Family of Liars

by E. Lockhart

I have been a liar all my life, you see. It’s not uncommon in our family.

Anyway. It’s hard to believe I was ever quite so blindly patriotic, and that my highly educated parents were. Still, the memories stick.

Here in the Sinclair family, we keep a stiff upper lip. We make the best of things. We look to the future.

We girls have never been taught to grieve, to rage, or even to share our thoughts. Instead, we have become excellent at silence; at small, kind gestures; at sailing; at sandwich-making. We talk eagerly about literature and make every guest feel welcome. We never speak about medical issues. We show our love not with honesty or affection, but with loyalty.

They hadn’t come to see how I was feeling. They had come to tell me to stop feeling that way.

Now that I am grown, I think don’t take no for an answer is a lesson we teach boys who would be better off learning that no means no.

“We need you” means my sisters love me, they rely on me, they admire me.

I walk a path of my parents’ making. I walk it the same way I walk the wooden walkways they’ve made that stretch across Beechwood. I do not see how to step off. If I exit the walkways into the bushes, under the trees, or onto the sand—it doesn’t matter. I am still on their island.

I owe him the truth. I owe him everything.

families are made and earned and need not be built on biology,

I know he was capable of terrible things. But so was I.

He loves me, I realize. He treats me like I am his flesh and blood. He cares what happens to me, no matter what I’ve done.

I realize then, and understand even more in retrospect, that we have gotten away with murder not only because we were clever, and not only because we were lucky, but because my father helped us.