Here She Lies

dime.
    I balanced her on my hip and slipped the dime into my pants pocket. Then my eyes settled on the sink: for an old sink that no one but Bobby used, it was surprisingly, freshly clean. I cranked open one of the faucets and held my fingers under the cold running water, then leaned Lexy in and repeatedly splashed water into her mouth, saying, “Let’s get that yucky dirt out of there, sweetie pie.”
    Lexy laughed and opened her mouth wide. As Icupped a handful of water and dribbled it into her mouth, the sink began to fill. A clogged drain. It was old and hardly used, so it was no surprise, but then the drain burped up a chunk of red. Crimson rivulets bled through the rising pool of water. Smaller flecks of dark red continued to pump up from the clogged drain.
    It had to be paint. Red paint. But what in this house was painted red? My mind cataloged the rooms: whites, cantaloupes, yellows, greens — but nowhere red. I turned off the faucet before the sink overflowed. Had Bobby painted one of his carpentry projects red? I glanced around the dim basement and saw the upended chair he had been constructing for over a year now: raw, unpainted wood. And then, as my eyes swept from the shop floor to the neatly organized workbench, I saw it.
    Among the tools on the top tier of his fanned-open toolbox, wedged lengthwise between a hammer and a short level: my long-lost kitchen knife. For months I had repeatedly searched the butcher-block knife holder and the kitchen drawers and had never understood where my best knife could have disappeared to. It was barely visible, but I recognized its ebony handle with the round steel screw that I was always tightening. Aside from the unreliable handle it was my favorite cooking knife; its ten-inch blade sharpened better than any of my others. A good cook can do just as well with any knife, but you formed special attachments to certain ones, and this one was mine. I was irritated to discover that Bobby had borrowed it for his carpentry projects, and on top of that he hadn’t returned it.
    I carried Lexy over to the toolbox and nudged awaythe level so I could get my fingers around the knife’s handle. Just as I picked it up I heard Bobby upstairs, calling me. Then his footsteps came thumping down the basement stairs.
    “Annie?” He stopped halfway down, his attention caught on the red-filled sink.
    “I found my knife.” I picked it up. My knife. I’d had it over a decade and had used it to make some of my best meals. “I wish you hadn’t brought it down here,” I said. And then I saw the filmy red streak edging the knife’s spine.
    I looked at the sink. The knife. The red. And then I looked at Bobby.
    His forehead dripped sweat, which he wiped with the back of his hand as he came all the way down the basement stairs. His other hand gripped the screwdriver.
    “What is this, Bobby?” My voice seemed to float out of me. My stomach clamped. Breathing stopped. I held tighter to Lexy. The earth was shifting, I felt it. “Is this paint?” But it was a stupid, hopeful, hopeless question.
    He was three feet in front of me now. Shaking. The color had drained out of his face.
    “I’ll take that,” he said.
    Instinctively, I pulled back. Shook my head. Angled Lexy away from him, toward the wall. “No.”
    “If we put it back—” he began, but I stopped him.
    “Is this blood?”
    “I washed it,” he said. “It was clean. Some must have dripped down from under the handle.”
    My brain reeled back to the moment when I sawZara lying there in an expanding pool of dark blood that glistened in spasms as the police lights flashed over it. The violent pivot of her head away from her body. The unnatural skew of her limbs. Her eyes like blank screens. Her red blood spilling around her, out of her, emptying her, draining the last living part of her onto the street.
    My fingers wanted to open, to drop the knife, but I resisted the urge to run away from this. He had to tell me. I had to know.
    “You killed her,” I said.
    “No. I never lied to you about that, Annie.”
    There I was, holding my first child, pregnant with my second, and survival for all of us was the only possible choice. We had to get out of this basement. I looked straight into his eyes: I would keep him connected to me, get him talking.
    “Okay,” I said. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
    The words seemed to rupture out of him, like he’d been holding them back with the flimsiest of wills: “It was