The Other Mrs.

by Mary Kubica

  But she was hungry.

  And, even worse than that, she had to use the bathroom, which was downstairs. Mouse had to go really badly. She’d been holding it for a long time, and didn’t think she could hold it much longer. She certainly couldn’t hold it the whole night. But she also didn’t want to have an accident in her bedroom because she was six years old, too old to have accidents in her bedroom.

  But Mouse wasn’t allowed to leave her bedroom until Fake Mom said she could. So she pressed her legs together real tight and willed the pee to stay inside of her. She used her hand, too, squeezing it into her crotch like a cork, thinking that might hold the pee in.

  But in time her stomach hurt too much, because she was both hungry and had to pee.

  Mouse coaxed herself into going downstairs. It wasn’t easy to do. Mouse wasn’t the kind of girl who liked breaking rules. Mouse was the kind of girl who liked to obey the rules, to never get in trouble.

  But, she remembered, Fake Mom didn’t tell her she had to go to her bedroom. Mouse had decided to do that. What Fake Mom had said was Go somewhere I can’t see you. If Fake Mom was asleep, Mouse decided, then she wouldn’t see Mouse on the first floor, not unless she could see with her eyes closed. In which case, Mouse wasn’t breaking any rules.

  Mouse opened her bedroom door all the way. It groaned as she did and Mouse felt her insides freeze, wondering if that would be enough to rouse Fake Mom from sleep. She counted to fifty in her head, and then, when the house stayed quiet, no sign of Fake Mom waking up, she went.

  Mouse crept down the steps. Across the living room. She tiptoed toward the kitchen. Just shy of the kitchen was a hallway that veered off and toward the room Fake Mom was in. Mouse peeked around the corner, trying to get a glimpse of the door, grateful to find it all the way closed.

  Mouse had to pee more than she was hungry. She went toward the bathroom first. But the bathroom was just a few feet away from her father and Fake Mom’s room, and that made Mouse scared as heck. She skated her socks to that bathroom door, trying hard not to lift her feet from the floor.

  The house was darkish. Not entirely dark, but Mouse had to feel the walls with her fingertips so as not to run into anything. Mouse wasn’t afraid of the dark. She was the kind of kid who wasn’t afraid of much of anything because she had always felt safe in her home. Or at least she had before Fake Mom arrived. Now she no longer felt safe, though the darkness was the least of her concerns.

  Mouse made it to the bathroom.

  Inside, she gently closed the door. She left the light switch off, so that it was pitch black in the bathroom. There was no window there, no scant amount of moonlight sneaking in through glass, no night-light.

  Mouse felt her way to the toilet. By the grace of God, the lid was already up. She didn’t have to risk making noise by lifting it.

  Mouse pulled her pants down to her knees. She set herself so slowly on the toilet seat that it made her thighs burn. Mouse tried to control her urine, to let it seep out slowly and inaudibly. But she’d been holding it for so long. She couldn’t control the way it came out. And so instead, once the floodgates were open, the urine came rushing out of her in a way that was turbulent and loud. Mouse was sure everyone on the whole block might’ve heard it, but especially Fake Mom, who was right across the hall in her father’s bed.

  Mouse’s heart started to race. Her hands got all sweaty. Her knees trembled so that, when she was done on the toilet and pulling her pants back up to her bony hips, it made it hard to stand. Her own legs wobbled like the desk legs when she tried to climb over it to avoid the hot lava spewing into her bedroom. They shook beneath her, threatening to break.

  With her bladder emptied and her pants pulled up, Mouse stood there in the bathroom for a long while with the lights turned off. She didn’t bother washing her hands. But she wanted to make sure the sound of her pee hadn’t woken Fake Mom before she left the bathroom. Because if Fake Mom was in the hall, then she would see Mouse.

  Mouse counted to three hundred in her head. Then she counted another three hundred.

  Only then did she leave. But Mouse didn’t flush the toilet for fear of the noise it would make. She left everything inside the toilet bowl where it was, urine, toilet paper and all.

  She opened the bathroom door. She skated back out into the hallway, grateful to find the bedroom door on the other side of the hall still closed tight.

  In the kitchen, Mouse helped herself to a few Salerno Butter Cookies from the cabinet, and a glass of milk from the fridge. She rinsed her glass and set it in the dish rack to dry. She gathered her cookie crumbs in her hand and threw them in the trash. Because Fake Mom had also said, You pick up after yourself when I’m here, you little rodent, and Mouse wanted to do as she was told. She did it all in silence.

  Mouse climbed the steps.

  But on the way up, her nose began to tickle.

  Poor Mouse had tried so hard to be quiet, to not make any noise. But a sneeze is a reflex, one of those things that happens all on its own. Like breathing and rainbows and full moons. Once it began, there was no stopping it, though Mouse tried. Oh, how Mouse tried. There, on the stairs, she cupped her hands around her nose. She pinched the bridge of her nose. She pushed her tongue all the way up to the roof of her mouth and held her breath and begged God to make it stop. Anything she could think of to stop that sneeze from coming.

  But still the sneeze came.

  SADIE

  The space is typical for a cemetery. I drive along the narrow graveled path and park my car at the chapel. I open the car door as a gust of wind rushes in to greet me. I climb out and walk across the graded land, sliding between headstones and full-grown trees.

  The plot where Alice is buried has yet to be covered with grass. It’s a fresh grave, filled in with dirt and scattered with snow. There is no headstone, not until the land settles and it can be installed. For now, Alice is identifiable only by a section and lot number.

  Imogen sits on her knees on the snowy earth. She hears my footsteps approaching and turns. When she looks at me, I can see that she’s been crying. The black eyeliner she so painstakingly applies is smeared across her cheeks. Her eyes are red, swollen. Her lower lip trembles. She bites on it to make it stop. She doesn’t want me to see her vulnerable side.

  She looks suddenly younger than her sixteen years. But also damaged and angry.

  “Took you fucking long enough,” she says. Truth be told, there was a moment on the way here that I thought about not coming at all. I put in a call to Will to let him know about the photos Imogen sent to me, but again the call went unanswered. I was headed back to the ferry when my conscience got the better of me and I knew I had to come. The bottle of prescription pills remains closed, lying beside Imogen on the ground.

  “What are you doing with those, Imogen?” I ask, and she shrugs nonchalantly.

  “Figured they had to be good for something,” she says. “They didn’t do shit for Mom. But maybe they could help me.”

  “How many did you take?” I ask.

  “None yet,” she says, but I’m not sure I believe it. I move cautiously toward her, lean down and snatch the pills from the ground. I open the cap and look inside. There are pills still there. But how many there were to begin with, I don’t know.

  It’s thirty degrees out at best. The wind blows through me. I raise my hood up over my head, plunge my hands into my pockets.

  “You’ll catch your death out here, Imogen,” I say, a poor word choice given the circumstance.

  Imogen doesn’t wear a coat. She doesn’t wear a hat or gloves. Her nose is a brilliant red. Snot drips from the tip of it, running down to her upper lip, where, as I watch, she licks it away with a tongue, reminding me that she is a child. Her cheeks are frosty patches of pink.

  “I couldn’t be so lucky,” she says.

  “You don’t mean that,” I say, but she does. S
he believes she would be better off dead.

  “The school called,” I tell her. “They said you’re truant again.”

  She rolls her eyes. “No shit.”

  “What are you doing here, Imogen?” I ask, though the answer is mostly clear. “You’re supposed to be at school.”

  She shrugs, says, “I didn’t feel like going. Besides. You’re not my mom. You can’t tell me what to do.” She wipes at her eyes with a shirtsleeve. Her jeans are black and torn, her shirt a red-and-black button-up, unbuttoned, over a black T-shirt.

  She says to me, “You told Will about the picture. You shouldn’t have told him.” She presses up from the ground and rises to her feet. It strikes me again just how tall Imogen is, tall enough to look down on me.

  “Why not?” I ask, and she tells me, “He’s not my fucking father. Besides, that was for your eyes only.”

  “I didn’t know it was a secret,” I say. I take a step backward, regaining my personal space. “You didn’t ask me not to tell him. If you had, I wouldn’t have mentioned it,” I lie. She rolls her eyes. She knows I’m lying.

  There’s a moment of silence. Imogen is quiet, brooding. I wonder what exactly she’s brought me here to do. I keep my defenses up. I don’t trust her.

  “Did you ever know your father?” I ask. I take another step back, bumping into the trunk of a tree. She glares at me. “I was just thinking how tall you are. Your mother wasn’t very tall, was she? Will isn’t particularly tall. Your height must come from your father’s side.”

  I’m babbling now. I can hear it as well as she.

  She claims not to know him. And yet she admits to knowing his name, the name of his wife, that he has three kids. She’s seen his house. She describes it for me. She knows that he has an optometry practice. That he wears glasses. That his oldest, Elizabeth, who’s fifteen, is just seven months younger than she is. Imogen is smart enough to know what this means.

  “He told my mom he wasn’t ready to be a dad.” But clearly he was. He just didn’t want to be Imogen’s dad.

  I see it in her expression: the dismissal still stings.

  “Thing is,” she says, “if my mom wasn’t so fucking lonely all the time, she might’ve wanted to live. If he’d have loved her back, maybe she would have stuck around a while longer. She was so tired of putting on a happy face all the fucking time. Miserable on the inside, but happy out. Nobody believed she was in pain. Even her doctors. They didn’t believe her. There was no way for her to prove that she hurt. Nothing to make her feel better. All those fucking naysayers. They’re the ones who killed her.”

  “Fibromyalgia,” I tell her. “It’s a terribly frustrating thing. I wish I would have known your mother. I might’ve been able to help.”

  “Bullshit,” she says. “Nobody could help.”

  “I would have tried. I would have done anything I could to help.”

  Her laugh is a cackle. “You’re not as smart as you want everyone to think. You and me have a little something in common,” she says, changing tack.

  “Oh yeah?” I ask, disbelieving. “What’s that?”

  I can’t think of one thing Imogen and I would ever have in common.

  She comes closer. “You and me,” she says, pointing between us, “we’re both fucked up.”

  I swallow against a lump in my throat. She takes a step closer, points her finger at me, stabs me in the chest with it. The bark of the tree presses against my back and I can’t move. Her voice is loud now, losing control.

  “You think you can come in here and take her place. Sleep in her bed. Wear her fucking clothes. You are not her. You will never be her!” she screams.

  “Imogen,” I whisper. “I never...” I start to say as her head drops into her hands. Imogen begins to sob, her entire body surging like ocean waves. “I would never try to take your mother’s place,” I say in a muted tone.

  The air around us is bitter and bleak. I brace myself as a gust of wind comes rushing past and through me. I watch as Imogen’s dyed black hair swirls around her, her skin raw and red instead of its usual pale white.

  I go to reach a hand out to her, to pat her arm, to console her. She draws swiftly away from the touch.

  She drops her arms. She raises her eyes. She screams at me then, the suddenness of her statement, the emptiness of her eyes startling me. I pull back.

  “She couldn’t do it. She wanted to. But she just couldn’t get herself to do it. She froze up. She looked at me. She was crying. She begged me. Help me, Imogen,” she seethes, saliva coming from her mouth, building in the corners of her lips. She leaves it there.

  I shake my head, confused. What is she saying? “She wanted you to help with her pain?” I ask. “She wanted you to make the pain go away?”

  She shakes her head; she laughs. “You’re an idiot,” she says.

  She composes herself then. She wipes at the spit, stands upright. Looks at me defiantly, more like the Imogen I know now, no longer in pieces.

  “No.” She continues undaunted. “She didn’t want me to help her live. She wanted me to help her die.”

  My breath leaves me. I think of the step stool, out of reach of Alice’s feet.

  “What did you do, Imogen?” I force out.

  “You have no idea,” she says, her tone chilling. “You have no fucking clue what it was like to hear her cry in the middle of the night. Pain so bad at times that she couldn’t help but scream. She’d get all excited about some new doctor, some new treatment, only for it to fucking fail again, her hopes dashed. It was hopeless. She wasn’t getting any better. She was never going to get any better. No one should have to live like that.”

  Imogen, with tears dripping from her eyes, starts at the beginning and goes through it again. The day began like any other day. She woke up; she went to school. Most days Alice would be waiting in the foyer when she came home. But that day Alice wasn’t there. Imogen called out to her. There was no reply. She started searching the house when a light in the attic lured her to the third floor. There she found her mother standing on the step stool, the noose around her neck. She’d been that way for hours. Alice’s knees were shaking in fear, in exhaustion, as she tried in vain to will herself from the stool. She’d left a note. It was lying on the floor. Imogen has it memorized. You know as well as I do how hard this is for me, the note read. It’s nothing you did. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. But I can’t keep living this double life. Not a Dear John note but Alice’s suicide note, which Imogen picked up and slipped into the pocket of her sweatshirt that day. Imogen at first tried to talk her down from the stool. To convince her to stay and live. But Alice was decided. She just couldn’t take the plunge. Help me, Imogen, she begged.

  Imogen looks straight at me, says, “I yanked that fucking stool from beneath her feet. It wasn’t easy. But I closed my eyes and I yanked for dear life. And I ran. I ran faster than I have in my life. I ran to my bedroom. I hid beneath the fucking pillow. And I screamed my head off so I didn’t have to hear her die.”

  I catch my breath. It was not suicide, not exactly, but also not as malevolent as I once believed. It was assisted dying, like those doctors who slip a lethal dose of sleeping pills to a terminal patient to let them die of their own accord.

  I’ve never been that kind of doctor.

  My job is to help patients live, not to help them die.

  I stare at Imogen openmouthed, thinking: What kind of person could do that? What kind of person could grab ahold of the step stool and pull, knowing full well what the outcome would be?

  It would take a certain kind of person to do what Imogen has done. To act on impulse and not think of what comes next. She just as easily could have called for help in that moment that she pulled. She just as easily could have cut down her mother’s noose.

  Before me she cries; she convulses. I can’t stand to think what she’s been through, wh
at she’s seen. No sixteen-year-old should ever be put in such a position.

  Shame on Alice, I think.

  But also: shame on Imogen.

  “You did the only thing you knew to do,” I lie, saying it only to console her because I think she needs to be consoled. I reach hesitantly for her, and for a split second, she lets me. Only a second.

  But as I wrap my arms gingerly around her, scared and just barely touching, it strikes me that I’m holding a murderer, even if the reasons for it were justified in her mind. But she is repentant and grieving now. For the first time Imogen displays an emotion other than anger. I’ve never seen her like this before.

  But then, true to form, as if she can hear the thoughts in my mind, she stands suddenly upright. She swats at her tears with a sleeve. Her eyes are vacant, her face deadpan.

  She gives me a sudden shove in the shoulder. There’s nothing gentle about it. It’s rough, hostile. The spot where her fingertips press violently into the thoracic outlet, that tender place between the collarbone and ribs, stings. I fall a step back, tripping over a rock behind me, as she says, “Get your fucking hands off me or I’ll do to you what I did to her.”

  The rock is large enough that I lose my balance completely and fall to my seat on the wet, snowy earth.

  I stifle a gasp. I stare up at her, standing over me, unspeaking. There’s nothing to say.

  She finds a fallen stick on the ground. She grabs for it, coming at me quickly like she might hit me again. I flinch, throw my hands inadvertently to my head to protect it.

  This time, she steps down.

  Instead of hitting me, Imogen screams so loudly that I feel the earth beneath me shake, “Leave!” the single word drawn out.

  I find my feet. As I walk quickly away, terrified to turn my back to her though I do, I hear her call me a freak for good measure, as if the death threat wasn’t enough.

  SADIE

  I drive home that night, pulling onto our street, heading up the hill. It was hours ago that I left Imogen at the cemetery. It was early afternoon then and now it’s night. It’s dark outside. Time has gotten away from me. There are two calls on my phone that I’ve missed, both from Will, wondering where I am. When I see him, I’ll tell him how I spent the day. About my conversation with Imogen at the cemetery. But I won’t tell him everything because what would he think of me if he knew I stole a woman’s keys and broke into her home?