I spew bullshit. I have no idea if anything I’m saying is true.
“What should we do about it?” Lily asks about the blood on the ground. I take what’s left of my water bottle and pour it over the splotch, weakening it, watering it down. Lily and I gather leaves and lay them on the ground, hiding what’s left of the blood. When we’re done, it’s not overly noticeable.
On the way back to the trail, I say, “Let’s look for the rock. We should try and find it just in case.”
Lily catches me in my lie. She stops suddenly, and turns to face me. “In case he’s dead?” she asks point-blank. “You just said he was fine, Christian.” Lily isn’t dumb and she’s much stronger than she looks. “In case I killed him?”
The answer is yes. She might have killed him. Or he might have left, he might be fine, just like I said. Absent a body, I don’t know.
Let’s be clear: I don’t want to find a body here.
But not knowing where he is is so much worse.
As it turns out, looking for a rock or an earring in a forest preserve is no different than a needle in a haystack. We never find either of them.
“What do we do now?” Lily asks as we walk empty-handed back to the car.
“I was thinking that he would have had to drive here from his house, right? Did you see his car in the parking lot when we got here?” I ask, because if not, then we’ll know he left, that, despite Lily hitting him, he was well enough to drive.
“I don’t think so,” Lily says. “But I wasn’t looking for it.”
We backtrack to the parking lot to look for Jake’s car. I take Lily by the hand as we walk. She’s gone quiet and I wonder if she’s thinking of the blood in the grass like I am, about how viscous it was, and about how there was more of it than I would have expected for a man who got up and walked away, despite what I said.
Jake drives a BMW 7 series. They start at close to a hundred grand, though some are more like a hundred and fifty grand. I know what kind of car he drives because the last time we met for dinner, months ago, the car was new and he was totally stoked about it. It was all he could talk about: how quickly it accelerated and how well it handled. After we ate, Jake and I left the ladies at the restaurant, and he took me for a drive, to show it off, to prove how fast it could go. Jake wanted me to envy his car and, by association, him. It hadn’t bothered me at the time.
Lily and I had laughed about it later, how he couldn’t shut up about that damn car.
Would you love me more if I was rich like him? I remember asking Lily in jest. I didn’t mean it. I knew Lily loved me regardless of how much money we had or didn’t have in the bank. Lily and I have never been rich, but we do just fine. Our house was way out of our price range when we bought it, but we made the decision to buy it anyway because, for the price and for the land it was on, with the size of the property and the river views, it felt absurd not to. We knew we’d grow into it. We both knew the next few years after buying the house would look different, and they have. But we felt okay with that because the house was an investment and eventually, our decision to buy it will prove fruitful. It just means that I drive a Honda for now and, unlike Jake, there are no BMWs in my immediate future.
Only now, all these months later, in light of what’s happened, does Jake rubbing his car in my face get under my skin.
When we get back, there are maybe ten cars in the parking lot, none of which is Jake’s. I feel relieved because it’s better, of course, if his car isn’t here. It means that Jake left on his own, that Jake is fine, that Lily didn’t kill him.
In which case, I might.
“He’s not here,” I say. “He left.”
I look at Lily. I expect for her to look relieved, but she doesn’t. She’s quiet.
Lily’s holding something back.
“What is it?” I ask.
“There is another lot,” she says, “off Feeney.” She knows this place better than me.
Lily and I get back in my car. We say nothing as we take the frontage road to Feeney Avenue, where we look for the second parking lot just off Newcomb Road.
The parking lot is round. Slowly, I make my way around it, not seeing Jake’s car. “He’s not here either,” Lily says, finally warming up to the idea that Jake Hayes is actually fine. “His car isn’t here.”
I gaze over at Lily in the passenger’s seat. “No,” I say, shaking my head, feeling a smile come on. “It isn’t.”
“Thank God,” she says, exhaling heavily, relaxing back into her seat. “Where do you think he went if he didn’t go home?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s crashing on a friend’s couch while his head and ego heal.” What I said that first night is right. Jake couldn’t have gone home with a gash on his head. How would he have explained that to Nina? He would have been worried, too, that Lily would have told Nina what he’d done or tried to do.
Lily’s relief is palpable. The very real possibility that she might have killed him, no matter how justified it was, weighed heavily on her. Lily never would have been the same if she’d taken a man’s life. She never would have forgiven herself.
I leave the parking lot. I go to pull back out onto the street.
It’s as I’m about to accelerate onto Newcomb, that I see it.
“Fuck,” I exhale, seeing Jake’s car before Lily does. It’s parked on the street, which is for overflow parking. It’s also for people who come to the forest preserve early, before it opens. When Langley Woods is closed, barricades stop people from pulling into the lot, but that doesn’t deter them from using the trails. There is nothing that says you can’t park in the street.
“What?” Lily asks.
“It’s there,” I say.
She leans forward, looking out the window, but she doesn’t know what she’s looking for. “What’s there?”
“His car.” I point at it.
Jake’s BMW isn’t alone on the street. Far from it. There are at least eight other cars there.
It takes a second for the realization to hit Lily, and then her hand goes to her mouth and she falls back in the seat, quiet, deathly still.
“It doesn’t mean anything, Lily,” I say, but it does, because Jake never would have spent the night—two nights now—at the forest preserve by choice. I bring my hand to her thigh. It’s been cold these last few nights. The temperatures get down to about fifty or fifty-five degrees at night, but it doesn’t have to freeze for a person to become hypothermic. If Jake was bleeding, if he’d lost a significant amount of blood, if he was wet or if it was windy outside, it would have made him more susceptible to hypothermia.
I pull out onto Newcomb and pass by Jake’s car on the way back to the expressway.
“What are you doing?” Lily asks.
I tell her, “Going home.”
“Why? No.”
“What are we supposed to do here?”
“We have to look for him,” she says. “We can’t just leave him here.”
Yes, I think, we can.
It isn’t that I don’t want to help. But if Jake Hayes is here, then he’s beyond helping. This place is huge and he or his body could be anywhere. We already know he wasn’t following the main trail. He’d gone off it, with Lily.