No One Will Miss Her(49)

“Listen,” he said, his voice panicked. He took a hurried step forward. “Look, just let me expla—”

She turned to face him then, and he stopped talking. Froze in place. His eyes, glazed and huge in the dimly lit room, were fixed on what was in her hands. Dark and sleek and fully loaded.

Well, I do declare.

“Wait,” he said.

She cocked the hammer.

“Lizzie,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Not anymore,” she said, and pulled the trigger.





Part 2





Chapter 19

Lizzie




I told you death has a way of making you honest.

And I told you the truth.

I just didn’t tell you everything. An incomplete truth is still the truth, and so I left out a few details. Not just about that terrible day at the lake, but about what came before. I never told you about how a carelessly secured log rolled off a truck and over my husband, crushing his bones to a pulp, and as I drove to the hospital—the same one where, two years before, I’d cradled the corpse of my stillborn son—I felt a brief, fierce flush of satisfaction at the idea that now Dwayne would know how it felt to lose a piece of himself.

I never told you about the first time I found him passed out on our bed with the rubber tubing still wrapped around his upper arm, or about the wave of visceral disgust and contempt that surged through me as I leaned in to see if he was breathing or not. I never told you how I put a finger under his nostrils, and when I felt the damp heat of his shallow breath, I briefly wondered how hard it would be to clamp a hand over his mouth, pinch his nose shut, and hold him down while he smothered.

I never told you how, in that moment, I hated him. Hated him for every broken thing he’d stamped on, for every broken promise, for our broken stupid life, which he could escape at the tip of a needle while I was left here, living it. I hated him more than I’d ever hated anything, a loathing so fierce that it felt like something with a thousand legs crawling around alive in my belly, and I never told you how I bent close to his ear and whispered, “I hope you die,” so quietly that I could barely hear the words myself, so quietly that there was no way he could possibly hear me, and I nearly screamed when his eyelids fluttered and he muttered back, “I hope we both die.”

And then he turned to his side, puked on the pillow, and passed out, and I stood there with my mouth open, feeling like I’d just lost the only intellectual debate we’d ever had.

I never told you how staying with him started to feel like a competition, each of us daring the other to blink first. How it became almost a point of pride, the way we hurt each other and kept hanging on. How it was like drinking poison, year over year, until you can’t remember what it was like to drink anything else, and you’ve even started to like the taste.

I never asked, but I thought there probably were other women, or had been, over the years. Everything changed after the miscarriage, the sex most of all. At first he’d only touch me if he was drunk, coming home from Strangler’s with beer on his breath, dirt under his fingernails, coming up behind me where I stood at the sink with a dishcloth in my hand. Jamming a knee between my legs to spread them, bending me over where I stood. I knew I was being hate-fucked; the sad thing is that I actually missed it later, when he wouldn’t touch me at all, no matter how drunk he was. That electricity I used to feel when I’d look up to see him coming toward me with angry lust in his eyes—it was gone. At first I thought it was because of the accident, after the doctor warned us that there might be problems—he called it “sexual side effects of traumatic injury,” a whole lot of fancy words to describe your basic case of limp dick. But then, a few months later at somebody’s backyard barbecue, I went to use the bathroom and walked in on Dwayne with Jennifer Wellstood. He was sitting on the toilet with his pants around his ankles, and she was tugging on that thing with both hands, and from what I saw before she started screaming and I slammed the door, it was standing up on its own just fine.

But I hadn’t known he was cheating with her. Not until Ian Bird showed up to thrust it in my face, thinking he was humiliating Adrienne, when what he really did was make me look at what I’d been working so hard not to see. Maybe I should have figured it out. Maybe I just didn’t want to. Looking back, the signs were everywhere. The trailing scent of her perfume, so strong that it couldn’t possibly have been coming off her hand-me-downs, buried in my closet. Those long, long hairs—reddish like mine, but brittle, and with a half inch of mousy root at the base. Clogging the drain at the lake house, clinging all over the furniture in every place she’d laid down her stupid head. They’d weave themselves into the fabric, somehow, so that not even the vacuum could pull them free, and I had to draw them out one by one, pinching them between my fingers. When I found them on Dwayne’s clothing and in Dwayne’s truck and even stuck to the elastic waistband of Dwayne’s underwear, I told myself they’d probably just traveled with me. On me. I was the one spending so much time with her, after all. And the alternative was unfathomable.

My husband fucking Adrienne; Adrienne fucking my husband.

It still sounds impossible. Ridiculous. It sounds like a sick goddamn joke.

But I should’ve known. I could have known. You could always tell where she’d been.