The Last Thing She Ever Did(5)

At twenty-nine, Liz was no longer young—at least not by the standards of her law-school class at the University of Oregon. Certainly there were older candidates for a law degree. In the beginning, Liz had placed those in their thirties or older somewhere along a spectrum between pity and admiration. She’d even caught herself thinking it was “cute” that a grandmother from Wilsonville had made it through the admissions process. Really, Liz? What’s that about? Someone starting over late in life, working like a dog at it, “cute”? Someday that might be you. Chasing a dream. Never getting there. A dangling carrot that her fingers could only graze.

Move.

Like a crazed marionette, Liz jumped from the shower and pulled a towel from atop the train rack over the toilet. No time to use the hair dryer. Working at her dark brown hair under the fluffy weight of the white terry cloth, she looked at herself in a mirror that did not offer the benefit of the concealing condensation a hot shower would have provided. She winced. She looked wired. Ugh. Her hands shook as she applied deodorant, and for the life of her she couldn’t step into her underwear without sitting on the toilet. The room was spinning a little, and for just a flash she thought of the carousel at Disneyland, where her parents had taken her and her brother when they were kids. She’d gotten sick and thrown up on Jim. He never let her forget it. She felt that same queasiness now.

Liz needed to get to the testing center. Now. The location was a hotel conference room in Beaverton, more than three hours away. She’d need to risk a speeding ticket to get there on time.

Jeans finally on. Top on. And only one shoe. Liz hobbled through the house, looking everywhere for her other shoe. She stumbled and leaned against the doorjamb. Where is that shoe? Finally, back in the bedroom, she found it next to Owen’s side of the bed.

Owen! She could kill him just then. Why had he let her sleep? Why hadn’t he shaken her awake at the table? He knew the importance of this exam. It was everything to her. It was the pathway to all she wanted to be. It would provide the proof to her husband that she could fulfill a dream.

That she had a goddamn right to one too.

As she slipped her foot into the second shoe, though, Liz recalled Owen speaking to her that morning. The memory came to her through a gauzy veil. Everything about the night before was a little foggy. The pills. The coffee. The reciting of case law out loud until her voice was a rasp. The fishing through the refrigerator for orange juice because she thought it would give her more energy than a Red Bull. Only because she was out of Red Bull.

Yes, Owen had tried to wake her that morning. He had. Great. Her lateness was her own fault.

Liz remembered him actually lifting her out of the dining chair. “You are zonked out, babe,” he said, hooking his strong hands under her arms. “You need to get yourself together. Get cleaned up and go.”

“I need to sleep,” Liz told him, resisting his help and sinking back into her chair. “Test tomorrow.”

“More like today,” he said. “Four hours from now, right?”

She looked at him. Her eyes were sore and dry. She knew she looked like a junkie at a 7-Eleven, watching the hot dogs on heated metal rollers as though they were as fascinating as a breaching whale.

“Four hours?”

He held out his phone, showing her the time.

“Shit,” she said. “I’ve got to get going.”

“Yeah, you do. And so do I. I have that meeting with Damon and the other principals this morning. Got to be there on time.”

Even now, in her addled state with both shoes on and the memory of his attempt to rouse her, Liz couldn’t suppress the feeling that Owen had always put his needs before hers. It had been that way since before their wedding. He had told her over and over that they would live large—and not because of her skills as an attorney.

“Lawyers are a dime a dozen,” he’d said more than one time. “No offense, babe. Technology is king. You’ll see.”

She hated technology. Sometimes she hated Owen. He was so sure of himself, so insistent that he was on his way to something very important. Something big.

With his firm about to go public, Owen had started a list of all the things money could buy. A Ferrari. A month in Fiji in one of those grass huts that stuck out over the ocean. It went on and on. She went along with his dreams, mostly because there was no point in arguing. Either they’d happen or they wouldn’t. Only one item on his list had made Liz push back: Owen planned to bulldoze their little house on the river. However, it wasn’t at the top of his ever-growing list, and for a long time she had hoped that he would forget he’d suggested it.

Liz couldn’t argue that the house didn’t have its problems. Dry rot had weakened the beams under it. Indeed, the floors slanted in the kitchen so steeply that once when she dropped a cherry tomato it rolled to the corner with such velocity that it could’ve been an outtake from Poltergeist.

“We have such history here,” she would remind him.

He’d wrap his arms around her as though he loved her and understood. “We’ll make our own,” he’d say. “Who wants to live in someone else’s dream?”

Liz would nod as if she agreed, though she didn’t. Her grandparents had built the two-story Craftsman bungalow in 1923. She’d spent every summer there. On the drive over from Portland, she’d watch the forest from her place in the backseat until they reached Bend, where the Deschutes sparkled like someone had sprinkled broken glass on a slate-gray table. The house was small, but every inch of it held some kind of memory. Even as a child, she’d felt it was her house. Her refuge. When her grandparents died, they left the house to her mother and father. After they passed in a car accident in Eastern Oregon, Liz and Owen bought out her brother, Jim. It took every penny they had and left them with a mortgage payment that stretched their already tight resources nearly to the snapping point. She’d thought Owen had fought to get the house for her. It was only after the deal was done that Liz understood how her husband of four years really felt about the house.