Lies She Told(26)

“I’ll get back by seven,” I say. “You’ll be home. We can talk then.”

“Sure. Well . . .” He looks up at me, smile no longer genuine. “Uh, I have some work that I was thinking might keep me.”

I bet. “This is important. You’re not on trial. I need you home at seven.”

“You don’t want to give me a clue as to what this is about?”

“Seven, Jake.” I say it in a seething whisper. “I need you home at seven.” I lean into the stroller and tuck a blanket around Vicky’s legs. As I do, Jake dips his head in and kisses the side of my face.

“I love you two,” he whispers. “You know that?”

My fight vanishes. The only choice now is to flee. I wrest my head away from his warm lips and grasp the stroller handle. “Seven. Okay? I’ll see you at seven.”





LIZA


I wake with blood in my mouth. At first, I think the metallic flavor is a phantom taste left from my nightmare. In my sleep, I’d been floating above a mortally wounded Colleen, an omniscient narrator ready to read my character her last rights. She’d writhed below me, hands cupping a hole in her gut. The liquid pooling around her had appeared black in the darkness, motor oil from a busted gasket.

My hand reveals that the cut is not in my imagination. A wet mark shines on the finger that I dragged across my lower lip. There are dark splotches that must be dried blood. I peel the sheets from my sweat-drenched body and roll from the bed, making my way from memory into the pitch-black hallway and toward the bathroom. Once inside, I close the door behind me and flick on the buzzing overhead light. The woman in the vanity has crazy hair and a raised welt from where a front tooth pierced flesh. I must rub my eyes to recognize myself.

I grab a washcloth from beside the sink, wet it, and press it to my mouth. Reality still feels ephemeral. Am I nursing a real wound or still asleep, facedown on a drool-drenched pillow?

By the time my bottom lip stops oozing, I’m wide awake. I return to my room and remove my charging laptop from the nightstand. I may not be ready to kill Colleen, but I can picture Beth’s next move: dropping the kid off with her mother. I cannot have her confront Jake again with a stage whisper.

*

I finish the chapter as day breaks through the shutters. The light casts an alternating pattern of sun and shadow on the knotted pine floor, like a still shot of the view outside a moving subway. My mind feels slow. I’d like nothing more than to pull the covers over my head and get a few more hours of shut-eye. Doing so, however, would negate my early morning progress. I’ll need a few all-nighters to make my deadline as it is.

Still, my brain requires carbohydrates, and my body could use a shower. A musky odor, like the smell of a dog’s neck, fills the room. There’s only one place it could be coming from.

I return to the bathroom and step into the shower. When I was a child, sliding glass doors above the tub had walled off the area, turning it into a mini-steam room. My mother swapped them for opaque plastic curtains before I turned ten, presumably so I could brush my teeth in the sole upstairs bathroom without watching her shave. Seeing your parents naked is only appropriate when you don’t have a sense of why “private parts” should be private.

Water sputters from the shower head. Though I have the dial turned to the hottest setting, the temperature is lukewarm at best, a consequence of the forty-year-old plumbing system. It’s amazing that people pay as much as they do to rent this place.

As I scrub my body, I think of my mother, of the way her energy still permeates the house during the day, buttressing the rafters no matter how rotted the wood may be. If only I’d inherited some of her strength. Her fight. She would have no problem making this month’s deadline while on fertility treatments. A woman who can work in an office all day and then do all the cleaning, cooking, and child-rearing at night while her husband goes out drinking and womanizing would not be so easily overwhelmed by synthetic hormones. She certainly wouldn’t be near tears all the time.

Despite everything my father did, I can only vaguely recall her crying once. I don’t remember what for. Probably he’d hit her. She’d done her best to send me upstairs when she’d sensed an argument would get ugly, but it was hard for her to correctly gauge it all the time. He’d come home drunk a lot, looking for a fight or a fuck—neither of which she’d ever wanted to give him. Either he was going to get violent or go looking elsewhere. How could she always guess right?

As I rinse, I try to understand why I’d become so depressed after my dad left. I should have been grateful. Maybe kids always want both parents around—even when one is a terror. Or maybe I had more good memories back then. I only have one now: a time when I’d stayed home sick from school and he’d lounged on the couch with me all day watching movies. He’d even let me rent an R-rated teen flick all the older kids had been chatting about six months earlier because of some nudity and the suggestion of sex. My mom had barred me from watching it, but Dad had said that she was being overprotective “about nothing.” I’d gone back to junior high the following day as the coolest eighth grader ever.

After I shower, I head into the kitchen for cereal, only to remember that I forgot to buy any at the store the night before. Christine’s presence had distracted me from my mental grocery list. I return upstairs to my phone and send her a text. “Nothing in the pantry. Breakfast?”