Just the Nicest Couple(88)

Downstairs I drift around the house. I search in drawers and cabinets. I carry a chair over and search things like above the kitchen cabinets where neither of us go. I lift up the floor registers. I look inside a wide vase, beneath flowers. I come up empty.

I don’t find a gun.

But just because I don’t find a gun, doesn’t mean there isn’t one here.

Lily’s work bag is on the floor by the garage door. It’s a large tan leather tote bag, big enough to hold textbooks and a laptop. I go to the bag. I crouch down beside it and unzip it. It has pockets, both on the inside and the outside of the bag, which Lily was ecstatic about when I bought her the bag for her birthday years ago. Now I run my hand along the inside of the leather, rubbing up against a book, a wallet, keys, feeling for something hard and cold like gunmetal.

I hear the rustle of something from behind me.

“Christian,” she says.

I rise up, looking slowly back over a shoulder, blinking the world into focus.

I turn to find Lily behind me. She stands ten feet away, by the window in the moon’s infinitesimal glow. She wears a thin white nightgown that hangs to the upper thigh, though in the near absence of light, she’s almost translucent, like a ghost. Her hair hangs long. It’s tangled, falling into her face where she leaves it, not bothered by the fact that she can barely see past the bangs. I can just make out the whites of her eyes. Her head is at an angle and her hands are hidden behind her back.

I realize that I’m both fascinated by and terrified of my wife.

“What are you looking for in my bag, Christian?” she asks. Her voice is the exact opposite of a balm, whatever that is. It isn’t soothing or restorative, though the tone itself is melodious and sweet. But it’s in what I know, or what I think I know, that I find it so disturbing.

Lily steps closer. My eyes are on her hands, which I can’t see.

Bludgeoning someone to death with a rock in self-defense is one thing. But bringing a gun to a forest preserve requires forethought, and the intent to harm or kill. It means killing someone in cold blood. If Lily went there intending to harm Jake, it means she knew Jake would be there. It wasn’t a coincidence that they were both there at the same time.

Maybe Jake didn’t lead Lily down that secluded path and into the woods.

Maybe Lily led Jake.

This raises doubt about everything I ever believed about my wife.

“I have to know,” I breathe out. “Did you shoot him, Lily?”

Lily watches me, unspeaking.

“Did you?” I ask again.

“That hurts, Christian,” she says, her voice quivering, on the verge of tears when she finally speaks. What I can see of her face is pained. Deep ruts form between the eyes. The edges of her lips point downward. She takes another step toward me, her feet so light and airy on the floors that if I didn’t know any better, I’d think she had levitated. “Do you really think I could do something like that?” she asks, coming even closer now so that I could touch her if I wanted to, though my arms remain stationary at my sides, while Lily’s hands are fixed behind her back.

Twelve hours ago the answer to her question would have been a definitive no. No, I don’t believe my gentle, loving wife could shoot someone in the head.

“Answer me,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm and level. I hear my heartbeat in my ears. I breathe through an open mouth, my chest rising and falling with each breath. “Did you shoot him?”

“No,” she says, her empty hands coming from behind her back to reach for me.

Lily stands on her toes. She presses her body into mine, though mine is straight as a ramrod. Her arms wrap around my neck. “Please,” she whispers into my ear, pleading, desperate. “Hold me, Christian. I’m so scared.” She presses her face into my shoulder. I feel the wetness of her eyes on my skin. I feel her heartbeat against mine. I wrap my arms around her waist, the cotton of her nightgown thin and insubstantial beneath my hands. I lift her into my arms. I carry her back to bed and lie down beside her, holding her until she falls asleep.

The rest of the night, I don’t sleep. I lie in bed, watching Lily sleep.

At some point in the night, I get out of bed and go to watch her from the armchair in the corner of the room.

Eventually, the sun slowly rises. Its light breaches the slats of the wooden blinds, thrusting itself into our room. As the minutes pass, the light grows, disseminating across the bedroom. It spills first across the wooden floors and then climbs the bed to where Lily lies, cocooned in the sheets. The light falls on her face, bathing her in light.

Only then do I slip back into bed with Lily. I lie on my side beside her, facing her, feeling nostalgic all of a sudden, wondering if today will be the day the police come, if today will be the last morning that I wake up with her beside me in bed. Neither of us even thinks about going to work.

Lily feels me come back to bed, though she doesn’t know that I was gone. She feels the movement of the bed, of the mattress absorbing my weight. That’s what wakes her.

Lily’s eyes flutter open and she finds my eyes holding hers.

“What are you looking at?” she asks, smiling momentarily as if half-conscious and blissfully unaware of what’s happening, before the knowledge, the memories return to her and the smile disappears.

I say, “You.”

Lily presses into me. I reach out and stroke her hip.