Dark Lie

ONE

As usual, I had to tell myself I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Every other minute of the week I lived for my husband and his business, my elderly mother and father, family values, et cetera. Surely I could be allowed my bittersweet secret on Saturday afternoons. If my husband ever found out … But I’d told him no lies. I’d told him I was going to the mall, and there I was.

I stood at the window of the plus-size store, pretending to scan the display of boxy blazers with matching elastic-waist skirts. Despite my uneasy conscience, I felt pretty sure that, in my old brown car coat and my favorite dress with its full blue corduroy skirt, I looked like any other overweight, middle-aged housewife in search of clothing that would disguise her thunder thighs.

Middle-aged? I was only in my thirties. But an affliction, as my parents called it, had roughened my face, scarred my skin, stiffened my joints, and made me look and feel a decade older. It was just lupus, and I’d met other people with lupus who danced through it, but my case had attacked like the wolf after which it was named. And the steroids my doctors had prescribed gave me chipmunk cheeks and hippopotamus hips. Actually I could have used some new clothes, if only for retail therapy.

But instead of really studying the plus-size fashions, I watched the reflections in the display window’s glass. That way, I could surreptitiously look down the mall.

There were not as many shoppers as usual on a Saturday because this was the first sunny, warm day after a miserable Ohio winter. Anybody with good sense was out digging in the garden or flying a kite. But I continued to watch and hope, because the spring formals were coming up and the mall was having a well-promoted Prom Time sale, so maybe—

Dorrie! Somebody behind me called my name. Dorrie, hi!

Oh, hi. Turning, I forced a smile. The speaker was an overly perky woman from church. Fulcrum is not such a small town—we have a branch campus of University of Ohio—but it’s still a one-mall town, and in that mall on a Saturday afternoon I could expect to meet people I knew.

Sam let you out of his sight? teased the woman, an annoyingly skinny redhead who worked as a teller at the People’s Bank of Fulcrum. All by yourself?

I made myself keep smiling, although I wasn’t amused. Sam was a nice guy, no worse than her husband or anybody else’s. Like most of them, he was not much to look at, just another standard-issue male with a big blunt pink face as plain as a pencil eraser, and hands that were clever when it came to machinery but klutzy when it came to romantic caresses. Like most of them, he didn’t dance or ask for directions, he left his wet towels on the bathroom floor, he required full-time care and feeding. But as husbands went, Sam was as good as most and better than some. Didn’t drink or fool around, did his best within his limits to make me happy. Not his fault if I wasn’t.

I tried to reply lightly. Yeppers. Sam let me out all by myself.

What’s he doing? It’s such a beautiful day. I hope he went golfing.

No, he’s at the machine shop. As usual. Right out of college Sam had taken a management job at Performance Parts & Gears, and now, only eleven years of shrewd hard work later, he owned and operated the place. Sam made good money, but he paid the price in long hours and penny-pinching and headaches. I would have loved to have gone on a cruise to Bermuda, Alaska, Panama, anywhere, but Sam couldn’t leave the shop that long, or so he said.

He’s there almost twenty-four/seven, isn’t he? What was that edge in the redhead’s voice? Sarcasm? Envy? Disapproval? And so are you, aren’t you, Dorrie? True, although my helping out in the office was supposed to have been temporary, until Sam could afford to hire somebody. Which he could now, but he didn’t want to spend the money. The redhead burbled, Working with the hubby—I don’t know how you do it. I’d go insane.

I stiffened. Not at all. But if anyone knew how much I lived in a secret world of memories and daydreams …

I changed the subject. Want to see what I bought? I held up my plastic shopping bag. As usual, I’d purchased something lightweight I could carry around so I’d blend into the mall ambience.

The redhead peeked at my purchase du jour. Wire baskets? Graph paper? For Sam?

Baskets for Sam’s desk. Graph paper for me. In case I go back to teaching.

Really! Is that what you’re planning—?

I cut her off. I’m not sure. Actually I’d gone into teaching only to appease my parents, and was surprised to find I was good at it and I liked it, if it weren’t for the administration, and some of the parents I had to deal with, plus the grading system and the politics …. I didn’t really want to go back. But I felt I had to do something with myself. Life stretched ahead far too empty. Some churches might have social activities other than the occasional covered-dish supper, but not mine. Some bodies might enjoy yoga or Zumba or a membership in the gym, but not mine. Some husbands might take their wives on interesting business trips or vacations, or bring them flowers for no reason, or have long, soul-searching conversations with them, but not mine. Sam and I used to talk, but not so much lately. Maybe if we had been able to have children, things would be different, but—

But what about your health problems? Will you be able to hold a job?

Annoyed, I glanced at my wrist as if I had to be somewhere. Except there was no watch there. I never wore a watch to the mall on Saturdays. Didn’t want to notice or care how much time I spent there. My wrist showed me only a display of irregular white splotches, unpigmented skin, caused by lupus.

Two hairs past a freckle, teased the redhead.

Pertinacious woman, did she have to notice everything? I showed my teeth in what I hoped passed for a grin as she consulted her own wristwatch and told me with digital precision, It’s two thirty-seven.

Um, thanks.

And at that moment I felt my face forget all about its polite smile as a movement far down the mall caught my eye. The lilt of a certain walk amid hundreds of walkers. Barely more than a hint at the distance, but my heart beat like butterfly wings. I’d know that coltish stride anywhere.

Um, excuse me, I told the redhead, hurrying off.

Limping, rather. Lupus made every movement painful, but if I let it slow me down, it would get even worse. At least today I wasn’t having the knock-me-flatter-than-roadkill fatigue. It was a good day. Actually, a wonderful day now that I had spotted the person I had come to see.

Not to talk to. Just to see. Secretly.

There. I caught sight of her more plainly now: a slim teenage girl striding along, her dark eyes shining as she laughed with her friends. A boy kept glancing at her; was he in love with her? He ought to be. The whole world ought to love this delicate girl with her sleek dark hair pulled back from an Alice in Wonderland brow, her small head poised high on a balletic neck. Capering, she broke free of the group for a moment to skitter like a spooked filly—no, she was lovelier than a filly, I decided as she circled back to the others. She was a deer playing in a cow pasture, set apart from the other teenage Ohio cornfed stock by every fawnlike, long-boned move, every lovely feature of her fair-skinned face.

Juliet.

Juliet Dawn Phillips.

My daughter.

Who didn’t know me.

Whom I was not supposed to know. Whom I had given up for adoption sixteen years ago.

When I’d married Sam, we’d thought we’d have children. We’d bought a house, big and rugged, kind of like Sam, to accommodate all our dream children. More children than most people. Maybe four or five or six.

It hadn’t happened. Lupus had happened instead.

Sam and I had been married for ten years now, and it had taken about eight of those to diagnose the lupus. My parents had muttered darkly of STDs at first, behind Sam’s back. Doctors had postulated hypochondria or depression. Even Sam had believed it was all in my head or, rather, my hormones, some kind of woman thing, and what I needed was a family. But it was my irregular menstrual cycle and my inability to conceive that had made the doctors stop murmuring vaguely of chronic fatigue syndrome, Lyme disease, possible lead poisoning, or whatever, and finally order the blood tests that had confirmed the lupus.

For ten years now it had been just me and Sam, Performance Parts & Gears, and our house—lavishing my frustrated maternal instincts on the house, I had made it a warm and welcoming place, as much unlike my parents’ home as possible.

Welcoming, but empty. Barring miracles, Juliet was the only child I would ever have.

Hiding behind a

MALL INFORMATION

sign, I gazed at her and let the sight of her transport me into the memories that seemed more real and alive than my weekdays, my husband and his forever work, my married life:

Me, Dorrie, age sixteen, and I am balletically slender with my long dark hair pulled back from my Alice in Wonderland brow, but I do not realize I am beautiful until Blake tells me so.

My parents will not let me crimp my hair, put makeup on my face, or wear jeans, ever, for they wish to save my soul. But they are not unkind. They have let me put aside the prayer bonnet except for Sundays, and they hope this will help me make friends at school and avoid beingjeered at as before. Always after school my mother is waiting with cookies warm from the oven. We talk little but she often prepares the meals I like best, hamburgers or spaghetti, as if to tell me something she cannot say.

Evenings I spend at home. Mother and Father will not let me go to the amusement park or the video arcade. They won’t let me date, or stay out after dark, or talk on the phone unsupervised, but they try in their ways to make me happy despite the many restrictions. My father is interested to hear what I have learned in school, and my mother keeps offering more cookies. Yet for some reason I remain thin.

Blake Roman is one of the older boys at my school in Appletree, Ohio, my hometown, which—although I do not know this—I am soon to leave, never to return. If Blake is aware of my parents’ rules at all, he bypasses them entirely. He doesn’t ask for my phone number. He doesn’t ask for a date. He doesn’t even say hi to me before the day he joins me as I walk home from school, takes the books from my arms, and places them on a park bench. He says, I know your name. You’re Candor Birch. I’m going to call you Candy. You’re going to be my Candy.