The Better Liar(84)

She said my name exactly the way she’d said it when we were kids, with that condescending lilt. Like she’d said it on the phone message the night of my wedding. I love you. I love you, Leslie—

“You blocked it!” she yelled at me now. “You just”—she folded her arms and did the I Dream of Jeannie boinggg—“blocked it out of your head, like it never happened! Well, it did happen, and it was your idea.”

My stomach lurched. I got up, clutching my belly.

    “Sit down!” Robin snapped.

“I have to—” I gasped. “I’m going to—” I ran into the back hall and flung open the door to the bathroom.

I was dry-heaving over the toilet when Robin came in. She sat on the edge of the tub, next to me. “You haven’t eaten anything today,” she said after a minute of listening to me choke. “You should probably give up on that.”

“I can’t stop.” But as soon as I said it, the nausea subsided. I sat back on the bath mat.

“See?” Robin said smugly. “Now are you going to listen to me?”

“I don’t understand anything you’re saying,” I whispered.

“I know you remember,” Robin said. “You just didn’t want to believe it. But it was your fault all along. I was only a kid. I followed you around. I practically worshipped you. And you said to me—”

“?‘I wish Mom would die.’?” I stared at her.

She nodded. “Exactly. That’s what you said to me. I just wanted you to be happy.”

“I was so tired,” I said. It was coming back in bits and pieces. “I was angry that she wanted to leave us so bad. She kept trying to…to leave us. And then Daddy would send her away, and she’d come back and hate us some more—so I wanted…I just wanted it to be over…” I focused my eyes again. “But you couldn’t have done it. You were only a kid.”

Robin snorted. “Mom weighed like eighty-five pounds, she was depressed, and they’d put her on downers. She was barely there. I found her half passed out in the bathtub, and I just…held her under.”

“No,” I whispered.

“Yes,” Robin whispered back. She laughed. “It wasn’t hard. She wanted to go. She didn’t fight me or anything.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t believe you.”

“Well, I can’t believe you!” Robin snapped. “When I told you about it, you said I was lying! I wasn’t lying!”

I stared at her. She was bright against the white of the tub, roundly healthy, pink-cheeked. Beautiful.

She couldn’t have killed anyone. She didn’t have it in her.

    No…

The nausea returned.

I’d known for a long time what it was that lived in her.

“I did it because I loved you, Leslie,” Robin said, wringing her hands. “I didn’t think it would make you hate me. I was just a kid. I didn’t know how your brain worked.”

Like it was me that was crazy.

“But you did.” Her brow wrinkled prettily. She really looked hurt. “You never looked at me the same after that. You acted like I was some kind of monster.”

Had I?

I’d spent so much time flattening the memory that now it was fractured. I didn’t know whether I’d pushed Robin away. But it was true that before my mother died, we’d done everything together. Spent all our time together.

After my mother died, we slept in separate bedrooms.

I’d always thought it was Robin who’d never liked me, who’d kept her distance. When I was in middle school she got her own room, I’d told Mary. Suddenly she hated me.

She’d hated me, so I’d hated her back.

No.

She’d loved me, in her own disgusting, sharp-toothed way. And I’d abandoned her. Shut her in the guest bedroom to sleep by herself.

I didn’t hate her because she was a monster. She was a monster because I hated her. I’d made her this way, made sure she grew up alone and angry.

I lifted my gaze. There she was. Beautiful, horrible. Alive.

My mouth watered and I spat into the toilet over and over until the bile lurched its way up my throat.

“Now you remember,” Robin said, over the sound of my vomiting. “I knew you’d get there eventually.”





52


    Leslie


When she went to Lakeview the first time, my grandmother came to stay with Robin and me in the house on Riviera. Not my mother’s mother—as far as I knew, we didn’t speak to her. It was my dad’s mother, Grandma Betty. She stayed for months, washing dishes and smoking at the kitchen table. I remember she still wore gloves to go to church, like it was the 1950s. My father joked to her once that you can tell how many generations a family is removed from poverty by how decked out its women get when they go visit God. The more accessories, the newer the money. Betty had frozen him out for the rest of the day. When I was eleven, after Betty’s funeral, Daddy told me Betty’s parents had been sharecroppers.

That first visit, she treated us like small dogs, letting us in and out of the house whenever we asked and feeding us promptly but otherwise ignoring us unless we made a lot of noise. The kitchen was hers for cooking and reading magazines and having her friends over, and we held almost zero interest. This wasn’t especially dissimilar to how our mother treated us when she was home, but for some reason, maybe other kids at school, I had got it in my head that grandmothers should dote on their grandchildren and spoil them and kiss their cheeks, and I was offended that Grandma Betty didn’t do any of that. Well, she insisted we kiss her cheek every night before bed, and if we made faces while we did it she told Daddy on us.