The End of Her: A Novel

by Shari Lapena

  The day of the picnic with Stephanie, he’d been agitated, undecided. Over lunch he’d developed a half-formed plan to drive back, Stephanie and the twins asleep in the car, twist the wheel suddenly—he would claim that he’d fallen asleep, lost control of the car—and go off the road at a spot he knew and plunge into the lake. He wouldn’t help Stephanie or the twins out of the flooded car—he would prevent her escape if he had to—but he would make it look like he’d tried to save her. But then Stephanie had insisted on driving back. He tried to protest, but it was as if she had a second sense, as if she knew. In the end, he’d been relieved. He probably never would have gotten away with it. It had been a desperate idea, born of a desperate situation. By the time he decided it would be a much better idea to get rid of Erica—the source of all his problems—she’d already gone to the coroner.

  He’d always planned to get rid of Stephanie someday, somehow—but Erica had forced his hand.

  He thinks back to how it all began—clumsily bumping into Lindsey at the top of the stairs while her back was turned. He made it seem like an accident but he knew exactly what he was doing. She went careening down the stairs to the floor at the bottom, and he thought it was done. She lay still for a moment by the back door, but then she began to stir. And . . . she was fine. He remembers his disbelief, his crushing disappointment. But he’d quickly realized what he must do and dashed down the stairs to help her up, exclaiming how sorry he was. Fussing over her, making a big show of concern. She hadn’t suspected a thing. She was only worried about the baby and insisted on going to the hospital for an ultrasound. They’d taken a cab to the hospital and he’d brooded in the waiting room at the ER, wondering how he could ever get rid of his wife and her child.

  It wasn’t until weeks later, during that snowstorm, lying in bed the night before their trip to her mother’s, that he thought of it. The exhaust pipe. How perfect it was. How pleased he was with himself for thinking of it. How easy it had been to do, and so low risk. He remembers the look Erica had given him at the funeral. As if she knew. But how could she know?

  He’s been afraid of her ever since.

  52

  When Patrick returns, Stephanie is in the driveway, buckling the twins into the backseat. Through the rear window, she sees him drive in and park his car beside hers. She wonders where he’s been for the last couple of hours.

  “Hey,” he says, getting out of his car and coming up behind her. She’s still got her head inside the car, settling the twins. He sounds conciliatory. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t know what he expects from her. He’s turned their lives upside down, their marriage into a fraud, and it doesn’t seem to have registered that it’s all his fault.

  “Where are you going?” he asks as she pulls her head out of the car and turns to face him.

  “Grocery shopping.”

  “You don’t have to take them. I’m home now. You can leave them with me.”

  “No, I’ve got them all settled now. It’s fine.” She notices that he seems upset, although he’s trying to pretend he’s not. His eyes are cold, distant.

  “No. Leave them with me. You always complain about grocery shopping with the twins, what a hassle it is.”

  She does. But she doesn’t want to leave them at home with him. It’s the first time she’s really had that thought crystallize in her mind, and it gives her a start. She’s afraid to leave the babies in his care. “I know,” she says, turning away, “but it’s good for them. They need an outing and they go to the park every day. The grocery store is different. I let them feel the oranges, the bags of rice. They love it.” And people always stop to tell me how adorable they are, she thinks, and I need that right now, it makes everything easier to bear. Whatever she does, whatever she decides, it will be for them, for Jackie and Emma. Maybe she’ll get in the car now with her twins, her diaper bag, and her purse, and just keep driving. . . .

  “Do you want me to come?” he offers.

  She manages to smile at him. “No, that’s okay. I do this all the time.”

  “Okay, fine.” He looks at her for a second and then turns away and goes into the house.

  She drives to the grocery store, her mind in a tumult.

  * * *

  • • •

  LATER THAT NIGHT, after a strained evening meal, after they have put the twins to bed, Stephanie takes her laptop to the living-room sofa and watches Patrick go upstairs to their bedroom.

  Stephanie sits on the sofa dry-eyed. All her tears have been shed. Tears are a sign of weakness, she thinks. What she feels now is a coldness, a resoluteness, a resolve that she didn’t have before. A kind of strength that comes from having no option but to face your situation head-on and deal with it.

  It’s late, nearly eleven. She closes the laptop, leaves it on the coffee table, and makes her way slowly upstairs. She’s so tired; exhaustion makes it feel like she’s climbing a mountain. She pauses at the top. For now, she’s still sleeping in the same bed as her husband. Should she move to the bed in the guest room? She would like to. Does she dare?

  She walks slowly to their shared bedroom, the carpet softening her footsteps to nothing. She gets to the bedroom door and stops. Patrick is at the closet. He has his back to her but at a slight angle, so that she can see what he’s doing. He’s holding his gun in his right hand, as if he’s checking it. Her heart begins to beat wildly. How had she forgotten about the gun? It’s always been there. Locked away, in the safe. Patrick keeps it there in case anyone breaks into their house while they’re sleeping—it would take him only seconds to access it.

  She stares, unable to move, her heart knocking at her ribs. The safe where he keeps the gun, on the closet shelf, is open. She knows there’s ammunition in there. Has he loaded the gun? Is this it? Is this how it all ends? He doesn’t know she’s there; he seems to be completely oblivious to her. She makes a quick calculation—she can’t turn and run, she could never get to the twins and get them out of the house fast enough. She’s glued to the spot.

  He places the gun back in the safe, locks it, and turns around, startled to see her there. He must notice her pallor, because he says, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “I’m just not feeling that great. I thought I’d go to bed.”

  He studies her. “Yeah, you don’t look too good,” he agrees.

  She walks to her side of the bed, grabs her nightgown from beneath the pillow, and turns her back to him. She starts stripping off her clothes. She doesn’t want to provoke him. She doesn’t dare move to the guest room. She crawls into bed without bothering to wash her face or brush her teeth, and turns on her side facing the wall. She tries to fall asleep, but her heart is racing.

  As Patrick joins her in bed and the long night stretches on, she can’t sleep, because she’s thinking about the gun.

  53

  In the dark, Patrick stares at his wife’s back, which is all she offers him these days. She’s pretending to sleep, but he’s not fooled.

  The look on her face when she saw him with the gun—Christ, it was like she expected him to shoot her. The situation is worse than he thought.

  If it weren’t for Erica fucking Voss, Stephanie would have no idea. She’d be happy and unsuspicious, with sleeping twins and an investment portfolio with over two million dollars in it. And now he might lose everything.

  He can feel himself unraveling. He’s incandescent with rage at Erica. He’s furious with Niall, and disappointed in Stephanie. He thought he’d beat the polygraph. He’d studied how to do it, how to bite hard inside his mouth for a spike of pain to throw off the test. He thought it would work. It should have worked.

  If Erica hadn’t come back into his life, if she hadn’t come to Aylesford . . .

  He remembers how he hooked up with Erica, that first time. They were out at a bar after work on a Friday night, he and Greg. Lindsey had joined them, bringing along her
friend Erica. Greg’s girlfriend had been there too. Lindsey said she was tired and went home early after a couple of mocktails, waddling out the door, heavily pregnant. She left behind her best friend and her husband, not worried at all, because why should she be? She’d told him, in front of everyone, to stay and have a good time because after the baby came he wouldn’t be able to do that anymore. He’d smiled at her, but the permission, and the warning, left a bad taste in his mouth.

  He was twenty-three, in his first real job, and he wasn’t ready to be a father. He watched his wife make her ponderous way across the bar and out the door, wondering if he should walk her home, but was soon distracted by something Erica said. He’d met her before, though he’d never really spoken much to her. But that night, beer had loosened his tongue, he felt reckless, and after Lindsey left, Erica seemed to be flirting a little with him. He was enjoying it, and it all seemed harmless. After all, she was a friend of Lindsey’s.

  They’d decided on just one more, and he’d tried to persuade Greg to stay, but he and his girlfriend wanted to go. They didn’t seem to think anything of leaving Patrick and Erica there together to have one last drink.

  Once they were alone, though, the dynamic changed quickly. He realized that she wanted to sleep with him, that ending up in bed with her was actually possible. He wrestled with himself a little. She was his wife’s best friend. Another drink, and it became probable. She whispered that Lindsey would never know. And then it was inevitable.

  They left the bar, and once outside, she took his hand and dragged him around the corner of the building. She leaned against the wall in the dark and pulled him to her. It was like . . . skydiving. That kind of daring, that exhilaration. He was harder than he’d ever been with Lindsey. He wondered how he’d ended up with Lindsey, about to become a father, when he should be fucking women like this one.

  She took him back to her place. It was a short walk away—everything in the small town of Creemore was a short walk away. He kept his eyes open for people he knew who might see them together, but no one was around. When they got to her building and into the elevator, alone, he almost unzipped. But there wasn’t time. The door slid open and he imagined slipping into her.

  Once inside her apartment—it wasn’t much, none of them had much in those days—she led him to her bedroom. Soon, everything was a blur of pounding excitement and a loss of boundaries. Afterward they lay on her bed, exhausted, and he stroked her hair and told her she was amazing.

  She’d smiled at him and said, “I know,” and they both laughed.

  She hadn’t said the same about him. “Lindsey can’t find out about this,” he said, turning serious. He didn’t need the grief. He looked at her lying naked beside him, her pale, slender body, and a vision of his wife popped into his head. It was wrong to compare them, it wasn’t Lindsey’s fault that she was bloated, stretched, darkened, and marked with veins—she was about to become a mother. But God, how he wanted more of this, the perfect woman lying right beside him.

  “No,” she agreed. “It would kill her.”

  Was she waiting for him to say something? “Will we do this again?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer him. She just smiled and said, “You’d best be getting back to your wife.”

  That was what she was like. She liked to be the one in control. She hasn’t changed. He’d gone home feeling like he’d been dismissed, wondering how the hell he would be able to act normally around Erica and his wife when they were all together.

  But then she’d called him at work that Monday—she was all he’d been able to think about—and asked him to come over to her apartment on his lunch hour. And that had been their routine. A pleasurable, exciting, but meaningless affair—for both of them.

  He lies in bed, awake, staring at Stephanie’s back, thinking about the past and everything that has led to this moment. He’d never loved Erica—there was something inherently unlovable about her. Perhaps it was that she herself seemed incapable of loving anyone. She frightened him a little, even then.

  And now, it’s ten years later, and Erica has wrecked everything. His once-adoring wife believes he’s a murderer. He’s afraid she’ll leave him and take her inheritance with her.

  54

  The next morning Stephanie stumbles out of bed and robotically goes through her morning routine. She’d felt her husband’s eyes on her back during the night, as she feigned sleep. She wondered what he was thinking, while she was thinking about the gun.

  This can’t go on.

  She’s coming up with a plan. It frightens her, but she needs a way out. She’d thought of it in that darkest hour right before dawn, when the mind turns to things that shouldn’t survive the cold light of day.

  But now it’s morning, the sun is streaming through the windows, and she’s still thinking about it.

  Hanna has invited her over again today. Stephanie hasn’t asked Hanna over to her place because Patrick is home and she can tell that Hanna no longer wants to set foot in her house. Hanna thinks Patrick is guilty, regardless of how much Stephanie has pretended otherwise. She’d let her guard down that one time, after the arrest, and now she’s afraid Hanna knows what she really thinks.

  She will go to Hanna’s this morning because she wants to—she’s desperate for normalcy—and also because Hanna is now part of Stephanie’s plan, although she does not know it.

  She takes the twins over in the stroller and knocks on Hanna’s door. She lifts the twins out of the stroller and carries them into the house. She puts them on their play mats on the carpeted living-room floor. Hanna has taken to baking comfort food for each of these visits—today Stephanie can smell chocolate chip cookies, and she is absurdly grateful for Hanna’s attempts to make her feel better.

  “Here, have one,” Hanna says when she comes back into the living room with a plate of cookies fresh from the oven. “I’ve just put the coffee on.”

  “You’re a godsend, Hanna,” Stephanie says, meaning it. There’s no one else she can turn to, or even comfortably hang out with. She never realized, before, just how isolated she’s become. She hadn’t made enough of an effort to keep up with people from work when she went off on maternity leave, she thinks. She’d let the women in her moms’ group fall away, not up to making the effort with everything that has been going on. She wonders what they think. Like Hanna, they probably think her husband is guilty. They all know he cheated on his first wife and how she died. She’s sure they must ask themselves why she stays with him. Stephanie wonders if Hanna discusses her situation with the other moms in the neighborhood. She probably does, she realizes, finishing the cookie and reaching for another. She must.

  They talk about the babies, what they’ve been doing, how they’ve been sleeping, little Teddy’s latest visit to the pediatrician. But then there’s a pause, and Hanna looks at her expectantly.

  There’s a long silence broken only by the sound of the babies babbling. Stephanie screws up her courage and says, “I’m going to leave Patrick.” Hanna doesn’t look surprised—she looks more relieved than anything. “I’ve realized that it’s over for me, even if it isn’t for him,” Stephanie says. “I don’t trust him anymore. He cheated on Lindsey. The whole world knows it. And all this about the accident—it’s damaged us, Hanna, more than anyone knows.”

  “I understand completely,” Hanna says. “I think you’re doing the right thing. When trust is gone—”

  Stephanie clarifies, “I don’t believe he killed Lindsey on purpose—the idea is ridiculous. I’m not afraid of him, Hanna, but—I don’t love him anymore.” She adds, “I resent him too much for putting me through all this, even though it’s not entirely his fault.”

  “He picked the wrong woman to have an affair with,” Hanna acknowledges.

  “He certainly did. And now we’re all paying the price,” Stephanie says bitterly. “I’m going to make an appointment with a divorce attorney on Mo
nday. I have to figure everything out before I tell him.”

  “When are you going to tell him?” Hanna asks, her voice worried.

  Stephanie takes a deep breath in. “As soon as possible. After I see the attorney, I guess. I just need this to be over.”

  “Like I said, I think you’re doing the right thing,” Hanna says firmly. “You know I’m here for you, right?”

  Stephanie smiles sadly at her. “I know. And I appreciate it. I don’t really have anyone else I can talk to. This is so hard.” She puts her hands up against her face. “I’m worried about Patrick,” Stephanie says, “about how he’ll take it.”

  “He might see it as a betrayal,” Hanna says uneasily.

  “Maybe. And he’s already really depressed. It’s all been so horrible, Hanna.” She bites her lip so that she won’t cry. She pauses and grabs a tissue from her diaper bag. “It was so awful when he was arrested. He won’t even talk about it.” She pauses to gain control of herself. “I thought that when the police let him go, he would get past it. But Niall dumped him. He doesn’t have his business, and how is he supposed to start over? His reputation has been destroyed, even though they dropped the charges.” She knows how bleak she must look. “It’s so unfair. And when I tell him I’m going to leave him—”

  Hanna looks back at her helplessly and says, “Stephanie, God, I don’t know what to say.”

  Stephanie continues, “He’s not himself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He blames himself for everything that’s happened. He’s moody, depressed, he says things.”

  “What things?” Hanna says, leaning forward anxiously.

  “He says we’d be better off without him.” She turns worried eyes on Hanna. “I’m afraid that if I leave him he might do something. Something drastic, harm himself.”