Before We Were Innocent, page 28
I had always assumed that part of Willa’s appeal, part of why Joni had fallen for her in the first place, would have been Willa’s adulation of her—this slightly older, accomplished woman who had already created a perfect universe for Willa to slot right into.
“And what are you implying would have happened if she hadn’t done the things Joni wanted?”
“I think you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know the answer to that yourself,” Lucien says. “Look, Joni had a temper. Once Willa showed up to meet me at a wine tasting and she had bruises all around her arm and shoulder. She wouldn’t tell me what happened, but I figured it was Joni.”
I swallow, suddenly reluctant to ask any more about it.
“And obviously there was the money thing,” Lucien says.
I frown at him. “What money thing?”
“Joni paid for everything and everyone in Willa’s life.”
“They were together for three years,” I say. “It’s pretty normal to share money with your partner.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Lucien says. “It was Joni’s way of controlling Willa. Joni didn’t just share her income or lifestyle or whatever, she actually paid her. Like, she’d reward Willa for not partying on a weekend by giving her a five-thousand-dollar bonus on the Monday. She wouldn’t say that’s what it was for, but Willa knew. How do you think Willa could afford to be so principled?”
I stare at him.
“Did everyone know about this?” I ask. “The money part.”
“Anyone who knew her well,” Lucien answers. “Willa would buy a round of drinks, and people would joke that Joni would kill her if she knew where her money was going. Joni didn’t like Willa drinking or even going out that much. In all honesty, I felt sorry for Joni, because if she wanted a house cat, then she’d just clearly picked wrong. I could have told her from the start that Willa was going to be impossible to tame, but wanting that level of control, it’s not healthy. Being indebted to someone isn’t a reason to stick around, you know?”
And you never know when she’s going to cash it in.
“But you must have believed Willa could be tamed once,” I say. “To have waited for so long.”
“I wasn’t waiting for anything. I never put any pressure on her,” Lucien says, stretching his palms out to me. “I made it clear from the day we met that I’m never going to be the superhero-perfect husband. I was happy with how things were. Willa was the one who decided she wanted out of what she and Joni had.”
“So did she tell her?” I ask, and Lucien frowns at me. “That night. Did Willa tell Joni it was over?”
“Joni knew she wasn’t getting the best of Willa, and she hadn’t been for a while,” Lucien says, and I can see that even Steven is getting frustrated with him now.
“But that was probably the plan, right?” Steven prompts. “The night she went missing.”
“It was Willa’s plan, yes,” Lucien says slowly.
I swallow a knot in the back of my throat at the thought that Joni might have lied to me yet again. Because isn’t this what I’ve feared all along, that Joni only found out about Lucien the night she turned up on my doorstep?
Lucien closes his eyes briefly, his eyelids fluttering as he thinks about what he wants to say next. “Willa used to say that it would kill Joni if she ever found out about us.”
“That’s not what happened, though, is it?” I ask. “It didn’t kill Joni. And if you actually mean what you’re insinuating, then I don’t understand how you can be so indifferent about it. The woman you loved from the second you saw her isn’t alive anymore.”
“I try to be as philosophical as I can,” Lucien says after a long pause. “Like, we’re all dying right now, you know? But still it feels pretty definitive—the loss but also the contrast. That she was here one second, then gone the next. I’m trying to capture that starkness in my writing, but it’s pretty elusive. That’s why so many of the greats relied so heavily on nature imagery.”
I stare at Lucien, unimpressed. I imagine how much the police interviewing him would have hated his faux cerebral smugness, his meandering, self-indulgent way of answering questions, and I can understand exactly how he ended up where he is, with a murder charge seemingly light on actual evidence. I can understand it because I was once where he is now: guilty of being unpalatable and strange before they even got to the actual crime.
“And you’re fine with your face being on the front page of every newspaper, every news outlet? You still think it was worth it?”
“The truth will come out,” Lucien says. “If not now, then once my trial starts.”
“The truth,” I repeat. “You haven’t actually said what you think happened.”
“Like I told you,” Lucien says. “Willa wasn’t the type of woman who could be tamed. And Joni couldn’t handle the thought of setting her free.”
I can hear my own heartbeat in the silence that follows.
“You seem pretty set on that idea, but any human can be tamed,” I say, my voice slicing through the air. “If you take enough away from them. It’s not a sign of weakness.”
“Maybe,” Lucien says, clearly thinking the opposite.
“So what did Willa say when you saw her that night?” I ask, and Lucien stares back at me like I’m being deliberately obtuse.
“Bess, I’m sorry, I should have made something clear from the start,” Lucien says. “I didn’t see Willa that night.”
I glance over at my brother, who is watching me closely.
“Her blood was in your car,” I say, but did I really believe he might drop the act for me, that he would just lie down and reveal himself to be the monster I so badly need him to be?
“Oh, that,” Lucien says. “That is bullshit, and they all know it. I told everyone I spoke to that Willa caught her hand on a gnarly branch at a climate march weeks ago. I have about two hundred eyewitness accounts to corroborate that too, but obviously no one wanted to hear it. They’re just buying time.”
He leans in toward me, enlivened suddenly.
“Do you know what the entire case against me really hinges on?” Lucien asks. “Three text messages Willa and I supposedly sent each other that night. Three text messages that conveniently place me with her before she disappeared. Three text messages that will never stand up in court in a million years, whatever the district attorney wants you to think.”
I swallow hard as Lucien smiles at me, his eyes unblinking and clear, teeth shining.
“But the thing is,” he says, “those messages weren’t from Willa.”
FIFTY-ONE
2018
YOU KNOW THE AIR-CONDITIONING can’t work with your window open,” Steven says, while he drives me back to Malibu. I ignore him and close my eyes, Lucien’s words still whipping through my mind like a tornado.
Lucien said that Willa had always been militant about deleting all forms of digital communication between the two of them, to the point where he often had to send the same text twice if it contained an address or venue name. This was relevant, insofar as whoever had sent him the message on the night Willa disappeared would presumably have been working from a blank slate.
At around nine p.m., he received a message from Willa’s phone saying I need to see you. Can we meet at the beach? followed by a black heart emoji, but instead of the message reassuring him, Lucien grew suspicious. In the entire time they’d been seeing each other, Willa had never once sent him an emoji, knowing how he felt about them. In the first class of every academic year, he would hand out letters sent between Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre to his high school English students, comparing their notes to teenagers’ texts today as an example of digital communication being the death of intellect, of passion, of nuance, as if any number of acronyms and pizza emojis could ever encapsulate as much emotion as the human language, which has already lasted over a million years, for fuck’s sake. Willa, while still demonstrative in her emoji use with Joni, for example, would never dream of sending Lucien an emoji, let alone one of a black fucking heart.
His spidey senses firing, Lucien wrote back: OK. Our spot?
As long as it’s me and you, I’m there.
Another emoji—this time the three droplets of water, suggestive and crass.
Lucien didn’t leave his house until the following morning, when he drove himself to work.
* * *
—
Steven pulls up at the end of Joni’s street, the engine still running.
“I know we don’t know anything for sure,” he says carefully. “But I still think this is for the best.”
I stare out the windshield as a dying wasp crawls across the glass.
“Do you want me to come in with you?” he asks, and I shake my head.
“She’s at a meeting with her agent,” I say, and then, because I can’t believe where we’ve ended up, I add, “Look, I’m not doing this because I believe Lucien, okay? The guy hid an affair for eighteen months, so he’s hardly the most reliable source, and he’s also obnoxiously pretentious. I’m doing this for you, because I can see how stressed you are about this and I don’t want to hurt you . . .” Any more than I already have.
Steven nods, but he’s gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles have turned gray.
“Just grab whatever you need, and get out of there as quickly as possible,” he says. “I’ll be waiting.”
* * *
—
I enter the security code and open the door to Joni’s house. I listen for any sign of her, but the house is still, the faint crashing of the waves outside the only signs of life. With my heart pounding, I grab my duffel bag and pack it with everything I brought over to Joni’s, back when I was a different person. Laptop, jeans, striped T-shirt, 5oulm8s hoodie, and my book on emotional resilience with the photo of Willa still tucked inside.
I’m nearly at the front door when I notice that Joni’s bedroom door is open a couple of inches. Checking my phone for the time, I figure Steven can wait another few minutes. Before I even have time to decide if it’s a good idea, I’ve dropped the duffel bag and I’m inside Joni’s room for the first time since I arrived here.
Her bedroom is typically tasteful and orderly, decorated in muted desert shades with dusky pink walls lined with photos of Joni at various events—one of her clutching the hands of Melinda Gates, another of her being awarded an honorary membership to a prestigious women’s-only space in New York. There are no photos of Willa, no signs of Joni having any friends other than those to whom she’s paid tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being in the same room.
I open the top drawer of her dresser, which reveals surprisingly simple underwear—the same thongs in various shades of nude and black, Joni’s A-cups never having had any real need for bras. I’m about to close the second drawer, filled with neatly balled socks, when I spot the corner of something yellow underneath the second layer. A leather journal.
Hands trembling, I open the book to find Joni’s familiar cursive scrawled across each page. I’m almost sickeningly relieved when I find that it’s filled with to-do lists—deadlines and massages and facial bookings, and phone calls with her editor—each of Joni’s days planned down to the nearest five minutes up until the moment Willa disappeared. These aren’t the possessions of a stranger by any stretch, and the thought soothes me more than anything as I bury the diary back underneath the socks. I think about Steven waiting outside and how meeting Lucien might have triggered some delayed-onset PTSD over what happened to me in Greece, and how maybe I should tell him to talk to someone. I’m about to call him to say to leave without me, that I’ll be fine here for a few more days, when I see something that makes my heart drop down, down, into the bed of the ocean.
In the third drawer, under a pile of old magazines and press cuttings about Joni’s stellar career, I find a slim phone in a cream case. Embossed on the back of the case in gold are the initials WB. I drop the phone and, before I can think about it, I am moving, stumbling to get out of the house before Joni gets home, heaving my duffel bag onto my shoulder and running to find my brother to take me away from whatever has happened here, from whatever I’ve understood or misunderstood or known all along.
FIFTY-TWO
2018
A MESSAGE FROM JONI: Where are you?
I ignore it, turning over in the bed Nova made up for me. I’m allergic to goose feathers, but I don’t mention it. When Steven hangs by the door to ask me if I’m okay, and what I’m planning to do about Joni, I just stare blankly back at him until he leaves. The feathers are already making my eyelids itch.
* * *
—
There’s a commotion outside the window just after sunset. I crawl along the wooden floor and peek through the blinds. Joni is trying to come inside, but Nova and Steven stand like rottweilers at the perimeter of the yard, telling her to leave. I try to feel something as I watch her drive away, but I fall short. My blood has turned to stone.
* * *
—
When I decline Nova’s invitation to come downstairs for dinner, Steven delivers me homemade gazpacho in bed. He presents it to me with a proud flourish, but the soup is unsatisfying, frigid in my mouth, and I have to force myself to swallow it, like I’m learning how to eat again after a stroke. There’s an old-fashioned radio in the room, and it’s already tuned in to the same golden oldies station that our mom used to listen to while she made us breakfast before school. The jangling guitars and dulcet tones of the presenters’ voices fill the room, and I wonder how many times she’s stayed here without telling me.
Steven has left a copy of Vogue on the bedside table for me, and I stare at it for a while, trying to work out who he thinks I am.
* * *
—
“You need to come downstairs,” Steven says, standing in the doorway of his own guest room the next night. “Just for dinner. Seriously, this is unacceptable behavior. You’re not a kid anymore.”
I groan and pull my eye mask up, squinting to focus on him in the low light.
“Bess,” he says quietly. “This is getting bad again.”
I’m about to snap at him that I just need more time, a couple more nights to lie in a darkened room and let time devour me, when I recognize the look on his face. My brother is begging me to be okay, and the only thing I know is that I can’t do it to him again.
“Fine,” I say. “But it better not be cold fucking soup.”
Steven looks so relieved it makes me want to claw my own eyes out.
* * *
—
Over dinner, Steven and Nova make polite conversation as if they’re on a first date, a setup presumably, sticking only to the safest of topics like I’m a nervous-minded child. When Steven asks Nova what her favorite subject was in school, I think that they must be doing it for my benefit—surely they must already know this about each other. I drink a glass of wine too fast, and I hate myself for not being the person they need me to be, the type of person who would know exactly what to do if they thought their best friend might have done something so awful it was almost inconceivable. I think of Lucien, rotting away under house arrest in his grandmother’s condo while Joni swans around Malibu, preparing for her book release, and I feel sick to my stomach.
“Bess?”
When I look up, both Nova and Steven are staring at me expectantly. I look down at the unidentifiable food on the end of my fork and try to remember what it is that I’m eating.
“So good,” I say. “Eggplant?”
“Nova was asking about your job,” Steven says, and I shrug.
“I’m taking some time off,” I say. “I need to recalibrate.”
“Joni’s idea, I assume?” he asks.
“Mine,” I say. “It gets pretty tiring only seeing the worst in people.”
* * *
—
After dinner, Nova whispers something to Steven, and he shakes his head.
“Come on,” she says. “Stay with us.”
“I’m with you,” he says, stooping slightly to give her a kiss on the head, the quiet intimacy nearly winding me. “I’m always with you.”
“So stay in the real world,” she murmurs.
“One hour,” Steven says, shooting a quick glance at me before he disappears up the stairs. And that’s when I realize it must be Sunday.
* * *
—
Steven sits in his war room on an ergonomic office chair, in headphones, frowning at the screen. I stand in the doorway as he scans the list of new posts before typing something into a search box. Soon, I see multiple Besses highlighted on the screen, and Steven rubs the back of his neck before getting started. I begin to feel weird watching him like this, so I step across the room and touch him on the arm, understanding as I do that he would have already seen my reflection in the monitor.
Steven takes his headphones off and looks warily up at me.
“You can pretend I’m not here,” I say, my eyes scanning the screen for any mention of my name.
GalacticDetective34: If E was that drunk, why did they even bring her to a party? It all seems suspicious to me. Where is Pierre Lauvin now anyway? Has anyone investigated his digital footprint? Could there be a link to J and B?
