by Mary Kubica
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MARY KUBICA
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 bet-
ter 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, run-
ning 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. She 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 an-
swer 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
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with a shirt sleeve. 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 fa-
ther. Besides, that was for your eyes only.”
“I didn’t know it was a secret,” I say. I take a step backwards,
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 know-
ing 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 awhile longer. She was
so tired of putting on a happy face all the fucking time. Miserable 9780778369110_RHC_txt(ENT_ID=269160).indd 239
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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 ev-
eryone to think. You and me have a little something in com-
mon,” 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 Imo-
gen’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.
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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 cry-
ing. 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, sh
e laughs. “You’re an idiot,” she says.
She composes herself then. She wipes at the spit, stands up-
right. 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 stepstool, 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 treat-
ment, 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 begin-
ning 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
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stepstool, 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 termi-
nal patient to lie 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 per-
son could do that? What kind of person could grab ahold of the
stepstool 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, what 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.
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“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 hesi-
tantly 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 repen-
tant 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, unspeak-
ing. There’s nothing to say.
She finds a fallen stick on the ground. She grabs for it, com-
ing 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.
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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 conversa-
tion with Imogen at the cemetery. But I won’t tell him every-
thing because what would he think of me if he knew I stole a
woman’s keys and broke into her home?
As I drive past the vacant house next door to ours, my eyes
go to it. It’s dark as it should be; the lights won’t turn on for
awhile still. Snow accumulates on the drive while others have
been shoveled clean. It’s so obvious no one lives there now.
I’m overcome with a sudden urge to see for myself what’s in-
side that home.
It’s not that I think anyone is there now. But my mind can’t
get past one thing. If someone had come to the island to mur-
der Morgan late at night, there would have been no ferry back
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to the mainland. He or she would have had to spend the night
here with us.
And what better place to stay than a vacant home, where no
one would know.
It’s not a murderer I’m looking for as I leave my car in my
&nbs
p; own driveway and sneak across the snow-covered lawn. It’s evi-
dence that someone has been here.
I look over my shoulder as I go, wondering if anyone is watch-
ing me, if anyone knows I’m here. There are footprints in the
snow. I follow them.
The house next door is a cottage. It’s small. I go to the door
first and knock. I don’t expect anyone to answer. But I do it
anyway because it would be foolish not to. No one answers
the door. And so I press my face to the glass and look in. I see
nothing out of the ordinary. Just a living room with furniture
draped in plastic.
I make my way around the periphery of the home. I don’t
know what I’m looking for. But I’m looking for something. A
way in, conceivably, and sure enough—after a little searching,
a few failed attempts, dwindling hope—it’s there.
The window well cover on the back of the home is not secure.
I lift it up and it easily gives. I dust off the snow. I remove the whole thing and set it aside, hands trembling as I do.
I carefully lower myself down into the window well. It’s a
tight fit. I have to contort my body in an odd way to get to the
window. The screen, when I get to it, is torn. Not just a little,
but enough for a whole body to get through. I tug on the win-
dow behind it, thinking it won’t give—surely this can’t be so
easy—but to my surprise it does.
The window into the basement is unlocked.
What kind of homeowner doesn’t secure their home before
leaving for the winter?
I press my body through the window, feet first. I climb awk-
wardly into the dark basement. My head passes through a cob-
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web as my feet land on concrete. The cobweb sticks to my hair,
though it’s the least of my concerns. There are so many more
things to fear than this. My heart pounds inside of my chest as
I glance around the basement to be certain I’m alone.
I don’t see anyone. But it’s too dark to really know.
I inch across the basement, find the unfinished steps to the
first floor. I go slowly, dragging my feet, careful not to make
any noise as I climb. At the top of the steps, I set my hand on
a door handle. My hand is sweaty, shaking, and suddenly I’m
wondering why I thought it was such a good idea to come here.