Lies She Told

by Cate Holahan

  I close my eyes and see the pills in my palm, two dozen perfect little circles, promising to make the pain go away. If I’d been shorter. Smaller. My legs give out. I fall to my knees on the sand and then drop back onto my butt. Hot grains scald my thighs. The pain reminds me that I am here. I am here and I am real even though I have invented my entire history.

  Chris sits beside me and drapes an arm over my shoulders. She pulls me to her side, offering her chest to cry on. Shame burns my cheeks. Chris loves me enough that I thought she might kill for me. How could I fail to trust my best friend?

  “The suicide attempt made you forget the abuse again. Your mom told you that the hospital stay was for depression.” Chris sniffs. “My mom said that the doctors told your mom to tell you the truth. There’s medication to help you reintegrate your memories. But your mom thought it better for you not to know. She said that the only reason you had been able to finish high school, get into a good college, and have a seminormal life was because you didn’t remember. She was afraid that if everything came back up, you wouldn’t want to keep on going.”

  Puzzle pieces fit together. Suddenly, I understand why I fear my childhood home when it gets dark. That would have been when he’d have come for me, in the between hours after school ended and before my mom returned from work.

  Chris wipes her face on the shoulder of her pajama shirt. “I was so worried that the doctors would reveal the abuse when you first went for fertility treatments. But I guess the scarring mimics severe endometriosis, and with the gynecologists not knowing your history, they must have assumed. And then I really did hope that one of these treatments would work, that the drugs would dissolve the scar tissue and it wouldn’t matter why it existed in the first place. I mean, medicine makes new things possible all the time.” Tears carve tracks into her cheeks. “I really wanted you to be able to have a baby and never again have to face what had happened.”

  Seeing Chris in pain for me over something I don’t even feel is real is too much. I focus on the water in front of me. It undulates like a curtain in the wind, pulling back, billowing forward. A breathing metaphor. The past is always hiding behind the present, threatening to peek out and drag everything down.

  Chris hugs me to her side. “I’m so sorry. I should have told you before. Your mom and I were wrong to keep this from you. You are strong and you are going to survive this. In a year’s time, David won’t matter. None of this will matter. You are going to be okay.”

  I know Chris wants to believe this, but I can’t agree with her. Instead, I grab fistfuls of sand and open my fingers just enough to allow a stream of grains to slip through. Over and over I do this, watching the seconds pass. I tried to end my life and I don’t remember it. My father sexually abused me for years and I don’t remember it. My mother killed him and I don’t remember it. What kind of person forgets the most formative events of her life?

  Not a strong one. Maybe a murderer.

  “I think I did something horrible and suppressed it,” I whisper. “I need to get something.”

  I grab my purse and head back toward the house, as if in a dream. Chris calls after me, begging me to explain where I am going, what I intend to do. But I can’t answer her. I’m not sure myself. I only know that I must find my Ruger. For the first time since discovering it missing, I have a sense of where it might be.

  When I hit the deck, I turn left toward the side yard. Chris steps sound behind me. She’s following, close enough to stop me from doing anything crazy while allowing some space. I approach the line of weigela. Clusters of flowers sprout from the plants like red-dyed dreadlocks. The bushes have sprawled over the years so that the side yard doesn’t have a garden bed as much as an unkempt hedge.

  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.

  Vicky stops crying the second I place her on the padded changing surface and release the tabs on her diaper. The blue line on the outside of her nappy that lets me know when it’s wet extends all the way to the waist, a mercury thermometer about to burst in the heat. The diaper is so heavy and warm with urine that I can’t properly fold it into the neat pentagon that fits in the hole of the fancy bin purchased at Babies“R”Us. Pee ruptures from the sides as I shove it inside while holding Vicky down on the changing mat with my other palm.

  “I can do this all by myself.” I say the words aloud to comfort me. “Jake wasn’t helping anyway. I can do this alone.”

  I put on a fresh diaper with my clean hand. Now dry, she wants to nurse. All the liquids that have leaked out of my eyes and chest during the past twenty-four hours have left me dehydrated. I pull Jake’s cover flat and place Vicky in the center of the bed on her back, feeling like a bad mom for leaving her unattended as I wash my hand in the kitchen sink and simultaneously grab a water glass from the cabinet.

  My thirst makes me overfill it. It spills as I rush back into the room, creating a wet spot on the hardwood that I will have to wipe up later. I scoop Vicky back onto my torso and sit with my back against our headboard, drinking water with my right hand while she drains my left breast.

  After she finishes, I put her on my shoulder to burp her. She spits up on the strap of my shirt, catching the ends of my hair. I tell myself that I could use a shower anyway as I put her to nurse on the other breast. When she’s done, I hear a loud squirt followed by the distinctive sour-milk smell of baby poop. Again, I remove her diaper, this time wiping the mustardy grains from her backside. I put on a fresh one, dress her in a side-snap onesie that says “Sleep, Eat, Poop, Repeat” and put her down for a short digestion nap in her crib.

  I strip out of my college gear and get into the bathtub, not even bothering to check the reflection in the mirror. I can imagine what I look like after bawling over Colleen. I don’t need confirmation.

  While rubbing shampoo into my scalp, I realize that Jake didn’t take any of his toiletries in the shower caddy. He probably only packed an overnight bag and intends to talk things out with me in the morning. I’ll have to box his stuff up and have it ready to go by the time he gets here. I add packing my husband’s things to my mental to-do list: feed Vicky, change her, entertain her, buy packing boxes from the UPS store—and tape. I can’t forget tape.

  The water rinses sudsy and clear. Not red. Not now. I tilt my face into the stream, as though the steady drops on my forehead might penetrate into my brain and flush the image of Colleen’s blood flowing off my body. It doesn’t work. Instead it adds the phantom sound of her falling into the water, like a log dropping into a stream. The sound intensifies as I head into the kitchen for another glass of water to help me replenish my milk supply.

  I sit on the sofa as I drink my eight ounces. The couch is a holdover from Jake’s bachelor pad days. He can have it. In fact, he can take the television too. I prefer reading to watching movies. I scan the room for anything I want to keep and realize that I can’t find one item. I only want Vicky. I don’t deserve anything else.

  Instead of packing Jake up, I should box my clothing and Vicky’s things. We can move to a cheaper apartment, maybe somewhere by my mother. Of course, then my commute would get longer. But my mother could help watch her when I needed to work late.

  A buzzing sound stops me from listing the pros and cons of relocating to New Jersey. I track it to my purse, hanging off of Vicky’s stroller in the foyer. Jake’s number is on my cell screen.

  He shouldn’t be calling me so soon. Goose bumps, like those I’d felt walking to the dumpster, break out on my arms. Something is wrong.

  I pick up without saying hello.

  “Beth, we need to talk,” he says. “I followed you in the park. I know what you did.”

  LIZA

  “You have to call the police.” Chris says this as though she’s stating the obvious, like we are talking about reporting a break-in or a suspicious stranger and not turning in murder evidence against my husband of twelve years. The best defense, she tells me, is a good offense. If I bring the gun to the cops and explain that David must have buried it, they’ll be more likely to take my side than if the weapon comes up in court as evidence unearthed by David’s investigator.

  She might be right. Still, I can’t do it. Though my husband didn’t love me like he loved Nick, I have to believe that our marriage meant something.

  “I need to talk to David first.”

  Chris looks at me as though I’ve forgotten our conversation or the fact that my husband lied to me for the better part of a year. “You can’t warn him. That’s idiotic, Liza. He’ll go to the police and say you told him that you buried it.”

  Arguing with Chris is difficult enough without reeling from the revelations of the past hour. My head is a Newton’s cradle where the horrors of my childhood hit against my present problems in perpetuity. My marriage began failing when I couldn’t get pregnant. My father is the reason I can’t have children. I married a man who could never really love me. I had a father who never loved me at all.

  “I have a splitting headache.” I press my fingers to my temples for emphasis. “I need aspirin.”

  Chris makes me promise to wait in the side yard for her to return with my pills. The house, with its kitchen knives in the drawers and its possibly full bottle of aspirin in the medicine cabinet, is far too dangerous for a person with a suicide attempt in her past and a plethora of reasons.

  I pretend to agree with her logic as I direct her to the downstairs bathroom. As she enters through the side door, I slip the gun into my bag and run to my car.

  I hear the screen door slide open again as I’m shutting the driver’s side door. “Liza?” Chris sounds incredulous. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m sorry,” I shout through the window. “But I have to talk to my husband.”

  Chris runs out to the driveway, waving the bottle of aspirin, shouting for me to come out and talk this through. I jam my keys into the ignition and put the car into reverse. The sound of gravel rattling beneath the chassis drowns out Chris’s cries as I back out onto the road and gun the engine.

  The man who proposed to me by the lighthouse as purple flames lapped at the cold night air is not a monster. He loves me, in his way. How could he have stayed with me for twelve years otherwise? There must be a less sinister explanation for him burying my gun at my house than trying to frame me for murder. Perhaps, panicked after shooting his boyfriend, he hid it in the one place he considered safe, somewhere he thought no one would ever look. If I confront him, he will explain that. He’ll tell me the truth.

  Now that I’ve had a healthy dose of reality, I need to know everything that happened. Ignorance is never bliss. It is to walk around with a cancer in your colon, one that could be cut out safely within seven years but is inst
ead allowed to grow, undisturbed, while you focus on other matters, unaware that it is spreading to your gut, infiltrating your bone marrow, your blood, all your vital organs until it has twisted your body into something grotesque and unsustainable. Until you’re too sick to survive.

  I need to know.

  *

  The headache subsides during the drive home. When I hand the keys to the garage attendant, my thoughts have stopped throbbing. For the second time in two days, I feel an unnatural calm, as though somebody else—not I—will imminently accuse my husband of killing his homosexual lover.

  The peace comes with heightened senses. As I enter my apartment, I feel David’s presence in the house. I drop my purse on the glass dining table and remove the gun from the zippered interior pocket. I place the weapon beside my bag. Sunlight seeps through the French doors and saturates the metal. David will see it as soon as he exits the bedroom. He won’t be able to deny that he had anything to do with Nick’s death with the evidence staring him in the face.

  “Dave?” I head to the master, listening for sounds of his activity. Is he sleeping? Working? Waiting for me?

  The door is open, revealing him at my desk, back to the exit. He’s hunched over his laptop, head close to the screen. I hear crying. Whatever he’s reading is engrossing and upsetting. Another letter from Nick?

  He doesn’t seem to know I’m here. I slip into the room and round the bed, trying not to startle him. When I get close enough to touch his shoulder, I clear my throat. “David. Come with me into the living room. We need to talk.”

  He bolts upright as though he’s heard a ghost. For a moment, I don’t recognize the man standing in front of me. Fault lines carve his cheeks from his gaping mouth. His brow bulges above narrowed eyes. This man is capable of violence.

  He raises a hand as if to hit me. I backtrack without thinking, stopping only when I feel the wall behind my shoulders. The bed blocks my escape to the living room. I’m penned in the corner, a trapped rat. David’s hands wrap around my biceps.