The Lies We Told

  He looked at me as though he didn’t understand my question. “Just keep on like we are now,” he said. “No difference, really. We ain’t got no car to begin with. We just need to get us another boat.” He smiled at me, that perfectly symmetrical, handsome-as-all-get-out smile, as he got to his feet. “You don’t understand us ’cause you ain’t like us,” he said. “You like your luxuries, but we ain’t never had any so we don’t miss ’em. They just tie you down, anyway.”

  “You’re probably right,” I agreed because I didn’t know what else to say. I remembered Simmee saying that Tully loved it when the power went out. He was definitely eating up the survivalist routine.

  “I’m gonna go clean that rabbit,” he said as Simmee returned to the room. He pecked her on the cheek. “Y’all work up an appetite with them tarrit cards now, hear?”

  “Oh, we will.” Simmee was carrying a small rectangular, maroon velvet bundle. The tarot cards, no doubt. She sat next to Lady Alice on the sofa, and I sank lower in the lopsided chair. I felt a bit chastened by the conversation with Tully, as if I was expecting too much from him. From all of them. Maybe I was. I was an intruder in their lives, after all.

  Simmee placed the velvet bundle on the table with great care. Unwrapping the fabric, she removed the deck and rested it on the corner of the table. Then she spread out the velvet, smoothing it with her hands, and began shuffling the cards.

  “You thinkin’ of your question, Lady Alice?” she asked.

  “’Course,” Lady Alice said.

  Simmee apparently had a little ritual worked out, steps she took with the deck to make it look like something sacred. She cut the cards with exquisite care. She held her hands flat above Lady Alice’s as the older woman cut the deck again. Then she began laying the cards on the velvet. “Now, you keep thinkin’ of your question while I make the septic cross,” she said.

  I frowned. Septic cross? I’d observed enough tarot card readings back in my college dorm days to know that the pattern in which the cards were laid out was called a Celtic cross. I didn’t know why, but hearing Simmee mangle the term, knowing she had probably mangled it for years and maybe even learned it that way, both touched and hurt me. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

  From where I sat, the cards looked old and worn, almost flimsy. Simmee glanced at me. “Want to come join us here, Miss Maya?” she asked.

  “No, thanks.” I’d never been one for the occult. I didn’t believe in any of it on a rational plane, but I supposed I did believe on some gut level, which is why, although I’d watched my friends have their cards read, I’d never wanted a reading myself. I was afraid of hearing something I didn’t want to hear, and that was especially true right now, when my future felt so uncertain.

  “Some people don’t like to know the future.” Simmee read my mind, as she flipped one more card off the top of the deck.

  “Me, I like to be prepared,” Lady Alice said with a firm nod of her head. She was staring at the cards as if they’d disappear if she took her eyes off them.

  I rested my aching head against the back of the chair and watched the two women, one very young, the other slipping into her senior years. One fair as wheat, the other dark as molasses. Lady Alice giggled at something Simmee said, and I smiled at the warmth between them.

  I’d nearly dozed off again by the time they were finished. “You stay and eat with us, Lady Alice,” Simmee said. “Tully’ll walk you home later in case the moanin’ starts.”

  The moaning?

  “Ain’t all that hungry.” Lady Alice got stiffly to her feet. “You just watch our patient, here, ’right?” She waved to me. “Bye, now, sweetness,” she said.

  “Goodbye, Lady Alice,” I said. “And thank you.”

  Simmee remained seated on the sofa, straightening the deck of cards with her hands before wrapping them again in the velvet cloth. We heard the screen door squeak open, then shut with a bang. Simmee lifted her gaze to me and I saw that her eyes glistened.

  “She keeps hopin’ I’ll say somethin’ about Jackson,” she said. “That’s her son that died.”

  I nodded. “She told me.”

  “What’d she say about him?”

  “How Tully found him.”

  Simmee flinched, and I understood. I knew how a memory could make you flinch. “It was awful,” she said. Then she sighed, leaning back in the sofa. “She didn’t used to wear them black clothes all the time. She don’t take ’em off now ’cept to wash ’em.” She looked at the velvet-covered deck of cards. “Don’t know what she wants to hear, exactly, but I know that’s what she’s hopin’ for. That I’ll say somehow he ain’t dead. That it wasn’t his body Tully brung to her house.”

  I felt the burden Simmee was carrying.

  “What did you mean about the moaning?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothin’ really. Lady Alice believes the woods are haunted.”

  “By Jackson?”

  Simmee looked surprised. “Jackson? Oh, no, no. By the slaves. In the olden days, the slaves was dropped off in Wilmington and was forced to walk all the way to Fayetteville, right past Last Run, though I guess it wasn’t called Last Run back then. Anyway, a bunch of ’em died on the way and she thinks they haunt the woods, so she don’t like to walk through them alone at night. She also says—I don’t know if this part’s true—that some of the slaves escaped and started livin’ here at Last Run, and they’re her kin.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “I hear the moanin’ myself sometimes. Gran said it was the slaves, just like Lady Alice, but Tully says it’s the trees rubbin’ against each other.”

  I nodded at the deck of cards on the table. “Do you believe in them?” I asked. “The tarot cards?”

  She shrugged. “Gran done ’em all my life,” she said. “She believed in ’em. I don’t tell people if I see bad things comin’. What’s the point? Lady Alice, I just see good things, but she don’t want to hear about all the good things happenin’ with her seven live kids. She just wants to fill up that hole Jackson left.”

  “Her youngest,” I said.

  “An’ her best. The onliest one that took care of his mama. The others is worthless.”

  “You know her others?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Simmee rolled her eyes. “I knew all her kids. They was older than me and they’d torture me, but it was just kids havin’ fun. All the others moved away down to Georgia…can you imagine? All your kids leavin’ you? ’Cept Larry, I guess. He helps out. He don’t like me, but when I take the boat over to Ruskin, I walk to his house and he takes me to the store. I get groceries for Lady Alice on top of for ourselves and he gives me money for hers.”

  “Why doesn’t Larry like you?”

  She shrugged. “Don’t rightly know. Probly ’cause I was always taggin’ along after him and his brothers. Bein’ a nuisance.”

  “Doesn’t Tully go with you to Ruskin?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes again. “Tully hates leaving Last Run,” she said. “Don’t matter. I’m used to it. He gets the meat and fish, I get the other things.” She stood up, one hand against her back as if it ached, then opened the drawer of one of the end tables. She reached inside and pulled out a photograph, which she brought over to me.

  I took it from her and held it toward the light from the window. The image was striking. Tully, his fair hair a little longer than it was now, grinned widely, flanked on either side by his two dark-skinned friends. Each man held a bottle of beer in his hand and they could have been any three, good-looking college-aged guys at a party. Simmee leaned toward me and I held the picture so she could see it. She ran one fingertip down the side of the image.

  “That’s Larry on the left,” she pointed, “Jackson on the right and Tully in the middle, of course. They was goin’ on a fishing trip. Larry’s wife took the picture.”

  I remembered how it had felt a short time earlier when Tully came home from hunting, how he’d instantly filled the room—the house—with male energy. Now he was
alone at Last Run Shelter with only women for company. I wondered what it had been like for him to lose his friend.

  “It’s got to be hard for Tully to be out here with just you and Lady Alice after having a guy friend to hang around with,” I said.

  “I s’pose so.” Simmee took the photograph from me, looking at it one last time before returning it to the drawer again.

  “Won’t Larry come again soon to check on his mother?” I asked, hoping Simmee would have a better answer than Lady Alice had offered.

  Simmee sat down again. “He come out the first day after the storm,” she said. “Said he almost didn’t make it, there was so much…mess on the creek and the water was so fast. He brung Lady Alice—and us, too—food and batteries and charcoal and such, and tried to talk his mama into goin’ back to Ruskin with him, but she wasn’t havin’ none of it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Would you leave your home, Miss Maya?”

  I thought of my house. My beautiful neighborhood with its tree-lined streets. I let in the thought that hurt more than I could bear—Adam and Rebecca’s reaction to my disappearance. I needed to be with them right that minute. I needed to go home. My chest ached with the need.

  “No, I guess not,” I said.

  “Larry don’t know our boat’s gone,” Simmee said, “so he don’t know we’re stuck out here now.”

  “So…what’s your best guess as to when he’ll be back?” I pushed. My hopes were pinned on the guy in the photograph.

  Simmee gave me a mischievous smile, then leaned forward to tap on the deck of tarot cards. “We could try to find out,” she teased.

  I smiled back at her. “I’ll pass,” I said, although if I thought the cards could truly tell me, I would beg her for that septic cross.

  27

  Rebecca

  “DO YOU MEAN THE TANGO?”

  Rebecca was cleaning one of the gurneys with an antiseptic wipe, but she looked up at the sound of Adam’s voice. He was sitting on the other side of the classroom-turned-clinic with his patient, a woman well into her eighties, and he suddenly rose to his feet, holding his arms out to her.

  “I’ve never done it,” he said. “Can you teach me?”

  With a chuckle, the woman stood up and stepped into his arms. She began humming a tune, leading Adam as best she could around the cramped quarters of the room, dodging chairs and tables, the crash cart, a gurney, a wheelchair. Dressed in a purple jersey and beige pants, she took long, sultry steps, her slender, graceful body pressed close to Adam’s. Adam was awkward but game, and their smiles quickly spread throughout the room to the nurses, the volunteers, the patients. The man with the sprained ankle started to clap. The three-year-old girl with the black eye jumped up and down. Watching Adam, Rebecca felt close to smiling herself. He makes people feel good about themselves, Maya had once told her.

  Yes, Rebecca thought. He does.

  “Good God.”

  Rebecca turned to see Dorothea standing behind her, an amused expression on her face.

  “He is so outrageously inappropriate,” Dorothea said. “I love it.”

  “I know.” Rebecca held her breath as Adam lowered his partner in a careful dip. “Me, too.”

  Adam and the woman took their bows, and everyone applauded. The dance had lasted all of twenty seconds, and each second had taken a year off the old woman’s face. Rebecca didn’t know what had brought her to the clinic in the first place, but she was going to leave cured.

  “So, aside from ‘dancing with the docs,’ how are things going in here?” Dorothea looked around the room. It was divided roughly into six examining areas staffed with physicians, physician assistants and nurses, with a couple of nurses doing triage near the doorway. “Looks like controlled chaos,” she said.

  “Exactly.” Rebecca organized her tray of equipment as she spoke. “We’re waiting for some partition walls. Then we’re golden.”

  It amazed her how much they’d accomplished in two days’ time. Practically overnight, the school had been transformed into a sort of refugee camp. Only part of the building was being utilized, because the generators couldn’t provide enough power for the entire school, but the environment was far more civilized than it had been in the airport. More generators were expected, and in a few days, the kitchen would be able to produce at least one meal a day.

  Three of the classrooms had been transformed into clinics, one of them staffed entirely with volunteer mental health workers who were at least as busy as the medical staff. A smaller classroom housed a makeshift pharmacy, and a few more rooms were devoted to helping people find housing and cope with insurance headaches. It was hardly a happy atmosphere. Many of the evacuees had lost all they owned, and many others lived with the uncertainty of still not knowing what they’d lost. Which is why those rare moments like the one Adam had offered the elderly woman—and by extension, everyone else in the clinic—were pure magic.

  “Take a break,” Dorothea said to her now.

  “Soon,” she agreed as she wheeled the clean gurney against the wall and peeled off her gloves.

  She was working long hours, and she was so glad to be busy. Every minute of every day, she was reminded that she was not alone in her heartbreak. The patients she treated didn’t know what she was going through, but she found strength in their strength, and the sympathy she showed them seemed to wend its way back to her somehow. There was a fine line, though, between giving her all to her work and being overwhelmed by it, and she knew she was treading that line on unsteady feet.

  So did Dorothea.

  “I’m serious, Rebecca,” Dorothea said. “Break.” She called to one of the triage nurses working near the classroom door. “Next patient is mine!” she said, shooing Rebecca out of her workspace. “You haven’t stopped moving in two days. Get a nap.”

  With her treatment area snatched out from under her, Rebecca had little choice. “Okay,” she said, heading for the door. She looked at Adam, wishing he could take a break with her, but he was busy with another patient and she left the room.

  She and Adam had been glued at the hip since they arrived at the school. They’d pitched in with the grunt work before the arrival of the evacuees. They’d helped set up long, neat rows of green cots in the gymnasium. They’d organized the cafeteria, with its pallets of bottled water, hand sanitizers, snack food and MREs. Always together, and whether that was Adam’s doing or hers, she couldn’t have said. All she knew was that she wanted to be near him—near someone who understood what was going on inside her. Adam got it, because he shared it.

  She walked through the school’s hallway, which was crammed with people sitting and sleeping on the floor as they waited for their turns inside the clinic, and headed for the exit. She passed the room that had been set up to aid family members find other family members. She found herself glancing into that room with longing. She wished she could step inside to discover a new method of finding Maya, a way that no one had yet thought of, because it still struck her as impossible that her sister had vanished from the face of the earth when she fell from that helicopter. So much had been accomplished in two days, and yet the search for Maya and the other passengers on the chopper had made no progress at all.

  Inside the trailer, she didn’t even consider sleeping. Instead she spent her break as she and Adam had been spending all their free moments: on the phone, calling hospitals throughout the eastern part of the state, describing Maya to overburdened social workers. She sat on the bed, her back against the trailer wall, the list of phone numbers she and Adam were working from next to her.

  She supposed if Brent were there, she’d be sharing this bed with him. In the trailer as well as in the clinic, he’d be like a wall between her and Adam. He’d get in the way of the growing intimacy she felt with her brother-in-law when they were working, talking or simply lost in their own fears for Maya. Cut off from Adam, she would feel ten times more alone.

  On their second night in the trailer, Rebecca was so exhausted th
at she fell asleep on top of the thin bedspread covering the double bed. It seemed like only moments later that Adam was shaking her shoulder.

  “Wake up, Bec,” he said. “Dot’s here.”

  She sat up quickly, her head instantly clear despite the darkness.

  “It’s not about Maya.” Dorothea’s voice came from the middle of the trailer, and Rebecca saw the bright disc of a flashlight bobbing in the darkness. There was a second flashlight, and the cones of light bounced off each other over the little table in the kitchenette.

  Rebecca got to her feet as Adam turned on the dim kitchen light, and she saw that Dorothea had a man with her. The two of them turned off their flashlights as Rebecca padded into the kitchen. The man was about fifty years old. He was bearded and bespectacled, and his bare arms were muscular and heavily tattooed.

  “What’s going on?” Rebecca glanced at Adam, but he only shrugged. They both wore the same clothes they’d had on all that day and the day before. She knew she looked as disheveled as he did. They had a shower now in their tiny bathroom. What they didn’t have was the time to use it.

  “This is Cody Ryan,” Dorothea said. “He’s head of the search team at the site of the chopper crash.”

  Rebecca sucked in her breath. “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “Tell us something good, man.” Adam made it sound like a dare.

  The guy—Cody—shook his head. “Nothing good, I’m afraid,” he said.

  Rebecca turned to Dorothea. “You said this wasn’t about Maya!” she said.

  Dot put her hand on Rebecca’s arm. “It’s not. Not…directly.” She physically moved Rebecca to the long built-in couch that Adam was using as his bed. Adam had already sunk down on it, and when Rebecca sat next to him, he put his arm around her. Tugged her closer.

  “We found one of the bodies this evening,” Cody said. “A girl. Woman. Not your sister, though.”

  “Janette Delk,” Dorothea said. “New DIDA nurse. You hadn’t met her yet. I spoke to her parents tonight.” She shook her head. “First volunteer I’ve lost.”