Here We Lie

Mom rocked back in her chair, looking at me. “That’s a lot of money, Megan. It’s enough for me to pay off the house. It’s enough for you to go away to college—any college, wherever you want to go. Doesn’t have to be in Kansas.”

“But you would be...”

“I’m staying here, in Woodstock.”

“I can’t leave you,” I said. “At least, I could come home on weekends...”

She lit a cigarette, not meeting my eyes. It was a habit she’d put on hold after Dad’s diagnosis, but one she’d picked up again with grim purpose, lighting the next one off the first. I thought about the man she’d been referencing from time to time—Gerry, her boss at the tax office. Gerry who was not dead, was not dying, was very much alive. A puff of smoke trickled out the side of her mouth. “Listen.” She patted the back of my hand. “I’ll take care of myself. But you’re going to have to take care of yourself, too.”

* * *

That night, I dug in the back of my desk drawer for the admissions brochures I’d collected before Dad’s diagnosis, their finishes bright and glossy, offering rose-colored glimpses of college life. Of course, I’d been planning to attend KSU—it was close and convenient, it was where all my friends were going, and between in-state tuition and scholarships, it was affordable, too.

But now, I could go anywhere.

I sorted the brochures into piles—Harvard and Yale and Princeton, places that were out of my reach, thanks to the grades I’d pulled after Dad’s diagnosis; Bates and Brown and Bowdoin, schools that seemed too snooty now that I was truly considering them; the Southern California schools that featured tank-top clad students on beaches, where I would be forced to put my pale and flabby body on display; schools that were in big cities, where I might feel like a Midwestern hick; schools that were quirky and artsy, where I would stand out for not being quirky or artsy enough; schools that boasted NCAA rankings, schools that looked too institutional.

At the bottom of my stack was a brochure from Keale College in Scofield, Connecticut, a private, girls-only school. On the front of the brochure, before a backdrop of towering brick, two girls stood with their arms around each other’s shoulders in what seemed to be a spontaneous display of happiness and camaraderie. An inset picture showed a scene of ivy-covered buildings and open expanses of green lawn, complete with girls lounging on the grass, girls sitting cross-legged with books thrown open in front of them, girls chatting, laughing, girls with futures I couldn’t even imagine.

I ran my thumb down the fine print and found the fees. Tuition, housing and other costs totaled $23,000 annually. Dad’s life insurance would buy me four years, free and clear.

“Keale College,” I said into the silence of my bedroom, trying out the words.

It was about as far away from Kansas as I could get, which meant it was about as far as I could get from everything—from the whistles of the truckers at the diner, from Kurt Haschke, from the memory of myself standing over Dad’s bedside, tears running into my mouth, promising myself that it was the right thing to do, that I shouldn’t feel guilty for doing it.

Maybe somewhere else, it would be possible to believe that those lies were true.

Lauren

If you live in Connecticut, you know my family—or you think you do. You’ve seen us on the news, in the Hartford Register, on campaign posters. We’re the all-American family—the dad, the mom, the three kids, the golden retrievers. We have an estate on eleven acres in Connecticut, a townhouse in Washington, DC, and our very own private island off the coast of Maine.

We’re the all-American family on steroids.

A brief history:

My mother, Elizabeth Holmes, was born into a family that had made its fortune on steel, although by the time I came along the mines were long sold, and the refineries no longer bore any trace of the family name. Being a Holmes meant property and trust funds and serving on the board of various charities and foundations. She graduated from Vassar with a degree in history that she never intended to use, and later that year at a party in Manhattan, she met Charles Mabrey, who was in his third year of law school at Princeton. The Mabreys didn’t have the immense wealth of the Holmeses, but they had their own kind of pedigree; Dad’s father, George Mabrey, was a West Point grad, a general in the US Army and an overall badass. His wife and son had followed him around the world—Germany and Cuba and Kuwait and Italy and Germany again—and by the time my dad met my mom, the Mabreys and the Holmeses were like interlocking puzzle pieces. My parents spoke the same language of private tutors and elite schools, of dinners with ambassadors and troubles with housekeeping staff. I figured Dad was a lawyer for about fifteen minutes before Mom started planning his political career, but I might be wrong. She might have sniffed that out from their first dinner party in 1962. With her old money pedigree and his military connections, they were practically a golden ticket.

Sometimes, I wondered if it had all happened exactly the way Mom had planned it—if she’d been able to foresee each move, like our lives were pieces on a giant chessboard. Because planning was needed, and that wasn’t Dad’s forte—he was best at making one-on-one connections. He could remember every name and face; I used to joke that it took us more than an hour to pass through the dining room at the Wampanoag Country Club, because Dad had to stop to say hello to each person we passed.

There were certain expectations for the Mabrey kids, too—things that were planned in utero, that were written somewhere in Mom’s long-range planner, cousin to her well-worn daily planner. I was the third dark-haired, blue-eyed Mabrey kid, eight years younger than Katherine and six years younger than Michael, who to me were always Kat and MK. There should have been one in between MK and me, another Kennedy-esque boy, another future politician, but that baby was stillborn, the cord wrapped tightly around his neck during delivery. I figured that three was always the goal, and if that baby had lived, there wouldn’t have been a need for me.

Sometimes, I wondered if my parents blamed each other for how I turned out, how I didn’t fit the Mabrey mold. Maybe they worried about how much time I spent with nannies, since Dad and Mom had both been busy with his career. Maybe they questioned whether they’d sent me to boarding school too young—not every kid could hack it as well as Kat and MK had. Maybe they’d been too indulgent, giving in because it was easier than arguing. Maybe I should have been disciplined more or disciplined less, talked to more like an adult, talked to more like a child.

Maybe I was just the bad seed.

It probably started when I was in kindergarten, at the fancy Brillhart School where I didn’t sit the right way, didn’t follow directions and sometimes wandered off in the middle of a lesson. I remember my teacher showing me the proper way to sit at my desk—hands at my sides, thighs parallel to the floor beneath me. Everything was like that, it seemed—there was one exact way to do everything, and a million wrong ways that I tried instead.

Kat and MK had been straight-A students. They were the captains of their teams, honors students and debate winners—the sort of achievers who could be held up as models to everyone else. At Reardon Preparatory School, where I boarded from seventh to twelfth grade, there were reminders of Kat and MK everywhere, in trophies for academic decathlon and essay-writing and long jump and water polo. My most distinguishing characteristic was that I was not at the top of my class; there was a huge pack composed of future doctors and lawyers and Fortune 500 executives, then a large gap and then me—Lauren Mabrey, the senator’s daughter, content with her 2.5 average.

“You’ll never get anywhere in life like this,” Mom had seethed to me more than once, driving me back to our house in Simsbury at the end of the school term.

But I knew that wasn’t true. For one thing, she was determined to get me there, and where I hadn’t succeeded or hadn’t been particularly concerned with succeeding, Mom was going to be victorious—that I never doubted. She’d gotten me into Reardon, after all, no doubt greasing a few palms along the way.

I was eleven when Dad became a state senator, and I was thirteen when a kid at camp passed me my first joint behind the counselor’s cabin. The smoke stung my nose, but I laughed it away. A year later, a girl from Manhattan demonstrated for me on a zucchini how to give the perfect blow job, which I tried out the first chance I could on a skinny boy from Syracuse.

By that time, I was used to seeing my dad in the papers—his graying hair, his dark suits, his demeanor that was serious and affable at once. There was a growing divide between the picture-perfect Mabreys and me. Dad was instrumental in passing legislation that regulated the purchase of pseudoephedrine, an ingredient used in methamphetamine production, and I once snorted a line of coke in someone’s bathroom and danced the rest of the night on top of his kitchen table.

“Our wild child,” Mom would say without a hint of affection when she saw my report card, when she chatted with Reardon’s dean of students, when she saw me slouching next to Kat and MK.

She didn’t mean this as a compliment, but I wore it like a badge of honor.

* * *

When I was seventeen, Dad ran for a US Senate seat, a campaign that consumed our lives all summer with photo ops and media blitzes, the Mabrey name plastered on posters and lawn signs and headlines in the Hartford Register. Since I was officially too old for another summer away at Camp Watachwa, I was forced to present myself with a smile at family outings and lunches around town. Tired of dragging me along with her, Mom found a volunteer position for me at the Hartford Arts Cooperative, half an hour from our house in Simsbury. The Coop, as it was known, was a politician’s dream, bustling with five-to twelve-year-olds who arrived with dirty hands and growling stomachs to produce cheerful portraits of their future lives as pro football players, astronauts, doctors and teachers. Even though I knew my position there was more or less an extension of the campaign, a footnote on the larger résumé of what the Holmes-Mabreys had done for Connecticut, I loved it anyway. Four afternoons a week, I stocked supplies and rinsed brushes and posted artwork on the walls, while as many as thirty kids ran circles around me. By the end of the day I was exhausted and satisfied, convinced that for once I was doing something that actually mattered.

During my first week on the job, I fell hard for Marcus, a sophomore art major at Capitol Community College and one of the few paid staff at The Coop. That summer he was working on a giant mural going up on the south side of the building, where previously there had been only the initials of taggers and a giant F YOU in five-foot letters. Marcus had a broad chest and ropy arm muscles, and his fingers were permanently paint stained with a crusty layer of blues and yellows and greens. The first time he touched me, brushing a piece of hair out of my face as I stood over the sink washing brushes, I felt a thrumming all the way to my toes. The next night he stood behind me at the sink, his thumbs pressing into the knots of my shoulders as the water ran from blue-purple to clear. When I turned off the faucet, he wrapped his arms around me in a giant backward bear hug, rocking me from side to side in a goofy, loose way, as if to tell me I shouldn’t take it or him too seriously.

Another girl might have left it at that, but not Lauren Mabrey. Marcus was the exact opposite of everything that had been planned for me from day one. He had never known his father, had three half siblings, lived off student loans and a stipend from The Coop. He didn’t own any button-down shirts, and he hadn’t recognized my father until I pointed out a campaign advertisement with the five Mabreys all lined up, Dad’s arm around Mom’s shoulders. “That’s cool,” Marcus had said. “So your family is famous or something?”

I laughed, not denying this, although famous was the wrong word. Powerful was more accurate. Influential.

At any rate, I knew Marcus was the exact wrong pick for me, but when the bear hug ended, I turned around, pressed my wet hands to his T-shirt and kissed him full on the lips.

Twenty minutes later, I’d lost the rest of my virginity on the sagging couch in the break room, and soon enough sex became an everyday thing, part of our closing ritual after the paint caps were tightened and the brushes laid out to dry. Marcus locked the outside door and flipped off the light switches, and we undressed each other in the semidarkness, laughing at our more adult version of blind man’s bluff. Afterward, staring up at the bulbous tubes of exposed piping near the ceiling, I felt for the first time that I could have been anyone in the world, not Lauren Mabrey, not part of a political family, not a prep school kid, not wealthy.

I was just happy.

Marcus always had a baggie of pot in one pocket or another, and sometimes we went up to the roof of The Coop to smoke, the sky darkening in lazy purple drifts, and listened to the sounds of the city: horns and sirens and barks and scraps of conversation that floated upward from street level. That summer, more and more, I was flirting with disaster, arriving home long after The Coop closed, sometimes after my parents had returned from one fund-raiser or another, picking a fight with them the moment I walked through the door. I was lazy, I was irresponsible, I had a bad attitude and I didn’t care.

I’d smoked here and there at Reardon, whenever one of my classmates went home for vacation and connected with a local hookup, returning with a few buds. The most I could handle was a hit or two before I felt sleepy and weak-kneed, but I didn’t want Marcus to see that I was a lightweight. When he passed me the joint, I always took my turn.

“I can get you more, if you ever need any,” Marcus said into my ear, a sweet trail of smoke wafting past my nose.

I laughed. “Pretty sure my parents bought into the whole Just Say No thing.” My words came out slurry—sure as soor, bought as brought.

“I mean like a side business, for when you go back to school. I bet those Reardon kids have deep pockets.”

I shifted, leaning back against his chest, hoping he would drop the idea if I didn’t offer encouragement. This time when he passed me the joint, I only pretended to inhale. My body felt heavy, and I still had the drive back to Holmes House.

“Or bennies or ’shrooms. Whatever you want, I could probably get it.”

“What are you, my dealer?”

He pinched out the end of the joint and dropped it in a plastic baggie, which he returned to his pocket. “Hey, some of us have rent to pay, you know.”

I’d been to a pharm party last January at Reardon, where everyone was required to contribute a few tablets filched from their parents’ medicine cabinets to enter, and then got to take from the bowl whatever they wanted to try. I’d added three muscle relaxers, my dad’s drug of choice for his occasional back spasms, and fished out two pastel pink pills for myself. On a beanbag in the corner, I’d waited for the pills to do something, to make me feel anything, but it never happened. The only thrill had been from the idea of getting busted, of my parents driving up from Hartford, the blue veins in their foreheads pulsing with rage as they helped me pack my suitcases and then led me in disgrace from the dorm. But nothing so exciting happened. A staff member came in, took one look at the pill potpourri and unceremoniously flushed the remains down the toilet, before ordering us back to our rooms.

This fall, if everything in the campaign went as planned, I would be Lauren, the senator’s daughter. It gave me a perverse thrill that I might also—or instead—be known as Lauren, the girl with the pot. I stood up, brushing my palms on my jeans, trying to sound casual, like this was the sort of deal I negotiated every day. “Maybe,” I said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

A week later, at the beginning of my shift, he showed me a quart-sized baggie fat with green clumps of pot, then shoved it deep into the zippered interior pocket of my backpack. “It’s good stuff,” he said. “Two hundred should do it.”

My stomach turned, a weird, queasy flip-flop. I’d pictured myself at a party this fall, casually producing enough to roll a joint. I couldn’t possibly hide this much at Holmes House, where Mom would sniff it out with her razor-sharp sense for whatever I was doing wrong. I thought about telling Marcus that I’d made a mistake, that I couldn’t do it—but that would mean losing whatever reputation I had with him. It would mean, most likely, losing him. Maybe I could ditch it somewhere on my way out of Hartford, make some homeless person’s day when he found it in a Dumpster.

“I know you’re good for it,” Marcus said, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek, and I said, “Course I am.”

That afternoon, I was replenishing paint palettes from giant tubs of tempera when the police officer came in, a radio crackling at his hip, a drug-sniffing German shepherd at his side. It was like watching an after-school special, some cautionary tale about what happened when a good girl met a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks. I watched as the officer and my supervisor chatted with their heads bent close together before they disappeared into the break room. Later, the rumor would be that someone had smelled marijuana and called the police. More likely my supervisor had been watching Marcus and me all along.

A minute later, she reappeared in the doorway of the break room, scanning the studio until her gaze settled on me, frozen in place, a blob of yellow paint running down my arm.

It was one thing to flirt with disaster, to tiptoe up to the edge of the canyon and peek over the side. It was another thing entirely to jump.

I said, That’s my backpack, but I don’t know what that stuff is.

I said, Someone must have put that there.

I said, I need to make a phone call.

A lawyer met me at the police station, demanding that I be released immediately. Marcus, it turned out, had a previous misdemeanor; he was cuffed and led away, and he passed me without making eye contact.

I never knew what my parents did, what strings they pulled or how they’d known to pull them in the first place. That night, I was cited for a misdemeanor and released, and my name never made it into the papers. At home, Dad paced while Mom did the talking, her voice losing its customary coolness. Did I understand the damage I had caused? Did I know what something like this might do to Dad’s career, to his reputation, to our family? Was I aware of his stance on drugs, the hypocrisy of his daughter being involved with a drug dealer, being found with an amount that constituted a felony? And just what did I have to say for myself?

I asked what would happen to Marcus, whether he would have to spend the night in jail.

“Wake up!” Mom hissed. “What do you think will happen to him?”

A few weeks later Mom wrote a check, I pled to a lesser charge and my record was sealed. My only punishment was the type of community service that would eventually work its way onto my résumé.

More pot had been found at Marcus’s loft, a place I’d tried to imagine over the six weeks we’d been together, when I’d fantasized about the two of us in an actual bed, on an actual mattress, with actual sheets. For bringing drugs into a place whose official mission was to serve children, Marcus was charged with a felony. That fall, I served a Mabrey-imposed house arrest, only leaving my bedroom on Tuesdays and Thursdays when Mom brought me to a local senior center to serve out my sentence.

One day that October, she slapped the Hartford Register in front of me, open to an article about an inmate that had been killed in a brawl. He was identified as Marcus Rodriguez, twenty, of Hartford, awaiting trial for felony drug sales. The article didn’t mention that he’d been a student at Capitol Community College, that he’d coordinated the new mural at the Hartford Arts Cooperative, that he’d had a kind smile, that he liked to talk after sex, that his girlfriend had sold him out.

In November, Dad won the senate race by a landslide.

* * *

I spent most of that fall on my childhood bed in Holmes House, shifting from hysterical to catatonic like they were the only settings that had been programmed into me. Marcus was dead, and I was going to come out unscathed. Marcus was dead, and his death was directly related to me, set in motion by the kiss I’d given him that night at the slop sink, my hands soapy with water, as if a line could be drawn between the two, a simple dot to dot.

Mom had spread the word that I was suffering from a bad case of mono, and from time to time get-well cards arrived from my classmates at Reardon. I completed my coursework that semester through independent study, moving zombie-like through worksheets and take-home tests.

Once Mom found me on my bed, sobbing into a pillow. “What now?” she asked, as if I’d done some new horrible thing.

I wiped away my tears, but my voice came out weak and blubbery. “He was so young.”

Mom leaned close, and for a moment I thought she might do something to comfort me, like pat me on the shoulder or tell me it would be okay. Instead, she slapped me across the face. “You will snap out of this,” she ordered. “You’ll get on with your life and we will never speak of this again, do you understand?”

She was true to her word; if Kat or MK knew anything about what I’d done, they never mentioned it me. Dad had already leased an apartment in Washington; after the election, that became his permanent residence, his stays at Holmes House brief and rare. Up until then, Dad had been a buffer between Mom and me, a mild-mannered negotiator. Now that he was gone, the silence stretched between us, too large to be breeched with a phone call.

Once I wandered downstairs while Mom was hosting a meeting for the local branch of the League of Women Voters, pausing in the hallway as the women chatted and sipped tea from china that had been in the Holmes family for a hundred years. Hildy, our live-in domestic help, passed me with the tea service rattling faintly on a silver tray.

“How is poor Lauren?” one of the women asked, and I started, hearing my name.

Mom didn’t miss a beat. “We were so worried about her, but she’s been growing stronger every day. This virus just hit her hard, poor thing.”

I leaned against the wall, listening to the women’s sympathetic murmurs as Mom reinvented my troubles—fevers and listlessness, loss of appetite, how devastated I’d been not to participate in more of the campaigning. “Lauren’s a strong girl, though,” Mom said. “She’ll be back to her old self in no time.”

It was an amazing performance, award-worthy. Somehow, Mom had managed to erase the drugs in my backpack, the hours I’d spent in the police station, Marcus bleeding to death in the Hartford Correctional Center, the months I’d spent crying into my pillow. She’d reinvented me as a brave warrior, a dutiful daughter.

She was so convincing, I almost believed it myself.