by Nina Laurin
I tune him out. Cybercrime. What, are they joking? How can they call me at a time like this?
“Ma’am?”
“This isn’t a good time,” I say flatly and hang up. I half expect the phone to ring again but it doesn’t. Blessed quiet surrounds me. That’s all I want. Quiet.
Lucinda Burke, that awful, impertinent girl with her smacking gum deserved what I did to her, and if anyone asks me, I don’t know a thing. They can’t prove it. They don’t even know who I am because I gave them a fake name and they never bothered to check my ID, as long as I kept forking over their exorbitant fees.
I scoop up the sweater, the one thing that’s still within reach. I press it to my cheek and then curl up in a ball and close my eyes.
* * *
“Wake up. Hello.”
Byron’s voice above me, soft and gentle. Oh God, what have I done? Where am I?
I’m passed out on the floor, on the pile of unworn baby clothes.
Colleen’s baby’s clothes.
The baby she never had, because she went to the clinic and had an abortion. She did—I know she did. Otherwise…What if I had it wrong, and she didn’t go through with it? Changed her mind at the last second? Decided to keep it? But…
This can only mean that she was pregnant when she died.
Byron is going to kill me, I think. But I can’t bring myself to panic. Everything is dull, my emotional responses blunted.
“Claire, get up.” He leans over me, his broad back blocking the only source of light.
“No,” I moan.
“Yes. Come on. Up you go. Let’s take you upstairs.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“You have to. I have a surprise for you, remember?”
I don’t want a surprise. I don’t want anything. Just leave me alone, please.
But he’s already threading his arm around my waist, grabbing me under the armpits, and hauling me to my feet. My knees buckle, and I refuse to stand, slumping against his shoulder.
“Stop it,” he chides in my ear. “Walk.”
I won’t walk. When he realizes it, he groans but lifts me up into his arms and carries me upstairs.
There’s too much light in the living room. The window is dark but it feels like every light in the house has been switched on. God, just dim it all a little, please. I can’t take it.
I turn my head and bury my face in Byron’s neck. He smells like soap and cologne and shampoo, a familiar scent. A scent I used to love so much I’d keep one of his shirts next to me all day just so I could take breaks from whatever I was doing to press it to my face and bask in that scent again, even for a second.
“Claire,” he says. “Wake up. Be an adult.”
They were going to have a baby after all—a girl. It’s all so close to coming together in my head. But the jagged pieces float around and never connect fully. The answers slip away. I never stood a chance, from the very beginning.
Everything I’ve ever done was fucked from the beginning. It was all for nothing.
It’s the only thing I know for sure.
“Claire,” Byron says again. He sits me down on the couch, like a doll. He folds my hands in my lap, and I don’t move. I look straight ahead and blink.
“There,” he says, taking a seat on the armchair across from me. “Good. We can talk now.”
“There isn’t anything to talk about.”
“Yes. There is.”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” I say, shocked with how broken and plaintive my voice sounds. “I do things I don’t remember doing. I sent emails that I didn’t send. Everything is such a mess. What’s going on, Byron? Can you tell me what’s going on?”
“I think you know pretty well what’s going on…Claire.”
“Was my sister here?” I crease my forehead. “What did she tell you? She’s a liar, Byron. She’s an evil, malignant— You can’t believe a word she says. She’s poison. It’s all her fault. She set me up—I’m sure of it. It can’t have been anybody, anybody…”
I trail off. My face goes numb when he slowly puts a little square box on the coffee table.
“Do you know what’s in there?”
I look up into his face. Seeking…answers. Seeking anger, love, pity—something. But there’s nothing. No emotion at all. Like there never was.
“I found it. I found the ring.”
My breath, weak as it is, catches. He opens the box, and there it is. Emeralds—real emeralds, more than a hundred years old—glimmer the color of envy from the rich setting of platinum and tiny diamonds that sparkle like tears.
The ring. The real ring.
“You need to tell the truth now. It’s all over, Tracy.”
Part Two
Tracy
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
You need to understand. Everything I did, I did because I love you. I love you like mad, they say, but that’s a lie—it’s not like madness, it is madness, pure and absolute madness. No one else has ever loved you like that, I assure you. Not Sarah Sterns, not that Melissa girl, not Isabelle, who left you behind as soon as the going got tough, at the first sign of trouble.
Not Colleen.
One day you might understand that.
The day I first saw you is still clear in my mind. The end of junior year of high school was looming, but to me, those couple of months might as well have been a hundred years. I was not motivated in class; I didn’t like school. I didn’t see what it could possibly bring me—me, who didn’t seem to be good at anything, who was chubby and average looking, and who was, worst of all, hopelessly devoid of that cool gene that made you stand out, that drew people to you. The same way they flocked to my older sister, for instance.
Chrissy was hardly prettier than me. We looked alike, at least as far as physical features went. We took after our mom: same round face, a slightly bulbous nose, dishwater-colored hair. Chrissy didn’t have stellar grades but she had friends and even a boyfriend whose sole purpose in her life seemed to be creating drama. Most of the time, she pretended we weren’t related. Nobody had any particular reason to look at me, and so I learned to be invisible.
It all changed the day I met you.
You didn’t see me either but I sure saw you. It was the first time I felt tempted to leave my shell of a world. The first time I thought there might be something out there for me, in the murky world after high school.
We had guest lecturers come in from universities all month. It was optional. During lunch hour and right after school, you could go to the gymnasium and hear some professor from this or that college try to sell you on social science or psychology or biochemistry. I wasn’t going to go. After all, there was no chance of me ever getting a scholarship, and my family had no money to pay for college.
But that day, Chrissy was bringing the useless boyfriend home to study—meaning sloppily make out in the room we shared while I camped out in the living room with Mom, pretending it wasn’t happening. I needed to kill an hour or two. The lecture wasn’t crowded so there was no chance of running into any nasty characters. So I went. I sat in the back and listened to you lecture about literature.
You know you’re good at it. I think you’re selling yourself short at that horrible liberal arts college, where they’ve never appreciated what you have to offer. I know you only went to work there because of Colleen—another way her self-absorption ruined your life. But you could do so much better.
And that day, you were on fire. You talked about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Faulkner and other names I hadn’t heard. You told funny anecdotes, and even the most hardened cynics of a small-town high school giggled. And I looked at you—you were enjoying the attention, I could tell. You were having a good time. You were glorious. To me, you were something akin to a god.
After the lecture, you took questions but I didn’t dare raise my hand. Even later, you stayed near the gymnasium doors to chat with anyone who still had something to ask. You were a natural. The god was down here on earth
, walking among us.
I watched from afar, concealed behind a large group of girls. Then they started to leave, and one of them said, “God. This guy. So up his own ass, right?”
The others laughed. Another girl said, “Yeah. I thought he was cute; that’s why I went…”
“Ew. No. He’s gotta be, like, forty.”
“Still hot. Hot older man, right?”
I felt dirty on your behalf. Sullied. Profaned. I remembered who they were and put glue in their lockers. Childish, maybe, but I risked a lot. If the teachers found out, or worse, if the girls themselves found out, it could have been disastrous.
But you never even knew about my sacrifice.
That was okay by me. Glue in lockers was only the beginning.
I had found my purpose now. I went home a different person, and nothing mattered: not Chrissy’s bullshit; not her asshole boyfriend, who’d laugh at her put-downs of me but leer when she wasn’t looking; not our mom, who was passed out drunk half the time. For the first time, I felt like I was somebody.
Or like I might become somebody, in the future. But that would take a lot of work.
I was ready.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Dear sister,
I think this email is secure. She doesn’t know anything. I don’t think she suspects. Maybe she’s not as vigilant anymore, now that she has what she thinks she wanted.
I checked her laptop again today. The bad news is there’s still nothing that could help us bring her to justice. The only thing I could determine from it is that she’s not working on her new “novel” like she said she does. Who knows what she does all day. But the good news is I have her passwords now. I can log on to her email accounts from another location.
I admit that it took a lot to convince me. Believe me, Em, no one wanted to find a sensible explanation more than I did. Maybe it was all a coincidence. Maybe she got hold of Colleen’s ring some other way. Maybe she simply found it in the bathroom of that restaurant, and she has nothing at all to do with the whole mess.
But rest assured, we aren’t tormenting an innocent young woman. She’s deranged, and I don’t say this lightly. I know you’re a psychologist, and you’re opposed to the use of that word. When I got the report from the background check firm I hired, I knew. All the lies, the name change, the sister I never heard of.
She told me stories about her past, Em. Fabrications. Pure fiction. She told me her parents died in a car crash when she was nineteen—that never happened. Her father left when she was little, and he still lives somewhere in Oklahoma. Her mother died only five years ago. She’s not from where she said she’s from.
Everything is fake. There never was a Claire Greene. Her name is Tracy Belfour, and she’s from a town called Peake Falls, Ohio. It’s a short drive from where I live, not even an hour. A blip on the map, population 4,000. I saw pictures of the house she grew up in. An absolute dump. She told me her parents were environmental lawyers.
I’m telling you, the moment I found that ring (in a tampon box, of all places, if you can believe it! I can’t decide if it’s charmingly naïve or utterly horrifying), I knew. It’s our grandmother’s ring, it’s one of a kind. The emeralds and diamonds, the setting. There can be no mistake.
Of course, I’m well aware that none of it will hold up in court. Forget court—none of it is enough to even get her arrested. The ring means nothing, and changing her name and lying about her past is sketchy but hardly a criminal offense. Our only hope is to get her to slip up and confess. I need your help, as a psychologist and as my sister. I need to know you’re behind me on this.
Best,
B.
Byron,
I am behind you 100%. But if you’re right, this is going to be difficult. And what’s more, it’s going to be dangerous. This girl—Claire, Tracy, whatever—has a mania, and that mania is you. She’s fixated on you. Or, at least, her idea of you.
The fact is people like her don’t really understand what love is. What she feels is more akin to a compulsion. Underneath, she’s a tormented and miserable person who thinks you’re the only key to happiness and a fulfilling existence. She doesn’t really have a solid sense of self, only a persona that’s based around her obsession, and that’s what makes her so volatile. If she convinces herself that it’s necessary in order to preserve the narrative she’s built in her head, she can seriously hurt you.
I will help you, but I beg you to be careful. You can’t bring back Colleen, and I don’t want to lose you as well.
Love,
M.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I look at the ring. It sits on the table in front of me, undeniably real. The exact replica of the one on my finger.
Then I look up at my husband. Tears blanket my eyes.
I remember how he proposed to me. I think I remember every second of every minute of that day. The day that I knew it wasn’t all for nothing. That I fulfilled my destiny.
It was a whirlwind courtship—just the way it should be, as I always thought. When you’ve met your true love and you know it, you don’t drag your feet and wallow in doubts for months and months, maybe even years. And when you haven’t met the one, you should be out there looking for him, not hopping in and out of undergrads’ beds.
I did know better, and I steered him to this step with meticulous care. Just like it was clear to me we belonged together, it had to be as clear to him. I did everything I was supposed to do. I made meals, showed up on weekends with pizza and rented Blu-rays. And if I sensed he was getting overwhelmed, I pulled back. Even though it was hard. God, he’ll never know how hard it was! I kept track of him during those times, of course. It was so much easier now that I had legitimate access to the house. A man must never be left to his own devices for too long.
The point is I made it easy for him. Every step of our courtship, he never once had to agonize over what to do with me next. That was my job, to make his life easy, and I did.
I knew he was going to propose because I kept track of his computer, looking in while he was in the shower or in another room. I checked his credit card statements and the receipts in his desk drawer—luckily for me, he’s way more organized than Colleen used to be. Sure, it ruined the surprise a little but that’s okay.
But when he finally got on one knee, I opened the little velvet box and saw it there.
The awed smile on my face didn’t waver, but inside, I felt myself wilt. It wasn’t an exact replica—there were subtle differences. The work on the real ring, the ancestral one, had been too fine to reproduce accurately. Or maybe he didn’t have enough money. But it was definitely a replica, emerald and diamonds set in platinum. I confirmed it later—took the ring to a jeweler to appraise, where I was told that the platinum was real but the emerald was lab grown, and the diamonds were cubic zirconia.
Why did he choose to do that? To recreate that other ring, instead of getting something new? It matches your eyes—that’s what he said. I still remember it. But that’s a lie. Is that what he wanted from the start? I found myself wondering. To recreate that ring and to recreate that marriage? That horrible failure of a marriage he had with the starter wife, where he had been so miserable?
I said yes, of course. I decided not to be petty. I put the ring on and agreed to marry Byron—the love of my life. But I never could bring myself to love that ring. Every time I looked at it, it was nothing more than a reminder. The ring should have been my first warning bell.
He wasn’t over her and never would be.
And now he found the real ring. How many times have I thought of just flushing it down the toilet or throwing it out of my car window? Why didn’t I ever do that?
He sits calmly across from me. He doesn’t look angry or sad. He waits.
I want to say something he probably expects to hear. Like, You have to hear me out. Or that eternal chestnut, I can explain! But I know it’s the last thin
g I should say.
“The baby clothes,” I say hoarsely. “Did she really—”
“It’s not the point.” He runs his hands through his hair. “Don’t you see?”
“I just want to know about the baby clothes.”
A long silence. The clock ticks. I find myself wanting to smash it to tiny pieces.
“Tell me what you did,” he says. “And then I’ll tell you about the baby clothes.”
I look him in the eye for what feels like a long time. Neither of us looks away. “I didn’t do anything, Byron.”
“Tell me what you did.”
“I only did…” The plan unfurls in my mind as I speak. Saving me. “I only did what you told me to do.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” He gets up. He’s towering over me. I have to look up to keep my gaze on his.
“If you call the police,” I say, “that’s what I’ll tell them.”
A shaky laugh escapes from him. “You have to be kidding. You psycho, crazy, stalker bitch.”
I can’t help it. I flinch. “I love you, Byron.”
“Like hell you do.”
“I want you to think about it,” I say. “Really think about it. Before you do anything you might regret, like calling the authorities.”
“If anyone should be worried about police, it’s you,” he spits.
“Why is that?”
His reaction is so immediate and intense that it scares me. He lunges forward. I think he’s going to hit me but his fist stops just inches from my eye. I don’t have time to shriek. I just sit there, trembling.
“You murdered my wife, you bitch!” He’s yelling but his voice breaks midsentence, trailing off to something close to a howl. It makes my hair stand on end. “You drove her to suicide. I don’t even have a grave to visit because of you.”
Inwardly, I catch myself smiling. I feel relieved.
There’s still a chance. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything.