Lie Still

6

I wanted to take the words back as soon as they floated from my mouth. Words like insidious dandelion seeds, blown from a slight puff of breath. Poisonous words that would thrive in a room like this, where the soil was already disturbed. But that must be the point.

One of the women in the room drew in an audible breath, either of shock or guilt. I didn’t care who.

This was not my secret.

I stared at the other slips of paper, wondering which one was.

“Pass the box,” Caroline ordered.

Reluctantly, I handed the box to Misty.

Misty glanced at her slip and then over at me, hesitating. Then she read in a clear, calm voice: “This baby is not my husband’s.”

“Are you kidding me?” The words flew out of my mouth. “How could you read that? Of course this baby is my husband’s!”

Caroline’s hand landed lightly on my knee. “Emily, this is a bonding exercise. We hold our thoughts until the end. You do not know if other women in this room are carrying a child.” I sucked in a breath. Every other belly in this room was a washboard. Actually, Tiffany’s and Holly’s sank in, like small moon craters.

Tiffany eagerly grabbed the box out of Misty’s hands. “This is fun. It reminds me of the old days at Alpha Chi. We told each other everything.” She giggled nervously, smoothing out her piece of paper. “This one is bad. It says: I do not believe in God. Well, I can tell you this is not my secret. Just ask the woman I witnessed to in the Kroger express lane yesterday.”

She thrust the box at Holly, whose hands were tightly clenched in her lap, a one-inch red nail digging into her wrist like an implement of suicide. It also looked sharp enough to mutilate a potato.

“Come on, Holly, you need to play.” Tiffany’s voice was impatient. “Hell, I’ll just pull a slip for you. Do you want me to read it?”

“That’s not allowed,” Caroline said.

“Give it here.” Holly snatched one out. I was mesmerized by the small crescent-shaped indent in her wrist. She read the words silently. Something I wish I’d done. But then her face relaxed. “It says, Look under my bed.”

“It doesn’t say that. That’s not a secret. It’s more like an order.” Tiffany ripped the slip out of her hand. “Oh. It does.” She shrugged. “Kind of ambiguous.”

What’s under my bed? Nothing, I assured myself. No old sketches. No diary. Just dust. Maybe a pair of Mike’s dirty socks.

The box passed to Lucinda, and I could feel its weight, so much heavier now that it was a few slips of paper lighter. I prayed that she would be the one person in this gathering with the common sense to stop all of this.

“There is blood in my house.” Lucinda’s lisp was a little hard to understand, but the word blood was unmistakable. She popped the slip of paper in her mouth and began to chew like a bubble gum addict on cocaine. I had guessed her to be the one who didn’t believe in God, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe there was blood in her house. Maybe her husband beat her, or her children. Maybe all the bad things in her life, all her insecurities and decisions, sprung from her very first lisping word.

A trickle of sweat rolled down my back. I felt physically pinned to the chair by invisible forces. Waiting for the punch from a sneering bully. I was certain this exercise was going exactly as Caroline intended.

A butterfly brushed my arm. Caroline’s silk dress. She was swaying slightly in her chair, falling into me. I leaned over to steady her while everyone else remained rooted, staring the other way, fascinated by Lucinda’s vigorous chomping.

“Are you OK, Caroline?” I said it loudly to get their attention, struggling to fake concern. After all, this nasty creature was torturing us.

Us. Already, the bonding that Caroline sought, and a seed of fury sprouted in me.

Lucinda had ceased to be the most bizarre thing in the room. Something appeared to be very wrong with Caroline. Her face was slick and waxy. “I’m getting one of my migraines,” she stuttered out. “We’ll have to finish this some other time. Misty, can you see me up?”

It was oddly intimate, the way Caroline said Misty’s name. Maybe Caroline had already chosen. Maybe Misty was in on all of this. Maybe Caroline was acting. I couldn’t tell. It was convenient timing. The box was empty, still sitting in Lucinda’s lap.

Mike once joked that body language should be a high school requisite, like French or Spanish. He believed that everything you really needed to know about a person could be observed. And Misty was up and draping Caroline’s arm over her narrow shoulders as if she’d done it a hundred times before.

Holly was the first of us to stand, finding her voice as soon as Misty and Caroline disappeared. “Well, girls, I had a better time spreading my legs at my last Pap. Caroline can stick her club right up her ass. I won’t be applying.” That was a lot of imagery my stomach couldn’t handle right now.

Because I could taste the inside of that box.

Holly was halfway to the door when Lucinda spit. The wad of paper flew out of her mouth and landed right on the pristine red toenail poking out of one of Holly’s Via Spiga sandals.

“Jesus, Lucinda, get some help, will you?” Lucinda flinched like a dog used to being kicked. Holly bent over to scrape the soggy ball off her toe with a practiced red fingernail. She stalked over to the fireplace and flicked it into the flames along with her own slip of paper. “I recommend y’all do the same and that we all forget the last twenty minutes ever happened.” She paused at the door, flashing a sly smile. “Not that it’s any of y’all’s business, but I keep a few naughty toys under the mattress.”

I wouldn’t want to share a lifeboat with Holly, but in the last ten seconds, I had developed new respect for her. I bet she’d carve a damn good potato. Lucinda hobbled after her, mumbling an apology to her back. On any normal day, I’d be jumping up, not admiring Holly in the least, trying to soften Lucinda’s humiliation, assuring her everything was OK.

Their exit left me alone with Tiffany and the flirtatious girl in the portrait. Tiffany slid over to Misty’s chair and pulled it in so close to me I could feel her body heat, ramped up from the fireplace. She smelled like chocolate-covered pinecones, probably some designer perfume I couldn’t afford. The two scars of her eyelid lift were barely perceptible. I thought that we weren’t so different from the girl in the hall, whose tiny foot had been broken and bound for beauty. Whose hands were bound by black string.

“If that’s all she’s got on me, I’m in good shape.” Tiffany snatched the piece of paper out of my hand. “Alex needed to go.”

Am I dreaming? Still in New York, asleep on my couch?

“Stop looking at me like that. It was just a little antifreeze in his water. Stop looking at me like that!”

I wasn’t sure what expression I was wearing. I couldn’t feel my lips or my cheeks. I was perspiring from the top of my head, which I hadn’t known was possible. The room was baking now, unbearable.

Tiffany began to pace like a feral cat in five-inch heels, desperate to be let out of her cage. Four steps forward. Four steps back. Again. Again. And again.

When did someone shut the door?

Tiffany halted abruptly in front of me, as if she’d made a decision. “Unfortunately, Hannah Beth was the one to find him. He was trembling and frothing a little bit at the mouth. But I told her he just spit up a little milk. She’s only four, so she probably won’t remember anyway. I bought her that Louis Vuitton purse shaped like a Chihuahua the next day. Adorable, and it doesn’t shit.”

It took a second.

She’s talking about a dog.

I tried to shut off my mind. To not imagine the face of the presumably adorable Hannah Beth when she found the small furry pile.

“See ya around, Emily. Or not. I really don’t think you have the stomach for it.” Tiffany’s eyes raked lazily over my belly. It felt like a threat. I wanted to strike out, but my hand lay dead in my lap, and then she was gone.

I gazed up at the girl on the wall, frozen in blues and browns and greens, and wondered what she knew. She had to hold clues to Caroline Warwick, to the reasons I was here contemplating all the things I had tried to forget.

The weeping willow in the portrait suggested that Caroline had been raised somewhere else in the South, maybe by a river. Georgia? Kentucky? That fit with the honeyed accent. Riding pants and high black boots hugged long, graceful legs. Her hands gripped the reins loosely, but there was no question about whether the horse or the girl was in control.

My eyes roved over the woodwork. The ceiling. I stood and stared into the shiny black pupil of young Caroline. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to quiet my mind. Instead, I saw the teddy bear on the bed in the little pink room somewhere above my head. Abused by love. No eyes. One ear, missing. The seam, sewn flat.

“What is wrong?”

My heart slammed like a rock against my chest, and I jumped sideways, knocking the Tiffany lamp. Too many Tiffanys, I thought crazily.

“I did not mean to scare you. Did you lose something?” Maria steadied the lamp.

“No. I’m sorry. I should go.”

I didn’t tell Maria that before I closed my eyes I had been looking for tiny cameras, because it would sound absurd. Or that I felt like I had stumbled onto a stage three days ago, in the smack-dab-middle of a play, and everyone knew their part but me.

And I didn’t tell her that the relief coursing through my body was like when Daddy pulled back my swing, high and taut, and let me fly into the wind.

That lovely wooden box that stunk like the morning breath of the devil?

None of its secrets was about me.

The praying mantis is a stick figure that has five eyes and can turn its head 180 degrees to stalk his prey. All the way home, this is how I thought of Caroline, as page 44 in my mother’s insect book.

Odd what pictures the brain chooses to keep. Me, age ten. Cross-legged on the kitchen floor. Opening up to the right page, as directed. My mother flipping pancakes and describing the beauty of the praying mantis despite the fact that it is a brutal and clever killer. The mantis pretends to be praying before thrusting out its spiky forearms and sinking its teeth into the neck of its prey. Not to kill it, but to paralyze it. Because the mantis likes to eat its victims alive.

I unzipped my dress and let it fall to the middle of my kitchen floor. My belly was a white balloon.

I wrapped a throw from the living room around my body, naked underneath except for a bra and a scrap of panties, opened the kitchen door, and walked purposefully across the backyard to the alley.

Mike had purchased two large plastic trashcans, preparing for the avalanche of diapers. I studied them, glancing both ways down the alley. No sign of life. I passed by our plastic bins and ventured another hundred yards to one of three old metal garbage cans in the tall grass between the houses. The alley was narrow, its road rutted like small-town alleys are, barely big enough for the garbage truck to pass.

I lifted the lid of the can and smelled the perfume left by thirty years of dung and rot. The can was empty, black on the bottom like a hole into the earth. I stuffed the dress all the way to the bottom. At the last minute, I slipped off my new sandals and threw them in, too. I slammed down the lid. It echoed in the afternoon silence, a dissonant cymbal clash.

I carefully retraced my path back on the dirt road, barefoot, trying to avoid the bits of glass and metal that had been spit back out by garbage trucks.

Three houses ahead of me, a man slipped from a yard into the alley. He wore the yellow and black nylon palette of Livestrong. He didn’t wave, but his eyes never left me. He moved into the middle of the alley, stretching his body as if warming up for a run.

I was keenly aware how vulnerable I was. How easy it would be to rip away the afghan hugging my body, the one that used to lie neatly folded across the back of my grandmother’s couch.

How no one would hear while the glass and metal and rock bit into my back.

He watched me until I disappeared behind our fence.