I Love You More

by Jennifer Murphy

  It was a real nice day. Birds were singing. The sun made the lake look like a mirror. I thought I smelled barbecue in the distance, but then I thought it might just be my imagination. Since I’d left so early, I didn’t have time for breakfast. I repositioned myself without thinking; a twig cracked. I immediately crouched, as if that would do any good, but when I finally peeked over my shoulder, I saw that they hadn’t heard me. They started taking off their clothes. I closed my eyes like I always did. I mean, Mama was one thing, and Jewels was thin so probably looked fine without clothes, but the last thing I wanted to see was a naked Bert. By the time I opened my eyes again, the three of them were swimming. As usual, they stayed in the water a really long time. When they started walking back, I looked away until I was sure they’d wrapped themselves in the pink towels. They always took a nap after they swam, which I thought was stupid for two reasons: one, because it just was; and two, because there wasn’t much for me to do while they were sleeping. Sometimes I worked on my word journal, but that day I’d left so fast I’d forgotten it, so I decided to take a nap too. When I woke, they were dressed. Mama was popping open little potato chip bags, Jewels was setting up the Barbie Dream House, and Bert was uncorking the wine.

  “To us,” they said in unison, as they clinked their wineglasses together.

  They sipped.

  “Okay,” Jewels said. “Let’s get started.”

  Mama and Bert reached into their handbags and pulled out little notebooks.

  “No notes,” Jewels said. “It’s too dangerous. Today we practice remembering.”

  “I was just going to jot down a few key words to help me remember,” Bert said. “I promise I’ll burn it before—well, you know.”

  “No,” Jewels said, firmly. “No notes.”

  Bert stuck the notebook back in her tote bag. Mama set hers on the blanket.

  “Pretend this is the beach house,” Jewels said, while pointing inside the Barbie Dream House. I saw that the inside didn’t look like a Barbie Dream House at all. Jewels had covered the walls with drawings of a different house. “Oliver will be standing here. Near the fireplace.”

  “How do you know that?” Bert asked.

  “Because he’ll be watching Diana swim from the sliding glass doors, right Diana?”

  “But how do you know he’ll be watching Diana swim?” Bert asked.

  “Diana?”

  “He always watches me swim when we’re at the beach,” Mama said.

  “But you need to make sure, just in case,” Jewels said. “You need to seduce him, okay?”

  Mama blushed. “Okay.”

  “Let’s go over the timeline,” Jewels said. “Diana, what time do you go for your morning swim?”

  “Six,” Mama said.

  “And you don’t return to the beach house until when?”

  “Seven thirty.”

  “Are you sure you’ll know what time it is?”

  “Yes,” Mama said. “I’ve been doing the same routine for years.”

  “Good,” Jewels said. She looked at Bert. “Now this is where you come in. Tell me what happens next, Bert.”

  “I jog to the beach house, retrieve the gun, and shoot Oliver,” Bert said. She looked proud of herself.

  “Before then,” Jewels said.

  “Before then?” Bert asked. “You said to tell you what happens next.”

  Jewels rolled her eyes. “Okay, not what happens next. Tell me everything you are going to do that morning.”

  Bert gulped down the rest of her wine, refilled her glass, and held the bottle toward Mama and Jewels. Both shook their heads.

  “I’m supposed to rent a car the night before—”

  “No,” Jewels interrupted. “You’re not supposed to rent a car, remember? We decided they could track that. It’s the Fourth of July. Cars will be coming and going; no one will pay that much attention. As long as you park far enough away, you should be fine. Oh, and remember you need to go to that restaurant in Blowing Rock the day before, and try to be memorable. It’s doubtful that anyone will remember the exact day they saw you there. Just make sure you pay in cash. Got it?”

  “I know that, Jewels,” Bert said. “I’m not stupid. Why do you always do that?”

  “Do what?” Jewels asked.

  “Act like you’re better than me,” Bert said.

  “I’m just trying to make sure we all remember what we are supposed to do,” Jewels said. “That’s all. It’s not always about you, Bert. Don’t take everything so personally.”

  “How can I not take it personally?”

  “Fine,” Jewels said. “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. Now, go on.”

  “I drive to Cooper’s Island, park my car, and jog to the beach house.”

  “Did you do a trial run?” Jewels asked.

  “Yes,” Bert said. “Last week.”

  “So you know how long it will take? I imagine you’re not a very fast runner.”

  “Dammit, Jewels,” Bert said. “Of course I know.”

  “Okay then,” Jewels said. “Good. And what about the gun?”

  “Gun?” Bert asked. “You mean I’m supposed to shoot him, not stab him?”

  Mama gave Bert the look I’d seen a million times. The stop-it-I-mean-it look.

  “Real funny, Bert,” Jewels said. “What I meant was, did you find a good place to hide the gun?”

  “There’s a little blue door around back,” Bert said. “It leads to the crawl space under the house. Immediately to your left, there’s a shelf with paint cans and such on it. I figure that’s safer than hiding it somewhere outside.”

  “It wasn’t locked?” Jewels asked.

  “No. It doesn’t have a lock. It’s just a door.”

  “And what do you do with the gun after you—uh—shoot him, Bert?” Jewels asked.

  “I wipe it down, put it in the garbage bag and then the fanny pack, take it with me, and once I get on the ferry, throw it in the ocean, when I’m sure no one is looking of course. Then I drive to Wildacres.”

  Jewels held out her glass for more wine. “Bert, I want you to know how much I appreciate you doing this for us.”

  By this Jewels obviously meant kill Daddy.

  It felt like my heart dropped to my belly button. A vision of my future flashed before me. The police would arrest Mama. I’d be shipped off to God knows where, some foster home somewhere. I had to stop them. But how?

  “I had no idea my boss was planning to have a hysterectomy,” Jewels continued as Bert refilled her wineglass. “And that she’d tell me to go to this silly charrette in her place. Are you sure you’re okay with it, Bert? I wish we could change the date, but everything’s set. Diana rented the beach house months ago.”

  “I’m fine with it, Jewels,” Bert said. “Don’t worry. I’ve got it.”

  “Well, thank you, Bert,” Jewels said. “And remember, we all are doing this thing, not just you, Bert.” She paused. “Okay, let’s go through it one more time from the beginning, this time ensuring we’ve covered every single, small detail. Diana?”

  My stomach was churning. I felt faint and nauseous. I managed to get up and walk away. I didn’t get very far before I vomited, but it was far enough that I didn’t think they could hear or see me. By the time I got back, they were toasting again. I’d missed the “details” part, but at that point what did it matter? The future was set to fall like dominoes. I kept hoping it was all a bad dream, that something would go wrong and Bert wouldn’t kill Daddy. Maybe she would run out of gas, or get in an accident and go to the hospital. Or die. I actually started wishing that Bert would die, or that Jewels’s airplane would crash. Surely if one of the two of them were fatally injured, Mama would snap out of her alien-inhabited trance.

  I heard Jewels talking again in her serious, bossy tone.

  “We can’t communicate after it’s done,” she was saying. “Murder investigations can take a while. We cannot in any way indicate that we know one another. They will find out about us
. That’s why Bert and I have to come forward first. It will look suspicious if we don’t report Oliver missing. When they tell us about one another, we act the scorned but devastated wives. We say we loved our husband. We had no idea who he really was. We just act dumb. Any questions?”

  That should be easy. They were being dumb.

  “What about our hair?” Bert asked.

  “What about it?” Jewels asked.

  “Should we dye it back, change our styles? I mean, won’t our looking so alike cause suspicion?”

  “I think it’ll look more suspicious if we dye it back now, so close to the murder,” Jewels said. “And I’m thinking it might work in our favor.”

  “I don’t understand,” Bert said.

  “Don’t you see?” Jewels said. “It’s brilliant, actually. The police will think we’d never be stupid enough to dye our hair the exact same color if we were planning to kill our husband. Besides, it’ll fuck with their heads.”

  Mama and Bert nodded like they were those bobbing-head dolls weird people put on the dash of their cars.

  “Diana,” Jewels continued, “it will be hardest on you. They will suspect you. They will interrogate you, but it will be okay. I promise. You just need to stick to the story, got it? And put on your charm.”

  It would be okay? Were they mental?

  “Got it,” Mama said. She actually sounded scared, which was good. Maybe she’d chicken out.

  “There won’t be any evidence, Diana,” Jewels said. “You won’t have pulled the trigger.”

  Mama started crying. Then Bert did too; she pulled a white candle from her tote bag. I’d never seen her bring a candle before. She lit it and started chanting something. A hymn? Prayer? The three of them held hands, and Mama and Jewels started chanting too. I was stunned. They really had gone crazy. I mean, who does that? Certainly not the Mama I knew. The one time I did a séance with Betsy Porter, this older girl who used to live down the street, I thought Mama’s head was going to pop off she got so mad. She even called Betsy’s mom.

  They stopped.

  “Remember,” Jewels said. “We’ll meet right here, exactly one year from the day Oliver takes his last breath, same time, same spot.”

  “Noon, July third,” Bert said with a nod.

  “Noon, July third,” Mama said.

  Then they packed up their stuff and walked off, each in a different direction like they were shoots of a firework.

  I waited for a while. I thought and thought, and thought more. Then I prayed (inside myself)—which I usually only did when I was sick or wanted something—for God to give me a sign. I must have sat there like that for a long time, but it seemed like only minutes. At some point I felt raindrops, and then the sun was setting. The sky had turned pale pink. Tomorrow would be a sailors’ delight day for some, but not for me. My life as I knew it was about to change. I noticed that the woods were eerily quiet. The birds weren’t singing. There was no buzz of people in the distance. No splash of boats on the water. No smell of barbecue. It was like the whole world had died.

  I rose, shivered, brushed the twigs and dirt from the seat of my shorts, stretched my damp, scrunched-up T-shirt back over my hips, zipped up my hoodie (I had no idea when I’d put it on), redid my ponytail, and walked to the bus stop, thinking all the while that unless I did something, one week from that day Daddy would be dead.

  The Wives

  We felt the emptiness the moment we walked away from our private clearing. It would be the last time the three of us saw one another for one long year. It rained on the way home. In our separate vehicles, we found ourselves lost inside the sound of the windshield wipers. Swish, swoosh, swish, swoosh. None of us remembered watching the road or even driving. We were consumed with thoughts of what was to come. We felt the inevitability of it; we’d committed and there was no going back. Somewhere along the way, time had begun running the show. Choice had been stripped from us, like patches from a soldier’s jacket.

  This was the way the murder was supposed to go.

  Sometime between when they arrived at the beach house and the murder, Diana was to hide Oliver’s gun behind the little blue door that led to the crawl space under the house. While seducing Oliver the second night would be a plus, she was definitely to do so the last night. That way she would ensure her scent and his lust blinded him. At exactly five o’clock the night before the murder, she was to call Jewels and verify we were still on. In the meantime, Bert was to wear a wig and a baseball hat just in case, stick a bag of rocks in her trunk, drive to Cooper’s Island in the early-morning hours, park somewhere far enough away to avoid suspicion, jog to the beach house, retrieve the gun from its hiding place in the crawl space, put on her gloves, drape herself in the garbage bag she’d brought along in her fanny pack, and kill Oliver. When she was certain he was dead, she was to turn the garbage bag inside out, wrap it around the gun, put the gun, gloves, and rocks in the fanny pack, jog back to the car, dispose of the fanny pack when she was on the ferry, and then drive to her writing retreat. Diana was to return from her swim and, finding Oliver dead, call 911.

  Yes, that was the way the murder was supposed to go.

  We had discussed all the things that could go wrong over and over again. What if Oliver didn’t get out of bed to watch Diana swim? What if someone saw Bert hanging around the house? Picasso was not an early riser, especially at the beach. Diana always woke her after she got back from her morning swim, but what if she got up uncharacteristically early? What if our research wasn’t accurate, and the blood spray wasn’t within the calculated distance? The garbage bag was a precaution, but what if blood did get on it or Bert and was transferred onto the steering wheel, seat, trunk? What if someone saw Bert throw the fanny pack into the ocean?

  “None of this is going to happen,” Jewels said more than once. “Everything is going to go smoothly as long as we stick to the plan.”

  But, as we were to learn, no matter how detailed, how considered, how seemingly impregnable our plan had been, life has a way of making its own plans.

  Picasso

  Mama spent most of the next day asleep in her room. I spent most of the day looking up words and working up my nerve. I’d pretty much run the gamut on passive-aggressive approaches to the situation and none of it had even close to worked. My only hope at that point was to confront her.

  At around four o’clock in the afternoon, I heard Mama get up and shuffle down the stairs. Then I heard her rooting around in the kitchen. I took a deep breath, closed my wordbook, opened the door to my room, walked into the hallway, down the stairs, through the living and dining rooms, sat at the counter, and stared at her. She was standing on the other side browsing through her catchall book, which pretty much holds Mama’s entire life, like, for instance, her to-do lists, recipes, and all sorts of clippings. I sat there for at least five minutes before she realized I was there. When she finally looked up, she jumped with surprise.

  “Picasso,” she said. “You scared me.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She started taking vegetables out of the refrigerator.

  “What’re you making?” I asked.

  “Paella and a summer salad,” she said.

  “Is Daddy coming home?” Daddy loved paella.

  “Daddy always comes home on Thursdays. You know that.”

  I did know that, but how else was I going to ease into the Kill Daddy conversation. I watched her chop and prepare; watching Mama’s hands while she cooks is one of my favorite things in the world to do—behind spelling and word journaling.

  After a while, not knowing what else to do, since Mama was in her “zone” and I still hadn’t come up with a plan to approach Kill Daddy, I stood on the rung of my stool, reached over the counter, grabbed the catchall book, opened it, and as if the inside spine had recently been smashed down, it settled on a page in the R section. And there it was. Mama must have scribbled the first part of the note when she was talking to Jewels that day, “noon, July 3rd, Rainy
Cove Park, same spot,” but the last part had obviously been added later because it was written in a different color pen, “one year.” Even though I was still nervous about bringing up Kill Daddy, I decided my turning to that very page in the catchall book had to be a sign, and since bad things can happen if you ignore signs, because signs are messages to keep you on your right path in life, I knew I had to say something. But what? Wording was extremely important. What could I say that might trick Mama into talking? And then it came to me.

  “We’ll be at the beach on July third.”

  Either Mama hadn’t heard me, which could easily have been the case since that happens a lot when she’s lost in thought, and especially had been happening a lot around then, or she was ignoring me, which also could easily be the case. So I said it again, louder.

  Mama looked up from her vegetable chopping, put down the knife, and wiped her hands on her pj bottoms. “What do you mean?” She attempted a look of confusion.

  I turned the book toward her and pointed. “This note says you’re meeting someone at Rainy Cove Park on July third, but you’ll be at the beach with Daddy and me on July third.”

  “Not this July third,” Mama said. “Next July third. A year from—”

  She must’ve realized what she said, because she didn’t finish her sentence. She bit her lip and looked at me with a combination of guilt, the kind of guilt that happens when you get caught doing something you shouldn’t, and fear. It seemed like forever that the two of us stared at each other, it was like we were having a conversation without really having one, and then her eyes got watery and she looked away, and what I really wanted to do was hug her and tell her everything would be okay, but I knew I couldn’t do that because it wouldn’t be okay if the three of them went through with their plan. And so I think I said something about overhearing her on the phone or being clairvoyant—I can’t remember what exactly—but I do remember saying in a practically begging manner, “Please Mama, don’t kill Daddy. I don’t want you to go to jail.”