Just the Nicest Couple(14)

“I’m just saying you shouldn’t feel guilty for anything you did or didn’t do. He put you in a difficult situation. He left you no choice but to fight back. You know that, don’t you?”

Her conscience deceives her.

“I keep thinking,” she says, “that if I had just screamed, someone might have heard me. If not, the sound of it alone might have scared him off.” She shakes her head, her eyes getting wet, the toast in her hand shaking so that she sets it down before she drops it. “I don’t think I screamed, Christian. I keep going over it again and again, trying to remember. I don’t think I said anything. Why didn’t I just scream?”

“Because you defended yourself, Lily. Which is better than screaming. You didn’t let yourself become a victim.”

She stares at me, saying nothing. She nods, but she doesn’t believe me.

I pack things in the trunk before we go: a shovel, gloves, garbage bags, just in case. Lily doesn’t notice.

As the sun rises, we leave the house and drive to the forest preserve just as traffic is starting to back up on the roads and expressway.

“Why did you want to come here?” Lily asks.

“I want you to show me where it happened.”

“Why?” she asks.

“I want to see it with my own eyes.”

What I don’t tell Lily is that I need to find the bloody rock, the thing that puts her here. I also wouldn’t mind finding her missing earring because I think it must have come out when she was trying to get away from Jake. I want to get rid of any evidence that she was here.

“What if he’s here?” she asks, scared.

“He won’t be,” I say. She doesn’t buy it. We both know that I don’t know. But if he is here, then he’s not alive or he’s not in good condition, and then there is nothing he can do to hurt her. Either way, she’s safe. I grab her by the hand and say, “Listen. That’s a lie. I don’t know if he will be here or not, but either way we’ll know, okay? Not knowing is the hardest part.”

Lily’s eyes hold mine for a long time, trying to decide if I mean it this time.

I park in the lot off Riley. We get out of the car, moving like prisoners on a death march. We don’t say much. What we say is out of necessity, things like “This way” and “Watch your step.” We’re not alone at the forest preserve. There are other people here, but it’s 7:00 a.m. and the path is far from crowded. This early in the morning, the people here are runners and bikers. They’re a different breed, almost aloof and detached as they slip on headphones and take off down the trail alone, lost in worlds of their own.

Lily and I move down the path at our own pace. We hang back, letting everyone else go first. We’re in no hurry. We don’t want to be here. It’s only of necessity that we are. We hold hands as we retrace Lily’s steps from the other day. We kick up pebbles as we walk, moving to the right as a biker comes soaring by, passing us on the left. The man rises to stand on the bike pedals as he passes, his calves like steel. Lily is jumpy. She doesn’t hear him approach. Only I do because he gives no warning. Lily doesn’t know he’s there until he’s directly beside her, and then she falls nervously back, her hand pulling from mine and going to her heart. “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s just a bike.” The biker doesn’t notice Lily’s reaction. He says nothing to us as he flies past, disappearing over a flat, wooden bridge and around a bend in the trees. I take Lily by the hand and we keep walking, watching the biker until we can’t see him anymore.

“Do you know where you were when you met up with Jake?” I ask Lily, my voice low in volume, looking down at the soft sunlight on her face. The sun is low, still rising. It’s beneath the treetops so that the light it gives off is subdued and serene. The trees are pretty this time of year, their color just barely starting to turn. Everything about this is serene except for the reason we’re here.

Lily looks around. She’s quiet, contemplative, trying to decide. The problem is that everything looks the exact same.

Lily knows this place well. If she can’t pin down an exact spot, no one can. The last marathon she ran, she trained here. That summer, it was her home away from home. Sometimes I came and ran with her, though I couldn’t keep up and I couldn’t run as far as she could. Inevitably, we got separated, which is how I know it’s almost impossible to get lost if you stay on the trail, which is a loop. Eventually you come back to where you started. Lily knows this trail like the back of her hand, and yet, except for the obvious landmarks—where it crosses the street, the part of it that overlooks the creek, or where it runs parallel to train tracks—it’s indistinguishable. You can’t tell one tree from the next.

“Maybe up here somewhere. It looked something like that,” Lily says. She points at an unmarked trail sitting just off the main trail, where the trees part ways and a small beaten path leads into the woods, disappearing. There are a vast number of unmarked trails that crisscross the forest preserve. I remember seeing them before. They’re the kind of thing that don’t get much, if any, foot traffic. They’re not on the map and they don’t always connect to any of the main trails. I know with 100 percent certainty that, if it wasn’t for Jake, Lily would never have stepped foot on one. She’s much more shrewd than that. She has good judgment. She would have stayed on the main trail, where there are people and where she wouldn’t get lost. But Jake is a friend and she didn’t have any reason to believe he couldn’t be trusted. He led her to believe there was something worth seeing down the more remote path. He took advantage of this, of her, of her trust in him. He led her away somewhere he knew he wouldn’t be seen.