Secret Girl

by Terri Elliot

  He stares on. He doesn’t answer. But the look on his face tells me.

  “They thought I was her,” I tell him. “Casey.”

  He cringes to the sound of her name. She’s buried for him. “They checked the records, saw an asterisk, made a miscalculation. They understand now.”

  “Asterisk?” I repeat. What does that mean? A stolen child equates to a footnote?

  Henry rolls his eyes, steps forward, and hunches over to plants his elbows on the island a few feet away from me. “Jesus, Emily, you were a fucking school teacher. How do you expect me to explain this to you?”

  “Don’t treat me like a child,” I chide.

  He lifts his head. “I love you, Emily. But some things…”

  I feel a rush of tears and mucous rushing up to my eyes, my sinuses. I silently rebuke them. “Some things what, Henry?”

  His eyes grow glossy. I can’t keep mine from doing the same.

  “Damnit, Henry, why?” They roll over my cheeks. The room refracts in them, skewing my vision.

  He sighs again, lowering his gaze to the countertop. His hand plays along its surface, fingertips tapping against the marble idly like a caught boy. “I have this part of me, Em. This vicious little version of me that sees things differently. Once upon a time, he had control. He convinced me of his worldview.”

  Through my tears, he could almost be a boy. But he’s not. Henry is thirty seven. I grit my teeth. “This isn’t a bedtime story, Henry.” I struggle to take a breath. I have to confront him. “Did you do it? Did you do the things I read?”

  I wipe my tears away and get a clear look at him for a moment. He’s confused. Does he not know?

  “Her journal. How did you think this started?”

  “Fucking right,” he mutters to himself. “I never read it,” he tells me. “I honestly forgot that I’d kept it. I don’t know why I did that.”

  I want to ask him if he’s fucking kidding. That the erosion of our marriage came from an explosive journal written by his ex chronicling their mutual crimes, which he didn’t even have a reason for keeping is nearly too banal to comprehend. For a moment, it’s worse than the crimes, than the lies. To have no good reason for holding onto such a dangerous book. It demonstrates a complete lack of reflection. Now I feel foolish. Tears return, though they feel hot against my skin, warmed by the fire burning in my cheeks. “Henry, did you kill that man in Los Feliz?”

  I see the shape of his head tilt up, but cannot make out the expression. I let my tears obfuscate his emoting, I almost prefer it. “Emily,” he says in a cool, tempered manner. “I’m not the man I once was,” he speaks in an even, slow rhythm. Careful. “I’m better than that man. But that man’s actions would have crippled my growing into who I am now, into your husband. So I did what was necessary to unshackle myself from--”

  He stops cold. I wipe the tears from my eyes to discern why. His face is white, expanded into an expression I haven’t seen on him in a long time. Ever. It’s caught off guard, or horrified. It’s looking over my shoulder.

  I spin to find we’ve been joined by another woman. The hairs lift on my neck as I see her. She’s filthy, her prior silent footsteps traced in dirt back around the kitchen towards the entrance. She’s tan, in an unhealthy way, dried out and burnt. Her hair is a dark mess atop her head, blonde, brunette, otherwise, made indeterminate by the layers of filth. Her clothes are tatters, her scent arresting. In the middle of her face, though, her eyes are a clean vision of fury that lock onto mine while her hand slides a knife out from the rack at the end of the countertop. “Door was unlocked,” she says, as if explaining her presence. Her voice is soft, if weathered. She holds the knife to her side. She doesn’t threaten me with it, knowing it’s enough to have it in hand. “Saw you in Beverly Hills. Saw you storm out. I’ve been staking it out for weeks, never saw someone storm out of there so angry.”

  “Casey.” I speak the obvious, to which she chortles. “How did you know who I was?”

  She lifts the knife, observes the correction in my posture and my held breath, then playfully taps the point of it against the countertop. “Nice house. Nice life. Rich. Of course, you’re on the side of a hill, which would keep me up at night. Earthquakes, mudslides. How’s the foundation here? Do you feel safe?”

  “Casey,” Henry speaks, standing now behind me. “Why don’t you put the knife down and we can talk.”

  She ignores him, stepping closer to me. I’m locked in place. “The mountains. I slept in the woods and watched the trailers burn after you left. You and your friend. Looked like a cop. You fucking him to get his help? I only had to suck one dick to hitch back into LA. Sex is transactional, everything is transactional. You married the father of my child for his wealth. He married you, what, for the clean image?”

  I feel Henry’s hands around my shoulders. It’s protective, but performative. He’s still behind me, the knife in front of me. “Alright, Casey. Make your speech. But there’s no need for violence.”

  She begins to laugh. “No, course not. This isn’t like Joey, no need to paint the floor with brains. And the walls, and ceiling for that matter.” She leans in closer to me, I smell her rancid breath. “You read my journal, didn’t you?” she whispers. “That’s why you took the new one. You read about her, Sarah Smith. Cunt. That’s why you went to their headquarters. But she wasn’t there, was she? Because she never is. You can’t find her, she stays hidden. Because she knows. There are a lot of people she’s wronged. She’s smart.” Casey walks back and pivots around the island, making her way to the dining room table. She sits herself down. Then she gestures to the other seats. “Care for a sit?” We stand still a moment longer until she stabs the top of the table. We oblige her, shuffling over to the table, taking seats opposite.

  I watch her eyes finally attach to Henry, in a manner that appears painful. Like looking at him stings. “Our baby,” she starts, but her words catch in her throat. “You just left after we lost her. How could you do that?”

  “You were too attached, Casey,” he replies weakly.

  She scoffs, turning her head. “Lilly needs a mother.” She slowly turns her head back to Henry, a little hint of a grin twisting her lips upward at their corners. Her eyes twinkle with the words to follow. “Lilly didn’t die that day, Henry. She survived.” Casey nods. There’s an energy to her body that seems to vibrate, making her jittery. “She was stolen. Our baby, Henry.” The smile fades, the twinkle dies. The revenge she desired over my husband is overtaken by emotion. She can’t revel in simply knowing the truth, because the truth hurts too much. I can see the hole through her. “Our Lilly was taken, by that fucking cunt and her bullshit nonprofit. It started when this woman in my support group mentioned this crazy theory. She was removed for it, but I couldn’t forget it. It started eating away at me. Without anyone to care for me, to love me, Henry, it was all I had. The hope Lilly was still out there. Because even being stolen as a result of some batshit baby snatching conspiracy was better than being completely alone. So I researched. I started hunting down the clues. And you know what happened?” She lifts and stabs the tabletop again. A pair of indents mark where the knife rests. “Everything came together. It was all true. In our wildest time together, all the stories we invented about our victims to justify robbing them, beating them, we never could have thought up something like this. That a whole criminal network of rich assholes looking for pretty babies bought them from a front, this California Children’s Future Society, headed by a kind, old woman just trying to help some kids from fucked out parents? Are you kidding me? It’s unthinkable. Well, except for those evil enough to think of it. They, of course, are the rich cunts that stole the babies from junkies, from the poor, from criminals, and sold them for money, for power. Could you imagine it?” Tears trace lines through the soot on her cheeks, clearing it away, exposing the soft, reddened flesh beneath. I look back to Henry, a stolid expression, ashen complexion.

  “He knew,” I hear myself utter.

 
; “Emily--” he attempts to silence.

  “He sold Lilly,” I tell her, looking into his eyes. They avoid me, instead reading the woman across from him. The one he has to disarm.

  She freezes. The energy that animated her exits with a breath, and nothing replaces it. She empties, tears rolling over her face as she stares in horror at Henry.

  “Wh-what? I don’t...what do you mean?”

  “You know what she means,” Henry tells her.

  “You sold our child? Moments after I labored, gave birth to her? For what?”

  “Freedom,” he tells her. “They were there, in the hospital. They keep an eye on the maternity ward there. They approached me while you were in the room. They told me they knew about who we were, the thing’s we’d done. In exchange for the baby, our slates were cleaned, Casey.” Henry stands from his chair with a confidence that rattles me. He walks along the other side of the table to stand beside her, hovering over her. He looks down and says, “What sort of mother do you think an inmate would have made? Did you deserve her? Have you asked yourself that question? In all this time, did you think to consider whether or not you should actually have her back? Your little crusade,” he mocks.

  “Every day,” she replies exasperated.

  Henry sighs. “Then you should have stopped, because the only correct answer to that question, is unequivocally,” he snatches the knife out from under her weak grasp, “no.” He seizes a handful of her hair in one hand and drags the blade of the knife across her throat with the other. I watch while she coughs. Her eyes grow wide, then shrink. Instinct kicks in, retribution, her mission, fade behind it. Then it all slips away, the will to survive along with everything else, flooding out of her in the blood pouring from her neck down along her body, onto the floor. For one last moment, she is human again, and I feel farthest from it. She slumps in the chair. Now she is nothing. And I feel nothing.

  Henry drops the knife into her lap and walks away. When he returns, I remain stunned while he moves into action. He has a pile of towels, which he uses to box in the blood stretching out across the floor. They soak and form a barrier, allowing her blood to rise in a small pool around the chair. He pauses to look up at me, crouched beneath Casey’s lifeless body. “Are you going to help me or just sit there?”

  His voice is sort of distant, like he’s behind glass. I don’t quite feel like it’s in the same room as me, like it’s from a television. He’s just cleaning up, after having murdered his ex. No questions. No questions for me, what I’ve done. He doesn’t care about the encampment. He doesn’t address the man Casey mentioned I was with. He’s absorbed into the act of coverup without a second thought. And he’s perplexed that I wouldn’t feel the same impulse.

  “Don’t be petulant,” he chastises. “Help me get this started, then one phone call to the Society and they’ll have people here in an hour.”

  “Petulant?” I say. I watch on in bemusement. It doesn’t look real, like what a dead body in my house should look like. It’s not the color of the blood, nor the lack of animation in her eyes. Those seem appropriate. It’s something surrounding it, like the air. The air doesn’t look right. It’s so surreal to explain, but the air should look horrifying. It should shock me to stare through it, to find, dangling like dust in the rays of light filtering in from the sliding porch door, particles of terror released from his violent act. They’re missing.

  He rises with a fresh sheen of sweat across his face. He grunts as he does so. “What else are you going to do, Em? Because the way I see it, you’re wrapped up in this now, too. Hunting her down, uncovering the truth about Sarah Smith. You already know you can’t report this. They won’t let you, which leaves you with two options: run away, or accept it. Since you already love me, the answer is simple.” He turns his head over his shoulder, staring down at Casey’s body. “She couldn’t accept it. She rejected the truth. You know, that’s why she’s dead now. World’s a nasty place, Em. In order to live in it, you have to make peace with that fact--”

  It’s a swift motion. I begin it with purpose, and I don’t lose focus throughout the act. The world comes back into a clarity that no longer feels surreal. It’s dull. Grey. My skin is neither hot, nor cold. The texture of the knife’s handle holds more detail than the sensations of my body reacting to this decision. And it goes in easy, the upkeep on the blade allows it to tear through flesh with relative ease. Like cutting through a choice steak from the high priced grocery store at the bottom of the hill. I watch the same cycle again, this time in Henry’s eyes. The initial shock, the struggle to live, the acceptance, a winded expression. All this in close proximity, my hands still on the knife gutting him, angled upward towards his heart. Never once does he look me in the eye, incapable of accepting the notion his wife as his own murderer. A fact he fails to make peace with before stepping backwards into Casey’s blood, losing control of his heel, and collapsing to the side where he takes his final breath. Sprawled out beside his face, I see the reflection of the hills that surround our home, Silver Lake’s finest real estate mirrored in the tiles. Henry’s blood slowly engulfs it.

  I suddenly begin to weep uncontrollably. My chest heaves with each sob, a release of pent up tears rushing out of me like vomit. My body is weak, I think I might crumple to the floor. I look down and find I would fall into their collected blood and think how it would stain my designer jeans and suddenly the fit lifts, the tears stop abruptly leaving their embarrassing trails on my cheeks. It’s worthless, crying. There’s nothing I can do about what’s been done. I survey my options, and the field narrows to a single choice. I can only proceed, much the way I’ve learned to do this summer, in a calculative, criminal fashion. Criminal, a word I find no longer imbued with negative connotation. It’s almost meaningless, except on the news, or in a courthouse. Places that peddle in the illusion of justice. Criminal is a word for losers. You’re not one until you’re caught, or you’re dead. Fear of criminality keeps the poor impoverished while the rich engage with it, directly or indirectly, to retain their lifestyles.

  I chuckle to myself. My thoughts read like Casey’s journal. The difference is, I don’t care.

  I pull my cell phone from my pocket and dial Geoffrey’s number. I think, in the moment it takes to lift it to my ear, that I’ll be able to store it in my phonebook now. I explain everything to him in short order, just the pertinent facts. His reply is equally short.

  “I’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of you.”

  27.

  I ease back my seat as I turn my head to peer through the tinted window at the opposite side of the street. There, I find what I’ve come to observe. A child, a little girl, aged nine, bounds out of the house towards one of two very nice, expensive cars. The block is filled with them, parked in the driveways of mansions. Brentwood is gaudy, in my opinion. I prefer the style and aesthetic of Silver Lake. She’s pretty. Long, blonde hair shimmers in the morning light. Her father follows after her. He’s a cosmetic surgeon, pulled in a million last year. The mother comes to the door, waving at the both of them. She’s a realtor, made another two. I wonder if that stings for him.

  Another fact Geoffrey has uncovered: they renamed her Lillian. Something about that feels offensive to me. To have stolen the child was one slight, to keep nearly the same name that Casey attached herself to? I can’t explain why, but that feels almost worse than having stolen the child to begin with.

  I could steal Lilly back, take the child under my wing. It wouldn’t set anything right, but morality doesn’t apply to a story like this. What’s right comes from the logic of revenge, which would find the ledger balanced if they were to lose their child. They love her, that’s evident. It would likely destroy them to find one day she’d been taken without a trace. Maybe a note. Something snide. “Rich Brentwood pricks are worse than junkies.” So they would know. I amuse myself with their imagined faces, finding such a note in their daughter’s bedroom. Not here, they would think. This sort of thing doesn’t happen in Brentwood.
But, of course, it already did.

  Another woman comes to the door, a cup of coffee rolling steam up along her wrinkled face, gleaming at the child and her father getting into his sedan. I recognize her immediately. She’s even shorter than I presumed. Sarah Smith grips the elbow of the mother, causing her to turn and smile down at the little, old woman.

  The father bends and says something to Lilly. Probably, “Go say bye to your mother and Auntie Sarah.” She rushes back to the door where the two women dote on her as she hugs each of them. Lillian wraps her arms around Sarah with almost more intensity than she does her own mother. Sarah keeps a close watch over her deals. She pats the child on the head who smiles up at her with a grin missing one of her two front teeth. What a bizarre process of human biology, that we replace bones when we become adults. I begged my mother for money, for validation, from the tooth fairy. She dutifully obliged, at least for a time. The last several, she fell off, like so many other things. She became busy with the burden of her mother passing away. I put quarters from my own piggy bank beneath my pillow to create the illusion for myself. I was old enough to know it was a story. Lillian holds onto Sarah Smith’s legs for an inordinate amount of time.

  My phone rings, I answer using the car’s touch screen. “Hey, baby.”

  “Hey, where’s your collinder?” Geoffrey asks. I can hear exasperation in his voice. I laugh, thinking of him cook, cleaning, domesticated. “What’re you laughing at?”

  “Oh, nothing,” I tell him. I put the car into gear and signal to reenter traffic. “I’ll be home in a minute.” Home. Our home. It’s paid off now, I own it outright. Henry’s life insurance covered the remaining balance.

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