Page 78 of Count My Lies

She tried to fight it, but her lawyer said there was a chance Jay was right, that a judge might deem her unfit, strip her of custody. And order her to pay alimony and child support. There was that trust fund from her grandma, after all. Yes, it was hers, but there were ways to access the income she made from it. It wasn’t worth the risk, in his six-hundred-dollar-an-hour opinion. Could she try and work it out? the lawyer had asked.

But hadn’t she already tried? For years, she’d tried because she loved him, because she believed him when he said he would change. Because despite everything—the infidelity, the money, the digs about what she should wear and how she should look—she thought he was a good dad.

At least, she thought that hecouldbe, if she showed him how to love unconditionally, how to love without expectation.

But now here was proof, definitive proof, that she was wrong. He would never be a good dad. A good dad would never care more about his hard-on than his daughter. And worse, a good dad would never steal a child from their mother. Harper needed her. He might as well be severing their daughter’s limb.

She could finally see the forest through the trees. Who Jay was, why he’d never change. At his core, all he cared about was money and appearances.Himself.And Violet, better than anyone, knew what that could—no,would—do to a child. Maybe, if she was there, she could lessen the blow, but if he was left alone with Harper, who knows the damage he’d do.

It was the other thing she’d turned a blind eye to, subtle now, but for how long?: comments about how much Harper was eating, her portion sizes. He hated the M&M’S, glared at Violet when she offered any treats. How he made sure Harper’s hair was neatly braided, her bangs smoothed, that everything she wore had the right label. If you didn’t know any better, you might mistake it for concern. I did. But Violet saw through it. Jay was teaching Harper—like he had taught her, like her parents had taught her—that her worth was inextricably tied to how she presented herself to the world.

So the answer was no, she couldn’t work it out. Jay had broken Violet’s heart, again and again, and one day, he was going to break Harper’s; of this Violet was sure. And that was the one thing, the only thing, she would never allow.

So together, in the bathroom of the beach house, we came up with a plan. There was just one rule: no more lies. At least, not to each other. Never to each other.

When we both had agreed, Violet handed the gun to me. Instead of her shooting me, I would shoot her.

Before I did, Violet called Danny on the burner. When he answered, she began crying again. “I couldn’t do it,” she told him. Her shoulders shook as she sobbed noisily, snot leaking from her nose, voice breaking. “I couldn’t.” On the other end of the phone, I heard his voice. “I know, honey.” It’s why he’d agreed to go along with it. He’d realized that when she picked up the gun, her finger slipping around the trigger, she wouldn’t be able to shoot me. It wasn’t who she was. He’d known it before she had.

The gun was heavier than I expected it to be. I could feel my heartbeat in my palm, pulsing against it. I breathed out shakily. Violet stood only a few feet away, her back to me as if she were running, like I had from her. I needed to shoot her at close range so I wouldn’t miss. Danny had told us to aim for her lower thigh. There would be a lot of blood, but it would be far enough away from any organs, and he could say her femoral artery had been hit. No one would question him; he was at the top of the ladder, his word incontestable.

Violet cried out when the gun went off, a low, guttural wail. I ran to her, but she waved me away. “The gun,” she said, teeth gritted, eyes screwed tightly closed. “Take care of the gun.”

I wiped it down and tossed it under the bed for the police to find. Then, pressing a washcloth to her thigh, I called 911. I was grateful for my too-large hands, mymitts, how they covered the wound, stopped the bleeding. “Help!” I yelled into the phone. “You have to help us! My friend, she was shot. Her husband, he shot her, then left!”

As we waited for the sirens, I couldn’t help but imagine what it would be like: me moving into their big house, Violet and I going shopping to redecorate Jay’s office, turning it into a bedroom for me. I’d be like an aunt to Harper, a sister to Violet. I saw myself waking up early to pack Harper’s lunch, braiding her hair, taking her to thepark after school, helping Violet make dinner, her at the stove while I chopped onions at the island. We’d take turns putting Harper to bed, trade off doing the dishes. At the end of the day, we’d collapse on the couch, bicker affectionately about what to watch.

I smiled down tenderly at her as I squeezed her hand with my free one. Violet had gone from being who her parents wanted her to be, to who Jay wanted her to be, stifling herself until she could barely breathe. She’d given everything she had. Still, it wasn’t enough. Still,shewasn’t enough. But she would be enough for me. We would be enough for each other.

Violet opened her eyes, smiling weakly. “I’m sorry I tried to kill you.”

I let out a half laugh, half sob. “I’m sorry I tried to sleep with your husband.”

Violet was drenched in sweat by the time help arrived on the scene. Danny arrived first, as promised, along with another EMT, a young, zit-speckled kid who looked barely eighteen, then two cops, one around the same age as the EMT, the other pushing sixty, a round paunch above his belt. In the commotion, I studied him. Violet was right; Danny was beautiful. When he went to her, his touch was tender, his eyes soft, voice low and soothing. It was no wonder every girl—and boy—on the island had been in love with him.

As Danny worked on Violet, bandaging her wound, strapping an oxygen mask to her face, loading her onto a stretcher, I sat with the officers. I told them what we’d rehearsed, that I came home from dropping off Harper from Anne-Marie’s and heard Violet and Jay arguing, him yelling at her. Something about divorce papers, how he’d never let her go. He sounded so angry, I said, my voice quaking. Then I heard a gunshot. Terrified, I hid in a closet. I heard him drive off, but I wasn’tsure if he was planning to come back, so I waited. When I came out and went upstairs, I found Violet like this, on the floor, blood everywhere. “I think he went to find his daughter,” I said finally. “She’s at a sleepover next door.”

At this, the older of the two cops got up abruptly. He made a call on his radio, said the word “backup.” Then they both left, their boots thudding down the hall, the bang of the front door, the wail of police sirens.Sorry, Jay, I’d thought, though I wasn’t sorry at all.

Danny and the other EMT wheeled Violet out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and out of the house. I followed them into the back of the ambulance, Violet lying supine on the stretcher, her face pale. Once the stretcher was secured, the second EMT closed the doors, then, a moment later, appeared in the cab of the ambulance, behind the wheel.

Danny hooked an IV into Violet’s arm. Fluids and painkillers, he told me. Violet’s eyes fluttered closed. Her breathing grew shallow. I couldn’t tell if she was acting or not.

Five minutes into the drive, Danny looked up at me. “She’s lost too much blood,” he said, shaking his head.

His face was so solemn, so drawn, that for a minute, I almost believed him. Then he pounded on the plastic partition to the driver’s cab. “Redirect,” he said. “Redirect to the morgue.”

Our siren cut out abruptly, the ambulance slowing. While we drove, Danny called the police. It was a short conversation, but when he hung up, he told me that they wanted me down at the station to give an official statement. Someone would meet us at the morgue to pick me up.

When the ambulance finally slowed to a stop, Danny pulled a thin white sheet over Violet’s face.

I stood in the parking lot while Danny wheeled her in, feeling like I was in a dream.

A few minutes later, he came out with an empty stretcher. The coroner had been two sheets to the wind, as usual, bottle of gin half-drunk on his desk, barely acknowledged Danny as he signed the intake form, waved him into the back, where Violet got off the stretcher and waited, in a coat closet, for Danny to pick her up after his shift ended. The morphine he had given her in the ambulance would hold her until then.

As the coroner took another swig in his office, his eyes glazed, head lolling, Danny took Violet’s file into the body storage facility in the back of the morgue. The occupied refrigeration units had similar files affixed to their doors in plastic sleeves. That day, there were three flagged for cremation; there were always at least that many, especially in August, at the height of the heat, throngs of tourists who’d overimbibed, overestimated their swimming abilities, careless with their suntanned bodies, their lives.

There, Danny slipped one of the files out and, in its place, slipped Violet’s in. When the body was cremated, no one would know it hadn’t been Violet. If the cops—or anyone—came looking for her, asking for an autopsy, the coroner would come up empty-handed. It wouldn’t be the first time there’d been a mix-up, intentional or otherwise, not the first time someone wanted something to seem different than what actually was. If it were another police department, another city, another town, there might have been an investigation, but here, the cops wouldn’t press the issue. The coroner was one of their own; the sooner this was buried, the better for everyone.

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