Here She Lies (11 page)

I took a deep breath and plunged into comforting, mundane detail. “Our bank keeps Saturday-morning hours, nine to noon. Just get there before eleven forty-five because sometimes they lock the door early.” I read him the confirmation number the bank had given me to verify that new cards had been issued and were snail-mailing their way in our directions. “Visa and MasterCard said we should have our new cards by Monday. A couple others said Tuesday, but now I can’t remember which ones.” All told, we had about seven credit cards—way too many, but neither of us had gotten around to paring them down.

“Okay, we’ll just have to cope with this,” he said.

“We have no choice.”

“I just wish you’d been a little more careful, Annie.

I mean, this isn’t the first time you’ve lost your wallet.” I said nothing, just stretched out long on the couch and listened to our phone static. The living room had six windows, all of which were pure black rectangles.

A complete lack of ambient light, the totality of the night’s darkness, seemed to erase the outside world.

For a moment, before Bobby spoke again, I thought of this living room and this house as a spaceship that was carrying me away from trouble.

“Listen, I cleared the weekend off with Kent. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to come see you guys tomorrow.” The softened tone of his voice told me that he had already, just now in that minute of silence, for-given me for the wallet. And I felt my body relax.

There had been much good in our marital give-and-take. I hadn’t forgotten that. How had we gotten to this distant spot in so short a time?

“Okay. It’ll be good for Lexy to see you. But how did you get Kent to agree?” I knew that Kent had threatened to make Bobby work Saturdays in retalia-tion for my bailing out of what he actually, upon occasion, called “the Evil Fortress” (always with a sinister little chuckle).

“I had to pull out my employment contract,” Bobby said. “He couldn’t argue with that.”

“I think I really hate that man.”

“Yeah, me too. But I’m not giving in to him.”

“I guess you’ll have to buy your ticket in cash.”

“Well, actually, I went online yesterday and booked it—flight and rental car—so I’m set.” We both knew that if I’d asked him
not
to come he could have used the air ticket later. “But I can only stay one night. I’ll have to leave Sunday afternoon.”

“I’m leaving Sunday night for Manhattan,” I said,

“so that’s perfect.”

We spent a few minutes going through our credit cards to make sure I’d called everyone. I could picture him sitting on our green velvet couch with the Infidelity File. I had worked hard collecting our financial data in one place and it contained the most current list we had of all our credit sources.

“Bobby? Bring the file, why don’t you? I can’t take much more of this in-between-ness. We have to really face this now.”

Pause. I could
see
him freeze, sitting on the couch, the file in his lap.

“Okay, I’ll bring it.”

So this would be it. Finally, we would go over the file together and in the face of so much hard evidence he would
have
to confess. Unless … unless I was wrong. I had to admit I was beginning to wonder if there was a chance I had made a terrible mistake. I doubted I had, but if I didn’t allow for that slim possibility I never would have let him come. Bottom line: I really missed him. And if he
did
confess, finally, and if he promised to give her up and stay faithful, couldn’t I forgive him—just this once?

The next day Bobby’s flight arrived on time, just before eleven o’clock, but the rental car agency refused to honor his reservation without a valid credit card on hand. A taxi for the long drive would cost far more cash than he had with him and he had no way to access an ATM. And the next bus didn’t leave for four hours.

So he called me and somewhat sheepishly asked for a ride. I told him where to wait and promised I’d be there in about an hour.

The problem was, I had no driver’s license. The Lexington DMV was sending a replacement, but it wouldn’t arrive until Monday. I would have to ask Julie if I could borrow a credit card and call it in to one of the taxi companies that serviced the airport.

I found her at her desk, hooked up to a headset and talking a mile a minute. She had told me she made all her international calls through her computer because it was much cheaper—and now that I thought of it she had also told me that today she had an important conference call with a client in a country where our today (Saturday) was their yesterday (Friday), a workday, and thus her availability was unquestioned. I stood in the doorway separating her bedroom from her office, feeling dense to have forgotten about this call. There was a lot of money involved, she’d told me, and many people were to be included in the meeting.

I shut the door as quietly as I could and stretched out on Julie’s neat white bed, getting comfortable, as I waited for her to finish her call. Sinking into her spot, I wondered if her mattress’s space-foam memory would mistake my body’s impression for hers, the way people in town had lately been mistaking us for each other. I shut my eyes and tried to rest.

“What is it?” Julie was standing in front of me, still wearing the headset with its male end dangling.

“Finished?”

“No, they put me on hold. I have, like, one minute, so what is it?”

“It’s fine. Go back to your call.”

But I knew Julie. She was an epic multitasker and if anyone could handle an international conference call on a Saturday-that-was-still-Friday and at the same time solve someone else’s trivial problem, it was my sister.

“Just
tell
me. Quick.”

I spit it out as fast as I could. “I have to pick Bobby up at the airport, but I don’t have a license so can I borrow a credit card so he can pay for a taxi?”

“A cab from the airport’s going to cost a fortune.”

“I know, but he’s waiting—”

“Use my license and borrow my car. And take a credit card until yours comes.”

“Are you sure?”

“
Yes.
Annie, you look exactly like me. No one will know and I’m giving you permission.”

“Julie—”

“Just do it, okay?”

“Thanks. Should I wake Lexy from her nap so you can work?”

“Bring the monitor up here; I’ll keep my ears open.

I’ll be done with this soon.”

She hustled away, back to her call. Downstairs in the kitchen I opened her wallet and saw what she meant. No one would know the difference if I borrowed her ID for a few hours. Trading identities was a skill we’d practiced, for fun, as teenagers. We had even mastered each other’s signatures. I slid out her driver’s license, her car registration, her insurance card and one credit card just in case. Her keys were on a hook by the kitchen door. And her car, well, it drove like a dream.

I found Bobby waiting calmly on an airport bench, reading the well-thumbed copy of
The Stone Diaries
I had recommended to him. It had been sitting on his bedside table for months; he must have started it after I left him. I loved novels that ambled and leapt and created drama purely from character, but Bobby was more a history buff, so I knew he was reading the Shields novel as a way of holding on to me. Because he missed me. His legs were stretched out long and crossed at the ankle beside his carry-on suitcase. When he saw me coming he stood up so abruptly the suitcase fell over and he lost his place in the book.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said.

“No problem.”

I hugged him. He smelled delicious, like an accidental whiff of a wood fire on a chilly day. I took another breath and was transported to last autumn, before Lexy was born, cuddling on the couch in front of our fireplace at home.

He zipped the book into an outside pocket of the suitcase and rolled it behind us through the parking lot to the car.

“You drove Julie’s car?” he asked.

“I
am
Julie today.”

He couldn’t resist taking the wheel of this beautiful car and I didn’t mind letting him (
his
driver’s license being one of the few things I had not had to cancel).

Steering with one hand, he operated the sound system with the other and still got us to Great Barrington in under an hour. Bobby made things seem so easy. I loved being encapsulated with him in the car with the road humming beneath us, pretending everything was okay. I assumed he had the Infidelity File in his suitcase. Neither of us mentioned it.

When we got back to the house Julie had lunch waiting. She had closed up shop (the other side of the world having finally tipped into Saturday) and there was an air of celebration; our days had grown so quiet that Bobby’s arrival was an event. Julie welcomed him with hugs and hellos, seating him at one end of the dining room table. We sat on either side of him and he held Lexy in his lap. In the center of the table Julie had arranged a bouquet of flowers from the garden. We ate the tarragon chicken sandwiches she had prepared; the chicken salad, one of those dishes that improved with age, was even more delicious than yesterday when I’d made it. I was impressed by how Julie had freshened the leftover loaf of ciabatta as I’d shown her by damp-ening it and setting it briefly in a low oven. She had ex-tended the iced tea and made a fresh fruit salad with lemon juice and a sprig of the wild spearmint that grew abundantly outside.

“I read in the
Eagle
that Zara Moklas’s body is being flown back to Hungary on Monday,” Julie said.

“Her uncle came to get her.”

“I haven’t seen anything else about it in the paper for a few days,” I said. “I get the feeling the investigation isn’t going much of anywhere. I don’t think they’ll ever find out who did it.”

“They never located that guy?” Bobby asked.

“Thomas …”

“Soiffer.” The name was ground into my brain; whenever I heard it or even
thought
it I saw blood and heard malarms.

“Nope, never found him,” Julie said.

In the window behind Bobby the afternoon dramatically brightened as a cloud moved along. The lawn outside Julie’s house turned Technicolor green. Two birds landed simultaneously to peck at the ground.

“Well,” Julie said, standing up to clear the table,

“anyone for coffee? Bobby? I think I’ll have some.”

“I’ll pass, but thanks.” He lifted Lexy up and sniffed her diaper. “Time for a change.”

I helped Julie clear while Bobby took Lexy upstairs.

In the kitchen, where the baby monitor now sat by the phone, we listened to him change her diaper and fiddle with something in the room. I pictured her becoming restless as his voice murmured, “Do you want Mommy? Is it Mommy time?” and right on cue my milk dropped.

“Want me to give her a bottle?” Julie asked.

“I think I’ll nurse her.”

“Leave the dishes. I’ll take care of it.” I peeled off the rubber gloves and headed upstairs, intercepting my family, all two of them, in the hall on their way to find me. Bobby and Lexy had the very same smile, only hers was all pink gums and so, so very sweet. When we were all together my love for them felt not so much
equal
as completely
merged
; love for one was love for the other, like nested cups or echoes. Separating Bobby out of this feeling was a brutal emotional surgery and at this moment, encircling them both in my arms, it felt completely impossible.

I nursed Lexy on the rocking chair in the Yellow Room. Bobby stretched sidelong on the bed and watched us. He had put his suitcase at the foot of the bed (reflexively, I assumed, as sleeping arrangements were undetermined and I for one had assumed he would again sleep in the Pinecone Room). I felt a need to smash the coziness of the moment because we were drifting together without having resolved a single thing.

“Did you bring the file?” I asked.

He exhaled. “I brought it.”

“This is probably as good a time as any to talk.” He opened his suitcase. The manila file was on top of his folded clothes. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, he opened the file and rested his handsome, squarish hand on the top page. The hand that knew ligament from bone, that expertly probed muscle and had healed the pains of countless inmates.

“The credit reports are practically in another language,” he began. “I must have gone through these re-ports twenty times and I really can’t find anything, well, interesting.”

It was true: the voluminous credit reports, with their lists and codes and keys, were almost impossible to read. I could imagine how frustrated Bobby felt trying to pry information from the long, impenetrable documents. He hated bureaucracy in any form, which was frankly absurd since he had made his career in government service. But I didn’t feel an iota of guilt; I had suffered through the mind-numbing papers, so why shouldn’t he? In the two months since I’d bought our reports from the three major credit reporting bureaus, my searching fingers—and now Bobby’s—had softened their edges to tattered curls. And still,
interesting
was not the word I’d use to describe them.

“The credit reports don’t show much of anything,” I said. “It’s the credit card bills, mostly. And the e-mails.

That’s
where you need to concentrate.”

“I realize that. I’ve been studying the bills. I’ve called every retailer and vendor that posted every one of these charges we can’t account for.”
Retailer. Vendor. Posted.
He
had
been on the phone.

In our time together Bobby had never dealt with a bill or any of our various service accounts. I had often wondered how he survived before I came along. Basically I think he just paid his bills on time and never sought any discrepancies to balk at. The ignorance-is-bliss approach had served him well enough—until now.

He moved aside the clipped reports and got the stack of credit card bills, which I’d marked up with yellow highlighter and red pen. There was now blue pen, too, I saw—Bobby’s contribution. Seeing his markings made me hopeful. In a strange way those blue lines, their earnestness, increased my willingness to accept the possibility of his innocence, because if he
wasn’t
innocent then his notes were just more documented lies, which would promote him from faithless to fraud.