“I need a favor.”
She eyes me. When I said these words yesterday, she ended up not sleeping all night. She quickly covers the distrustful look with a tight smile and nods at me to continue. I am her daughter. She’d do anything for me—even if she doesn’t like it.
“Jake cancelled on me last night and—”
“Oh, honey. I’m sorry. Was it work? Did you at least get to see him a—”
“I went out with a friend and spent the night. I’d rather Jake think I was here.”
My mom folds her arms across her chest, a perfect replica of my own skeptical stance—or, rather, the original version. I’m the imitator. “What friend?”
I lower my head as though ashamed. A normal person would feel that way. Clearly, something is wrong with me. “A male coworker.”
“Oh, Beth.”
“I was lonely and wanted the attention. Nothing happened. I just drank a bit too much. I’m not used to it now that I’m nursing. I passed out on his couch.”
My mother frowns. She hates cheaters. My father was a philanderer. She hates my father. Now I seem as though I took after him.
“I’m not proud of it, Mom. It was a mistake. It won’t happen again. I was disappointed that Jake canceled, and I’ve been a bit depressed, honestly, being home with Vicky all the time.” I’m playing the overwhelmed mom card. That always gets a bit of compassion. “Jake is always working late. I went out for a drink by myself and ran into this guy—”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter! Please, just, if anyone asks, say I slept over here last night.”
“Won’t you see this man when you go back to work?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Come on, Beth. You changed your clothes.”
My mother is looking at me the same way she did when I was a little kid and she’d catch me picking my nose and wiping it on the side of the couch. What is wrong with you? You think I didn’t see that? I could tell her that I changed when I realized Jake wouldn’t take me out, opted for this black ensemble. I could reiterate that nothing happened. But she thinks she’s seen me.
“Mom.” I reach for her, but she recoils. “It was a mistake. I’m sorry. Do you want Jake to divorce me over one act of stupidity?”
My mother looks away. I’ve disgusted her. She’s ashamed that she raised me. Feeling horrible for poor Jake. “Everyone says they’ll never do it again,” she says.
Pictures flash in my mind. The pipe. The blood. The smashed back of Colleen’s head and her face, battered and broken beyond recognition from striking the floor each time I slammed the metal pipe into her back. Tears fill my eyes. I wipe them away with my forearm. More come, wetting my cheeks, filling my nose, falling from my chin. I shake my head vigorously. I will never, ever, ever do anything like this ever again. Never. “I’m so sorry.” My voice comes out as a rasping, wail. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I will never . . . I’m so—”
My mom opens up her arms. “Oh, Beth.” Her voice cracks, as though she, too, struggles with tears.
“I’m so sorry.” I fall into her embrace. She feels warm and comforting. Thank God for mothers.
“It’s okay. It was a mistake.” She strokes the back of my head and shushes into my ear. “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay. You were here all night.”
LIZA
I wait for David in a stark gray room, sitting in a classroom chair that is as uncomfortable as the ones I remember from high school. The precinct lacks cell service, so I amuse myself by flipping through stored photos. Here’s a picture of David and me at an anniversary dinner. Here’s one of us posing with Chris and Emma last year. Here’s one I took of Dave and Nick.
They stand side by side. David’s arm is draped over Nick’s narrow shoulders. My husband is tilted forward with his mouth slightly open, as though he were giving a camera direction. Nick, for his part, is smirking with his lips pursed. The expression is probably to show off his high cheekbones, but it could be that he’s suppressing a laugh—possibly something to do with me.
After ten minutes, David emerges from behind a steel door. His pink complexion looks drained. The only time I remember him being this upset was a year ago. Nick had called. David had rushed out in the middle of dinner. Later, he’d said that there’d been a problem with the lawsuit against the school. He’d missed something important and needed to work it out. He’d had the same pallor.
“What’s going on?”
David shakes off the question and gestures with his head to the officer behind him. Whatever transpired in the police department, he won’t discuss it anywhere near the station. His secrecy makes me nervous. If he can’t tell me in front of the cops, what the hell is he hiding? What did they do to him? What do they think he did?
A police officer says something about following up. I’m not listening to the detectives so much as looking at David’s reaction to whatever they say. He blanches with each word. By the time the officers are done, my husband looks exsanguinated.
A protective instinct ignites inside me. “We are mourning our friend and you are pressuring him like this?” I yell. “That’s unconscionable. We have rights. You can call our lawyer.”
Instead of making similar threats, David walks in a daze to the exit. We pass through the metal detectors in silence and exit onto the guarded street. Once outside, I again ask what happened. He pleads that he is too tired. We will talk when we get home.
By the time we enter the apartment, the suspense has made me physically ill. My head throbs as I lead David to the living room love seat. City lights stream in from the French doors, spotlighting the white leather sofa onto which David slumps, shielding his eyes with his palm.
I turn the chandelier above the dining table to its dimmest setting and then draw the blackout curtains. David’s hand drops from his face. I ask if he’d like water. When he shakes his head no, I assume my position: sitting beside him, looking squarely into his lowered eyes. “Tell me everything.”
David coughs, as though the words are lodged in his throat. “They found Nick’s body in the East River. They showed me photos.” He rubs his lids with his fists. “He was beaten. Badly. Horribly. I mean, God, Liza. His head was bashed in with something. A tire iron, maybe. There were flecks of metal. And . . .”
David takes a choppy breath. “He’d been shot. The cops think that the killer put a .22 into his gut and then, once he was immobilized, beat him to death.”
In my mind’s eye, I see Beth with the lead pipe, reddened with blood, raised like a baseball bat. A knifelike pain stabs my frontal lobe. White spots speckle my vision. I drop my head into my hands and rock back and forth. I lack the constitution for true crime. Violence against my made-up characters is all the brutality I can withstand. Thinking about Nick’s real warm blood coming out of his real bludgeoned body, the fear that he must have felt as a real, live human being facing his all-too-real death . . . it’s too much for me. I can’t let myself imagine.
David pats me on the back, happy, I think, that I am finally as broken up about his friend as he has been. “God, Liza, his face was barely recognizable, just this waterlogged . . .” I feel his body tremble beside me, as though an electric current has been applied. The cops tortured David with these details. Why would they get so graphic? What could they hope to gain?
“His skull was destroyed. He might have been alive when—”
I put up a hand, unable to swallow any more gory details.
My racing heartbeat resounds in my head. “I don’t get why the police told you all this.”