Lies She Told(66)

I look at my hand. My diamond engagement ring shines beside my wedding band. David proposed on my favorite beach. He married me. He suggested that I start fertility hormones. Why would he have a child with me if he was homosexual?

Because he felt bad for you. The answer comes in Beth’s voice. For once, she’s not being hypersexual, overly emotional, or cursing like a drunken soccer fan. Her tone is almost sad, as though I’ve learned a secret that she already knew. David understood that I wanted a baby more than anything in this world. At first, he’d hemmed and hawed about getting me pregnant because he’d known that he was attracted to men and, deep down, must have realized our relationship wouldn’t last. But he also knew that to leave me, at my age, with my history of fertility issues, would guarantee my childless future. So he stuck it out—even after starting an affair with the man he really loved—in hopes of giving us a parting gift. But then, none of the standard fertility treatments worked, and David realized that having a child with me could take years, if it happened at all. He couldn’t ask Nick to wait forever.

The suicide case would have brought Nick and David together romantically for the first time. Probably, it pushed both men to face their feelings, prompting long conversations about their childhoods in Mississippi and Texas, being bullied and belittled for what they felt. They would have opened up to one another. Admitted their mutual attraction. Fallen in love.

A tear tumbles down my face, a mosquito bite at dusk. Many more are to come. Trevor saw David and Nick kissing not because he needs glasses and stumbled upon two similar looking men, but because kissing was what my husband had been doing with his male law partner before my big book launch. David intended to leave me for Nick. His choice explains the year of detachment and dismissiveness, which I mistakenly attributed to his frustration with my fertility issues. He was pushing me away, hoping that I’d end things myself and spare him the apologies.

I sit on David’s side of the stripped bed, too weak to rise. Why would David kill Nick, though? He wouldn’t have murdered the man that he loved simply to prevent me from finding out about their affair. He was willing to leave me. I would have learned of his relationship with Nick eventually.

The realization sneaks up on me, a robber with a knife to my throat. All of a sudden I can’t move. Can’t swallow. Can’t breathe.

Nick was stealing my husband. I had the motive.

Oddities for which I’ve invented excuses flash in my mind. I see David’s confusion after the police couldn’t find my gun followed by Sergeant Perez’s satisfaction as he insisted that I’d become a good shot. David really hadn’t appeared to know the location of my Ruger, and he isn’t an actor. Perez had been so sure that he’d seen me at the academy, and he’s trained to differentiate between similar people. What if I had taken my gun? What if I did go to the range? What if I suspected the affair and took protection into Nick’s rough neighborhood to stake out his apartment and catch David in the act?

But why wouldn’t I remember?

I writhe on the mattress as the answer rips through my brain. The hormones! Dr. Frankel warned me that they could cause memory loss. And they’re still in the experimental stage. What other side effects might they have that she doesn’t even know about?

I bring my forearm to my face. My throbbing vision makes the white lines sink deeper into my epidermis. I’d been willing to sacrifice anything—even my sanity—for a baby. But I’d never imagined the drugs could make me a murderer.

*

I call the fertility clinic from the cab. The secretary tries to push me off until my next appointment. “I need them out now,” I yell. “You don’t understand. I have to be seen now. I’ve got to remember. I have to know.”

Panic prevents me from controlling my volume in the vehicle’s small interior. The driver checks the rearview mirror to monitor me, as though he fears I could start ripping apart the plastic seats or throw open the door and run before paying the fare. I hear the child locks click.

“Okay, Ms. Cole. Please calm down. We will fit you in right away.”

A nurse is waiting for me at the clinic door. She rushes me through reception into a private room as though my hysteria is contagious, capable of infecting the developing fetuses swelling in all the successful trial subjects waiting for Dr. Frankel’s glowing smile. The needles burn beneath the skin. I claw at my bicep, turning those faint raised lines into raw red tracks. The nurse keeps her distance as she tells me to sit on the examination chair and wait for the doctor. She sounds like a dog trainer.

I’m not to disrobe. I keep on the denim shirt dress that I threw on before racing out of my apartment. I take off my purse and place it beside me.

Clothed, I can appreciate the room in a way that I never could while shivering in a paper gown atop wax paper, bracing for a probe. I smell urine masked with lemon-scented disinfectant. The sonogram cart appears ancient. Its monitor is scuffed black around the edges. The urine collection cups have a gray film of dust outside. A hair clip lies on the counter, dark strands clinging to a knot inside it. Did the staff not have time to get the room ready for me, or has it always been this way? Did my hope for the treatment make me view this place as a state-of-the-art medical center when it was really a dirty lab with human rats?

Dr. Frankel’s smile is even more strained than usual when she enters. My chart is already under her arm, and a laptop is balanced on her left palm. Instead of inquiring how I am doing, she asks, “What seems to be the problem?”