The Perfect Fraud Read online

  Dedication

  For Michael,

  For Always

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1. Claire

  2. Rena

  3. Claire

  4. Rena

  5. Claire

  6. Rena

  7. Claire

  8. Rena

  9. Claire

  10. Rena

  11. Claire

  12. Rena

  13. Claire

  14. Rena

  15. Claire

  16. Rena

  17. Claire

  18. Rena

  19. Claire

  20. Rena

  21. Claire

  22. Rena

  23. Claire

  24. Rena

  25. Claire

  26. Rena

  27. Claire

  28. Rena

  29. Claire

  30. Rena

  31. Claire

  32. Rena

  33. Claire

  34. Rena

  35. Claire

  36. Rena

  37. Claire

  38. Rena

  39. Claire

  40. Rena

  41. Claire

  42. Rena

  43. Claire

  44. Rena

  45. Claire

  46. Rena

  47. Claire

  48. Rena

  49. Claire

  50. Rena

  51. Claire

  52. Rena

  53. Claire

  54. Rena

  55. Claire

  56. Rena

  57. Claire

  58. Rena

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Claire

  “Claire, your phone’s buzzing. Again,” yells Cal.

  I don’t carry anything when we run, and my boyfriend, Cal, who whines about his role as my personal Sherpa, usually has his pockets stuffed with things like mints, tissues, and my phone, in addition to whatever he might need.

  “Who is it?”

  “Your mom.”

  “Decline, decline, decline,” I shout over my shoulder.

  At a minimum, conversations with my mother are stilted volleys of how are you, I’m fine, how are you, fine, how’s Dad, resting, that’s good, okay, I better go, me too, bye, bye.

  Sometimes, though, because her natural resting state is worry—a condition exacerbated by my father’s long-term illness—her phone calls are fueled by frenzied and unfounded concerns for me, their only child.

  Since my mother is a psychic, as were her mother and her mother’s mother, her twice-weekly calls are often peppered with messages from beyond: don’t go near any green cars on the tenth; your great-great-grandmother says you should see a dentist about your back molar on the right side; toss your red pants (because of fire danger). I wasn’t sure whether this last one really was predictive of disaster or because the pants on my five-foot-ten frame made me look like a clown tottering on garishly colored stilts. Obstinately, after that call, I wore those pants for six evenings straight, with every candle in our apartment lit, and met no catastrophic fate.

  Miss Madeline, as my mother is known, is somewhat of a celebrity on the East Coast. She does it all: foretelling the future with tarot; channeling deceased spirits through mediumship; and medical intuitiveness, where she’ll scan a body with her mind to identify areas of illness or disease. The only thing she can’t or won’t do is aura reading. She says all the electronic devices people have on or near them these days interfere with the energy fields and that this prevents her from accurately seeing the colors hovering around their heads.

  Clients flock from every state and, not infrequently, from other continents for an opportunity to sit across from her. It’s not only to learn whether their deadbeat son-in-law will come through with the court-required child support payments so their equally feckless daughter and her two hyperactive sons will not have to live with them until their last opportunity expires to move to the west coast of Florida and have some peace at last, for God’s sake. My mother is also a revered healer, having honed her skills in the opulent backyard herbal and medicinal garden of the suburban Philadelphia home where she still lives and practices. She can argue for hours about the virtues of goat’s milk over cow’s, or ferociously debate whether the benefits of a gluten-free existence are more fad than fact. So, besides offering assurance to Nanny and Pop-Pop that the universe predicts a move to warmer climes (and away from their wayward brood), my mother can also sell them kava kava root to steep, sip, and soothe their frazzled nerves.

  Of course, as I have been told since I was old enough to comprehend, I am expected to carry forth the family gift.

  Three days a week I read tarot and provide “psychic guidance” at Mystical Haven, the seventh or eighth—I’ve lost count—in a string of employers with names like Sandi’s Spirit Spot, the Soul Center, and Psychic Circle. Before we moved to Sedona, Arizona, I worked at Tea and See, a store on Central Avenue in Phoenix, which specialized in leaf reading but was actually a front for the owner’s thriving drug business featuring a whole different kind of leaves.

  “I’ve pressed ‘decline’ six times, but she keeps calling back.”

  “Good. Do it again.”

  “Maybe it’s important,” Cal nudges.

  “Press. ‘Decline.’ Please.”

  Since my mother keeps trying, I assume she’s in one of her revved moods, and I refuse to spend what will be over an hour on the phone listening to her tell me about a vision she had where I was saved from quicksand by a fox or a hedgehog, she couldn’t tell which, or to have her ask whether I’d read the article on “The Restorative Properties of Slippery Elm,” which arrived in our mailbox earlier this week. She’d highlighted a paragraph—in neon purple—about “languid digestion.” This was after I’d complained about a bellyache, although I was fairly certain my distress was from a spicy chicken enchilada and twice that in margaritas, details I’d neglected to mention.

  I leap over a prickly pear, several of its pads half-mooned by javelina, a fact substantiated by the residual eye-watering stink. I figure they’d marked the area and breakfasted here, probably within the past hour or so, and I hope they’d moved on to forage through the neighborhood trash cans or doze under some mesquite shrubs.

  Yards behind me, I hear Cal stumbling. He’s all forward movement, little grace. I ran hurdles in high school, which trained me to gauge where to place my lead leg and to avoid stutter steps when facing an obstacle—like the agave that, judging by a string of curses, Cal flew into and not over.

  “Watch out,” I shout back, laughing.

  This morning we’re running on Little Horse, a trail most people avoid after a heavy rain, which I don’t understand because it’s precisely the time I want to be here. After the soaker last night, the dusty arroyos are overflowing, transforming the trail with glistening miniature waterfalls. It’s a run we can squeeze in before work since we never take the side leg to Chicken Point because that’s where the Pink Jeep tours deposit their customers. I get my fill of tourists in the store during the day, with their white sneakers, oversized glass “diamond” studs, and tacky sweatshirts pronouncing: DROVE HERE FROM BOBBIE’S BEANERY IN TOPEKA AND STILL HAVE GAS IN THE TANK.

  Besides, I’ve heard the shtick from the Pink Jeep tour drivers so many times I could probably lead a group. First, they inch the Jeep back almost to the rim of the plateau so the women will scream, imagining themselves plummeting to their deaths. Then, after everyone hops down, the driver will shout, “Who wants a jumping picture?” and all the kids will line up. As he takes the photo,
they’ll leap as high as they can so it looks like they’re hanging suspended in the air over a ravine. It’s actually only ten or so yards down but it’s an impressive shot to show the folks back in Minnesota.

  A tiger whiptail lizard races across the path, his brownish-orange body nearly camouflaged by the puffs of red dust in his wake. He zips under a creosote bush at the base of a gnarled juniper pine.

  Rounding the final bend of the trail, I nearly slam into a family hiking up. I can tell they belong together because of the matching red camp shirts with the white lettering on the front that reads: MALOVECKIO, LIVE THE ADVENTURE, 2018. Definitely not local. They’re hatless, dressed in tank tops, and wearing flip-flops. The girl sports a sheer lace top, false eyelashes, earrings that dangle to her shoulders, and a deep brownish-colored lipstick. The older man (her father, I assume) is red-cheeked and sweaty, and his bald head shimmers like blacktop on a sweltering day. A woman (mom) and another, younger kid (son) struggle behind. I want to take the phone out of the daughter’s hand, dial nine one one, and then return it to her. That way, she’ll be prepared to save her father’s life when he collapses with heat exhaustion.

  “Phone, Claire. C’mon. She keeps calling back,” Cal shouts, and then I hear him exchange pleasantries (beautiful day for a hike; only another two miles to the top, cools down at night) with the Maloveckios as he maneuvers around their caravan. Even though I’m always begging him to not engage, I’ve seen Cal have a fifteen-minute conversation with the guy who delivers our UPS packages. I observed this from the living room window and figured they were probably discussing the exorbitant expense of shipping. When I came out front to remind Cal we only had ten minutes to get to a movie, I interrupted the delivery guy’s story about his daughter’s attachment to her rabbit, which, at almost eleven years, had recently died, leaving his little girl brokenhearted. Nodding sympathetically, Cal said that was a pretty long life for a rabbit and he hoped his daughter would feel better soon. He also advised the guy not to replace the bunny quite yet, to allow for a period of grieving.

  “Fine,” I yell to him. “I’ll call her when I get to the store. Let’s finish this, okay? You sound like you’re about to collapse.” I glance back to confirm what I knew I’d see: Cal, scarlet-faced and puffing, navy T-shirt plastered to his chest. The little engine that tries and tries and almost can’t.

  “Only another half mile,” I say in a voice I hope sounds liltingly encouraging but suspect comes off as condescendingly disapproving.

  A grunt from behind.

  We skid into the gravel parking lot, and Cal bends over to clutch his knees and gulp air. From here, there is a clear view of the sky, which is an unblemished turquoise except for a jet plume streak of white.

  “Good run,” he huffs and grins. He means it sincerely, even though it will take another twenty minutes for his breathing to stabilize, and tonight he’ll be limping from a strain in one or both calves. He means it because he knows I love to run and because he loves me.

  Five things about Cal:

  One, Calloway Parker Reinberg is the name on his birth certificate, a reflection of his parents’ love of jazz, particularly scat and bebop.

  Two, Cal was born circumcised, a rare occurrence, which in the Jewish religion indicates the baby boy will be blessed with unlimited potential. His parents gasped in joy when presented with their foreskin-less baby. At the time, since they possessed both optimism and creativity, they were certain this child, favored with a sparkling future and sporting the initials CPR, would somehow revive their crumbling marriage. He didn’t.

  Three, Cal dreamed of becoming a psychologist and had just started a master’s program at UCLA before he ran into me five years ago at Taste of the Maze, a beer and wine sampling event held on seven acres of corn. There are probably inebriated attendees still wandering around in the labyrinth, searching for the exit.

  Four, Cal is more generous, kind, and understanding than I can ever pretend to be.

  “Let’s go, Oz. Those cards aren’t going to read themselves, you know,” he says now, grinning and pushing me toward the car.

  It’s a nickname—Oz, sometimes Ozzie—he gave me after we smashed into each other at the drunken maze event. This was during fall break my sophomore year at the University of California, Berkeley. I drove north to visit a friend, who adamantly refused to go into the maze with me. “I get lost in the mall,” she whined.

  I had rounded a corner I was certain was the same one I had passed three times already and hurtling toward me was a blur that only registered to me in the dark as “man, tall and wide.” We collided and as we untangled limbs and exchanged Are you okay?s he extracted a toy-sized flashlight from his pocket—sub-fact about Cal: he’s always prepared—and directed it toward my face. He introduced himself and declared my eyes were so incredibly green they reminded him of the Emerald City of Oz. He then took my hand and, illuminating the turns ahead of us, led us to freedom within three minutes.

  The fifth thing about Cal is that he knows I can read tea leaves only if the bag is clearly marked Lipton. That the tarot deck means nothing to me except that the pictures are pretty. And that any psychic visions I have are likely the result of a terrible hangover.

  Only Cal knows that Claire Hathaway is a complete fraud.

  2

  Rena

  “Yeah, they want to keep her some more in the hospital,” I tell my sister. Squeezing the phone between my shoulder and my ear, I count out underwear. “And I still have to finish this stupid packing.”

  “How’s that going?” Janet asks.

  “Pain in the ass.”

  “They giving you a hard time?”

  “Like you would not believe. Listen, I gotta go, okay?”

  “Sure, bye.”

  A “hard time”—that’s a laugh. When Gary and me were first married, our cat got stuck inside a birdhouse. One of those ones on a pole. I’m washing dishes that afternoon and there’s this black tail waving back and forth from the hole. Gary had a hell of a time getting that dumb cat out. Still has the scars to show for it too.

  Trying to get Stephanie, my little girl, discharged from the hospital has been like that.

  Moving her from New Jersey to a new doctor in Arizona was my idea. Of course, Gary’s mad. He sells spiral staircases, and his territory is the southeast. He said, “I can’t be expected to just pick up and leave, you know.”

  No, he can’t. But I have to do anything and everything to help my baby.

  I really don’t know how much more her tiny body can take. It started when she was six weeks old. She’d throw up and scream all the time. I took Steph to Dr. Grant, her first pediatrician. He tested for anemia. He checked her heart and her lungs, and after a million more tests, he says to me she’s a “failure-to-thrive baby.” I just busted out crying when he said that. It felt like what he was really saying was I was a failure as a mommy. He told me that wasn’t true and that some kids just needed more food.

  No shit, but anything I fed her came right up or went right out. The doctor says to me, “Just keep up the calorie intake any way you can.”

  That’s when I switched her to an all-organic diet, but it didn’t seem to help much. Her stomach was still a fucking mess. I was a fucking mess. I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up all night long, listening to see if she was in pain or needed anything.

  I really thought Dr. Grant was great at first. He was always nice. Once, he even complimented me on the way I was holding Steph because it calmed her right down. But when he told me to just feed her more, it felt like he was totally blowing me off. I mean, wasn’t I the one at home with her all the time? Gary and me, we could see how sick she was. The doctor, he says, “Rena, overall, she’s a healthy little girl, just small for her age.” He told me to try changing formulas. Oh, sure, like finding another organic formula was so easy. And he said to feed her a lot of small meals during the day.

  I followed all his advice, I really did. She’d still scream for hours, and this was after o
nly a stupid spoonful or two of mashed potatoes. What the hell? What’s easier to digest than mashed potatoes? Sometimes when things got too bad, I’d have to take her to the emergency room. I swear, we’ve been to every single ER in the five hospitals around where we live in northern New Jersey. She’s been examined by physician’s assistants, interns, residents, and nurses. And she’s had more CT and PET scans than I can count on all my fingers and toes. They keep checking for things like missing stomach enzymes, cystic fibrosis, celiac disease, allergies, and congenital heart defects.

  Nothing’s ever found. I’ve been bugging Gary to go to the doctor because he’s had a horrible stomach ever since him and me have been together. Maybe it’s a genetic thing? Who knows? We need to look at every possibility. We have to figure this out.

  When Steph and me go to a new doctor, I always say this little prayer right before the appointment: “Please, God, let this doctor figure out what’s going on so my baby can get the help she needs.” And I’m always so sad and disappointed when it doesn’t turn out that way.

  Where is Gary all this time? On the road selling curving steps. It’s been me doing what I needed to do when I needed to do it. The doctors here don’t seem to know shit about what’s going on with my baby, so I spent hours and hours on the computer to find the best pediatric gastroenterologist in the nation. Gary’s pissed, but is it my fault that Dr. Riley Norton’s practice is in Phoenix?

  Gary and me split when Stephanie was only one. As part of the divorce, we coparent. On paper, this means he lives in the next town over and is supposed to have Steph every other weekend. But since he’s on the road at least three weeks out of every month, I take care of most everything, including all the medical stuff. Really, he only sees her on holidays, usually at my house. He said he’d try to get to Arizona sometime during the six months I think I’ll need to stay. I don’t care how long it takes. Six months or six years—I’m not leaving until someone can finally tell me what’s wrong with her. Gary’s right about making sure he keeps his job. He definitely cannot do anything to screw up our health insurance, which he carries. This was part of the divorce settlement too.