A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  “I think you’re missing something,” I say, and pass her an ebony walking stick, half bowing like a Victorian valet for her mistress.

  “Perfect.” She raps the foot of the cane against the floor, playing her own part with aplomb. “Carry on, madam.”

  I hook my arm through hers, and we meander through the maze of artifacts, maneuvering around scratched furniture and piles of old license plates. Ellis digs up a pair of pince-nez, and I find myself in ivory lambskin gloves.

  I spot a cast-iron kettle that looks ancient, like it might date back to the eighteenth century, and I wonder if it really does—if one of the Dalloway Five might have used it, if something of their ousia, their essence, would cling to any object they’d touched.

  “Don’t you ever wish you could go back?” Ellis murmurs, gaze turned up toward the chandeliers; their light glitters off the lenses of her glasses. My gaze snaps away from the kettle, back to her. “To some other time,” she says, “when things were a little wilder. When the rules were a little less clear.”

  It’s the opposite of the usual line. A simpler time. A time when a lady was a lady.

  “Maybe. I hadn’t really thought about it.” I rub the edge of a tablecloth between my thumb and forefinger but feel only the friction of my age-softened gloves. “I suppose it depends on where I was, too. I wouldn’t want to get burned at the stake as a witch.”

  “Oh, but can you blame them? You are a witch. I don’t doubt you would have poisoned the village crops, salted their fields, and led their daughters into temptation.”

  My breath freezes in my lungs. But Ellis isn’t even looking at me—she has a painted figurine in hand and seems very interested in the whittle-work.

  For a second all I can do is stand there, sucking in air and clenching my fists; the leather creaks as it stretches over my knuckles.

  And then, at last, I manage to push the words past my throat:

  “Just their daughters?”

  Ellis glances back. She’s taken off the pince-nez; the frames dangle from one idle hand. “It takes one to know one.”

  It isn’t an accusation. It isn’t anything. It’s…a statement. Of fact.

  I take off the gloves.

  Ellis is still watching. She watches me fold the gloves and place them on the table, watches me pretend to look at the tablecloth embroidery.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she says.

  A dry laugh rasps out of me. “I know that.”

  “Are you ashamed?”

  “Of course not.” The words are sharper than intended. I grit my teeth and try again. “No. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready to tell everyone.”

  Ellis holds up both hands, palms out: a surrender. “Fair enough. Forget I said anything.”

  Only now that the seal has broken, it’s impossible to go back. And maybe I don’t want to forget what she said.

  Ellis heads into the next room, and I trail behind her like a second shadow. She hasn’t told anyone, either. If she had, I’d have heard about it. It would be in the interviews, the profile pieces.

  “My girlfriend wanted me to come out,” I say, standing there in the middle of a Persian rug as Ellis drops into an emerald-cushioned armchair. “I wasn’t ready. But she kept pushing.”

  “She sounds like a bitch.”

  I shrug. “She wasn’t. At least…not most of the time. Not to me.” I don’t want to say Alex wasn’t a bitch. That wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. But bitch felt like a harsh word to apply to a girl who was fighting so hard to make space for herself in a world that didn’t want her. Alex was many things. She contained multitudes. And to say she was a bitch sometimes was to erase everything else she was: brave, stubborn, passionate, affectionate, a girl who would destroy empires to save someone she loved. “She was of the opinion I didn’t want to tell anyone because I was worried I wouldn’t be popular anymore if people knew.”

  “I doubt that would have been the case.”

  “No. It wouldn’t have. Alex was out, and no one cared. Everyone worshipped her.”

  I realize I’ve said her name only after it’s already fallen from my lips. Ellis is unfazed, her knees crossed and the top leg swinging: a feudal marchioness presiding from her throne. Maybe she’d already figured out Alex and I were together, our relationship inevitable as any plot twist in Ellis’s book.

  I shake my head, an odd smile twisting at my mouth. “I don’t know. I’d rather wait until after I’ve graduated. It seems like such a cliché, doesn’t it? Lesbians at a girls’ school.”

  “Hey now. I happen to like that cliché.”

  I laugh. “I bet you do.” All at once I’m giddy, as if buoyed up on champagne fizz. The chandeliers seem brighter; the brass seems brassier. The dust flickers like diamond shards in the window light. On impulse I steal Ellis’s hat, tipping down the brim to gaze at her from under its shadow with a cocked brow.

  “I’d have smoldered at the stake right next to yours, no doubt.” Her smile is more subdued than mine, but it’s still there. It’s real, crinkling the edges of her eyes. She seems younger suddenly, just a girl wearing a ridiculous pair of glasses, sitting in the middle of a shop filled with everyone else’s castoffs, all the memories no one wanted to keep.

  I offer her the hat back; she shakes her head and says, “It looks better on you.”

  We move into the next room, which is full of books—everything from leather-bound tomes with gold foil lettering on the spines to frayed mass-market paperbacks. I pull out a particularly thick one and let it fall open to the middle page, bury my nose against the paper, and inhale.

  “Tell me about her,” Ellis says. “Alex. What was she like?”

  I open my eyes to look at Ellis over the edge of my book; she stands just a few feet away, ignoring the shelves entirely.

  It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for, of course. This is the moment when Ellis finally musters the nerve to ask me how it felt, to write for her the emotional arc of the Dalloway Five murders.

  And so she wants to know about Alex’s murder.

  I didn’t kill her.

  I almost say it, but the words don’t come. Instead I lower the book, slowly, although I don’t put it down. It feels better to clutch the book to my chest, leather binding gripped in both hands.

  Maybe I owe Alex this much, after what I did. Maybe if I put it to words…

  They say knowing the name of a thing gives you power over it. And right now, I need power. As much of it as I can get.

  Ellis can write whatever she wants.

  “She was…very clever,” I say. I’m surprised by how even my voice sounds, almost like it doesn’t hurt. Almost like I don’t care at all. “She was in Godwin House, too. She read satirists, mostly.”

  Ellis doesn’t say anything. It’s the oldest trick in the book, but it works; now that I’ve started talking, I can’t stop.

  “She was funny. Sometimes that was a bad thing—if you got on her bad side, she could be…not cruel, not necessarily, but…”

  I don’t want to disparage her. Not to Ellis Haley. Not to anyone, actually.

  And because if Alex was cruel, then some might say that’s motive for murder.

  I press my thumbs in harder against the book’s spine. “She liked dogs. You couldn’t take her anywhere—she’d have to stop every time she saw a dog. Had to say hello. She’d run into traffic if it meant she could pet a Labrador on the other side of the street. She was terribly allergic, but that didn’t seem to make a difference.”

  “That’s sweet,” Ellis says.

  “It was. She was.”

  God. I hadn’t ever talked about her this much. Not even to Dr. Ortega, in therapy: Talking will help, Dr. Ortega had said. Remembering her how she was….

  “She was outdoorsy,” I say. “She liked climbing, hiking, that sort
of thing. I mean, she was a professional—or gonna be. She qualified for the very first Olympic sport-climbing team. She summitted Everest. Twice.”

  All at once it’s harder to breathe, as if the air in here has become heavier. I can see dust motes sparkling in the air, dead skin particles from a hundred patrons, possibly even from the former owners of all the trinkets for sale in this place. I imagine that dust draping over us like blankets, suffocating us.

  “I know this must be hard to talk about,” Ellis says softly. She has one hand on the surface of a nearby table. She doesn’t move, just says: “Because of the way she died.”

  I swallow. The back of my throat feels like it’s covered in grit. “Right.”

  For a moment we both stare at each other, Ellis’s eyes unblinking over the frames of those rickety pince-nez.

  I try not to think about the abortive scream as Alex fell, cut off too quickly as she hit ground. I used to hear it everywhere: in my nightmares, in movies. Right now it echoes in the hum of the old record spinning on the turntable by the front desk, the music gone silent, static prickling at our ears.

  I didn’t want her to die. I never wanted her to die. But I’m not innocent, either.

  That’s the thing the doctors kept missing at Silver Lake, with their trauma therapy and white pills and cloying pity: That I’m the reason she died. If I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t walked into Alex Haywood’s life, she’d still be alive.

  Ellis is looking at me like the doctors did, now—examining me, dissecting me for her goddamn book the same way those doctors might have used me for case studies. Like I’m confused, or misguided, or broken. Like I’m incapable of killing an ant, never mind a girl.

  “I swear to god,” I say, “if you tell me it wasn’t my fault—”

  “I wasn’t going to say any such thing.”

  “Good.”

  She lifts a brow. “It was an accident. Everyone knows that. Everyone who read the papers, anyway.”

  I break first. I look away, down at the book still held against my chest. The dust threatens to make my eyes water.

  “Yes,” I say. “Well.” The papers don’t tell everything.

  Silence stretches out long and taut—easily broken.

  I slide the book back into its place on the shelf. When I’m turned away from Ellis, it’s easier to speak. “Everyone says I’m a murderer.”

  “You aren’t a murderer. I research murderers, I should know.”

  I make a sound that’s meant to sound derisive but comes out strangled, bitter—as if this whole scenario could get any more humiliating. I rub the heel of my palm against my brow, not that it does much good.

  “Hey,” Ellis says, and she has both hands on me now, grasping my shoulders to look me in the eye. “Hey. Listen to me. The death wasn’t premeditated. You didn’t have malevolent intent. You loved her.”

  That isn’t what Alex said. Alex insisted—she’d insisted—that I couldn’t possibly love her, that I didn’t want her, I just wanted to own her. It had been so…unfair, so brutally and callously unfair, as if the past year of our relationship had meant nothing to her.

  I grimace. “I know. I know I didn’t murder her—not really. But…we’d been fighting. I was still so…so angry at her. And maybe if I hadn’t been distracted, maybe if I’d…if I’d paid better attention…”

  Maybe I could have saved her.

  I can’t know for sure. How can I prove, even to myself—?

  I know I’m not a murderer, but the difference between murderer and killer seems insubstantial sometimes. I was responsible for her death.

  Our argument feels ridiculous now. We’d been fighting about the same thing we always fought about: Alex had called me spoiled, said I didn’t appreciate how lucky I was to have grown up the way I did. It was the kind of comment that never hit well with me. Especially not when we were staying in Colorado, with my mother, with my mother’s empty wine bottles and empty words.

  If Alex and I hadn’t fought…maybe I would have made a different choice.

  Or maybe I would have gone down with her.

  “You couldn’t have saved her,” Ellis says. “It was an accident.”

  She must be able to tell I’m unconvinced, because she sighs. She takes the hat off my head and puts it aside, as if she needs to see me properly.

  “It was a long time ago,” she says. “It’s done now.”

  It doesn’t feel done to me.

  Whether Ellis is using me for her story doesn’t seem to matter anymore. All I can think about is the spaces between the words I just said, all the confessions I didn’t speak aloud.

  How could I explain the way Alex’s accident was the period at the end of a very long sentence—the conclusion of a long-owed debt?

  I’m afraid if I close my eyes I’ll find myself back there, one year ago, with the candles and the incense and witches whispering in my ear. With that ritual Alex and I tried to enact, the one that Alex ruined, the ritual that cursed us.

  “We were climbing Longs Peak,” I say. “We’d gone home to stay with my mother. For…Christmas, you know. We’d begged and begged her to let us go off and do one peak alone. Alex was…very persuasive. It was December, so we’d expected storms, but…”

  When I close my eyes, I still see white. Everything there was white, the snow blinding.

  Only the storm had come later.

  “They never recovered the body, so they couldn’t do an autopsy to be sure, but we’d both been trained to recognize pulmonary edema. When you’re up at that altitude, sometimes it…Your lungs can start to fill with fluid. That’s what happened to Alex. She was in a lot of pain and starting to find it hard to breathe, so we…The most important thing at that point is to get down to a safer altitude as quickly as possible….”

  Stupid, so stupid. We should have turned around as soon as Alex had started showing symptoms. But we were reckless, and as far as we had been concerned, we were immortal.

  Ellis was perfectly, thankfully silent.

  “You have to summit Longs Peak before noon, or you risk getting caught in a storm—that’s how people die up there. And we’d kept climbing too late. By the time we started to descend…that’s when the storm began. There was so much snow everywhere it was impossible to see anything, and we…I made a wrong decision. We descended off a cliff. Or I mean…Alex. She was caught in midair. I was still on the mountain. I couldn’t…I wasn’t strong enough to pull her up. She was too heavy—she had my oxygen.”

  I bite down on my inner cheek. The sharp flare of pain is enough to keep me going.

  “The storm was bad. The snow…it was shifting. We were both…We weighed too much, with both of us. The snow was going to break. And we’d both fall.” I nod, just once. “So I cut the rope.”

  Ellis touches my elbow. I startle. I hadn’t realized she’d approached, and now she was right there, close enough I could have counted her eyelashes. The pince-nez have vanished again.

  “She was screaming,” I whisper. “The whole time. She was screaming for me to pull her back up.”

  The confession drops into the space between us like a lit fuse. And there it is: the nasty truth.

  “Alex begged me not to, and I cut the rope anyway.”

  Ellis takes in a shallow audible breath. Her hand is still on my arm, at least—she hasn’t recoiled in disgust.

  “I don’t understand,” she says. And neither do I. Neither do I. My breath shudders in my chest, and I turn away so she won’t see my tears.

  Ellis’s hand tightens on my arm, and she moves back into my line of sight until I have no choice but to look at her.

  “I don’t understand,” she says again. “Alex didn’t die on a mountain. She died here, at school. She drowned.”

  Ellis’s words land heavy in my mind, and I rock back on my heels, away from her touc
h.

  She drowned.

  I can still see Alex in my memory, her lips tinged blue and her hand shaking where she gripped her ice pick. I still feel the frigid wind tearing at my hair, the snow wet against my cheek. It feels as if that reality has pressed itself up against this one, like I could reach into the dusty air and tear it apart and find myself back on the mountaintop. We were there. We—

  “I read it in the paper,” Ellis is saying; I barely hear her, barely see her. “She fell off a ledge by the lake. That’s what you told the police, anyway. You said she couldn’t swim.”

  No.

  That isn’t what happened. I cut the rope. It was thick, almost impossible to saw through—my hand was numb by the end of it. She screamed the whole way down.

  “That isn’t what happened,” I say. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. “I was there. I…No—”

  “Felicity,” Ellis says. She’s being careful—careful like the hospital doctors were careful, careful like I’m insane. “What did you use to cut the rope? A knife? Where did you get it?”

  I hesitate, mouth half-open, lungs full of dead air.

  Ellis releases my arm; my skin is cold where she once touched me. Alex’s skin was cold up on that cliff, slippery with tears, her flesh translucent like polished quartz.

  No.

  That’s not right. I never touched her. She fell.

  She fell.

  “You were there,” Ellis is still saying, slow and so perfectly concerned. “Remember? You said she lost her balance. You came back to campus, dripping wet, and said she’d fallen into the lake.”

  I remember. I remember standing in the foyer of Godwin House, the cold night at my back and muddy dress clinging to my legs. Ice water pooled on the floor. I remember MacDonald calling the police. I remember them picking Alex’s red hair from where it had caught, tangled, around my fingers.

  Oh god.

  It was an accident. I had just kept saying that, over and over, a litany.