We Lie Here: A Thriller, page 13
My client list is about to explode
There won’t be enough of me to spread around
Second, an investment just paid off BIG TIME
I can take you to Rome, Paris, Milan
Wine you dine you LOL
Do all the things a woman like you deserves
My body hates me for playing this game, and all of me cramps. I drop the phone on my bed, then pick it up again.
And what is this investment, I type.
Tesla?
Amazon?
A divorce?
Ha, he types. I wish I had those stocks
As for divorce, she left me a lot
Didn’t want to at first but she came to see my point of view
I click through his photo gallery.
Two Rolexes on each wrist. Him posing in front of a matte-black Porsche. Shirtless again while lying in a chaise at a swanky hotel in Tahiti. His connected Instagram account offers even more self-absorbed shots. None include my dead cousin, but there are no shots with other women, either. He’s smart about that, at least.
Dude is a user. I don’t know if he wants me for access to bigger Hollywood players or to write his “inspirational” story. No matter; his wife died less than twenty-four hours ago.
Investment just paid off?
Is that what Felicia was to him? A sugar mama? A walking ATM machine? Did he ever love her? Looking at his page, I’d say that he didn’t.
So you’re free, I ask.
Yep she’s gone
Did he kill her?
Going by this conversation alone? Yes, he did.
And that’s why I’ll share this message string with Kayla.
U still there? he types.
Yes, I type.
I don’t have to worry about dramatic confrontations with her?
My hands shake, and the skin around my knuckles feels thin, dry.
Dramatic confrontations?
Nope
She’s gone
And I’m living my best life
Uplifted
Join me beautiful
I find my father in the front yard, sitting on the chair beneath the tree with his beer bottle, golf club (to fend off coyotes), and bag of Doritos. He gazes north to the desert and foothills now lost in shadow. A notepad and pen sit on his lap. It’s cold out, but he’s wearing shorts and has pushed up the sleeves of his sweatshirt.
I plop on the grass and wrap my arm around his leg. “Working on your toast?”
He kisses the top of my head. “My toast? For what?”
I snort. “You did not just say that.”
He blinks at me with vacant eyes.
“For the anniversary party,” I say, irritated. “I know you haven’t forgotten—”
“No, I haven’t forgotten. I’m just working on something else right now.” He forces a smile to his lips. “I’m supposed to give a toast on top of everything else?”
I gulp cold air to calm the pounding in my ears. “What’s ‘everything else’? Showing up?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” He swipes the pad, then shifts in his seat.
He says shit like this and never understands why we get so frustrated with him.
I lay my head against his knee. “If it’s not a toast, what are you writing?”
He chuckles. “I’m not saying just yet. I’ve been stopping and starting drafts all week. I’m not good at this writing thing.”
I take the pad. “But I am. Lemme help.”
He reclaims the pad. “I want it to be a surprise, one hundred percent authentically me.”
I squint at him. “Again, I put words in people’s mouths for a living.”
“I’ll write the toast later, Yaya. Damn.”
“Fine.” I draw my knees to my chest, anxious and burning and dreading the moment he blows it all up with something flippant and rote. Words can’t express the way I feel or Our love is forever or You’re so perfect.
The desert makes night sounds all around us. There’s the soft roar of the distant highway. The skitter of lizards through dry brush and across sand. There’s the birdsong of night wrens and ravens.
“You guys aren’t arguing as much,” I say. “Other than me staying at the hotel, right?”
He grunts, smiles, says nothing. He writes a few lines, then crosses them out.
“Did you know Felicia?” I ask my father.
“I did back in high school and a few years after that. We didn’t talk much once your mom and I got married. A few times here and there.”
“She seemed almost obsessed with me,” I say.
“It’s that ego of yours that makes you think that.”
“Ha ha.”
“It’s as big as your head.”
I smile and stick out my tongue. “What did you think about her?”
He shoves his hand inside the bag of Doritos. “I liked Lee, but we weren’t close in school. I’m a few years older, so it wasn’t like we saw each other every day. She was very smart, very organized, and extremely insecure.”
I chomp a few tortilla chips. “Are we talking about the same lady? Our cousin from LA? The hot-stuff business analyst for Northrop Grumman?”
Dad laughs. “She was insecure because she knew more than everybody else and that people like your mom hated that. You remember being a teenager. Lee had to figure out how to balance her genius with wanting to be liked and invited to parties.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That part sucked. Doesn’t sound like she and Mom made up.”
Dad shrugs. “What’s the term? Frenemies? I stayed out of it. Cuz not only was there girl drama, but there was also family drama. Felicia started writing mean things to your mother, so they stopped communicating.” He pauses, then asks, “You hear more about what happened?”
“Not really,” I say, grateful that he can’t see my face, grateful that a raven’s croaking disguises the quaver of my voice.
Unlike Mom, Dad doesn’t share many memories. I’ve seen only a few pictures of him as an adult that don’t include Mom. There are no LaRains flitting around him. For my father, he’s about football, Barbara, Dominique, and me.
But here we are, talking about the past. And I don’t want us to stop talking, so I give him a high-level version of Kayla’s earlier visit. That they’d found Felicia in the lake, that there’d been empty rum bottles in her car, that my number had been found in her text message history.
He closes the bag of chips and chugs from the beer bottle. “I heard she got fired.”
My eyes bug. “Really? Who told you that?”
“DeShawn—he dated Felicia’s assistant’s daughter.” Dad takes another long pull of Heineken. “Felicia had complained about this racist, sexist asshole manager and something-something and boom, they revoked her security clearance. Of course, she can’t do her job without clearance. She was gonna sue—she’d kept records and had all this evidence but . . . she’s gone now.”
A dead husband, an ex-husband, a current husband currently flirting with me on social media, and a fight with her manager.
Yeah, that lady was marked.
“Did Mom know you talked to DeShawn about Felicia sometimes?”
He smirks. “Do I need to report everything I do to your mother?”
“No. I just . . .” I shift on the ground to fully face my father. “May I ask another question?”
Dad doesn’t respond at first, then says, “Sure.”
“Where do you think Mom goes when she storms out of the house?”
He twirls the pen around his fingers. “In-N-Out or Barrel Springs Trail just to walk, just to get away.” He nods to the desert beyond our property line. “Out there sometimes.”
I frown. “I don’t think that’s where she goes.”
“You ask her?”
“No.”
“Then . . . true story. In-N-Out. Barrel Springs Trail. The desert behind our house.” His gaze drops to the pad, and he scribbles a few lines.
“She took her bag last night,” I say. “It’s not in the little nook anymore.”
He grunts, and his pen moves across the pad.
“Where do you think she went last night? In-N-Out? The trail? Back here?”
“Don’t know, Yara. You’d go out there sometimes.”
I cock an eyebrow. “Uh, no.”
“Uh, yeah. When you were a kid, you’d sleepwalk, and after tearing up the house, looking for you, I’d find you out there.”
I blink at him, near tears.
“I’d wrap you in blankets to keep you from moving.” His eyes also glisten with tears. “I felt like shit doing that.”
I shrug. “Wasn’t your fault that I had sleep issues.”
He takes a deep breath and looks out to the out there.
“Did you get Mom a good gift?” I ask.
“Haven’t bought it yet.” He picks up his pen to write.
I poke his calf with my foot. “Better be magnificent.”
He says, “Uh-huh,” and his smile dies as he writes.
My father is getting old, from the gray stubble on his jaw to the muscles that are still there but softening in his arms and gut.
I watch him for a minute and whisper, “Are you happy, Daddy?”
“With?”
“Everything.”
His writing slows but doesn’t stop. He focuses on the words now filling the page.
My heart wobbles. I don’t know what to do with that reaction.
“You hear about my tires?” I ask.
“Dengue fever without the fever.” He pushes out a breath, then lifts my chin. “You need to watch your back. What were you doing up there anyway?”
“No clue.”
He returns his attention to the pad and starts writing again. His handwriting is a series of weird swoops, dips, and crags, and at this angle, I can’t read a word that he’s written. Definitely too many words for a toast.
I poke his thigh again. “May I write the toast for you?”
This makes him stop writing, and he frowns at me.
“I know what Mom wants to hear,” I say, my underarms sticky now with flop sweat. “I know what the guests will want to hear. I know what Mom wants the guests to hear.”
I was incomplete before I met you, or . . .
Life’s road is long, glad you’re by my side, or . . .
My very happiness is sharing my life with you.
“I think I can handle writing a toast to my wife, Yara Marie.” He says this with a bite and a few flashes of irritation.
Right now, even though my eyes well up with tears and my heart still wobbles, I give my father a wide smile. “I just want this one night to be perfect. For the both of you. For all of us. Three hours is all I need. Okay?”
“Yep. Sorry for snapping at you.” He guzzles the rest of his beer, then looks to the shadowy western Mojave Desert.
I lay my head back on his knee. My pulse revs and it’s hard to breathe because . . .
Are you happy, Daddy?
Why didn’t he say what I needed to hear?
Yes, Yara. I’m happy.
Why didn’t he say that?
And why did I have to ask?
I already know the answer.
23.
Ritter Siphon
9:27 p.m.
Stinks out here. Dead fish and rotten eggs, wet dirt and skunks. No rainstorms lately, so the water in the siphon becomes stagnant. Just like this plan has become.
The world now knows that she’s dead. But being dead can’t always stop people from hurting you. A snake can still bite even with its head chopped off.
Watch your back. Now that’s a credo to live by. More than “do unto others” and “live each day as a gift.”
The cabin plot took a left turn. Wanted to do so much more, use that knife for something other than slashing those tires. But that old man had stumbled back and forth from his cabin to the porch to his truck. His eyes had pecked at the woods and had paused too long . . .
Had the old man seen?
Don’t know, but it was time to move.
Out of fear, plain and simple.
You’re a chicken.
A big chicken, but a smart chicken. It’s not like there won’t be any more chances.
I need a new plan.
A drive by the tiny post office helped. No ordinary mail in that PO box. No—the future can be found in that small metal cubby. Nothing will be the same next year this time. Hell, even two months from now.
I could’ve removed that obstacle today, but I chickened out.
Bloody desire niggles at a place that’s been abandoned for years. But after taking out Felicia, that . . . urge has returned. Like mold on bread. But mold never just starts. There’s an invisible spore on that slice days before. And now, a craving to take out another swells and surges.
That need grows watching Rob sit there on the lawn with Yara at his knee.
Desire shifts to hatred, and it burns, scours, and sours.
Nothing more will happen tonight and so, back to the task at hand.
But something will happen, and sooner than planned. There is a horizon.
24.
I leave my father to whatever he’s writing on that pad. My heart still aches that he couldn’t answer my simple question. Even if he and Mom had argued all yesterday, even if he’s been eyeing the door all this time (and I know in my gut that he has), part of me wishes that he’d just said his lines as written: Yes, I’m happy, Yara. There’s no other woman I’d rather be with than your mother. Sure, we have our bumps, and your mother’s broken in ways that I can’t fix, that she refuses to fix, but there’s no other family that I’d ever want except this one.
Dad’s an idealist, and he’s caring, and he never says anything he doesn’t truly mean. Which is why he doesn’t talk much. But for this anniversary party, I need him to come out of his psychological trailer, channel his inner Denzel Washington, say the freakin’ lines, and make us all believe that he believes in this cast of actors known as the Gibson family.
Mom buzzes around my bedroom. Best Friend Bee is cute in her yoga pants and cutoff Aerosmith T-shirt. She’s changed the linens and lit the candle. Now the room smells like shortbread cookies and the vapor from my asthma inhaler. She karate chops the middle of my pillows and says, “I know I just put them on yesterday, but there were leaves and dirt . . . I guess you were wandering around outside, barefoot.”
I cock my head. “Bare . . . ?” When did I climb into bed with . . . ? Sleepwalking again?
“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “I was gonna change them anyway because of the cigarette smoke. No worries.”
I hop onto the bed. “Did you use my inhaler after your workout? I smell it.”
“Okay, so I’m almost fifty, not eighty. I don’t need your inhaler.” She throws up her biceps and grins at me. “I have something for you. Well, a few things.”
I sit up on my knees, eager as a ten-year-old. “A pony? A Barbie townhouse?”
She reaches to the small of her back and produces a batch of old envelopes. “Remember when I told you that Felicia had written me awful things?”
My eyes widen, and I pluck the cache from her hands. “You kept them?”
She chuckles. “Read them and you’ll see why I did.”
“And the second thing?” I say.
“I’ve been holding on to this and planned to give it to you once you became a mother, but I can’t wait anymore.” She reaches behind her again, and this time, she produces a book.
I recognize the red cover of Beloved by Toni Morrison.
“And yes,” Mom says, “I know you have your copy from school. Just open the cover.”
There’s writing on the title page. For Yara, the magnificent . . . Toni Morrison’s signature sits beneath the inscription along with the date. Signed a month after I was born.
Mom’s hands clench at her chest. “I know this is your favorite of hers.”
Tears burn in my eyes now. “You’ve held on to it all this time?”
“Every time you reached a milestone, I thought, Give it to her now, but . . .” She dips her head. “I didn’t want this lost in the grandeur of graduations and TV deals.”
I turn to the first chapter and read the first line: “124 was spiteful.”
Mom strokes my hair. “This way, you can appreciate it and enjoy it as its own thing.”
We hug again. “I love it, Mom. And I love you.”
She knocks my forehead with her knuckles. “We still bingeing The Terminator?”
“Yep. I say we don’t wait for Dom. Where is she anyway?”
She frowns. “With OG Lucifer probably.”
“Does your best friend know your nickname for her son?”
Mom rolls her eyes. “She’s the one who started calling him that back in second grade.”
I cackle. Then I read aloud a passage about thin love not being love.
Mom waggles her head. “I don’t understand what the hell any of that means.”
With a crazy smile, I lean forward and whisper, “It’s about—”
“Slavery, love, haunting, yeah, sure, got it. Way too dense for me. Give me The Bluest Eye or give me death.”
“Your skin’s really irritated,” I say, pointing to Mom’s face.
She taps at her tender cheeks. “Being outside all day.”
“Lemme do your sunburn mask!” I scramble off the bed.
She follows me into the bathroom. I grab from my toiletries bag my tub of goop that contains aloe vera, cucumber extract, and hyaluronic acid and slather it over Mom’s delicate skin. “Now let this sit for fifteen minutes.”
She examines herself in the mirror, tilts her head this way and that. “And I’m still fly.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’ll pick up dinner once this comes off.” She leaves me, closing the bedroom door behind her.
How romantic! My mother waiting in line to have a book signed by my future favorite author before I could even sit up by myself. And Beloved was more than just a ghost story. Morrison wrote about mothers and daughters, relationships, freedom . . . In Tough Cookie, Cookie’s dead daughter (named Denver) haunts her mother like Toni Morrison’s Denver haunts her mother, Sethe, in Beloved. In Cookie’s worst moments, memories of Denver slowly cripple her momentum. She’s trapped in the past—how can she help other people when she couldn’t hear her daughter’s ragged breaths until it was too late? How can she save lives when she couldn’t save her own child? My showrunner had no awareness of the mother-daughter relationships in Beloved. Clueless, she blinked at me each time I told her how I’d threaded scenes with themes from the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel.
