Just the Nicest Couple(90)

I narrow my eyes. “You lied to me, Lily.”

“About some things. Yes. But not about everything. I thought he was going to kill me, and then I saw that rock out of the corner of my eye. I reached for it. I dug it out of the ground and I hit him with it. I couldn’t stop myself. I just kept hitting him with it. He tried to fight me off. We fought, and then eventually he fell and I ran away. But I swear on my life, Christian, on our baby’s life, I didn’t shoot him,” she says, clutching my hands as, from downstairs, the doorbell rings following by the sound of knuckles pounding on the door, and Lily’s eyes go wide with fear.

“You have to believe me, Christian,” she begs, moaning as a pain shoots through her abdomen and she clutches it, folding herself in half over her arm. “I didn’t shoot him,” she swears, her nails digging into my skin, from the fear, from the pain, leaving slits behind, “but someone else did.”



NINA


Ryan has called three times already. He’s left three voice mails and texted twice. He wants to know if I’m okay. He wants to know if I need anything. I’ve heard from Officer Boone, who finally spoke with the florist, forcing her to give up the name of the person who sent me flowers. It was Ryan. It didn’t even come as a surprise.

“Please, Nina,” he begged on the last voice mail, his voice steeped with empathy and something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on but that made me uncomfortable nonetheless, made me get up and go to the windows in my mother’s house and pull the curtains closed. “I’m worried about you. Please let me know what I can do to help you through this. You know I’m always here for you.”

I stopped listening at that point, and then I went into my contacts and blocked his number so that if he calls, the phone won’t ring and if he leaves a message, I won’t get a notification, though before I blocked him, one of the two texts that he sent read, Where are you, Nina?

My mother’s address is listed in the White Pages.

He knows I’m not home.

I wonder if it’s only a matter of time before he finds me here.

One day and then two days pass. There are many things to do when your spouse has died, especially when he has been murdered. My mother and I go to the funeral home and make arrangements for Jake for when his body gets released by the police. I pick out a casket. I pick out a cemetery plot. I call the hospital and Jake’s office and tell them the news, listening to complete strangers sob on the other end of the line and having to console them. I call the life insurance company at my mother’s reminding. In order to initiate the claims process, I need to fill out paperwork and send in a copy of Jake’s death certificate and make a request for benefits. It’s all too much to deal with and I’m grateful for my mother’s help. Otherwise I wouldn’t do any of it.

I feel gutted, like someone tore into me to rip out my internal organs. The visits, the questions from the police are endless, though it’s been relatively clear-cut. Lily did this. She says she didn’t, but she did. She’s confessed to an affair with Jake and an altercation with him in the exact place where he was later found dead, but she swears she didn’t shoot him. She’s asked the police to do a lie detector test to prove it, though they’re not always accurate and not often admissible in court. Even if a lie detector test were to say she didn’t shoot Jake, I don’t know that I’d believe it.

The police arrested her for murder. She sat in jail for forty-eight hours before the bail hearing, and I hoped they’d never let her out. The bail was set at a million dollars. The police, from what I heard, got a warrant and searched her home, turning it inside out looking for a gun. They didn’t find it, but Lily had plenty of time from when Jake died until now to get rid of it. The gun is somewhere and only Lily and Christian know where.

But even without the gun, the evidence against Lily is incriminating. Jim Brady saw her there. There was physical evidence of Lily on Jake, according to the medical examiner’s report, blood, saliva, skin cells and hair.

Almost every night I fantasize about ways to destroy her life.

I’ve gone to some dark place, where it’s hard to find joy in anything. I’m tired all the time. All I want to do is sleep, and most of the time my mother lets me, but then sometimes she comes into my dark cavern of a room, opens the blinds and I squint and thrash and react like a vampire who’s allergic to light.

When she leaves, I close the blinds again and slip back into bed beneath the covers.

There is nothing that says I can’t go back to my own house. The police did what they wanted with it and now it’s all mine. But I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to be there with the knowledge that Jake won’t ever be coming home, or of what Lily and Jake did together in my house.

“You could sell the house,” my mother suggested once as she sat beside me in bed, spoon-feeding me soup because it was the only way I would eat, if she kept shoving the food into my mouth like I was a toddler. “Or we could sell both houses, yours and mine, and move somewhere together.” I liked the idea of that. We daydreamed about places we could go because, now that Jake is gone, there is nothing that keeps us tethered here. My mother is the only one who loves me. She’s the only person I have left.

“Despite the circumstances,” she said to me one night as she sat beside me in bed, “this is kind of nice. It’s just like old times,” and I agreed that yes, despite the circumstances of my husband being dead, it was just like old times.