Beautiful Lies (22 page)

So we followed him to the guest room. We watched as his chubby fingers pressed against an ordinary-looking part of the wall, and together we gasped as the door swung open, almost like it had materialized from out of nowhere.

“See?” Charlie asked, obviously pleased with himself. “It’s a secret passage. It leads into the kitchen. There’s another door down there, in the wall next to the fridge.”

My sister and I peered inside the dark stairwell. “It’s cold,” Rachel said.

We could hear voices lilting up from the kitchen. It was our aunt and uncle, along with our grandmother, the three of them having a heated discussion about something.

“Don’t tell anyone that I showed you. I wasn’t supposed to,” Charlie said.

I glanced back at him. He gave me a shy, sincere smile. I pulled my thumb and index finger across my lips, like I was zipping them shut. Then I pretended to toss the key across the room.

After that day, my sister and I began to spend hours in the stairwell, listening. It was how we learned that my aunt and uncle refused to let my grandmother—who Rachel and I adored—take custody of us. My aunt claimed that our grandmother was unstable. Even though a part of me suspected she was right, at the time it seemed cruel that we weren’t allowed to stay with the relative we were closest to, instead of having to move in with people who were basically strangers. But even though Aunt Sharon and our mom hadn’t spoken for years, she explained to our grandma in hushed, angry tones that she would be
damned
if she’d let her raise us.

“You think I’m incompetent?” our grandma had asked,
sounding more amused than upset. “You turned out just fine, didn’t you? Here you are, a nice house, good family—what are you so worried about?”

Although I couldn’t see my aunt, I pictured her so clearly in my mind: her eyes shut, fists clenched in frustration, genuine fury in her voice—yet I was certain that if I could have seen her right then, she wouldn’t have a single hair out of place. “Mother, you need to let this go. We will take you to court, and we will win. You cannot raise these girls.” She’d paused. “Not like you raised me and Anna. Especially Anna.”

My sister nudged me from her place beside me on the stairs. I could barely see her in the dark, but I understood immediately what she was feeling. Her breath was ragged. A warm dampness seemed to rise from her body: sweat combined with flushed panic, the rapid heartbeat of someone who felt helpless and trapped. She didn’t want to listen anymore, I knew. And from that day on, I went into the stairwell alone.

Today, Kimber and I find my sixty-year-old grandmother standing in her kitchen, her clothing covered in blackberry juice, her hands stained a deep shade of purple. Her counter-tops are lined with empty mason jars. A huge silver pot filled with dark-purple goo simmers on the stove. The room smells so sweet that it’s almost overwhelming. She’s making jelly,
I’m guessing, which is an extremely uncharacteristic thing for my grandma to do. She barely cooks at all; even though she never stays to visit, my aunt usually brings her over a casserole or something every Sunday, and it lasts pretty much all week. My grandma is rail-thin, and I’ve heard her complain more than once that her medication takes away her appetite. It could also have something to do with the fact that she chain-smokes and drinks coffee all day.

“Hello, ladies,” she says, smiling graciously, almost like she was expecting us. She’s wearing an apron, which is also out of character; I’m surprised she even owns one. Underneath it, she’s wearing a pale-pink nightgown, which is really more of a slip. Her feet are bare. Her hair, which she’s been dyeing red ever since it started going gray, falls past her shoulders in gentle waves. It’s the hair of a much younger woman, and it might look ridiculous on anybody else her age, but somehow she pulls it off. Her face is wrinkled but still beautiful, her eyes sharp and deep blue, her makeup subtle except for her lips, which are painted a bright red. In her right hand, she holds a lit cigarette between her index and middle finger. Every few seconds she takes a dainty puff, blowing smoke rings into the air. I’ve never heard her say anything about wanting to quit.

After I’ve made the introductions between my grandmother and Kimber, I take a harder look around the kitchen. It’s a huge mess; she’ll be working for days to get it cleaned up, if she bothers to clean it up at all. She might just wait for
my aunt to come over, notice the mess, and take care of it for her.

“I know what you’re thinking,” my grandma says, dragging on her cigarette, “but I had no other choice. I had all these berries in the basement freezer. Jack Allen’s wife, Louise, grew them in her garden.” My grandma gives a little snort of amusement. “Louise passed away two weeks ago. Jack is moving to Pine Ridge—that’s an assisted-living facility—so he’s cleaning out their house. Now here I am, stuck with a dead woman’s berry stash. How the hell am I going to eat them? I’m not a bird. So I thought, well, I’m an old lady. Aren’t we supposed to do things like this?” She winks at Kimber. “But it’s my special recipe. Medicinal jelly. I should put up a stand outside the senior center downtown. What do you think I could charge—forty dollars a jar? Fifty? I won’t go lower than thirty-five. I need the money. I’m on a fixed income, you know.”

Kimber is confused, and I’m not surprised; I didn’t say anything to prepare her for my grandma’s … personality. “Why is it medicinal?” she asks.

Without any hesitation, my grandmother replies, “Why do you think? It’s pot jelly.”

Kimber gives me a panicked glance. I giggle.

“She’s kidding,” I explain. “It’s just regular jelly.” At least I hope she’s kidding. I’m fairly certain that reefer jelly won’t complement my grandma’s pharmaceutical regimen too well.

“Bullshit.” My grandma grinds out her cigarette in a clay
ashtray. “That’s the thing about being older. You can get away with anything. Even shoplifting!”

“Grandma—” I begin, but she interrupts me.

“I know why you’re here.” She fans the smoke in the air. “You’re looking for your sister.”

Kimber and I both nod. I open my mouth, ready to launch into an explanation of recent events, but my grandma doesn’t seem interested in listening at the moment. She has other ideas. She turns abruptly, collects half a dozen sealed jars of jelly, and presses them into my arms. “Before we discuss this,” she says, “take these into the barn real quick for me. Put them on the shelves.”

“Here,” Kimber says, leaping at the opportunity to get away from my grandma, who I guess must seem downright creepy to someone as wholesome as Kimber. “Let me help you, Rachel.”

“Oh, please. Stay with me, would you?” My grandma’s voice becomes falsely meek and pathetic. “It’s so rare for me to get company … especially now that Louise is gone.”

There is an uncomfortable pause as Kimber—who seems torn between the polite thing to do and what she obviously wants to do (avoid being alone with my grandma)—presses her rosy, full lips together, doing her best not to pout.

With my arms full of jars, I begin to back away. “You know, Kimber is a Girl Scout,” I tell my grandma.

Kimber shoots me a desperate look. I shrug apologetically. “I’ll be right back,” I tell her.

As I’m going down the hall toward the front door, I hear Kimber ask, “Was the woman who passed away—Louise—a close friend of yours?”

“Not really,” my grandma says. “She was a Republican.”

“Oh.” Pause. “How did she, um, can I ask—”

“How did she die? Well, she was eighty-four, so that should be obvious, shouldn’t it?”

“Uh … you mean because she was very elderly? So I take it she was in poor health?”

“No,” my grandma replies, “she was in fine health.” I hear the distinct hiss of a match as she lights another cigarette. “It was a waterskiing accident.”

The barn sits at the bottom of the hillside, a few feet from the driveway and Kimber’s car. Although my grandma doesn’t use it much, my aunt and uncle make sure the building stays in decent repair. A few summers ago they had it repainted and had the roof replaced. Still, it’s only a barn: it has a dirt floor, plenty of spiderwebs (and spiders), and no heat. Inside, the only source of light comes from a few bare bulbs scattered around the walls, their wiring exposed, simply stapled to the wood.

Since my arms are full, I nudge one of the wooden doors with my hip. There is an immediate blast of cold as I step into the dark, damp space. A long, narrow triangle of light
illuminates the dirty floor, the air filled with thousands of tiny specks of dust, as the door drifts all the way open.

I feel like a child. I feel afraid. There are rustling sounds in the darkness, but I can’t tell exactly where they’re coming from. There could be all kinds of creatures hiding in here. I gather the jars in one arm, and then I use my free hand to feel along the wall for the light switch. Directly behind me, outside, it is a bright and lovely day; yet standing in the barn makes me feel like I’ve stepped into another world. The daylight over my shoulder seems to be getting farther away with each second, like I’m being pulled against my will through a dark tunnel, leaving the light behind. There is a musty, unpleasant odor in the air, but I can’t quite place the smell. I consider setting the jars down on the ground right in front of me and leaving, not bothering to put them on the shelves, which are on the opposite end of the barn. The light coming from the burning bulbs is dim; the exposed wood beams in the walls look like hovering figures all around me. The rustling sound persists. It is quiet enough that I might not have noticed it if I weren’t alone in here, if my senses weren’t heightened by my anxiety and the darkness.

I squint, looking around, trying to focus on the noise, to stay calm, to steady myself. There is a sudden loud snapping sound, like somebody or something has stepped on a twig. And then I realize: the noises are coming from the hayloft.

Behind me, the door creaks back and forth in the light breeze. The noise could be anything. It could be something
as innocent as a squirrel or the wind coming through a crack in the wall. The smell, so pungent and unpleasant, is probably just the smell of an old barn: wood chewed away by insects from the inside out, piles of who knows what stacked against the walls, my grandmother’s random stuff collected over the decades and stashed away, unused but still wanted. She likes to hold on to things. It’s not so much a matter of being sentimental as it is a matter of her being sort of insane.

The smell is stronger now. It might as well be seeping from the walls. All of a sudden, I recognize it, plain as anything: it’s the smell of rotting apples, the odor sweet and damp and rancid. There are several crab apple trees on my grandma’s property. When my sister and I were younger, our parents used to keep us occupied during visits here by giving us paper grocery bags and sending us into the field to collect the apples that had fallen onto the ground. Usually they were rotting, chewed by bugs in places, obviously not fit to eat. But I remember the way my hands would smell after an afternoon spent gathering apples. They smelled like this place, right here and now. Back then the smell didn’t bother me; I was so happy to be outside with my sister, just the two of us alone, the rest of the world a distraction that we could simply ignore. Today, the smell is overwhelming, so unsettling that my skin feels electric with fear.