Family of Liars(55)

“So we can do this,” I say. “We are good at it.”

“What?” asks Penny.

“Acting. We have been pretending everything’s okay all year, and we will keep pretending everything’s okay. We know how. It’s the family way. And after a time, it will be okay. Understand?”

They nod.

“We just have to get through this next part and the rest will be easy in comparison. No way out but through.” I quote my father’s motto.

Bess holds the anchor.

I take Pfeff’s shoulders.

Penny takes his legs.

We lift him and step onto the seats. The boat tilts with our weight, all on one side, but we do not lose our footing.

We drop Lor Pfefferman into the sea, the anchor around his waist.

We watch his body sink.

“?‘Of his bones are coral made,’?” says Penny, quoting Shakespeare. “?‘Those are pearls that were his eyes.’?”





61.


I TURN ON the motor and we move away. Soon we cannot tell where Pfeff lies, and we stop the boat again.

We change clothes—into the bathing suits and cover-ups that Bess brought.

We put our sweatshirts on.

We use a lighter, stored in the motorboat for our parents’ cigarettes, to burn the paper towels that Bess used to clean the dock. We toss the burning papers into the air and watch them disintegrate to nothing, tiny orange sparks settling on the sea and then extinguishing.

I open the bottle of whiskey and we pass it around in silence.

It is about 3:45 a.m.

We lie all three together under a rain tarp on the floor of the boat. But it is hard to sleep.

“Remember when that friend of Mother’s took us all camping?” says Bess.

“Um-hm,” I say, though I don’t, really. I have a fuzzy memory of hot dogs cooked on sticks and a bright yellow backpack filled with supplies. That’s about it.

“I was like, only three,” Bess says. “We all slept together under a blanket like this. I was way too young to go camping.”

“You peed the bed,” says Penny.

“Did not.”

“Oh, you totally did,” says Penny. “I woke up with Bess pee all down my leg. I had to go to the creek and wash in this freezing, freezing water, and our bed was all pee-covered and we had to put everything in a black plastic bag to bring it home to Mother to wash.”

“Who was that guy?” asks Bess. “Why did he want to take us camping?”

“Beats me,” says Penny. “But he gave Carrie this bag of mixed jelly beans, I remember. And he said ‘Share them with your sisters,’ but he totally put her in charge of them. She would dole them out two at a time, like she was queen of the jelly beans.”

“Buddy,” says Bess. “That was his name.”

“How do you even remember that?” says Penny sleepily.

“My brain is more powerful than you know.”

“Buddy Kopelnick?” I say, understanding.

“Maybe,” says Penny.

Buddy Kopelnick took us camping. Took me camping.

“Kopelnick?” asks Bess.

“Yeah, that was his name,” I say, remembering more now. “We had the hot dogs on sticks. He put the ketchup on a paper plate and we all three dunked our hot dogs in there.”

“It was supposed to be just you,” remembers Penny. “Because you were the oldest. But then I pitched a fit and Mother said I could go. And Bess pitched a fit, and so we all went.”

“That’s not like Mother to let some random dude take us camping,” says Bess.

“He was an old friend,” I say.

I try to recall Buddy’s face, but it isn’t there. His whole self isn’t really there. I can remember the hot dogs and, now that she told the story, Penny washing her leg and yelling about it. She was wearing sky-blue athletic shorts, and her dirty white sneakers sat on the shore of the creek beside her. I remember keeping the pink jelly beans for myself, too, and doling out green and black to my sisters, since I didn’t like them. Bess extending sticky palms, asking for more candy.

His face won’t come up, though. It is like he never existed for me. Buddy Kopelnick is only a scratched-out face on an old photograph.

Bess and Penny have stopped thinking about him. They are tipsy, singing “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?”

They’re doing just as I asked them to. As we Sinclairs always do.

Pretending. Lying. Trying to have a good time.



* * *



—

WHEN THE SUN comes up, we drink the coffee from three of the four thermoses. We eat the potato chips.

I tell them about Rosemary and me, that time we had the potato chip breakfast when she was alive.

Bess wants to drink more whiskey, but I say no. We have to be sober and smell of seawater and coffee when we get back.

Instead, we pour some of the coffee from the fourth thermos into our own cups. Into “Pfeff’s” thermos, a tall one, we pour a large amount of whiskey, leaving room at the top so it looks like he drank at least half. We have no idea how fingerprinting works, and we should have put Pfeff’s mouth and hands on the thermos, but it’s too late now, so we wipe it with a beach towel and plan to say it fell in the water with the lid on. That’s the story of why his prints aren’t on it. If anyone asks. But there’s probably no police record of his fingerprints, I tell my sisters. So it likely doesn’t matter what’s on the thermos.