Lies She Told

by Cate Holahan

  I reach the store and loiter outside, reluctant to hand over the bank check in my wallet. In all likelihood, we’ll never get this money back. I’ve written too many stories about “wrongfully” accused characters to think that the state files charges willy-nilly against upper-middle-class people. Either the defendant is being framed, or he’s guilty of something.

  The exterior of the bail bondsman’s reminds me of a dive bar: brick outside, neon signs in the picture window. Inside, however, it is set up like a miniature version of my local Chase bank. There’s a bar-height wooden desk topped by a likely bulletproof glass wall. On the other side, a heavyset man eats lunch at a blond Ikea-type desk, biting into a foot-long sub with the paper peeled back to reveal bread as thick as my bicep. He wears a pinstriped shirt and tie, no jacket. His neck has been tanned to the color of marmalade.

  I wait for him to finish chewing before announcing my presence. He looks up from the sandwich, takes another bite, and points to a door in the corner. I hear it unlock as I reach it. The man welcomes me into his office. Lettuce is wedged between his incisors as he smiles and asks how he may help.

  I start bawling. Adrenaline and my doctor’s wary stare kept me from crying over the phone, but I can’t maintain composure in the face of a simple pleasantry. I know that’s all his offer is. This man doesn’t want to “help” me. He wants to charge me the down payment on a mansion for a short-term loan that he’ll get back the moment David shows for his court date. Yet the offer of help, said without condescension, sounds so good.

  I follow him, sobbing, to a desk stacked with file folders. As I sit in a rolling chair, he offers a tissue from a drawer, which only makes me cry harder. He walks me through the documentation I need in the manner of an oncologist delivering a bad diagnosis. Yes, he’s getting rich off of me, but he feels my pain. Everything is accessible through my smartphone or his computer. Bank statements. Property records. Twenty minutes later, my bail bondsman—I never thought I’d say those words—makes a call. I’m told that that my husband is out. I can go home.

  *

  I emerge from the underground into a painfully bright summer day. The afternoon sky is a neon blue, even though it’s nearly 5:00 PM. I shield my eyes with my palm and keep my gaze trained on the sidewalk until I hit my block. My apartment building is unmistakable, even at a glance. A New York riff on Italian architecture, the midrise is unique with its white stone and microbalconies cupped by ornate lattice work. When David and I had bought the condo, I’d imagined throwing the French doors wide and leaning over the railing to see the sun rise over the East River. The apartment had seemed so romantic. I hadn’t considered the reality of the busy street beneath my feet, the obnoxious honking that would drown out my own thoughts, let alone conversation.

  I wave to my doorman as I enter and then take the elevators to the eighth floor. Bail posted an hour ago. David may be inside by now. One last chance to figure out how to confront my husband about the charges that he murdered his best friend.

  David, I know you were seeing Nick. Trevor told me yesterday that he saw you two kiss on the street. Did you kill him?

  Do I really want to know?

  The pounding in my head picks up as I ride to my floor. I close my eyes against the glaring elevator lights and wait for the car to stop. When it does, I exit into the hallway and head to my apartment. Rather than use my key, I knock. David should be prepared for me. You shouldn’t surprise a murderer.

  He opens the door looking like a well-dressed homeless man. Lines that I have never noticed wave across his forehead, reminding me of a beach after the tide has receded, leaving behind its sunken garbage.

  He steps back from the doorway. I brace myself for our confrontation, to tell him that he needs to, finally, be honest with me and with himself. Suddenly, his arms surround me. His head falls into the crook of my neck. Tears wet my dress strap and soak my shoulder. Sounds sputter from his throat that I’ve never heard before. Wailing, moaning.

  I lead him to the couch. Getting him to sit takes all the skill of a wild horse trainer. I hold his hands and guide him to the cushion, whispering things I don’t believe about everything turning out okay. When he’s finally on the couch, I grasp his hand and ask about Nick in the least pointed way possible. “David. Please tell me what is going on.”

  He runs his palm under his nose and over his eyes. The skin glitters in the light pouring from the window. Not a single square inch of his face is dry. “The police found a note that Nick had sent me in the pocket of one of my jackets.” He gasps. “There was blood on it.”

  “They arrested you over a note?”

  “Yes.” He sounds as though he’s gargling. “A note. They think . . . Oh, God. It was his blood. They think I . . .” He bolts from the couch and stands, shivering, in front of me. “I don’t know how his blood got on it. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What did the note say?”

  I ask, though I can guess. This is the document that David had been tearing apart the house to find, the piece of evidence tying him to Nick’s murder. I imagine a Dear John letter written with Nick’s scathing wit and a threat to out David if he didn’t walk away from the firm. The man was trying to take away my husband while I was undergoing extensive fertility treatments to have our child. He was ruthless when it came to getting his way.

  David’s mouth opens as though he can no longer breathe through his nose. He stares at me, panting. I imagine his thoughts are racing. How to tell your wife of more than a decade that you had an affair with the best man at your wedding?

  “Why do you ask?” His face, pinked from crying, darkens to a plum shade.

  “It seems pertinent. A spot of Nick’s blood on a piece of paper shouldn’t be enough to call out the cavalry.”

  “Who said it was a spot?”

  “You did. Didn’t you?”

  His eyes narrow. “What do you think it said?”

  His questions are squeezing my brain. I stand up, finally angry. “How the hell would I know, David? You’re ranting about a note that has made the police think you murdered your best friend. Naturally, I want to know what the note said.”

  The fight that had flashed across David’s face vanishes. He moves back to the couch and slumps onto the cushion. He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hands, pressing them into his eye sockets to a point that seems painful. “Nick wrote that he was in love with me. He said he’d been in love with me for years.”

  David confesses like a lawyer. He’s not admitting any guilt. Nick wanted him. He’s not volunteering whether or not he reciprocated those feelings. But I know already. David at least explored a romantic relationship. He’d kissed Nick. And my heart says that if David kissed another man, the experimentation didn’t stop there.

  “Did you love him too?”

  David has to say it. Otherwise, I might stay. I’ll invent a melodramatic fiction in which a lovesick Nick kissed David and then, rejected, shot himself before diving into the East River with his last breath. I’ll keep pretending that the man whom I fell for so many years ago wants a life with me.

  Lying to myself is in my nature. When my father left, I convinced myself that he was coming back even though everyone kept telling me that he was gone for good. Chris. My mother. My grandparents. When he didn’t return after a year, I became depressed. I don’t remember all the details. I do remember talking to doctors.

  David looks at me miserably. “He was my best friend.”

  “I mean, did you love him like he loved you? Did you want to be with him?”

  David’s mouth contorts like a stroke victim. I fear a blood vessel in his head will burst or that his heart will give out right here. “Yes.” The word slips out, so quiet that it could be the hiss of wind beyond the window.

  I close my eyes, prepared to be battered by waves of pain. Instead, a strange warmth radiates from my belly to my extremities. As it tingles to the edges of my fingertips, an extreme calm washes over me. It’s as though my soul has le
ft my body and is watching me, unfeeling, from a distance. I see myself rise from the couch, hear myself speak. “I need to be alone for a while. I’m going to the house.”

  I watch as I pick through my disheveled closet, selecting jean shorts off the floor and tank tops from a shelf, choosing bras and underwear from disturbed drawers. I grab sunscreen. My laptop. Everything is stuffed into a canvas shoulder bag unearthed by the police search.

  As I walk through the living room, David calls my name. He attempts a smile, but the look is so pained, it resembles a grimace. “I want you to know that this—our life—hasn’t been playacting. I wanted, so much, to give you a baby. I love you too.” His voice breaks. “Just, differently.”

  The acknowledgement that my husband has never felt for me like I have for him should be a corkscrew twisted in my heart. Yet I don’t feel anything. It’s as though the man sharing this admission is a stranger. I nod at him and walk through the foyer. My only vague discomfort is the slap of the bag against my butt.

  It’s not until the door slams behind me that I slide back into my body with a long slow breath. It’s safe to come back now, I suppose. Hope is gone. My marriage is over. There will not be kids. School pickups. Family vacations. David will go to prison for Nick’s murder, or he won’t. It doesn’t matter. Either way, he won’t be with me.

  As I walk down the hallway, a beep sounds inside my purse. I fish inside for the handset and see that I have a new message from an unknown number. Probably it’s the police wanting to know about my role in this: How long has David had access to my gun? Did I realize it was missing?

  I click the icon and listen to the voice mail. “Hi, Ms. Cole.” The voice is young. Male. Uncertain. He doesn’t sound like a cop. “My coworker Frank at Le Bonhomme said I should give you a call. I was there the night that Nick came in with his new friend. The one in the photo.”

  The bartender leaves a number. I wait until I am in the garage, in the seclusion of the driver’s seat, to call him back. Though I’m resigned to hearing about Nick and David on a date, I can’t promise that the details won’t set off the waterworks again.

  The kid answers on the third ring. From the clinking glasses and background chatter, I can tell that he’s probably in the bar right now.

  “Hi, this is Liza. I’m returning your call about my missing—” I choke on the word “friend.” “About Nick.”

  “Right. Yeah. Hold on.” His voice is muffled as he shouts something to another patron. When he returns to the line, the background noise is more of a murmur. “Well, like I told police, Nick was a regular. He lived in the area. He had started coming with the new guy in July, a few weeks before the papers said Nick disappeared. Usually they came during the week, right around when we’d open. That Saturday was the first time I’d seen them together on a weekend.”

  The revelation doesn’t have any impact. I am dead inside. “Okay, thanks.”

  “And you wanted to know about the woman, yeah?”

  I’d forgotten. “Yes. Right.” My muscles tighten even though I know that she can’t have been me. Dr. Frankel assured me that I wouldn’t forget anything life-changing. Learning that my husband had a gay lover would certainly register on the earth-shattering meter.

  “I’d never seen her before,” the bartender says. “I remember her being really striking though. She was tall, maybe in her thirties.”

  I stare at the concrete wall beyond the windshield and flip through my mental database of Nick’s dates. They were all striking and tall, at least compared to him. Most of the women were probably in their twenties rather than in their thirties. But Botox and alcohol can blur the difference.

  “Anything else you can tell me about her?”

  “Yeah. She had red hair. Not that brick color like everyone is dyeing it now, more like reddish orange. Ginger, I guess. Natural like.”

  I exhale, a long drawn-out whoosh like the breathing exercise at the end of a tough gym class. Though I didn’t believe I was the woman in the bar, it feels good to have confirmation. In no world would I ever be described as a natural redhead.

  “And freckles. Lots of them. Cheeks. Forehead. Everywhere.”

  My relief vanishes. Natural redheaded women with freckles are rarities, like white peacocks or black swans. I’m sure that I know the only one in the world who would be furious at seeing Nick and David together, who would want to break up their relationship at any cost.

  I turn the key in the ignition. Chris is my best friend. She’s always taken care of me. She’s always said that she’d do anything for me.

  I never thought that meant murder.

  Chapter 17

  Tyler is not happy to see me. He opens his apartment door with a tight-lipped smile appropriate for a funeral and doesn’t welcome me in, despite the baby carriage at my side. “Beth, you’re here. Is everything okay?”

  I dab at my dry eyes. “Jake was home when I got there. He’s in a rage about the police coming to the house this morning. I’m sorry. I needed to get out. I told him I was taking Vicky for a walk, but it’s too hot to stay outside for long, and I’m afraid to go back to our apartment . . .”

  I trail off and stare up at him. His lips are parted. The invitation is right there on the tip of his tongue. I only need to coax it out.

  “I am trying to come up with an excuse to go to my mother’s, but she’s still at work, and she’s not answering her phone.” Again, I pretend to fight tears.

  Tyler steps back from the doorway. “You can stay here while you wait to hear from her.”

  In the light of day, his apartment appears different: a plain bachelor pad rather than a sumptuous studio. It has an open layout, similar to my own apartment sans the separate bedroom and eat-in kitchen. The living room has a large couch worthy of a dorm’s common room and an obscenely large flat-screen television on the wall. There’s no dining room. Instead, a breakfast bar with four high-backed stools separates the kitchen from the main entertaining space. The bedroom is in a nook at the back.

  I push Vicky’s stroller to the side of the couch, away from the light pouring in from the windows. “She’s sleeping,” I say. “I really can’t thank you enough.”

  His tight smile widens a bit. “I’m just sorry that you are going through all this. Can I get you some water or tea?”

  I am a coffee drinker, and I certainly didn’t come here for Earl Grey. Still, I accept the tea. It’s a gateway to other things.

  He removes two mugs from a cupboard along with a fancy glass contraption with a well and a filter. From another cupboard, he withdraws a tin of tea leaves. While his back is turned, I pull down the Columbia tank to show maximum cleavage and tilt my torso in his direction.

  Tyler keeps his back to me as he takes the teapot, now with leaves added, to a standing water cooler in a corner of the room. He presses a red lever, and boiling liquid begins filling the well. Steam rises in the climate-controlled air. “We have to let it steep a minute,” he says, returning the clear pot to the kitchen counter.

  As he sets it down, I see his eyes dart to my chest. The memory of his lips on my breasts can’t be that far gone. I round the breakfast bar, grasp his hand, and tilt my head to look into his eyes. He stares back, waiting for me to say something. Studies show that sustaining eye contact with a stranger for two minutes results in passionate feelings—even love. I figure I need twenty seconds for lust.

  Tyler blinks. “This tea—”

  I stand on my toes, grab his face, and plant my lips on his full mouth. For a moment, his eyes remain open. They don’t stay that way. His lids close. His lips part. When he kisses me, I know he understands why I came here.

  We move to the bed. I inhale the musk of his skin. It works like incense, chasing away my mental demons. Here, with Tyler’s hands on my body, I can forget all about Jake and Colleen and what I did. It was a bad dream. This man, this bed, the pants falling past chiseled thighs, the fingers pulling at the drawstring of my sweats: this is reality.

  As he
slips off my underwear, he suddenly freezes. “What about Vicky?”

  “We’ll be quiet.”

  Recalling that my infant daughter is in the room changes his demeanor. Instead of the wild romp that it seemed we would have moments before, he kisses me as though my lips are chapped. His fingertips trace my neck and move to my breasts, the feathering stroke after a massage has ended. He slips on a condom and positions himself on top of me, bearing his weight on his elbows and knees so that I am not pinned to the mattress. When he enters, he doesn’t make a sound.

  Such tenderness feels like love, not sex. I am not ready for this.

  Images of Colleen’s crushed skull flood my vision. I pant from the force of them. Tyler slows his already lethargic rhythm as though he might be giving me more than I can handle. The images come faster. I see the pipe. The gun. The blood.

  I start coughing, a violent hacking fit that doubles me over and waters my eyes. Tyler withdraws from my body like he’s spotted signs of a venereal disease. He tells me I need tea.

  No amount of liquid will wash Colleen from my mind. I was stupid to think that I could rid myself of her and start my life anew. She’ll never leave me. I’ll never be able to forgive myself.

  I start bawling, silent sobs that shudder through my whole body and blind me with tears. Tyler returns without a mug. He helps me sit up and then positions himself to my right, far enough away that there’s no chance of our naked bodies touching. Any desire he’d felt is long gone.

  “Beth.” He speaks softly, subduing his accent. This is his shrink voice. “You shouldn’t feel obligated to sleep with me because I am letting you stay here for a few hours. In fact, we shouldn’t do anything besides talk. You need to process everything that has happened.”

  “No.” The word barely makes it out between sobs. “There’s nothing to make sense of. It’s all over. My marriage is over.”

  “Even if that’s true—”

  I gasp. “I don’t want Jake anymore.”