Beautiful Lies (30 page)

“Sure I do. Why?”

I never thought I’d be telling her what I overhead that day, but I can’t stop myself. Bringing it up right now seems cruel. She’s tired. She’s upset. I do it anyway, though. It’s like I can’t stand to go one more day without knowing why she said those things.

“While you were paying for our dresses, the saleswoman asked you if we were your daughters. You said yes. She asked if you had any other children, and you said no. I heard you.”

My aunt looks at her hands. She fiddles with her wedding band, twirling it around her finger in a worried gesture. For a second I think she might cry.

She doesn’t. She presses her hands against her frosted beer mug. “I poured this the wrong way,” she says. “See how there’s so much foam on top? When we were in high school, at parties, your mom always had this method for dissolving it. She’d rub her finger on her face, and then she’d stir it around in the foam.”

“You went to parties in high school? With my mom?” I can’t imagine my aunt surrounded by fun or laughter. I can’t
imagine her approving of a party full of high school students, much less attending one.

The question seems to upset her far more than my revelation of what I overheard at the dress shop two years ago. “Of course I went to parties. That surprises you, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe a little,” I admit.

“I even had a nickname.” She glances into the living room, where my uncle is still watching television. “I had this boyfriend named Anthony, but everyone called him Tony. He moved here from New York City at the beginning of our senior year. He drove a red Camaro.” She laughs. “Can you imagine? Me riding in a red Camaro with this beautiful, sophisticated boy? At least, we all thought he was sophisticated. He sold a lot of pot, I remember.” Her eyes crinkle at their corners in a reflex of disapproval.

“What was your nickname?”

“What? Oh, right—it was Sherry. Sherry Baby.” And she starts to hum softly. I recognize the song: it’s “Sherry Baby” by the Four Seasons.

“What happened to him?”

She stops humming. She seems lost. “What happened to whom?”

“Your boyfriend. Tony.”

“I have no idea. We broke up after a few months, and we graduated shortly after that. I went off to college and met your uncle. A couple of years later, we had Charlie. You know the rest. I don’t think I’d recognize Tony if I passed him on the
street tomorrow. It’s funny, because at the time, I was so in love with him. I thought we’d get married after high school, and the rest of our lives together would be perfect.” She sips her beer. “I was stupid back then, Rachel. I didn’t know anything about life. Someday you’ll understand what I mean.”

My aunt has never talked much about her youth until now. I’m still not sure I believe anything she’s saying; maybe she’s making it all up, trying to convince me there was a time when she was cool. She’s right about one thing, though: the idea of her riding around town in a Camaro with a cute boy from New York City seems impossible.

“I remember the day I took you shopping,” she says. “We had so much fun, didn’t we? You and your sister tried on all those dresses … you both looked so beautiful.”

“You let us buy Wonderbras that day too,” I say. My sister and I were giddy over them. For an instant, my thoughts shift to Kimber and her cutlets, and I feel almost ashamed by the fact that I got to own a Wonderbra despite already having perfectly adequate breasts.

“I remember what I said to the saleswoman too.”

I’d expected her to deny it, or insist that I misheard their conversation. “You do?”

“Yes.”

“…”

“…”

“Why did you lie, Aunt Sharon?”

She leans her elbows on the table and rests her chin in
her hands. “Don’t you ever wish you could be someone else, Rachel? Even for just one day?”

When I don’t answer her right away, it’s like the spell she’s been under is suddenly broken. She sits up and shakes her head a little bit, like she’s coming out of a daze. “Well. I have to finish these bills before I go to the post office tomorrow.” Her voice is crisp again. “Tell your cousin to get some sleep.”

When I reach the second-floor landing, Charlie’s bedroom door is closed most of the way, but not completely. I can hear the soft mewing of kittens within. I nudge the door open and see my cousin curled up on his side in bed. He’s already asleep, snoring softly, his sheets pulled up to his chin, a pair of bulky headphones over his ears. The headphones are attached to his iPod, which is clipped to the collar of his white undershirt. The music is turned up so loud that I can hear it from across the room. I can’t help but smile. The song is “Rocky Raccoon” by the Beatles.

As I’m looking at him, I notice something moving beneath his sheet, near his stomach. Taking careful, slow steps so as not to wake him—although he’s always been a deep sleeper—I lean over the bed and tug back the sheet. There, nestled at his side, are all four of the kittens.

They’re asleep. At least, I think they are—they’re probably
not old enough yet for their eyes to have opened. They lay in tiny gray balls, so close to one another that I can barely tell them apart, each of them no bigger than my cousin’s fist. They don’t even look like kittens, really—more like some kind of unknown, furry creature, sort of like a tiny squirrel crossed with a miniature rabbit. They are far too small to have climbed up here by themselves, I know. Charlie has brought them into bed with him. He wants to keep them close.

At the other side of his room, Linda McCartney is awake and watching me. She sits on her side, her fuzzy tail beating against the beige carpet. She’s skinny all over, except for her belly, which is fat and distended, swollen with milk. It looks like she’s nursed recently; the fur around her nipples is wet and shiny.

Charlie’s breathing is deep and even. He looks incredibly peaceful right now, his serene expression so different from how I’m feeling inside. As I watch him, I can only think of one thing: I want to sketch him like this.

So I go up to my room, find a sketchbook, and hurry back downstairs. I shut his door behind me and sit on his bedroom floor with my legs crossed, trying to work quickly so my aunt or uncle doesn’t catch me in here, but still trying to enjoy the act of drawing, which I haven’t done in days.

My mother taught me how to draw and paint. When I was four, my dad built me my own miniature easel. He set it up beside my mom’s, and she and I would spend hour after silent hour that way, eyes focused on the blank spaces as we
filled them in, trying to breathe life into our subjects on paper.

When I was thirteen and living with my aunt and uncle, I completed my first oil painting. It took me seven months. It was a painting of my late grandfather, who I never had the chance to meet; he died long before I was born. I worked from some photographs that my grandmother had provided for me. Sometimes my aunt told me stories about him. She remembered the tiniest details: once, she described to me how he used to brush her hair when she was a little girl. “He was so gentle,” she told me. “Your grandma was always in a rush to get me ready. She’d tug a comb through my knots, yanking so much that I’d cry sometimes. Your grandpa had these big, rough hands that looked clumsy and intimidating, but when he’d brush my hair, he was so gentle that he barely touched me. I’d go to school with knots all through my hair. I didn’t even care.”

Once the painting was finished and framed, I presented it to my grandma for her birthday. She wasn’t taking medication at the time, and it showed. She was disoriented. She’d stay up for five days straight and then sleep for three. She moved the Captain into her family room—he was already stuffed by then—and she’d watch soap operas with him in the afternoons, carrying on long, one-sided conversations, pausing after she spoke, pretending to listen to his responses.

When she saw the painting, my grandma stared at it for a long time without saying anything. Her expression shifted out of focus, and she started to sway on her feet, almost like
she was going to pass out. My aunt grabbed her by the elbow. “Mom, are you all right?” Her tone was a shade harsher than concerned. “Mother! Answer me!”

My grandma smiled at me. “I see him,” she said.

I stared at her, listening, trying not to reveal how scared I felt. “Who do you see, Grandma?”

“Oh, I don’t know his name. He’s a looker, though. A young man, Alice. A young man guides your hand.”

“Mom!” my aunt barked again, genuine anger in her voice. “Stop it!”

It was like she’d slipped into a kind of trance. When I was thirteen, I wanted to believe so badly that my grandmother had a special ability to see things others couldn’t. But my aunt had no patience for her mother’s displays. She’d been putting up with them her whole life. To her, there was nothing special about it at all. It was just simple lunacy.

I lose track of time as I sit, sketching Charlie. Maybe it’s been twenty minutes, or maybe it’s been two hours. That’s what happens to me when I draw: I go somewhere else. It’s the most amazing feeling.

As I’m finishing up, I stare at the kittens, my hand working to draw their wispy, almost invisible whiskers. The four of them are completely still, except for the faint rise and fall of their rib cages as they breathe. When the drawing is complete, I set aside the sketchbook and approach the bed. They
can’t stay here with him all night. They have to be with their mother.

One by one, I pick them up and move them to the floor. Immediately, they find Linda and burrow close to her, their tiny mouths opening as they search for milk in the darkness.

But when I pick up the last kitten, it feels oddly heavy in my hand. It is warm and limp. It’s not breathing.

Charlie will be devastated. I consider taking it downstairs, giving it to my uncle and letting him worry about it. These things happen, I know; the kittens are weak and small. Things die all the time, every day, but that won’t matter to my cousin. He’ll be heartbroken.

I take the kitten to its mother. Before I set it down beside her, I hold it against my chest with both hands. I take long, deep breaths with my eyes closed. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not expecting anything to happen. But it feels right to hold it close, my hands cupped so tightly around its body that, if it were alive, I’d be worried I was going to hurt it.

After a minute or so, I lay it gently on the floor. I pull Charlie’s sheet up to his neck again. I turn down the volume on his MP3 player, the sounds of “Hey Jude” receding until I can barely hear them.

The day feels like it has lasted forever. Despite my long nap earlier, I feel exhausted all over again. I can’t concentrate
either; when I try to focus on the night’s events, they are nothing but a blur, and for a second I almost convince myself that I’ve been asleep this whole time, that I haven’t woken up from my nap yet, and everything that’s happened to me—at work, with Sean, with TJ—is a bad dream.

Right now, what I want is to sleep
without
dreams. To do so, though, is going to require a healthy dose of pharmaceutical assistance. Rachel doesn’t even like to take NyQuil because she says it makes her feel fuzzy the next day. I, on the other hand, seem to have a natural affinity for self-medication.