The Good Liar(33)

Teo pulled me down to the ground. It was cold, that concrete. Colder still because the cuts in my coat and the dress underneath meant my skin was in direct contact with it. In any other circumstance, I would’ve been horrified at the potential for a staph infection, but that never crossed my mind. The floor was dirty. It was cold. I was sitting on a dirty, cold floor surrounded by people I didn’t know still holding the hand of a strange man who hadn’t said a word to me in the hour we’d been together.

And then he did.

“What’s your name?”

I tried to speak, but my throat was full of dust.

“What’s your name?” he asked again.

I pointed to my neck and made a slashing motion. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pad and pen. I took them, finally breaking contact to hold the pad steady against my bloody knee. My left hand had a gash on it that was scabbed over with pebbles and grime. I wrote my name in block letters and handed the pad back to him.

“Cecily?”

I nodded.

“I’m Teo.”

I reached for the hand he held out to me. It was the only warm thing in the cold, cold world.

“Do you want me to call anyone?”

I shook my head and put my free hand in my coat pocket. My phone was still there, and when I pulled it out, it had service. This surprised me, something normal in a world askew. How had it never occurred to me until then to reach out to my children? How long had it been since I stepped into the street? Where were they? Did they even know anything had happened? What—oh my God, what if this was happening everywhere?

I used my rattling thumb to text Cassie and Henry.

I’m okay! Go to Grandma’s. I’ll be there as soon as I can.

I listened to the text whoosh away from me. “Received” it said under it, and then, seconds later, “Read” by Cassie. “Read” by Henry. Okay, they wrote back almost simultaneously. We R okay!

I started to shake. They were safe. Whatever was happening, whatever this was, they were where I’d left them, at school, surrounded by responsible adults and counselors and— My phone quivered with another text.

It was Cassie, who’d written, Are you with Dad?





Chapter 15


Memories


Cecily

“Why, Cecily,” my mother says, opening the door in a dark-blue robe cinched tightly over her pajamas, “you’re here late.”

“I’m sorry. I can come back tomorrow.”

“Nonsense. Come in. I was watching the Netflix.”

“Anything in particular?”

“Oh, this and that. I’m not sure it’s working properly. It keeps asking me if I’m still watching. Do you think it’s judging me?”

I take my coat off, hanging it on the hook that’s always waiting for me here. We go into the living room, where the television screen is frozen on an episode of season four of Orange Is the New Black. The room is actually overwhelmed by orange—my mother’s Halloween decoration box is open, much of its contents organized into piles on the thick beige carpet.

“What’s all this?”

“I’m trying to cull.” She looks down at the stuff on the floor. She’s taller than me, five ten when she was at her tallest. It felt like I was looking up to her my whole life. “With the kids getting older, seems like I could get rid of some of this.”

“You’ll still give out candy, though?”

I feel uncharacteristically sad. My father always took Halloween so seriously, keeping statistics of how many kids came to the door each year and how much candy had been given out. Since he died, my mother’s kept dutifully on, her messier handwriting following his in the log. The thought of no one writing in that book seems like the end of something I’m not ready to accept.

“Yes, dear, don’t worry. Harry would never forgive me if I didn’t give out the candy.”

She looks up at the ceiling, as if that’s where my dad’s been hiding all this time. We named Henry after him but kept the more formal version of his name.

“Henry, either, I don’t think.”

“Probably not. It’s a real pain in the ass, though.”

My mother never said one bad word in my presence the entire time my father was alive. He wasn’t in the ground twelve hours before I heard her use the word “asshole.” That was because of the broken garbage disposal. Now that term often refers to anything she doesn’t like, like a child who doesn’t know how the word works or what it’s meant for.

“We could take over,” I say.

“It’s all right. But you could take some of this off my hands.”

I sit down on the floor. The gas fireplace is on, throwing off a nice flickering light and a good blast of heat. I pick up a paper skeleton, one that used to glow in the dark.

“Tom never liked decorating the house.”

“I didn’t know that.”

My mother sits in a lotus position near another pile of Halloween debris. She’s seventy-five but does yoga every day and has better knees than I do. She’ll probably be the one who helps me up when we’re done.

“So, what brings you by?”

“I went on a date tonight.”

Her face lights up. She let her hair go its natural gray five years ago, and it suits her. “Oh, that’s good! Do I know him?”