“I’m a monster.”
“You made a mistake. Don’t make another. Don’t drag us down to a place that we can never get out of.”
“We’re already there, Owen.”
Owen ushered her out of his office and down the hall to the reception area. He could feel the eyes of Lumatyx employees as they traced his movements. Owen used to show Liz off. She was so beautiful. Smart. She could talk to anyone who worked there about whatever it was they did in a way that made everyone feel that she understood what they were talking about. One coder thought Liz was cool. The accounting lead asked Owen one time if Liz had been a model. She was part of what his future was going to be. Not arm candy. She was smarter than that. True, some of that pride had ebbed when she failed the bar. He’d lied and said she’d had the stomach flu that day. He didn’t want his team to think his wife was a failure. That would make him look foolish, as though he’d chosen poorly.
And now Liz had made a spectacle of herself. He was embarrassed beyond words. Angry too. She was a screwup.
He had chosen poorly.
“Is Liz all right?” the front desk girl asked as Owen turned to go back to his office.
“Our cat got hit by a car,” he said.
“Oh, no,” she said, making a sad face. “That’s terrible. Is it going to be okay?”
“No,” he said. “I’m afraid not. She didn’t make it. Liz is crushed. Me too.”
Her sad face went into overdrive. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “That’s super-rough.”
He thanked her and went back to his office. Later that day a card addressed to Owen and Liz appeared on his desk. Everyone at Lumatyx had signed it:
Sorry about your cat . . .
Linda Kaiser had just about given up on her latest Blue Apron meal. Tuscan-style pear and arugula pizza? Seriously? There was no need to make pizza from scratch when anyone in Beaverton with a phone could get one delivered and ready to serve in half an hour. The pictures made it look easy, but it was nothing short of a major hassle. She put the caramelized pears on the pie and slid it into the oven and poured herself a glass of wine.
She followed the sound of the TV news and joined her husband in the family room to watch. The lead story featured reporter Katrina Espinoza-Jones discussing the case of a missing boy from Bend.
She sipped from her glass as a woman’s face filled the flat-screen mounted over a fireplace mantel crowded with framed family photographs and Scottie dog knickknacks.
“I know that woman,” Linda said, pointing. “I saw her at the bar exam.”
Her husband, Dale, reached for the remote. He preferred ESPN.
“Wait,” Linda said, tapping his hand. “Stop it! That woman’s lying. Why is she lying?”
“Lying about what, Linda?” Dale asked, although he didn’t care about anything she had to say. She always saw trouble where there wasn’t any.
Linda snatched the remote. “She wasn’t at the exam all day at all. She left after only a few minutes. Came late, too. Something’s very wrong about that girl.”
“Hey,” he said, “why don’t you report it?”
His tone was only on the edge of being sarcastic. Too much and she’d smack him. Linda never liked her “rightness,” as she called it, challenged. Dale had learned to live with it by allowing himself to be less right.
Even when he wasn’t.
Linda was always tweeting a complaint. Calling customer service. Telling a server how to present a dish. Asking to see the manager at a store. Linda always needed her voice heard. One time she called the police about a suspicious package left at her door.
It was from UPS, addressed to her husband.
She took her wine to her laptop and looked up the number for the Bend Police Department. When it came to giving her two cents about anything, Linda refused to be denied.
“It’s my civic duty,” she told her husband as she punched in the numbers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MISSING: FOUR DAYS
Over the next few days Carole and David would appear in front of the cameras. Carole would plead for their son’s return. She’d hold a framed photo of Charlie against her chest, much in the same way she’d held him when he was a baby, rocking slightly back and forth. David sat there impassively, responding to questions only when prompted, and never when Carole was speaking.
“Our Charlie was our dream come true,” he said during the interview with the reporter from KATU. “If you know anything about where he is or what happened to him, please call the Bend Police Department.”
When the lights went off, the war between Carole and David would start again.
After a while, only Carole and her precious framed photo would meet the press.
David was nowhere to be seen.
Liz filled the old white claw-foot tub and stripped while the bathroom filled with the dense vapors of the rising water. She sat awkwardly on the edge of the tub, thinking about what to do. She’d lost a couple of pounds since the accident, the only good thing that had happened because of it. Stress had made her hair fall out in the back, and she’d taken to wearing a ponytail to conceal the physical effects of her guilt. Her skin above her breasts broke out in a light pink rash, and no amount of calamine could calm its angry hue.
The bath was an escape more than anything. She needed an escape. From everything. And everyone. Especially Owen. He was flopped on the bed reading some paperwork and cursing Damon, who he was all but certain was trying to screw him over.
“He’s just a nerd without any game,” he said as she slipped away to the quiet of the bathroom. “All of a sudden his balls have grown to grapefruit size and he’s trying to push me around. What a joke. He’s such a prick. He thinks that he’s the one that created Lumatyx. It wasn’t even his idea. It was mine. I was the one who came up with everything. He just worked the code and the back end.”
She wondered how long this had been going on, how long her husband had been a stranger. She’d been immersed in her law books and her volunteer work at the humane society and hadn’t been paying attention.
The water beckoned her with the promise of an end to her misery.
So did the expensive razors that Owen had been buying online.
Liz slid into the water, letting it envelop her. Her head slipped below the surface, and she opened her eyes. The surface swirled, breaking up the light from the overhead fixture. She wondered if drowning victims were able to see the world from the depths before they died. Was it beautiful to them?
She stayed under the surface for a long time before emerging, gasping and sucking in air. Drowning would never work. With drowning there was too much time and too much fear baked into the solution.
A razor glinted at her.
I’m over here! it seemed to say. Pick me up. Easy. Quick. Never dull.