“When they identify the body,” Lily says, “Nina will know where he was when he died. She already knows I was there at the forest preserve, remember?”
Of course I remember. How could I forget? It’s all I’ve been thinking about since we first heard about the discovery of the body: that people know that Lily was there, and soon they’ll know that Jake was too.
“Maybe it’s not even him,” I say, trying to stay optimistic. “Other people have died in those woods.”
Lily just gives me a look. Of course it’s him.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean that you did something to him, Lily. That forest preserve gets a lot of foot traffic. You remember how busy it was when we were there. It was hard to even find a place to park. Anyone could have been there. Anyone could have done it. Anyone could have hurt him, like that Brady guy.”
“Jim,” she says, the husband of her colleague, the man who saw Lily there that day.
“Right, Jim Brady. He could have done something to Jake.”
“Why would Jim Brady do something to Jake?”
“He didn’t. I’m just thinking out loud. Creating reasonable doubt,” I say because that is all we need. Reasonable doubt. “Or maybe Jake did something to himself. Maybe he slipped and fell and hit his head.” I’ve asked before, but never gotten a clear answer. I try again now. “How many times do you think you hit him with the rock, Lily?” If it was once, maybe twice, a skull fracture could be ruled an accidental death, maybe. There are plenty of things to trip over at the forest preserve, plenty of places for a head to hit, like a boulder or concrete. I went to school with a kid who fell off his bike and hit his head on the curb. He wasn’t wearing a helmet because no one did back then. I was there when he fell off his bike. I watched him fall over the handlebars and onto the street. He got up, dusted off his pants, got back on his bike. I laughed at him. We all did. He laughed at himself, too, which later helped lessen my guilt. We went to the store for candy. He thought he was fine. Six hours later he was dead.
“I don’t know, a few,” Lily says. This whole thing with the body has her visibly rattled. Lily didn’t sleep again last night. All night, I felt her tossing and turning in bed. She mumbled in her sleep, things like stop and no, and unconsciously she whimpered so that I had to shake her awake and tell her she was okay. For a long time, I stayed awake with her, rubbing her back, trying to get her to relax.
“Do you think it was like twice,” I ask, “or like six times?”
“I think more than twice.” Lily is on the verge of tears. I hate bringing it up because I know it upsets her. “I just, I don’t know, Christian, I just reacted. It was involuntary. I don’t even remember doing it, but I know that I did because I remember what he looked like after, how he was bleeding.”
When I think of Lily fighting back, I picture something wildly uncontrolled.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.” That’s good to know. Not the answer I was hoping for, but good to know. “Where do you think you hit him? Like here?” I ask, pointing to my forehead, “Or here?” pointing at the base of my skull. I ask because I know that a fracture at the base of the skull can be more deadly because it’s stronger there and harder to crack. If you do, you’re essentially screwed, which is what happened to my friend from grade school. When he came down on the curb, he came down on the back of his head.
Lily shrugs. “Maybe both,” she says. She thinks about it, trying to decide, and then she shakes her head. “I don’t know, Christian. I really don’t know. It happened so fast. I reacted.”
“But if he was coming at you,” I reason, “he would have been facing you, right? You probably got him here,” I say, pointing again at my forehead.
Lily forces herself to think. I’m quiet. I let her think. I see in her eyes that she’s going through it in slow motion, watching it play out all over again. Her face changes. She’s remembering now. Something is coming into focus. “I think I hit him in the forehead. And then I remember that he turned around. He started to walk away from me. I don’t know why, I think I didn’t believe he was really through with me, that he wasn’t going to hurt me again. So I hit him again, maybe here,” she says, pointing at the back of her skull. “That’s when he looked at me, over his shoulder, when his eyes went wide and he fell.”
I didn’t expect that. Lily hit him when his back was turned, when he was walking away.
I don’t blame her. She was scared. She was a quarter mile from help, at least, and there was nothing to tell her he wasn’t going to reel back and come at her again. She wanted to make sure he was subdued.
“And then that was it?” I ask. “Then you dropped the rock and ran?”
“Maybe,” she says, still noncommittal.
“What do you mean maybe?”
“I don’t know, Christian. I just don’t know. I can’t remember exactly.”
She’s getting emotional now. There are definitely tears in her eyes. She’s no longer just on the verge of crying. She’s upset with herself for not remembering. She’s upset with me for the way I keep incessantly asking, for the way I keep forcing her to remember something she’d rather forget. “Okay,” I say, reaching for her, pulling her close to me. “It’s okay, babe. It doesn’t matter.”
If that wasn’t the last time she hit him—when Jake was walking away—then it means Lily hit him again when he was on the ground. At minimum, that’s three blows. One to the forehead, one to the back of the head, and a third when he was on the ground. Which essentially rules out accidental death because how likely is it that you fall and hit your head in three different places?
“Christian,” Lily says, pulling away from me so that I can see her eyes.
“What?” I ask, looking down at her. We’re in the family room. The lights are off. Only the TV is on, the news moving on to other things that are going on in the world, all of which pale in comparison to what’s going on with Jake. It’s hard to believe there’s anything else going on. This, Jake and Lily, is all I can think about.
The TV is bright, the color radiating on the side of Lily’s face, making her look sickly and distorted. “Do you know a lawyer?” she asks, her voice cracking. Lily looks small and scared.
I’m quick to respond, flippant, because I, too, am scared, though I’d never admit that to Lily. “We don’t need a lawyer.”
“We don’t,” she says, “but I might, Christian, if I’m arrested.”
“You won’t be arrested.”
“How do you know?”
“Why would they arrest you?”
“Because I killed him,” she says. She’s crying without reserve now, her shoulders shaking.
“Stop saying that,” I snap. I don’t mean to snap at Lily. I never snap at Lily. It’s just that, if she’s going to get away with this, she needs to be careful about what she says. “Just because you were both at the same place, at the same time, means nothing. No one saw you together. You had no motive to kill him. Look at me, Lily,” I say, setting my hands on either side of her wet face and forcing her to look at me. Her makeup has started to bleed. There’s a smudge of black under her eyes. “You were there, yes. But you did not see Jake. Do you understand?” I ask, and she dimly nods. “Say it, then. Say ‘I did not see Jake Hayes at the forest preserve.’”