Just the Nicest Couple(16)

“Did you see them?” I ask, and Lily shakes her head, sad, because we both know there were never any deer here.

“He got close to me,” she says, “like this,” pressing the side of her body into mine. “He wrapped his arm around my waist, like this.” Lily’s hand wraps around me from behind, her cold fingers coming up under the hem of my shirt, touching skin, stroking me somewhere just above the hip. My whole body tenses, not because my wife is touching me, but because some man touched my wife like this.

Lily is talking fast now, like she does when she’s scared. “I could feel my pulse in my neck, Christian. I wanted him to get his hand off me. I wanted to go back, to the main trail, but I didn’t know what to say, how to make that happen. He kept pretending he was looking for the deer, and I thought that if I just played along, he’d eventually give up on looking for the deer, and then we could go back.”

A noise from deep in the woods startles us. Lily flinches. She jerks, backing away from the trees, grabbing onto my arm to feel protected. Her fingernails leave little crescent moons in my skin.

I press a finger to my lips to keep her quiet. I wiggle my arm free, and then I step closer to the woods, gazing deeper inside, acutely aware that, though we found blood, we found no body.

The trees are the kind with white trunks and bark that flakes off. They stand in a line like soldiers. The trunks are even, equidistant from one another like a man’s legs. There is no end to the number of trees. I stare into them so long that they become an optical illusion. It becomes almost impossible to tell if the trees are moving, if they’re coming closer, or if they’re rooted to the earth.

The noise—like the rustle of leaves, the crackle of footsteps—gets closer.

Lily whimpers. The sound of it is a scared puppy.

The leaves are still thick on the trees. The trees themselves are thick, wide enough for a person to hide behind. It’s dark and shadowy deep in the woods. I have no idea how far we’ve walked away from the main trail. Maybe a quarter mile. Our car is even further. I think of Lily tearing away from this place and how desperate and terrified she must have felt running back through these woods alone and away from Jake.

I part the boughs of the trees with my hands. I take a step deeper into the woods. Branches reach out, scratching at my arms. The noise gets closer and closer until it’s upon us, and yet I still can’t see what it is.

“Christian,” Lily moans.

And then, suddenly, a chipmunk beetles out from the trees. It crosses between us. I jerk back and almost step on it. “Shit,” I say, exhaling loudly. Lily’s hand is pressed to her mouth, holding back a scream. It takes a second to catch my breath. I let go of the trees and fall back. “Fuck. It’s okay,” I say to Lily. She’s gone white. I go to her. I wrap my arms around her and pull her into me, feeling the beating of her heart against my chest. “It’s nothing, just a stupid chipmunk.”

What did we think was going to happen?

“Christian?” Lily asks when she catches her breath.

“What?”

“Where do you think he is?” she asks.

I release her so that I can see her face. “Honestly? I think he left. I think he’s fine.”

“But the blood,” she says.

“It’s not that much. It’s deceptive. It looks like more than there is. You’ve donated blood before,” I remind her. “They fill a whole bag with it. You can lose a lot of blood and still survive.”

I try to decide if the blood on the ground was more than a blood bag’s worth. I don’t honestly know.

I spew bullshit. I have no idea if anything I’m saying is true.

“What should we do about it?” Lily asks about the blood on the ground. I take what’s left of my water bottle and pour it over the splotch, weakening it, watering it down. Lily and I gather leaves and lay them on the ground, hiding what’s left of the blood. When we’re done, it’s not overly noticeable.

On the way back to the trail, I say, “Let’s look for the rock. We should try and find it just in case.”

Lily catches me in my lie. She stops suddenly, and turns to face me. “In case he’s dead?” she asks point-blank. “You just said he was fine, Christian.” Lily isn’t dumb and she’s much stronger than she looks. “In case I killed him?”

The answer is yes. She might have killed him. Or he might have left, he might be fine, just like I said. Absent a body, I don’t know.

Let’s be clear: I don’t want to find a body here.

But not knowing where he is is so much worse.

As it turns out, looking for a rock or an earring in a forest preserve is no different than a needle in a haystack. We never find either of them.

“What do we do now?” Lily asks as we walk empty-handed back to the car.

“I was thinking that he would have had to drive here from his house, right? Did you see his car in the parking lot when we got here?” I ask, because if not, then we’ll know he left, that, despite Lily hitting him, he was well enough to drive.

“I don’t think so,” Lily says. “But I wasn’t looking for it.”

We backtrack to the parking lot to look for Jake’s car. I take Lily by the hand as we walk. She’s gone quiet and I wonder if she’s thinking of the blood in the grass like I am, about how viscous it was, and about how there was more of it than I would have expected for a man who got up and walked away, despite what I said.