I realize that I’m both fascinated by and terrified of my wife.
“What are you looking for in my bag, Christian?” she asks. Her voice is the exact opposite of a balm, whatever that is. It isn’t soothing or restorative, though the tone itself is melodious and sweet. But it’s in what I know, or what I think I know, that I find it so disturbing.
Lily steps closer. My eyes are on her hands, which I can’t see.
Bludgeoning someone to death with a rock in self-defense is one thing. But bringing a gun to a forest preserve requires forethought, and the intent to harm or kill. It means killing someone in cold blood. If Lily went there intending to harm Jake, it means she knew Jake would be there. It wasn’t a coincidence that they were both there at the same time.
Maybe Jake didn’t lead Lily down that secluded path and into the woods.
Maybe Lily led Jake.
This raises doubt about everything I ever believed about my wife.
“I have to know,” I breathe out. “Did you shoot him, Lily?”
Lily watches me, unspeaking.
“Did you?” I ask again.
“That hurts, Christian,” she says, her voice quivering, on the verge of tears when she finally speaks. What I can see of her face is pained. Deep ruts form between the eyes. The edges of her lips point downward. She takes another step toward me, her feet so light and airy on the floors that if I didn’t know any better, I’d think she had levitated. “Do you really think I could do something like that?” she asks, coming even closer now so that I could touch her if I wanted to, though my arms remain stationary at my sides, while Lily’s hands are fixed behind her back.
Twelve hours ago the answer to her question would have been a definitive no. No, I don’t believe my gentle, loving wife could shoot someone in the head.
“Answer me,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm and level. I hear my heartbeat in my ears. I breathe through an open mouth, my chest rising and falling with each breath. “Did you shoot him?”
“No,” she says, her empty hands coming from behind her back to reach for me.
Lily stands on her toes. She presses her body into mine, though mine is straight as a ramrod. Her arms wrap around my neck. “Please,” she whispers into my ear, pleading, desperate. “Hold me, Christian. I’m so scared.” She presses her face into my shoulder. I feel the wetness of her eyes on my skin. I feel her heartbeat against mine. I wrap my arms around her waist, the cotton of her nightgown thin and insubstantial beneath my hands. I lift her into my arms. I carry her back to bed and lie down beside her, holding her until she falls asleep.
The rest of the night, I don’t sleep. I lie in bed, watching Lily sleep.
At some point in the night, I get out of bed and go to watch her from the armchair in the corner of the room.
Eventually, the sun slowly rises. Its light breaches the slats of the wooden blinds, thrusting itself into our room. As the minutes pass, the light grows, disseminating across the bedroom. It spills first across the wooden floors and then climbs the bed to where Lily lies, cocooned in the sheets. The light falls on her face, bathing her in light.
Only then do I slip back into bed with Lily. I lie on my side beside her, facing her, feeling nostalgic all of a sudden, wondering if today will be the day the police come, if today will be the last morning that I wake up with her beside me in bed. Neither of us even thinks about going to work.
Lily feels me come back to bed, though she doesn’t know that I was gone. She feels the movement of the bed, of the mattress absorbing my weight. That’s what wakes her.
Lily’s eyes flutter open and she finds my eyes holding hers.
“What are you looking at?” she asks, smiling momentarily as if half-conscious and blissfully unaware of what’s happening, before the knowledge, the memories return to her and the smile disappears.
I say, “You.”
Lily presses into me. I reach out and stroke her hip.
“I have something to tell you, Christian,” she says, breathing the words into my neck.
I pull back to look at her. “What?” I ask.
Lily pushes herself up into a sitting position, so that she looks down on me. She hesitates, thinking twice about saying whatever she has to say. She gazes toward the window, stalling for time, and I reach for her, setting my hand on her chin, turning her face, forcing her to look at me.
“What is it, Lily? What do you want to tell me?”
She says, “You told me once that there is nothing I could ever say that would change the way you feel about me. Did you mean that?”
I nod, though inside, something has changed. Lily has changed.
“I’ve been lying to you,” she says. “It didn’t happen like I said it did.”
“Okay,” I say slowly, drawing it out as my heart races inside of me. “How did it happen, then?”
“Would you still love me, Christian,” she asks, her eyes turning rheumy and red, her nose starting to run, “if I did something terrible?”
My heart stops. I push myself upright and into a sitting position beside her and ask, “What did you do, Lily? What did you do?”
What Lily tells me is bad. But it’s a different kind of bad than I imagined.
I feel like someone stabbed me through the chest with a knife and that when the blade was inside of me, they twisted the handle.
I wonder if it would hurt less if she said that it happened once, that one single time she got carried away, caught up in a moment, that he seduced her, that he practically forced himself on her, or that she was out of her mind drunk.
But five times. Five times is what she said when I asked her, which is exactly five times too many. Five times is voluntary and deliberate and, for two married people having an extramarital affair, planned out in advance. It doesn’t just spontaneously happen. There are things to think about, things to consider, like how to do it without getting caught by the ones you’re supposed to love.
“Say something. Please,” she pleads, biting down hard on her lower lip.
I can’t look at Lily. I can’t stop thinking about Jake’s hands on her and hers on him. I feel like throwing up.
Lily reaches for me as I get out of bed. I turn my back to her, walking away, unreachable to her hands. “How did it happen?” I ask.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes. It does. To me.” Lily is quiet behind me. I turn back, looking hard. “You’re not going to tell me, Lily? That’s the least you can do, don’t you think?”
It happens as these things almost always happen. It was innocent at first. They ran into each other by accident and they grabbed coffee. But then it happened again, not so accidentally that time.
“Why?” I ask. “I thought you loved me, Lily.”
“I do. I love you more than anything, Christian.”
In this moment, I find that hard to believe.
“Where did it happen?” I ask. “Here? In our bed?”
“No,” Lily insists and it’s the one thing she says that I maybe believe. “Not here.”
“Then, where?” She swallows. I see the movement of her throat. “A hotel?” I spit out, losing patience. “His car, their house? Where, Lily?”
I can see in her face that I got it right. Lily had sex with Jake in his and Nina’s house.