Well, this had to be wrong. Katie was trustworthy. She also had the house keys and the caretaking responsibility for two other grad students currently abroad on Fulbright. She was everyone else’s closest friend too.
And saying that: Kasia had noticed that their group chat had gone quiet recently. Messages from Katie had all but dried up. That dinner had ended quite awkwardly: Katie had lost at Diplomacy so badly it had looked like she’d been lying about even knowing how to play.
Did she suspect we had suspected her? And was trying to—what—hide?
Surely there was evidence in her favor about the Polish thing. She had told both of us she’d grown up in a large farmhouse. Only now Kasia remembered her saying once she’d grown up in a communist block as well, just like Kasia. So which was it?
She’d only ever mentioned the communist block once (right after Kasia had), and then never again; whereas the farmhouse had come up a few times. Katie had always said her father was Polish (and her mother, French), and had worked as a Professor of some kind. So why would a university professor in Poland live in a farm house? This didn’t quite make sense in Poland—no one was commuting into Kraków from a farm house in “Kraków’s commuter belt.”
She did once say she had cousins near Katowice—although now Kasia thought about it, Katie had pronounced the Polish “ce” at the end (“tseh”) with an Italian pronunciation (“chay”). It was like saying “Washingtom B.C.” And her birth name, Katarzyna—if it really had been—she’d once pronounced the English phonetic way (“cat-arr-zee-na”)—a big mistake, when “rz” is the same single sound as the “je” in “je m’appelle.” For someone who grew up in Poland until the age of eight, why would she forget the alphabet? And why had she lost her accent so totally, especially if she spoke it at home? Even if she somehow did speak it, and all this was due to the language-processing difficulty—why wouldn’t she correct herself, why would she continue on with total confidence?
Kasia and I were both cupping our cheeks. Oh my God. We alternated between distant, shocked looks and frantic exclamations of ahhhh, attempts to exhale the insanity of it all.
Had she lied on that first day and felt too embarrassed to correct it?
No: she’d been running with it long afterward, elaborating on it over time.
Hang on, let’s take stock, let’s review, Kasia said. Because it wasn’t that she was a liar. These were quite big things, yes, but they weren’t lies at least, they were just big fibs. Fortunately they’d been harmless. We knew Katie. She wasn’t a bad person. She liked us, she liked Kasia—we knew she did.
It was now Friday evening. As we cooked dinner we simply continued remembering, without direction. And details kept snagging. To follow just one thread: Katie’s whole housemate beef had been due to a surprise visit from her mother over Christmas, who was in fact the owner of the house, and the roommate’s de facto landlord. The housemate insisted Katie had said her auntie was visiting, not her mother, which Katie insistently denied to the housemate. But Kasia also only found out Katie’s mother was visiting, not distant family, when Katie dropped out of Wigilia (Polish Christmas-Eve dinner) at our house at the very last minute. This was after Katie had agreed to cook three of the dishes herself—which had thrown a spanner in the works for us somewhat. Dishes which any Pole would know and eat for Wigilia—so Kasia had reeled them off quickly at the time. Too quickly for Katie to write down and look up later. So Katie had needed to pull out. And the Diplomacy game Katie had been telling us about the previous week (the one she’d played a few days before our game): this would have been during this visit of her Mom’s—a game in which the counters hadn’t even been popped out of the cardboard holder, until I started doing this while she told me.
Then there was a flood. Stories we remembered of dramatic injuries or illnesses, never referred to again—they would flare up right before each academic conference panel she was supposed to sit on with Kasia. Offers to drive Kasia places, where Katie would say she knew the way, then take bizarre turns, leaving Kasia running for her train or lecture. And the whopper, which we’d even realized at the time, but then chose to let go of: the last time Katie stayed over to dog-sit for us, we realized the bed hadn’t been slept in. The sheets were starchy and clean. At the time we’d told ourselves she’d probably washed them. But actually, the very first time Katie had stayed around, Kasia found her towel hanging up to dry, only with that starchy crease that towels get from when they’re freshly folded still down its middle. Sure, Kasia had noticed back then, but it had seemed too flagrant—Katie must’ve brought her own towel over, or gone home to shower. But why would she hang the dry towel up? When we checked the first photo of the dogs that she sent us, she was laying with her feet up on the bed with shoes on, visible at the edge of the frame. Had she ever stayed for long enough to take them off? The photos she sent us every day had been sent in clusters around noon and six p.m. Did she set a reminder for it on her phone—or were those the times she drove over? Come to think of it, why had the dogs been so distressed since we’d returned from the last trip? Why were they ridden with fleas after her last stay?
Yes, none of this was provable, but all of it was weird, it was off. And if she hadn’t even stayed over once—all the money it had cost us! Now it looked like she had said yes to our faces, taken our money—only to go and do whatever she’d fancied.
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