Here She Lies
account for.”
Retailer. Vendor. Posted. He had been on the phone. In our time together Bobby had never dealt with a bill or any of our various service accounts. I had often wondered how he survived before I came along. Basically I think he just paid his bills on time and never sought any discrepancies to balk at. The ignorance-is-bliss approach had served him well enough — until now.
He moved aside the clipped reports and got the stack of credit card bills, which I’d marked up with yellow highlighter and red pen. There was now bluepen, too, I saw — Bobby’s contribution. Seeing his markings made me hopeful. In a strange way those blue lines, their earnestness, increased my willingness to accept the possibility of his innocence, because if he wasn’t innocent then his notes were just more documented lies, which would promote him from faithless to fraud.
“I put in a dispute for every one of those charges, but it’s going to be weeks before we hear anything back,” he said.
“Well, one of us bought that stuff, Bobby, and it wasn’t me.”
“It wasn’t me either.” He stared at me as if trying to drive home a point I didn’t quite get. “Something’s really wrong here, Annie.”
I felt like laughing — no, not laughing, crying. We were back at the same old dead end: something was wrong but we couldn’t name it and he wouldn’t admit any responsibility.
“Just say it, Bobby.”
“I won’t lie just to end this stalemate.”
“She wrote you love letters.”
“Annie, those e-mails aren’t real.”
Oh, that was a good one! He didn’t think they were real. They looked real to me with their Bobbybobs and Lovyluvs and their accurate descriptions of his body when he made love. I felt like such an idiot sitting here listening to this nonsense.
“You know what, Bobby? Just forget it. It’s over. We can’t keep going through this.”
“Annie...”
That one tired word, my name, seemed to suck allthe air out of the room. Suddenly we were ten thousand feet above the clouds in a world without atmosphere.
“I’m hiring an investigator,” Bobby said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed now, his body alert, refusing to let me give up what I’d started. “He’s coming to the house Monday night. He’s some kind of computer specialist. He’s going to go over our files, our whole system, with a fine-tooth comb. If you need answers before you’ll come back home, Annie, I’m going to find them for you.”
He crossed the room, stroked Lexy’s hair and then took my hand. His palm felt dry, familiar. “Please, Annie, sweetheart, don’t give up on me. I’m going to do whatever it takes to solve this.”
I had to do it, give him another one-more-chance — but slowly and carefully. He slept in the Pinecone Room that night while I lay alone in my pretty bed in the Yellow Room, comforted by the soft rhythm of Lexy’s breathing, until eventually I fell asleep.
I stayed in bed later than usual the next morning, taking my time nursing Lexy. When I went downstairs there were already breakfast dishes in the sink. I set about giving Lexy her “morning mush,” as we had come to call it, preparing the area surrounding her high chair for an onslaught of mucky mess. Halfway through her bowl of rice cereal — some of which assumedly made it into her stomach on its way onto her face, her bib, the high chair tray and the floor — I glanced out the window and saw Bobby and Julie appear together in the distance. They were nearing the house, returning, it seemed, from a walk down theroad. I wondered how long they’d been out and what they were discussing. Lexy, of course. Zara, I imagined. Me.
Julie was wearing my pale green capris, rubber flip-flops that I suspected were also mine because they just weren’t her style and her tie-dyed Buddha sweatshirt. She was dressed more like me than like her usual tidy self. There was something so weirdly familiar about seeing her with my husband because I was seeing us, Bobby and me, and yet it wasn’t us because it was them. Definitely them. To the naked eye they might have looked like “Annie and Bobby,” but they were not. I could see the difference. There was a solid two feet of space separating them, whereas when Bobby and I walked together our bodies always veered sloppily toward each other, invading each other’s spaces, preventing solitude. Bobby and I shared something they lacked; invisible yet emotionally palpable, it was what made us a
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