No One Will Miss Her(37)

“Never mind,” Bird said. “So Lizzie was your assistant.”

“Right. Yes. I was saying, I did like her. She was smart, a quick learner, and good with the animals. Some people come in thinking, Oh, I’m an animal lover, I can do this job, but when a dog comes in that’s been run over by a snowmobile . . .” He sighed. “It’s not easy. You’ve gotta be able to keep it together. It takes some nerve. Lizzie was good. She didn’t balk at the sight of blood.”

“Okay,” Bird said. “So remind me, then—why’d you fire her, again?”

Hurley blew a frustrated exhalation into the receiver. “She really didn’t give me a choice, man. I was sorry to lose her. That’s why when I heard about what happened, I thought I should call.”

“Sure, I hear you. Walk me through it.”

“It was a bad situation. Basically, some medication went missing.” The veterinarian’s tone was perplexed, and Bird noted the phrasing: went missing, like the pills had wandered off on their own.

“Missing as in stolen?” he asked carefully.

“I still can’t make sense of it,” Hurley said. “Working around here, you know, you see a lot of that. You get to know people; you can tell who has a problem. Lizzie never seemed like the type. But only employees knew where we kept it, and whoever took it had a key. I knew it wasn’t me, obviously, so . . .”

“Process of elimination,” Bird said. “Right. What was the medication?”

Hurley’s tone shifted; talking shop was more comfortable for him than calling a dead woman a thief. “Tramadol. It’s an opiate, a painkiller. We give it to dogs, mostly, but it works on people.”

“Tramadol. Got it. So what happened?”

“The whole thing was just so strange,” he said, the regretful tone back in full force. “When I confronted her, she clammed up. Not even denying it—she just wouldn’t say anything. At all. I really tried, Detective. I told her we could forget the whole thing, if she’d just return the meds. I meant it, too. The last thing I wanted was to let her go.” He paused, sucking air through his teeth. “She didn’t argue. She just took off her smock and handed it to me, and then she walked out the door.”

“Did she say anything?” Bird asked.

“Yeah,” Hurley replied. “I’ll never forget it. She looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘I really loved this. I should have known it couldn’t last.’”





Chapter 15

Lizzie




We’re almost at the end now. The big bang, and everything after. Blood on the wall and soaked into the carpet; a body under a blanket; cops, picking up shattered teeth and bits of bone with tweezers and dumping them into a bucket marked ouellette, elizabeth. I wonder what they’ll do with the pieces, whether they’ll be dumped down a sink somewhere or buried with the rest. I wonder what they’ll put on my gravestone, if I have one. It’s always someone else who decides how you’ll be remembered. It’s the name they called you that goes on the epitaph.

Daughter. Wife. Lover. Liar. Trash bag.

The only one I’m sure they won’t use is “mother,” because nobody ever called me that. He never got the chance.

My baby.

My perfect baby boy. It was the strangest thing, to see him. They gave him to me afterward, wrapped in a blanket, and you never would have known that he wasn’t finished yet. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open, his tiny fists were lightly clenched around the air like he wanted to fight. There wasn’t a single thing wrong with him, except that he wasn’t breathing.

We never talked about the baby, Dwayne and I. We were such idiot kids, in over our heads, trying to fumble our way into a life that neither of us was ready for. Even the name was a choice we couldn’t figure out how to make. I told Dwayne I wanted to wait, to see what he looked like when he came out. A James or a Hunter or a Brayden. I was sure I’d know right away, just as soon as I saw him, once I’d looked into his eyes. I used to look forward to meeting him, when he was still alive inside of me. But then he was born, and gone, and I was still drifting in the anesthetic twilight when they asked Dwayne what to put on the death certificate. I don’t know why he said it—a sudden sense of paternal responsibility, or maybe he was just confused—but the name Dwayne blurted out wasn’t any of the ones we’d ever talked about. It was his own. Dwayne Cleaves: that’s what it says on the baby’s grave, on the smallest stone in the cemetery beside the hilltop church. Like he only belonged to one of us. Like it was Dwayne’s loss instead of ours. Instead of mine.

We never talked about that, either.

There was nothing to say. And as the years passed, there was nothing to remember him by. Not even a name of his own. With one Dwayne Cleaves walking around town alive, people seemed to forget about the other one, the one they’d never met, the one some people still tried to pretend had never existed at all.

But someone might remember my baby now. Now that it’s convenient. Some uppity old bitch from that church on the hill might try it, spewing a stupid platitude as they pour dirt in the hole, about how the two of us are finally together in heaven.

If she does, I hope the words stick in her throat. I hope she chokes on them until she turns gray, just like he was when they put him in my arms.