Family of Liars(23)

23.


MOST EVERYONE HAS left the lawn and I am heading back into the house when I spot my father down on the end of the dock. He’s with the dogs: Wharton, McCartney, Albert, and Uncle Dean’s Lab, Reepicheep. He is bent over, doing something in the moonlight, wearing a dark sweater over his white clothes.

I turn and head down there. I haven’t forgotten the photograph in my mother’s jewelry drawer, and it is rare to get him alone. I want to ask him about it.

He’s pulled up a loose board. “Needs repair,” Harris says when I get close. “This thing has rusty nails sticking out of it.” He sets the board down on the edge of the dock. “I’m sure it’s not the only one. I should probably have the whole thing looked at.”

I’m not interested in his real estate maintenance, but I glance at the old board in pretense. “It’s warped,” I say.

“There are lots like that. The storms we had this spring really did a number on the island.” Harris sits down in one of the two Adirondack chairs we have stationed on the dock. His glass of whiskey, ice melting, rests on one arm. “Did you have fun tonight?”

“I did.”

“Your mother got cross with me because I didn’t hunt.”

I nod. It’s a typical dynamic between the two of them. “She wants all her work to be appreciated with full participation.”

“I appreciate it. I just don’t need to look for lemons like a schoolboy.” He chuckles. “Dean went all-out hunting. He’s kissing up to her after bringing all those guests.”

“Is she going to forgive him?”

“Dean does whatever he wants in the moment and charms people later. That’s his modus operandi,” says my father. “They always forgive him.” Albert comes up with a tennis ball in his mouth and drops it. “Okay, you beasties,” Harris says to the dogs. He stands up again with the ball. “You ready?”

They are.

He winds up, pretends to throw it, laughs at their confusion. Then he really throws it, and all four dogs hurl themselves into the ocean, paddling urgently toward the ball. Harris looks at me. “They are indefatigable,” he says. “It never ceases to amaze.” The dogs come out and he throws the tennis ball again.

“Can I ask you a question?” I say.

“You may.” He winks, to take the edge off correcting my grammar.

I planned to ask him about the photograph, but I stop myself before the words come out. To ask will be to force Harris into a vulnerable position. Your wife has a secret.

If he knows she keeps the photo, I can’t imagine he’s happy about it, whether it’s Uncle Chris or an old boyfriend. And if he doesn’t know she keeps it, he’ll hate that he didn’t know. Either way, he’ll lash out.

I press my lips together. “Never mind,” I tell him.

“Drop it!” Harris says to Albert, who has come up the ramp with the tennis ball.

Albert drops it.

“Good dog.” My father snatches the ball and holds it high, waiting for the others to come out of the water and pay attention. “You sure?” he asks me. “?‘The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.’?”

“I think it was the wrong question.”

“Claude Lévi-Strauss,” he adds, explaining the quote. “Anthropologist.”

All four dogs are waiting now. Harris throws the ball and they leap into the water, swimming and panting.

He puts his arm around me. “You did well tonight, with the lemon speech,” he says. “Did me proud.”





24.


THAT NIGHT, I take one of the sleeping pills I stole.

I take it because I am curious.

I take it because if I don’t take anything, I’ll likely get up in the middle of the night sweating, thirsty, and disoriented. That happens a lot. And I like the feeling I get from my painkillers, so I want to save those for when I’m awake.

I take it, too, because the events of tonight have me especially keyed up—my mother’s photograph, seeing Yardley and George, the kisses with Pfeff, the plan for tomorrow, the conversation with my father. Energy buzzes through me, but I am also bone-tired. I want to turn myself off like a light.

I am careful. I do not take the sleeping pill with anything else. I have not had any alcohol.

And it works. I fall into sleep, fast. It is dreamless.

I do not know yet that it will take me some years and two stays in rehabilitation clinics to stop taking pills.

I do not know that this habit will make me drop out of college. Or that even after recovery, I’ll always drink a little more than I should, to fill the gap where once these pills consoled me.

I don’t know yet that I’ll regret drinking so much, and the way that habit has made me a lazy thinker. It clouds my judgment and makes me a more selfish, dimmer version of the person I might have been. I don’t know yet that I will wonder, in my forties, whether my son Johnny is dead partly because I am such a drinker.

I don’t know any of that.

I just sleep.





25.


LET ME TELL you another fairy tale. It is not a famous one. I first read it in our family’s copy of Grimms’. And I read it to Rosemary again, the summer I am seventeen.