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“The police,” Lily says. “They came to school to speak with her. Nina was crying. Someone overheard what they said to her. They said that Jake was dead. They found him.” Lily’s chin quivers. I pull her into me. I wrap my arms around her and, at first, she lets me. At first she sinks against me and she lets me hold and console her.
But then she pulls abruptly back and says, “She looked at me, Christian,” her voice changed, becoming stronger and more taut.
I ask, “What do you mean she looked at you?”
“I was there, just as she was leaving. I saw her walk out of the building with the police. She had her back to me. I didn’t think she saw me. But then, she stopped all of a sudden. She turned back. She looked right at me. Her eyes,” she says, and then she shudders, like she’ll never forget the look in Nina’s eyes as she was leaving, walking through the foyer, bookended by the police, turning back as with some clairvoyant knowledge that Lily was there, to fix her gaze on Lily’s face.
“Did she say anything to you?”
“No,” Lily says. “She just stared.”
I don’t know which is worse. If she had said something or that she didn’t.
And then, in a mind-numbing tone, as if telling me dinner is in the oven or asking about my day at work, she says, “The police should be here soon,” and I wheel back, squinting my eyes toward a window at the front of the house to see if they’re already here.
Lily turns her back to me. She turns around to face the other way, staring back out the window at nothing, as if resigned to her fate.
“Lily?” I gently ask.
“What?”
“What time did the police come to school?” I try to work out how much time we have until the police are here. Now that they’ve identified the body, they know where Jake died. A witness puts Lily at the scene on the same day that he died. It’s too much of a coincidence, though what the police have so far is mostly circumstantial. A person has to infer something from the evidence. They have to presume something. It’s not direct evidence, such as if Jim Brady had actually witnessed Lily hitting Jake with that rock or if the police found the rock with Jake’s blood and Lily’s fingerprints on it. What they have is enough to suspect Lily was there and that she might have done something, but it’s not enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she killed him. They have no motive. They have no weapon.
I offer false promises. “It’s okay,” I say to Lily as I grip her gently by the shoulders, leaning into her, sinking my face into the back of her head, inhaling her scent. “It’s going to be okay.”
I don’t know if I say it for her benefit or for mine.
In my arms, she’s stiff. She’s quiet. She knows I’m lying.
My hands move down to her abdomen. My arms wrap around her from behind, coming to rest on my child growing inside. “We’ll figure this out,” I say, and then I hold her and we stand like that for a long time, looking out into the backyard as it gets darker outside, the clouds drifting in the wind, the faint moon rising up over the river, revealing itself intermittently, depending on whether it’s behind the clouds.
I think about the first time I saw Lily. We were in college, in a calculus class. Lily was the shy, quiet one, who was also brilliantly smart. She could solve the problems no one else could. I loved her from the very first time I ever laid eyes on her, the first day of the semester when I walked into class and saw her sitting there, bent over her desk. Her hair was even longer then, impossibly long. It pooled on her desk, the color of toffee. Lily must have felt me staring at her because she looked up and our eyes met and, when they did, I felt complete.
I leave Lily standing at the window. I go to look online for information. It’s not there yet. We have to wait, which is torture. I hate waiting. I need to know now.
Eventually I convince Lily to move away from the window, though it takes some persuading. We spend the evening in nervous anticipation. I can’t sit down. I can’t sit still. I try to, but then I find I need to get up, to move, to do something. I mill about the house. Every time I hear a car engine coast down the street, I think it’s the police, coming for Lily or me. I go to look and find myself standing in the foyer in the dark, watching the bobbing and weaving movement of headlights down the street. I hold my breath as they come, descending on the house. I think this is it, the beginning of the end. But then the cars stop before they get to our house, going to some other house, and I feel my jaw unclench, my body slacken. I breathe. I go back to sit by Lily, only to return the next time I hear a car in the distance.
I do anything I can to distract myself. I make dinner that neither Lily nor I eat, and then I busy myself cleaning dishes like they’ve never been cleaned before, taking out all my angst on a pan with a steel wool pad.
If we say anything, it’s only to appease ourselves, things like “Just because Jim Brady saw you at Langley Woods, doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’tproveanything” and “It’s justifiable homicide, Lily. You acted in self-defense. There is no criminal liability in cases of justifiable homicide. We’ll get a good lawyer. The best.” I do most of the talking. Lily’s eyes are glassy, empty, blank, and her skin is pale. I try to get her to eat—just some crackers if nothing else—but she won’t eat. I try to get her to drink. I hand her a glass of water. She takes it from me, she thanks me for it, but then she sets it on the coffee table, where she leaves it untouched.
At some point I say, “I’ll say it was me, Lily. Just because Jim Brady didn’t see me, doesn’t mean I wasn’t there.” And then, “This isn’t something you did alone. We’re in this together, Lily, remember? Like Bonnie and Clyde,” trying and failing to get a smile out of her. She nods dimly, and I’m not sure what she’s nodding at, us being in this together or me taking the blame for what she did.
I force myself to sit on the couch beside Lily. We stare blankly toward the TV, waiting for the news to come on and eventually it does. The lead story is how the body found at Langley Woods has been identified.
My eyes go to Lily’s hands in her lap. She’s been picking at her nails so that one bleeds. I reach over for her hand. It’s like ice. I take it into my own, rubbing it between mine to warm it up.
This moment reminds me of some apocalypse movie. The asteroid is about to hit Earth and we know we’re going to die. It’s imminent. It’s only a matter of time.
I look back at the TV as they share a picture of Jake, one which I have to think came from Nina, and I imagine Nina going through the pictures on her phone, finding one of Jake to share and giving it over to the police. It’s the first time I’ve paused to think about Nina and what she must be going through. I’ve only been thinking about Lily and me, and for a second, I get almost choked up, imagining Nina at work being informed by the police that Jake is dead.
In the image, Jake is on a boat. A blue lake surrounds him. Jake looks so easygoing and affable in the image, and I have a hard time reconciling this face and this wide smile with the furious, unhinged man who attacked Lily that day in the woods.
It’s almost like they’re not even the same guy.
They go to a live shot of a reporter standing in the parking lot of Langley Woods. It’s night now. Darkness surrounds her, though with the camera’s lights, the trees are still visible behind her. The reporter says, “The body belonged to thirty-nine-year-old Jacob Hayes, a local neurosurgeon. Dr. Hayes was found dead yesterday morning with a gunshot wound to the head...”
I choke on nothing. Everything but the reporter’s face fades out. I only see her face.
