I turn to face my friend. She twists her hair into a coil. In the white sun, it looks like a rose-gold rope. “When I arrived, he was with David. I didn’t assume a date, though. I thought maybe that it was an intervention of sorts for you through me. Nick had said that David wasn’t working hard enough because he was taking care of you. I thought maybe now David was here to tell me that the fertility drugs were making you . . .”
She trails off, but the word she wants is “insane.” Her political correctness takes me aback. Christine doesn’t have to fear calling me nuts. The only people who can’t be called crazy are crazies. Am I acting loopy? Do sane people even ask that question?
“I wasn’t about to listen to two men complain about a woman’s hormones,” Chris continues. “So I didn’t go over to them. Though I did have a drink. I’d gone all the way out there, right? It was crowded, and I deliberately stayed in the corner behind some big dude so they didn’t see me.” She releases her hair. It stays wound on her shoulder like a stretched copper spring. “I didn’t suspect that Nick and David were on a date until they left together. They weren’t kissing, but maybe they were walking a bit close. Anyway, I asked the bartender about them and he said that Nick had been bringing David by a lot recently. The way he said it, kind of smirking, made me think something could have been going on.”
I examine Christine’s guilty posture. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know for a fact and I didn’t want to upset you. I mean, you were already under so much stress trying to get pregnant.” She looks out at the water and blinks. “I didn’t want it to push you over the edge and have anything happen again.”
She swallows this last word as though she regrets it.
“What do you mean, ‘again’?”
She digs her feet into the sand and tightens the coil of hair on her shoulders. I recognize these behaviors from our childhood. This is Chris at her most nervous and defiant. “‘Again’ like when you got depressed after your dad left.”
She isn’t looking at me. Reminding me of my brief bout of depression should not be this difficult for her. It’s not as though she’s a stranger to psychiatrists. She saw one after her divorce. I wonder what she’s hiding. Is it that she followed Nick back to his house to talk sense into him and ended up shooting him? Chris has access to her father’s gun. She might have taken it if she’d been heading into a bad area in Brooklyn.
Unspent tears make Chris’s hazel eyes glow green. My best friend has always looked out for me. If she killed Nick because she believed me too fragile to handle the affair, then I’m responsible. It’s my fault he is dead.
I grasp her arms. “Please, Chris. What are you not saying? I won’t tell anyone, but I have to know. I just can’t take more lies. I am going crazy from all the secrets. I don’t know what’s true anymore. What’s real. I can’t take it. I can’t live like this.”
I am on my knees, begging and shaking my best friend. To my right, I can hear the water. I fight the urge to run into it, to bury my head beneath the waves until I can’t breathe anymore.
Chris looks at me as though she heard my thought. “You tried to kill yourself, Lizzie. In high school, after you found out that you couldn’t have kids because of the abuse.”
I release my friend and fall back onto my haunches. “No. Why would you say that? I talked to some doctors because I was depressed that my dad left and I’d realized he wasn’t coming back.” An image assails me as I speak. A white bottle with a red label. Over the counter. Generic brand.
“Your mother killed your father in front of you.” Chris wipes away the tears on her cheeks with sandy fingers. Crystals sparkle like glitter on her spotted skin. For a moment, I don’t think she’s real. She’s a figment of my imagination. I’m inventing what she’s saying.
She shudders. “He’d been molesting you for years. Since you were eight, I think. You didn’t say anything until the touching became more . . .” She coughs, driving fresh tears from her eyes. “Invasive. He had you convinced that everything was a normal expression of affection until then. You opened up to me about it. I told my mom. She told yours. Your mom came home to confront him. You’d been here alone a lot that summer while your mom was in the office and your dad was, supposedly, selling houses. She caught him in the act and—”
A sob cuts off her words. I look out over the ocean, trying to make sense of her story. My story. The childhood she describes is a nightmare out of one of my books. It’s not mine. I had an alcoholic father who skipped out on the family and a loving, devoted single mom who died young of cancer. It wasn’t an ideal childhood. But it wasn’t that horror show.
Tears slick the skin beneath Chris’s nose. She looks at the ground as she wipes them away. “Your mom hit him with something. Knocked him into the pool unconscious. He drowned. She never went to jail for it, but everyone kind of knew she did it. Even the police. No one really wanted her to pay for it, though. Ultimately, the cops bought the line that he must have been drunk and dove into the shallow end. It was plausible enough. There’d been a dent on the bottom of the pool. The police psychologist who talked to you kind of put two and two together, but the cops couldn’t prove it. They couldn’t find any weapon that—”
“Wait, I know this story.” Anger pulls my legs upright as I realize the source of Chris’s tale. This is the plot of my first book. My best friend is recounting my own fiction rather than admitting to killing Nick.
I dust the sand from the back of my bare legs, not caring that the wind is carrying it into Chris’s eyes. “This is what happened in Drowned Secrets. You don’t think I’d know a story that I wrote?”
She stands and reaches for me. I step back from her, leaving her hands hovering in the air. “You based that on your life, Liza! On suppressed memories.”
I take another step back. “No. I made it up. I make things up. That’s what I do. I make up—”
“That story was real.” Chris’s voice has lost its practiced calm. “The doctors said that the trauma of what your father did and then guilt over your mom’s actions made you disassociate from the experiences.” Her hands fall to her thighs. “You probably remember bits and pieces, but you’ve convinced yourself that they’re dreams or things you’ve seen on the television or . . . your fiction.”
Christine walks forward and grasps my hand. The pressure of her fingers pleads with me to be strong, to remember.
“Your mom and I didn’t know, at first. When you wouldn’t talk about what happened, we thought it was too painful to discuss. Then when you started to demand that everyone call you Liza rather than Bitsy or Beth, we thought it was because your dad had used those nicknames and you didn’t want to be reminded . . .”
She trails off, tears tumbling down her cheeks. I can’t look at her. She can’t be telling me the truth. I don’t remember my father touching me.
But why would she lie?
I slip my hand from her palm and turn toward the water. The morning mist has burnt off. Sunlight dances across the ocean. It’s surreal that the day is bright and beautiful. I’ve stumbled onto the wrong movie set.
Chris sniffs loudly. “It wasn’t until high school, when you didn’t get your period and went to see the gynecologist, that we realized you didn’t remember. The doctor told you that you couldn’t have kids from scarring related to the abuse, and your mom had to explain. You tried to overdose on aspirin. If you hadn’t already had such bad headaches and the bottle had been fuller . . .”
I close my eyes and see the pills in my palm, two dozen perfect little circles, promising to make the pain go away. If I’d been shorter. Smaller. My legs give out. I fall to my knees on the sand and then drop back onto my butt. Hot grains scald my thighs. The pain reminds me that I am here. I am here and I am real even though I have invented my entire history.