Here She Lies (32 page)

Among the tools on the top tier of his fanned-open toolbox, wedged lengthwise between a hammer and a short level: my long-lost kitchen knife. For months I had repeatedly searched the butcher-block knife holder and the kitchen drawers and had never understood where my best knife could have disappeared to. It was barely visible, but I recognized its ebony handle with the round steel screw that I was always tightening.

Aside from the unreliable handle it was my favorite cooking knife; its ten-inch blade sharpened better than any of my others. A good cook can do just as well with
any
knife, but you formed special attachments to certain ones, and this one was
mine
. I was irritated to discover that Bobby had borrowed it for his carpentry projects, and on top of that he hadn’t returned it.

I carried Lexy over to the toolbox and nudged away the level so I could get my fingers around the knife’s handle. Just as I picked it up I heard Bobby upstairs, calling me. Then his footsteps came thumping down the basement stairs.

“Annie?” He stopped halfway down, his attention caught on the red-filled sink.

“I found my knife.” I picked it up.
My knife.
I’d had it over a decade and had used it to make some of my best meals. “I wish you hadn’t brought it down here,” I said. And then I saw the filmy red streak edging the knife’s spine.

I looked at the sink. The knife. The red. And then I looked at Bobby.

His forehead dripped sweat, which he wiped with the back of his hand as he came all the way down the basement stairs. His other hand gripped the screw-driver.

“What
is
this, Bobby?” My voice seemed to float out of me. My stomach clamped. Breathing stopped. I held tighter to Lexy. The earth was shifting, I
felt
it. “Is this paint?” But it was a stupid, hopeful,
hopeless
question.

He was three feet in front of me now. Shaking. The color had drained out of his face.

“I’ll take that,” he said.

Instinctively, I pulled back. Shook my head. Angled Lexy away from him, toward the wall. “No.”

“If we put it back—” he began, but I stopped him.

“Is this blood?”

“I washed it,” he said. “It was clean. Some must have dripped down from under the handle.” My brain reeled back to the moment when I saw Zara lying there in an expanding pool of dark blood that glistened in spasms as the police lights flashed over it. The violent pivot of her head away from her body. The unnatural skew of her limbs. Her eyes like blank screens.
Her red blood spilling around her, out
of her, emptying her, draining the last living part of her
onto the street.

My fingers wanted to open, to drop the knife, but I resisted the urge to run away from this. He had to tell me.
I had to know.

“You killed her,” I said.

“No. I never lied to you about that, Annie.” There I was, holding my first child, pregnant with my second, and survival for all of us was the only possible choice.
We had to get out of this basement.
I looked straight into his eyes: I would keep him connected to me, get him talking.

“Okay,” I said. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

The words seemed to rupture out of him, like he’d been holding them back with the flimsiest of wills: “
It
was Julie.
”

“But why”—I tried to steady my trembling voice—

“do
you
have the knife?”

“If we unclog the sink, and clean the knife better, and put it back, no one has to know.”

Outside, a car passed the basement window and dragged a shadow across his face, blotting him out except for a gray shimmer that surrounded him like fog.

Agree
, I told myself.
Just agree.

“Okay,” I said.

“Annie—” He stepped abruptly closer. Lexy’s lower lip jutted out and her eyes searched my face for a signal. I kissed her, pressed my cheek to hers, rubbed her back. “You have to understand. Julie was just so—”

“I know what she is,” I said. “I loved her, too.” He came closer, so close I could smell his sweat, the sharp, earthy smell of panic. If he thought he could bring me over to his thinking, convince me to trust him, get me to stay,
he was wrong.
But I had to pretend I was open, that I was listening carefully enough to maybe change my mind.

“The minute I drove up to her house,” he said, “and saw Zara lying there
dead
, I knew the whole thing was insane. It was a nightmare, and I woke up. I thought Zara was
you
, and it just hit me how much I love you, and I couldn’t go through with it.”

“So you and Julie—you planned it? To kill
me
?” Was it even worse than I had come to understand? Had they actually wanted me dead?
Julie and Bobby both?

“No one wanted to kill you,” Bobby said, and his tone grew urgent, speeding like a reckless train, and I recognized this burning insistence from childhood, trying to convince my parents of something-I-hadn’t-done-but-actually-
had
. “She wanted to make it look like
you
killed Zara. It was all planned out. She wanted you in jail and out of the way so we could …” And then his voice trailed off.

“Why didn’t you two just run away, Bobby?” It seemed so obvious. “Why go to all that trouble when you could have just left?” As I asked this simplest of questions I felt myself shattering like a million pieces of broken glass barely holding the shape of a woman.

But I could not,
would not
fall apart. I had children. I had my
self
, beneath the broken outside layer of what had been my life.

“It was never an option.” He stared at the grimy, pocked cement floor. “It was Lexy she wanted, really.

Not me.” He looked at me and I stared into his weak, filmy, nothing eyes. “All this was
her
idea,” he said.

“Never mine. You have to believe me.”

“I
don’t
believe you!” My voice was loud and hard, like a rock through a window. Smashing it. I didn’t care.

“It’s true.”

“You’re lying.”

He steadied his eyes on me. “She hates you.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“She does.”

“But
why
?”

“Annie … how can I explain this?” His forehead tightened as he sought the words. “When Julie looks at you, she sees a better version of herself, and she can’t stand it.”

“What about you? Do
you
hate me, too?”

“No.”

“But you went along with it. You gave her the knife.”

“She took it,” he said. “Last March, when she was here. She took it right after you used it, so it would still have your fingerprints. She said identical twins didn’t always have the same fingerprints”

“You knew, all the time, what she was planning?

What you
both
were planning!”

“Not me.
Her.
I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t back off. I didn’t believe she would actually go through with it.”

What could I possibly say to that? He had participated in everything that had happened leading up to my walking out of this house last spring
and he hadn’t
believed it was for real
?

He stepped closer, and closer, until he was only a foot away from us. Lexy was silent, frightened. I squeezed her to my left side. My right hand gripped the knife. Sweat now coated Bobby’s face like oil and I could see in his eyes that some kind of calculation was taking place.

“I made her give me the knife so I could bring it home and clean it, so I could protect you. I told her if she didn’t give me the knife I would tell the police everything.”

“Which would have screwed you, too, Bobby. You saved yourself, not me.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “I love you.
Please.
Wash the knife with me, help me clean out the sink. We’ll replace the pipes. This can be over.”

I would do it, if I had to, to survive the next hour.

But there was one thing I had to ask first: “Bobby, what does Julie expect from you now?”

“Nothing. I broke it off that morning, under the tree, when you were photographing us. That’s why she took off with Lexy.”

I could still see his photo-frozen look of vexation that morning. Had she threatened to take Lexy? Had he not believed her?
The fool.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll help you clean it.” The knife was covered with my fingerprints.
My
fingerprints, and a tangible shadow of my blood mixed with Zara’s—

frozen blood, but still
mine
. “Let’s do it upstairs, in a bucket, with some bleach.”

“All right.” He smiled, softened. “That’s a good idea.”

I edged past him through the dark, grim basement, aware of how risky it was to have my back to him now.

I heard him following me and when we came up the stairs into air and light—windows and doors, avenues
out
—I started to breathe.

He locked the basement door behind us and I set Lexy down on the floor. Still holding the knife, I leaned down and opened the cabinet under the kitchen sink, got the bucket and set it under a fast stream of hot water. My hand shook as I poured in a copious amount of bleach. I set the open bottle on the counter, thinking
I could throw it at his face, blind him, and get out of
here
—but there was Lexy, crawling between the kitchen and the dining room, pulling her toy dog on a long string as it clacked across the linoleum.

“Put the top back on the bottle,” I told him. And he did it, just like that. In that moment I understood how afraid he was and that he wanted to be told what to do.

Bobby’s passivity had often annoyed me, but only now did I comprehend its hidden danger.

I dropped the knife vertically into the bucket and angled it so the whole thing was submerged in the bleachy water. The pinkish residue that had edged the spine of the knife vanished. I rinsed my hands and dried them on a dish towel.

And then I turned to my husband, who was leaning on his elbow, looking into the bucket like it was a well deep enough to bury secrets. It wasn’t, because
now I
knew the truth
, and that hard kernel of knowledge would grow and blossom in my mind for the rest of my life. In the natural light of the kitchen Bobby’s skin had taken back its healthy tone and he looked weirdly confident, as if everything would be fine between us now that the problem of the knife had been cleared up. He looked almost handsome, almost kind, almost right; almost my Bobby—but not him. What came next was what I
had
to do; it was the most strength I could pull out of myself to build a simple bridge—a bridge to safety—for me and my children.

“I’m going to ask you to do one thing for me,” I said. “Only one. But it’s very important.”

“Anything.” He touched my arm with what was supposed to be affection but felt like assault. I didn’t flinch.

“I won’t turn either of you in. Just don’t stop me from leaving and don’t try to find us.” His eyes clouded with surprise, panic, disappointment, a parade of emotions too cacophonous to control. He looked as if he might cry, but he didn’t. He nodded. And that was the last communication between us, ever.

Just as he had last spring, he stood by and watched as I loaded Lexy’s and my suitcases into the car and buckled her into the car seat. She didn’t like being strapped down. She wanted to roam free and fast every waking minute, but today she had no choice. I started the engine, put the car into Drive, and inch by inch, mile by mile, devoured the road away from him.

It was all over now. Over.
And I was gone.