Here She Lies (29 page)

“What if—” I stopped myself.

“What if what?” Bobby turned the steering wheel, pulling us into the parking lot of the police station.

“Nothing.”

After that we kept quiet—what was there to say?

Lexy had fallen asleep almost instantly upon leaving the restaurant, so Bobby sat with her in the car while I went inside for the news.

Detective Lazare was standing in the station lobby, staring out the window with his hands clasped behind his back. He was calm, thinking. Two armed officers got up from a snack table as soon as they saw me, handcuffs dangling off their belts.

“I’m sorry, Annie. I really am,” Lazare said. “But now we have an eyewitness
and
evidence.” I guessed I knew then, but
still
I didn’t fully believe it.

One of the officers approached me as he snapped open a handcuff.
No
, I thought, and against my will I started to cry.

“That really isn’t necessary, is it?” I asked.

“It’s the law,” he said, and the officer bound my wrists behind my back while Lazare spoke:

“Anais Milliken-Goodman, you are under arrest for the murder of Zara Moklas. Anything you say can be held against you in a court of law …” The rest was a blur until he stopped reciting the legal catechism and paused to search for words. “Annie, listen, I’m—”

“
Don’t
say you’re sorry!”

He sighed and didn’t say it again.

“The blood tests,” I said. “Tell me, because I don’t believe this is happening.
Tell me
.”

“The blood is yours.”

“So what you’re saying is that Julie and I aren’t identical?” I didn’t really believe that, either; nothing in me had ever truly questioned our inherent sameness.

“Go ahead, Detective. Lay it on.
Tell
me.”

“Actually, you and Julie
are
identical. But your blood shows a vital difference: lactation hormones.”

“And you think you found
my
blood—”

“No, Annie, we
did
find your blood—at the crime scene, and on the sweater with traces of Zara’s blood, and it’s conclusively yours.”

My brain was whizzing through a maze, looking for entries and exits, desperate for release from this illogical knot. How had they found
my
blood at the scene of a crime I didn’t commit? How had
my
blood gotten onto the sweater? I thought of the moment, as I was leaving Bobby, when my elbow buckled the stained glass on our front door … but the glass itself hadn’t broken … I hadn’t gotten cut from that. It made no sense.
How?

“Wait a minute, Detective.” My wavering voice rose an octave; it was someone else’s voice, not mine.

“Soiffer never said anything about a sweater when he saw Julie kill Zara, did he?”

“So you took it off and then put it back on,” Lazare said. “There are various explanations for that.”

“I didn’t kill Zara,” I said. “Please listen to me: I did not kill her.”

“Those are only words, Annie.”

“What if you’re wrong, Detective? I mean, people get sentenced to death on conclusive evidence that
isn’t
conclusive in the end.”

“This isn’t wrong. It was double- and triple-tested. I didn’t want any mistakes.”

“Detective Lazare,” I said, my shackled wrists burning, “before you go through with this, I want you to think about something really carefully: Why would
I
kill Zara Moklas?”

“Good question.” The thin smile, the cool eye. He nodded to the cops to take me away.

When I first stepped into my cell at the Berkshire House of Correction in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, all I saw was hard surfaces: concrete floor, cinder-block walls, a low stainless-steel toilet with no seat, a tiny stainless-steel sink, bars on a slit of a window, a concrete slab with a thin, stained mattress that was to be my bed. But little by little I began to study the cell’s details and was surprised by how much I found.
People
had been here, proving that I was not really alone; and as the hours passed the ghosts of my cell kept me company. Their smells: sour, musky and a little sweet.

Their stains: on the floor by the bed and in the corner near the toilet. Their scratches: on the sides of the sink, the corners of the slab-bed and every single bar. Especially their wall etchings:
I will be stronger when this
is done
;
I am a gif in a box, when they unrap me they
will no I am good
;
pls forgive me mama
. What had these women been accused of? This was a holding cell in the Department of Corrections, like the clipboard on your computer that holds the cut before the paste, or the garbage can before it’s emptied.

Correction. Department of. Who named it that?

Never before had I thought about that term:
correction
.

I had worked in a prison and never really thought it through! No one was perfect and in every society there were mistakes, errors, and these errors (these
people
) sometimes needed correction. Sometimes the wrong people were corrected. Sometimes the uncorrected were released still riddled by error. Sitting here, I kept thinking of my father’s old typewriter and how its individual keys leapt at the page to strike a blow that left the imprint of a letter. A had a broken leg. P, a broken face. U always struck with a shadow. Dad would carefully correct his stories with a black pen and a bottle of Wite-Out. I hadn’t thought about that typewriter for many years and remembered now that Julie and I had let the liquidator sell it when the house was emptied in preparation for sale. We had walked out of that house one day, not really
knowing
we would never return. We had moved from there to here on a wave of time, and now another wave had overtaken us and I was hover-ing on the crest, waiting to see where it would plunk me down.

Here in jail the nature of waiting was completely different from last week’s wait at the inn. This wait was bottomless.
Endless
. It was amazing how fat and long and droopy individual minutes could become.

You sank into them, grew paralyzed in your state of waiting. Sitting on your thin mattress. Or standing, feeling the cold floor soak through your thin plastic sandals. Everything had been confiscated from me, even the flow of time; I had no watch, there were no clocks on the walls and the guards thought it was fun to keep us in temporal darkness. All I had was the sun sliding up and slipping down my window strip. I stopped counting hours after lights-out. It didn’t matter anyway:
time
. Thinking of time. Speaking of time.

I
couldn’t.

I didn’t eat anything, either, because the food was so bad. Now I understood something the prisoners back home used to joke about, how you knew how good prison food was once you spent a few nights in jail waiting for your trial. Jail food was awful—I hadn’t known meat could be that tough or how nimbly human hair stuck to undercooked potato. Twenty-four hours on the inside and I could feel I’d gotten thinner, making my recent efforts to diet really absurd. Even my breast milk went on strike, to the point that I didn’t even bother requesting a pump.

No sister, no baby, no milk, no body, no time, no
me
.

Bobby visited after lunch the second day, and mer-cifully he brought Lexy. He had to know how much that meant to me. I admit I had worried that he would keep her away from the correctional facility in case floating errors might randomly insert themselves into her psyche and mysteriously screw her up for life. (As if being wrenched away from her mother, now twice, would not leave a scar.) So when he showed up with her, I felt renewed confidence that he had my best interests at heart.

We were given a private visiting room. I don’t know why (though I could guess why, since the room was in a cell that locked up tight: it must have been for violent offenders, you know, really scary people
like me
). Four stools were affixed to the base of a round stainless-steel table and the room was brightly lit. A boxy in-house phone hung off one cinder-block wall.

As soon as the guard locked us in and turned her back, I took Lexy into my arms. I didn’t offer my breast and she didn’t try to nurse; it seemed wisest to let her adjust exclusively to the bottle since I had no idea when I’d be out of here. She had grown more restless than even yesterday and could not be contained in my arms for long, so I put her down and watched her crawl around, grateful that Bobby had dressed her in long pants so her knees wouldn’t get chewed up by the concrete floor.

Bobby had thoughtfully brought a few family pictures for me to keep in my cell (I was allowed up to ten): shots of the three of us taken by Julie and a couple of him and Lexy taken by me. He set the pile on the table. Looking through the photos, I saw he had also brought one of Lexy and me, but on closer inspection I saw that it wasn’t me—it was Julie. Weeping, I ripped it in half, fourths, eighths.

“I’m sorry,” Bobby said. “It was a stupid mistake.”

“Can’t
you
tell us apart?”

“Yes, I can.” He leaned from his neighboring stool to hold me and I could smell him: spicy, warm, familiar. “You’re depressed, sweetie,” he said, stating the obvious, but I forgave him.

“Don’t I deserve to be? Julie’s destroyed me, Bobby. She’s really done it.”

“You won’t be in here much longer.”

“But neither of us ever thought it would go this far,” I said, “so what does it matter what we think?”

“Elias is working really hard.”

“Yeah, right.”

“He is, Annie, but these things take time.”

“Do you remember that guy at the prison—Ernesto, the lifer? He always said he was innocent. No one listened to him.
We
didn’t listen to him.” Ernesto had briefly worked as an orderly in the PT clinic until his constant talk about his innocence got on everybody’s nerves and we had him replaced.

“I remember him.” Bobby sighed. “This is going to change us. When I go back, things are going to be different.”

“I?”

“
We
. But I meant, specifically, back to the prison—

you said you weren’t going back to work there.”

“I’m never setting foot in that place again.” Lexy then crawled her chubby little hands up my leg until she grasped my knee, standing.

“Look at you! My big girl!” I lifted her up and swung her in the air. Her riotous laughter made me smile.

Footsteps of a guard approaching and a rough male voice: “Time’s up!”

I held Lexy, kissed her, drank her in, whispering,

“Come see Mommy tomorrow, okay?” Then I looked at Bobby: “Okay? You’ll bring her?”

He smiled at us and kissed me. “Okay.” But the next day he came alone.

“Mrs. Boardman offered to watch Lexy at the inn.” He handed me the copy of
Ethan Frome
I’d bought at the Mount, then said, “Bad news.” He faced me across the cold steel tabletop, holding both my hands in both of his. His palms were sweaty and I wanted to pull my hands away but didn’t. “I don’t know how this happened,” he said. “It came out of left field.”

“What, Bobby? You haven’t told me
what
?”

“I spoke with Liz—”

“I thought she was finished—there’s no more grand larceny charge. Bobby?”

“It was reinstated.” He pulled one hand away to run it through his hair in a gesture like something off TV, I thought, something not completely genuine, not
real
.

His other hand gripped mine so hard it hurt and I instinctively drew away, laying both palms flat on the table. Panic ripped its way up my spine and I told myself:
No.
I would come at this head-on.

“Why?” I asked.

“The FBI’s been going through our home computer.

They said that all the identity theft activity was

‘ghosted’ in Julie’s computer—generated by someone else. They said she might have been set up. They said it started in
our
computer, Annie, with
us
.” His pupils shrank to black dots. Was he afraid of me now?
Me?

“Say it, Bobby. You want to.”

“Okay.” He looked at me with those wary eyes.

“With—” But he couldn’t say it and we were left with silence, coldness, four stone walls, a steel table, a man and a woman and a single, unspeakable word:
you.
He couldn’t say it and I wasn’t going to say it for him because I couldn’t believe he would think it at all. How could he think
I
had started all this!? Why
would
I? For what purpose? To land myself in jail?

“It doesn’t make any sense, Bobby.”

“Yes, I know it doesn’t. I
do
.” He slumped into folded arms, smaller than I’d ever seen him. Shaking, crying. I reached over to touch the back of his neck.

His hair was tacky, like he hadn’t washed it in a couple of days, and a film of sweat seemed to have ground itself into his skin. “I’m
sorry
this is happening to you.

It was never supposed to be like this.” Of course it wasn’t. We had been a normal, happy family; bad things were never supposed to happen to
us
. And yet somehow they had, one thing after the next—and it wasn’t over yet. As he cried, my anger cooled. I wasn’t the only one Julie’s lies had fouled. I
had
to be here, but he
didn’t
. Before I released him, though, I had to ask him one more time:

“Are you
sure
you believe I didn’t do any of this, Bobby?”

“I’m sure.” He lifted his face from his arms to look at me. His eyes seemed sunken in dry, creased skin that didn’t belong to him; I had never seen him so exhausted. “But the
computer
—”

“Computers lie,” I said.

He nodded. Our lives these past weeks had demonstrated
that
more than anyone should ever know.

“Listen, Bobby, I’ve been thinking that you and Lexy should go home. You were right when you said this whole thing was going to take a while and you sitting in that inn isn’t doing us any good. The day care will take her back—I’m sure they will—and you can get back to work. Both of you could use the normalcy, I think.”