Here She Lies

about the felony warrant and the slow drain of my credit, but blaming Julie was way out of line. She was an intense person and yes, yes, she could be inappropriately flirtatious at times — I’d seen her in action, but I’d always understood the blurred boundaries even if others hadn’t. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Bobby had probably misinterpreted something Julie had said or done. It had never occurred to me before this moment to wonder what feelings Julie, my look-alike, stirred in him. Feelings he couldn’t help, feelings that simply resided in him because of our own sexual relationship. I knew he could tell Julie and me apart, but when he looked at her what did he see ? What did he feel ? What involuntary sensations bubbled under his skin? I had always thought of Bobby as my very own and felt confident that Julie honored that, but I had not considered Bobby’s side of things, not really. I would now. And I had to open my mind to the probability that he had been faithful to me all along, that the Lovyluv e-mails were somehow (but how ? ) part of the identity theft, my arrest, the whole rotten shebang. I rested my ankle on his knee, and in a return of my gesture he laid his warm hand on my bare skin. And then he breathed. We both did.
    “So where do you think they went?” he asked.
    “Maybe to the playground. Lexy discovered the baby swings recently and she loves to swing. Or maybe to the store. Or even both.”
    “She wakes up too early, doesn’t she?”
    “The minute the sun’s up, so is Lexy.”
    “So you think Julie took her out on errands and stuff?”
    “Of course,” I said. “The note to Mica said she’d be back at noon — so they’ll be back at noon.”
    “Actually, it said if she’s not back by noon she’d pay him next week.”
    “Meaning she expects to be back but she might not make it in time. Same difference, Bobby, don’t you think?”
    He nodded, yawned. “Are you hungry?”
    “Starving.”
    In the kitchen I brewed coffee and raided the fridge for eggs, bread, butter and jam while Bobby searched the phone book. This time he wasn’t looking for a cybercafe; there were plenty of computers right here in this house. I knew what he was looking for: a jeweler. Before he said anything, I had a chance to think it through. What would be the harm of having an appraisal of my zircons? If that was what it would take to get him off the subject of Julie, then why not? We could go right after breakfast and get it done before Julie and Lexy got back at noon. By the time we sat down to breakfast, I had made up my mind.
    “We can go for an appraisal,” I told Bobby.
    He smiled, put down his coffee, consulted his notes. “There’s a jeweler on Railroad Street that opens at ten.”
    It was almost nine when we finished eating and piled our dishes into the sink. While Bobby showered, I went upstairs to the Yellow Room. Everything was exactly as I had left it except for the yawning absence of Lexy, her empty crib, the unusual quiet. I tried Julie’s cell phone again and left another message (where was she?). There was a new voice mail, which I saw was from Clark Hazmat. I hadn’t heard my phone ring and I wondered if his latest call had come in during the beeping as I’d turned off the alarm system; preoccupied by the mind-static of dread at another possible malarm, I wouldn’t have registered anything. Why was Clark calling me, anyway? I had neither time nor energy for him, especially now, and so I ignored his second message as well. I then called Liz. She wanted to see our credit reports and I promised to fax them right over. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, gathered my hair into a ponytail and took the voluminous reports upstairs to the fax machine in Julie’s office.
    Ten minutes later, Bobby found me standing in front of Julie’s desk watching the fax feed through. I had to stand guard over it, occasionally adjusting the pages so they wouldn’t get stuck. Waiting with me, he glanced around her large high-tech office and I realized he had never been up here before.
    “She has been successful,” he said, looking at her Stevie and the other awards arranged on the shelf.
    “Where do you think she gets all this money?”
    He cocked an eyebrow, avoiding my rhetorical question, and crossed back over to the desk, where he watched my credit report (a work of fiction) threadthrough the fax machine. Picking up the pages that had finished, he neatened them into