“You heard her,” I said quietly. “You heard what she was going to do.”
“Yeah, but—”
I turned, thrusting the gun at him with both hands. He flinched away from it like he thought it might bite him. “Take this,” I said. “Put it in the truck. Then get his body off the stairs and put it in the passenger seat. He’s not a big guy. You should be able to carry him up on your own. If there’s blood, don’t step in it. Be careful.”
“But,” he said again, and I stepped forward and shoved the gun roughly into his chest. “Take. It. You wanted me to have an idea? This is it. This is my idea. I’ll explain the rest to you later. Right now, we need to get this part done while there’s still some light left. Put the gun and the body in your truck. Wait for me outside. Where’s your buck knife?”
“In my pocket.”
“Give it to me.”
Wordlessly, he did. I clutched the knife against my chest.
“Do what I said, and then stay outside. I don’t want you coming back in here.”
I thought he might argue, but he didn’t. If anything, he looked relieved, casting a final, sidelong glance at the body on the bed before he turned away, the gun in his hands. A lover’s last look, I would realize later. I wonder what he was thinking, whether it was something tender. I wonder if he even really liked her.
I waited until I heard the screen door slam and his footsteps crunching across the driveway. I didn’t want Dwayne there for what I was about to do, but even once he was gone, I hesitated. The voice in my head was urging me on, but a part of me still understood, in that moment, that I didn’t have to listen. That there were other ways for this to end, including a version of the story where I plugged the phone back in, called the police, and let them arrive just in time to catch my blood-spattered husband stuffing Ethan Richards’s body into the passenger seat of his truck, right next to a recently fired shotgun. A version in which I told everyone that Dwayne had killed them both, and I was either too late or too frightened to stop him. It would be my word against his, but I thought I could make them believe me. If I had to. If I wanted to. Certainly, the odds of that were better than the odds of pulling off my other plan, which wasn’t even fully thought through yet and only seemed like it might work because it was so utterly, bat-shit crazy: the way that Adrienne, in those last moments, had looked for all the world like a fun-house-mirror reflection of myself.
The truth is, I didn’t rush into it. I imagined it the other way, all the way through. I thought about how it might end: with Dwayne in prison, or maybe even dead, if the police arrived at the wrong moment or if he was stupid enough to reach for the gun. With me, standing alone in our dingy little house, looking at the long dent on the couch where the man I’d promised to comfort and keep, for better or for worse, used to sprawl out at the end of the day. I imagined the looks, the whispers, the anger, if he went away and I went free. They’d say I drove him to it. They’d say he should have killed me, too. The police might believe me, even a jury might, but my neighbors? Never. Could I possibly stay in Copper Falls, after that? And if I left, where could I go? I imagined trying to start over, broke and uneducated and almost thirty, in a place where nobody knew my name—and then realized that after what had happened here, that place wouldn’t exist. No matter where I went, there I’d be. The junkyard jezebel. The redneck bitch. The one who got off scot-free after her husband killed two people. Adrienne was right: it was a hell of a story. Only unlike her, I wouldn’t be getting the survivor’s book deal, making the talk-show rounds. I wasn’t that kind of girl. I could still hear her words, the truth of them, echoing in my head.
Look at me, she’d said. Look at me, and look at you.
I took the knife and went to work.
Dwayne kept his blade sharp. The mole under my breast came off with a zing of pain so fierce and fine that it made me gasp. One moment, it was part of me; the next, it was just a small, black nub, caught between my thumb and forefinger, nothing left but a dull throb in the place where it had been attached. I’d been worried about blood, but there was hardly any. I kept a bottle of Gorilla Glue in one of the kitchen drawers; I’d used it earlier that summer to mend a broken handle on Adrienne’s favorite coffee mug. A tiny dab was all it took to make the mole stick—well, that and a lifetime’s worth of rumors. I thought of the boys who’d chased me into the woods all those years ago, who’d pulled my shirt over my head and told everyone what they found underneath. The humiliation of that moment had followed me all my life, but now I was grateful for it: it made it absurdly easy to pass off someone else’s body as my own. I slipped the diamond ring off her blood-greased finger, and slid my plain gold band on in its place. I stepped back, closed my eyes, took a breath. My heart was pounding, but my thoughts were eerily calm. I reached behind me for the light switch. For this next part, I’d need to see clearly.