“Until death did you part,” Bird said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Until then. I should go.”
The comforter fell away as she sat up, turning away from him. He laid a hand on her back.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For your loss. Whatever that means to you.”
She turned fully toward him, leaned in, touched her lips to his.
“Thank you.”
He watched as she stood, slipping her bra straps back over her shoulders, reaching behind her back to clasp it. There was a tiny scar on the inside of her right breast, paler than the surrounding skin and slightly wrinkled.
“Chicken pox?” He pointed.
“War wound,” she deadpanned.
“From another life,” he joked back, and maybe it was just how fuzzy-headed and sleepy he was, but he would never quite understand what happened next: she blinked at him, then threw her head back and laughed like he’d made the funniest joke there was. But if there was anything he’d learned tonight, it was that there was a lot he didn’t understand about Adrienne Richards. He watched her put her shoes on and shrug her jacket over her shoulders. She pulled an elastic from the jacket pocket and twisted her hair into a knot, taking a last look around the room.
“So. Same time next month?” he said, because he felt like he had to say something, and this time she didn’t laugh.
“Wouldn’t that be a thing,” she said, smiling in a way that said, We both know this will never be a thing. For a moment, she paused, shifting her weight, and he thought she might ask for his number after all, or at least come to kiss him goodbye. Then she shrugged, turned away, and opened the door.
“Adrienne,” he said, and she stopped, her hand still on the doorknob. Not turning back, but looking, glancing back over her shoulder. Lips lightly parted, her cheeks still pink from the heat of sex, her hair coiled messily on top of her head. Pale blue eyes fringed with heavy lashes, open wide. As if caught by surprise.
“Good luck. I mean it.”
She nodded.
Then the door closed, and she was gone.
Chapter 28
Lizzie
My name is Lizzie Ouellette, or it was, before I gave it away. Another woman has it now; it’s written six feet above her head on a stone in the Copper Falls cemetery, where she’s buried wearing whatever the mortician’s wife decided was most appropriate. Old Mrs. Dorsey would have done the job, riffling my closet for a burial dress just like she riffled through my mother’s all those years ago, testing the weight and weft of the options with her arthritic fingers while my father nodded mutely along, going with whatever she suggested. She would’ve been careful, even though it hardly mattered. After the wreck I made of the new Lizzie’s face, a closed casket was the only option. I wonder sometimes what she chose, though. If she ran her fingers over the silky green gown, squinted at the label, wondered at how I’d come to own such a thing. If people whispered after the funeral about all those beautiful, expensive dresses, things that had no earthly business in my closet. All my nicest clothes were things Adrienne had given me. I wonder if that’s how it ended for her: moldering in a grave with someone else’s name on it, wearing a dress she’d tried to give away, while I continued on in the life I’d stolen. All wrapped up in her identity like a little girl playing dress-up.
It was late spring, the grass in the cemetery fresh and green, when I arrived back in Copper Falls. Wearing my Adrienne-Richards-in-disguise disguise, driving her ridiculous car. It was risky, returning to the scene of the crime like some kind of murder mystery cliché, but I think I always knew I would. I had to. There were things I needed to do, and things I needed to prove. I needed to show myself that Lizzie was so dead, so gone, that she could cut a perfumed path right in front of their stupid noses and they’d never even notice. I needed to go back, if only to know for sure that I could never really go home. To lay my hand on the headstone and trace the shape of a name I’ll never write out again. To look at the two stones just beside it, one large, one small, both bearing the same name, and feel a sad sense of satisfaction at the idea of them keeping each other company. To drive past all the places I used to live, and see that I wasn’t there anymore. To watch through someone else’s eyes as life went on without me.
It turned out that I was half-right: nobody saw Lizzie that day. Not in the aisles of the grocery, where I once made a spectacle of myself shouting at Eliza Higgins. Not at the local ice cream shop, where Maggie was still scooping, still scowling, and still giving dirty looks to anyone who asked for flavor samples. Not at the cemetery, where I knew I shouldn’t linger, but couldn’t help pausing to lay a small bouquet of jewelweed and clover on the baby’s grave. Not at the post office, where I slid a postcard and an envelope filled with cash into another, larger envelope, no signature, no return address. I dropped it into the mail and then wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have. I wondered what I was more afraid of: that he wouldn’t understand, or that he would.