Chapter 1 #2
I spent the rest of the day in a silent panic.
At lunch, both Mary and Wilma expressed outrage that I’d been unfairly accused.
I said nothing, and felt even worse. When school got out, I waited for my brother at my usual spot, watching fat snowflakes fall from the pearly sky, their beauty no consolation.
When I got home, my mother asked me about my day.
I said my day was fine. Because why not?
In for a penny, in for a pound. She looked up from her ironing, wincing as if in sudden pain.
Or that’s how I remember that moment. She’d always told me she could tell when someone was lying, and so I held my breath and waited.
The look of pain left her face. She smiled, reached out to muss my hair, and said if I changed my clothes and wore my warm hat, I could go out and play.
That night, I was not visited by demons, and I woke to find, to my surprise, that I had not perished in my sleep.
When I returned to school on Monday, I noticed that Mr. Pile didn’t call Tom or Ronald or Peter any names but their own. He didn’t call on them at all—his pride was too great for that. But at least some decent part of him realized he shouldn’t be dishing out what he so clearly couldn’t take.
And so my relief turned to jubilance. I didn’t care that no one knew I was the one who’d taught the teacher a lesson.
Everyone thought Diana Prince was a regular army nurse, but she was secretly Wonder Woman, using her jet and lasso and superpowers to fight evil, near and far.
I had no magic lasso, and no invisible jet, but I could lie with eyes of steel, and that felt like a superpower.
Over the next few days, I planned an entire career of secretly using this power to take down other villains.
On Friday, the principal showed up outside Mr. Pile’s door.
He said my name and told me I should gather my things.
I could barely strap my books because my hands were shaking, though Mr. Pile himself only seemed surprised.
Out in the hallway, the principal touched my shoulder and spoke to me gently, saying my father was in his office.
And I knew. My father was a machinist at a metals plant.
He went to work even when he was sick. If I was in trouble, no matter how serious, my mother would have been the one to come.
I broke into a run, ignoring the principal calling after me.
Some of us are like that with what scares us.
If we know it’s coming, we rush to it. The dread is worse than the thing itself.
When the secretary saw me in the doorway, she looked at me with pity, then glanced at a door a few feet from her desk.
I moved past her, opened that door, and there was my father, a giant in a chair made for a child, the laces of one of his boots undone.
He’d been crying. And just that, seeing tearstains on my father’s cheeks, was like seeing water run uphill.
I’d entered a new world, with different rules.
“Oh honey,” he said, and held out his arms.
My mother had collapsed while she was hanging clothes in our backyard.
I learned later that Mrs. Ritchie next door saw her fall, and she’d had to run and get her step stool so she could get over the fence and try to help.
By the time she did, my mother was already dead.
An aneurysm, my father said, and I could tell the word was unfamiliar to him as well.
But he explained as best he could, putting a fist by his left ear, then shooting out his oil-stained fingers.
A burst vessel in her brain. He couldn’t understand it.
She was the best person he knew, my mother.
And there was no family history of any such thing.
She was young and healthy. It made no sense, he said, gasping through sobs, his shoulders heaving. No sense at all.
Of course, all of it made sense to me.
If my father had asked me directly why she died, I would have told him the truth, even if he hated me for it.
I sincerely believed my lie had killed her, and that if I lied again, my father or Bobby might be taken as well.
But he didn’t ask me why she died, and I didn’t volunteer the information.
My whole life, my father had brightened at the sight of me, laughed at my jokes, and advised my brother, three years younger, to follow my example.
I’d grown up basking in the warmth of his esteem, and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing it.
So I let him think that my misery was like his, coming only from grief.
My shame was so great that I told no one of my guilt, though for months it was always with me, an itch under my sweater, burning but unseen.
—
I wasn’t completely irrational. By the time I started seventh grade, I’d noticed that other people told lies all the time, and most of their mothers were still alive. Slowly, I came to understand that our family simply had bad luck, and I hadn’t really caused my mother’s death.
But by then, I’d lost my eyes of steel. Even with little fibs, the kind that saved someone’s feelings, I’d hesitate, and then I’d get nervous about the hesitation, and I’d invariably start to stammer.
My friends thought it was funny, how bad I was at lying.
But it’s a terrible thing to be caught in a lie, or to know that someone is thinking of you as dishonest, and maybe losing respect for you as you speak.
So I returned to my policy of honesty, not because I feared God or punishment, and not because I was especially moral. I stopped lying because I was so bad at it.
I didn’t lie again, or even try to, until I was older, and in love.