A Woman Alone

by Nina Laurin

  And so, right before I dialed 911, I went to my own recorder, which was very much like yours, and erased the last session. Because I couldn’t let it continue to exist. Not with what I told him.

  Because I told him that it was her. It was her that I would kill. If I could.

  And now I know I can. What do you think of that?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “I knew you’d show up here eventually. You, or someone like you. How has life been at 32 Rosemary Road?”

  There’s no glass. Lydia sits across from me, a table separating us. But this casual atmosphere is only illusory. I see the guard hovering by the door, seemingly still but her eyes shrewd, all of her massive bulk tense and ready to pounce like a cat.

  I open my mouth but struggle to speak. Here she is, Lydia in the flesh, very much like I pictured but not at all. Not petite but tall and slender. Her hair is in tight little curls, pulled back in a simple bun. It’s hard to tell if she’s beautiful. Without the right makeup, the right haircut, the right outfit, she’s not ugly but plain. Lydia Bishop, everywoman.

  “I found the tape,” I finally say. “Dr. Alice’s tape.”

  Her reaction is so mild that it’s anticlimactic. She barely raises her eyebrows.

  “Dr. Alice is a good person,” she says. “She truly looks out for her patients. She has compassion. Maybe too much compassion. If she’d surrendered that tape, I would have been stuck here for life, I guess. Because it proves premeditation. As it is, I have a conviction for second-degree murder. Up for parole in ten years. That’s worth something.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say.

  She chuckles. It’s a clear, melodic sound, and it’s not hard to imagine her having a cocktail with her girlfriends at a café on the Main, back in Venture. It’s incongruous, how she doesn’t fit into this setting. Yet here she is.

  “They made sure it wasn’t in the news,” she says with a shrug. “IntelTech. And they even promised to help me with the parole hearing when the time comes. Imagine that!”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because I keep a secret for them. But I think, if you made it here, I can share with you. You won’t blab.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  She gives me a look that sends goose bumps racing down my spine. Her eyes are clear and intense, and for a moment, I’m convinced she can see right through my skull, inside my head, deep into the recesses of my murky little thoughts.

  “You killed her,” I say, licking my lips. For some reason, I feel the need to lower my voice, even though there’s no one here to hide from. “You killed Faye. Your sister.”

  She gives a slow, deliberate nod. “Congratulations. Do you want a prize?”

  “But what…what does it all have to do with 32 Rosemary Road? Why does that house hate me so much?” My voice breaks midsentence, and I realize how crazy I sound. But she watches me impassively, unmoved by my impending breakdown.

  She shifts and refolds her hands on the table in front of her. They’re cuffed together, I notice, although the chain is quite long.

  “All right. Listen.”

  * * *

  For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived in Faye’s shadow.

  She’s one year older than me. I’m not sure why my parents had me at all. To hear them talk, Faye was everything they ever needed from day one.

  I was an afterthought. Maybe I was an accident, or my mother hoped for a Faye 2.0, but if that was the case, she was in for a disappointment. According to her, Faye met every milestone early while I was always lagging, stressing everybody out and prompting appointments with pediatricians who suspected I had this or that, autism, elective mutism, whatever. In the end, nothing turned out to be wrong—nothing concrete, other than me being a definitive letdown all across the board.

  If only my sister had been someone truly exceptional—then at least I could find some justification for resenting her as much as I did, for as long as I can remember. Then everything would have an easy explanation. It would be understandable why everyone always liked her so much more than me. If she were particularly beautiful, it would explain why she’s been up to her eyeballs in boyfriends since middle school, while I ended up having no prom date and graduated a virgin. If she were particularly smart, it would explain why teachers were always so indulgent and forgiving, always willing to help her out, extend a deadline for just one more day, pad a test score by just a point or two to bump it from B+ to A. If she were particularly nice and sweet, it would explain why our parents worshipped the ground she walked on.

  But she wasn’t any of these things. The funny thing is, we were actually alike in almost every way. I was better at humanities than math, and so was she, I needed glasses and had acne, and so did she. She had the same hair, the same eye color, the same height. Yet something, some little detail, some mysterious stroke of genetic luck, always tipped the balance in her favor. Her nose was just a tiny bit smaller, her boobs a tiny bit bigger, and when she put on makeup, it didn’t run or flake. When she did something to her hair, it looked amazing, and later, when I’d sneak into her room and do the exact same thing with the same products, the result was a pale parody.

  Faye, of course, went to law school like our parents wanted, and that sealed the deal. She was the official and unsurpassed favorite. What I did from then on didn’t even matter.

  And to be fair, I was a sport about it all. I never played the ugly sister, seething with rage and hatred and envy. I had opportunities to bring her down—opportunities I never took.

  On the contrary, sometime around the end of high school, I became her keeper of sorts because it might let me live life vicariously through her and absorb at least some of the adoration and love in which she always basked. And so, when I found out by sheer accident that she was cheating on her high school sweetheart, I kept the secret. I didn’t tell him, or anyone. She wasn’t even aware that I knew. Hell, there was so much she was unaware of.

  And I kept covering for her fuck-ups like a good little lackey. I knew which exams she cheated on and never told a soul. I never told our parents when she was on academic probation in her first year of college. And later, when she was working at her first law firm, rising like a meteor through the ranks, I never told our proud parents that their precious Faye had developed a coke habit. What a mistake that turned out to be!

  By then, I was supposed to know better. Much better. But out of some old, ingrained reflex, I kept the secret. I covered for her when she missed work, when she showed up obviously high to a family gathering. And then there was that incident. She got behind the wheel of one or another boyfriend’s car while high as a kite. Ran over that poor little girl. She lied even to me, you know. She told me it was a grown man she ran over—as if that made it less bad.

  By the time I realized I should have turned her in, it was too late. I’d taken that stupid SUV to get it cleaned and get the paint job repaired, and so I made myself complicit in a hit-and-run. My career would be over, and I had just married Dustin back then.

  I had so much to look forward to. She told me that, in that tone of hers, that little voice that gets right into your soul. I knew, then, how she always managed to get her way. Not because she was inherently better or superior or because of some magic pheromone she secreted from her very pores. She was just a skilled manipulator.

  But after that, something changed. I no longer lived vicariously through her. I began to hate her. Hate her worse than death. That’s what Walter brought out in me: that hate. He tapped into it, and after that, there was no more putting it back in the box. And to this day, I wonder if that’s the real reason he went for me with that knife. He could have killed me easily, you know. He was bigger and stronger, yet he let me overpower him. First, he opened the floodgates of my hatred. Then he showed me I could kill.

  But still. It all could have been different. It would have been different. I could have maintained the charade endlessly, pretending none of it had ever happened. It was Faye herself
who put the final nail in the coffin. She didn’t have to. If only she’d stayed the hell away from me and out of my life, she could have continued her shitty, pointless existence where everything fell effortlessly into her lap even though she didn’t deserve it.

  I always thought my marriage was the only thing I had on her. Sure, Faye had the world but I had Dustin—handsome, rich, kind. I had the whirlwind romance followed by a great marriage. And Faye, for all the male attention she got, remained single into her thirties.

  I bet you want to know what happened.

  Let me tell you then. It was the coffee machine. That’s how I knew. It was the goddamn coffee machine that told me. We’d only been living at 32 Rosemary Road for a few months. It got my coffee wrong. I asked for a dry latte, as usual, and when I turned around, there it was. That heap of whipped cream that I never take on my coffee. We shouldn’t have even had it in our grocery order. I picked it up and recognized the smell at once. Cardamom. Faye’s favorite coffee drink. The specific one, with the extra syrup that made it too cloying for a normal person but Faye drank them like water.

  I set it down on the counter, and my hands were shaking. There was no way, unless the coffee machine had made this same exact beverage before. I had to sit for a minute to calm down. Surely there was an explanation. I took my phone, and I called her, and for once—for once—she picked up right away.

  “Hey, sis.” All cheerful, like she had just rolled out of bed past noon.

  “Faye,” I said, “did you happen to pass by my house?”

  She hesitated for just a millisecond too long, and when she spoke again, the cheeriness was still there but I heard the wary note in it. “What? No. That’s way the hell out of the way for me. Let’s be fair. That techy house of yours may be the latest and greatest but it’s in the middle of nowhere. But don’t worry, I’m still coming to your dinner on the weekend. I can’t wait to finally see that technological marvel for myself.”

  It was because she lied. That’s how I knew for sure. Faye had been to my house, and now she lied to me about it. And there was no way for her to enter without her own chip or electronic key or authorization through an app. I sure didn’t give them to her. So that meant someone else had. Are you following, Cecelia?

  After everything I’d done for her, she jumped into my husband’s bed.

  That weekend, at the dinner, I emptied out my entire bottle of painkillers and blended it into Faye’s first course. I had almost a whole refill left over since the attack—I’d hurt my ankle fighting off Walter. I was sure it would be enough. But instead of dropping dead with her face in her lobster bisque, she started wigging out and convulsing. Dustin freaked out but while he was on the phone calling an ambulance, I just took a throw pillow from the living room couch and pressed it over her face until she was gone.

  So listen to me when I say this, Cecelia. If you think you have secrets, things you wouldn’t like anyone, or the world, to know, that house isn’t your friend.

  Think about it, Cecelia. Think about it really well. Do you have a secret? One that will send your entire carefully built life tumbling down?

  Because you can be sure. The house knows about it. And soon, so will everyone else.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  2016

  The house is a disaster area. Cecelia doesn’t know what possessed her to agree to this inane plan. She liked it just fine before—and now she remembers that old-fashioned kitchen and cramped bathroom with fondness because at least there wasn’t all this chaos all day long, all this banging and drilling and dust and strange smells. Maybe she could live without a quartz counter and fancy new tub after all.

  These petty thoughts make her feel small-minded. After all, it matters so much to Scott. Such things are important to him—counters and bathtubs and hardwood floors. In the beginning, that’s what she liked about him, the attention to detail and affinity for the finer things.

  That was before she had to spend the last week showering at the gym down the street. Now it just annoys her. That keeping-up-with-the-Joneses schtick, how 1980s.

  The first week, she tried to be cool about it. Determined to grin and bear the noise and inconvenience and this unceremonious barging into the rhythm of her day. She was reasonably polite and made herself scarce, flitting back and forth, offering the workers cold water from the filter or snacks. She seethed but didn’t say a word when they ate their fast-food lunches on her porch and then left the greasy papers and empty cups right there, without even the basic courtesy of putting them into a bag so they wouldn’t get scattered all over the place by the first gust of wind. She picked up the hamburger wrappers all over the lawn and put them in the trash. And then kept smiling and making herself scarce.

  The second week, she’d had enough and decided to decamp to the local Starbucks. Her excuse was that she couldn’t get any work done because of all the disturbances but it turned out the excuse was mostly for herself. First, she already knew full well that there wasn’t much work to get done. Her ebook covers business had been drying up for months, and the sad truth was that she’d let it. She’s been turning in work that was less than inspired, slapdash, and not always on time. Perhaps because of that, requests in her inbox had reduced to a trickle. These days, she sold mostly the premade covers, and although the number of available ones dwindled, she couldn’t bring herself to make more.

  And besides, Scott would never bother to ask what she’s been doing all day. The only way he’d know she was sitting in a coffee shop from eight to five was by the burnt-coffee reek that seeped into her clothes and hair. Nor did Scott care about how her business was carrying on. It was sort of a tacit understanding between them that she would eventually let her “career” lapse. Scott’s idea of the life he wanted for himself—for them—included not just counters and bathtubs but also a wife at home, comfortably provided for by him and happily raising their child.

  And if this relationship had any future, that’s what Cecelia was meant to deliver.

  And so her time at Starbucks was spent mostly scrolling through social media, reading clickbait articles and staring off into the distance. On the first day, it was pure bliss. Instead of the hammering and the loud, obnoxious music pouring from scratchy speakers (someone on that crew had an unhealthy passion for ’80s hair metal), there was the familiar, ordinary hum of a café. Generic jazz overhead, the hissing of steam, the din of chatter that receded so easily into the background, letting her thoughts flow. The coffee and snacks within reach and the lack of dishes to wash also helped.

  On the second day, she found herself settling into her new routine. She avoided the mistakes of her first day (arrived early to snag the corner booth, brought headphones, and capped the coffee consumption at two cups only) and even ended up working on a couple of premade covers.

  On the third day, she brought a book, one of those hyped literary fictions with flowers on the cover that she bought but had been putting off reading, but the environment proved a bit too distracting to concentrate on dense, florid text. Plus her laptop sat right there, tempting with the easier gratification of social media. She skipped the pastries, which made her feel heavy and oily, and had a panini instead.

  On the fourth day, she ate nothing at all and got a water along with her coffee. By the fifth day, she was ready to have a go at the café with a wrecking ball. The smell alone made her twitch, and her insides churned at the thought of another greasy, plastic-wrapped treat. The table was the wrong height, and the din seeped into her headphones, polluting her curated playlist. When she glanced at the time in the corner of her laptop screen, she despaired to see that it was barely noon. She wanted to go home.

  When she looked up from the screen, her gaze landed on a familiar face.

  She didn’t place him right away—she knew only that she’d seen him before. Seeing him here confused her in that way it always does, seeing a familiar face out of the usual context. So she tried to remember, and while she did that, he glanced sideways and not
iced her looking.

  Heat rose to her cheeks, and she instinctively ducked behind the laptop screen. Then, realizing how rude that was, she straightened her back and made herself look at him again, trying to keep her cool and not look embarrassed by her lapse.

  He gave her a nod of recognition. She returned it, even though recognition still eluded her. She felt relief when his turn came and he gave the girl at the cash register his order. Figuring that was all, she turned her attention to her screen.

  “So this is where you hide out all day, then.”

  Her head snapped up. He stood over her, coffee cup in hand. It wasn’t a to-go cup, she noticed.

  “I was just wondering,” he went on when she didn’t reply. And that’s when she clued in: He was one of the guys working at the house. He’d been there for two whole weeks, and she couldn’t be bothered to recognize him. Her face flushed with embarrassment she couldn’t hide.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, unsure which exact thing she was apologizing for. “It’s just…there’s all that dust. And noise.”

  He shrugged. He made no move to sit down across from her but no move to leave either.

  “Sorry about that. And the music probably doesn’t help.”

  Before she caught herself, she wrinkled her nose, and he grinned. “It’s not my music. It’s…one of the other guys’. Damn, I’m a horrible liar. I admit it, it’s my music.”

  Cecelia couldn’t help herself. She burst out laughing. Now that she got a better look, no wonder she didn’t place him right away. He had changed out of the dirty, paint-stained jeans and sweatshirt. His clothes were clean. The only indication of what he did for a living were his hands, weathered and with dark crescents under the fingernails.