Here She Lies (2 page)

“I’m going to wake her,” I said, “or we’ll miss our flight.”

“Where are you going?”

“To Julie’s.”

His face seemed to clamp at the mention of her name. No surprise to me. I’d always figured that, deep down, he was jealous of the closeness I shared with my twin.

As I walked toward the stairs, he followed me.

“Annie, please—
please
don’t take Lexy away from me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. And I
was.
Sorry. Sad. Out of rationalizations. Finished with begging for what he couldn’t seem to give me: the simple truth and an end to the affair.

I went upstairs to get Lexy. Quiet footsteps on the pale carpet Bobby and I had chosen together, an im-practical but beautiful shade of champagne. He would be lonely by himself in this house. (Would he bring
her
here?) I could feel its emptiness and I wasn’t even gone yet; I was still here, Lexy was still asleep in her very own crib, I could still change my mind, we could stay, we could stay …

Lexy’s bedroom doorknob was cool in my hand. It clicked when I turned it.

Morning light edged the pulled-down window shades, creating a silvery half darkness. Lexy’s breaths were long and deep and her room smelled baby-sweet.

It was a good-sized room, with butter yellow walls trimmed in white. Two built-in corner bookcases held whatever things she had collected in the five months of her life. Dolls, books, colorful objects that made all kinds of sounds when you moved them.

On a high shelf of one bookcase was the collection of tiny handblown glass cats and kittens from the summer my parents took us to Italy, when Julie and I were seven. It was the July before they got divorced, a final and typically dramatic try at making their marriage work. It was a fun summer, though; Julie and I played happily beneath marital thunderclouds inside the ancient stone walls surrounding the Florentine rental cas-tle where we stayed for four whole weeks. We were the kind of kids who didn’t worry about things unless we had to, believing that our twin bond protected us from hazard (we may have actually still believed this, now, at the age of thirty-three). Being together always felt like safety in a storm.

The way our parents finally broke the news was this: Dad left the house and Mom sat us down in the living room (we were still in our matching pink nightgowns; the new school year hadn’t yet started) and said in her cheerful way, “Daddy and I have decided that enough is enough. There won’t be any more fighting.” Their divorce was final before Christmas. Under the tree that year my mother wrapped my glass cats in purple tissue paper with a green ribbon. Julie’s cats were wrapped in green paper with purple ribbon. We had watched the glassblower make the tiny cats and even tinier kittens but never knew, until we received the gifts, that our parents had gone back to buy them for us.

Now I wrapped my glass cats in tissues and eased the soft square into my sweater’s pocket. Well, Julie’s sweater—she had forgotten it on her last visit, in March, and I was wearing it to return to her tonight. (It was a wonderful sweater, an expensive Oilily with pink and orange flowers shifting dominance depending on the angle of the light, creating a hallucinogenic effect. It reminded me of the old Cheerios boxes Julie and I would stare at during childhood breakfasts, shifting our gazes to catch another invisible, floating O.) I noticed that one of the sweater’s six large, distinctive flower-shaped buttons had fallen off—and for a moment I panicked. But I had no time to search for a button now.

Lexy was asleep on her stomach even though I’d left her on her back; she had only recently started turning over. I ran my hand lightly down her back to let her body know Mommy was there, then carefully picked her up and positioned her over my shoulder so she could keep sleeping. Her eyes fluttered open, then fell shut again. I detoured to my bedroom for one more glance to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything and discovered that I had: the novel I was in the middle of reading.
The Talented Mr. Ripley
had been keeping me up nights, distracting me from my troubles, and I needed to finish it. Steadying Lexy, I dipped at the knee and took the slender paperback in my free hand.

Downstairs, I transferred Lexy to Bobby’s shoulder so he could hold her while I put the suitcases into the trunk of the car. I figured I owed him that. At first he wouldn’t follow me outside into the bright morning, instead staying in the front hall with our baby sleeping floppily over his shoulder. It was the week our cherry tree was in full bloom, with a few pink petals on the dappled shadows of our front lawn, and I got the feeling that the perfect beauty of the tree and the clear sunlight would pain him more than he could handle at the moment. I did feel sorry for him. But I had to go.

“Okay,” I whispered. “I’ll take her now.” He didn’t move. I could see him drinking her in, smelling her, feeling her. I gave him another moment before slipping my hands under her arms and shifting her back to my shoulder. This time she woke up. She took a deep yawn and settled her weight into me.

“I’ll park in Long Term and leave the ticket under the mat so you can get the car,” I said.

“How will I get to the airport to get the car and then drive it back? I’m just one person.” His eyes teared up and for the first time I saw a fleck of gray in his left eyebrow, just one lone hair. In the past months he had sprouted silver at his temples and his face had become a fretful map. He had twelve years on me—he would grow old first. I’d always known that and it had never bothered me. I wondered now if his affair was some kind of midlife crisis. Was
that
what this was?

“Oh, Bobby. You’ll figure it out. Ask someone to go with you.”

He knew who I meant.
Her.
The mystery woman.

Lovyluv.

“You’re making a real mistake,” he said. “This is a marriage. We have a child.”

But I still believed that if he really wasn’t having an affair, if the love letters and credit card charges were really part of some hoax, he would have found a way to prove it. I kept hoping he would. Even up to the last minute, after I’d strapped Lexy into her car seat, my heart was primed … but all he could do as I got into the car was turn around and walk back into the house. He kept his eyes down, on the flagstone path, refusing to even glance at the cherry tree. I drove away. In the rearview mirror I could see his chest rising and falling.

He was weeping. I was weeping.

He shut the door.

I turned the corner off our street and began the long day’s journey from our home in Lexington, Kentucky, to my sister’s house in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts.

It was five o’clock when I carried my restless baby off the plane at Albany International Airport. I changed her diaper in the ladies’ room, brushed my hair and refreshed my pale pink lipstick (usually the only makeup I wore, an irrational yet effective source of confidence; the putting-on-of-lipstick in a mirror was something we had often watched our mother do: the stretched lips, the steady eye, the smooth stroke of color). Then I gathered our bags and sat for twenty minutes to nurse her. My cell phone service had no network this far east, so I had to find a working pay phone to let Julie know we’d landed on time.

“Expect us by seven. And Julie, don’t hold dinner.”

“I never eat before seven, anyway.”

Having grown accustomed to late-afternoon dinners (Bobby and I were in bed by eight thirty to be up at five, day care at six thirty, work by seven), I had forgotten how skewed my hours had become. Before Kentucky and Bobby and Lexy and the good ol’ Public Health Service, I too used to eat dinner at seven, eight, even nine o’clock.

“I’ll have to nurse Lexy as soon as I get there and throw her into bed, so just eat when you’re hungry. Did you get the—”

“Crib’s all set up. I got the cutest sheets. You’ll see.” I had asked her to rent a crib for the summer, but Julie being Julie (she was a successful independent marketing consultant, apparently some kind of sought-after guru), she had gone out and bought one.

“Did you—”

“
Yes
, Annie, I washed the sheets first. Just get in the car and
be
here, okay?”

By the time we picked up the rental car, Lexy had had enough of traveling and she didn’t want to get into the car seat. She wanted to roll around the floor and practice grabbing for toys.

“Just a little longer, sweet baby. Promise.” I ran my hand over her peachy wisps of hair and kissed her forehead, both cheeks, her dimpled chin, her button nose. She laughed, then immediately cried. Her little face screwing up so suddenly brought me to tears.

I had felt like crying for hours but hadn’t wanted to attract attention to myself on the plane. All day I had felt that everyone could see me for what I really was: a wife who had left her husband, a mother who had taken a child from a father, a woman who had lost hope in a man. Did it show? I knew that from now on, when people mentioned the Goodmans, it would be with the tagline “that broken family.” I was Anais (Annie) Milliken-Goodman. (
Anna-ees
, the French pronuncia-tion. Naming us Anais and Juliet had been a flight of fancy in the romantic early years of our parents’ marriage.) Would I drop
Goodman
from my name? Slice off the dangling hyphen? Go back to square one? If I did, then Lexy and I would officially be Alexis Goodman and Anais Milliken. But I had always wanted to share a last name with my child. Maybe we could drop our last names all together; she could be just Lexy and I could be just Annie. We could start a band. A sob ratcheted up my throat and escaped as a shout. I felt like such a fool. What had I done?

A headache blossomed as the little blue car’s engine leapt into gear. The jolt quieted Lexy and I felt guiltily indebted to the sudden, unnerving grind of noise. Poor baby. What did she make of all this? Did she know something momentous was happening today? That the day was a knife carving a groove in our lives between before and after? Maybe I was wrong, but I sensed she felt the cut, the separation, as deeply as I did.

Why had Bobby done it? Why hadn’t I been enough for him? There was a time I would have bet my soul that he and I were made for each other. With him, I had felt almost as right as I did with my identical twin: one person, joined in separate bodies.

I switched on the radio and we listened to classical music as we drove out of Albany toward the New York–Massachusetts border. When Lexy sighed, deep and long, I felt myself relax a notch. In the rearview mirror I saw she had fallen asleep and I whispered

“thank you” to the windshield. Humming along the highway, we consumed the miles to Great Barrington.

To Julie’s. I had never been to her new house, but I felt I was going
home
. I was as eager to arrive as I had ever been to get anywhere. Home after work. Bed after a tir-ing day. Birth after labor. Love after loneliness. Reso-lution after doubt.

After weeks of agony, I had a made a decision. I couldn’t just stay there, living with Bobby, sleeping with him, working side by side, wondering who
she
was. I couldn’t agree that black was white or white was black when all I saw was shades of gray. I would
not
repeat my mother’s mistake, accepting my father’s lies for years until finally it turned out her suspicions had been correct: he was cheating. It was terrible watching her struggle to recover from her own self-deceptions, her willingness to believe his lies. In the end, she never
did
recover—cancer got her first. We were only ten when our mother died, leaving me with the conviction that a woman should never compromise on the truth.

At twelve, when our father died suddenly in a car accident, I learned that nothing was permanent or real except what you felt in your heart. You had to create your own reality, believe in it and it would make you strong.

The old maxim
time is too precious to waste
became a vivid reminder to always take action when I was sure of something.

Until Bobby could tell me the truth, there was no going back.

Driving, I thought of something Julie had once said to me, about how she and I were as close as any two people could possibly be. Closer. How even marriage could not compare. It was my wedding day, a cool May afternoon in Kentucky, and I was two months pregnant. (Almost exactly one year ago—Bobby and I had not even made it to our first anniversary.) The night before, she had tried on my wedding dress and it was loose on her; I was already plumping up but not showing yet. For the first time ever, we were not exactly the same size. Standing there in my dress, waiting for my music cue to walk the aisle, she put her hand on my belly and repeated, “Closer.” My wedding day. Our first. Julie’s engagement had broken up two years ago, dropping her back into a dating scene that felt more ruthlessly competitive the older you got. When I became pregnant and Bobby and I decided to marry, Julie shared our happiness. She
knew
, in the deep unspoken way of twins, how in love with Bobby I was. In the end, only motherhood could compare to the absolute connection Julie and I shared.

Romantic love was intoxicating. Toxic. I felt sorry for people who didn’t have a twin with whom to entwine when life weakened you, on whose fibers of love and shared memory you could always strengthen yourself.

I decided I was not eligible for self-pity, not even today, because I had a daughter
and
a twin sister. Julie and I had clung together through every twist and turn of our lives, ultimately raising each other—at the shoddy Long Island boarding school where our mis-guided guardian, Aunt Pru, had placed us immediately after our father’s funeral, in the sleepaway camps where she had sent us for two months every summer, and during the single dull week we spent with her annually in California. We had survived all that. I would survive this.

When we finally crossed the border between New York and Massachusetts, we had been on the road for over two hours, not the fifty-seven minutes predicted by the global positioning system suction-cupped to the windshield. Somehow, despite the GPS, I had managed to get lost twice. And a detour to nurse Lexy and change her diaper had inflated into a dinner stop when I realized how hungry I was. By the time we turned the car onto Division Street, Julie’s street, a gentle country twilight had eased into the deep purple that comes just before the sky goes black. It was almost eight p.m. My body was screaming for sleep—and Lexy was just screaming.