Chapter 4 - The Little Liar

By the time she’d pulled off her gloves and fished her phone out of her pocket, the ringing had stopped. The screen showed an unknown number. Lisa listened to the voicemail. Alice Keridreux agreed to take her case and was offering her a meeting the following Thursday afternoon. She should have anticipated this. Still kneeling on the damp soil, she went back to her weeding. She’d gone to see a female attorney on an impulse, and now wasn’t so sure what she wanted. She would have to start all over again, describing what had happened to her over and over. Maybe she could delay, say she wasn’t free that day or not call back. Alice Keridreux would forget. The woman could have made an effort, she thought to herself, asked how she was doing. Nothing. Lisa was struggling to push aside a limb from a rambling rose, when a branch sprang free and scratched her face. Why the hell did she have to deal with all this on her own?

The other apprentices had already stopped for the day. She put the branches into a pile, gathered up her tools, and slipped them one by one into their pockets in her tool bag, then dusted the dirt from her pants and headed slowly back to the shed. She could hear laughter coming through the wide-open door; the oldest gardener on the team was celebrating his birthday and the boss had provided champagne. Lisa couldn’t leave without saying anything to them. She was greeted with exclamations and handed a glass, she toasted with them. Their warmth and high spirits relaxed her. She would go to the meeting.

At this time in the evening her father was probably home. Well, good—the conversation wouldn’t last so long. Since he’d made a new life for himself, he avoided talking to her in front of his wife. He didn’t pick up right away, Lisa waited, he was probably taking himself off somewhere before answering. The champagne was still having a slight effect on her, her voice was buzzy. She apologized and very quickly explained that she’d met a female attorney who had agreed to represent her. There was a silence that lasted several seconds, a bit of throat clearing. She couldn’t make a decision like this on her own, she should have spoken to him about it sooner, Laurentin was wonderful, it really wasn’t a good idea to go changing … Lisa didn’t let him finish.

“Dad, this is my thing.”

She could hear Leo crying in the background. Then her father’s wife calling him. He must have put his hand over the phone, the sounds were muffled, he said of course he understood, but it was just … the child’s screams stepped up a gear.

“Don’t worry. I promise it’ll be fine.”

“What did your mother say?”

It had taken Lisa a while to get used to these “your mother’s and “your father’s that had replaced the “Mom’s and “Dad’s of previous conversations, this device they’d come up with to foist their breakup on her. And then, like all children of divorce, she’d adapted. She played on their resentments as she would a keyboard. She knew what to say, which buttons to press and how, and what was better left unsaid. A proficiency that comes quickly, it turned out. Her father was always flattered when she told him things first. It must have reassured him, slightly eased his guilt for dumping his wife and daughters, particularly her, the younger one, with what she’d been through.

“She doesn’t know yet. I wanted to tell you first.”

He said he was sending her a big hug, he’d call back very soon and they’d have lunch together.

Lisa didn’t even think to ask for news of Leo. She hardly knew him, this half brother of hers. She would have liked to love him, though. But she couldn’t help herself, she was jealous of her father’s pride when he held his son in his arms. And anyway, her father—with his two-day stubble, his new glasses, and his stomach tucked into his jeans—really ticked her off. She thought he was ridiculous trying to act all young at his age.

That Saturday Lisa had lunch at her mother’s. She felt a little pang in her chest every time she went through the gate. Nothing had moved in the house. The frames still formed their impeccable line all the way up the staircase. There were seventeen of them, one for each stair. It had been a ritual, posing as a family every summer, sitting on the sand with their backs to the sea, all in a line, as if on parade. Black-and-white portraits, ordered from the photographer on the beach, all the same size. In the last of them, Lisa must be thirteen, a little chubby, as tanned as her father. Solène has the same fair complexion as her mother. Her parents are pressed up against each other, smiling, they look gorgeous, the pair of them.

They sat at the kitchen table, both making an effort to seem bright, breezy, and happy to see each other. Lisa had brought some yanagi-ichigo fruit and a rare kind of ancient grain. She’d made a great fuss over her mother’s present, an orange sweatshirt that she would never wear—she loathed the color. Until dessert, conversation rolled along nicely, covering seedlings, the vegetable plot, global warming, and the benefits of stinging nettle purée. At least they could agree on all that. The awkwardness had come along with Solène. Her trip to Sweden was meant to last a year, long enough for her to get another diploma. But a tall, bearded Nordic man had been appearing in photos on the family WhatsApp group for some time now, and Solène had stopped talking about coming home. Because of the bearded guy and Solène’s smile next to him, Lisa’s mother avoided the subject. She didn’t want to upset Lisa.

Since her experience, an embarrassed silence had hung over anything that touched on relationships or sexuality. Memories of those tortuous years were still too raw. Poor Mom. She didn’t even dare suggest going to the movies or watching a movie together on TV, she must have been afraid they’d stumble across a sex scene halfway through.

Lisa pounced on the moment when her mother, bending down to put on her gardening boots, wasn’t looking at her.

“I’m changing attorneys. I’d prefer to be represented by a woman.”

She’d turned the sentence over in her head several times on the way there. Her mother couldn’t object on any grounds: Lisa clearly remembered her hesitating to opt for Laurentin at the time. She could picture her sitting in the living room, telling one of her girlfriends that it would be easier for her daughter to confide in a woman. Her father had maintained that, quite the opposite, it would be better to have a man to square up to Lange and his attorney. They’d asked what she thought, she’d said she didn’t give a damn. For once her father had won.

“I’ve met one. Her name’s Alice Keridreux. I’m seeing her again soon. She’s older than you.”

Lisa described the practice, right in the town center, the large office looking out over the river, adding that the attorney had two children—all things, she thought, that would reassure her mother.

“Your father won’t agree to it.”

“I told him just before coming here. He was at home, Leo was crying, the conversation didn’t last long, I didn’t want to bother him with this … You know what he’s like now …”

She had it all worked out and wasn’t proud of herself for it. Her mother had bristled, as she did whenever anyone mentioned her ex-husband’s new life.

“But did he at least get that this means a lot to you? He divorced his wife, not his daughter.”

It was in the bag.

Darkness was closing in as they reached the station. They stood in silence for a few seconds, facing each other on the platform.

“You know, you’re right, about the attorney.”

Her mother hugged her awkwardly. Lisa could feel herself stiffening involuntarily.

She smiled at her through the train’s graffitied window, put on her headphones, pulled up her hood, and kicked aside the crushed can and the greasy fastfood box on the floor. The tracks followed the highway, ran along an expanse of warehouses, and then curved around to the left before going over a bridge. The whole town could be seen from there. Lisa waited for her high school to appear, with its semicircular façade punctuated with yellow metal tubes, and she closed her eyes. The train was now racing through countryside dotted with residential areas. A group of teenagers got on at the next station, and she sunk deeper into her seat. A girl with raven-black hair and a nose piercing let her eyes glide over her. They sat in a block of four seats farther down the carriage and talked loudly while their smart speaker spewed out a terrible noise.

Since her experience, Lisa had hardly seen anyone from that time. She hadn’t even been in court the day her friend Marion had given evidence. The only people she hadn’t been able to avoid were her two old high school teachers, Mrs. Valette and Mr. Boehm. They’d been at the far end of the room when Lisa came in, and Pauline Valette’s eyes were red. It had really shaken Lisa up. The attorney was bound to ask her all sorts of questions about them.

Her thoughts drifted back to her mother, who would already have messaged Solène to tell her everything. Her sister would agree, too, about having a female attorney.

They didn’t talk about religion much at home, and it was a long time since anyone in the family had been to church; politics wasn’t a subject for them either, but anything that touched on the gender gap incensed her mother. She hadn’t forgiven her own parents for failing to give her the same encouragement as her brothers with her schoolwork. Which was why she’d been so exacting about her own daughters’ academic results. She wanted her girls to be independent and perhaps also to avenge her.

“We need to be armed,” she always said. “I wasn’t properly prepared.”

It hadn’t been easy, in her particular family, being a teenage girl with breasts that turned the boys on.