Here She Lies

she would feed off our weakness, but Lazare promised that it was part of his plan. When Soiffer eventually emerged, so would we, again, relieved and hopeful that this person of interest could offer information that would lead us to our daughter. And then, if Lazare had his way, in the relative safety of misdirection, Julie would shed a layer of caution. Or would she? The Julie I knew had never been careless and the Julie I didn’t know was turning out to be exceedingly calculating.
    At two o’clock in the morning Thomas Soiffer arrived at the Great Barrington Police Department in a sea of artificial lights. It was a carefully brokered moment; there was no talk, just the image of Soiffer being escorted into the station between his son and Detective Lazare. Half an hour later, senseless with exhaustion, Bobby and I faced a splinter group of reporters who had traveled back to Julie’s house.
    “I’m so grateful.” I wept on camera, Bobby pressed to my side. “Now they have Thomas Soiffer in custody. If this man knows who killed Zara Moklas, then maybe he can also help us find our baby.”
    And so the night passed, hour after hour, while Detective Lazare kept Thomas Soiffer to himself in ominous silence at the police station. The reporters and TV crews camped outside the Main Street entrance occasionally defaulted to reporting on themselves with another “live update on the situation in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.” Bobby and I kept the TVs on throughout the house so wherever we were we would hear thenews bulletins. Soiffer’s appearance and our on-screen plea were continually repeated, but there was nothing new. I started to wonder if we’d have better luck getting information from our reporters — the small clutch of them huddled in vans out front or pacing Julie’s lawn to stretch their legs — but I had already cried twice on camera and Lazare had coached me not to overdo it and not to let them catch me off guard. He preferred scheduled, controlled news conferences. Every half hour or so there was a woodpecker-like burst of knocking at our kitchen door, which we ignored. Until Lazare announced the results of his interview with Soiffer, or until Julie made a move, there was nothing more to say.
    Finally, in the pitch-dark hours of early morning, Bobby and I retreated to the Yellow Room — and bed. It had been over a month since I had made love with my faithless husband, but now his faithfulness had been rebuilt by a pile of rotten facts. He had never cheated on me; his denials had been accurate all along. Julie had systematically stripped me down and ripped us apart. I felt a kind of angry sorrow that I didn’t recognize and felt as if, no matter what happened now — if Lexy was back with us, unharmed, in an hour — I had lost something forever. Our marriage would never be as innocent as it once was. I put my hands under his T-shirt, pulled it over his head, unbuckled his belt and zipped down his pants. He pulled all the white cloth off my body. His skin felt warm and familiar and yet there was a sense of urgency in our lovemaking, as if it was the first time — or as if we’d never have another chance. I loved him. But something was still wrong. I couldn’tdetach my mind from Lexy. Nothing could blot out her absence, the empty crib in our room. Nothing.
    Dawn arrived, bracing the house in its usual chilly mist before spreading fresh, clear light across the sky. Peeking out the window of the Yellow Room, I could see individual dewdrops clinging to blades of grass and had to resist the urge to run out there barefoot and feel the dampness for myself. I hated being shut in the house like this, sleeping in helpless bursts, waking again and again to the sharp realization that my baby was still gone.
    Bobby slept deeply and I tried not to disturb him as I turned on my camera, positioning myself at the window. I shot straight through glass and screen, wondering how these barriers would translate the outside view, how exactly they would distort the plain reality of grass. As my camera clicked and whirred I imagined Lexy, a little girl, running into the frame, her bare feet feeling the damp grass. I could feel her life. If Julie succeeded in keeping her, would her sensations of me as her real mommy eventually be erased? Would the two mommies, the double vision of me and Julie together in her buried memories, blur into one? I took a dozen shots before capping my lens and zipping the camera back into