Liars and Fools Read online

  I was still crying, but it wasn’t the panicky-can’t-breathe type anymore—just the regular kind of tears. “I want to go home.”

  “Take a few minutes and calm yourself down, okay? Then we’ll finish our dinner and…”

  “I’m not eating with her.”

  Dad looked at me, his hair flopping the wrong way and his shoulders lifting helplessly. “Fiona. Please. This is important to me.”

  I didn’t know how he could even stand to be in the same room with her. Anger flashed through me like electricity, and I stopped crying abruptly. “Come on, Dad. She says she talks to dead people.”

  “Fiona. Don’t be so closed-minded.”

  I thought about what Kathy had said back at the Mystic Heart—the waves, the darkness, the feeling of fear. “Do you believe her?” I rubbed my eyes with my sleeve, harder than necessary. “You can’t believe her, Dad. That’s crazy.”

  He took off his glasses and polished the lenses on his shirt, not looking at me. “I don’t know, Fiona. Who’s to say it isn’t possible?”

  I wanted to believe it was possible. I really did. I’d give anything to talk to my mother again. But wanting to believe something didn’t make it true. I couldn’t robin stevenson stand to see Dad being taken in by Kathy’s lies. “Me,” I said fiercely. “And anyone who isn’t a total idiot.” I reached up and snapped my fingers in front of his eyes. “Dad. One. Two. Three. You are waking up now. Open your eyes.”

  He swatted my hand away. “What are you doing?”

  “I thought maybe she’d hypnotized you,” I said.

  “Don’t be smart. This isn’t funny.” He put his glasses back on.

  “You’re telling me.”

  We stared at each other for a long minute. Dad’s face was creased with fury, and for a second I thought I’d gone too far. His Adam’s apple jumped as he swallowed. “Fiona.” He took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, as if he was trying to calm himself down. “I know it was probably a shock to find out I was dating, if that’s the right thing to call it. But I don’t understand why you got so upset, why you rushed off like that.”

  “You don’t?” I raised my voice slightly. “Seriously? You don’t know?” My stomach hurt, and I folded my arms across it.

  “Fiona, come back to the table. Whatever is going on with you, well, you can be angry with me if you want to, but it isn’t fair to Caitlin and Kathy to take it out on them.”

  I hesitated.

  “Now.” Dad lowered his chin and met my eyes. “Right now.”

  Obviously, I didn’t have a choice. I followed him back to the booth and slid back in beside Caitlin like nothing had happened. She was even more wide-eyed and stunned-looking than before.

  “It’ll be okay,” Kathy said, like she was trying to be reassuring. “You’ll see.”

  Did the spirits tell you that, Kathy? I bit my tongue and said nothing. I wasn’t so sure that everything would be okay. My hopes on that subject were not high at all. In fact, they were somewhere down around the fallen pieces of pepperoni on the black-and-white-tiled floor. I sighed. For now, I just had to get through the next couple of hours.

  To my relief, everyone decided to ignore me, and they carried on with their meal as if I wasn’t there. Every so often, I snuck a peek at Kathy. I couldn’t believe Dad had actually fallen for someone who claimed to speak with dead people. I couldn’t believe he’d fallen for someone who told lies for a living.

  seven

  The awful dinner at Paul’s Pizza Palace ended eventually. I looked away as Dad said goodbye to Kathy, all awkward handshakes and shoulder pats, like he wanted to kiss her, but not in front of me. He tousled Caitlin’s hair. “Bye, kiddo.”

  Kiddo was what Tom called me, but I’d never heard Dad say it before. It looked like he already knew Caitlin well enough to be on a pet-name basis. Apparently, I was the only one who had been kept in the dark about Dad and Kathy’s relationship.

  “Bye, Fiona,” Kathy said. “It was nice to meet you.”

  “Uh-huh.” I kept my eyes lowered, embarrassed about having lost it earlier. They probably thought I was a drama queen. Then again, who cared what they thought?

  Dad and I got in the car, and he drove toward home. Neither of us spoke until we were pulling into our driveway. Dad glanced at me and looked away again. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and fiddled with the windshield wipers, squirting washer fluid and cleaning the windshield even though it looked perfectly clean already. He turned off the engine and looked at me. His eyes were pink and tired-looking behind his wire-rimmed glasses.

  “I guess I shouldn’t have sprung it on you like that,” he said. “Maybe you needed a little more warning. A little time to get used to the idea before you met them.”

  I felt flat and emptied out from crying. “Maybe.” I didn’t think I’d ever get used to the idea. I didn’t even want to get used to it.

  It was a relief to get up to my own room and shut the door behind me. It wasn’t late but I changed into my pj’s before lifting my mattress and sliding out the chart book I had hidden there. I sat cross-legged on my bed and spread the chart book open in front of me. I stared at the familiar pale blue background dotted with the tiny yellow shapes of the islands and swirled with contour lines. Somewhere in that pale blue expanse was my mother.

  Dead reckoning. That’s what it was called when you navigated without using a GPS or anything, without having landmarks or even the stars to look to. Dead reckoning meant finding your way by keeping track of your position based upon your speed, your compass course and the passing of time. I knew how to take a fix on a point of land; I knew how to plot my position and my course on a chart. Mom had taught me that. I also knew that when you were on the water, lots of things could throw you off. Tides, currents, drift. Even your watch running a few minutes slow, or the algae on your boat’s hull interfering with your boat’s knot meter so that you didn’t gauge your speed accurately. You could end up miles from where you thought you were.

  That’s what we believed happened to Mom: a simple navigation error. She had flown down to French Polynesia to help a friend with a passage from Raiatea to another island, and they hit a reef in the middle of the night. They shouldn’t have been anywhere near it. A GPS error, some people had suggested, but Mom would never have relied on GPS. She’d have been plotting her course the old-fashioned way. Another boat saw the flares they set off, but it was a rough night, and Mom’s boat a long way from anywhere. It was the next morning before anyone could even start looking.

  By that time, it was too late. The sailboat had been battered on the reef and completely destroyed. A couple of weeks later, their life raft was found hundreds of miles away. It had been inflated and released, but no one was in it.

  They never found Mom or her friend.

  I traced my finger over the lines around Raiatea. Sometimes I imagined that Mom was still out there somewhere, that she had washed up on some tropical shore and was surviving on coconuts, waiting to be rescued. Or maybe she’d been rescued by the islanders and was living with them, playing on a golden beach with their chubby laughing children and catching brightly colored fish and watching the waves rolling over the fine white sand. But I didn’t really believe it.

  I knew she wasn’t ever coming home.

  The next day at school, I grabbed Abby in the hallway before the morning bell rang.

  “You are not going to believe this,” I told her.

  She raised one eyebrow. “What?”

  “Dad made me go for dinner last night with the woman he’s been seeing. And guess what? It was that woman from the Mystic Heart place.”

  “Are you serious?” Her mouth fell open in a perfect circle. “The owner or the psychic?”

  “The psychic. Well, the one who claims to be psychic.” I made a face. “Her name’s Kathy.”

  “Yeah, I remember. That is so weird.” Abby bit her lower lip and shook her head slowly. “Freaky weird.”

  “Tell me about it.
”

  “I kind of thought you were taken in by that reading,” she said. “When you wouldn’t talk about it, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know.” I shrugged. “But I thought about it later. And I think you were right. She totally could’ve been just tossing words out. Waves could be anything. Microwaves, radio waves, a wave pool, waves of sadness, somebody waving.” I stopped walking and let the rush of kids part around us on their way into the lunchroom. “What I can’t believe is that Dad seems to be taken in by her lies. He’s all, like, ‘Well, Fiona, who’s to say it isn’t possible?’”

  She winced. “Tedium. He doesn’t seem the type to fall for that kind of scam.”

  The bell rang, and I looked Abby in the eyes. “Lunchtime,” I said quickly. “We have to talk. And I have to come up with some kind of a plan to get her out of my life.”

  I don’t think I heard a word Mrs. Moskin said that morning. All I could think about was how I could get rid of Kathy. Unfortunately, most of my ideas involved things like rare untraceable poisons, cliffs or zombies. None of which was very practical.

  Finally we were set free, and Abby and I grabbed seats in the back corner of the lunchroom. Abby tipped her sandwich out of its plastic container: thick brown bread with seeds on the crust and leafy bits sticking out. The kind of sandwich my mom used to make. Dad mostly buys packaged things, like Baby Bel cheeses, and applesauce or pudding, and those little containers of crackers with cheese spread. When he makes sandwiches, they’re plain peanut butter or gross greasy salami on thin squares of supermarket bread.

  “Fiona? Earth to Fiona?”

  I looked up. “Sorry. What?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this all morning. Listen, I know it isn’t likely, but what if Kathy really can do stuff? You know? Like talking to spirits or whatever. People who’ve died.”

  Like your mother. She didn’t say the words, but I knew we were both thinking them. If Kathy was for real, maybe I could actually find out what had robin stevenson happened to Mom. Maybe I could even talk to her again. I started to get a tight ache in my stomach. “She can’t,” I said shortly. “No one can.” My breath caught in my throat, and that panicky feeling started building up in my chest. I looked around the lunchroom: dozens of kids eating, talking, laughing. Acting normal. Sometimes I felt like there was a thick wall of glass between me and the rest of the world.

  Abby looked at me. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded. I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay. Deep breaths. My breathing eased, and the panicky feeling started to recede. “I don’t believe in any of it,” I said flatly.

  “Yeah, I guess I don’t either. Not really.”

  “Mom and I saw a palm reader once,” I told her. “Did I ever tell you that? Last year, at the fall fair in Sidney?”

  “You did? I thought they just had horses and pigs. Well, and rides and stuff.”

  “And this woman. Joanna something-or-other.”

  Abby looked curious. “And? What did she say?”

  “She said that Mom had a long life line.” I couldn’t read Abby’s expression. She was looking at me, head tilted, but not saying anything. “Well, so obviously she was a fake,” I said. “You can’t ask for clearer proof than that.”

  Abby nodded slowly. “I guess that doesn’t prove they all are though. Right? It doesn’t say anything about Kathy either way.”

  “I don’t care. The only tricks I’m interested in seeing Kathy do are disappearing tricks. Poof. And her stupid kid too.” I put down my half-eaten sandwich and peeled the lid off a pudding container. “I can’t believe Dad’s doing this to me.”

  “It is kind of weird that he’d pick someone so flaky.”

  “Yeah, I know. He doesn’t usually go for that kind of thing. He’s always made fun of people who read their horoscopes. I mean, he used to teach science. And he’s always said he’s an agnostic because there’s no proof either way of God’s existence.”

  “An agnostic? Is that like an atheist?”

  “Sort of. It’s saying you don’t know whether there’s a god or not. He says it’s unknowable. Atheists believe there is no god, which is what I think. Well, most of the time at least.” I licked the back of my plastic spoon. “Dad and Tom used to go on and on about this stuff.”

  We used to spend most Thursday nights together: me, Mom, Dad, Joni and Tom. We’d have dinner and play Balderdash or Labyrinth or Pictionary, Dad and Tom would argue about philosophical things, and I’d be allowed to stay up late. But since Mom died, that’s fallen apart too. I see Joni and Tom a lot, but Dad never seems to want to go over there anymore.

  Abby fiddled with a piece of lettuce that had fallen from her sandwich. “I believe in God. It’s something you’re supposed to take on faith, right?”

  I had never understood how Abby, who was so logical about everything else, could make this one exception. She went to church every Sunday and to a Christian camp for two weeks every summer. When we were little, she used to say her prayers before she went to sleep; and I suddenly wondered if she still did. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask someone. “Dad doesn’t usually take anything on faith,” I said instead. “He’s all about evidence.”

  She shrugged and popped the lettuce in her mouth. “I guess he must believe Kathy’s for real though.”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “Well, I’m assuming. He wouldn’t want to be with someone he thought was lying, right?”

  I didn’t know how to make sense of Dad and Kathy. I spooned the pudding into my mouth slowly, letting it melt into a warm sweet liquid on my tongue. If Dad believed her, wouldn’t he want to try to speak to Mom? But if Kathy had actually given Dad a message from Mom, surely he’d have told me.

  Abby took my silence as agreement. “And we know her psychic thing has to be phony, right? I mean, she isn’t actually talking to dead people or predicting the future or whatever.”

  “Obviously.” I couldn’t see how any of this was helping. There was a long depressing silence. Kathy was liars and fools a liar, Dad was stupid if he believed her, and I was stuck with a big phony in my life whether I liked it or not. I couldn’t believe Dad had been taken in. If only…I gasped. “Abby!”

  “What?”

  “I’ve got the best idea.” And it didn’t involve poison, cliffs or zombies.

  She looked apprehensive. “What is it?”

  “Well, like you said, Dad wouldn’t want to be with her if he thought she was a fraud. If he realized she was making all this stuff up.”

  “Maybe.” Abby balanced a plastic container lid on one edge and tried to spin it around.

  It skittered across the table toward me, and I put my hand down on it hard, like swatting a fly. “What do you mean, maybe?”

  She shrugged. “If he likes her, you might be stuck with her anyway.”

  No way was I letting that happen. “If we prove she’s a fake, Dad will have to forget about her.”

  Abby’s eyes widened. “What if we did that for our science project? Mrs. Moskin said anything was okay as long as we had a hypothesis that we could prove or disprove.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, I can really see her going for this. ‘Oh, Mrs. Moskin? Our hypothesis is that my dad’s girlfriend is a big liar.’”

  She shook her head impatiently. “We wouldn’t word it quite like that, obviously. Maybe…hmm. hmm.” She drummed her fingers against the edge of the table.

  Something occurred to me. “Abby! Does this mean you want to be partners?”

  “We’re always partners.”

  “I know, but you seemed like you weren’t sure.”

  She shrugged. “It’s just that grades are really important to me, and lately you haven’t been so much into schoolwork. But we’re still partners, Fi. I wouldn’t want to work with anyone else.”

  One of the knots inside me loosened and untied itself. “I’ll do my share of the work, don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried. If we do this topic, you’ll be motivat
ed, right? Success is all about motivation.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Quit analyzing me.”

  She ignored me. “What if our hypothesis was that predicting the future is not possible? Or that psychic, um, psychic phenomena can be explained by…I don’t know. I think we need some books.”

  Maybe we really could find a way to prove that Kathy was a liar. A spark of hope flickered and caught, and suddenly the room seemed brighter. “Abby? You’re a genius.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know.” After a moment, her grin faded and was replaced by an anxious frown.

  “What now?”

  “I just don’t know if this is a good idea. I wasn’t too sure about my dad dating either, but his girlfriend turned out to be okay.”

  “She’s not pretending to channel dead people or read palms.”

  “You were upset about your Dad dating even before you knew who his girlfriend was,” Abby pointed out. “I don’t think you should do this, okay? For the record.”

  “Got it,” I said. “For the record.”

  “It might not be as bad as you think,” she said. “With Kathy and your dad, I mean. She actually seemed pretty nice to me. Maybe you just don’t like changes.”

  “Abby!” Sometimes she drove me crazy. “Quit analyzing me already and help me figure out how to get rid of her.”

  “Okay, but Fiona…”

  “I want her gone.” I looked at Abby. “Poof.”

  She hesitated; then she sighed and nodded. “Poof.”

  eight

  I considered stopping by the marina on my way to Joni’s after school but decided not to. It might be officially spring, but it sure felt like winter. My hands were practically frozen to my bike’s handlebars. Besides, the thought of seeing Eliza J with that For Sale sign on her depressed me. I couldn’t see any way to convince Dad to let me keep her. Even if, by some miracle, she didn’t sell, he’d never let me sail her again anyway.

  It wasn’t like Mom’s accident was Eliza J’s fault. Eliza J was built back in the seventies, and she was strong and solidly made. Mom said that modern boats were so thin-hulled you could see the fiberglass flexing when you hit the waves. When we installed liars and fools a new compass on Eliza J, she’d sawed a four-inch circle of fiberglass out of the bulkhead. Look at this, she’d said, holding it up triumphantly so that it glinted in the sunlight like a medal. At least an inch thick. She may not be fast, our Eliza J, but she’s damn near indestructible.