Here She Lies

In the meantime, we all have to wait.”
    “What if our blood’s identical?” I asked. “Then what?”
    Lazare gave me one of his half-baked smiles, which infuriated me because I expected, or wanted, so much more from him. And he said, “We’ll see.”
    We re-rented a car and Detective Lazare followed usall the way back to the Weathervane Inn. Thankfully Lexy fell asleep in her car seat. I was so glad she wouldn’t remember any of this when she grew up and I wondered what, in the future, we would tell her. It was so strange to think that we could simply leave it out of her life story — and that she would never know Julie.
    The silence in the car was stifling, so I rolled down a window a few inches to let in some air. When we left the highway for the smaller roads, the wayside displays of bright azaleas, forsythia, roses, marigolds, lilacs, daisies, the regiments of newly planted impatiens — reds, pinks, oranges and whites — made me think about the sweater with its vivid colors, announcing I am here. It was what I had originally liked about the sweater and what I now detested: you couldn’t fail to see it. My mind kept replaying the memory reel of the rubber-gloved technician taking it out of my trunk and dropping it into a paper bag. What had Julie done to the sweater she’d stuck in the car on purpose for the police to find? Did it have blood on it? And if our blood turned out to be as identical as our faces, how was I going to prove that the blood found on the sweater, if it was ours, wasn’t mine ?
    It was late afternoon when we pulled into the parking lot of the inn, first Detective Lazare, then us. He didn’t get out. He just sat in his car and watched us carry our baby and our luggage up the curving path bounded by bushes of blue pompoms. Watched us skulk back into the inn. I paused just inside the door, listening to the detective’s engine drive away, leaving the road empty and quiet. Apparently he trusted usenough to stay put. At that thought I looked at Bobby, who was standing at the dining room entrance calling out for one of the innkeepers. I felt like a fly stuck in a sticky web and, seeing a way out, I blurted, “Bobby, wait — let’s just go.”
    He seemed to droop. “Oh, Annie.”
    Mrs. Boardman just then came through the dining room from the adjoining kitchen. “Welcome back! I saved your room, just in case.” I wondered now if he had suggested to her that we might be back, if he had thought all along we would never get on that plane. She handed him the key and I marched past them, up the stairs, struggling through an unexpected sensation that I was standing in the middle of a live firing range and couldn’t tell who was shooting blanks. That was isolation: when you wondered if anyone trusted you. I thought of my blood, the DNA that was my body, and I realized that it would have to speak for me now as Thomas Soiffer’s had spoken for him.
    In our room, which had been cleaned and neatened, I tossed my purse on the chenille bedspread, kissed Lexy’s cheek and set her in the borrowed crib with the yellow bunny Julie had given her and to which she had become attached. Bunbun, we had named it. The lace curtains had been drawn open and sunlight blazed into the room. After a few minutes Bobby came up and unpacked for all of us while I sat in the wingback chair, remembering, with inchoate longing, a winter trip Julie and I had taken with our parents to Florida: Mom unpacking in our large hotel room, Dad brushing his teeth in the bathroom, while Julie and I improvised hide-and-seek by sealing ourselves into the cigarette-smoke-smellycloset. We sat beside each other on the scratchy carpet, holding our breath and clasping hands, thrilled by the possibility that our parents didn’t know where we were.
    Bobby zipped the empty suitcase and stashed it in the closet.
    A whole week went by.
    A week of sleeping, meals, minor errands, books, phone calls, conversations. A week in which Liz engineered the acquittal of the embezzlement charges against me and the repayment of the bail bond, which freed our house and my future. A week when no sooner was I officially a free woman than I met my new criminal defense lawyer. Elias Stormier was a wiry man with a halo of gray hair, who listened gravely to my story and believed me when I told him I had nothing to do with Zara Moklas’s death, and who asserted nonetheless that a good defense was a good offense, and who joined the wisdom-chorus advising