The Housekeeper

by Natalie Barelli

  Then a loud noise. Someone is pounding the front door.

  “Stay there,” Harvey snaps, but you can already hear them running up the stairs. Eryn still has Mia in her arms as she leads them inside and points at me.

  “There she is! Get her! Shoot her! Her name is Claire Petersen and she tried to steal the baby!”

  Cops, guns drawn, and it’s pandemonium. “Are you Claire Petersen?” someone shouts at me. Harvey is saying that I tried to kill Mia. I’m under arrest, someone tells me I have the right to remain silent, but I don’t hear the rest because Harvey picks up the notebook from the floor and hands it to a policeman. “My wife’s diary,” he says, jabbing his finger on top of it. “Take it. It’s all in there.”

  I’m yelling that it’s a lie, that he wrote it all because he’s trying to kill his wife, but I know it’s hopeless and someone has put handcuffs on me and already I’m being dragged away. Mia is crying and my heart is breaking because surely, I will never see her again, never hold her, never console her. She is gone from my life and I don’t even know if I kept her safe. I turn to Eryn, tears and snot streaming down my face. “Don’t give Mia back to him, please. He will hurt her.”

  But as I’m being dragged past the coffee table I almost trip on something. The video monitor. It’s on the floor; it must have fallen when Harvey pushed me down. I turn to the policewoman who is holding my arm and yell out. “Pick it up, now! I recorded everything! It’s on the SD card!” And everyone stops talking except me. I’m yelling, telling them where the screen is, I’m begging them to go and get it so they can watch everything that’s been happening for the last three hours. I say all this over and over and then Harvey is in my face, shouting that I’m a liar, that I have come here to hurt his wife and it’s all in the diary, but I can see in his eyes that he’s not sure what’s happening. And I know, right then, he never guessed about the monitor. That thing has been with us all afternoon, silent as a fucking stone, and he never caught on, and suddenly someone has returned with the video screen.

  “But why do you want them dead?”

  “She was going to leave me. Nobody leaves me, Claire. Nobody.”

  Harvey’s eyes are wild with panic, and he knows it’s over. In an instant he has grabbed Mia from Eryn and hurled himself at the French doors leading to the terrace. He has hoisted himself onto the brick wall with Mia in his arms.

  “Oh my God. Stop him, somebody stop him!”

  The policewoman lets go and I run to the terrace. Harvey has turned around and I am on my knees in front of him, my hands, still in their handcuffs, outstretched to him. I’m so close I could touch his feet.

  Harvey. Please, don’t. I beg you.

  All the cops have their guns out and trained on him, but they can’t shoot, can they? If they kill him, he and Mia will fall. He looks around, then stares down at me with a look of pure hatred.

  “Give her to me, please, Harvey.”

  “Fuck you.” Then he holds up Mia under her arms and I watch his whole body begin to lean backwards.

  “No!” And it’s like watching the end of the world in slow motion. My scream is so loud, so piercing that I feel it slice my chest. I’ve leapt up and grabbed Mia’s ankle with both hands just as his whole body loses its balance. There’s a surprised look on his face for that split second when he still wants to hold on but it’s too late, and there’s panic in his eyes. He instinctively lets go and spreads his arms out, as if he could fly, as if he could undo it all.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  I expected Hannah to be hooked up to machines and fed by tubes, but she’s sitting up in bed idly watching TV, looking better than I’ve ever seen her, with Mia asleep in a crib by her bed.

  She looks up and there’s a moment where her eyes narrow, like she’s angry with me, but then her features relax and I don’t know if I’ve imagined it.

  “Can I come in?”

  She doesn’t reply, just looks at me as if she’s considering it, and I think this is a mistake. I shouldn’t have come. But then she says, “Sure. Come in.”

  “So, how are you?” I ask after I’ve brought the chair closer to her. “You look well.”

  “I trusted you,” she says, her eyes not leaving mine.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I thought you were my friend.”

  I tilt my head at her. “Did you? Really?”

  “Yes!” she snaps, then slaps the top of her bed with the palm of her hand, although since it’s a soft cover, the effect is non-existent. But then a nurse appears at the door.

  “Everything all right in here?”

  “Yes,” we reply in unison. The nurse leaves and I get up to close the door. When I return to my chair, I bring it even closer and lean forward.

  “Look, I’m sorry. I really am. I lied to you, but you have to understand, I really did think you were…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know! Some kind of scheming, lying, a fraud, a con—“

  She puts her hand up. “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously. What do you think? Everything that happened back then, it ruined my life, Hannah!”

  “But that’s not my fault!”

  We’re both silent for a moment.

  “I didn’t lie, about your father,” she says. Words that days earlier would have sent me into a fit of rage.

  I shake my head. “I don’t want to talk about that right now.”

  She gives me a quick nod. I want to tell her it’s because I have a call still to make, I need to talk to my father’s lawyer, but it’s too soon for that conversation.

  “I’m sorry, Hannah, that I went into your house like this. I’m sorry about all of it.” Suddenly I can’t stop talking. Maybe I want absolution, I don’t know. But I tell her everything. About seeing her that day at the hair salon. How I stalked her and met Diane. I tell her about the rat, about the threatening calls. What I’d said to Diane when she stormed into the house, trying to warn Hannah about me. She’s staring at her hands, which are picking at the blanket. Only when I get to the Instagram post does she look up.

  “That was you?”

  I nod. I tell her about Dominic and the lies I told him to make him take the photo. I tell her about the dress, and when I run out of things to say, I tell her about finding the notebook.

  “He really did play us both,” she says. She tells me the police examined it for fingerprints. They found plenty of mine, lots and lots of Harvey’s, but not a single print belonging to her.

  Then she reaches for my hand. “I know what you did. I know I should be thanking you, not berating you. Sorry.” She gives a small laugh, but her eyes have filled with tears and I take a deep breath.

  As soon as the doctors realized it was a case of foxglove poisoning, or cardiac glycoside toxicity, they were able to save her. The woman I spoke to on the street, she did call the hospital, incredibly. And Hannah recovered fully, which frankly was nothing short of miraculous considering how sick she was.

  We talk some more, about what Harvey was like, what he did to her. He liked to burn her breasts with cigarettes if he thought she’d been smoking. I remember the mark on her chest the day of the dress. I recall with burning shame how shaken she was the day of the Instagram post, when she asked me to go with her and Mia to the park. I think of all the things she wouldn’t tell him, like the fact she’d been involved in a scandal years before.

  “What will you do now?” I ask.

  We both turn to look at Mia. “I haven’t decided. My mother wants me to go back to Canada, but honestly, I don’t think I could bear it.” She sighs. “I can’t go back to the house, obviously.”

  “No. Of course not.” Then before I realize what I’m saying, it’s too late. The words are already out.

  “You could come and stay with me and April if you like. You two could have my room, I can stay on the couch.”

  “Really?”

  It’s funny, but I have no regret about blurting it out. I only hope that she
will say yes. The thought of having Mia around for days or even weeks fills me with a strange emotion. I don’t dare name it out loud, so I whisper it to myself. Joy.

  “Shouldn’t you ask April first?”

  I laugh. “Yes, you’re right, I should. But she’ll say yes. Trust me, April is something else. She’s on the angelic end of the spectrum.”

  We talk some more about the events of the last few weeks, and then she asks, “What about you? What are your plans?”

  I tell her I don’t know yet. I have to deal with the fallout of all this. The cops want to interview me again. They’re going to want to know how I came to be a housekeeper called Louise Martin if my name is Claire Petersen.

  “I’ve managed to put that one off, for now, because I had to get a lawyer. April is going to help me out. Apparently impersonating someone is a criminal offense in some circumstances.”

  “I haven’t told them anything,” she says. “I mean, I haven’t told them about hiring you or anything. We haven’t gotten to that part yet. Maybe I could tell them I knew who you were?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if I said that we ran into each other? The day you saw me at the salon? I told you about Harvey. I’ll say we concocted this subterfuge so you would go and work for me and see what could be done to help me.”

  I think about this, try to understand. “What about Louise Martin?” I ask.

  “I’ll say it was for Harvey’s benefit. In case he checked you out. We only used Louise Martin’s name to fool him. We’ll have to apologize about that part, especially to the real Louise Martin.”

  I tilt my head at her. “You would do that for me? After everything I’ve done to you?”

  She pulls herself up higher against the bedrest and stares at me like I’ve got two heads.

  “You saved my child’s life! I was angry with you, yes, because you have to understand, the whole time you were in that house with me, I thought you were going to help us. I could tell how much you loved Mia. I was building up to telling you what it was like, what Harvey was like. How frightened I was. Because I didn’t know if he’d let us go and that’s the truth. I needed a friend to confide in and I didn’t think Eryn was it. But I thought you were. I thought you were going to save us.”

  I drop my head. I don’t know if I can take another round of hearing how screwed up I am, but then she says, “And you did, save us. The police told me everything. Your bravery?” She shakes her head. “I don’t even have the words. When I think of everything that went on in that house when you were alone with Harvey—you could have run away and saved yourself, but you stayed for Mia. And even right at the end—” She stops with a sharp intake of breath. “Mia would be dead without you,” she says simply, then squeezes my hand. “As I would. You did save us, Claire. I owe you everything.”

  Chapter Forty

  I’m sitting on a chair. It’s made of dark plastic supported by a steel frame. It’s not very comfortable, but I don’t mind. I’m at the back of the auditorium looking down at Professor Caldwell. The class is Ethics and Society, and she’s talking about euthanasia and the idea of personal identity and persistence. “What does it take for a person to persist from one time to another—to continue existing rather than cease to exist?” she asks. Good fucking question, I think. I was in the shower the other day, and it dawned on me I hadn’t thought of Harvey or my parents in literally days. Considering it’s been close to a year and a half, and it used to be that I couldn’t go for an hour without thinking about one or all of them—I count that moment in the shower as a revelation. It was like being on a raft and seeing land for the first time in years.

  Harvey turned out to be an even bigger monster than we thought possible. When no one was able to locate Serena, the police feared he must have killed her. We all did. There was only one clue. Not far. That’s what he said on the video when I asked where she was. The police asked Hannah about the places Serena could be. Was there a house in the country, maybe? Somewhere with a garden where he could have buried her?

  Hannah told me it was the words buried her, and also the fact that she’d disappeared not long before Hannah had moved into Harvey’s house. She said she dropped her head into her hands because she was going to faint. She knew then. She’d figured it out.

  “Harvey put in a gym downstairs. Just for me. There was even a new concrete floor poured in.”

  And that’s where they found Serena, dead from a sharp blow to the head, wrapped in layers and layers of thick black plastic. Harvey had loosely laid a layer of timber over of her, and a tradesman had come and poured concrete, not realizing what was beneath. Sometimes I think it’s not just Hannah and Mia whose lives were saved when he died. It’s all the other women he would have tortured and killed after that.

  I don’t know if I believed Harvey when he talked about my father and the other women who had come forward. But later I thought back on the day my father’s lawyer came over to see my mother. My father had just died, and they locked themselves up in the living room and stayed there for hours. Shortly after, my mother instructed him to sell all our belongings and told us children that she had to pay out his clients because of some financial mess he’d gotten himself into.

  I went to see that lawyer, and I asked him about that day. He sat with his hands clasped together on his desk and a look of pity in his eyes. It wasn’t the clients that were paid off, he said. There was nothing wrong with my father’s company or the way he administered his finances. It was his other victims. They were the ones whose silence was purchased.

  “What if they’d lied?” I asked. “Once a scandal like that happens, lots of other people want to cash in, surely.”

  But in a cruel twist of irony, he had filmed some of his victims with a small spy camera hidden in the office bathrooms. A secretary had found it, and she’d confronted him. When Hannah came forward and it looked like it was her word against his, and his was louder and more convincing, other victims, the secretary included, decided to speak up. But then he died. They still spoke up, only because they wanted to set the record straight, and they had proof. Video is what saved me and it’s what incriminated him. I understand that in the end, my mother’s offer was too good to refuse.

  Then there’s Eryn. I saw her once more since that terrible day. It was her who called the police after I walked out with Mia. She told me that when the two of them realized I’d gone and taken Mia with me, Harvey started shouting my name, accompanied by lots of swearing, obviously. Eryn clicked then. Claire… Claire Petersen! Groton School! Harvey had run out into the street looking for me and left Eryn behind. He didn’t know she’d called the police, thinking that would be helpful. There’s a woman called Claire Petersen who stole a child, this is the address. I honestly don’t know what would have happened if she hadn’t done that. I know that Hannah was already on the antidote at that point, but I’m not sure I would have lived long enough to see her recover.

  Eryn and I had a drink at a bar, where we hugged awkwardly. I thanked her for calling the police, and she chuckled. “Honestly, Claire, when I realized it was you, I nearly died. I thought you were going to do something criminal and despicable. So just saying, I wasn’t trying to help you.” She smiled. Then she said something strange. She went back to that day at Philippa Davenport’s birthday party.

  “No, don’t,” I said, putting up my hand.

  She took it, put it back down. “Listen,” she said. Then she told me how awful it was for everyone that day. That she tried to find me, but I’d already left.

  I cocked my head at her. “You were laughing, like all the others,” I said. “Not that it matters anymore.”

  “Nobody laughed, Claire. But you left immediately with your mother and I never saw you again. But nobody laughed. I swear to God. Why would we?”

  Did I even remember that day as it really happened? Or was it another construct of mine? I don’t know anymore. Maybe she’s telling the truth, maybe not. And it doesn’t matter now an
yway. We left with the same awkward embrace and promised to catch up soon, then she emailed me to say she and her fiancé, Carlos, were moving to Puerto Rico and she wished me well.

  It was Dominic who suggested I enroll in college. I laughed. People like me don’t go to college. We’re too damaged, too stupid. Irretrievable. But he told me not to knock it—that’s what he said, don’t knock it—so I looked into it, the way you might through your fingers, because everyone deserves another chance. That’s what my therapist said. Even me? I asked. Especially you, she replied. I wasn’t sure about the especially.

  So now I’m in my first year of Social and Public Policy at NYU. It might seem like an odd choice, but I hope that it will lead me to a law degree eventually. Because it’s true that everyone deserves another chance. I’ve lived that truth. You wouldn’t recognize me if you saw me today. I’m a different person—on the outside, anyway. And on the inside, too. I work out every day. I run every morning, two miles minimum. I’m fast, too. I love it. My body loves it. I’m strong, I’m fit. I’m happy, I think. Most of the time, anyway. And, hey, I try not to lie! I seem to be managing it. Lies were a tapestry for me to hide behind. The more lies, the better. When I said that to my therapist, she said, “Hide from what?”

  Loneliness. Being abandoned. Knowing that you’re unworthy, unlovable.

  Why would you think that? she asked.

  Because they left me. All of them. My family, my friends, everyone. My mother especially. Who does that? Dies like that? Gives up, knowing that she’s leaving two children behind who’ll never be right again? But if you’re an awful person who lies and steals and hates the world and the world hates you back, well, then, it all makes sense. Of course they left you, Claire! Look at you! You’re a horrible person! What did you think would happen?

  I used to think that if Hannah suffered as much as I did, then it would go some way to right the wrong, as if the world was one massive ledger with credit and debit columns. But I’ve learned a lot since then about what illness does to people, and I understand a lot more about what my mother went through than I did then. She needed help, but no one could do it. It’s finding the courage to help people that’s the hard part.