Here She Lies (7 page)

“There never did seem to be a question of arresting me.” Bobby’s hand nestled in a pants pocket, fiddling with something. “He’s trying to figure things out, I guess. There was just a lot of talking. Though he did take a sample of my saliva.”

“Saliva?” But even as I said it, I knew why: that was one way the police now chronicled DNA.

“I don’t think it meant that much. It seemed pretty routine, actually, like they do it all the time. It would be stranger if he didn’t take all this seriously.”

“That’s true,” I agreed. But
a DNA sample
? “By the way, he’s got a cop sitting outside in his car, keeping watch, and I admit it’s a relief.”

Bobby crossed the room to look out the window, then came over to sit with me on the couch.

“I heard you got pretty upset last night when you found Zara out front,” I said. “It must have been awful.”

“I rushed to get here. I needed to talk to you, Annie.

I should have known you’d make a few stops and probably get—”

“Lost.” He knew me. “Plus I took a dinner break.”

“But I’m glad you didn’t get here first,” he said,

“because if you’d seen what I saw when I pulled up and found her lying there …” He shook his head.

Ocean eyes dulled by a very bad night.

“What did you need to talk to me about?” Say it:
Lovyluv.
Or better yet, give her a real name.

“I was hoping something would come to me, some way to convince you to come home. I jumped on the first plane out.”

“And?” Meaning: Tell. Me. The. Truth. Now. And.

I. Will. Come. Home. With. You. How plain could I make it? I had already practically drawn him a road map. The old frustration welled up inside me and I turned away from him and looked down at our baby.

She must have sensed my attention because she snapped her mouth off my nipple and blazed me with her best smile. I smiled back.

“When I saw you dead, Annie, I freaked. I mean
freaked
.”

Hearing him say that sent a chill up my spine. “But it wasn’t me.”

“The time it took me to realize that was the longest minute of my life.”

The longest minute of my life
: a cliché. I wanted more from my husband. I wanted him to peel back the surface of what was happening between us, to
dig
.

“But why would someone kill
me
?”

“That’s what I spent half the night explaining to the detective,” Bobby said. “No one would, especially not me. I wasn’t angry at you when you left. I was upset. I was frustrated—but not angry.”

He spoke with such intensity that I was drawn into his emotions, wave by wave. He seemed helpless, marooned on an island of misapprehension—helpless and very hurt. I had hurt him. I had brought all this on by storming out of our life and coming here. I wanted to touch him, but it would send the wrong message. I hadn’t changed my mind about what had propelled me here in the first place.

“Just so you know, Bobby, I
did
see what you saw last night. I knew something was wrong because of all the police, but I still saw what you saw and thought what you thought. I
felt
that horror you felt when I saw her lying there. Except I thought I was looking at Julie.”

He leaned into me on the couch, his left side warm against my right. My body wanted to melt into his, find comfort and healing the easy way. But we had already tried that at home, using sex to settle the argument, and it had never worked for more than a few hours. By morning, my brain would wake up, my eyes would open.

“Here,” I said, handing Lexy to him. “Could you please burp her?” He got up and paced the floor with Lexy over his shoulder, gently patting
the spot
on her little back. He was a good father; you had to give him that.

“What did Lazare want this morning?” he asked, kissing the side of Lexy’s head.

I pulled the fax out of my pocket and unfolded it.

“Did you ever hear anyone at the prison mention Thomas Soiffer?”

Bobby took the crushed paper and looked it over.

“Who is he?”

“A neighbor saw him lurking around outside the house yesterday,” I said. “Well, not lurking. Sitting in his van—but for hours.”

He dropped the fax on the coffee table, on top of yesterday’s newspaper, and kept moving, patting and bouncing Lexy. “If they knew about this guy, why did he put so much time into me? He kept me for
hours.
”

“The neighbor didn’t remember the van until this morning. That’s when the detective found out, too.”

“So last night I was the best thing they had?”

“He said they never get cases like this. They probably don’t know what they’re doing. So what kind of questions did he ask you?”

“We went over every minute of yesterday, every
second
, over and over and over.” He chanted those last words “over and over and over” as he bounced Lexy in the air in front of him, the way she liked. He angled her side to side, eliciting happy squeals. Then he sang a stanza from Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” which his parents had sung to him as a lullaby when he was small. Bobby’s parents had been hippies, and though he had rebelled early against their peripatetic, under-funded lifestyle (rebellion by bank account), their bo-hemianism had peppered his inner life. His social consciousness may have come from them—he was a strong advocate of prisoners’ rights, as liberal a liberal as you’re likely to find—but his stalwart, conservative sense of stability came from himself.

Lexy burped, and I said, “Why don’t you put her down now? She hasn’t had any floor time since yesterday morning.”

He set her on her stomach on the carpet. I picked up her favorite teether—a sticky red rubbery duck—from the coffee table and put it in front of her. She grabbed it and stuck it in her mouth. Bobby sat down next to me again and reached for my hand, which I pulled away.

He smelled so good; I
missed
him. But it was too soon.

Julie walked into the living room and stopped when she saw us. She seemed a little startled, realizing she had interrupted our awkward reunion.

“Jules,” I said, “would you mind watching Lexy for a few minutes?”

“I’d love to.” Julie picked Lexy up from the floor and held her high, earning smiles and a cackling little laugh.

Bobby followed me through the French doors into the backyard. The overcast morning cast a muted, tentative light over the sweep of lawn, dulling the green grass and darkening the bank of forest at the edge of Julie’s property. Without agreeing on a direction we walked around the side of the barn-house to the front, where a bright seam of orange marigolds defied the shadowy imminence of rain. Spring, glorious spring, and my heart was aching. I knew I was going to send Bobby home alone.

In the daylight I could see how isolated Julie’s house was; none of her neighbors was visible from her property. The barn sat looming on a plot of landscaped green that extended back from the intersection of two roads, gray ribbons of asphalt that crossed each other at an uneven angle, with one becoming a hill and the other curving into a turn. We were alone here (except for the maroon car and the man inside it, who I could now see had short brown hair and a double chin—and
really
, I thought, what would be the difference if we brought him coffee? Stationed in his car, on this lonely road where
everyone
knew there had been a murder, he stuck out like a sore thumb), and I immediately saw the appeal: the rolling hills, the woven greens, the candy-sweet air. I breathed deeply, and again.

On the road almost directly in front of the house was a white outline of Zara’s body. I was shocked to see this because I hadn’t noticed it last night, though they must have drawn it while she was still lying there. I had been aware of the unnatural angles of her limbs, the deep bloody slice in her throat and the presence of all the people, but not this painted-on caricature of the last action of a woman’s life.
Here she lies.
The yellow police tape surrounding the
crime scene
(I hated that phrase for her, for us) had drooped on one side and detached on another. The disengaged end floated up on a breeze and then settled back onto the ground. That morning a local reporter had been poking around (we had declined to come out of the house to be interviewed; we were still too upset) and I wondered if
he
had detached the yellow tape to get a closer look at the ground. I wondered how much the reporter knew about what had happened last night, how much anyone knew.

I wondered what would become of Zara’s body.

“Listen, Bobby—”

Before I could say it—
I’m not going home with
you
—he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I would never try to stop you from doing what you need to do.”

He had jumped halfway through the discussion, but he was right: there was no point repeating the same talk, talk, talk that had gotten us nowhere these past weeks.

“It’s not what I
need
.”

“I know how much you hate living in Lexington.” So true.

“And the prison isn’t for you.”

Correct.

“And now you’ve got this new job lined up for yourself in Manhattan. You’ve been wanting to live in the city.”

Yes. Yes. “But, Bobby, it isn’t about all that. I wouldn’t break up our family for any of
that
.”

“Wait, Annie. Please hear me out.”

“Credit card bills don’t lie.” The familiar chorus of my recent song.

“No, they don’t. I don’t understand it either—”

“And love letters, Bobby!”

“It’s my turn to talk.”

He was right. By now I had hogged most of the talk for myself and it
was
his turn to contribute something substantial.

“I’m going to walk the path you walked to get here,” he said, “so I can see exactly what you mean.”

“Good. Finally.”

“I guess I didn’t realize how serious this was until yesterday, when you left.”

That floored me. I had been very specific, very clear. I had even given him a file of collated bills and printouts, evidence to examine.

“You mean you haven’t looked through the file?” I asked.

“Of course I did. I even called the credit card companies and entered disputes for those charges. But now I’m going to go over them again, differently, and really think about what you’ve been saying. Because I did not make those charges, Annie. I’ve told you a million times.”

“What about the e-mails? All those personal details?”

He sighed. I felt the familiar clamp of frustration.

Here we were again.

“I didn’t write them and I didn’t receive them. I never even
saw
them until you pointed them out to me.”

“That’s
ridiculous.
”

“I do not use the computer.” He hammered out each word. True, he didn’t use computers much, he wasn’t any good at them; but that didn’t mean he didn’t know how. “I’m going to take a much closer look at everything, okay?”

“It’s all on the desk at home,” I said. “And in the computer.”
Good.
When he saw what I saw the way I saw it, we would be on the same page and could
finally
begin the same conversation.

“Okay,” he said.

We walked slowly, away from Zara’s outline, to-ward the side of the house where lawn had been carved into a thick edge of woods. His fingers brushed mine and then tentatively, almost shyly, he took my hand and I let him.

“Annie, I have to go back today. It’ll give us some time. And if I miss any more work—well,
you
know how happy it would make Kent if he could fire me right before my pension matures.”

One year. Bobby had only one year left before he could retire. And it was true: our boss, Kent, was a petty bastard. He had made a pass at me when I was first on staff and when I rebuffed him he made my life miserable. Then, when I got together with Bobby, he extended his spite to us both with a heartlessness that he blamed on the military culture. Kent would have loved to find a way to dismiss Bobby at the eleventh hour of a career he’d stuck with this far mostly so he could enjoy the second half of his adulthood. With me and Lexy (and hopefully more children; we’d had our plans).

“I can’t let this go now,” Bobby said. “My benefits are going to take care of us for the rest of our lives.

We’ll have health care and money and we’ll be able to put Lexy through college.”

“We?”

“Do you really think we should pack it all in right now,
everything
, without any hope at all? Without even trying?” He stared at me. My Bobby. Of course he was right.

“No, I’m not saying that. I
never
said that.”

“Can’t we take this as a trial separation? Nothing definite?”

“I guess so.”

He smiled, revealing the slight gap between his front teeth. That sexy smile. I felt a blossoming of heat in my center.

“I thought I’d visit next weekend,” he said. “Or do you need more time apart than that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, wanting him,
resisting
wanting him. “Can we play that by ear?”

“Whatever you say.”

It seemed a tepid response. Why wouldn’t he fight harder for me?
I
had no idea how much time we needed. Would a week be enough time for
him
to re-assess the evidence? Would he open the Infidelity File, as I had come to think of it, as soon as he walked in the door of our house? Or would he settle back into disbelief and revert to hoping I would change my mind?

What I
did
know was that regardless of what happened to our marriage, I would not return to work in the prison or move back to Lexington. He was right in a big way: it wasn’t for me. If our marriage somehow survived this, we would have to figure out the logistics.

In a week there was a job orientation for all new employees at the Manhattan hospital that had hired me conditionally, based on a meeting with an off-site interviewer, and I planned to go. Once the higher-ups had met me face-to-face, finalized the paperwork and approved my employment, I could start looking for a suitable apartment.