The Better Liar(41)

    “I don’t sleep,” Mary said. “I just kind of hang upside down by my feet.” She gave me a wide smile. “You guys look tired. Want me to hold him for a while?”

“How did you know?” Dave said, handing Eli over as I opened my mouth to protest. He quieted immediately. “Did you see that?” Dave asked me, twisting around. Then to Mary: “What the hell are you?”

Mary shrugged. “Babies love me.”

“Don’t put your finger in his mouth,” I said as Mary let Eli chew on her knuckle.

“Leslie, babies need exposure to all kinds of germs and stuff. That’s how they build up their little immune systems,” Mary told me, wiggling her finger.

“Well, let’s not stop there,” Dave said, catching my expression. “Let’s go roll him in the mud right now. We’ll bring his blanket outside and he can sleep out there, snack on some worms if he gets hungry in the middle of the night.”

Eli stared into Mary’s eyes. He had a small confused expression on his face. “Did you torment your daddy all day?” she asked him in a baby voice. “Did you scream right in his ear? I bet you did. You’re the worst.”

Eli laughed.

My throat went dry. I watched as she disappeared around the corner with him, asking him if he wanted to watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding. “Leslie, can you bring me, like, a bowl of whatever that was?” Mary called from the other room. “I can’t move with him on my lap, but I’m starving.”

“I’m glad your sister’s home,” Dave said, coming to put his arms around me.

“I know,” I said, thinking of the body on the bed.

I waited until he went into the other room to bring Mary her dinner, and then I sat down at the kitchen table alone. There was a notification on my phone. I’d been tagged in a photo. Elaine had been right. The light suited me.





28


    Mary


That night I waited until Dave and Leslie’s bedroom went dark. Then I lugged the Floreses’ phone book upstairs to the guest room, called a taxi, and slipped out the back door into the sleeping neighborhood.

The real-grass back lawn was summer-warm during the day, but cooled to numbing after midnight. I wanted to take my shoes off again, drag my feet through it, but instead I just squatted to touch it. It was like a dozen buzz cuts against my palms.

I went around the house and sat on the curb under a streetlight, waiting for the cab. The houses all had their lights off except one, farther down the block. A husband and wife drifted across the lighted upstairs window, getting ready for bed. They looked fuzzy, tricolor, like old television.

A car went by, playing “Get Up 10” at top volume. The sound washed up against the houses and faded again as the driver steered past, his head turning to look at me on the curb. I pictured myself briefly through his eyes, the halo the streetlamp would make on my red hair. No—I’d forgotten I was blond now. With my pale arms I would only register as the white shape of a girl.

    I imagined Robin like this, a bright, flaring afterimage, leaving behind a bedroom full of faces and a ghost waiting for a taxi.

The cab pulled up after half an hour or so, and I jumped up to keep the driver from hitting the horn. He was an old man, with the ruddy, broken-capillaried skin that you saw all over Vegas, Irish people who’d been under the desert sun too long.

“You going to the airport, you said?” he asked as I swung open the back door.

“Yeah, the Hertz rental.”

“You got any bags?”

“No.”

He started to turn around in the Floreses’ driveway. “You going to the airport and don’t have any bags?”

“I’m just going to rent a car.”

He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Yeah? Kind of late to be renting. You going on some kind of trip?”

“I just need to get out of my sister’s house for a while,” I said. “I’m in town to visit her and she keeps taking the car and leaving me in the house by myself.”

“She take the car overnight?”

“No, I just…If she knew I was renting a car she’d want to know why, and it’d be a whole argument, and I don’t…” I shrugged. “Can I smoke in here?”

He tapped his thick fingers on the steering wheel. “Tell you what,” he said, after a few seconds, “you can come sit up here with me and open the window if I can play my music.”

“Deal,” I said immediately.

He pulled over on the neighborhood street and put his hazards on. I got out onto the sidewalk and shuffled over to the passenger-side door, sliding in beside him and pressing the button for the window.

“I’m Billy,” he said when I’d lit up, sticking his hand out.

I hesitated, then shook it. “I’m Alice,” I said, making up the name on the spot.

Billy shifted the car into gear. “You like Wanda Jackson, Alice?”

“I don’t know who that is,” I said truthfully.

    “She invented rockabilly,” he said, taking out a CD case and prying it open one-handed. The woman on the cover had blue eye shadow up to her eyebrows and helmetlike ratted hair. He slid the CD into the dashboard’s mouth and turned up the volume.