I know this person too, though my mind can’t piece together where from. She’s the kind of woman about whom people whisper, “She was a beauty in her day.” Now frown lines frame her mouth. Her eyes are pulled down by dark circles. She wears a sopping button-down shirt. Her hair has been yanked haphazardly from a chignon so that half is still pinned while other sections hang to her shoulders.
“Mom.” The girl whispers the call. She hugs her arms over her askew bikini top and shivers. “Mommy.” She starts rubbing her forearms. The bloody tissue in her hand shreds from the friction. Bits of paper fall to the floor. “Mom.” Still, she whispers. “Mom.”
The child drops the tattered tissue and stars clawing her arms. Tracks of blood follow the lines of her jagged nails. Terror fills her dark eyes. “Mom!” She screams. “Mom! Mom!”
The woman splashes to the steps, running beneath the water. Blue slacks cling to her legs as she emerges onto the deck. The spearhead of a garden shovel hangs beside her knees. It clatters to the ground.
The mother kneels beside the girl and grasps her hands, stopping the fingers from tearing into any more flesh. “Shh,” she hushes. “I didn’t know. I’m so sorry. I never thought . . .” Though tears fill the woman’s eyes, she doesn’t let them fall. “We found him in there. Okay? He’d been drinking. None of this happened. Okay? Nothing happened. We just found him.”
The girl considers the woman with a glazed expression and then turns her attention back to the sea. A blank calm erases the terror that had twisted her features.
The mother slowly releases her daughter’s hands. She watches them, waiting for another attack, but they hang limp at the child’s sides. She runs back to the shovel, picks it up over her shoulder like a musket, and rounds the house to the side yard. The girl stands and follows. Her face still, like the ocean just before dawn.
Again, there is grunting. The shovel sticks from the earth beside a line of flowering weigela bushes. The woman steps on its head, burying the metal deep in the ground before heaving it upward to dislodge a mound of dirt. She continues digging until a hole, the depth of a forearm, appears beside her feet.
The shovel goes in. She stands on the blade and then tugs at the handle until it pops out. The stick is tossed to the side. She motions for her daughter. The child crouches beside her. Together, they push back the earth with their hands until there is nothing except a sprawling bush. Wine-colored petals cover the site so that not even the earth looks disturbed.
*
I wake, unable to breathe. Panting. Gasping. Drowning. Tears have soaked my pillow. My neck is wet. Instinctively, I reach to where David would lie next to me and claw air. Everything that has happened in the past twenty-four hours returns with dizzying clarity. I have left my husband. I am in my house in Montauk. The woman in my dream was my mom.
A pale-yellow glow looms outside the patio doors. I stumble from the couch and walk through the dining room to the half bath. My reflection stares at me. Her eyelids look sunburned. I turn on the faucet, splash water on my face.
“Stupid nightmare,” I tell my mirror image. The woman had been my mother, but I’d cast her in a distorted version of my bestseller, Drowned Secrets. “It was just a bad dream.” My reflection sobs in response. She doesn’t believe me.
I am still wearing yesterday’s denim shirtdress, now speckled with wet splashes and stinking of hormones. Christine has seen me looking worse. I’ve seen her on day six of the same pajamas. How I look or smell doesn’t matter.
I reenter the living room and grab my phone from my bag. Chris’s voice mail answers my first call. I dial again. I have to know what role she played in all this. Did she know that Nick and David were seeing each other? Why didn’t she tell me? What did she do when she found out?
She answers on my third try. “Hey, Lizzie.” She yawns. “What’s up? What time is it?”
“I’m in Montauk. Please come over.” My voice is raspy. I can barely get the words out.
“God, Liza, what’s wrong? Are you okay? Is David there?”
“David’s home. I need to talk to someone. He’s been charged with Nick’s murder.”
There’s a gasp on the other end. “Okay. It’s all right. Everything will be fine.” She’s awake now. Her voice is sharp. Adrenaline filled. “Are you in the house?”
“The living room.”
“Okay. I need you to go to the beach behind the house, where people can see you. Don’t stay in the house. Go where people can see you, okay? I’ll be right there. The beach. Wait for me on the beach.”
I don’t understand why I can’t be in the privacy of my home. “Okay, but—”
“Liza, where’s your gun?”
*
Chris stays on the phone as she rushes out of her house and drives the ten blocks to mine. Every few seconds, she asks me to reassure her that I don’t have my Ruger and that I am sitting on the beach. She demands to know what the sand feels like, what the waves look like, anything to keep me focused on the present. I tell her that my sandals are going to leave awful tan lines on my feet and that I am concerned about grains getting caught in the stitching of my purse. This makes her feel better.
Whenever I attempt to discuss David, she tells me that we will talk about him all I want as soon as she gets there and then inquires about the weather. My foul-mouthed friend speaks in the soothing tones of a suicide hotline operator. I have the sense that this isn’t her first time talking someone off a ledge.
I hear a car stop in front of the house simultaneously through the phone speaker and from somewhere behind me. Chris’s footsteps crunch on the gravel driveway and then slap against the deck boards. I turn as she is clearing the tall grasses at the edge of the house. She slides down the beach, still in her blue-and-white-striped pajamas, ginger hair shining in the morning sun.
Before she sits beside me, she looks at my hands, scanning for my Ruger. I open my purse in front of her as though she were an airline security agent and then drop the bag back onto the sand and raise my hands in surrender. She smiles weakly at me and settles down on my same dune. Her arms open. I fall inside her embrace and lean my head on her shoulder.
“What happened?”
The waterworks are no longer on full blast, but the dial could turn at any moment. I try to share my story in one breath—before I’m sobbing too hard to speak. She gets the facts of the case against David without my opinions. The cops arrested him for Nick’s murder after finding a note with Nick’s blood on it in his suit pocket. Nick had written that he was in love with my husband. They’d been having an affair for months, maybe the better part of a year. On the night Nick disappeared, he’d been seen at a bar with David.
When I finish, she hugs me tighter and repeats how sorry she is. She says nothing about the bar.
I peel away from her. “How long did you know?”
Her chin retreats to her chest. “What?”
The motion seems too theatrical to be genuine. I can’t watch anyone else that I love lie to my face. Instead, I look at my fingers pressing a print into the sand, the kind hospitals give new mothers of their babies’ palms. “A bartender at the gay bar where Nick and David were seen said a woman came in asking about them.” I grab a handful of sand and watch it slip through my fist like a timer. “She had red hair and freckles.”
Chris’s tense energy changes beside me. I sense her shoulders lower. Her back curves. She inhales and exhales, preparing for a story.
“I saw them together. Nick called and said that I should meet up with him at the place we went before.” She scoffs. “I should have known he’d have a motive other than sleeping with me. But the power of wishful thinking, right? I convinced myself that he’d gotten distracted on our first date and wanted to try again.”