Just the Nicest Couple(85)

Lily’s shoes block the door. Her jacket is on the kitchen island beside her bag and keys. “Hey,” I say, stepping over her shoes and setting my own bag on the floor, leaned against the island. “How was your day? I tried calling you.”

Lily doesn’t reply. She stands, staring out the window as if in a state of suspended animation.

“Lily?” I ask. I come across the kitchen for the living room. When I reach her, I set my hands on her shoulders, looking past her for the backyard, to see what she sees. There isn’t too much worth looking at, though the view, as always, is beautiful and serene. It’s quiet outside. There is no one there, no one walking along the path. The river is still and the day gray, the sky patchy with clouds. “Is everything okay?” I ask, turning her gently by the shoulders with my hands, forcing her to look at me.

Lily’s skin is pale. Her long brown hair falls flat and frames her face. “He’s dead,” she says, cold and emotionless. “They identified him.”

Lily’s words reach my ears, but my brain hasn’t done anything with them yet. It’s slow in catching up.

By instinct, I ask, “Who?” though I know who.

It comes as a complete blow, though it shouldn’t, because we’ve known since they found the body that this was bound to happen. I just didn’t know it was going to happen today.

“Jake.”

“When?”

“Today.”

“Nina told you?”

Lily shakes her head, her words coming out in unsteady bursts. “The teachers. At school. It’s all anyone is talking about.”

“How do the other teachers know that Jake is dead, that they’ve identified his body?”

“The police,” Lily says. “They came to school to speak with her. Nina was crying. Someone overheard what they said to her. They said that Jake was dead. They found him.” Lily’s chin quivers. I pull her into me. I wrap my arms around her and, at first, she lets me. At first she sinks against me and she lets me hold and console her.

But then she pulls abruptly back and says, “She looked at me, Christian,” her voice changed, becoming stronger and more taut.

I ask, “What do you mean she looked at you?”

“I was there, just as she was leaving. I saw her walk out of the building with the police. She had her back to me. I didn’t think she saw me. But then, she stopped all of a sudden. She turned back. She looked right at me. Her eyes,” she says, and then she shudders, like she’ll never forget the look in Nina’s eyes as she was leaving, walking through the foyer, bookended by the police, turning back as with some clairvoyant knowledge that Lily was there, to fix her gaze on Lily’s face.

“Did she say anything to you?”

“No,” Lily says. “She just stared.”

I don’t know which is worse. If she had said something or that she didn’t.

And then, in a mind-numbing tone, as if telling me dinner is in the oven or asking about my day at work, she says, “The police should be here soon,” and I wheel back, squinting my eyes toward a window at the front of the house to see if they’re already here.

Lily turns her back to me. She turns around to face the other way, staring back out the window at nothing, as if resigned to her fate.

“Lily?” I gently ask.

“What?”

“What time did the police come to school?” I try to work out how much time we have until the police are here. Now that they’ve identified the body, they know where Jake died. A witness puts Lily at the scene on the same day that he died. It’s too much of a coincidence, though what the police have so far is mostly circumstantial. A person has to infer something from the evidence. They have to presume something. It’s not direct evidence, such as if Jim Brady had actually witnessed Lily hitting Jake with that rock or if the police found the rock with Jake’s blood and Lily’s fingerprints on it. What they have is enough to suspect Lily was there and that she might have done something, but it’s not enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she killed him. They have no motive. They have no weapon.

I offer false promises. “It’s okay,” I say to Lily as I grip her gently by the shoulders, leaning into her, sinking my face into the back of her head, inhaling her scent. “It’s going to be okay.”

I don’t know if I say it for her benefit or for mine.

In my arms, she’s stiff. She’s quiet. She knows I’m lying.

My hands move down to her abdomen. My arms wrap around her from behind, coming to rest on my child growing inside. “We’ll figure this out,” I say, and then I hold her and we stand like that for a long time, looking out into the backyard as it gets darker outside, the clouds drifting in the wind, the faint moon rising up over the river, revealing itself intermittently, depending on whether it’s behind the clouds.

I think about the first time I saw Lily. We were in college, in a calculus class. Lily was the shy, quiet one, who was also brilliantly smart. She could solve the problems no one else could. I loved her from the very first time I ever laid eyes on her, the first day of the semester when I walked into class and saw her sitting there, bent over her desk. Her hair was even longer then, impossibly long. It pooled on her desk, the color of toffee. Lily must have felt me staring at her because she looked up and our eyes met and, when they did, I felt complete.