Truth Be Told Read online

  I stopped at the wine store but abandoned the bottle I had intended to purchase when a girl joined the queue behind me and immediately began tapping away on her phone. The suspicion she might know who I was overwhelmed me, and even though I knew I was acting crazy, I rushed out of the store. Back on the street, I spotted the painted window of a previously unnoticed hair salon and ducked inside.

  “I need a haircut,” I said, my voice sounding too loud in my own ears. The young receptionist looked at me uneasily. I was aware I should lower my voice, try to soften my frazzled edges, but that seemed beyond my capabilities and I doubled down instead, leaning forward and adding, “Immediately.”

  “All right,” she said slowly, her voice as careful as if I were waving a gun in her face. “Let me see if anyone is available.”

  She rose cautiously from her desk and walked to the back of the salon, glancing over her shoulder at me twice, clearly distrustful. She held a whispered conference with the three black-clad stylists gathered in the back of the salon before one of them, a whippet-thin platinum blonde, shrugged and stepped forward, her armful of thin bangles clanking together.

  “I’m Axl,” she said. “I can take you.”

  “Cut it off,” I commanded, sitting down at her station. “Cut it all off.”

  I had a sudden, jarring flashback to an afternoon almost ten years ago, a damp, drizzling late-May afternoon that found me sitting in a chair in a discount hair salon in London. Cut it off, I had said in what I had hoped passed for a brave voice. Just cut it off. That stylist had taken one look at my red, puffy eyes and the days-old makeup crusting my face and shook her head. I don’t think you’re in the right mind-set to be making any drastic decisions about this beautiful hair, pet, she’d said. How about I give you a nice trim instead? Freshen you up? Lacking the energy to disagree with her, I had nodded meekly and walked out looking like a more well-groomed version of the same person I had been when I had entered. Weeks later, there had been a similar experience in Paris, with a cigarette-scented woman holding my hair in her hands like it was a sentient animal and bemoaning the idea that I would heartlessly destroy it. Wash, rinse, and repeat in Amsterdam and Barcelona. I finally convinced someone in Rome to give me a bob, but by the time I met Caleb in Africa four years, fifteen countries, and more short-term, paid-under-the-table food service jobs than I could count later, I had stopped thinking about my sister whenever I saw my own face and had let my hair grow out. It had been long ever since. I was out of practice for negotiating a haircut, and I steeled myself for disagreement.

  But Axl just lifted her shoulders in an indifferent shrug. “Whatever you say.”

  “And dye it,” I directed, emboldened. “Like yours.”

  Her magenta-colored lips twisted up into an amused smirk. “You’re the boss.”

  I regretted my decision almost immediately. The peroxide stung on contact and gradually warmed until it felt as though my scalp were covered in a carpet of fire ants. Tears streamed from my eyes and I wanted to beg Axl to take mercy on me, but I clenched my teeth and suffered through the pain. My previous attempts to erase Josephine Buhrman had lacked conviction; I needed to chemically scrub at her vestige until nothing remained.

  After the peroxide had been rinsed from my hair and my locks had been lopped into an unsubtle pixie cut, Axl spun me around in the chair to face the mirror. “What do you think?”

  The change was startling, almost dissociative. My hair, or what was left of it, had not gone quite as platinum as I’d hoped, settling instead into a light butter-yellow. Without the distraction of hair around my face, my eyes looked enormous and the dark, bruise-like circles under them were suddenly that much more apparent. My eyebrows, still ink-black, were a pair of aggressive crescents above my eyes. I looked unhinged. I felt unhinged.

  “The eyebrows,” I managed.

  Axl nodded, and soon peroxide was burning my eyebrows and I was worrying about chemically induced blindness. But the momentary terror was worth it: when she presented me with the mirror again, I looked eminently more reasonable. I studied my reflection and noted with satisfaction that I looked nothing like Josephine Buhrman.

  Even though Axl wasn’t a very skilled colorist, I tipped her 80 percent and then walked out onto the street, unshackled from the concern that people were staring at me. Or at least knowing that any stares were likely due to my extreme hairstyle and not because I looked like a member of the Elm Park Buhrmans, that cursed family. Whether my spontaneous makeover was a direct result of paranoia or the reasoned adoption of a disguise, I didn’t care. All that mattered was that I was finally able to stop thinking about the podcast for at least a few minutes—finally able to feel once again like the person I had worked so hard to become.

  From Twitter, posted September 18, 2015

  chapter 3

  When Caleb returned from the DRC on Monday night, he was shaggy and skinny, just like he had been when I first met him.

  “Honey, I’m home,” he called as he pushed open the door, the joke trailing off into a ragged cough. My heart squeezed. I could hear the weeks of antimalarials, mild food poisoning, and eighteen-hour workdays in his hoarse voice. I wanted to usher him straight to bed, tuck him into the sheets I had freshly laundered for his homecoming, my instinctive desire to tend to him so strong I forgot I had been awake all night obsessing over the podcast and sick knowing it was only a matter of time before Caleb learned about it.

  “Just tell him,” Ellen had said, sounding irritated about my repeated post-midnight phone calls the past several days. “It’s not like you can keep it a secret at this point.”

  “I thought Peter was going to sue her. Get her trash off the internet. What happened to that?”

  “Apparently it’s more complicated than I thought. Anyway, even if it weren’t, too many people know about it now. Did you know it was spoofed on SNL last weekend? There’s no way Caleb won’t hear about it. You’re going to have to tell him.”

  “But how?”

  “Josie, you’re a grown-up. I’m sure you can figure it out. Maybe now’s the time to come clean anyway.”

  I knew Ellen had a point, but the idea of owning up to my lies filled me with dread. When I first met Caleb, I had told him my parents had passed away. It was a careless, throwaway line I had been using as I backpacked and hitchhiked my way across Europe, Southeast Asia, Europe again, and then finally Africa. Those relationships had seemed disposable; there was no need to ruin the mood with stories of my murdered father, my insane mother, and my despised sister. But Caleb had turned out to be the furthest thing from disposable, and then the lie fed upon itself and grew, and I had never known how to tell him the truth.

  The evening of Caleb’s homecoming I was caught up in a vigorous debate with myself over whether I should confess—and, if so, how—but once I heard him walk in, all the arguments I had made and the anguish I’d felt over making them faded away. I needed to be in his arms. The shadows of the past could wait.

  Caleb was dropping his dirt-stained duffel bag in the entryway as I rounded the corner, my heart thundering giddily.

  “Hey, babe.”

  He looked up at me, his gray eyes weary and ringed, and his smile froze on his face. “Fucking hell, Jo. What happened to your hair?”

  I startled, realizing that I had spent so much time thinking of how to break the news to Caleb (“I have something to tell you” sounded too ominous, too much like I had been having an affair, but “So, have you heard about this podcast?” didn’t carry enough gravity) that I had completely forgotten about my drastic makeover three days prior.

  “Oh,” I said with a forced laugh. “I saw this hairstyle on someone else and decided to give it a try. You know me, impulsive.”

  He blinked. “It’s . . . jarring.”

  “Exactly the look I was going for,” I said, my voice thinning to an unnatural pitch.

  Caleb was too exhausted to do anything other than take my words at face value. He told me that I was still bea
utiful, kissed me on my head, and then proceeded to sleep for the next thirteen hours.

  • • •

  I had not always hated my sister. For the first fifteen years of our lives, she had been an inextricable part of myself; I existed only as one half of a matched set. I had once truly believed I would cease to be if I were separated from her.

  That was back when she still cared about me, though, before she traded my respect and love for booze, drugs, and low-grade anarchy. Back then, she had been daring rather than rebellious, just a pigtailed girl with scabbed knees and a sense of adventure. She led me on countless escapades, up into the loft of our grandparents’ barn and down by their pond; she showed me the hole in the wall behind the sink in our small backyard playhouse where she hid her illicit treasures, the candy pilfered from the cabinet, broken costume jewelry stolen from Ellen, and tawdry novels lifted from our mother’s bedside table. (It was the last of these items that led our mother to ransack our bedroom and playhouse until she discovered Lanie’s hiding spot. Books and jewelry were returned; candy was confiscated.)

  But for every act of mischief, for every night of sleep Lanie ruined by telling me stories of men with hooks for hands and hitchhiking ghosts, my sister was also the first one to come to help me, to comfort me when I was sad. We had once so delighted in our twinship that we felt sorry for our mother, who had a sister, my Aunt A, but not a twin, and our cousin Ellen, who had no siblings at all. We thought we were special; we thought our bond was invincible.

  But then Dad was killed and Mom abandoned us and Lanie went completely off the rails. I tried to hold on to her, but Lanie didn’t want to be saved. She made that perfectly clear.

  It had been ten years since I last saw my twin sister. There had been a time, early on in our separation, when she was all I could think about—I saw her everywhere: pouring drinks in a rowdy pub in central London, contemplating Winged Victory in the Louvre, lighting a cigarette on a darkened Roman street. And every time I closed my eyes there she was, hollow-cheeked and borderline feral. She stalked my subconscious and materialized whenever my mind wandered for even a fraction of a second.

  But as time and distance wore on, my memory of her faded. Occasionally, I woke up in the middle of the night sweating, convinced that something was wrong with her, and I would spend the rest of the night sitting by the phone, waiting to hear that something had happened, but then morning would come and life would return to normal.

  Since that strange three a.m. phone call and the subsequent discovery of the podcast, the shadowy figure of my sister had once more been lurking on the periphery of my thoughts. I had largely avoided succumbing, but with my sister’s usual impeccably cruel timing, thoughts of her were impossible to shake the night Caleb returned home. With his familiar lanky form finally slumbering beside me once again, I tried to sleep, but images of my sister at her worst (smudged eyeliner, vacant eyes, bloody nose) flickered rapidly across the inside of my eyelids.

  Sleep was out of the question, no matter how desperately I wanted it. I rose quietly, then microwaved a cup of tea, grabbed an afghan, and curled up on the couch, planning to watch episodes of The X-Files on Netflix. Programming about aliens and human-sized worms prowling the sewer system was the ultimate in escapism and rarely failed to calm me when I was anxious. Despite this, I froze at least once every twenty minutes, certain I heard my phone ringing. My connection to my sister had been dulled over the years—first by drugs, then by distance—but my body insisted Lanie was calling out for me. I hadn’t decided if I would answer.

  By the time the sun broke over the tops of the downtown Brooklyn high-rises, there had been no call that Lanie was dead, maimed, or otherwise, and I decided I had been mistaken. It seemed Lanie and I weren’t connected after all; maybe we never had been.

  “Morning, love,” Caleb mumbled, padding out of the bedroom and rubbing a hand over his sleepy face and through his loose brown curls. “How long have you been up?”

  “A while,” I admitted, handing him the slice of buttered toast I had prepared for myself and dropping another into the toaster.

  He made short work of it and grinned. “I’ve missed your cooking, babe.”

  “Stop it,” I said, hitting him playfully in the stomach. “Like I’m supposed to believe you were dining on gourmet fare in the DRC. I know how you aid workers do it. It’s all gruel, beer, and snack cakes.”

  Caleb caught my hand and tugged me toward him. I licked my lips and stepped closer, tucking my fingers into the waistband of his pajama pants, looser than they had been when he left. When my fingertips hit his mildly feverish skin, something inside me softened. Everything was going to be okay. The podcast no longer mattered; the past and the lies I had constructed on top of it no longer mattered. All that mattered existed within the circuit of our hearts and flesh.

  Caleb lowered his face to mine, our lips connecting. I barely noticed his teeth had not been brushed in more than twenty-four hours. Caleb was home, and everything was safe and warm again.

  My cell phone sounded shrilly from the bedroom, crumbling the cocoon that had been forming around us. My stomach dropped. Lanie.

  “Leave it,” Caleb murmured, grabbing at me as I pulled away.

  But the mounting dread was too strong to ignore, and I nearly choked on my racing heart as I hurried to answer the call.

  “Josie, sweetheart, I’m sorry,” Ellen said, the unnatural softness in her demeanor sending prickles down my spine.

  “What?” I asked, more an impotent puff of air than a word.

  “There’s no easy way to tell you this. She’s dead. I’m so sorry.”

  I touched my breastbone, my fingertips pushing into my skin. I could still feel my sister pulsing beneath my chest; she didn’t feel dead. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, honey, I’m sure. I haven’t seen . . . her, if that’s what you’re asking. But Mom got a call from someone with the Life Force Collective this morning.”

  I paused, Ellen’s words permeating my consciousness slowly. The call had come from the Life Force Collective. Lanie wasn’t dead.

  My mother was.

  “Oh. All right.”

  The flatness of my own words surprised me. I had imagined this moment more times than I could count, and I had always expected that I would cry, that I would scream, that I would be inconsolable, flattened by the lost chances. I expected a sense of emptiness, of despair, but as it turned out, I felt nothing.

  Ellen inhaled sharply. “Well. Yes.”

  I nodded, a gesture Ellen could not see. Pulling the bedroom door shut, I asked, “How did it happen?”

  “She . . . Oh, hon, she hung herself.”

  A shiver ran through my bones as I pictured my mother’s thin body swinging in the air, her neck at an unnatural angle. A sob threatened to escape my throat, and I was strangely pleased that I had to choke it back. Perhaps I wasn’t so cold after all.

  “Where should I send the flowers? To the funeral home or to your mom’s house?”

  “Skip the flowers and just hand-deliver yourself to Mom’s house.”

  “Ellen, I’m not going home.”

  “Josie, you have to come home. You’re her daughter.”

  “The daughter she abandoned more than a decade ago! I don’t have to do anything.”

  “She was still your mother.”

  “She’s dead. It doesn’t matter if I’m there or not. She’s going to be just as dead if I’m there as she is if I’m here.”

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that. You know very well funerals are not for the dead. They’re for the living the dead have left behind. We need you here. My mother needs you here. If you think things have been bad with that podcast—not that you ever once bothered to call Mom to see how she was handling things—they’re about to get a whole lot worse. That bitch Parnell is going to be beating down my mother’s door, and you will be there to help deflect her.”

  “Ellen, you know I told Caleb both my parents were dead,”
I said, dropping my voice and glancing toward the bedroom door.

  “And you honestly think that’s a secret you can keep? Even now? Especially now?” She paused for my response, but I had none. She sniffed. “Fine. Tell him that my mother died. Problem solved. Just come home.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Goddammit, Josie—”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated, disconnecting the call.

  My cousin generally insisted on having the last word, so my finger was poised to decline the call that immediately followed. The phone rang again, and once more I hit the red button to ignore it. After the third attempt, I powered the phone down completely. Ellen could call all she wanted, but I wasn’t going back to Elm Park.

  Caleb, holding the half-eaten remains of my second piece of toast, pushed open the door and peered inside. “Jo? Is everything okay?”

  I opened my mouth to say Yes but a strangled sob slipped out instead. Caleb took me in his arms, rubbing my back in gentle circles and asking me what happened.

  “Aunt A died. I have to go home.”

  The words left my mouth without warning, but hearing them aloud, I knew Ellen was right: I had to go home. I owed it to the memory of my mother, and more importantly, I owed it to Aunt A, who had taken care of me when my mother wouldn’t. Aunt A had given so much of herself to be a rock for my sister and me, and I couldn’t let her go through this without support.

  “Oh, no,” Caleb murmured, wrapping an arm around me and holding me close. I burrowed into his thin chest, squeezing my eyes shut and stifling wails as images of my mother flooded my mind. I saw nothing but happy memories from a long time past: my young, beautiful mother with her hands in my hair, weaving the thick black strands identical to her own into a braid; my mother smelling of chamomile tea as she leaned over to kiss me good night, her long hair tickling my face; my mother wearing that apron with ruffles at the shoulders, putting a dab of vanilla under my and Lanie’s noses while baking cookies.