Here She Lies (8 page)

Bobby reached out and touched my cheek. It was a good-bye touch, a see-you-soon touch that left a cold spot on my skin as soon as his finger retreated. Then he leaned in and kissed my lips. I couldn’t help it: I grabbed him. We held each other for a few minutes before I pushed him away and ran into the house.

I went straight upstairs to my room, feeling soaked through with sorrow and confusion and regret and determination. Peeking through the yellow curtains, I saw him standing on the front lawn, hesitating. The man in the maroon car was watching him. I knew Bobby was thinking of Lexy, whether or not he should go in and say good-bye to her or just leave. She was little enough that she wouldn’t know the difference, but
he
would. And I would. He had almost nothing to pack and could have turned around, gotten into his rental car and driven straight to the airport. Instead he walked across the lawn and entered the house through the kitchen door. Ten minutes later I heard his car drive away.

The feeling of loneliness was overwhelming. Bobby was gone. Lexy was downstairs with Julie, beginning a process of bonding I didn’t want to interrupt. I finished unpacking, then stood at one of my bedroom windows and looked out. Stillness. Quiet, except for the low buzz of a lawn mower somewhere in the distance. The overcast sky had developed threatening rain clouds. I moved to another window, took in another tranquil view, then went from window to window, realizing I couldn’t see the crime scene from anywhere in the Yellow Room.

As soon as I thought of Zara’s outline, her final mark in the world, I knew the imminent rain would wash it away. I couldn’t let that happen unrecorded, so I got my digital camera and went outside to take pictures.

I took shots from every angle, and the more I took, the more her shape abstracted. She had gone from three-dimensional woman to two-dimensional contour, a memory, in a matter of minutes; that was death. After a few minutes a cloud moved and the sun blasted. Suddenly my shadow filled Zara’s outline, wavering over the fading white edges. I managed two shots of the strange, disturbing image before the sun vanished again. In seconds, the sky darkened and it started to rain. I took one more picture before running into the house.

Ten minutes later, that last blurred image, downloaded into the loft computer, piqued something in me.

Yearning—to fill Zara’s outline with more than shadow. Curiosity—to see how filled shapes might change, how the lens might alter assumptions. Inside the house, with the rain coming down and no agenda whatsoever, I decided it was a good day for portraits.

Lexy was the only one I had ever photographed endlessly and with a sense of fascination. Now I turned my lens on Julie.

She protested at first, but I insisted she let me; projects, quests, were a great diversion from worry and she knew that photography was my lost love. Like a true big sister (she was three minutes older), she humored me. She hammed it up, posing and voguing, but after a while she stopped noticing the camera and that was when my lens really found her. She sat primly at her office computer without trying to seem relaxed; jumped at Lexy’s cries when she woke from her nap; hunched over the turkey-and-pesto sandwiches I made for our lunch; stared hungrily when I nursed my baby; sprawled on the couch with the newspaper without trying to contain her limbs. And I photographed my sister and daughter together, wondering if they would look like
us
, like me and Lexy,
convincingly
, the way Julie and I could pass for one another.

Before I had a chance to download the newest images, the rain suddenly stopped, the sun reappeared in force, and Julie and I looked at each other.

“Let’s get out of here.” Julie.

“Good thinking.” Me.

“There’s a playground in Stockbridge with baby swings. Want to make it our destination?”

“Why not?”

We got dressed for
out
, swapping clothes as we always had. I wore Julie’s cowboy boots with my swishy velvet skirt, one of her expensive white T-shirts, my old jean jacket and my fake diamond earrings. (As promised, I had sterilized both pairs that morning.) Julie wore loafers with her jeans, my striped blouse,
her
fake diamonds and a new corduroy blazer I decided to lay claim to in due time. Just for fun, we traded lipsticks: she wore my pale pink, I wore her brick red. Outside, the asphalt driveway had partially dried after the rain. We settled into her car, a new Audi I hadn’t paid much attention to until now, without discussing its obvious luxuries. Before we were halfway down the road to town, our conversation had covered Bobby, Zara and Detective Lazare, specifically his offer to “talk” whenever I felt like it.

“Sometimes we run focus groups that way,” Julie said, driving carefully along Division Street. We drove with the windows open and a lovely soft wind filled the car. The spring air was sweet and the surrounding greenery—trees and bushes and fields—was verdant after the nourishing rain. “It’s based on the talk therapy model: just see what comes out and take your cues from that.”

“Are you saying marketers use the same psychology as the police?” I asked.

“I guess so. In some ways—yes.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little creepy?”

“Not really. I mean, it all boils down to the same thing, right? You’re looking to tap into those quiet pockets of desire just kind of festering in people’s minds.”

“Desire?” I almost laughed. But she had a point: desire for self-expression, desire for acknowledgment.

Didn’t we all suffer from the desire to be understood?

We entered town on Maple Street, where the police station sat at the intersection of Main, just beyond a traffic light. The one-story brick building, trimmed in white with a small cupola on its roof, was fronted by a blue sign with fat, cartoony lettering: GREAT BARRING-TON POLICE. So this was where Detective Lazare worked, in an innocuous little building that was like a welcome mat for a country town. But there were cops in there, and guns, and criminals. Much like the man himself: easy on the outside, barbed on the inside.

Well, I should never have assumed otherwise. Appearances were famously misleading. As an identical twin, I understood
that
well enough.

Main Street was busy with shops, boutiques, galleries and restaurants, a town center more polished and inviting than I’d expected. Unlike the strip malls I had grown used to down south, with their utilitarian chain stores, this was the kind of place where you might like to walk and browse. I was an unabashed shopaholic—

prime feed for marketers like my twin, advertisers, telephone solicitors, the whole bunch of them—and in light of our conversation on the way into town I began to feel supremely stupid sitting in my sister’s leather passenger seat. Her keen awareness of the workings of the world, her mastery of it, afforded her leather, while our car back in Lexington was upholstered in stained cloth. I wondered if it was possible that everything I did, half of what I thought, was influenced by someone else and I didn’t even know it. After all, in recent years the
marketing
of stuff had grown more ubiquitous and even sexier than the stuff itself. Were we offered what we wanted before we knew we wanted it? Were our own lurking desires being used to formulate and
transform
our wants into needs? I considered this as we drove ten more minutes along Route 7, the lush, hilly road that led into Stockbridge.

Stockbridge was another jewel of a New England town in a prosperous area. It had its own Main Street, similar to Great Barrington’s, but it felt different in a way I couldn’t put my finger on at first. Then, when we passed a sign pointing in the direction of the Norman Rockwell Museum, I knew what it was. I remembered Rockwell’s classic midcentury painting of this very street: a lineup of brick and whitewashed storefronts on a cold winter night at Christmastime, a serene and pastoral small-town moment that anyone could recognize in his or her own way. His painting had become an American icon, reminding us of the simplicity and peacefulness of our national soul back when existence was organic—not just the food but people’s daily lives.

But the town
I
saw didn’t look or feel like the painting. Around the linchpin of a huge Victorian hotel were all the signs of a tourist trap gone to seed: a candle shoppe, a candy shoppe, a store featuring sweatshirts advertising the names of local towns and attractions, a crowded eatery. It looked to me like the painting’s fame had driven the town around the bend, devouring the innocence that had brought it acclaim in the first place.

Was this—this sweet but faded town—what marketing left you with after the sale? A vague memory that you had once valued something but you could no longer recall precisely what it was because you had, almost inadvertently, replaced it with something else? It was cynical—I knew that—but there was something about this place, these scenic, almost staged towns and roads and flower beds and skies, that made me want to scratch their pretty surfaces to see what really was beneath. I liked it here, but none of it felt precisely
real
.

I sighed, lay my head back against the headrest and pressed my fingertips into my temples. What I needed was to stop thinking. It had been an
awful
twenty-four hours.

“What’s wrong?” Julie asked. We had reached the playground and she pulled up to the curb alongside it.

“A little headache coming on,” I said.

“It’s been that kind of day.” She smiled, trying to cheer me, and popped the locks automatically from her side. “Come on. Let’s show our baby a good time.” Julie carried Lexy, while I pushed open the playground gate with my foot; there was a fuzzy brown caterpillar inching along the top of the gate and I
hated
worms of any kind. It was a large and generous playground and we had it all to ourselves—swings, monkey bars, a sprawling modern jungle gym linked by gliders, tunnels, bridges, slides and ladders. Julie went straight to the baby swings, put Lexy into one and pushed. I had never put her in a swing before and was thrilled to see how much she loved it. I imagined how happily she would be to play here when she was older, on visits from the city to Aunt Julie: exploring the tunnels, scaling the ladders, rocketing down the slides. I stood in front of the swing, cooing and opening my arms each time Lexy swayed toward me. She would give me one of her big toothless smiles before swinging backward for another gentle push from Julie.

Another caterpillar crawled onto the toe of my boot and I kicked it off into the grass. And then I saw more.

There were so
many
of them. They were dark brown with tiny yellow balls—eggs?—dotting their backs. I looked around and realized they were everywhere: crawling along the picnic table, climbing up a leg of the swing set, inching along the jungle gym, swarming through the grass, hanging from the canopy of branches.

“What’s with all the caterpillars?” I asked Julie.

“What caterpillars?” She pushed Lexy, who laughed in delight.

“There are hundreds of them. It’s
disgusting
.”

“It’s the country, is what it is. We’ve got bugs.” “
That’s
why there’s no one else here,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“But she’s having so much fun. And honestly, A, do you really want to go back to
the house
already?”
The
house
. The way she said it, I knew what she meant.

Going back to the house meant going back to Zara’s murder, going back to Bobby-not-being-there.

“Not really,” I answered. But just then a caterpillar landed on my shoulder and I whacked it off with my bare hand, feeling the recoil of its furry body. Without thinking, I grabbed Lexy when her swing hurtled toward me, stopping her in midflight. She protested with an angry squeal, twisting to look back at Julie, but I pulled her out of the swing, letting it fall backward through the air.

Julie followed me as I walked toward the gate through a web of sticky caterpillar threads, previously invisible and
revolting
now that I was aware of them.

On the sidewalk outside the park I saw caterpillars creeping in every direction.

“You’re overreacting,” Julie said.

“No, I’m not.
Look
at this.” I stood impatiently next to her car. “Open it, Julie,
please
.” She opened the doors remotely and we got in.

“You’re silly,” she said, starting the engine.

“What
is
that?”

“Gypsy moths, probably. They come in cycles.”

“It’s horrible. Didn’t you notice?”

“You’re really sensitive, Annie. Do you know that?

It’s been a crappy couple of days, but that doesn’t mean there’s a dark side to
everything
.” We drove in silence for a few minutes until I real-ized we weren’t heading back to Great Barrington. I looked at her, wondering where she was taking us; she glanced back at me, grinned and said, “Lemons into lemonade?” It was what our mother used to say to convince us to turn around a bad situation.

“Okay,” I said, “but please admit that was gross.”

“It was gross.”

“Thank you.”

“Good,” Julie said. “Now I’m taking you out to dinner.”

I twisted toward her, about to protest—
In what
we’re wearing? With a baby? When we’re too tired to
enjoy it?
—but she stopped me before I could utter a word.

“We’re not cooking tonight. They’re great with kids.

And it’s casual.”

A few minutes later we pulled into the tiny village of West Stockbridge and parked across the street from a gray clapboard house that had been turned into a restaurant called Rouge. A waitress seated us in a small front room that was both cheerful and elegant, with sponge-painted yellow walls, purple tulips lilting out of glass vases suspended on the wall and strands of colorful glass discs that hung in a large bay window overlooking the quiet street. Before long, we were laughing over “the caterpillar incident.” I had to admit it
was
a little silly. We ordered delicate organic salads, which we ate with warm bread, trout and asparagus.