Just the Nicest Couple(65)

“Hey,” I say, turning her around. I look at her. Lily’s eyes are swollen. They’re red but not bloodshot. The swelling and the redness will go down by the time she gets to school. No one will notice. I wipe a tear from her cheek with my thumb. I don’t say anything because there isn’t anything I can say that isn’t a lie. Instead, I pull her into me. I wrap my arms around her and hold her and, in my arms, she feels like she could break.

I go to find her coat for her, and then I help her into it before she leaves.

At the end of the school day, Lily’s car won’t start. She calls me at work and says, “I tried to start it, Christian, but nothing happened.”

“Where are you?” I ask.

“Sitting in my car.”

“Okay,” I say, looking at my watch. Thankfully a meeting I had this afternoon already got pushed to the morning, freeing up the rest of the day. “Let me just finish up a couple things and I can leave. I’ll come give you a jump. You can take my car home and I’ll take yours to get fixed. It’s probably a dead battery. Go back to your classroom for a while. Wait there. It’s warmer inside.”

Lily says okay, that she will go back inside and grade papers. I feel bad for making her wait because I know how tired she is at the end of the day, and how eager she always is to get home.

I leave work as soon as I can. I drive to Lily’s high school. I find her car in the parking lot and I pull in, facing it so that it will be easier to jump.

I put my car in Park and turn off the engine. I send a quick text to Lily to let her know I’m here, and then I walk over to her car to pop the hood when I hear footsteps approach. “That was fast,” I say, but as I turn to look, it’s not Lily, but Nina Hayes.

She says, “Hi, Christian. I thought that was you. What are you doing here?”

“Nina,” I say, trying to keep my voice level. I’m not surprised to see her, but I was hoping I wouldn’t. I don’t know how Lily does this, how she looks Nina in the eye every single day and pretends that everything is okay. I stand at the hood of Lily’s car. It’s smaller than mine, a little two door coupe that we only intend to keep until the baby comes, and then Lily will need a new car, a family car. “Lily’s car won’t start. I came to give it a jump.”

Nina smiles. “Her knight in shining armor. Does she know you’re here? I can get her for you?”

“Yeah. No, she knows I’m here. I texted her.”

“Okay,” she says, and I know that I should say something about Jake, that I should ask if there is any news or if she’s heard anything from him, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I wonder if Nina knows about the body they found at Langley Woods. She might, but she also might not. For us, the police finding this body is pivotal. It’s practically all I can think about. But bodies are found and people get murdered all the time and most of them, you never hear about.

I unlock Lily’s car with my key. I pull open the door and I lean over to pull the lever to pop the hood, and then I come around to the front of the car, find the release latch, open the hood and prop it open with the prop rod, all the while keeping my back to Nina, hoping she’ll leave. “Hey listen, Christian,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“I wanted to say I’m sorry if I was rude to you the other day at your house. This whole thing with Jake just has me completely undone, and I’m sorry if I took it out on you. I didn’t mean to.”

I look at her. “No problem, Nina. You weren’t rude to me.”

“No,” she says, “I was.”

“Well, I didn’t notice. And if you were, you have every right to be. Lily and I feel really terrible about what you’re going through with Jake. We’re sorry this is happening. We just hope Jake comes home soon. But Lily says that your mom saw him, so you know he’s okay at least, that he’s not hurt.” I step past Nina, moving back toward my own car for the jumper cables. I pop open the trunk with my key fob and the tailgate lifts.

“This is your car?” Nina asks, looking at it, watching the tailgate slowly rise.

“Yup,” I say, “this is me,” reaching down inside the trunk for the jumper cables. Nina follows me to the car. I feel her come closer and, when I come up with the jumper cables from the trunk, I notice how she’s staring at my car in a way that makes me suddenly uncomfortable. Nina walks to the passenger’s side, slipping between parked cars, and then she runs her eyes over the outside of my car, before crouching down to look inside. She tents her hands to her eyes to block out the glare, staring into the cabin of the car for a long time. A very long time. Nina takes her time, appraising the dashboard, the leather seats, before moving to look into the back seat.

My mouth goes dry. Because there, on the floor, in the back seat of my car, tucked partway under the passenger’s seat where I didn’t think anyone could see it, is the bag of Lily’s bloody clothes. The bag of Lily’s clothes isn’t obvious—the floor of the car is dark like a cave—and it’s just a bag. It could be groceries, garbage, anything. Literally anything.

But a guilty conscience can take control of a person’s mind and make them think and do irrational things.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Nina was staring directly at the bag, that she could somehow see inside of it, through the opaque plastic.