Just the Nicest Couple(78)
“Where is the earring now?”
“I have it.”
“She gave it to you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That’s good.” I don’t know why this is good exactly. But I like the idea of evidence being back in Lily’s possession.
What I still can’t figure out is how it ever got in Jake’s car.
NINA
Christian and Lily live on a dead-end street. Theirs is the last house on the block. I’ve parked in the cul-de-sac at the end, where there are no homes, only trees. There is no through traffic either, which means I’m the only one here. I turn off my car and sit, staring through the dark copse of trees at their home. The porch light is on. It casts a yellow glow on the porch, making it warm and homey and snug, though I have no intent of going to the front door and knocking.
I sit there in the darkness watching. I know they’re home because I saw movement on the other side of the blinds, though I couldn’t identify them. It was just shadows passing by the windows.
There was only one other time in my life that I considered Jake might be cheating on me. It was early in our marriage. We were out to dinner when Jake and I ran into a colleague of his at a restaurant. The woman was one of the surgical techs at the hospital. She was beyond beautiful; she took my breath away and was the only person in my life that I ever remember making my husband tongue-tied. Even I had never had that effect on him. I remember at the time, Jake saying something along the lines of how he liked working with this woman because not only was she competent and conscientious at what she did, but that she was nice and easy to talk to, which came as a crushing blow because she wasn’t just a pretty face, although she was that too.
Jake swore he wasn’t flirting with her that night at the restaurant. He said he was only being nice and I let it go, but I never knew if I believed him. The irony was that even though I thought Jake might be cheating on me, I didn’t feel angry with him. I felt angry with her. I wondered how any woman could be so horrible as to pursue a married man, and I thought of that woman who had stolen my father from my mother and me and practically ruined our lives. I remember that I went to Jake’s hospital once. I sat in the parking lot in my car, waiting for this beautiful surgical tech to leave and when she did, I followed her to an apartment where she lived, and then I sat and watched from that parking lot, fantasizing about ways to ruin her life. I thought of many. I never acted on any of it. It was therapeutic enough just to imagine all the awful things I could do to her if I was so inclined.
My anger is exponentially worse because Lily is supposed to be my friend.
Has Jake left me for Lily? Or did Christian find out and do something to Jake?
I’m sitting in the front seat of my car. The time on my phone reads nine twenty-eight when the front door of Christian and Lily’s house unexpectedly opens. I sit more upright in my chair. Christian appears in the doorway, looking out. He lets his gaze run over the street and I think at first that I’ve been caught. I watch as Christian steps out of the house. He’s alone; Lily isn’t with him. He turns back to the door to pull it closed behind him, and then he’s practically floodlit in the porch lights. Because of the lights, he’s easy to see, wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, holding a plastic bag in his hand and, as I watch, he steps from the porch with the bag, making his way toward the trash cans at the end of the driveway.
I sink low in my seat as Christian approaches. My car can’t be thirty feet away, though it’s shrouded in darkness. The porch lights don’t reach this far so Christian is far less conspicuous here, no longer spotlighted. Now he’s a mere silhouette. I can only make out the contour of him, blending into the darkness of the street.
Christian doesn’t go to the garbage bins to throw the bag away as I expected. Instead, he walks straight past them and I watch, entranced, as he comes to the street, turns and walks along the edge of it with the plastic bag suspended from his hand. I sit motionless, watching through the windshield as Christian grows smaller with the distance. He walks so far that eventually I can’t see his silhouette. My curiosity gets the best of me and I decide to follow him. I wait in the car a few more seconds, and then I press the switch on the interior lights so that they don’t turn on when I open the door. I don’t want to be visible. I slip from my car, pushing the door gently closed and setting it back into place. I don’t slam it. I stand immobile after I do, making sure Christian didn’t notice me getting out of the car.
Darkness wraps its arms around me. The night air is cool. You can smell fall in the air, the earthy scent of things dying.
I tread softly in the direction that Christian went. Christian and Lily’s neighborhood is wooded. Tree branches hang over the street, moving like arms. The homes are old and there are no sidewalks and very few streetlights, which leaves long stretches of blackness where the light doesn’t reach. The street itself is uneven and potholed. I have to be careful where I step, so that I don’t trip and fall. I’ve lost sight of Christian up ahead. Still I follow, listening for footsteps, hearing only the movement of fallen leaves as they scatter across the street in the cool breeze.
Suddenly I’m startled by the low creaking sound of a screen door opening from somewhere behind me. I wheel around as the door slams emphatically closed. I wonder if it’s Lily, if Lily saw me or if she’s come outside looking for Christian. I stand in the middle of the empty street. My eyes take stock of the homes behind me. It’s not Lily. A house back, someone has stepped outside. I wouldn’t know it, except that I see the flare of a match and then an amber glow like from the end of a burning cigarette.