Notes from a Liar and Her Dog

  “Shut up, you don’t know anything!” She glares at me. Then her face seems to soften. “Trust me, she hates the way you walk, so sit down and don’t move. And be nice. BE NICE! I’m not going to get her until you promise.” She crosses her arms.

  I make a scoffing noise, but I sit down. “I’ll be nice,” I say, “but I don’t walk like any monkey.”

  “Fine. Okay,” Elizabeth says. She gestures with her hands as if this is the end of it, then she gets up and leaves me and Pistachio alone.

  I am petting him when my mom comes out. She sees me sitting in the chair, with the table, the flowers, and the lemonade. The corners of her mouth turn up. It is a small smile and it only lasts two blinks, but in it I see something that surprises me. My mother is glad to see me. Me. I smile back, before I catch myself. Do not do this, I tell myself. The second Elizabeth or Kate shows up, you’ll be couch food again.

  My mom touches her hair as if to check that it is in place and sits down. I pour us each a glass of lemonade and offer her a rice cake with jelly, just like Elizabeth said to. My mom crosses her legs. “So, what’s this all about?” she asks.

  Elizabeth has told me not to mention the thing about Pistachio until the end, but this is where I start, though I do take Elizabeth’s advice on how to ask. I say the words exactly as Elizabeth scripted them for me.

  “I found this flyer on the kitchen desk. I wasn’t snooping, it was just there, out in the open. And when I saw it…it worried me.” I hand the folded-up flyer to my mother.

  My mom opens the flyer. When she sees what it says, her face gets tense. She frowns, shakes her head, and sighs. Then she looks out at her yellow pansies and back at Pistachio, curled in my lap. She sighs again. “Pistachio seems to be doing okay. We haven’t taken him to the vet recently, or at least I haven’t.” She looks at me.

  “I haven’t, either,” I say.

  “I don’t think it’s time to euthanize him, if that’s what you’re worried about.” She looks at me again.

  “You mean murder him,” I say, but as soon as the words pop out of my mouth, I am sorry I’ve said them.

  My mother makes an annoyed sound in her throat. Here we go again, I think. But then she seems to regain her cool. “I am concerned about how we’re going to get him to Connecticut, though. I’m afraid we may need to fly him there.”

  “In an airplane?” I say. I can’t believe my mother is suggesting spending money on Pistachio.

  “It’s tax deductible,” she offers.

  That figures, I think, but this time I manage to hold my tongue.

  “And then I don’t know if Pistachio will have to be quarantined. It’s one of the one hundred things I have to find out about. I got that flyer because it talks about how old dogs can be traumatized by a move. I wanted to show your dad because I’m worried if something happens to him, you’ll never forgive us.”

  I look at her. I’m surprised she has thought about this. Amazed, actually.

  She shakes her head. “You and that teacher of yours act like I never think about you…like I don’t know how attached you are to that dog. I’d have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to see that. The way I figure it, I better make sure nothing happens to Pistachio or it’ll be a Lizzie Borden situation.”

  “Lizzie Borden?”

  “Decapitated her parents with an ax.”

  “God, Mom!”

  “It’s a joke, Antonia.” She smiles. She seems pleased with herself. “What”—she looks over the top of her sunglasses—“you never heard of Lizzie Borden?”

  I shake my head.

  “You got an A in history. I thought you might have heard of Lizzie Borden. You did get an A in history, didn’t you?”

  I nod.

  She seems reassured. “You’re a puzzling child, you know that? And sometimes, you make me so angry, I could tear my hair out.” She pulls at her neat blond hair.

  I look at her. Her chin is resting on her fingertips. Her brown eyes are watching me. She seems to take me in from head to toe, as if I am someone she hasn’t seen before. “You look nice in that dress, Antonia.”

  “Thank you,” I say. It feels good to hear her say this. I try to block how good it feels, but I can’t. Something inside me has softened and I can’t make it hard again.

  “As a matter of fact, you look a little like I did when I was eleven.” She smiles.

  “I do?” I look down at myself.

  “Your hair and that nose …” She bites her lip. “Gosh, I hated my nose when I was your age and I hated my mouse brown hair. You know, honey, you shouldn’t worry about your nose. We can do something about that when you get older.”

  I reach for my nose. “I like my hair and my nose,” I say, protecting it with my hand.

  She sighs. “Well, fine then,” she says, her eyebrows raised high, her jaw hard.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “When I was a baby, did you love me…or did you hate my nose then, too?” I shouldn’t have said this about the nose. It is mean and angry.

  Her neck stiffens. “That’s not fair,” she says. “I don’t hate your nose now. I’m just …” She sighs and shakes her head. “Oh, never mind. Forget I said anything.”

  “No. I want to know. Did you love me when I was a baby?”

  “Of course I did. Of course,” she says, looking into my eyes.

  I can’t look at her. I look down. I don’t say anything for a long time. I am trying to remember what it was like when I was little. What she was like.

  “I did, Antonia. I did.”

  “You used to sing to me, I remember that,” I say.

  “Uh-huh. I remember that, too. You always liked when I sang. I’d sing a song and you’d giggle and smile and clap your little hands together as if I was the best singer you ever heard.”

  “And when you said good night to me, you’d say ‘Don’t let the bedbugs bite.’”

  She nods. She is watching me now. We sit quietly, both of us. It’s nice, remembering this. But then I have to speak again. I have to. “Mom?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What happened?”

  Her jaw stiffens. Her lips clamp back into their hard line. “Nothing happened.”

  This is not true and we both know it. I wait. She looks at me. I run my hand over and over Pistachio’s head. I wait some more. I want to know. I have to know.

  “You’re a tough one, Antonia. You fight me on everything. Everything I do—everything is wrong. And the lies…I can’t trust anything you say.”

  I bite my tongue when she says this so I won’t argue, so I will let it pass. This is not the real thing. I want to know the real thing. “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “How come you love Elizabeth and Kate more than me?”

  She bristles. “I don’t.” Her eyes are hard and mad. “I love all you girls the same.”

  “No.” I choke on the word as it comes out.

  She looks away—out to her yellow pansies. The flower bed is close, but her eyes seem to see through to a distant spot. She is quiet for a long time. Then I see her fingers dab the corners of her eyes. She is crying. I try to remember if I have ever seen her cry. The tears are spilling out faster than she can dab them. She searches in her pocket for a Kleenex and blows her nose in that delicate way she has and cleans the tears off her face.

  She starts again, “They do what I tell them. You never do. With you, I’m always the villain.” She has to stop again because she’s crying so much.

  I look down at Pistachio, his little triangle ears and sweet brown eyes. He loves me.

  “Even when you were little…I’d send you to preschool in the morning, brand-new clothes, all neat and clean, cute as a button just like I wish my mom had done for me, and you’d come home filthy from head to toe, belt torn off your dress, shoes on the wrong feet, nose bloody. Your teacher would say you got in a fight. That was always the first thing you did when someone did something you didn’t like. You’d punch ‘em. And not
some nice polite little hit, either. You’d really go after them.”

  Well, they probably deserved it, I think. But I do not say this. She is going somewhere with this. I let her finish.

  “Do you know how embarrassing it is to have a little girl who is always getting in trouble? You were kicked out of two preschools, you know that? I was mortified. And then you started the lying business. You’d tell some elaborate story about how you were the queen of Egypt’s daughter. The queen of Egypt? Where do you get these things?” She shakes her head. “No one can ever believe you are Elizabeth’s sister. She is such a good child. And Kate is, too. But you …” She dabs at her nose with her Kleenex. “Of course I prefer them. Who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t?”

  Something inside me goes cold and hard. I stop hearing, stop seeing. I crawl inside myself to where it is safe. I think about my real mother and how I am her favorite. I don’t care that she isn’t real. I think about Just Carol and how she picked me and not Joyce Ann Jensen. I think about Harrison and how I am his best friend. I imagine a time in the future when my mother tells me how wrong she was this day, today.

  “I am smarter than Elizabeth and Kate,” I say.

  “I am!”

  “But then that teacher comes along,” my mother continues. “She really likes you. She thinks you are bright and funny and in a lot of pain. She thinks there’s something wrong at home. That I haven’t given you any ground to stand on. That I’ve set up, what did she call it, ‘a no-win situation’ for you. That it’s too hard for you to be good when Elizabeth and Kate have already claimed that title. That you’ve dug yourself in so deep, you can’t get out. That you aren’t tough at all. In fact, you’re pretty darn fragile. She doesn’t know what happened before, but now all your lying is pretty much confined to lies to protect a dog you love more than life itself and fantasies about your real parents.”

  “Fantasies?” I shake my head no. My real parents may not be real, but they sure as heck aren’t fantasies. Fantasies are what crazy people have.

  “I tell Just Carol she’s wrong. What she says sounds like a bunch of psychobabble, a big load of horse manure. Then I find out you’re the District 2 Champion in math and you got almost all A’s on your last report card, only you brought home Harrison’s so I wouldn’t know. And I begin to see your lies usually are about Pistachio. That when we set up a way for you to feel like you’re taking good care of him, things do get better. And I think that maybe, maybe Miss Carol Samberson, fresh out of college, is not so far wrong.”

  She is still crying. Every minute or so she mops the new tears with her Kleenex. Her mascara is dripping down her face in big black rivers. She closes her eyes and the tears stream out of the messy black lashes.

  I wonder why she is crying so hard. I know she hates being wrong…but would that make her cry this much?

  “Antonia …,” she says, her eyes still closed. She bites her lip. Her voice breaks. “What I’m trying to say is I’m sorry.”

  For a second I have to think about how to breathe. I open my mouth. Now I’m breathing, but my chest is still packed solid, and all I can think about is what it would feel like to hug my mother. I know that Elizabeth and Kate do. But not me. I must have hugged her when I was little. I know I hugged my father. But I don’t remember ever putting my arms around my mother. I wonder if she is thinking about hugging me now.

  “Mom,” I say. My voice sounds funny. It echoes in my ears as if I have a head cold. It sounds far away from me. “I’m sorry, too,” I say. No, I’m not, I think. I’m not. This is all a big lie. But it is not a lie. It is the truth. This is my real mother. I wish she were different. She wishes I were different. But that doesn’t mean she’s not mine.

  “Mom,” I ask, “will you call me Ant?”

  “Oh, Antonia,” my mother sighs. Her face looks pained. She is quiet for a few moments and then she says, “Antonia is such a lovely name. When I named you, you were the sweetest, most perfect little baby. I never dreamed you’d want to shorten Antonia to Ant. Tony, I could see. Tony I could live with. Tony is kind of cute. How about Tony?”

  “My name is Ant,” I say. I look in her eyes, past where I usually look to a spot inside.

  My mother is silent. She stares off across the street. Then she looks back at me. Her mouth tries a little smile, she covers her hand with my hand. “All right…Ant,” she says.

  We sit this way for a minute. I think about pulling my hand away, but I don’t. I don’t.

  “Maybe this move will be good for us,” she says. “It will give us a fresh start.”

  My stomach dips down. I feel the blood drain from my face. I jerk my hand away. I’d forgotten all about the move and what it was I was supposed to be talking to her about.

  “No,” I say. This comes out louder than I mean it to. My mother’s eyes grow suddenly wary.

  “We move too much. It isn’t good for …” I try to think who to name here. I settle on: “Pistachio.”

  Her eyes dart away again, as if it is too painful to look at me.

  “How come we have to move all the time? How come Dad doesn’t stay long at any job?”

  My mother shakes her head. Her lips are pressed together. She dabs at her eyes as if she’s trying not to cry. But she is crying.

  “I need to stay here in Sarah’s Road with Harrison and Just Carol …” I try to say the last, but I can’t. I start again. “I need to stay here with Harrison and Just Carol and Daddy and Elizabeth and Kate …” I think I will end here, but my voice keeps going. I try to stop the words, but they bubble up from deep inside. “I need to stay here with you,” I say. My voice cracks. I bite my tongue and open my eyes wide so I won’t cry. But I can’t keep the tears back. They chase each other down my cheeks.

  She squeezes my hand. We are quiet for a long time, listening to distant noises. The traffic sounds from Sarah’s Road, the sassy voice of a radio disc jockey, the mechanical drill of a power saw, and our own sniffling.

  I look at her. Her brown eyes are glossy with tears. Every time she looks at me, the tears spill over again.

  She is trying. She is. And so am I.

  27

  THE FACTS

  I’ve tried to imagine the conversation that happened later that day—the one between my mom and my dad. I think about it as I clean the kennels in the vet’s office or sit listening to Cave Man in math class or say good-bye to Harrison when he’s going to the zoo, where he’s allowed and I’m not. Usually I imagine the discussion happening late at night when Kate and Elizabeth and me are all asleep, and the only sounds in the house are the hum of the refrigerator and the tick of the heater turning on. I picture my mom and my dad sitting in the living room watching TV. I see my mom click the power off and the screen go suddenly blue and blank. I imagine her turning to my dad and saying: “I don’t want to move to Connecticut, Don.”

  And then my father smiles his salesman smile and says, “Oh, honey. You’ll love it there. You just wait.”

  But this is made up, of course. The only facts I have to work with are these. The week after my mom and I had our talk, my father turned down the job in Connecticut and accepted a position close to home. Then, my mother unpacked all the boxes in the garage and she planted two trees in our backyard. That’s it. That’s all I know, but I spend an awful lot of time wondering about the rest.

  What I can’t figure out is why my mother told my father she didn’t want to go. Is it because my mom hates icy winters and sticky summers? Is it because of Elizabeth and her performance schedule at Miss Marion Margo’s? Or is it because of me? I think about this almost every day. I shouldn’t, though. I know I shouldn’t. Because I really don’t want to know the answer to this question unless the answer is me.

  Turn the page for an excerpt from

  the next thrilling installment

  in Gennifer Choldenko’s

  Alcatraz series!

  1. THE WARDEN’S SON

  Sunday, January 19, 1936

  Today is my dad’s f
irst official day as associate warden on Alcatraz Island, home to anyone who is anyone in the criminal world. On our island we have world-famous robbers, thieves, swindlers, sharpshooters, second-story burglars, mad-dog murderers, plus a whole lot of ordinary criminals—vicious but not well-known.

  No one ever believes I live on Alcatraz. Even my eighth-grade history teacher made me write on the chalkboard I do not live on Alcatraz two hundred times. She didn’t even apologize when she found out I wasn’t lying.

  My mother couldn’t buy stockings at O’Connor and Moffat’s. Tey wouldn’t take her check, on account of it said: Helen Flanagan, Alcatraz Island, California. My father had trouble getting his driver’s license. Tey thought he was an escaped prisoner too stupid to fake his address, instead of an officer at the most notorious prison in North America.

  My friend Annie was kicked out of Sunday school for saying she lived on Alcatraz. They sent her to confession. She confessed she didn’t live on Alcatraz and the next day she confessed she’d lied in confession.

  Of course, Piper, the warden’s daughter, never gets in trouble for anything. Nothing sticks to her. She’s as slippery as a bar of soap.

  I’m betting a guard like Darby Trixle—also known as Double Tough—doesn’t have these kinds of problems either. Darby was born in a uniform, one size too tight. My dad, on the other hand, looks like a middle-age dance instructor. You’d never expect him to carry a firearm. An accordion maybe, but not a rifle. Not that there are firearms everywhere on Alcatraz. Only up in the guard towers and the catwalks. At any given moment you are in the crosshairs down at the dock, for example, but not up on the parade grounds.

  My dad may not look the part, but as of today, he’s the number two guy on the island. Piper lords it over all the kids that she’s the warden’s daughter, but now I’m the warden’s son. Okay, the associate warden…but still.

  In the kitchen, Dixieland band music is playing on the radio and my father is dressed in his crisp blue uniform. My mom is patiently trying to brush my sixteen-year-old sister Natalie’s hair, which she really hates.