Lies She Told(77)

A wine-colored shrub calls out to me from my subconscious. I kneel beside it and brush back its tangles of blooms until I see the dirt beneath. I scratch at the ground with my short fingernails. The earth is soft, like fresh mulch. It gives way easily. Clumps of soil fill my palms.

I keep digging, trying to get a hole up to my elbow as my mother did in my dream. In my memory. Again, Chris asks what I’m doing. She tells me to stop. I can’t, though. Somewhere deep inside of me is a need to be here, sitting on my haunches, fists beneath the ground.

My fingers hit something. Hard. Metal. I pull back the overgrown bush and carefully remove the object. It’s too small for the head of a broken spade, though it has a handle. My entire body starts vibrating as though the ground is shaking beneath my feet. I rub my eyes with the back of a soiled hand and stare into the smudged palm of the other one. There’s a fat rubber grip connected to a long barrel. A silver slide catches the sunlight.

“What do you have there, Liza?” Fear fills Chris’s voice.

I don’t answer. But this is my gun.

My hand trembles so badly that I am afraid to put my fingers anywhere near the trigger. I pull out the magazine. The weight of it alone tells me bullets are inside. It lands on the ground with a dull thud and sinks into the loose soil. I pull back the slide. A round pops out into my waiting palm. I examine the copper bullet with its red tip as though it is a strange wasp that I fear might sting me. Slowly, I tilt my hand and watch it fall from my palm into the mound of dirt beside the hole.

It needed to be done. Beth speaks in an assuring voice.

I face Chris with the weapon in my hand. “Don’t worry. I unloaded it. But I knew it was here, which means . . .”

My voice breaks. Chris kneels beside me. She rubs my back slowly, urging me to continue. I don’t have to tell her to keep what I say secret. Her set jaw assures me that whatever I tell her she’ll take to the grave.

“I must have used it. I probably found out about the affair somehow and then went to confront David and Nick. I must have killed—” I cut myself off with a deep breath. The air burns in my lungs like smoke.

Chris places both hands on my shoulders. “Liza, you did not murder Nick. You didn’t even know that he was sleeping with David until this week.”

I gnaw at my bottom lip as I shake my head. “With my history of suppression, I could have found out before and then forgot. But while I knew, I might have—”

Chris hushes me. “You are my best friend, Lizzie. I’ve known you for how many years? You’re the most loving, caring, honest, good human being that I know. You didn’t kill Nick.”

I want to believe her, to trust that murder is not in my character. But I didn’t know who I was until moments ago. I have the backstory of a bad person.

“Nick was shot, Chris. He was shot and I buried a gun.”

“There must be another explanation.” Her eyes widen. “Maybe David buried the gun.”

“At my house? Where I knew to look?”

Again, she shushes me, patting the air this time for me to control the hysterical wavering in my voice. “It was buried beneath the hedge like where the woman disposed of the murder weapon in Drowned Secrets. Maybe that’s where David got the idea.”

“Come on, Chris. Why would he do that?”

Chris digs her hands into her hair, picking up the twisted section into a ponytail. She holds it atop her head, thinking. After thirty seconds, she lets her hair drop with a long exhale. “In case the police suspected him . . .”

She doesn’t need to finish. Her eyes say the rest. She thinks David wanted the gun to point to me. My husband was setting me up for Nick’s murder.





Chapter 18

Endings don’t stop time. My marriage and a woman’s life are finished, but Vicky is howling in her bassinet, begging for my breast. Her life goes on and so must mine. I am a single mother. I don’t have the luxury of wallowing in guilt.

I tell Tyler that I’m heading to my mom’s house across the river. With all the lies I’ve told about Jake, he’d feel honor bound to keep me from my apartment as long as my husband might be there. He doesn’t know that I’ve kicked Jake out already. It didn’t fit the damsel-in-distress narrative that I’d used to convince Tyler to let me back in his bed.

He knows that we’ll never see each other again. I can tell by the way Tyler lets his fingers linger in my palm as I step into the hallway and cautions me to “take care of myself.” In another life, I’d be with a man like him. We would share our stories over bottles of wine, take our kids to picnics in the park, laugh at one another’s jokes. Make love until morning. We’d build a happy blended family based on kindness and mutual respect.

But I’m a murderer. I don’t get that happy ending.

Fortunately, Jake is gone when I reenter the apartment. Vicky is near hysterics from a full diaper. I lift my baby from the carriage and hold her against me with both hands, too weak from all the emotions and activity in the past twenty-four hours to trust myself with a dangling football carry. The changing table is in the bedroom. As I enter, I can’t help but notice that the covers on Jake’s side of the mattress are tossed back onto my spot by the window. His refusal to make the bed seems vengeful. In my head, I can imagine him excusing his sloppiness: You can’t kick me out and think I’m going to straighten up before I leave.