Here She Lies

innocent. No one listened to him. We didn’t listen to him.” Ernesto had briefly worked as an orderly in the PT clinic until his constant talk about his innocence got on everybody’s nerves and we had him replaced.
    “I remember him.” Bobby sighed. “This is going to change us. When I go back, things are going to be different.”
    “I?”
    “We. But I meant, specifically, back to the prison — you said you weren’t going back to work there.”
    “I’m never setting foot in that place again.”
    Lexy then crawled her chubby little hands up my leg until she grasped my knee, standing.
    “Look at you! My big girl!” I lifted her up and swung her in the air. Her riotous laughter made me smile.
    Footsteps of a guard approaching and a rough male voice: “Time’s up!”
    I held Lexy, kissed her, drank her in, whispering, “Come see Mommy tomorrow, okay?” Then I looked at Bobby: “Okay? You’ll bring her?”
    He smiled at us and kissed me. “Okay.”
    But the next day he came alone.
    “Mrs. Boardman offered to watch Lexy at the inn.” He handed me the copy of Ethan Frome I’d bought atthe Mount, then said, “Bad news.” He faced me across the cold steel tabletop, holding both my hands in both of his. His palms were sweaty and I wanted to pull my hands away but didn’t. “I don’t know how this happened,” he said. “It came out of left field.”
    “What, Bobby? You haven’t told me what ?”
    “I spoke with Liz—”
    “I thought she was finished — there’s no more grand larceny charge. Bobby?”
    “It was reinstated.” He pulled one hand away to run it through his hair in a gesture like something off TV, I thought, something not completely genuine, not real. His other hand gripped mine so hard it hurt and I instinctively drew away, laying both palms flat on the table. Panic ripped its way up my spine and I told myself: No. I would come at this head-on.
    “Why?” I asked.
    “The FBI’s been going through our home computer. They said that all the identity theft activity was ‘ghosted’ in Julie’s computer — generated by someone else. They said she might have been set up. They said it started in our computer, Annie, with us.” His pupils shrank to black dots. Was he afraid of me now? Me?
    “Say it, Bobby. You want to.”
    “Okay.” He looked at me with those wary eyes. “With—” But he couldn’t say it and we were left with silence, coldness, four stone walls, a steel table, a man and a woman and a single, unspeakable word: you. He couldn’t say it and I wasn’t going to say it for him because I couldn’t believe he would think it at all. How could he think I had started all this!? Why would I? For what purpose? To land myself in jail?
    “It doesn’t make any sense, Bobby.”
    “Yes, I know it doesn’t. I do .” He slumped into folded arms, smaller than I’d ever seen him. Shaking, crying. I reached over to touch the back of his neck. His hair was tacky, like he hadn’t washed it in a couple of days, and a film of sweat seemed to have ground itself into his skin. “I’m sorry this is happening to you. It was never supposed to be like this.”
    Of course it wasn’t. We had been a normal, happy family; bad things were never supposed to happen to us. And yet somehow they had, one thing after the next — and it wasn’t over yet. As he cried, my anger cooled. I wasn’t the only one Julie’s lies had fouled. I had to be here, but he didn’t. Before I released him, though, I had to ask him one more time:
    “Are you sure you believe I didn’t do any of this, Bobby?”
    “I’m sure.” He lifted his face from his arms to look at me. His eyes seemed sunken in dry, creased skin that didn’t belong to him; I had never seen him so exhausted. “But the computer —”
    “Computers lie,” I said.
    He nodded. Our lives these past weeks had demonstrated that more than anyone should ever know.
    “Listen, Bobby, I’ve been thinking that you and Lexy should go home. You were right when you said this whole thing was going to take a while and you sitting in that inn isn’t doing us any good. The day care will take her back — I’m sure they will — and you can get back to work. Both of you could use the normalcy, I think.”
    “I don’t know.” He nodded, shook his head, criedharder. “I don’t want to leave you here.” And then we were quiet, leaving unresolved the possibility that Bobby and Lexy would go home without me.
    A minute later, when the