There Will Be Lies (25 page)

Her name is Melany, with a
y
like that. When you’re deaf, you know how people’s names are written. She made a joke about how her parents couldn’t spell very well, which I guess is a big ice-breaker for her in her job, and I laughed because it seemed like that was what she wanted.

We’re in a bigger room now, with a table and chairs and coffee – maybe they figured the cell was not good for me. It’s, I don’t know, two days later.

The reason I needed Melany is, they – the CART team, the psychologists, everyone – have like a quota of one thousand questions an hour they have to ask me, otherwise there will be untold consequences, or that’s what it feels like anyway. Questions about Shaylene, did she abuse me, did she touch me inappropriately, did she ever, did she sometimes, did she –

So many questions.

But anyway, at least now we’ve moved from my cell to this
bigger room, which makes it feel less like an interrogation, and I’m trying to tell myself that instead, they’re just concerned about me and want to make sure I’m not screwed up in some major way. Which of course I am, but not in the way they’re afraid of. I mean it’s not like (Mom) used to batter me with a hot iron or anything.

We walked down a corridor to get here; the whole decor in this place is very neutral, very every-office: white walls, chrome, pine. It’s like having your life turned upside down at an insurance company.

You haven’t committed a crime
, says FBI Special Agent Deacon, through the mousy woman. I haven’t seen the city attorney since forever, and I guess maybe he’s in trouble for telling me too suddenly about who I really was. Whatever the reason, it’s Deacon who seems to be in charge now. He has silver hair, but his skin is smooth and his eyes are sharp. Like weapons. Right now, it seems they’re on my side, though, which is good.

I know I haven’t committed a crime
, I say to him.

You don’t need a lawyer, then
, he says.
You’re a victim
.

This is stupid of him, but I don’t say so. I mean, if a diamond is stolen from an heiress, is it the diamond that’s the victim? No – the diamond is just, I don’t know, the object of the crime. It’s the heiress who’s the victim. Here, in this situation, if there’s a victim, then I guess it’s my parents, my real parents, who had me stolen from them.

And me? I’m the object. I’m the diamond.

But I don’t want to explain this with sign language.

I want a lawyer anyway
, I say.
A woman lawyer. I can pay
. This is true. (Mom) set up a savings account for me. It has forty thousand dollars in it. (Mom) said that anything extra left over from her salary wasn’t for her, it was for me. For when she was gone and couldn’t look after me any more.

Keep me safe.

HA HA HA HA.

Special Agent Deacon looks over at some other person in a suit, who shrugs, and then Deacon sighs.
OK
, he says. He motions to someone who leaves the room.
But can I ask you some questions now?

No
, I say.
I will ask you questions
.

Deacon blinks.
Right, yes, fine
.

My
…
I mean, Shaylene Cooper
. This takes a while to spell out and Deacon watches patiently as the interpreter translates.
Have you found her?

No
.

When you do
…

He knows where I’m going with this.
She’ll be tried. Kidnapping, assault, possibly child abuse charges … She could get life without parole
.

No
, I say.

No?

No child abuse. She was … she was good to me
.

Deacon nods, makes a note of this in a little black book in front of him on the table.

My parents are in town? My real parents?

Yes. In this building, actually. They are very eager to see you. We’ve been holding them back but … there’s no legal requirement. We have no probable cause to detain you for any crime. They … You went missing when you were two years old. They’ve been waiting fifteen years. A lot of times, people told them you must be dead. They’re pretty desperate
.

I have been thinking about myself, only myself, but a feeling of,
I don’t know what, sadness, compassion, pity, something, crackles through me like electricity. I can’t imagine what that must be, to lose a child. I could try, but it would hurt too much, I think.

You said I was in a hospital, when she … took me?

Burns. From a deep fryer. That’s what first alerted Dr Maklowitz when he saw the scar tissue on your legs – I mean, it was pretty big news fifteen years ago, and the burns were mentioned a lot; an identifying characteristic, you know. You don’t hear about it now, which is probably why … why you didn’t know. But he remembered
.

And that’s it? That’s why we ran? That’s why you found us?

Partly
, he says.
I mean, the burn scars wouldn’t have been enough. But your … Shaylene gave her real name at the reception desk
.

Oh, I think. Because I reminded her about her licence, in her purse. But she knew it was there – she just didn’t want to show it. For a crazy second, I wish I could go back to that moment, could take all of this back, and have it just be me and (Mom), and nothing to say any different.

From there, it wasn’t difficult. There was no ID for you, so they checked her records and there was no sign of Shaylene Cooper having a daughter. And there was no Shelby Jane Cooper on file anywhere, not at your address, not in local schools … We lost you for a while, of course, but after that spectacle in the diner … Well, Luke Scheinberg has a tracker in his car. We just followed it
.

Of course he does, I think.

And then we had you
, he says,
and you’re the biggest piece of evidence. I mean, they took blood, when you were born. Just a prick test for sickle cell anemia, PKU, you know, but it was enough. DNA
.

That’s why they tested my blood, I think.

I tap my fingers on the table.
She told me she was Anya Maxwell
.

She
…
what?

After the diner. I saw us, on CCTV on the news, leaving the hospital, and she said she was Anya Maxwell. Is she?

Deacon does like a cough-laugh thing; his smooth silver hair shakes.
Absolutely not
, he says.
Anya Maxwell would be in her sixties
.

I think back: the closed captions on the TV; the police believe these pictures may show An–

Angelica Watson, I think.

They were going to say Angelica Watson. But my (mom) used it, she must have thought so FAST, to come up with that story … She’s like some kind of really smart monster, like someone I don’t know at all. Who does that? Who pretends to be a famous murderer, so their daughter doesn’t know she’s stolen?

I want to see my parents
, I say.

Of course, we’ll bring them right in and
–

No. You have one of those rooms, like on TV? Where the witness or whatever sits on one side of the glass and the detectives can watch without being seen? I want to see them, but I don’t want them to see me
.

This is a little hard to say in sign, but I think the interpreter manages it. She’s like the people who type, when the anchors are talking on the TV news, doing the closed captions – you stop noticing her after a while, and so yeah, maybe her mousiness, her forgettableness, is like a total asset for her job.

Yes
, says Deacon thoughtfully.
We do
.

The other guy steps forward and I realise now he’s some kind of
lawyer for the FBI or the police or something because he says,
This is highly irr–

But then Special Agent Deacon busts out this badass stance, like chin raised, chest puffed out, which he has obviously practised in front of the mirror, and he says,
I don’t give one goddamn what it is
, and that’s the end of that.

There are things that, when they break, they keep on functioning, just in some other, lesser way. Like an elevator: it breaks, and it’s a room. An escalator: it breaks, and it’s stairs.

The heart is the same.

It breaks, and you might not even notice, because you still feel things, you still have emotions.

But there’s a dimension missing, like for the elevator; it still works as a room, but it has lost its vertical axis of motion, and it’s the same with a heart: it breaks, and yeah, you can still have feelings, you can still feel sorry for someone, or angry, or sad, but there’s something that’s lost, a motion, a dimension. It breaks, and it’s just an organ, beating.

You will never really feel happy again; you will never really, deep down, care about anyone else again.

Not ever.

This is what I’m thinking as my parents step into the room on the other side of the two-way glass, because the first thing I feel with my broken heart is an emotion I don’t even have a name for, something like love, I guess, for these two people who look so unbelievably sad and also so hopeful. Pity, maybe. But then, very quickly, it’s gone, and I just feel cold and empty.

I don’t want to be here. I want to lie in the cold clean dust of the moon and close my eyes. But I don’t. I look at them.

The father is older, maybe fifty. He has a bald patch at the back of his head, and he’s wearing clothes that look like they come from L.L. Bean, that whole hiking-in-the-hills look. He isn’t wearing sandals over socks but he is, like, one step away from it.

The mother is 139 times more attractive than him, and maybe ten years younger. She has long hair that I guess is naturally red, from her freckles, but is also obviously dyed, the same colour. She is wearing jeans and a T-shirt, very little make-up, and if she wasn’t the homecoming queen then I am a fricking walrus. She must have been beautiful, and I don’t mean beautiful like people usually use it to describe any old thing, I mean beautiful like stunning.

This woman can’t be my mother, I think.

Around her neck, there’s a gold cross on a chain. She keeps touching it, unconsciously – a God-person, I realise. Still, I think. I guess she has had reasons for praying.

The mother is also crying like nothing I have ever seen, like she’s a balloon person full of water, and someone has put pinpricks in her eyes, she’s just crying and crying and crying, leaking all over her face.

Father puts his arms around her, awkwardly.

This, I think, is awful! And weird! And creepy!

But I keep watching. They turn to the glass, I guess they know I’m here, and their faces are so full of it, so full of expectation and hope that I don’t know if I can bear it.

I mean, they’re strangers to me.

Then the mother reaches into her jeans pocket and takes something out and she moves suddenly forward – I flinch back, even though there’s glass between us – and the father tries to catch her
arm, to hold her back, but he’s not fast enough and she is there, pressing something against the glass.

It’s a photo.

It’s a photo, of her looking much younger and yes, just as beautiful as I thought, and she is holding this baby under the arms, she’s lying back on a couch and the baby is above her, kind of dandling its feet on her chest, and she’s laughing up at it.

This baby – me.

The expression on her face, though, man, the expression on her face.

It’s not love, it’s so far beyond that, it’s like love is the normal engines and this, whatever it is, it’s warp drive – it’s something so intense that even as the father pulls her back, her face shaking, her lips trembling, I am leaning forward to keep looking at that photo, to keep seeing that thing that I see in her face fifteen years ago.

Not love. Something bigger.

But – and this is how I know my heart is broken – I step back and I close the valves that have opened, and they turn back into strangers, people I don’t know.

I’m supposed to live with THEM?
I say.

They’ve said they’ll hire an interpreter. To stay in the house, until, you know, they can learn
, says Deacon.

When’s my lawyer coming?
I say.
I want to talk with her. This is NOT happening
.

Oh, honey
, says Deacon, and for the first time those ballistic eyes of his go soft.
I’m sorry, but it is happening
.

I’m not in love with my lawyer, but, you know, she’s OK.

It’s just, she’s one of those people who feel sorry for you because you’re deaf. I want to say to her, it’s not a fricking disease. I want to say all kinds of things to her.

I mean, OK, here:

I watched this show on TV once, and the characters were talking, and their whole conversation was, like, what would be worse, being blind or being deaf? So, right there – the assumption. People think it’s terrible, being deaf, something to be frightened of.

But,

A) I have never known what it is like to not be deaf, except in the Dreaming, and that’s not real. It’s just a part of me. I don’t have anything to compare it to. It’s not bad. It’s not good. It just is.

B) You want to know what would be the worst? What would be the worst sense to lose? Touch. That’s what SHOULD scare people.

Touch.

See, we walk around on the earth, all the time, on two feet, which is kind of a miracle of balance, and it’s only because of touch. It’s the touch of feet on ground that tells us when we hit the zero moment
point in the wave of our walking, and it took like forty years for scientists to teach robots to do that, to walk on two feet – I know because (Mom) taught me.

People say a bird is free.

But a bird isn’t free, it just has different architecture. A bird is an open window on to thin air; and thick air; thermals, eddies, currents. A person is a ground floor, foundations driven deep in the earth.

A bird: what it can’t do is throw arms around its mate. Some of them, even, they can’t ever land, like swifts: they can’t touch, so they can’t love. Right now, I have an idea of how that might feel – it’s like I’m disconnected, like a bird, just floating in empty space. No one to hold me.