Truth Be Told Read online

  “Josie, hold up,” she tried again, catching me above my elbow.

  I yanked my arm out of her grasp with such force that I came close to dislocating it. Wincing in pain, I whirled around to face her. “Do not touch me.”

  She held her small hands up in a surrendering posture. “Understood. And I apologize. I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”

  “I have nothing to say to you.”

  She leaned forward eagerly like a terrier on the hunt. “But if you’ll just—”

  I should have walked away. The only way to avoid escalating the situation was to avoid it altogether, but I had been unsettled by the fight with my sister and then lubricated by the midday alcohol, and so I cut her off.

  “Shut up. Don’t you listen? I have nothing to say to you. You are a parasite. This is some sort of game for you, but this is my life. My father was murdered. Murdered. And it destroyed my family. Completely, utterly, irreparably. And now, thirteen years later, you’ve arrived to dredge everything up all over again? What could I possibly want to say to you other than go fuck yourself?”

  Undeterred, Poppy took a step toward me, those huge eyes of hers even wider. “Aren’t you interested in the truth?”

  I shivered, remembering how I had said nearly that same thing to Lanie that very afternoon. Unwilling to let Poppy see the chink she had made in my armor, I crossed my arms over my chest and infused my voice with steel. “Warren Cave had his day in court. He was found guilty.”

  “Primarily because your sister claimed she saw him do it. But what if she wasn’t telling the truth? I understand she may not be a paragon of virtue.”

  The instinct to protect my sister—something I thought I had outgrown long ago—flared, and before I was aware of what I was doing, I thrust my finger in Poppy’s weasel-like face and snarled, “Shut your mouth, you gossip-mongering bitch.”

  Poppy Parnell did not recoil; instead, she seemed oddly thrilled. “That’s a pretty strong reaction you’re having there.”

  I retracted my finger and choked back a couple of profanity-laced retorts. With as much serenity and conviction as I could muster, I said, “My sister ruins everything. If you are even half the investigative journalist you claim to be, you should know that Lanie has betrayed me time and time again. But she is my sister, and I will not let you drag her name through the mud.”

  “Can I quote you on that?” Poppy asked, pulling some equipment from her bag.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said, and turned away.

  • • •

  The ceiling of my old bedroom housed a constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars that Adam and I had attached one long-ago afternoon. Adam advocated for realistic placement, constructing Orion and the Big Dipper, while I bounced on the bed and attached them at random. When the last star had been hung, Adam shut the door and pulled the curtains, simulating dark as best he could to allow us to admire our handiwork. “I’ll think of you every night when I see them,” I had promised. Now as I stared at them, all I could think of was whether everything I had believed over the last thirteen years was wrong. What if my father’s murderer was walking free? What if my sister was more of a liar than I had ever imagined?

  Downstairs, the front doorbell rang. I reluctantly dragged myself off the bed, already exhausted at the effort required to politely converse with yet another well-meaning neighbor bearing a casserole or ham or Harry & David basket of cheeses.

  Just as I opened the bedroom door, I heard an unambiguously Kiwi “G’day.”

  “Hello,” Aunt A said pleasantly, unsuspecting.

  Upstairs, my body had turned to stone. I held my breath, waiting for the caller to speak again. I must have misheard.

  But then I heard Caleb—unmistakably Caleb—say, “I’m looking for Jo, please.”

  “And whom shall I say is looking for her?”

  “You can tell her it’s Caleb, ma’am.”

  “Please, come in,” Aunt A said, her voice frothing with enthusiasm. “I’ve heard so much about you. It’s such a pleasure to finally meet you. I’m her Aunt Amelia.”

  There was silence before Caleb cleared his throat and said, “Oh, ah, I see.”

  Oblivious, Aunt A continued. “It’s so good of you to come. Please make yourself right at home. I’ll run upstairs and fetch Josie. That little rascal didn’t tell me you were coming.”

  “It was, ah, a surprise.”

  I stood motionless in my bedroom doorway, torn between the desire to hide and the desire to run. Neither was a viable option. In moments, I would be forced to admit that I had lied to Caleb—lied to him over and over again, about everything.

  When Aunt A’s footsteps sounded at the turn of the staircase, I ducked through the open door of her craft room. Before Aunt A had filled it with yarn and scrapbooking materials, it had been the spare bedroom that, for a matter of months in 2002 and 2003, housed my mother. I gently pulled the door closed behind me, nausea settling over me as I remembered hearing the muffled sounds of my mother talking to herself through this same door.

  “Josie?” I heard Aunt A say.

  In desperation, I glanced toward the open window. It was just over the roof of the front porch; I could slide out onto it and— My fevered thoughts were interrupted by the sound of heels clicking up the porch steps, and then I heard a voice that made everything eminently worse.

  “Well, well, well. What have we here?”

  “Ah . . . hello,” Caleb said suspiciously.

  “Oh! Caleb. I had no idea you were coming,” Lanie said, affecting a breathless voice that I supposed must be her imitation of me.

  Aunt A called my name again, her voice sounding closer.

  I looked back at the window. The only certain way to avoid the disaster waiting downstairs was to disappear again, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of running. I was almost thirty years old; it was time for me to face my reality, no matter how unpalatable it might be. With a breath of firm resolve, I abandoned the safety of the craft room and began descending the stairs. At the curve of the staircase, I paused to gather myself and took the opportunity to look around the corner at my sister and my boyfriend. Lanie turned in flirtatious circles in front of Caleb, diamond earrings sparkling. Jealousy and a dull sense of déjà vu combined into a hard, cold lump in my stomach, tinged with unease. The behavior was odd even for my unpredictable sister. What was she hoping to accomplish? Adam’s concerns about Lanie’s stability rattled around in my head.

  “How do you like my new sweater?” Lanie trilled.

  Caleb cocked his head and ran a hand through his loose hair, still in desperate need of a haircut, his expression one of complete befuddlement. “Uh . . . do we know each other?”

  “It’s me!” she said, barely able to contain her smirk.

  “I’m not . . . Jo?” he asked unsurely, his brow deeply furrowed.

  Lanie laughed triumphantly. It was time for me to put a stop to this bizarre charade.

  “Josie!” Aunt A exclaimed, appearing at the top of the stairs. “There you are! Caleb is here. You should’ve told me he was coming! I would have had the cleaners come. Or at least picked up the place a little.”

  “Sorry,” I murmured, beginning my unavoidable descent to the ground floor. At the base of the stairs, I cleared my throat and said, “Lanie, that’s enough.”

  She inclined her head toward me, blue eyes dancing, and smiled innocently. “This one’s a keeper.”

  “If you don’t mind,” I said stonily.

  “Nice to meet you,” Lanie said to Caleb, her voice sugarcoated. Then she stepped into the living room, shouting, “Aunt A? Did I leave my wallet here earlier?”

  Caleb turned to me warily, as if I might not be myself, either. “Jo, what the hell is going on?”

  I intended to meet his eyes but ended up looking at his right earlobe instead. “That was my sister.”

  Caleb made a noise that was part laugh, part incredulous exhalation. “What do you mean, ‘That was my sister’? What sist
er? And perhaps you’d like to explain just how the bloody hell the door was answered by the aunt whose death you’re supposed to be mourning?”

  I opened my mouth, even though I had yet to formulate an explanation. Lanie giggled in the next room, and Aunt A’s hovering presence was audible from the staircase. Whatever I was going to say to Caleb, I needed to say it without an audience.

  “Let’s go upstairs.”

  Caleb looked over at the staircase and clenched his jaw. His hesitation was a punch in the stomach.

  “Please,” I said, my voice wavering.

  After another agonizing moment, Caleb nodded silently and followed me upstairs.

  • • •

  I shut the door and gestured for Caleb to take a seat on the bed. The expression on his face indicated he thought the bed might be a lie, too, but he conceded to sit tersely on the blue-and-white quilt.

  “I thought we agreed that you weren’t going to come to Illinois. How did you even know how to get here?”

  I instantly regretted starting on the offensive. Caleb stared at me as though he could not believe that I was going to try to make this into his fault, and then his expression hardened.

  “Your aunt’s return address was on an envelope on the desk. After I got over the jet lag and cleared my head, I realized I should’ve never let you come to the funeral—or,” he said, hooking his fingers into air quotes, “the ‘funeral’—alone. Your aunt raised you and you think of her as a mother. If that’s even true.”

  “The truth is complicated.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Jo. The truth is never complicated. It’s just the truth. Circumstances may be complicated, but the truth is always black and white.” Caleb looked at me sternly. “Now, I need some answers. What the hell is going on?”

  My throat was clogged with a lump so large I doubted words would fit around it. I swallowed hard, and my saliva was bitter and metallic. It seemed like an unpromising start, but I forged ahead. The only thing that could salvage our relationship was the truth.

  “I haven’t been entirely honest with you about my family.”

  Caleb snorted to signal that was an understatement.

  I nodded miserably, uncertain what to say next. My father is dead, my sister is crazy, my mother is both dead and crazy? Nothing sounded right. Caleb was watching me expectantly, and I could feel the air between us cool with each moment I hesitated. In desperation, I reached for a literary trope, something I had often heard extolled in the bookstore: Show, don’t tell. I stuck my hand in the top drawer of my bedside table and dug past decade-old notes, tangles of costume jewelry, sticky tubes of lip gloss, and a dog-eared romance novel until I found it. My fingers trembled as they closed around the edge of the frame and pulled it from the drawer.

  I was almost too heartsick to look at it. The photograph had been in the drawer ever since Aunt A had received the letter from our mother, the one that informed us she had chosen the Life Force Collective over us, the one that did not contain a single line for Lanie or myself. Reading that letter, my blood had gone fiery with unfamiliar rage. I had wanted to destroy everything that reminded me of her, tear it into tiny, unrecognizable bits, set it aflame and curse the ashes, but my sentimentality had ultimately prevailed. Instead, I had buried the photograph beneath teenaged flotsam and done my best to forget about it.

  The photograph had been taken Christmas 2001, the last Christmas that the Buhrman family numbered four. Using the camera’s timer function had resulted in an off-center and slightly out-of-focus image, but it was nonetheless our last remaining family portrait. In it, Lanie and I sit in front of the Christmas tree in matching plaid pajamas, our father behind us, a pipe clenched between his teeth and his great arms encircling us and pulling in my mother, a reluctant figure in a cranberry-colored sweater offering a shy smile, diamond earrings twinkling in her ears. My father had not been a religious man—I couldn’t recall a single instance of him attending church—but he had always loved Christmas, its emphasis on family and demonstrative affection.

  I set the cheap, gold-edged frame in Caleb’s hands and pointed at the faces as I identified them.

  “This is me,” I said, laying my finger on the head of a dark-haired girl with rosy cheeks and a gleeful grin. I could barely remember being that person. “And this is my twin sister, Lanie. We were fourteen here. And this is my father. Ten months after this picture was taken, my father was killed.

  “And this,” I said, placing my finger on my mother’s soft expression without waiting for Caleb to absorb the information about my father, “is my mother. My father’s death was hard on all of us, but it was hardest on her. My mother had always been delicate, but she fell completely apart after Dad died.” Memories of my mother sitting in the courtroom, her face pale and utterly slack, or of pacing in the bedroom across the hall, making endless circles on the worn floor, flooded my mind, and I had to shake my head to clear them. “We essentially lost both parents the same night. Our mother shut down completely. She stopped speaking to us, she’d barely even look at us. Aunt A took care of us from then on. That part has always been true.”

  I hazarded a glance at Caleb. His brows were knit together and his mouth was tight, but I couldn’t tell if it was an expression of sorrow or pity or anger.

  “And then, a year after Dad was killed, when Lanie and I were sixteen, our mother ran away to join a cult. We hadn’t heard from or about her until the other day, when Aunt A got a call. Our mother is dead. It was her visitation I went to yesterday, and it’s her funeral you’ll be attending tomorrow.” I swallowed hard. “That is, if you stay.”

  Caleb frowned. “Why did you tell me that your aunt died?”

  “Because I’d told you years ago that my mother was dead. How could I explain that no, actually, this time she was really dead?”

  “But why did you lie in the first place? Why did you tell me that your mother was dead when she wasn’t?”

  “Because, Caleb, she joined a cult. She abandoned us. By the time I met you, I hadn’t heard from her in seven years. For all I knew, she was dead. But it wasn’t just about her. It was about me, too. I’d devoted a lot of time and effort to distancing my old life from my new one. I tried to forget about my family.”

  “Jo, I’m not trying to minimize anything that happened to you in your childhood, but I don’t understand what you were thinking. Didn’t you think that someday I’d find out the truth?”

  “Honestly, I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. When I first told you about my family that night in Zanzibar, I didn’t know we had a future together. I thought I was just something to keep you entertained while you were in Africa.”

  “Something to keep me ‘entertained’?” Caleb repeated, his mouth twisted in horrified surprise. “Is that really what you think of me?”

  “Caleb, that was years ago. It’s not a reflection on you; it’s a reflection of how jaded and cynical I was back then. I’m not that person anymore, and I have you to thank. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that. I love you, Caleb.”

  “I don’t know, Jo. Even if I could understand you lying about your parents—and I’m not saying that I do, but just for argument’s sake—even if I could, why didn’t you tell me about your sister?”

  “Lanie is a self-centered, backstabbing drug addict. I try to forget she exists.”

  Caleb, who worshipped his own sister, looked pained to hear me speak about my own flesh and blood in such a manner.

  “Trust me, Caleb. Lanie is a story for another day.”

  “What if I hadn’t found out? Were you going to hide this from me forever?”

  “I never meant for it to get this far. In the beginning, even while I was falling in love with you, I thought this was temporary.” I put up a hand to stave off his outraged protest. “I know, I was wrong. But you can’t imagine what I’d been through. By the time I met you, I had been completely lost for five years. I couldn’t
imagine anyone being permanent in my life ever again. And then you left, and I felt justified for thinking that.”

  “Jo, my contract ended,” he objected. “I had to go back to New Zealand. I didn’t leave you.”

  “I know. But you don’t understand what a mess I was back then. I didn’t trust anyone; I didn’t know how. And then you wrote a few months later and asked me to visit you, and I started to think that maybe I could trust you. Maybe you were different, maybe this was something real. I was happier than I’d been in years, and I was too afraid of wrecking things to tell you the truth. I promised myself I’d do it when the time was right, but the time just never seemed right, and then we were moving to New York together and I couldn’t tell you because I’d been lying to you for so long.” I reached for Caleb’s hands, but he pulled them out of my grasp. Choking back tears, I continued. “I’m sorry, Caleb. I’m so sorry. I know that an apology is probably too little and much too late, but I don’t know what else I can do. I’m sorry. I should never have lied to you. You are the only thing that means anything to me in this entire world, and I would die if I lost you.”

  For one long, awful moment, Caleb stared at me with eyes as blank and cool as steel. It was a look I had not even imagined his empathetic face capable of making, and it made me sick. I had always known Caleb would someday realize I wasn’t as good a person as he, certainly not as good a person as he deserved, and that day had arrived.

  But then Caleb wavered. His spine remained rigid and his jaw clenched, but there was a minute softening of his eyes. “Don’t say that.”

  “I would,” I insisted, my voice shaking with emotion. “I would die without you.”

  Caleb grimaced and lifted his shoulders in a half-shrug. “I don’t quite know what you expect from me, Jo. If what you’ve told me about your life is true, it’s horrible, but—”

  “It’s true,” I promised. “And, Caleb, there’s more.”

  “What else? A brother you keep chained in the basement?”

  “A podcast. Have you heard of Reconsidered?”

  He nodded slowly. “I haven’t listened to it myself, but I’ve heard of it. True crime?”