by Cate Holahan
Chapter 12
I pay cash for a cab to the Forty-Second Street ferry terminal and then drop a twenty for round trip tickets to Weehawken. The boat skims across the gray water at a speed that car commuters could never hope to achieve in the Lincoln Tunnel. Eight minutes later, I am walking over a metal gangplank to the terminal. Another minute and I’m facing the bedrock cliff that supports the majority of the town above sea level.
I cross the street and climb up a rickety metal staircase bolted to the rock face like a fire escape from suburbia. My mom lives on top of the hill, several blocks back from a pricey apartment complex overlooking the city, on a postage stamp lot reminiscent of how the area used to look before developers realized they could build condos overlooking Manhattan and charge three thousand dollars a month for the privilege of waking up to the midtown skyline.
My thighs tremble as I ascend the last step into a narrow park. The past five hours was more exercise than my body was equipped to handle. I am not in shape. The biggest pain, however, isn’t in my wobbly legs. The night without nursing has swollen my breasts into two water balloons. One of my nipples has already sprung a leak. A circular stain darkens the fabric on the left side of the tank top. I’m lucky it’s black.
It’s 6:30 AM when I ring my mother’s doorbell. She welcomes me in with a yawning smile. The circles beneath her eyes are darker than yesterday. Victoria still wakes up every two hours at night. Interrupted dreams are a form of torture.
“What are you doing here so early?” she asks, pulling me inside as though the summer air isn’t a balmy seventy degrees already.
I gesture to my top. “I need to nurse. The pump doesn’t work like the baby.”
My mom pokes my hardened breasts. A vein that I didn’t know existed bulges beneath the cleavage popping above the tank’s scoop neck. “That looks painful, Beth!”
She steps back into the house and gestures to the stroller. “I fed her a bottle about an hour ago. She likes it better in there than the Pack ’n Play.”
I lift Vicky from the bassinet. Her tongue protrudes from her petite mouth at my scent, though her eyes remain closed. I pull the right breast up over the tank top’s neckline. She latches on in her half-asleep state and pulls the milk from my body. It’s a release better than any I have ever known. I could fall asleep like this.
Milk dribbles down the tank from the leaking left breast. My mother asks if I need a towel.
“I hate this shirt anyway,” I say.
“It looks nice on you.” My mom tilts her head. “The pants aren’t right though. Maybe the waist is a bit boxy.”
Vicky starts coughing. I remove her from my chest and pat her back while the spray from the right nipple soaks whatever dry fabric remained on my top. “Sorry, baby,” I say as I hold her upright against my shoulder.
“Let me get you a towel.”
“It’s all right, Mom. You know what you could get me though? Something from my old closet. A T-shirt. Maybe a pair of old jeans.”
“Everything is from college.”
“I’ll squeeze.”
I put Vicky back into nursing position. She fusses as she drinks from one milk fountain and then the other, annoyed by the speed at which the liquid rushes from my body. When I burp her, there is a deep gurgling sound. Moments later, my clothes are coated in sour milk vomit.
Vicky settles down right after. Possibly she’d already been full and had only nursed because she wanted to be near me. More likely, there was something wrong with my milk. All the adrenaline in my blood stream probably poisoned the supply. I fed my baby rotten milk. Tears threaten to fall from the thought. I’d rather be a murderer than a bad mother.
As I’m placing Victoria back in the bassinet, my mom comes down the stairs holding a blue Columbia tank top and drawstring sweat pants, one of those college gym outfits that everyone lives in for four years. I probably left it here because I was sick of wearing it.
She wrinkles her nose as she looks at me. “Give it here.” She holds out one hand with my outfit and the other for the soiled clothing clinging to my chest. “I’ll wash it.”
I grab the hem of the tank and bring it up to my breasts, distributing the baby vomit. “It’s done, Mom. I’ll put it in the trash.”
“But—”
“It didn’t fit right, anyway.”
I ball up the top and walk it, near naked, to the kitchen garbage. As my mom protests, I push it deep inside the plastic bag with the other refuse: uneaten pasta and red sauce from the smell of it. “Really, Mom, that outfit was ruined.” I slip the shirt over my head and then go into the bathroom where I jostle into the oversized sweats. Colleen’s pants follow her shirt into the trash.
“I could have washed those.” My mom shakes her head at me as though I am the most wasteful woman in the world for throwing out perfectly good clothing saturated in human fluids.
“I need a favor.”
She eyes me. When I said these words yesterday, she ended up not sleeping all night. She quickly covers the distrustful look with a tight smile and nods at me to continue. I am her daughter. She’d do anything for me—even if she doesn’t like it.
“Jake cancelled on me last night and—”
“Oh, honey. I’m sorry. Was it work? Did you at least get to see him a—”
“I went out with a friend and spent the night. I’d rather Jake think I was here.”
My mom folds her arms across her chest, a perfect replica of my own skeptical stance—or, rather, the original version. I’m the imitator. “What friend?”
I lower my head as though ashamed. A normal person would feel that way. Clearly, something is wrong with me. “A male coworker.”
“Oh, Beth.”
“I was lonely and wanted the attention. Nothing happened. I just drank a bit too much. I’m not used to it now that I’m nursing. I passed out on his couch.”
My mother frowns. She hates cheaters. My father was a philanderer. She hates my father. Now I seem as though I took after him.
“I’m not proud of it, Mom. It was a mistake. It won’t happen again. I was disappointed that Jake canceled, and I’ve been a bit depressed, honestly, being home with Vicky all the time.” I’m playing the overwhelmed mom card. That always gets a bit of compassion. “Jake is always working late. I went out for a drink by myself and ran into this guy—”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter! Please, just, if anyone asks, say I slept over here last night.”
“Won’t you see this man when you go back to work?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Come on, Beth. You changed your clothes.”
My mother is looking at me the same way she did when I was a little kid and she’d catch me picking my nose and wiping it on the side of the couch. What is wrong with you? You think I didn’t see that? I could tell her that I changed when I realized Jake wouldn’t take me out, opted for this black ensemble. I could reiterate that nothing happened. But she thinks she’s seen me.
“Mom.” I reach for her, but she recoils. “It was a mistake. I’m sorry. Do you want Jake to divorce me over one act of stupidity?”
My mother looks away. I’ve disgusted her. She’s ashamed that she raised me. Feeling horrible for poor Jake. “Everyone says they’ll never do it again,” she says.
Pictures flash in my mind. The pipe. The blood. The smashed back of Colleen’s head and her face, battered and broken beyond recognition from striking the floor each time I slammed the metal pipe into her back. Tears fill my eyes. I wipe them away with my forearm. More come, wetting my cheeks, filling my nose, falling from my chin. I shake my head vigorously. I will never, ever, ever do anything like this ever again. Never. “I’m so sorry.” My voice comes out as a rasping, wail. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I will never . . . I’m so—”
My mom opens up her arms. “Oh, Beth.” Her voice cracks, as though she, too, struggles with tears.
“I’m so sorry.” I fall into her embrace. She f
eels warm and comforting. Thank God for mothers.
“It’s okay. It was a mistake.” She strokes the back of my head and shushes into my ear. “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay. You were here all night.”
LIZA
I wait for David in a stark gray room, sitting in a classroom chair that is as uncomfortable as the ones I remember from high school. The precinct lacks cell service, so I amuse myself by flipping through stored photos. Here’s a picture of David and me at an anniversary dinner. Here’s one of us posing with Chris and Emma last year. Here’s one I took of Dave and Nick.
They stand side by side. David’s arm is draped over Nick’s narrow shoulders. My husband is tilted forward with his mouth slightly open, as though he were giving a camera direction. Nick, for his part, is smirking with his lips pursed. The expression is probably to show off his high cheekbones, but it could be that he’s suppressing a laugh—possibly something to do with me.
After ten minutes, David emerges from behind a steel door. His pink complexion looks drained. The only time I remember him being this upset was a year ago. Nick had called. David had rushed out in the middle of dinner. Later, he’d said that there’d been a problem with the lawsuit against the school. He’d missed something important and needed to work it out. He’d had the same pallor.
“What’s going on?”
David shakes off the question and gestures with his head to the officer behind him. Whatever transpired in the police department, he won’t discuss it anywhere near the station. His secrecy makes me nervous. If he can’t tell me in front of the cops, what the hell is he hiding? What did they do to him? What do they think he did?
A police officer says something about following up. I’m not listening to the detectives so much as looking at David’s reaction to whatever they say. He blanches with each word. By the time the officers are done, my husband looks exsanguinated.
A protective instinct ignites inside me. “We are mourning our friend and you are pressuring him like this?” I yell. “That’s unconscionable. We have rights. You can call our lawyer.”
Instead of making similar threats, David walks in a daze to the exit. We pass through the metal detectors in silence and exit onto the guarded street. Once outside, I again ask what happened. He pleads that he is too tired. We will talk when we get home.
By the time we enter the apartment, the suspense has made me physically ill. My head throbs as I lead David to the living room love seat. City lights stream in from the French doors, spotlighting the white leather sofa onto which David slumps, shielding his eyes with his palm.
I turn the chandelier above the dining table to its dimmest setting and then draw the blackout curtains. David’s hand drops from his face. I ask if he’d like water. When he shakes his head no, I assume my position: sitting beside him, looking squarely into his lowered eyes. “Tell me everything.”
David coughs, as though the words are lodged in his throat. “They found Nick’s body in the East River. They showed me photos.” He rubs his lids with his fists. “He was beaten. Badly. Horribly. I mean, God, Liza. His head was bashed in with something. A tire iron, maybe. There were flecks of metal. And . . .”
David takes a choppy breath. “He’d been shot. The cops think that the killer put a .22 into his gut and then, once he was immobilized, beat him to death.”
In my mind’s eye, I see Beth with the lead pipe, reddened with blood, raised like a baseball bat. A knifelike pain stabs my frontal lobe. White spots speckle my vision. I drop my head into my hands and rock back and forth. I lack the constitution for true crime. Violence against my made-up characters is all the brutality I can withstand. Thinking about Nick’s real warm blood coming out of his real bludgeoned body, the fear that he must have felt as a real, live human being facing his all-too-real death . . . it’s too much for me. I can’t let myself imagine.
David pats me on the back, happy, I think, that I am finally as broken up about his friend as he has been. “God, Liza, his face was barely recognizable, just this waterlogged . . .” I feel his body tremble beside me, as though an electric current has been applied. The cops tortured David with these details. Why would they get so graphic? What could they hope to gain?
“His skull was destroyed. He might have been alive when—”
I put up a hand, unable to swallow any more gory details.
My racing heartbeat resounds in my head. “I don’t get why the police told you all this.”
“I don’t know.” David stands. I look up long enough to see him walk from the couch to the curtains. He pulls back the heavy fabric. A long rectangle of light from the neighboring building breaks in, bathing my husband’s button-down and suit pants in a white glow. I can’t stand to see that halo.
“I don’t understand who would do this. I mean, the savagery . . .” David gasps. “The hate they had to have . . .” A sob cuts off his words. I peer from beneath my lowered lids at him, trying to see his expression without taking in the light. His body shudders and shakes as though he dove into a cold ocean. I have never seen my husband cry this hard.
“Why would they show you the photos?” I mumble the question, unable to silence my inner monologue with the throbbing in my temples.
He rubs his hands back and forth over his bald head. “For all I know, I’m a suspect.”
“What reason would you have to hurt Nick?”
“I don’t know!” He whirls on me like an angry dog. “I don’t have a fucking clue! I don’t even own a gun. I had no reason to want Nick dead. He was my friend. The best man at our wedding.”
I recall Detective Campos’s line of questioning. “Do the police think you and Nick had disagreements about the firm?”
David shakes his head in disgust. “I don’t know, Liza. I do know that without Nick, our biggest clients might leave. So you tell me. Why on Earth would the police think I’d hurt my friend?”
If I were writing a book, I could invent a variety of reasons. Nick was stealing money from the firm and David found out. David had messed up a case and Nick was blackmailing him. Nick planned to leave and take their best accounts. As I consider motives, needles stab into my forehead, forcing my eyes shut. In the blackness, I see the empty space in the lockbox. A horrifying thought flares in my brain. It consumes the oxygen in my lungs. Suddenly, I’m gasping. Choking.
David killed Nick with my gun.
Fear wrests open my eyes. I watch David step from the window and survey the room, scanning for evidence. His red, tear-stained face looks wracked with guilt. “The police always spend the first part of an investigation leaning on those closest to the deceased. That’s probably all this is. They might come here at some point.” His index finger shoots toward me, accusing me of wrongdoing. “If they do, demand a warrant and call me. They’ll probably have one since they know I’d have any search overturned in court otherwise. Still, ask. If they don’t give you anything, make sure you tell them, ‘I do not consent to this search.’ Okay? Those exact words.”
My head swims with the migraine and the realization that I may be married to a murderer. Memorizing anything is too much. I drop my forehead onto my thighs. Bile sears my throat. I swallow it along with any idea of revealing that I know my gun is missing. I don’t want David to think that I suspect him or, worse, to confess anything to me. Ignorance is bliss. Whatever he did, I don’t want to find out for certain. I don’t want to know anything at all.
“Say it, Liza!”
His volume startles the words from me. “I do not consent to this search.”
“Good. Good.” David is pacing. I hear his shoes against the hardwood. Three steps right, turn, three steps left. “By the way, I was looking for a note Nick sent. Um, for a case . . .”
His tone has changed from angry to distracted. He’s trying to hide the importance of this note. Does it show a motive for him to kill Nick? I don’t want to know. I mentally repeat the words like a silent prayer. I don’t want to know. God, I don’t want to know.
“I
have to go the office. If they come, call me.”
It must be after midnight. Maybe after one. What is so important in the office?
It’s an effort to raise my head. I see that David’s briefcase is in his hand. Despite the dim lighting, the room is far too colorful. My gut is clenching. I need the bathroom. “But—”
“Liza. Whatever you do, don’t say anything to the police, okay? Spousal privilege. Tell them you’re invoking spousal privilege.”
I can’t answer.
“Liza, say spousal privilege.”
My stomach does a last somersault. I wretch and cover my mouth, running to the toilet before the next spasm spews the contents onto the floor. The front door slams as I hurl over the bowl.
Chapter 13
Jake answers the door before I can put my key into the lock. He’s showered and dressed for work, though he’s not wearing a tie, socks, or shoes. It’s past noon. Dark circles swell beneath his lower lids. Last night, apparently, was not a restful one. Welcome to the club.
As I enter with Vicky, he tries to reach into the stroller. I push my baby past him into the apartment, knocking his arm away with the bassinet’s sunshade. Victoria fell asleep ten minutes ago. He cannot play daddy now and wake her because it’s convenient for him. Besides, she’s played already. Vicky stayed awake the whole boat ride back to the city and during the lengthy stroll through the chain of parks and piers lining the Hudson River en route to our condo. Her navy eyes had observed everything. She’d been so engaged, I’d even taken her to play on the lawn outside Chelsea Piers. As I’d swept her bare feet over the blades of grass, she’d gurgled an openmouthed infant laugh. Neither of us had been in a hurry to return home.
“Where were you?” Jake grips his hips. A laugh bubbles in my throat. More than a month of sleeping around and he’s angry that I didn’t come home.
If he only knew what I’d done.
“I was at Mom’s.”