E. Lockhart - We Were Liars

Gat and I climbed up to the attic with glass bottles of iced tea and sat on the floor. The room smelled like wood. A square of light glowed through from the window.

We had been in the attic before.

Also, we had never been in the attic before.

The books were Dad’s vacation reading. All sports memoirs, cozy mysteries, and rock star tell-alls by old people I’d never heard of. Gat wasn’t really looking. He was sorting the books by color. A red pile, a blue, brown, white, yellow.

“Don’t you want anything to read?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“How about First Base and Way Beyond?”

Gat laughed. Shook his head. Straightened his blue pile.

“Rock On with My Bad Self? Hero of the Dance Floor?”

He was laughing again. Then serious. “Cadence?”

“What?”

“Shut up.”

I let myself look at him a long time. Every curve of his face was familiar, and also, I had never seen him before.

Gat smiled. Shining. Bashful. He got to his knees, kicking over his colorful book piles in the process. He reached out and stroked my hair. “I love you, Cady. I mean it.”

I leaned in and kissed him.

He touched my face. Ran his hand down my neck and along my collarbone. The light from the attic window shone down on us. Our kiss was electric and soft,

and tentative and certain,

terrifying and exactly right.

I felt the love rush from me to Gat and from Gat to me.

We were warm and shivering,

and young and ancient, and alive.

I was thinking, It’s true. We already love each other.

We already do.

GRANDDAD WALKED IN on us. Gat sprang up. Stepped awkwardly on the color-sorted books that had spilled across the floor.

“I am interrupting,” Granddad said.

“No, sir.”

“Yes, I most certainly am.”

“Sorry about the dust,” I said. Awkward.

“Penny thought there might be something I’d like to read.” Granddad pulled an old wicker chair to the center of the room and sat down, bending over the books.

Gat remained standing. He had to bend his head beneath the attic’s slanted roof.

“Watch yourself, young man,” said Granddad, sharp and sudden.

“Pardon me?”

“Your head. You could get hurt.”

“You’re right,” said Gat. “You’re right, I could get hurt.”

“So watch yourself,” Granddad repeated.

Gat turned and went down the stairs without another word.

Granddad and I sat in silence for a moment.

“He likes to read,” I said eventually. “I thought he might want some of Dad’s books.”

“You are very dear to me, Cady,” said Granddad, patting my shoulder. “My first grandchild.”

“I love you, too, Granddad.”

“Remember how I took you to a baseball game? You were only four.”

“Sure.”

“You had never had Cracker Jack,” said Granddad.

“I know. You bought two boxes.”

“I had to put you on my lap so you could see. You remember that, Cady?”

I did.

“Tell me.”

I knew the kind of answer Granddad wanted me to give. It was a request he made quite often. He loved retelling key moments in Sinclair family history, enlarging their importance. He was always asking what something meant to you, and you were supposed to come back with details. Images. Maybe a lesson learned.

Usually, I adored telling these stories and hearing them told. The legendary Sinclairs, what fun we’d had, how beautiful we were. But that day, I didn’t want to.

“It was your first baseball game,” Granddad prompted. “Afterward I bought you a red plastic bat. You practiced your swing on the lawn of the Boston house.”

Did Granddad know what he’d interrupted? Would he care if he did know?

When would I see Gat again?

Would he break up with Raquel?

What would happen between us?

“You wanted to make Cracker Jack at home,” Granddad went on, though he knew I knew the story. “And Penny helped you make it. But you cried when there weren’t any red and white boxes to put it in. Do you remember that?”

“Yes, Granddad,” I said, giving in. “You went all the way back to the ballpark that same day and bought two more boxes of Cracker Jack. You ate them on the drive home, just so you could give me the boxes. I remember.”

Satisfied, he stood up and we left the attic together. Granddad was shaky going downstairs, so he put his hand on my shoulder.

I FOUND GAT on the perimeter path and ran to where he stood, looking out at the water. The wind was coming hard and my hair flew in my eyes. When I kissed him, his lips were salty.

GRANNY TIPPER DIED of heart failure eight months before summer fifteen on Beechwood. She was a stunning woman, even when she was old. White hair, pink cheeks; tall and angular. She’s the one who made Mummy love dogs so much. She always had at least two and sometimes four golden retrievers when her girls were little, all the way until she died.

She was quick to judge and played favorites, but she was also warm. If you got up early on Beechwood, back when we were small, you could go to Clairmont and wake Gran. She’d have muffin batter sitting in the fridge, and would pour it into tins and let you eat as many warm muffins as you wanted, before the rest of the island woke up. She’d take us berry picking and help us make pie or something she called a slump that we’d eat that night.

One of her charity projects was a benefit party each year for the Farm Institute on Martha’s Vineyard. We all used to go. It was outdoors, in beautiful white tents. The littles would run around wearing party clothes and no shoes. Johnny, Mirren, Gat, and I snuck glasses of wine and felt giddy and silly. Gran danced with Johnny and then my dad, then with Granddad, holding the edge of her skirt with one hand. I used to have a photograph of Gran from one of those benefit parties. She wore an evening gown and held a piglet.

Summer fifteen on Beechwood, Granny Tipper was gone. Clairmont felt empty.

The house is a three-story gray Victorian. There is a turret up top and a wraparound porch. Inside, it is full of original New Yorker cartoons, family photos, embroidered pillows, small statues, ivory paperweights, taxidermied fish on plaques. Everywhere, everywhere, are beautiful objects collected by Tipper and Granddad. On the lawn is an enormous picnic table, big enough to seat sixteen, and a ways off from that, a tire swing hangs from a massive maple.

Gran used to bustle in the kitchen and plan outings. She made quilts in her craft room, and the hum of the sewing machine could be heard throughout the downstairs. She bossed the groundskeepers in her gardening gloves and blue jeans.

Now the house was quiet. No cookbooks left open on the counter, no classical music on the kitchen sound system. But it was still Gran’s favorite soap in all the soap dishes. Those were her plants growing in the garden. Her wooden spoons, her cloth napkins.

One day, when no one else was around, I went into the craft room at the back of the ground floor. I touched Gran’s collection of fabrics, the shiny bright buttons, the colored threads.

My head and shoulders melted first, followed by my hips and knees. Before long I was a puddle, soaking into the pretty cotton prints. I drenched the quilt she never finished, rusted the metal parts of her sewing machine. I was pure liquid loss, then, for an hour or two. My grandmother, my grandmother. Gone forever, though I could smell her Chanel perfume on the fabrics.

Mummy found me.

She made me act normal. Because I was. Because I could. She told me to breathe and sit up.

And I did what she asked. Again.

Mummy was worried about Granddad. He was shaky on his feet with Gran gone, holding on to chairs and tables to keep his balance. He was the head of the family. She didn’t want him destabilized. She wanted him to know his children and grandchildren were still around him, strong and merry as ever. It was important, she said; it was kind; it was best. Don’t cause distress, she said. Don’t remind people of a loss. “Do you understand, Cady? Silence is a protective coating over pain.”

I understood, and I managed to erase Granny Tipper from conversation, the same way I had erased my father. Not happily, but thoroughly. At meals with the aunts, on the boat with Granddad, even alone with Mummy—I behaved as if those two critical people had never existed. The rest of the Sinclairs did the same. When we were all together, people kept their smiles wide. We had done the same when Bess left Uncle Brody, the same when Uncle William left Carrie, the same when Gran’s dog Peppermill died of cancer.

Gat never got it, though. He’d mention my father quite a lot, actually. Dad had found Gat both a decent chess opponent and a willing audience for his boring stories about military history, so they’d spent some time together. “Remember when your father caught that big crab in a bucket?” Gat would say. Or to Mummy: “Last year Sam told me there’s a fly-fishing kit in the boathouse; do you know where it is?”

Dinner conversation stopped sharply when he’d mention Gran. Once Gat said, “I miss the way she’d stand at the foot of the table and serve out dessert, don’t you? It was so Tipper.” Johnny had to start talking loudly about Wimbledon until the dismay faded from our faces.

Every time Gat said these things, so casual and truthful, so oblivious—my veins opened. My wrists split. I bled down my palms. I went light-headed. I’d stagger from the table or collapse in quiet shameful agony, hoping no one in the family would notice. Especially not Mummy.