Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

Then the car streaked away under the yellowing plane trees, through the slanting beams of sunlight and past the faded houses and their scraggly lawns. With another scream of rubber and road, its great, sleek body careened around the corner, blasting across the path of the shapeless old lady in her shapeless blue dress.

And she-she just kept shuffling forward along the sidewalk, slowly, slowly approaching the whirlwind of dust and yellow leaves that lingered in the autumn air after the Cadillac was gone.

"So where is she?" said Lauren.

I was standing on the stoop of her row house. She was in the doorway, peering around me, looking for Serena.

"She ran away," I said, and brusquely stepped past her into the house.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the mantelpiece in the living room. I looked angry. I was. At this point, it felt good to be angry. It felt better, anyway, than my other feeling-my feeling that Serena had made a jackass out of me.

I sat on the sofa. I told Lauren what had happened. She sat in a wooden chair beside the fireplace, smoking one Kent after another from the box on the lamp stand while she listened. A couple of times as I talked, she laughed out of the side of her mouth or shook her head. A couple of times, she made that exasperated, disdainful sound of hers- Pah! -with the smoke blowing out on the breath of it.

She was wearing the same kind of get-up as before, the sweater and skirt that made her look fleshy and ungainly. Her coarsened, bloated face and those damp, fierce, cynical eyes-so different from the way she looked when I first knew her-still came as a shock to me every time I looked at her.

"I guess she must've called these punks while she was in the bathroom," I said. "She must've gotten the address off the realty flyer and told them where we were. She was just waiting for me to pull over and stop somewhere, so she could jump out and run off with them. I probably should've just stuck to the expressway and called the cops from the car."

Lauren snorted, her elbow on the chair arm, the cigarette held straight up beside her ear. "That's my baby girl."

"Do you think it was bullshit top to bottom?" I asked her. "The whole story? The murder in the swamp, and so on. You figure it was all lies?"

Pah! "A true word out of that kid's mouth would die of loneliness. She's a born liar. I was there. I know." When I shrugged glumly, she gave me a shrewd once-over. "She really got you, didn't she?"

I hesitated. My instinct was to stop talking. There were all these doubts and suspicions still swirling around in my brain, but my instinct was: Leave them alone. See, to be honest, as humiliated as I felt, this wasn't really a bad situation for me. The way things were, I could just tell myself that Serena's story was a pack of lies, and I'd be finished here. No cops, no courts, no killers. Nothing more for me to do. Just head back to Long Island, put my mother's house on the market, then fly home to hearth and family and never see these people ever again.

But somehow that didn't work for me. Somehow I felt compelled to go on.

"It just bothers me," I said. "Her story was so detailed, there were so many specifics. The way it looked, the way it sounded. Not the kind of things a girl like Serena could just make up. It's hard for me to believe it was all just an out-and-out lie."

"Yeah, I know, she's good at that." Lauren waved the whole incident away with a casual gesture of her cigarette-a gesture so blithe and self-assured and unconcerned it made me want to knock her out of her chair ass over teakettle. "Kids. They're always fucking with your head one way or another. What can you do?"

I could hear my voice begin to take that ultracalm patriarchal tone it gets when I begin to become enraged. "Maybe you're right. But, just as a suggestion, it might not be a bad idea to look into it a little further, make sure she's not in any real danger."

"What do you want me to do, Jason? Call the FBI?"

"No, but… Does she have a computer? Does she go on any of those friend sites? MySpace or something?"

"I don't know. How the hell would I know? God, I hope not. I hear all kinds of shit goes down on those things."

"Well, you might want to check, Lauren. Find out if this guy Jamal is on her friends list-find out who she's hanging out with in general, you know."

Pah! "Are you kidding? Go into her computer? Come on, Jason. She's sixteen years old. That's practically a grown woman. I hate to even think about the kind of shit I was into when I was sixteen. I'm not gonna go snooping around in her computer. It's like reading her diary or something."

"Okay," I said-and my voice grew even more calm, even more patriarchal as I grew more enraged. "If that's the way you feel. But when you called me originally, you sounded kind of concerned about her."

"I am concerned about her."

"You told me you were so scared for her, you couldn't sleep."

She made that blithe gesture with her cigarette again, that gesture that made me want to knock her down. "Sure, 'cause at that point, I thought she could be dead or something. I mean, she just vanished on me. She could've been in the hospital for all I knew. I mean, look, I'm sorry she took you on this whole wild-goose chase and everything, hurt your pride or whatever, but at least now I know she's safe. You did a good thing. I appreciate it, Jason, really."

I had to draw a deep breath to keep that voice going, that calm fatherly voice that disguised my fury. "You feel pretty sure she's safe, then."

"Oh, yeah," said Lauren. "Yeah, look-she's with a guy. She found some guy she wants to be with, and she's having that experience. That's all. I did the same thing when I was her age. He'll tell her she's special while he bangs her for a while, then, about three months or whatever, it'll suddenly occur to him that other girls have exactly the same thing between their legs that she's got between hers, and she'll be all, 'I thought I was special,' and he'll be all, 'Yeah, no, what I meant was you were a convenient warm, fuzzy hole for me to stick my dick in,' and she'll be all, like, 'Boo hoo hoo,' and she'll come home and sleep with her teddy bear in her own little bed and everything'll be back to normal."

The gospels tell us to withhold judgment on other people's sins. I believe in that. But I'm not very good at doing it. I am pretty good at pretending to do it, though, so I sat there listening to this irresponsible horseshit Lauren was spewing with what I hoped was a more-or-less uncritical expression pasted on my face. Here, meanwhile, is the speech I was not making, the speech that I was making in my head and that I would go on making, revising and refining furiously for an hour or so after I left her:

Listen, you bitch, you coarse, ugly, reckless excuse for a bitch, I don't know whose husband you were out fucking last night while I was watching your daughter vomit pills and liquor into my toilet bowl, but maybe you ought to start paying attention to her because, one way or another, this child is in trouble, and it's your fault-yours. She needed a father and she needed a family and she needed a mother with half a mustard seed of moral sense and you gave her none of those things and now she's miserable and lost and poisoning herself and dressing and acting like a common whore and maybe she's even in danger and it's not just 'kids today' and it's not just 'boys and girls together' and it's not just the way things are-it's you, your fault, your responsibility, you bitch, bitch, ugly, vulgar, irresponsible bitch.

"All right," I said quietly in that ultracalm voice of mine, that voice of the All-Father of the Fallen World. I stood up. "All right, then I guess there's nothing else for me to do."

Lauren threw herself back against her chair and laughed.