Liars and Fools Read online

  There was a sharp stabbing feeling in my throat, and my eyes were suddenly wet. It was a relief to feel something. Lately it felt as if even my memories of my mom were slipping away. No one talked about her anymore. Not Dad, not my Aunt Joni, not Tom. It seemed like they were all starting to forget her. I wouldn’t let that happen. Not ever.

  I pedaled hard, flew down the streets to school and managed to slip into my seat seconds before the bell rang. Just as well. I’d been late way too many times this year. For the first few months after the accident, the teachers all treated me like I was made of glass. They gave me tentative smiles, asked if I was okay, told me they were there if I wanted to talk—that kind of thing. Even if I was late or skipped homework, they never gave me a hard time about it.

  Lately though, it seemed like there was some kind of time limit on grieving. The first anniversary of Mom’s death was March 1, which was three weeks ago. Maybe they had it on their calendars. Maybe they’d talked about me at a staff meeting and agreed that it was time I got my act together. All I knew for sure was that the sympathetic nods had recently been replaced with lunch-hour detentions. My free pass had expired.

  I looked around the room, only half-listening to the announcements over the PA system. Abby was grinning at me from the next row. I grinned back, but stopped smiling abruptly when I saw what Mrs. Moskin was handing out. Last week’s math quiz. Ugh. The teacher gave me a funny look when she put my paper on my desk: almost a smile, but not quite. So maybe I’d done okay?

  I lifted the corner and peeked at the grade. Nope, not okay. Not even close to okay. A fail. Dad was going to flip. For a moment, I considered dropping the paper in the garbage and not telling him, but I’d be bringing a report card home in a month. He’d find out anyway. After last term’s grades, it wouldn’t exactly come as a shock.

  I folded the paper in half and started to stick it in my binder. The back of my math test was covered with scribbles and notes. I paused and ran a finger along the first line. It read: 20° 52.45' N; 156° 40.77' W. Lahaina Harbor, Maui.

  I’d been daydreaming, imagining sailing to Hawaii. It was a trip Mom and I had planned to do together someday. Dad used to say he’d meet us there: he got too seasick to want to spend much time offshore. I picked up my pen and drew a little sailboat on the edge of the page, its sails set for a downwind course across 2,300 nautical miles of blue-green ocean. I closed my eyes for a moment. Dolphins, sunsets, Pacific Ocean trade winds… Mrs. Moskin cleared her throat.

  “Would you care to join us, Fiona?”

  My cheeks flushed hot. “Sorry?”

  Mrs. Moskin fluffed her hair. She’s always doing that. She’s a small, skinny woman with thin white hair and a pink scalp that shows through in places. Her eyebrows are penciled on, two brown lines arching above pale blue eyes. She’s twitchy, and everyone calls her the Mouse. Though not to her face, of course.

  “Unless you have something more important you’d rather be doing?” she asked me.

  “Well…”

  The Mouse read my mind. “It was a rhetorical question. I think I’d rather you didn’t answer it.” She took her beady eyes off me and addressed the class. “As you’ll know if you were paying attention, I was talking about the science fair,” she said. “This will be a chance to explore any topic that interests you. You can pose any question you want, provided you can come up with a hypothesis and devise an experiment to put it to the test.”

  “Can we do our project with a partner?” I asked.

  Mrs. Moskin nodded. “Yes.” She looked at me and then at Abby. “If you do your project with a partner, you will share the grade. So be sure you pair up with someone who will do their share of the work.”

  As if I’d ever let Abby down. I glanced across the aisle, trying to catch her eye, but she quickly looked down at her desk. My stomach started to hurt.

  Ayla Neilson put up her hand. “Mrs. Moskin?”

  “Yes, Ayla.” Mrs. Moskin sounded tired. Whoever said there is no such thing as a stupid question had never met Ayla.

  Ayla twisted a red-blond curl around her finger. “Well, what kind of topic? Like, what is a science topic? Do we have to dissect anything? Because I don’t believe in killing animals or, like, plants or anything.”

  The Mouse sat down on the edge of her desk. “Any topic, as I said, can be suitable for scientific exploration. You do not have to dissect anything. I don’t usually feel a need to spell this out, but let me be clear: please do not kill anything. If you have a topic in mind and have questions about it, please see me after class.”

  I looked over at Abby again, but she didn’t look up. “Pssst. Abby.”

  Mrs. Moskin frowned at me. “Fiona. Please save your private conversations for lunch hour.”

  As the morning went on, I felt worse and worse. I couldn’t believe Abby would actually think I wouldn’t do my share of the work. We’d done practically every project together since we started hanging out in the fourth grade. We were always partners. Always.

  By the time the lunch bell finally rang, I wanted to go home. I dragged my feet to the cafeteria and sat liars and fools down beside Abby in my usual spot. Mrs. Moskin’s words were stuck in my head, and I couldn’t decide whether to bring up the subject or not. I crumpled my paper lunch bag in my fist and sighed. I didn’t think I could stand to hear Abby admit she didn’t want to work with me.

  Beside me, Abby pulled out a set of matching plastic containers. She took the lids off and stacked them neatly, uncovering a sandwich, some applesauce, and sliced carrots and celery. She brought the same thing every day. “How did you do on the math test?” she asked.

  I wondered if my answer was going to make a difference to whether she’d want to work with me. “Not too well.”

  Abby waited, eyebrows raised.

  “Okay, okay. It was bad. A fail.” I really wanted to ask her about being partners for the science project, but I was scared to push for an answer. As long as we didn’t talk about it, I wouldn’t have to hear her say no.

  “Can I see?”

  I pulled the page out of my binder and held it out to her. Abby took it, biting her lip when she saw the grade. “Fiona! I told you how to do these problems. They’re exactly the same as the ones we studied.” She turned the paper over and studied the scribbles on the back for a few minutes before handing it back to me. “I don’t understand how you can do this stuff but flunk an easy math test.”

  I didn’t answer right away. I did okay in math last year, but after Mom died, I missed a lot of school— most of the last couple of months of sixth grade. Dad had stopped going to work. He stayed awake all night and slept on the couch in the afternoon. He didn’t care if I went to school. I don’t think he even noticed. There was never any food in the house unless Joni brought dinner over, and in the end I went to stay with her and Tom for a while. Eventually Dad got better, and I moved home and went back to school for grade seven, but I got a lot of bad stomach aches, and I had a hard time concentrating.

  Anyway, somewhere in there the math itself had gotten weird. The Mouse started wanting us to add letters instead of numbers, and move triangles around on grids. “I hate math,” I told Abby at last.

  She pointed at the pages of equations on the back of my test. “What do you call this?”

  I picked up the top page. Latitudes and longitudes. The course I’d been plotting from Victoria to Maui. Sailing west at an average speed of 5 knots…2,308 miles divided by 5…equals 461 hours…equals 19 days. Of course, the wind is unpredictable and 5 knots might be unrealistic. Still, it shouldn’t take much more than 3 weeks.

  I didn’t know why I was wasting time thinking about the trip. It wasn’t like it was ever going to happen, not without Mom. The numbers started to blur and I put the page down, blinking back tears. “That’s not math,” I said. “That’s sailing.”

  three

  Dad and I live near Willows Beach in a yellow stucco house with blue wooden trim and a wide front porch. It is only a few
blocks from the water—close to the marina—and Dad always says that if we had to buy it now, we couldn’t afford more than the downstairs bathroom. Mom and Dad moved here when they got married, and I’ve lived here my whole life. We’ve got tons of pictures all over the walls: Mom and Dad at their wedding; me as a toddler dolled up in dresses before I was old enough to object; the three of us at the beach or camping or on vacation in Tofino. Mom and Dad are holding hands in most of them, smiling at each other or at me. None of the pictures are from the last few years.

  I pedaled slowly on my way home. Dad never got home before five thirty, and I hated being alone liars and fools in the house. I usually went to Joni’s after school, but she had called this morning to say she was sick and that I shouldn’t come in case she was contagious. I’d asked Abby if I could go to her place, but she’d said she had a piano lesson.

  I slowed to a stop before I turned onto my street. Maybe I’d go to the marina and hang out there for a while. Dad wouldn’t know the difference. I could spend an hour on Eliza J, even clean the deck and the stanchions, if I could borrow a hose or find a few rags. I could be home by five, boil up some pasta or heat up some soup, have dinner ready by the time Dad got home. I sped up, dropped my bike in the driveway and ran into the too-quiet, too-empty house. I crammed a few rags and a water bottle into my backpack, got back on my bike and pedaled as fast as I could toward the marina.

  The wind had died down since the morning; the sun was warmer and the marina busier. A boat was making its way to the dock, its sails bundled loosely on the deck, an older man at the helm carefully maneuvering into a slip. Some people sat in their cockpits, talking loudly, laughing; others were striding down the docks, lugging coolers to their boats, untying lines, getting ready to go out.

  I ignored them all, walking quickly past them to get to E-dock. The first job was to get rid of that green sludge around the cockpit drains, I decided. Mom had been a total clean freak when it came to the boat. In the house she sometimes let things slide, but the boat had to be perfect. Now Eliza J just sat there, her deck grimy, her steel railings rust-stained and her waterline dark green with algae. It made me sad to see it, but at the same time, I couldn’t stay away. I’d feel like I was abandoning Eliza J if I didn’t at least do what I could.

  As I got closer, something caught my eye. A white and blue rectangle, dangling from her bow rail. I squinted.

  FOR SALE.

  It didn’t make sense. I stared at the sign. It wasn’t our phone number on it. Blue Pacific Yachts, it said. A yacht broker. I thought of Eliza J as Mom’s boat, but legally, she was Dad’s now. And Dad was selling her. I stood, staring at the sign for a long moment, barely able to breathe. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t sell Eliza J.

  “You okay, kid?” a man’s voice asked.

  I spun around. It was the old guy who owned the blue-hulled powerboat in the next slip. “Fine,” I said. My voice didn’t come out right; it sounded tinny and hollow, like it was echoing inside my skull.

  He nodded. “Beautiful boat.”

  “Yes. She is.” My eyes were suddenly stinging, and everything blurred. I turned and walked away, opening my eyes wide. If I blinked, the tears would spill out, and I was scared they might never stop.

  Before Mom died, I hardly ever cried. Once when I was tying up Eliza J, a gust had pushed the boat away from the dock and the rope had torn a layer of skin from my palms. Some of our boat neighbors— including the old guy who had just spoken to me, as well as all the others who now nod to me and look away—made a huge fuss. Mom squeezed my shoulder. Fiona never cries, she said. She grinned at me. Next time, let go of the rope.

  I sat on the couch, half-watching TV while I waited for Dad to get home. With every minute that passed, my anger got hotter and harder and more solid inside me. I knew Mom wasn’t coming back, but that didn’t give Dad the right to get rid of the things that were most precious to her. All the things I wanted to say to him were rushing through my head, all the angry words crammed together in broken sentences and unfinished thoughts. He was going to be upset that I’d gone to the marina, but too bad. I couldn’t believe he’d put Mom’s boat up for sale without even telling me. What if I’d gone down there one day and the boat was gone? My stomach was starting to hurt like it did right after Mom disappeared.

  Finally I heard Dad’s key in the lock. The front door opened and closed. I could hear him taking off his shoes and hanging up his coat.

  “Hi there, Fiona. How was your day?” Dad walked through the living room and right past me without looking up. He started sifting through a pile of mail that the cleaner had left stacked on the kitchen counter.

  I wanted to hit him or throw something across the room. “Not so good,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.” He ripped open one envelope. “Bills, bills…”

  He wasn’t even pretending to listen. He obviously didn’t care how my day was. “Why bother asking?” I said.

  “Huh?” He looked up. “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.” I turned off the TV, stood up and headed upstairs. I don’t think Dad even noticed.

  I was probably the only kid in my school who had no phone and no computer in her room. Mom had always said technology was bad for relationships. Personally, I couldn’t see how making communication more difficult was supposed to help my friendships. Anyway, Dad had both a computer and a phone in his own room now. It made enforcing Mom’s rule with me seem a bit hypocritical.

  Mom had been opposed to technology on boats too. She was a purist, she’d said. She’d believed in doing things the traditional way—roller-furling systems were for fat and lazy weekend sailors who couldn’t be bothered to leave the comfort of their cockpits to adjust the sails; radar was just one more thing to break down; GPS navigation systems and other high-tech gadgets were bad, bad, bad. In her words, these things were destroying the closeness of the relationship between sailor and sea.

  It was one of the things she and Dad used to fight about. Bad enough that you take off to the South Pacific or the Caribbean for weeks at a time, Dad had complained. I’d been sitting at the top of the stairs, crouched on the landing and straining to hear every word. The least you can do is take along the technology to communicate. A satellite phone, maybe. Tell me, how would a satellite phone interfere with your experience?

  Peter, if you don’t understand by now, there’s not much point in me trying to explain. Mom’s voice was angry and loud.

  Well, one of those GPS rescue things at least, so the coast guard could find you if you needed help. You don’t even have to use the damn thing unless it’s an emergency.

  Mom shrugged him off. I’ll be fine, Peter.

  Right. You’ll be fine, Dad said. And that’s all you care about, isn’t it? You, you, you. He stood up. I’ve had enough of this, Jennifer. It isn’t fair to Fiona or to me.

  I leaned over the railing. Leave me out of it, Dad, I shouted. Anyway, Mom knows what she’s doing.

  Dad looked up, red-faced and angry. Fiona! What are you doing up?

  Go back to bed, honey. Mom’s voice was firm, but she smiled up at me, like she was glad I was on her side.

  Stop trying to tell her what to do all the time, I said to Dad. She knows what she’s doing. You don’t even know how to sail.

  He opened his mouth and closed it again, shaking his head as if he couldn’t find the words. Then he turned and walked right out the front door. At eleven o’clock at night. Mom made hot chocolate for me and told me about the trip to the South Pacific she was planning. She was going to fly down and spend three weeks with a friend who had been cruising for the last two years. She showed me a picture of the boat: a new-looking, white thirty-six footer with a center-cockpit, flashy, but not as pretty as Eliza J.

  I tried to sound like I was excited for her, but I couldn’t help thinking about what I had overheard. They’d had arguments before, but this was different. What did Dad mean, I’ve had enough of this? For the first time, I wondered if they might actually
get divorced.

  When I was little, Mom had a different boat—a smaller one, called Banana Split. Dad used to come sailing occasionally, but he never liked it much. He got seasick, and anti-nausea drugs made him sleepy. And Banana Split was so small, he couldn’t stand up in the cabin or stretch out in the bed. When I was eight, Mom sold Banana Split and bought Eliza J. Bigger beds, standing headroom, and sturdy enough for any conditions. She wanted to do a long trip: the three of us, sailing down to Mexico or across the Pacific to Hawaii, living on the boat together for months or years.

  But Dad wouldn’t do it. He said that even on the new boat, he would still get seasick, and besides, he couldn’t afford to take that kind of time off work. Mom was—in her own words—devastated. They started fighting all the time. And Dad stopped sailing completely. He wouldn’t even set foot on Eliza J. Mom got more and more into it and started crewing on other people’s boats, helping them on long passages in the South Pacific and the Caribbean. She took off for weeks at a time. You’d think Dad would have been happy that she’d found a way to pursue her dreams, but all he said was that it cost way too much money. He was always going on about what things cost.

  I hated it when my parents fought, but I was secretly glad I didn’t have to share sailing with my dad. It was the one time my mom slowed down enough to really talk to me. It was our special thing.

  Now I sat on the edge of Dad’s bed, on the side that used to be my mom’s. Back when she was alive, there were always messy stacks of books and magazines on her bedside table. A few weeks after she died, Dad tidied it up. It stayed bare for months, but slowly he had taken over Mom’s side, so now he had two bedside tables covered with his junk. I didn’t like to look at it. It was like even the space Mom used to occupy was slowly disappearing.