And then there is Esther, of course, lying there before me, her body recumbent, her eyes closed tight.
Just beyond the reach of her chalky-white hand lies a single photograph of two young girls, one big and one small, and these words in black Sharpie scrawled along the upper edge of the picture: Genevieve and Esther.
Alex
The blood coagulates inside my veins, no longer delivering oxygen to my body. My legs go numb, beginning to tingle. My knees buckle, threatening to give.
“You don’t look so good, Alex,” she says, holding the knife in her hands, a shiny knife, over a foot of sturdy steel with an ultrasharp edge. A chef’s blade plucked from Ingrid’s kitchen set. She leads Ingrid and me to the living room and forces us to sit down. My footsteps are loud as I cross the room, the booming sound of gunfire at a firing range, exploding at one hundred and fifty decibels or more. A cork blasting from the neck of a bottle of champagne. A sonic boom. Thunder. The heavy pelting of rain on a car’s steel hood, hollow and persistent and loud.
“You don’t want to do this,” I say to her as she stands in the hub of the room with the knife in her hands. There’s a surety about her—she does want to do this—and yet it’s accompanied by a frenzy, a delirium. She’s manic. Genevieve is manic. Her toes tap. Her leg has a tremor to it. Her eyes skitter in their sockets; her hands, the very hands which wield a weapon, shake. She holds that knife not like one about to slice into a cut of meat or a birthday cake, but rather at the ready to penetrate skin, human skin. Her grip is tight, skin taut, veins and arteries leaping out of the flesh.
“You were there, weren’t you?” says Ingrid. “I saw you at the market. I know it was you.”
“Of course you did. I wanted you to see,” says Genevieve.
“All those years. How did you remember?”
“How could I forget? You’re my mother,” Genevieve says. “A girl doesn’t ever forget her mother,” and I see a resignation in Ingrid’s eyes that says sooner or later she knew it would come to this. Her secret couldn’t be a secret forever.
The market. The place where Ingrid had her panic attack. The last public place she stood before locking herself in her home. When Ingrid had her panic attack, gawkers claimed she spat off these words: Go away and Leave me alone, and Don’t touch me! They said that Ingrid screamed.
“I followed you inside,” Genevieve says, her jaded voice, barely audible, drifting through the air.
“You looked different then,” says Ingrid. “You looked like...”
“I looked like me,” Genevieve says, “but now I look like her. You like me more like this, don’t you? You always loved her more. But I don’t want to talk about Esther. Not now. Not yet.”
And then she goes on to talk about that day, the day she tracked Ingrid to the market in town. She watched Ingrid walk up and down the aisles with a shopping basket in hand, she says, up and down, up and down. She followed her for a long, long time. She describes the way Ingrid dropped her basket when she spotted her, Genevieve, from across the store: the dropping of the basket, the clutching at her heart, the grating scream.
“How did you know it was me?” Genevieve asks, and Ingrid says solemnly, “A mother doesn’t ever forget her child.”
Genevieve’s feet tread back and forth across the room. Her steps are measured steps, while on the sofa, Ingrid and I sit. She is fairly composed; I am anything but. Ingrid is scared, yes, though it’s a relenting fear, a telltale sign of defeat. She gives up. She sits gingerly, posture straight, her hands folded in her lap. Her hair is tame. Her eyes remain on Genevieve the entire time, never straying, hardly blinking. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t ask to be let go, while I, on the other hand, want to do all of these things, but I don’t. I can’t. I can’t speak.
I see then the similar shape to their eyes, their noses, the lack of a smile. It’s there in the minute details: the thin lips with their sharp angles, the upturned noses. The angular diamond structure of their faces, the broad cheekbones, the pointy chins. The color of their eyes.
“You have to understand,” Ingrid says, her voice shaking like a wooden maraca. “I did the very best I could. I tried everything. Everything,” she repeats. Genevieve’s feet continue to tread along the floor. I could run and tackle her or subdue her in some other way, but there’s no telling where the knife would land. My lungs, my kidneys, my abdomen.
“Things were different back then,” Ingrid says. “These days every child is diagnosed with some disorder. Autism, Asperger’s, ADHD. But it wasn’t the case back then. Back then these kids were just bad kids. You, Genevieve, you were a bad girl. These days I would’ve brought you to a psychologist and they’d slap a diagnosis on you and make you take some pills. But that wasn’t the case back then, over twenty years ago.
“There was so much talk, Genevieve. About the things you did, the things you didn’t do. The things you did to the children at school. People were talking. At only five years old, they’d say, imagining what you’d do as you grew older and more callous and calculated. People were afraid to imagine. I was afraid to imagine.
“And you know what they did when you misbehaved? The teachers, the neighbors. They looked down on me,” Ingrid explains as a tear wiggles loose from her eye and runs the length of her cheek. It hovers there at her trembling chin, hanging on for dear life. I watch on, still trying to process the repentance in Ingrid’s words, the fact that she’s not in the least bit surprised a living, breathing Genevieve is standing before her in this room. She knew all along that she was alive, that the body she purportedly toted back from a hotel was not that of her dead daughter. She let the townsfolk bury an empty box, let them believe Genevieve was dead. She let them feel sorry for her.
Meanwhile, she gave Genevieve up just like that.
What kind of mother does that to her child?
It’s not easy, she told me, being a mother.
“You were hard enough to handle,” she says, “but that was before I had Esther. We both know how you felt about Esther, Genevieve. The things I saw you do to that girl... She was only a baby. How could you do those things to Esther?” she begs, and with that her voice trails off to nothingness. Just vapor. Air. She doesn’t speak and for a moment the room grows quiet and still.
In time Ingrid goes on, her words clipped like the clickety-clack of typewriter keys, banging out the story for me. Genevieve was more than a headache for Ingrid. More than a pest. She had a mean streak in her, a crazy side, a fit of rage. That’s what Ingrid says.
“You remember the things you did to Esther?” Ingrid asks. “Of course you do. You must.” And then she reminds her, in case somehow she’s forgotten. She reminds her of the time Genevieve attempted to suffocate baby Esther while she slept soundly in her cradle. Were it not for Lady Luck steering Ingrid to Esther’s crib just in time, the baby would have succumbed to the weight of the pillow, the diminishing air. That’s what Ingrid says, her words now plaited with anger. She tried hard to make excuses for it at the time, to tell herself that Genevieve didn’t know what she was doing as she laid that pillow on the baby’s dormant face and pressed, but somewhere inside she knew that Genevieve knew what she was doing. Even at the young age of four or five, Genevieve knew that this one small act could make that baby go away. And that was exactly what she wanted; she wanted the baby to go away.
Silence befalls the room. Everything is quiet. Everything except for the sound of Ingrid’s subtle cry. That and a clock on the wall, the sound of the rapid tick, tick, tick—to accompany my own brisk heartbeats—as that secondhand moves its way around the face of the clock. And then, like that, a tiny door opens and a bird emerges. A cuckoo clock, warbling out twelve o’clock. It’s noon. And the room is no longer quiet. Chirrup. Chirrup. Twelve times. Across the street, the café is imaginably busy, people coming and going, completely unaware of what is happening here. My only hope is
with Priddy. That Priddy is packing lunch for Ingrid as we speak: a BLT with a mountain of fries and a pickle on the side.
“I knew that I couldn’t keep you. It was dangerous for Esther, dangerous for me. I did the very best I could. I found a reputable adoption agency and they found you a good home. Your adoptive family, Genevieve, they were good people. They could take care of you better than I ever could.”
“Or maybe you just didn’t bother to try,” Genevieve snaps.
“I tried,” whispers Ingrid under her breath. “Oh, how I tried.
“How did you find us?” asks Ingrid then, reaching shaking fingers out to touch the pearl bracelet on Genevieve’s thin wrist. Pearl. The bracelet is pulled taut, the elastic showing through the beads, cutting into her skin. “You have that still?” she inquires, telling or maybe reminding Genevieve, “I made that for you. When you were just a girl. You still have it,” she says, and this time it isn’t a question. Ingrid made that pearl bracelet for Genevieve when she was a girl.
Genevieve ignores this. She yanks her hand away from Ingrid’s gentle touch. “What you mean to ask is how did Esther find me? Yeah, that’s right. It was Esther who found me. She found me online. She reached out, but then just like that, she wanted me gone. She tried to pay me to go away. Can you believe that? But you see, I didn’t want to go away. I wanted to be with my family. With you and with Esther. And when Esther refused, I thought maybe I could just be with you. If I looked like Esther, if I acted like Esther, then maybe you’d love me, too. Especially if Esther was no longer around.”
“What did you do to Esther?” asks Ingrid in distress, and Genevieve shrugs her shoulders and says, “You’ll see,” and then she urges Ingrid to go on, to finish her narrative about how she ended up bringing a phony casket home from that hotel, claiming the little girl was dead in a tragic bathtub incident.
“This doesn’t change the fact that your potential adopters, Genevieve, your new parents were exemplary. I saw the paperwork. I was there behind the scenes the first time you met. He a doctor and she a schoolteacher. They would take care of you. I thought this was for the best. I thought they would take better care of you than I ever could.”
“You told me you had an errand to run. You left me with some man I didn’t know. Be a good little girl, you said. And then you were gone.”
“I was there, Genevieve. Watching through the window. I saw them come, and shortly after, I saw you go. Your new mother held you by the hand. She held your hand as you left. And I...” she stammers, trying again, “I...” Her voice trails off before she completes the thought, sagging against the weight of the sofa cushions, her rigid body becoming sloppy. “I’ve never felt so relieved. You were gone,” she says, and, “It was through.”
“It was never through,” says Genevieve as she rises from the sofa and again begins to pace. “You left me. You gave me up. You picked Esther over me—that’s exactly what you did. All you cared about was Esther. Esther, Esther, Esther. But never me.”
“I didn’t think that you’d remember,” Ingrid confides. “You were too young to remember what I’d done. I thought that you’d be happy.”
“I was never happy,” says Genevieve.
I consider my options, wondering whether or not I could bring Genevieve down. I’m thinking of the blood vessels that knife would sever on its way in through the elastic skin, blood seeping from the vascular system and into other parts of my body. I’m thinking I would be lucky if she hit the aorta, or the hepatic artery, maybe, something that would cause death quickly, immediately, rather than the slow trickle of blood from the liver, the kidneys, the lungs.
I’m also thinking about my new friend, Pearl. About the part of me that still wants to touch her hair, that wants to hold her hand. But I can’t do this. Of course I can’t do this, but deep inside it’s exactly what I want to do. Touch her hair, hold her hand, disappear out the front door with Genevieve, holding hands and ambling down the middle of the street.
Ingrid inhales deeply, trying to flatten her breath. It comes to her in fits and starts, and at times it seems it simply won’t come. There are moments when a look of terror crosses over Ingrid’s face. She can’t find air, she can no longer breathe, but then it arrives and placates her for a little while; she can breathe, she tells herself as she lays a shaky hand upon her chest and reminds herself to breathe.
Ingrid winces as Genevieve sits down beside her and lays the cold, hard steel against her neck, as she then hikes the cuff of a shirt up to reveal a row of blue-gray veins there on Ingrid’s fair skin, at the ready to be sundered. Death by exsanguination. That’s what it’s called. By definition, the draining of blood. Genevieve leans in close to Ingrid and hisses into her ear, “Hold still. You don’t want my hand to slip.” And then she says, “Please don’t tell me you’re going to refuse me, too, just like Esther did.”
I can’t stand by and watch this happen. Ingrid is a good person, I remind myself, though right now I’m having a hard time believing it.
Though I’m scared half to death, I try my hardest to remain cool, calm and collected. In control. “You haven’t hurt anyone yet,” I rationalize for Genevieve, though whether or not this is true, I really can’t say. On the outside I may look relatively relaxed, or as relaxed as is to be expected, but inside I’m guessing I’ll never be the same again. Something has changed. And it doesn’t have to do with just Genevieve, either, the woman who I thought for a whole forty-eight hours was the woman of my dreams. It has to do with Ingrid, too. I’ve changed.
“Ingrid is fine,” I tell her. “You and I are fine,” as I point a finger at myself first, and then at her. Inside, though, I don’t really know if I’m fine. “You can still change your mind. I’m not even sure you’d get in trouble, not with what she’s done to you, what your mother’s done to you,” I say. “Besides,” I tack on as I aim a finger at the razor-sharp item that glints in her hand, “that isn’t even a weapon. It’s a knife. Just a knife. For cooking. You see what I mean?”
I sit there on the sofa beside Ingrid. “The police are on the way,” I lie. “I figured it all out before I arrived. I called the police.”
In the distance is the sound of sirens, though they’re not coming here. I didn’t call the police. I could have called the police on my way from the library, but I didn’t. Instead, I came straight here. “The best thing you can do right now is surrender,” I say, hoping a subtle psychological tactic might work. “Or run,” I add. “You could run. If you go now, they’ll never catch you. I have money,” I say as I reach into a pocket and extend my hand. In it lies two twenties. That’s all. But I’m guessing it’s more than she has. Enough for a train ticket out of town. I peer out the window, and as I do, I see billows of thick, black smoke fill the air on the other side of town. A fire. Something is on fire.
But Genevieve only laughs, this hideous, unspeakable laugh that will forever haunt my dreams. Her muddy-brown eyes rove between Ingrid and me as she says, “Or I could kill you both right now.” Her words are fast. “I just need to be quick about it. Do it before the police arrive. Then I’ll take your money and run,” she adds, nodding at the cash in my hand.
I nod. My knees have begun to shake and I find that it’s hard to stand. But I can’t think about that right now. Right now I need to focus on the task at hand. “Or you could do that, too,” I concede. But I don’t mean it. Of course I don’t mean it. It’s a strategy, a scheme. I’m building rapport with Genevieve, trying to earn her trust. My words, my tone of voice, are slow and calm, hoping that Genevieve’s will follow suit. That Genevieve’s words—or more importantly her actions and behavior—will be slow and calm like mine. “You have every right to be angry, Genevieve.”
“That’s right,” Genevieve says as she draws closer to Ingrid, knife in hand. She stares her mother in the eye and says, “I’m angry.” And it’s the look of resignation in Ingrid’s eye that terrifi
es me the most, the fact that she could right now give up. Let Genevieve take her life. Ingrid looks to be tired, droopy, spent. Her body sags, her posture slumped, the wooden smile that usually commandeers her face now gone. She doesn’t even have the energy or desire to sustain a fake smile. She runs a hand through her hair making it stand erect, and in the course of ten or twenty or thirty minutes begins to age, decades at a time. Ingrid turns sixty, then seventy, and then eighty before my very eyes. She takes on the appearance of a decrepit old lady.
“Doesn’t matter, anyway,” says Genevieve. “Those sirens aren’t coming here,” as her eyes follow mine out the window to a mantle of smoke. The fire. There are flames now, what I imagine to be orange and red serpents that reach into the sky a mile or a half mile from here. But from where I stand, all I see is smoke. “Seems someone left the heater on in that old, abandoned home.”
And then she laughs.
She burned the dang thing down once and for all.
Ingrid then asks, “Where’s Esther?” her words coming out in a desperate whisper, and Genevieve laughs again, and says, “Esther is dead.” Esther. Is. Dead.
“No,” says Ingrid. “You wouldn’t. You didn’t.”
“Oh,” says Genevieve, smiling a cruel smile, “but I did.”
And that’s when the situation begins to quickly dissolve, any hope of being salvaged lost. Ingrid begins to whimper, crying out over and over again, “My baby! My baby!” while Genevieve screams at her wildly that she was once Ingrid’s baby. She was Ingrid’s baby, too. But then Ingrid abandoned her, and it’s as this betrayal is rehashed a second, third and fourth time that Genevieve loses her rationality and becomes more angry, more mad. I try hard to get her attention, to refocus on other things instead. The money in my hand, the fact that Genevieve has yet to harm either one of us, the fact that she could still run. It’s Hostage Negotiation 101: let Genevieve speak her peace, but also keep her calm. Don’t let her spew. Spewing can only lead to a loss of control, an impetus or a catalyst, the inciting factor that makes her lodge that knife into Ingrid or my midsection in a moment of passion and recklessness.