Don't You Cry(78)

My Dearest,

You took my family away from me, and now you need to know how it feels to lose something you love. It was your fault I had to go. I want to be sure you know. They told me I was a bad girl, and that was why I couldn’t stay. But we both know that’s not true.

It wasn’t that girl’s fault. You should know that. It was yours. I wish I could say that I care that she’s gone, but I don’t. It had to be done. It was simple, it really was, a sleight of hand: swapping the flour while you were at work. You really must get better locks on your doors, my dear. You don’t want strangers skulking around your home when you’re not there.

It was priceless, too, watching from my vantage point as you scooped that flour into a bowl, and then fed it to your poor, unsuspecting friend. The grasping at her neck, the vomiting, the scene spiraling so quickly out of control. Better than I could have ever imagined. Priceless, it was. Just priceless. I had to wait days for you to serve that fallacious flour, but it was well worth the wait. Well worth the wait as I watched the scene play out before me, like a performance I had scripted myself. Absolutely perfect.

Unfortunate, really unfortunate, too, that I’d done away with the girl’s EpiPen. That would have come in handy, wouldn’t it have? It’s mine now.

It’s your fault I came back, you know. You’re the one who found me. You could have just let me be. Were it not for you, I never would have discovered that I was already dead.

If only you could see me now, sweet Esther. If only you could see what I’ve become.

I’ve been watching you for a while now, long enough to know your habits, your customs, your routine. I’ve been trailing you to work, to school. On your errands. Did you see me? Did you know that I was there?

I shop where you shop and I dress how you dress. The same shoes, the same coat, the same hair. It wasn’t hard to do. Once you were the only Esther Vaughan, but now I am Esther, too.

You thought that you could change your name, that you could simply disappear. That you could pay me to go. How naive.

You were always her favorite, but if I’m you, then maybe she’ll love me, too.

All my love,





EV





Alex

All the way there, I run, my feet hammering against concrete, though I’m completely anesthetized. I can’t feel a thing.

I pound on the door when I arrive—once, twice, three times—watching as the metal portal shifts in its casing from the momentum of my blow. And then again and again.

She opens the door with a quizzical look on her face, and stands before me, her hair pulled back from her eyes, her gentle hands folded over her abdomen.

“Alex,” she says in a way that is both a question and a statement as I let myself inside and push the door to. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Everything all right?”

I can’t reply. There are no words. I fight to catch my breath as Ingrid slips down the foyer and into the kitchen. I listen to the sound of her footsteps as she goes, unable to speak because I can’t summon the breath to speak. I double over, dropping my sweaty hands to my knees, and then, when that doesn’t do it, I squat down to the floor. “Let me get you some water,” Ingrid says from a distance, and before I can say a thing, I hear the sound of a kitchen faucet spilling water into the sink; the jarring noise of ice cubes plummeting from an ice-maker and into a glass; the seagulls outside, cawing in the distance over the sound of a truck that passes by on the abandoned street, the bobbing of tires as they yoyo over the quarried stone. Breathe, I tell myself. Just breathe.

“I didn’t know you were coming by today,” Ingrid calls from the kitchen. “You should have told me. I would have baked something. Banana bread, or...” And her voice carries on, but I can’t hear a thing because I’m stuck on the librarian’s revealing words—newsy and gossipy. Ingrid Daube used to live there, she had said to me as I stood there, mouth agape, in the old library. That was her house. She was a Vaughan until her husband passed, you know, and then she returned to her maiden name of Daube. It’s Dutch, I think, Daube. Of course, no one really makes mention of the fact that that was Ingrid’s home. Such a tragedy what happened there. You do know about her little girl, Genevieve? The librarian had continued to jabber, but by then I’d already begun to run, realizing that for all those times Pearl sat at the café window, staring out across the street, it was never Dr. Giles’s home she had her eye on.

“I’m not hungry,” is all I manage to say. I force myself upright and begin to plod into the kitchen, one foot in front of the other, one hand dragging along the wall for balance. The room spins in circles around me. There’s the strongest urge to drop my head between my legs and force the blood back up into my brain. I’m light-headed, dizzy, hardly able to breathe.

But Ingrid doesn’t seem to notice.

I’ve taken less than four steps when the sink faucet turns off and the home becomes still, and that’s when I hear the humming of a song, a morose song, a gloomy song, one I’ve heard Ingrid hum before.

A day or two ago I would have said I didn’t know the song, but now I know: I’d recognize that lullaby anywhere.

“Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry,” I say, my feet standing on the line between kitchen and foyer, eyeing Ingrid as she stands before me with my glass of water in her hands. I say the words, but I don’t sing them, my voice trembling, though I try to mask the rippled effect with a plumb posture, like a scared cat arching my back so that I’ll look big.