Here She Lies (10 page)

“Gatsby’s,” I said, leaning my elbows on the counter, sinking my face into my hands. “I probably left it behind when I bought the sweatshirts.”

“Probably,” Julie said. “You’ll call them first thing in the morning.”

“I wonder why they didn’t call me.”

“Because you don’t have any local ID.” Julie squeezed my shoulders with both her hands, simultaneously relaxing and forgiving me. “You’ve got to put my address and phone number in your wallet. When you get it back, I’ll give you one of my business cards.”

“Right.” I felt like such an idiot. “I wonder if Bobby got a call.”

“He would have let you know, A, don’t you think?” I nodded. “I guess the store just figured I’d be back.” Mack stayed until Detective Lazare arrived, looking freshly dragged from sleep, his cheek bearing the in-dentation of a wrinkled bedsheet. He listened as Mack said there was no sign of breaking and entering, as Julie told him she had searched the house and nothing was missing, and as I explained about my wallet.

Lazare then had his own look at the rogue window and, apparently satisfied with Mack’s assessment, opened his pad and made a few brief notes.

“You should have the alarm company come in and check out the system,” he told Julie. “Do it tomorrow.

You don’t want to lose another night of sleep.”

“I will,” she said.

“I’ll send someone over first thing in the morning to dust the window for fingerprints, just to be sure.” He peered sleepy-eyed into the blackness beyond the window, then slipped his notepad into the pocket of his nylon jacket. “If someone was out there, Mack would have seen him. Well, I’ll give you a call tomorrow, let you know what Forensics has to say about the window.”

Julie saw him out. I went upstairs, back to my room, where Lexy’s deep, rhythmic breathing seemed to warm the air. And yet, when I got into bed between the chilly sheets, I felt
cold
. The glowing red face of the digital clock showed 2:16 A.M. At the sound of Julie’s footsteps in the hallway, I got up and popped my head out to say good night.

“Think you’ll sleep now?” I asked.

“Probably not. Damned
malarm
.” She didn’t have to explain; I knew she meant
malfunctioned alarm.

I smiled. “Sweet dreams, if you can.”

“You too.”

But I tossed and turned, wired from the excitement of the malarm. I felt a sickening awareness that I had never been so afraid,
controlled
by fear in a way I didn’t like. Being severed so abruptly from deep sleep had triggered a Pavlovian dread of the alarm’s ever going off again, even in the case of an actual intruder or a fire or some other reason we would need to be alerted to real danger. If the mere
thought
of it going off made me so tense, how had it registered in Lexy’s brain? They said that children had no memory until generally the age of three, but clearly some things were programmed during those early years. I remembered reading about a woman who had grown up in Israel saying that years later, living in America, every time she heard a car backfire she hunkered down, taking cover. To her, every explosive sound was a bomb.

Would Lexy associate sudden noises with falling out of windows? Would her mind catalog the experience as having almost been
thrown
out of a window? Not that I was ever going to throw her, but what had her baby eyes seen from our angle at that height? Would our moments in the window later translate into an amor-phous mistrust of me?

As my mind ground over the possibilities, something else occurred to me.
Why
had the magnet slipped? I could understand it if the glue holding it in place had grown old and dried out, but the alarm system had only recently been installed. Could something have shifted it, like a movement of the window?
Had
someone tried to open it from outside?

Definitely a paranoid thought. The magnet had simply slipped. But now I knew it would be impossible to sleep, so I got out of bed, checked Lexy (sound asleep; an angel), double-checked that all my bedroom windows were locked, picked up the receiving end of the monitor and walked quietly through the hall, thinking I’d go downstairs and read a while. The house was so
still
. Nothing creaked; floorboards and hinges were still too new to have acquired the complaints of an experienced house. Standing on the split staircase I wondered if Julie was awake and on impulse, instead of going down, I went up.

She was sleeping, a long lump under her white blanket in her big king-size bed. The high-contrast room in the depth of night was neither black nor white but
silver
. A soothing, peaceful space. I put the monitor on the floor and got in beside her. Her bed was very comfortable and I immediately felt calmer and warmer, reassured, and without thought I fell into a dreamless sleep.

In the morning I woke up with Julie swiveled in my direction, propped on her elbow, watching me. When I opened my eyes, she smiled.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

I stretched my arms. “This mattress is supercom-fortable.”

“It’s some kind of space-age foam,” she said, “supposedly developed by NASA. It holds the shape of your body.”

“How much?”

“Don’t ask.”

Then I thought of Lexy and turned to look at the monitor. The sound and motion sensor was unlit, reassuring me that all was well.

“Not a peep,” Julie said. “You can relax.”

“Easier said than done. I haven’t felt really rested in weeks.”

“Well, that’s no surprise, considering everything you’ve been through.”

“We,”
I told her. “You’re going through it with me.”

“The Zara thing, yes. But not your separation. I’m not losing anything; I’m gaining.”

I couldn’t bring myself to remind her that her gain of me and Lexy would be temporary, just for the spring and part of the summer.

Julie went downstairs to make breakfast while I set up my breast pump in the downstairs bathroom (so as not to wake Lexy with the loud motor) and expressed a bottle of milk. It relieved my swollen breasts, which by this time of the morning had usually fed Lexy once.

When I was finished I stowed the bottle in the fridge and joined Julie at the small table by the
good
kitchen window—the one whose alarm had not gone off last night. She had prepared a delicious breakfast of scrambled eggs and thick slices of toast slathered with straw-berry jam from a local farmers market. Outside, flickers of light showed the sun’s struggle to break through the clouds. I hoped we wouldn’t have more rain.

We ate our breakfast and, as Lexy slept in to com-pensate for last night’s rude awakening, Julie and I discussed the day, which largely involved reviewing last night. Detective Lazare had promised an official, forensic analysis of the window. The alarm company was sending someone over. And my wallet was missing, presenting a host of inconveniences, since I was leaving for New York (on the bus, I guessed, now that I was without a license) on Sunday night, just two days away, and there were preparations to be made. Simple but difficult preparations, for in many ways I was a reluctant participant in my own plan. Meanwhile, it was still up in the air if Bobby was coming this weekend—

and now on top of everything else, if my wallet
wasn’t
at Gatsby’s, I would have to tell him that I was cancel-ing our joint credit cards once again. Because it was a long trip from Kentucky, I knew he wouldn’t come until tomorrow if he came at all, so I would have a little time to straighten out as much as possible before delivering the news, if necessary.

No one answered at Gatsby’s and a quick Googling on the Web told me that they didn’t open until eleven o’clock. So I would wait. Meanwhile, Ray the Forensic Specialist arrived at just past nine a.m. and introduced himself to us before hunkering outside the kitchen window to dust and brush and photograph surfaces for telltale fingerprints. He then dusted the inside window frame, thanked us and left. It took all of fifteen minutes, and another ten to clean up the chalky white residue he’d left behind inside and out. No one seemed particularly worried about the malarm; in fact, I was getting the feeling from all the law enforcement guys—Mack and Gabe Lazare and Ray—that they dealt with misfired alarm systems on a regular basis.

By the time we had scrubbed all traces of Ray from the window, Lexy was awake. Julie got dressed and I left them alone in the kitchen so aunt could give niece her bottle of expressed breast milk. I showered and dressed and from the Yellow Room heard another car pull up and stop outside the house. Looking out the window, I saw a van from the alarm company. Another guy carried another toolbox up the flagstone path and rang the kitchen doorbell. Then it was quiet; Julie must have let him in. The thought that she could navigate feeding a baby cradled in her arms while getting up to open the door encouraged me that my brief trip away would go smoothly. Julie was nothing if not competent and responsible and she
loved
Lexy.

Later, while Julie played with Lexy in the living room, I headed outside with my camera, stopping to say hello to the malarm man. He was wearing a blue uniform, pacing the grass, staring at the ground.

“Searching for a needle in a haystack?” I asked.

He looked at me. Moss green eyes. A nice smile. “I just can’t figure out where that magnet went. Not inside, not outside. The new one’s going to stay in place, though. I made sure of
that
.”

I realized he thought I was Julie and that we were continuing a conversation they had started earlier in the house—Julie with her hair now in a ponytail, wearing different clothes and pounds heavier. It was funny how often people failed to notice the details. But I went with it, stepping closer to take a look. On the inside of the window a new half-inch strip of magnet had been stuck into a prodigious bed of glue. Now, tonight, the alarm system could go to bed happy.

He produced a clipboard with a form for my signature. I signed Julie’s name and he gave me the bottom half of the carbon, which I folded and stuck in my pocket. I’d give it to her later, after she was finished with Lexy.

“Baby down to sleep?” He must have met Lexy, too; Julie must have said something about feeding Lexy before her morning nap, not bothering to explain that today’s nap would come later than usual.

“Just about.”

“You can call us twenty-four/seven if there are any more problems with the alarm.”

“Thank you,” I said, and watched him get into his car and drive away. And then I walked to the curb and into the road, where day by day I had made a habit of photographing Zara’s gradual evaporation.

Though her outline had washed away, there was still some visual evidence of her blood. It was as if the asphalt had absorbed it, leaving shadowy splotches that were more or less pronounced, depending on the time of day and the weather. I didn’t know what I would eventually do with the photographs—maybe superim-pose them and see what emerged, maybe just keep them as they were, to speak for themselves. For now I was collecting them, counting days forward, building Zara a passageway, in my mind, between the time zones of life and death. Or maybe my little project was just plain voyeurism. I didn’t know, but I felt more compelled to lift my camera to this moment than I had to anything else—except Lexy—in years.

At exactly eleven o’clock, I called Gatsby’s. I recognized the voice of the clerk, an older woman who had sold me the sweatshirts.

“No, dear,” she said. “We didn’t find a wallet here.

There were two of us working yesterday and we closed up together. Give me your number and if it turns up we’ll call you.”

I gave her Julie’s house number and my cell number, thanked her and hung up. I had
counted
on my wallet being there; it was the last place I’d paid for anything. Now I had no idea where it could be. Someone must have picked it up in the store, not said anything and kept it.

So that was that. My wallet was nowhere. I left Bobby a voice mail saying that I was going to have to cancel all our credit and bank cards. Then I sat down at the kitchen table and began the arduous task of list-ing everything that was in my wallet, calling 800 numbers and making my way through labyrinthine automated customer service systems. The day passed.

Darkness fell. Julie gave Lexy some rice cereal and her evening bottle, then bathed her. By dinner I was on my second glass of wine—the milk I would pump later tonight would be useless.

After dinner I lulled Lexy to sleep in the rocking chair in the Yellow Room. I had discovered, with the overhead light dimmed just so, that at night the room acquired the richness of glazed apricots. This mutabil-ity of shades reminded me of the bloodied asphalt, how it revealed differences depending on elemental shifts. I thought about the unreliability of perceptions as Lexy fell asleep in my arms. I thought about love. I thought about Bobby on our wedding day and how scrubbed and handsome he’d looked in his tuxedo, beaming as I joined him in my white gown. How I dropped my bouquet of ivory roses and he picked it up and handed it back to me.

I set Lexy down in her crib and went downstairs, where I sank into the bend in the living room couch and closed my eyes. I was
tired
. When the phone rang, Julie shouted from the kitchen, “It’s Bobby!”

“What happened exactly?” he asked.

I told him the whole story—the middle of the story, that is, since I still didn’t know its beginning: how I had managed to lose my wallet in the first place.

“You canceled all the credit cards?”

“I think so. I wanted to go over it with you to make sure I didn’t miss any.”

“So neither of us has any credit cards now. Or bank cards.
Wow.
How are we supposed to get money?”

“The old-fashioned way: You walk into a bank before it closes, talk to a human being and make a with-drawal.”

“It’s
Friday night
and I’ve got no money.” It sounded like a song with an inevitable (to my burned-out brain) next chorus:
And I got a date with
my Lovyluv honey.
As quickly as the lyric popped to mind, I banished it. Imagining
her
was driving me crazy.