Chris sits beside me and drapes an arm over my shoulders. She pulls me to her side, offering her chest to cry on. Shame burns my cheeks. Chris loves me enough that I thought she might kill for me. How could I fail to trust my best friend?
“The suicide attempt made you forget the abuse again. Your mom told you that the hospital stay was for depression.” Chris sniffs. “My mom said that the doctors told your mom to tell you the truth. There’s medication to help you reintegrate your memories. But your mom thought it better for you not to know. She said that the only reason you had been able to finish high school, get into a good college, and have a seminormal life was because you didn’t remember. She was afraid that if everything came back up, you wouldn’t want to keep on going.”
Puzzle pieces fit together. Suddenly, I understand why I fear my childhood home when it gets dark. That would have been when he’d have come for me, in the between hours after school ended and before my mom returned from work.
Chris wipes her face on the shoulder of her pajama shirt. “I was so worried that the doctors would reveal the abuse when you first went for fertility treatments. But I guess the scarring mimics severe endometriosis, and with the gynecologists not knowing your history, they must have assumed. And then I really did hope that one of these treatments would work, that the drugs would dissolve the scar tissue and it wouldn’t matter why it existed in the first place. I mean, medicine makes new things possible all the time.” Tears carve tracks into her cheeks. “I really wanted you to be able to have a baby and never again have to face what had happened.”
Seeing Chris in pain for me over something I don’t even feel is real is too much. I focus on the water in front of me. It undulates like a curtain in the wind, pulling back, billowing forward. A breathing metaphor. The past is always hiding behind the present, threatening to peek out and drag everything down.
Chris hugs me to her side. “I’m so sorry. I should have told you before. Your mom and I were wrong to keep this from you. You are strong and you are going to survive this. In a year’s time, David won’t matter. None of this will matter. You are going to be okay.”
I know Chris wants to believe this, but I can’t agree with her. Instead, I grab fistfuls of sand and open my fingers just enough to allow a stream of grains to slip through. Over and over I do this, watching the seconds pass. I tried to end my life and I don’t remember it. My father sexually abused me for years and I don’t remember it. My mother killed him and I don’t remember it. What kind of person forgets the most formative events of her life?
Not a strong one. Maybe a murderer.
“I think I did something horrible and suppressed it,” I whisper. “I need to get something.”
I grab my purse and head back toward the house, as if in a dream. Chris calls after me, begging me to explain where I am going, what I intend to do. But I can’t answer her. I’m not sure myself. I only know that I must find my Ruger. For the first time since discovering it missing, I have a sense of where it might be.
When I hit the deck, I turn left toward the side yard. Chris steps sound behind me. She’s following, close enough to stop me from doing anything crazy while allowing some space. I approach the line of weigela. Clusters of flowers sprout from the plants like red-dyed dreadlocks. The bushes have sprawled over the years so that the side yard doesn’t have a garden bed as much as an unkempt hedge.
A wine-colored shrub calls out to me from my subconscious. I kneel beside it and brush back its tangles of blooms until I see the dirt beneath. I scratch at the ground with my short fingernails. The earth is soft, like fresh mulch. It gives way easily. Clumps of soil fill my palms.
I keep digging, trying to get a hole up to my elbow as my mother did in my dream. In my memory. Again, Chris asks what I’m doing. She tells me to stop. I can’t, though. Somewhere deep inside of me is a need to be here, sitting on my haunches, fists beneath the ground.
My fingers hit something. Hard. Metal. I pull back the overgrown bush and carefully remove the object. It’s too small for the head of a broken spade, though it has a handle. My entire body starts vibrating as though the ground is shaking beneath my feet. I rub my eyes with the back of a soiled hand and stare into the smudged palm of the other one. There’s a fat rubber grip connected to a long barrel. A silver slide catches the sunlight.
“What do you have there, Liza?” Fear fills Chris’s voice.
I don’t answer. But this is my gun.
My hand trembles so badly that I am afraid to put my fingers anywhere near the trigger. I pull out the magazine. The weight of it alone tells me bullets are inside. It lands on the ground with a dull thud and sinks into the loose soil. I pull back the slide. A round pops out into my waiting palm. I examine the copper bullet with its red tip as though it is a strange wasp that I fear might sting me. Slowly, I tilt my hand and watch it fall from my palm into the mound of dirt beside the hole.
It needed to be done. Beth speaks in an assuring voice.
I face Chris with the weapon in my hand. “Don’t worry. I unloaded it. But I knew it was here, which means . . .”
My voice breaks. Chris kneels beside me. She rubs my back slowly, urging me to continue. I don’t have to tell her to keep what I say secret. Her set jaw assures me that whatever I tell her she’ll take to the grave.
“I must have used it. I probably found out about the affair somehow and then went to confront David and Nick. I must have killed—” I cut myself off with a deep breath. The air burns in my lungs like smoke.
Chris places both hands on my shoulders. “Liza, you did not murder Nick. You didn’t even know that he was sleeping with David until this week.”
I gnaw at my bottom lip as I shake my head. “With my history of suppression, I could have found out before and then forgot. But while I knew, I might have—”
Chris hushes me. “You are my best friend, Lizzie. I’ve known you for how many years? You’re the most loving, caring, honest, good human being that I know. You didn’t kill Nick.”
I want to believe her, to trust that murder is not in my character. But I didn’t know who I was until moments ago. I have the backstory of a bad person.
“Nick was shot, Chris. He was shot and I buried a gun.”
“There must be another explanation.” Her eyes widen. “Maybe David buried the gun.”
“At my house? Where I knew to look?”
Again, she shushes me, patting the air this time for me to control the hysterical wavering in my voice. “It was buried beneath the hedge like where the woman disposed of the murder weapon in Drowned Secrets. Maybe that’s where David got the idea.”
“Come on, Chris. Why would he do that?”
Chris digs her hands into her hair, picking up the twisted section into a ponytail. She holds it atop her head, thinking. After thirty seconds, she lets her hair drop with a long exhale. “In case the police suspected him . . .”
She doesn’t need to finish. Her eyes say the rest. She thinks David wanted the gun to point to me. My husband was setting me up for Nick’s murder.
Chapter 18
Endings don’t stop time. My marriage and a woman’s life are finished, but Vicky is howling in her bassinet, begging for my breast. Her life goes on and so must mine. I am a single mother. I don’t have the luxury of wallowing in guilt.
I tell Tyler that I’m heading to my mom’s house across the river. With all the lies I’ve told about Jake, he’d feel honor bound to keep me from my apartment as long as my husband might be there. He doesn’t know that I’ve kicked Jake out already. It didn’t fit the damsel-in-distress narrative that I’d used to convince Tyler to let me back in his bed.