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“What did he do, Lily? Did he hurt you?”
“I’m so sorry, Christian,” she says, a spasm, a vibration to her voice as she says it. She isn’t crying, but she is on the verge of it. Her chest is heavy when she breathes, her lungs falling into her with each breath, practically gasping.
I cup her face in my hands. I tell her, “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
Lily talks faster now, her words rushing out like water from the tap. “He said he and Nina have been having trouble. He started telling me about it, about how she’s been distant lately. Her mother has been sick. They found a mass, among other things. I think I told you that. It’s an emotional burden. And Nina has been caring for her mother, which leaves her emotionally unavailable for Jake. Jake said that he needed affirmation and affection from Nina that she wasn’t providing, that she couldn’t provide because she’s always with her mother. He understood—he was sympathetic, but that didn’t mean that, as a man, he didn’t have needs of his own. That’s what he told me. I didn’t know what to say. It was so personal, Christian. It was awkward. It didn’t feel like he should be telling me any of it. Nina is my friend, not him. It’s the kind of thing women tell their girlfriends. I said nothing back, I just listened, and then Jake told me what a good listener I was, how he was so grateful for me. If only Nina could be more like me, he said.” She pauses. “He tried to kiss me, Christian,” she says, and I stand up and fly into a silent rage, not at Lily but at him. I know him. We’ve had dinner together, a handful of times. I’ve been in their home and they’ve been to ours. I recommended him to a friend whose wife needed surgery to have a brain tumor removed. I vouched for him, and then he makes a pass at my wife.
“That son of a bitch,” I say, going to stand at the window, looking out. In my head, I think that I could kill him.
I’d always mostly liked Jake. He’d been cocky, if anything, a little overconfident, but a good guy, I thought.
“The thing is, Christian,” Lily says, rising up, coming to me, reaching for my arm, “that I might have hurt him.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, turning away from the window to face Lily.
“Nina said today that he didn’t come home last night. She doesn’t know where he is. She hasn’t seen him since he left for work yesterday morning. She’s worried.”
“Hurt him how?”
“I pushed him away when he tried to kiss me. He didn’t like that, being refused. He turned on me.You think you’re better than me? That I’m not good enough for you.That’s what he said, and then he said something like how I was sending the wrong signals and leading him on. He called me a whore. He was angry, Christian. So angry, and I was... I was scared. We were down one of those paths, far away from the main trail. There wasn’t anyone else there. He grabbed me by the arms, like this,” she says, fastening her tiny fists around my upper arms, and I see on hers now, when the light hits them, how there are the marks of Jake’s hands, his fingerprints bruised on her skin, some made black-and-blue. Lily is upset as she describes how he pushed her and how she fell to the ground, and how she wasn’t sure that he might not try and rape her. She got onto her hands and knees and tried crawling away, but he grabbed her by the ankles and pulled her back so that she fell to her face, and not just her face but her abdomen where the baby, our baby, my baby, is.
I don’t breathe as she describes it for me.
“There was a rock. I could reach it. It was large, big enough that it fit my whole hand. It was partially buried and I didn’t know if I was even going to be able to get it out of the dirt. I didn’t think about what I was doing. I just had to get away from him, you know?” she asks, and she’s crying now, and she doesn’t have to tell me how she hit him with the rock.
“It’s okay, it’s fine,” I say, running my hand the length of her hair, pulling her body into mine, comforting her. “You did the right thing, babe.”
“His eyes went wide, like this,” she says, showing me with hers, “like I’d surprised him. He staggered, and then fell away from me, to the ground. There was blood coming from his head.”
“How much blood?” I ask.
“A decent amount.”
“Was he conscious?”
“Yes. I think so. His eyes were open.”
“But he fell?”
She nods. “Yes.”
“How many times did you hit him? Just the once?”
“A few times, maybe,” she says. “It happened so fast. It was a reflex. I felt like I had to do whatever I could to get away. For me. For the baby.” She’s talking so fast now. “I didn’t think about what might happen to him. He fell, and then I ran as fast as I could. I kept running until I got back to the car. I didn’t look back. I didn’t know if he’d gotten up, if he was coming after me. Why do you think he didn’t come home, Christian? Do you think I—” And then she gasps, and her hand goes to her mouth.
“No,” I say decisively. She didn’t kill him. I take her hands into mine, only now seeing dirt wedged beneath her fingernails, the broken nails from where she clawed that rock out of the earth. “No. No, Lily. I think that fucking coward was too afraid to go home. There would have been a gash on his head. A bruise. Right? How would he have explained that? And he probably thought you’d tell Nina what he’d done. Did you tell Nina what happened?” I ask, and she shakes her head erratically, her hair falling into her eyes, and says no, that she thought about it, but that she couldn’t bring herself to tell Nina because she didn’t want to hurt her like that. Nina would have been devastated if she knew what Jake tried to do.
Later she shows me the marks left behind from Jake. It’s not just on her arms. Her knees and a shin are skinned from crawling away from him. A palm is bruised from where she caught herself when she fell, when he pushed her to the ground. The emotional wounds are worse. Lily is scared. She’s haunted by what happened. She thinks he might be out there somewhere, angry, seeking revenge. I tell her no. But I don’t know where Jake is, and I don’t know why he didn’t go home to Nina.
“You should have seen his face, Christian,” she says, trembling. “I’ve never seen anyone so angry. His face was red. He was sweating. There was spit coming from his mouth. He just...” She shakes her head. There’s fear in her eyes. She’s reliving it.
“Lily, stop,” I say gently, but she keeps talking.
“I don’t know, Christian. He just snapped.”
Jake snapped. That’s one way to put it. We’ve all been there before. We’ve all had those moments where we freak out, where we act aggressively, in a way that feels beyond our control. It’s a rage response. Once I cursed out some twenty-year-old kid on the side of the road who rear-ended me. I almost broke a computer because the page was loading too slowly and I didn’t have the patience to wait. In high school, I punched my fist through wired glass after missing a shot that would have won us the conference basketball game. We lost the game. I needed stitches. I still have a scar. But Jake Hayes took it too far.
As night falls, Lily moves away from the wall of windows that face the river, telling me she feels exposed in our home. I dim the lights, but short of turning them off, we’re still visible from the outside. There is a vaulted ceiling in the family room, with two floors of windows. We couldn’t figure out how to cover them when we moved in, so we didn’t. We left them bare. We preferred the undisrupted view at the time: the river, the trees.
