Just the Nicest Couple(8)

“Why?” she asks, willing to talk despite having a classroom of teenagers waiting on her. I’m grateful for that.

“Because, Lily,” I say, hesitating a beat, almost ashamed to admit it, even to Lily, and because saying it out loud makes it real, “he didn’t come home last night.”

Lily’s mouth parts. Her eyes get wide. She lets go of my hand, her arms going to hang stiffly at her sides. It’s unintentional, I think, because she realizes quickly that she’s made this very obvious reaction and she tries reversing it because she doesn’t want to make me feel worse than I already do.

“Oh God, Nina. I’m so sorry,” she says, blinkingly slowly, and then she hides her surprise behind a sympathetic smile and reaches again for my hand.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” I ask. “That he didn’t come home.” Lily goes to shake her head, to say no, when I ask, “Has Christian ever not come home?” hoping her answer is yes. I mean, it can’t be that uncommon. People fight. Feelings get hurt. It’s not like you want to see that person the next day and pretend everything is okay. You need time for the situation to defuse. If he had come home, Jake and I would probably have just wound up fighting again because our emotions were still high. What good would that have done?

Lily is brutally honest. “No,” she says. “I’m sorry. I almost wish the answer was yes. But no, he hasn’t ever not come home. But that’s just Christian, Nina. He’s always the first to cave when we fight. I don’t even know that he’s always sorry when he says he is. He just hates conflict. He would do anything to avoid it.”

That’s sweet. It sounds like Christian. Christian is a good guy. But it makes me feel exponentially worse about myself and about my situation with Jake. I wish Lily would have just lied and said the answer was yes to appease me. How would I have known it wasn’t true?

“Have you tried calling him?” she asks.

“Yes. Many times. It goes to voice mail.”

“What were you fighting about?” she asks, but before I can explain, there is an eruption of noise from inside the classroom. Someone must have done something, and the class exploded into raucous laughter. A few kids are out of their seats and almost no one is doing what Lily asked them to do.

“Listen,” she says, “I have to get back to my class. Let’s talk about this later, okay?” She gives my hand a final squeeze, and I say yes, of course, that I’m sorry to have kept her so long.

But later, at the end of the day when I go back to Lily’s classroom to talk it out, she’s already gone.



CHRISTIAN


It’s two twenty in the afternoon when Lily texts. I’m in the middle of a meeting. A handful of us sit around a conference table working on a survey for a client. I look down at my phone. Lily’s text reads:

Can you leave early? Can you meet me at home? If not, that’s ok.
This is so classic Lily, to not want to put anyone out.

“Hey,” I say to my colleagues, still staring down at Lily’s text and thinking the worst again, that Lily has lost the baby, if not yesterday then today. I push my chair back and stand up, glad this isn’t a meeting with a client. It’s not a huge deal if I leave. “I hate to do this,” I say, packing up my things and pushing my chair in, “but I’ve got to run.”

I’m in my car, pulling out of the parking lot within five minutes. Two minutes later, I’m heading eastbound on 88, where my speedometer reaches eighty-five miles per hour.

Lily is in the leather chair again when I come in. It’s a swivel chair. Today it’s turned to face the garage door, so she sees me arrive, having to use my key to unlock the door because it’s locked, which it never is. We always leave that door unlocked. Lily must have locked it by mistake.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” I ask, tossing my keys on the island and practically running to her. As expected, the day got warm. As soon as the sun came out, the temperatures rose by thirty degrees. Now the sun streams in the wall of windows on the back of the house, falling across Lily’s lap. She’s stripped down to a tank top and leggings because of the heat, and sits with her legs pulled into her, cross-legged in the chair.

There are scratches on her arm and shoulder, some quite deep. This is the first time I’m seeing them. “What happened?” I ask, lowering myself to the floor, running a finger over them before gazing benevolently up at her, into her eyes. “Did you fall?”

Her eyes are wet and I know that she’s been crying. Lily is reluctant to speak. I leave her and go for the antiseptic and antibacterial ointment, and then I come back and clean her arm. She’s like a rag doll lying limp while I manipulate her arm to get to the scratches.

“Tell me, Lily,” I say as I take care of the wounds. “Tell me what’s wrong.” I think she must have fallen and landed on the baby. The baby is dead. It has to be.

She doesn’t say.

“Lily,” I say. “Why did you need me to come home?”

“I’m sorry. I should have just waited until after you were through with work. I shouldn’t have asked you to leave.”

“It’s fine. It was a quiet day. But I’m here now. Please tell me.”

It wasn’t exactly a quiet day. Besides the meeting with colleagues this afternoon, I spent the morning liaising with clients, getting to know prospective clients and updating existing ones on progress. I’m working on multiple projects right now and need to make sure that, at any given time, they all run smoothly. Mine is usually a nine-to-five job, but there are things I didn’t get done today—because I was in meetings all day and because I left early—that I’ll need to do tonight. It doesn’t matter. Lily is what matters.