And then he turned to his side, puked on the pillow, and passed out, and I stood there with my mouth open, feeling like I’d just lost the only intellectual debate we’d ever had.
I never told you how staying with him started to feel like a competition, each of us daring the other to blink first. How it became almost a point of pride, the way we hurt each other and kept hanging on. How it was like drinking poison, year over year, until you can’t remember what it was like to drink anything else, and you’ve even started to like the taste.
I never asked, but I thought there probably were other women, or had been, over the years. Everything changed after the miscarriage, the sex most of all. At first he’d only touch me if he was drunk, coming home from Strangler’s with beer on his breath, dirt under his fingernails, coming up behind me where I stood at the sink with a dishcloth in my hand. Jamming a knee between my legs to spread them, bending me over where I stood. I knew I was being hate-fucked; the sad thing is that I actually missed it later, when he wouldn’t touch me at all, no matter how drunk he was. That electricity I used to feel when I’d look up to see him coming toward me with angry lust in his eyes—it was gone. At first I thought it was because of the accident, after the doctor warned us that there might be problems—he called it “sexual side effects of traumatic injury,” a whole lot of fancy words to describe your basic case of limp dick. But then, a few months later at somebody’s backyard barbecue, I went to use the bathroom and walked in on Dwayne with Jennifer Wellstood. He was sitting on the toilet with his pants around his ankles, and she was tugging on that thing with both hands, and from what I saw before she started screaming and I slammed the door, it was standing up on its own just fine.
But I hadn’t known he was cheating with her. Not until Ian Bird showed up to thrust it in my face, thinking he was humiliating Adrienne, when what he really did was make me look at what I’d been working so hard not to see. Maybe I should have figured it out. Maybe I just didn’t want to. Looking back, the signs were everywhere. The trailing scent of her perfume, so strong that it couldn’t possibly have been coming off her hand-me-downs, buried in my closet. Those long, long hairs—reddish like mine, but brittle, and with a half inch of mousy root at the base. Clogging the drain at the lake house, clinging all over the furniture in every place she’d laid down her stupid head. They’d weave themselves into the fabric, somehow, so that not even the vacuum could pull them free, and I had to draw them out one by one, pinching them between my fingers. When I found them on Dwayne’s clothing and in Dwayne’s truck and even stuck to the elastic waistband of Dwayne’s underwear, I told myself they’d probably just traveled with me. On me. I was the one spending so much time with her, after all. And the alternative was unfathomable.
My husband fucking Adrienne; Adrienne fucking my husband.
It still sounds impossible. Ridiculous. It sounds like a sick goddamn joke.
But I should’ve known. I could have known. You could always tell where she’d been.
And I know how it looks: like we planned it, Dwayne and I, to kill the rich couple and run away with their money. It looks like I got close to Adrienne, pretending to be her friend, learning her tics and her accent and her smartphone pass code, just so that I could steal her identity after I shot her in the face. I even figured out how to make myself look more like her, mimicking the way she styled her hair and overlined her lips to make them look bigger. But Christ, it’s not because I wanted her dead. It’s because I wanted her life. And didn’t I tell you I was always good at pretending? It was so easy to imagine myself slipping out of my sad little existence and into hers. I could see so clearly how it was possible. Have you ever seen one of those movies where the grubby girl takes off her glasses, and plucks her eyebrows, and poof, she’s magically transformed from a mousy nobody into somebody worth looking at? That was us, me and Adrienne. She was the after; I was the before.
Dwayne laughed in my face the first time I said it, in an unguarded moment during that first summer, after I’d delivered their first round of groceries. The words just came out of my mouth—“Don’t you think we look a little bit alike?”—and he laughed so hard that he started to choke, while I stared at the floor and felt my cheeks flush crimson.
“In your dreams,” he said. “Maybe after a million bucks of plastic surgery.”
But it didn’t take a million. Not even close. I know the exact dollar amount it took to erase the one significant difference between me and Adrienne Richards: five hundred. That was the cost of the injection that filled in the hollows under my eyes, the lines on my forehead, and the funniest part is that she’s the one who told me I should do it. I can still hear her voice, never more syrupy sweet than when she was insulting you in the guise of a compliment: Girl, I’ve been getting preventative Botox for ages. I wish I could be more like you, and just not care what I look like. Those under-eye bags would drive me crazy. They can fix that, you know.