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I’ve spent the night lying awake, wondering where it is and if it has blood on it like Lily’s sleeve, and if so, if it has Lily’s fingerprints on it too.
She rolls over onto her back. My question forces her eyes open. I see the whites of them in the darkness. She sleeps in my old shirts at night, ones she took out of a Goodwill bag and laid claim to. This one is flannel. It’s soft beneath my hand. The shirts are long because I’m that much taller than Lily, who is five foot three, relatively petite. They hang down to her upper thigh, meaning her legs are bare. I press my leg against hers, feeling her skin next to mine. Under the weight of the quilt, she gives off heat.
“I dropped it, I think,” she says, her voice slow with sleep.
“Would you remember where?”
“I don’t know.”
I say okay. I wait until Lily’s breath slows and evens out as she falls back to sleep. I slip quietly from bed, careful not to wake her. I sort through the hamper in the closet for the clothes Lily wore yesterday: the white shirt mostly, but also the pants, her underpants, a pair of socks. I carry the clothes downstairs, and leave them in a plastic bag, knotted tightly, by the garage door.
I’ll have to get rid of them.
Early in the morning, I convince Lily to take the day off work. I’ve already called my own boss and told her I wouldn’t be there. A sub can give Lily’s math test. The kids can live without her for a day. I listen as she calls in sick, saying that she must have eaten something that didn’t sit well; her stomach is bothering her. Lily rarely, if ever, misses work. Whoever is on the other end of the line is understanding, sympathetic even. She can’t use the pregnancy as an excuse because no one knows we’re pregnant.
Lily says that she slept better last night. I hardly slept. Still, she wears a bemused expression on her face, as if lost in thought, and I can only imagine what she’s thinking about and if she’s reliving the moment Jake Hayes pushed her to the ground.
I pour myself a cup of coffee. I sit and watch from over my mug as Lily forces down a piece of dry toast. The key to staving off morning sickness, she’s told me before, is to eat. Hunger is what makes it worse. I watch Lily from across the kitchen table. Even in this state, she’s a sight for sore eyes. She has a round face and full cheeks, with features that are soft, nothing overly angular or sharp though her eyes are large. Her skin is like satin; I imagine it staying that way even when she’s sixty or seventy and we’re growing old and gray together.
“What?” she asks, looking up from her toast as she catches me staring at her.
I lower my mug to the table. “If you did anything to him, it was only to protect yourself.”
I say it to soothe her, to quiet the voices in her head.
I make it worse. I shouldn’t have said anything.
“Do you think I killed him?” she asks, her eyes widening, and I think of the blood on her shirtsleeve, the shirt in the bag by the door, trying to quantify it, to work out how much blood it really was, and if it only looked worse than it was. I minimize it, telling myself if Lily broke his nose when she hit him, that would explain the large amount of blood. Broken noses have a tendency to bleed a lot. And they’re not fatal.
“I’m just saying you shouldn’t feel guilty for anything you did or didn’t do. He put you in a difficult situation. He left you no choice but to fight back. You know that, don’t you?”
Her conscience deceives her.
“I keep thinking,” she says, “that if I had just screamed, someone might have heard me. If not, the sound of it alone might have scared him off.” She shakes her head, her eyes getting wet, the toast in her hand shaking so that she sets it down before she drops it. “I don’t think I screamed, Christian. I keep going over it again and again, trying to remember. I don’t think I said anything. Why didn’t I just scream?”
“Because you defended yourself, Lily. Which is better than screaming. You didn’t let yourself become a victim.”
She stares at me, saying nothing. She nods, but she doesn’t believe me.
I pack things in the trunk before we go: a shovel, gloves, garbage bags, just in case. Lily doesn’t notice.
As the sun rises, we leave the house and drive to the forest preserve just as traffic is starting to back up on the roads and expressway.
“Why did you want to come here?” Lily asks.
“I want you to show me where it happened.”
“Why?” she asks.
“I want to see it with my own eyes.”
What I don’t tell Lily is that I need to find the bloody rock, the thing that puts her here. I also wouldn’t mind finding her missing earring because I think it must have come out when she was trying to get away from Jake. I want to get rid of any evidence that she was here.
“What if he’s here?” she asks, scared.
“He won’t be,” I say. She doesn’t buy it. We both know that I don’t know. But if he is here, then he’s not alive or he’s not in good condition, and then there is nothing he can do to hurt her. Either way, she’s safe. I grab her by the hand and say, “Listen. That’s a lie. I don’t know if he will be here or not, but either way we’ll know, okay? Not knowing is the hardest part.”
Lily’s eyes hold mine for a long time, trying to decide if I mean it this time.
