Just the Nicest Couple(69)

In the garage, we haul storage bins and and move garbage cans to the side of the garage, creating space. As she stands by, watching, I back her car out, and then pull it back in, to the side instead of the center of the garage where she left it last, months ago, the last time she drove before her vision got so bad she couldn’t. I pull my own car into the space we’ve made.

She feels for the the button to lower the garage door, and then we stand on the driveway, watching until it’s closed and my car is hidden from view.

I’m safe here. No one can find me now.



CHRISTIAN


“What exactly did she say?” Lily asks.

“Just that my car looked like the one in the doorbell video,” I say.

“Do you think she suspects it was your car?”

“I don’t know.”

“Even if she suspects it, Christian, that’s not enough to get you in trouble. She’d need something more substantial than a hunch.”

“No, you’re right, Lily,” I say, trying to make myself believe it.

In the coming days, the details of the body emerge painfully slowly. I look for them online. I watch the news, neurotically, obsessively, waiting for something. And yet, there is practically nothing. It’s as if no one’s even talking about the body, as if no one is even thinking about the body but Lily and me. All we know at this point is that it was discovered early the other morning by some youth group camping overnight at Langley Woods. No surprise, it was in a lesser-known, hard-to-reach part of the forest preserve. The youth group was searching for some secret waterfall that hardly anyone has ever heard of before and is incredibly hard to reach. It’s hidden. The forest preserve doesn’t want you to find it because they want to keep the land around it unadulterated. The youth group didn’t find it, but what they found was even more memorable. These kids will never forget seeing a dead body.

The body had yet to be identified. On the news that night, they referred to it interchangeably as a body and as human remains, so there’s no way to know what exactly was found, but I’ve already decided: they found Jake, or whatever is left of him. It’s been well over a week, almost two, since Lily ran into him at the park. How much decomposition happens in that time? I don’t know and I don’t want to know, though I do know that the fresher the body, the more lurid it is. It has probably swollen to twice its size and was likely crawling with maggots. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that when the body is identified and Jake’s name gets released, it will change everything. He will no longer be missing. He’ll be dead. And then people will start to wonder why and what happened to him. The medical examiner will do an autopsy. They’ll find a skull fracture, from where Lily hit him with the rock. They will say it was blunt force trauma. I don’t know how, but they’re pretty good at knowing the difference between homicide, suicide and accidental death.

“When they identify the body,” Lily says, “Nina will know where he was when he died. She already knows I was there at the forest preserve, remember?”

Of course I remember. How could I forget? It’s all I’ve been thinking about since we first heard about the discovery of the body: that people know that Lily was there, and soon they’ll know that Jake was too.

“Maybe it’s not even him,” I say, trying to stay optimistic. “Other people have died in those woods.”

Lily just gives me a look. Of course it’s him.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean that you did something to him, Lily. That forest preserve gets a lot of foot traffic. You remember how busy it was when we were there. It was hard to even find a place to park. Anyone could have been there. Anyone could have done it. Anyone could have hurt him, like that Brady guy.”

“Jim,” she says, the husband of her colleague, the man who saw Lily there that day.

“Right, Jim Brady. He could have done something to Jake.”

“Why would Jim Brady do something to Jake?”

“He didn’t. I’m just thinking out loud. Creating reasonable doubt,” I say because that is all we need. Reasonable doubt. “Or maybe Jake did something to himself. Maybe he slipped and fell and hit his head.” I’ve asked before, but never gotten a clear answer. I try again now. “How many times do you think you hit him with the rock, Lily?” If it was once, maybe twice, a skull fracture could be ruled an accidental death, maybe. There are plenty of things to trip over at the forest preserve, plenty of places for a head to hit, like a boulder or concrete. I went to school with a kid who fell off his bike and hit his head on the curb. He wasn’t wearing a helmet because no one did back then. I was there when he fell off his bike. I watched him fall over the handlebars and onto the street. He got up, dusted off his pants, got back on his bike. I laughed at him. We all did. He laughed at himself, too, which later helped lessen my guilt. We went to the store for candy. He thought he was fine. Six hours later he was dead.

“I don’t know, a few,” Lily says. This whole thing with the body has her visibly rattled. Lily didn’t sleep again last night. All night, I felt her tossing and turning in bed. She mumbled in her sleep, things like stop and no, and unconsciously she whimpered so that I had to shake her awake and tell her she was okay. For a long time, I stayed awake with her, rubbing her back, trying to get her to relax.

“Do you think it was like twice,” I ask, “or like six times?”