Page 60 of An Honest Lie

Summer closed her eyes; the safest place for her was with her mother.

“If there was foul play involved in her death, police will move forward with an investigation.”

Summer looked at O’Connor and the woman nodded; she didn’t feel good about that, but she didn’t feel bad, either. Things were still in the air, as her dad used to say.

“What if they can’t prove foul play?” she asked carefully.

“Then there is no case,” O’Connor said matter-of-factly. Summer nodded, settling back into her pillow.

“Good news is, your grandparents are on their way. They should be here in a few hours,” Dan said.

“I’ll be able to live with them?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t know how it started; suddenly, she was gasping, and then the gasps hurt so much that she couldn’t get around them, or around her own air, which somehow seemed to be pressing into her. A nurse rushed in and her two visitors stepped back. She could only hear her own gasps, feel her own feelings, but the last thing Summer saw before she sank heavily into unconsciousness was O’Connor mouthing the words:You’re safe now, it’s okay. You’re safe now, it’s okay...

After her mother died, Summer’s body had been physically free of the compound, but her mind had stayed trapped behind its walls. For a while, her grandparents tried to get Summer to work with a specialist who dealt with former cult members, but she’d refused to speak to him, saying it wasn’t her who’d been part of the cult but her mother. She’d only been a kid. She’d screamed this at the grief counselor until he’d smiled and said they were finally getting somewhere. When her free counseling ended, her grandparents shifted her from therapist to therapist, trying to find someone to coax her out of her depression. But no one could understand what she was feeling, and she didn’t want them to. It was her private hurt.

Her therapist suggested she get a part-time job, and her grandparents latched on to the idea, citing all the opportunities that came with having a job. They also offered to buy her a used car to get to and from work, which was the only reason she agreed. A car meant freedom, and that was a precious commodity. She got a job at a local restaurant, busing tables and then later working as a server. The tips were good and she had nothing to spend her money on, so she saved it. What else was there to do? Summer had gone over the options, things like cheerleading and chess club, and the sport that must not be named—softball. She had no interest in doing things that normal kids did; nothing brought her joy. In the morning, she’d drive to school, and after school she’d drive to work, from work it was home: easy-peasy.

On nights when she didn’t work, she sat between Mark and Gilda as they watched their shows: the news (so they could bemoan the wickedness of the younger generations),The 700 Club(Pat Robertson was her grandma’s crush) andDr. Quinn, Medicine Womanreruns. It was her favorite time and not because she enjoyed the content. No, Summer daydreamed during those hours, hands pressed between her knees, her eyes glazed over. She thought of who she was going to be next, and where she was going next, and most importantly, she thought of all the things she wanted to do to Taured to punish him for killing her mother. She used whatever they were watching on TV to come up with her fantasy: if Pat Robertson was talking about the fires of hell, that’s where Summer would send him. If Sully was bitten by a rattlesnake, Summer would have Taured bitten by one, as well, but instead of saving him, as the brave Dr. Quinn would have, she’d watch him die, writhing on the floor in pain. It was nice, better therapy than the therapy, if she were honest.

After the shows, she’d fall into her mother’s old bed and sleep deep and heavy, momentarily sated with revenge. And that’s how it went.

When Summer graduated high school, she legally changed her name to Lorraine Ives—her mother’s maiden name, which she shortened to Rainy—and moved to New York. Her grandparents wrote to her regularly, folding a religious tract into each card or letter they sent. Rainy kept every piece of Christian propaganda in a shoebox in her closet because she thought her mom would find that funny. Shortly after her graduation, Mark and Gilda died, within eight months of each other.

She enrolled in art school after a year of working the New York restaurant scene, using the money from the sale of her grandparents’ house for her first year’s tuition. Rainy was not an artist; Taured had cared about educating the young ones with his skewed view of the Bible, art falling very low on his list of accepted activities. But art was the way people gave voice to truly important things. When she’d walked through MoMA for the first time, she’d felt like every cell in her body had come to life. You could say anything you wanted to—anything at all, and hide its meaning between layers of paint, or in the bend of metal, or in the folds of performance art. During her visit, Rainy had overheard two friends discussing an exhibit, which consisted of a piece of linen wrapped around a rope.

“I swear to God I can’t wait until this class is over. What the hell does Campsey want us to say about this. I cannot...” The taller of the two unhooked her arm from her friend’s and went over to examine the display, getting so close Rainy swore her nose brushed against the rope.

“It says nothing. I hate it.” The girl backed up, joining her friend, who was draped over her phone, not even looking.

Rainy couldn’t disagree with her more. Both the rope and the linen had been created from the same fabric, yet each was woven into a distinct texture, and then they had been wound around each other. She’d gone back to the room she rented and Googled Professor Campsey on her laptop as she ate pickle chips from a bag. Daniel Campsey taught at NYU. In his photo on the college website, he had a round face with two rosy spots high on his cheeks that made it look like he was wearing blush. He looked like a shaved Santa Claus, and she wanted to take one of his classes. It was a gut feeling, and since she was living on those lately, she licked her fingers clean of pickle crumbs and filled out an online application.

When Rainy found out that she was accepted, there was no one to tell. She wrote a letter to Taured detailing her life after the loss of her mother. The letter was six pages long; she burned it in the kitchen sink after she reread it, ashamed both of how weak she sounded and that her first instinct had been to write him at all. She didn’t want to send Taured a letter detailing her hurt; she wanted to make him hurt back.

There had indeed been an investigation into her mother’s death, but Taured’s people had protected him, backing up the story that her mother was mentally ill and had overdosed on drugs, either accidentally or on purpose. There was no way to prove that she had been injected against her will. The community was asked why they hadn’t contacted anyone for help about Lorraine’s drug addition, and Taured had said that they hadn’t known; Lorraine had taken great pains to hide it from everyone. Her death had been ruled an accident, and Taured got away with it—all of it. The only thing he didn’t get was Rainy herself: the courts had ruled that she would stay with her grandparents. He’d never gotten her back. She knew how enraged that would make him.

She took classes slowly, while working forty hours a week at a sports bar, serving beer and burgers to the late-night crowd. Nothing fit quite like the feel of welding iron. At first, the idea of spitting fire at metal seemed like hot, heavy work. But despite her reservations, she’d loved it, and had taken more classes, choosing metal sculpture for her senior project, a depiction of inner self using an outer medium. She chose to make a full-body sculpture of herself as an old woman, using reclaimed metal. She wanted to show not who she was in her current state, but who she would be. It took her months just to find the pieces of metal she wanted to work with, scouring junkyards and old construction sites. She hoarded scrap metal for months, stacking it against the wall in her bedroom.

When it was finally time to start working, she sketched drawings of herself as she thought she’d be in fifty years. Nothing was working, and she couldn’t get it right until one day she realized that she needed to go deeper than skin. She stripped her sculpture of its topical flesh and started making a figure out of muscle. She hadn’t wanted to make something beautiful, as so many of her classmates had; rather, she wanted to make something so ugly it was a warning. At the end of a grueling ten months of work, Rainy submitted her piece: a five-foot-five statue of her seventy-year-old self, her back rigidly straight, but the muscles on her arms sagging low in hammocks of flesh as she gripped a walking stick that looked like a baseball bat.

Her senior project made it into the school’s yearly art show and a reporter was there to do a write-up. He’d interviewed her and asked to take a photo of her standing next to her work; when she’d refused to be in the photo, he’d taken one of her hand touching the hand of the sculpture instead. He called the pieceA Millennial View of Selfand put the photo of Rainy’s hand reaching for her sculptures alongside the article.

She never could pinpoint what it was about the piece that captured the art world so suddenly, and she didn’t have time to think on it. Suddenly, Rainy’s sculpture was on the front page of the art section in theTimesand interview requests began to pour in. Her first commission after she graduated was for the public library and was put directly in the vast lobby with a plaque with her name on it.Caught Up in Booksis what she called it: a ten-foot tornado of books hurtling in every direction. It was a whirlwind of fame and acclaim that could never be attached to her real name or her face. She’d never allowed a photo of herself to be taken, in case he were to see it. What would he do after all these years if he saw her photo in some magazine? But still, she lived in fear, walking in the shadows in case he noticed her. How angry it made her on some days that she had to live her life both without her mother and constantly looking over her shoulder. But she wasn’t angry enough to not be scared.

24

Now

Rainy stared out the window at the gaudy lights and the silent desert beyond. Beside her, on the seat, sat her phone.

I’m going to kill her. You’d better come if you want to save her, the text had read.

She looked up at the cabdriver. “If you could drop me off a couple blocks away, I’d appreciate it.” She looked down at her hands as they shook in her lap, the chipped red nail polish reminding her of her mother.

A brief nod from the driver and the car veered sideways. It was too early for the city to be beautiful; Vegas was a moon child, and under the sun’s microscope, she looked like costume jewelry. Hands pressed between her knees, she stared at the Bellum, the crawl of it toward the sky. A vertical tomb.

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