Maybe the city was more like Copper Falls than I had ever imagined.
The knocking officer reached the end of the street and turned back, stopping to talk to another cop just a few feet away. He gestured at the adjacent houses, shook his head, and shrugged. I shifted my weight on the curb, trying to wiggle my toes inside the pair of shoes that someone had brought me from inside after they noticed my feet were bare. I hadn’t noticed.
But, of course, I was in shock. I knew this, because Kurt Geller had told me so.
“Tell them it was self-defense, and you want to speak to your attorney before making a statement,” he’d said. “They’ll try to persuade you to talk. Don’t. You can’t do that tonight.”
“I can’t?” I asked, and Geller’s voice took on a grandfatherly tone.
“Nobody in your position is capable of having that conversation, Adrienne. Not right away. You’ve lost your husband, and you just killed a man. You’re traumatized, whether you feel it or not. When they tell you you’re free to go, leave.”
In truth, I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel anything, except tired, in the bone-deep way that you get when you’ve spent all day using your body to push things around. The kind of tired I would get from clearing brush, scouring rust, digging the car out of a hard-packed pile of snow and ice after Dwayne had stupidly plowed it in and buried it for the third time that winter. Slinging the shovel like a sledgehammer to break up the crust of filthy ice, all mixed together with dirt and gravel so that it was damned near impossible to chip away. I’d work until my hands ached and my armpits were soaked with sweat inside my winter coat. I would dig and dig, the whole world reduced to the motion of the shovel and the harsh huffing of my own breath, lost in the job until the job was done. And then the exhaustion would be on me, so heavy that it pinned me where I sat as soon as I stopped moving. So that I couldn’t do a single thing more, not even bend at the waist to unlace my boots or lift a hand to unzip my jacket.
My twenty-four hours as Adrienne Richards hadn’t required shoveling or scouring—she had people to do that for her; hell, even the cat had a fucking robot litter box that self-cleaned every time he took a shit—but the exhaustion was the same. I’d been walking around all day wearing another woman’s identity like a second skin, and it was heavy. All I wanted was to go back into the house, slide between the impossibly silky sheets, and close my eyes on the world. To spend the night as my naked self. Just Lizzie, living dead girl, unburdened by the weight of Adrienne Richards for a few short hours before I woke up to put her on again.
But I couldn’t shed her. Not now, not yet. Maybe not for a long time, and the exhaustion sank deeper still as I realized that there was nothing to do but keep plodding forward.
Geller’s words echoed again in my head: You’re traumatized, whether you feel it or not. In my previous life, I would have wanted to slap the man who said that to me. But now I was grateful for it, condescending as it was, or maybe because it was. It made things easier. Adrienne didn’t have any friends, but she did have people like Kurt Geller or Rick Politano, people who were only too happy to instruct her on the details of who she was, how she felt. It made me think of a scary story I’d read growing up, the one where a woman wakes up in the middle of the night to her husband gently undressing her, reaches for the bedside lamp only to have him pull her hand away. There’s something not quite right, not quite familiar, but she’s too sleepy to wonder about it; it’s a little bit sexy, even. They make love in the dark—and then she wakes up the next morning to find her husband sprawled dead on the bedroom floor, dead for hours and hours. Her body is covered with bloody fingerprints, and there’s a message scrawled across the bathroom mirror: AREN’T YOU GLAD YOU DIDN’T TURN ON THE LIGHT?
Adrienne had always had people there to hold her hand, to guide her through the dark, to make sure she did what was expected of her. Now they were holding mine. If I wanted to know how to be her, all I had to do was ask—and unlike the woman in the story, I doubted they’d ever know the difference.
“Mrs. Richards?”
I looked up. A man was standing in front of me. I saw his shoes first, brown and scuffed, then lifted my chin to look at his face. He had tired eyes in a middle-aged face, and a raggedy blond beard that made me feel a little bit sorry for him, not just because the beard was terrible, but because there was apparently nobody in his life who loved him enough to tell him that it wasn’t working. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but there was a gold badge hanging around his neck that said detective. I stared up at him and nodded, wondering if I should try to look scared, then realizing that I didn’t have to look like anything. Geller’s instructions were a stroke of genius; I was traumatized, whether I felt it or not, which meant that trauma could look any way I wanted it to. If I screamed and tore my hair out, that was trauma. If I seemed too calm, that was trauma, too. Trauma had seared every detail of tonight’s terrible ordeal in my mind, unless of course there were inconsistencies in my story, in which case it had fragmented my memories. Trauma explained everything. Trauma was my new religion.