Page 98 of The Five Year Lie

Just everything.

He doesn’t want to talk, so he kisses her hungrily instead. This is the only way he can be truthful—with his questing hands and his tongue and his knee nudging her legs apart.

Her body softens beneath him, as it always does. Her arms tighten around him. Their kisses are bottomless as he slides inside.

The room is quiet, but his thoughts are loud. Even his heart beats out a rhythmic plea.Love you, miss you, need you.

And a new thought, too.

I’ll come back for you.

Wait for me.

32

ARIEL

That night Buzz and I make pizza together.

He slathers his dough with an unreasonable amount of sauce. And then he covers every square centimeter with pepperoni and olive halves.

I’m not a fan of olives. But when Buzz was two, he ate an entire dish of them that my mother had set out for her book club.

Look at him go!she’d said.You never know what kids will like.

But Drew loved olives.

My pie has onion jam, serrano ham, feta and arugula. And last time Buzz tasted the arugula and made a face that accused me of child abuse.

“Let’s go, pal,” I say when they’re ready to bake. “We’re borrowing Grandma’s oven. You don’t even have to put on your shoes.”

He perks up. “Can I watch a movie on the big TV?”

“Sure.”

I let myself into Mom’s kitchen, because she’s off to an art film with her friends, and because her Wolf oven gets a lot hotter than mine, which makes for a crispier crust.

Buzz is in front of her TV before I can even set the oven to preheat. But that’s how we roll on a Saturday night.

While I wait for the oven to reach five hundred degrees, I wander around the main floor of my mother’s immaculate house tryingto keep my mind occupied. Then I climb the stairs to scope out her bedroom bookshelf. She always gets one or two hardbacks from Book of the Month, and I am free to help myself after she’s finished reading.

As I peruse the new offerings, my eye snags on a gray file folder on the bedside table. It’s unlabeled, but even as I reach for it I know what I’m going to find.Incident report: August 16th 2017.

Opening it up makes me feel queasy. But this doesn’t belong to my mother. The police shared it when she asked. They’d probably give it to me as well.

I listen to make sure that Buzz is still in front of his movie, and then I flip to the first page.

It’s grim reading. My mother’s 911 call was logged at a few minutes before one p.m. The transcript is brief.It’s my husband! He’s died. He’s dead. At his desk. Oh my God, he’s gone.

The dispatcher asks her the obvious questions and summons the first responders to the house. They arrive only seven minutes later.

When I flip the page, I find Officer Barski’s report.

Fifty-nine-year-old man found slumped over his desk. Declared dead at the scene. Entered into evidence: one prescription pill bottle found on the desktop, prescribed for the deceased. Dated the day before his death. Pill count listed as thirty. Twenty-six remained in the bottle. Also found: a yellow index card with times and dosages listed on it. The last entry is “2 pills 10a.”

Behind this, I find a photo. I wasn’t ready for that. But there he is, head down on the desk, cradled in his arms. And I feel sorry for him, maybe for the first time ever.

God.I flip the page again and find a photo of my dad’s indexcard, where he recorded what he’d taken. It was probably the last note he ever made on one of those cards.