The Better Liar by Tanen Jones
Nothing is safe.
You get on a train, you disappear.
You write your name on the window, you disappear.
There are places like this everywhere, places you enter as a young girl, from which you never return.
Like the field, the one that burned.
Afterward, the girl was gone.
Maybe she didn’t exist, we have no proof either way.
All we know is:
the field burned.
—LOUISE GLüCK, “AVERNO”
PROLOGUE
Robin
Like most of the dead, I want to be remembered.
The lucky dead leave ghosts of themselves everywhere: an impression on a mattress, a name in the mouth. My name has almost disappeared now.
Robin Voigt—my old boss said it this year, going through the tax folder for the fiscal year 2011–2012, preparing to throw it out. It was one in a list: Krista Ungert, Maria Villanueva, Robin Voigt. My face rose up briefly before him, half-remembered; I had reminded him of his daughter.
Robin Voigt, written in eight-point font underneath my name in the yearbook. Kevin Borrego’s youngest daughter smeared her finger over my face. Who’s that? she asked. She’s pretty. Kevin said, Oh, Robin. She was a couple years below me. I think she moved away.
Robin, in script high on my ex-boyfriend’s inner arm, so that I pressed into the ripe furry creases of his armpit, pocked with eczemic scars.
Flimsy, shitty ghosts. I’m fading.
The only people who can keep you alive are the ones who loved you. Not the ones who panted after you, bought you flowers, thumbed your nipples. I mean the ones who saw your disgusting insides and loved you anyway. The people who really knew you.
I only had one person like that. Leslie, my sister.
My ghost wakes up with her in the morning, chews on her hair like I used to when we were children. It holds her hand at night. I’ll never leave her. No one loved me more than Leslie. She loved me so much she sat my ghost up and breathed into it, made it walk around our home again, the way the living do. She bound herself to me a long time ago, but she won’t say my name aloud anymore.
If I tell you how it happened, maybe you’ll remember me as well.
Maybe you’ll say my name to each other, a little chant, like a dirge.
1
Leslie
By the time I found her she was dead.
I groped for somewhere to sit down. The only place other than the bed, where the body lay, was a wooden dining-room chair half-buried under a pile of wrinkled clothes. It had a cushion hanging off the seat, patterned with cartoon bees, and as I moved to straighten it a cockroach, startled by the movement, hurried up the chair leg. I jerked my hand back and closed my eyes. Then I opened them again—helplessly.
I didn’t want to look at the body. The body—Robin—Rachel. I’d never seen her as an adult, but as a teenager she’d been round-faced, milk-fed. Now she was so thin as to be impossible to look at. My vision unfocused itself when it encountered her ribs, visible through both the fabric of her RUNNIN’ REBELS T-shirt and the sheet in which most of her body below the shoulders was tangled. Her hipbones, too, projected, cradling the vacant, starved abdomen.
A little vomit had dried in the corner of her mouth and on her tongue, the color of burned things. She had been unconscious when she’d choked on it.
Iker was panicking. “Should I call the police?” he said, directing his gaze at the close yellow walls, the popcorn ceiling. “I’m really sorry about this, I’m so sorry. I’ll call the police. I’ll call.” He wore a white polo with the logo of the housing company on it. Crescent-shaped sweat stains gathered underneath his sagging pectoral muscles, like a pair of closed eyes. They twitched as he began digging in the pockets of his khaki pants for his cellphone.
“No,” I said, trying to think fast. “No, I’ll call. You go outside. I just want—” I swallowed. “I just want to be with her for a minute.”
“Yeah,” Iker said, wiping his upper lip. “Okay. Okay. I’ll wait. Outside. I’ll be…” He pointed. “I’ll be right down there if you need me.”
He went down the stairs into the living room below, taking his proprietor’s key but leaving the door ajar. After a minute I could hear him shuffling on the front porch, audible through the mosquito screen on the open window.
She was still on the bed. The fact of her was as sweltering as the room.
In my imagination I reached for my phone. In another version, I didn’t. I lived these two visions simultaneously for several long minutes, my hand twitching in the air above my purse, unable to choose between them.
If I called the police, then Robin would be dead—absolutely dead. Legally, governmentally dead. I would have to identify her, and arrange somehow to take her body back to Albuquerque to be buried, and have a funeral, and then everyone would know she was dead and it would be over.
I could contest, maybe—but contesting could take a year or more. I couldn’t wait a year. If I didn’t call the police, then she would still be dead, but—
I took her wallet off the dresser and looked at her ID. “Rachel Vreeland” stared out at me from the hypersaturated photograph. She’d been pretty as an adult, the pale skin I remembered from childhood turned slightly orange by the sun or the DMV’s printer. 5’-09”, the text next to her face said. Eyes: BRO.