Liar. Part 14

One time when Dad was blue he told me that his father wasn't French after all.

Mom was with the brat at soccer and Dad was sitting at the kitchen table trying to work. When his writing didn't go well, he got sad.

I'd gone into the kitchen to get some juice. I was thinking about going for a run. Dad looked up and I knew immediately he was going to unload.

"I went all the way to Ma.r.s.eille," he told me, without any word of greeting. "I was trying to find him. I knocked on the door of every black family in the city, which is way more than you'd think."

Okay, I thought. He's talking about his dad. I wondered how he knew he'd knocked on all their doors.

"My mother lied to me," he said. "Again."

I leaned against the sink. "Maybe he moved?"

"Ha!" Dad looked at me like I was being crazy. "I found a letter. Upstate. It was in English, not French-American English. Addressed to 'My darlin Hope.' Your grandmother's name is Hope," he told me unnecessarily. "The letter was asking after their child-after me. It was all about how much my dad missed my mom. How much he wanted to hold the baby-to hold me!" Dad's eyes are welling. "It was signed, 'All Yers Always.' There was no other name unless my dad's name was Always or Yers Always. There's no way a Frenchman wrote it."

"Oh," I said.

"I waved the letter in Mom's face. You know what she did?"

He was looking at me. I shook my head.

"She told me not to be so melodramatic. She told me to act my age. I was twenty-two! I was acting my age."

"Did Grandmother say why she lied to you?"

"She said, 'You had a good time in France, didn't you, Isaiah? Found yourself a good wife.' She wouldn't tell me who my father is. She said I didn't need to know. That it's better to keep the past muddy. That's her all over, isn't it? I don't think my past could be muddier.

"I still haven't gotten anything out of her. She's back to acting like my dad was French. So I do the same. Push the truth out of the way. Go on acting like the lie is true. Don't tell your mom. She doesn't know."

He grinned, gave me a wide-open smile that made his eyes crinkle. Dad's teeth were shiny white. "Just another family secret to add to the pile. This one's between you and me. Like Hilliard."

"Right," I said. Dad opened up his laptop. I got myself a gla.s.s of orange juice. The end of our father-daughter bonding.

Is it any surprise that I turned out the way I did, with so many family lies?

I'm at least a third-generation liar. Though I bet it goes back earlier. If I could get Grandmother or Great-Aunt Dorothy to talk about it. I wouldn't bother asking Hilliard. I don't think I've ever heard him say a whole sentence.

I wonder if there is a lying gene. If so it runs strong in my family. Which makes me wonder about Dad's story. Was there a letter? Is anything he said true? The only story I've ever had out of the Greats is the one about the French sailor. Maybe Dad lied to me about the letter? Maybe he lied about having gone to France?

No, that has to be true because my mother really is French. Ma.r.s.eille is where they met. Sometimes I think she's the only part of the story that's true. I stick to the French sailor story because I've heard it so many times before. Because Dad only told me about the letter once. I have no idea which version is true. Maybe neither is.

"Keep the past muddy." I believe my grandmother would say that. It was something the whole family lived by. Dad, too, whether he admitted it or not.

It leaves me feeling unanch.o.r.ed.

Telling you the truth is my attempt to anchor myself. It's all I've got.

BEFORE.

The next time I saw the white boy was in Central Park.

Me and Zach were running. Lockstep. Not talking. Just breathing. My thoughts weren't anywhere but in the feel of my feet hitting the ground, my elbows at my side, the breath in and out. Zach beside me: feet to ground in unison. Breath in and out at the same time.

The boy came from the other direction. Running toward us in jeans and a T-shirt and beat-up pair of boots. Not regular running-in-Central-Park clothes. And so skinny the clothes flopped around him, engulfed him, slowed him down, almost tripped him. He was still fast though. Even with his elbows askew and his heels. .h.i.tting the ground.

Zach nudged me. But I'd already seen. Already recognized. The boy was looking at me, too. I didn't have words for the expression. Intense. Almost like he hated me.

Then he was past us.

"Ha," Zach said. "Freak."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't help thinking that Zach thought the same of me. Or used to. I imagined him in school, watching me walk past, then turning to Tayshawn to spit out the word: freak.

I had more in common with that boy than I did with Zach, running with his high-knee lift and elbows tucked tight at ninety degrees. No one ever called Zach a freak.

AFTER.

This is how it feels now.

Blankness.

Numbness.

Nothing.

Without Zach I'm nothing. I'm not even half of anything, not even the in between I was before. Not girl, not boy, not black, not white.

It's all gone.

I'm gone.

AFTER.

Tayshawn shows us the court where he and Zach first played ball together, the court where they first dunked, the spot in the park where they first got drunk together. He shares a whole series of firsts.

It feels as if Tayshawn's telling us that Zach was his. That we could never know him the way he did.

I don't care. I know he belongs to them more than he did to me. Sarah's been with him-on and off-since freshman year, and Tayshawn and Zach go back to the third grade. I shouldn't be here.

He takes us to a little cave deep in Inwood. Their firsts here were playing truth or dare with neighborhood girls and smoking pot.

It's dank and musty. My nose wrinkles. There are lots of cigarette b.u.t.ts, empty beer bottles.

"Cla.s.sy," Sarah says.

Tayshawn laughs. "You're probably the only one of his girls he never took here."

Sarah stiffens. I don't. I'm not even offended that Tayshawn clearly doesn't think of me as one of Zach's girls.

He sits down a little bit in from the cave's mouth, where it's still light enough that we can see each other but not so far forward that people walking by on the path below would know we're there. Sarah crouches next to him, unwilling to get her dress dirty. She clutches her purse. I sit cross-legged on Tayshawn's other side, letting the skirt of Mom's dress pool in my lap.

"I'm honored," Sarah says. "Clearly he only brought his trashy girls here."

"You should be."

"He never showed me this place," I say, though we'd run past it. Sarah looks at me quickly and then away and I regret saying it, a.s.serting that I was one of his girls, too. I don't know either of them. Not really. I'm only here because I miss Zach.

"You and him . . . ," Tayshawn begins, staring at me.

Sarah nods. "How'd you two . . . ?"

Neither of them can say what they want to say. The frame of their question is broken.

"It just happened," I say.

I've been asked this question so often but finally I want to answer.

"I guess. We were both in the park. Central Park, I mean. Not here. We said, you know, 'Hey, how you doing?' We'd seen each other in cla.s.s. Never spoken though. So we got talking. Turned out we both loved running so we started running together."

"You really ran together?" Sarah asks. "You're not lying? I never saw you run."

"I'm not lying. I like running. We ran together. It wasn't the same as you and him, Sarah. Honest. He wasn't my boyfriend."

"What was he then?" she asks. "For you."

Tayshawn holds up his hand. "None of our business, right?"

"I'm not sure," I say. "I guess it is your business, isn't it? You were his best friend. You were his girlfriend. The two people who knew him best."

"I don't think I knew him that well," Sarah says. "I didn't know about you."

"Like I knew!" Tayshawn says. "But I thought something was up, you know? Been a few months. He wasn't hanging around as much. I noticed. Asked him about it. But he was all, 'What do you mean? Nothing going on.' Made me think there was. Now I know."

"I didn't even suspect," Sarah says. "I had not clue one."

"We mostly ran." I uncross my legs, pull the dress over my knees and hug them, resting my chin. I haven't talked about this with anyone but the cops.

"But you didn't only run," Sarah says.

"Zach's fast. How'd you keep up?"

"I'm fast, too," I say, relieved at Tayshawn's interruption. He looks skeptical. So does Sarah. "We ran in the park. Sometimes we'd run up there all the way from school."

"What else d'you do?" Sarah asks. "I mean, me and Zach, we talked about stuff, hung out with friends, went to movies. Stuff like that." Her eyes fill with water but she doesn't start crying. I know how she feels. This talk of Zach is making the rawness inside me swell.

"That all?" Tayshawn asks. " 'Cause, you know, talking and going to the movies, that is not the main thing I do with my girl." I wonder who his girl is. She's not anyone at school.

"You want all the details? Pervert!" Sarah laughs. "Sure. We made out. He was my boyfriend. He tell you about that stuff?"

Tayshawn smiles but he's not saying anything.

"He did, didn't he? s.h.i.t. And everyone says girls are blabbermouths!"

"He never said a word about Micah." Tayshawn is having fun. He winks at me.

"Great," Sarah says. "He keeps her s.e.x life private but not mine."

I don't say anything for the moment, but then I think, why not? We're all being honest, aren't we? "He was too ashamed. Why would he tell anyone about me? You saw what everyone said when they found out. First they didn't believe it. Then they acted like they felt sick. 'Cause Zach and me? No way!"

"I believed it right away," Sarah said. "I heard it and I knew."

"Really?" I ask. "I thought you said I was too ugly for him. I'm like an ugly boy, you said."

"Harsh," Tayshawn says.

"I was mad," Sarah says. "I'm still mad." She's not looking at me.

"It's what everyone was thinking," I say. "Is thinking."

"Not me," Tayshawn said. "I don't think you're ugly. I mean, you're not beautiful or anything, but ugly? Nope."

"Thanks," I say, smiling. It feels strange on my face. The muscles almost don't know what to do. Sarah and Tayshawn laugh. "It's not me not being pretty. I know that. It's what a freak I am. I mean, look at me, look at you. You wear makeup and walk and talk right. Anything I say, people stare. You got your hair all pretty and relaxed and long. I'm cropped short."

"I wish I could do that," Sarah says. But I know she's lying. She's proud of her hair. "You got any idea how long this takes?"

I do. I can't imagine spending that many hours every morning combing my hair out. But I like the way it looks on her just as much as she does. Loose curls that tumble to halfway down her back.

"What do you think happened to him?" Tayshawn asks.

I don't know what to say. I've thought about it. I've wondered. But I know so little.

FAMILY HISTORY.

I remember my first visit to the Greats. I was very small. Too small for coherent sentences, but already walking around.

My father hadn't been speaking to them since his first baby-me-was born. He wasn't answering their calls and returned letters unopened. That was until my mother wore down his resistance and made him take me up to see them for the first time. She didn't join us.

I remember being in the front seat, even though I should have been in back in the car seat. I remember wriggling out of the straps that held me to the seat, so I could crawl in front and see over the dashboard and out the windows to the trees bending in over the car as it went up the b.u.mpy road. I remember green leaves as far as I could see, the sunshine blurring blades and veins and stems together, so that all those branches and leaves swaying in the wind became a green, almost golden, glow.

It must have been summer.

I remember laughing at the sparkling gold green light and my dad shushing me and cajoling me to sit down again but I wouldn't: I wanted to see.

Then we were almost at the house.

Dad stopped the car. We got out and Dad pulled me up onto his hip so I could see as good as he could from almost as high. We pushed through trees until we were at the house that was right in the center of them. Trees leaned in so close they were almost pushing in through the windows. The only clear s.p.a.ce was the veranda that wrapped around the house.

Five adults were sitting in rocking chairs. There were children in their laps and at their feet. A few as little or littler than me, but mostly bigger. They were tugging and nipping at one another.