date a freak, right?”

“Kimber …”

She shakes her head. “Stop. Don’t say anything else. I’m sorry I brought it up at all.”

There is a silence, not so much awkward as it is filled with unspoken thoughts; I can tell we both have plenty of them.

Kimber looks at our surroundings, like she’s noticing them for the first time. Just beyond the gravel driveway, in a wide clearing on a hillside, there is a big brick Colonial house covered in dark-green ivy. A crooked wooden porch wraps around the entire first floor. Beyond the house, there’s a large red barn. This place hasn’t been a working farm in decades; in the field beside the house, a rusty, broken tractor rests on the ground, surrounded by tall grass. It’s like somebody, many years ago, decided to take his lunch break in the middle of working the land and simply never returned.

“Your grandma lives here?” she asks. “This is beautiful. I never knew this place even existed.”

“Yep. This is our family’s old farm.” I open my door and climb out of the car, sliding my purse onto my shoulder. “Come on.”

“You think Alice might be here?” Kimber steps gingerly on the uneven ground, large patches of dirt and rocks mingled with the grass beneath us.

“I don’t know,” I say, staring at the house. I cannot set foot in this place without thinking of my childhood and all the times we used to spend here as a family: my parents, my sister, and myself. We visited as often as once a week, mostly
on Sundays. Even when my grandma wasn’t here, away on one of her many stints at the state hospital, we still came by to check on the place all the time.

My mother never seemed to resent my grandma for her problems. She was always gentle and loving and patient, even when my grandma was out of control. I remember arriving one Sunday morning, years ago, to find her—she was in her fifties—up on the roof, still in her nightgown. She was painting the eaves of the house bright green for no particular reason. Once my parents coaxed her down, she admitted that she hadn’t slept in almost four days.

When we were kids, my parents never explained much about my grandma’s condition. They simply told us she was sick. “Sometimes people’s bodies get sick,” my mom would say, “and sometimes our minds get sick.”

As a child, I was confused by the explanation. “But she has a gift,” I said. “She knows things other people don’t. You’ve told me so yourself. How does that make her sick?” To me, it only made her extraordinary.

The question didn’t faze my mother; I realize now that she’d probably given the matter plenty of thought herself. “It’s a fine line,” she told me. “Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference. And sometimes the line is … blurred.”

My aunt has never been nearly as tactful. She throws around words like “crazy” and “delusional” and “destructive.” She
only references her childhood in terms of neglect and unhappiness. My grandma first started to show signs of illness when my aunt and mom were toddlers. After their father died, there were times when my grandma wasn’t able to care for them, and they ended up in and out of foster care until they were teenagers. My aunt can’t let it go.

My mother and her sister dealt with their upbringing in very different ways. My mom threw herself into art, using her creativity to disguise whatever hard feelings might have lingered inside her, turning her suffering into beauty. But she was also a little unstable, maybe never quite as invested in reality as she should have been. I didn’t understand that as a child, but I do now.

My aunt is the polar opposite of her mother and sister. She clings to order and logic and facts, like they’re somehow more reliable than emotion, which can get so out of control if it comes unhinged. She’s afraid of ending up like my grandma; that much is obvious. But what she doesn’t seem to understand is that you can’t make something go away simply by ignoring it.

That’s why my aunt will never accept that I have any special connection to my sister. The idea is too close to the insanity that she grew up with for her to acknowledge that it might be real.

“Are you okay?” Kimber is staring, waiting for me to move toward the house so she can follow. She squints at me. “Rachel?”

At the sound of my sister’s name, an achy wave of guilt
ripples through my body. It should have been me who disappeared on Saturday.

If I pretend hard enough, could I make it true? Could I make it happen by simply ignoring the truth? I could almost be her right now. I could fool everyone. And would they even miss me—would they miss Alice? Would they wish I hadn’t disappeared? Or would they be content for the rest of their lives, believing my sister had been spared whatever happened to her twin?

Because I could do it, if I wanted to. If I put my whole self into it, I could become Rachel—I know I could. I could make Alice disappear forever. And maybe everyone would be happier that way.

After our parents’ deaths, my sister and I came to understand certain facts that no nine-year-olds should ever have to contemplate. We learned, for instance, that our parents had been desperately broke: living on a single teacher’s salary, struggling to keep up with student-loan payments and a mortgage, while still supporting themselves and their daughters. We learned that there had been no life insurance to speak of—and while we might not have understood exactly what life insurance was at the time, we could pick up enough meaning from our relatives’ tones to know it was pretty important.

We learned that neither one of them had bothered to draft a will. Our grandmother covered the cost for our mother’s funeral; our father’s parents, who had lived in Las Vegas all our lives and who we rarely saw, paid for his casket and burial. It was sort of like the way a bride and groom’s
parents divvy up costs for a wedding, except it wasn’t like that at all.

We learned by listening. Eavesdropping, really. My sister and I began staying with our aunt and uncle almost immediately after the accident. When they gave us our tour of the house, they made a point of not showing us the secret stairwell. It makes sense that they wouldn’t want us to know about it; the stairs are steep and could be dangerous for a child. And the doors—especially the one that leads into the kitchen—tend to stick. Of course they didn’t want us crawling around in the darkness alone either.

But after we’d been living there for a week or so, Charlie found a quiet moment when we were watching television together downstairs to bring up the subject. He was only thirteen back then. My sister and I understood that he was slower than we were, but the difference didn’t seem nearly as pronounced at the time.

We were watching
The Price is Right,
the three of us sipping soda from plastic cups, uncomfortable, staring at the screen, pretending to be engrossed in the game show. Up to that point, Charlie had been extremely shy around us.

“Hey,” he’d said, brightening, looking around to make sure his parents weren’t anywhere they could hear us. “Do you guys want to see something cool?”

Rachel and I exchanged a wary glance. We didn’t answer him at first.

“I mean it,” he said. “It’s awesome. You guys aren’t supposed to know about it. I’m breaking a rule.”

Even at that age—and even in the wake of my parents’ deaths—I was drawn to breaking rules. I nodded at Charlie. “Okay.”

Rachel was more hesitant. “I don’t know,” she said, weaving her fingers through mine. “I don’t want to get into trouble.” She shifted her gaze to our cousin. “How do your parents punish you, Charlie?”

All three of us had neon-green straws in our cups. Distracted, Charlie blew air bubbles into his drink. “What do you mean,
punish
?” he asked. “Like when I get into trouble?”

Rachel nodded. “Yeah. Do you get sent to your room? Or do they do something different?”

It seemed like a fair enough question. We might have been related to them, but we’d only known these people for a week. Who knew what they might do if they caught us snooping around their house without permission?

But Charlie only shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he told Rachel. “I hardly ever get into trouble.” He paused. “Are you gonna let me show you?” His eyes were bright and warm. I barely knew him, but I loved him already. “You’ll like it. I promise.”