Don't You Cry(81)

“You don’t want to do this,” I say to her as she stands in the hub of the room with the knife in her hands. There’s a surety about her—she does want to do this—and yet it’s accompanied by a frenzy, a delirium. She’s manic. Genevieve is manic. Her toes tap. Her leg has a tremor to it. Her eyes skitter in their sockets; her hands, the very hands which wield a weapon, shake. She holds that knife not like one about to slice into a cut of meat or a birthday cake, but rather at the ready to penetrate skin, human skin. Her grip is tight, skin taut, veins and arteries leaping out of the flesh.

“You were there, weren’t you?” says Ingrid. “I saw you at the market. I know it was you.”

“Of course you did. I wanted you to see,” says Genevieve.

“All those years. How did you remember?”

“How could I forget? You’re my mother,” Genevieve says. “A girl doesn’t ever forget her mother,” and I see a resignation in Ingrid’s eyes that says sooner or later she knew it would come to this. Her secret couldn’t be a secret forever.

The market. The place where Ingrid had her panic attack. The last public place she stood before locking herself in her home. When Ingrid had her panic attack, gawkers claimed she spat off these words: Go away and Leave me alone, and Don’t touch me! They said that Ingrid screamed.

“I followed you inside,” Genevieve says, her jaded voice, barely audible, drifting through the air.

“You looked different then,” says Ingrid. “You looked like...”

“I looked like me,” Genevieve says, “but now I look like her. You like me more like this, don’t you? You always loved her more. But I don’t want to talk about Esther. Not now. Not yet.”

And then she goes on to talk about that day, the day she tracked Ingrid to the market in town. She watched Ingrid walk up and down the aisles with a shopping basket in hand, she says, up and down, up and down. She followed her for a long, long time. She describes the way Ingrid dropped her basket when she spotted her, Genevieve, from across the store: the dropping of the basket, the clutching at her heart, the grating scream.

“How did you know it was me?” Genevieve asks, and Ingrid says solemnly, “A mother doesn’t ever forget her child.”

Genevieve’s feet tread back and forth across the room. Her steps are measured steps, while on the sofa, Ingrid and I sit. She is fairly composed; I am anything but. Ingrid is scared, yes, though it’s a relenting fear, a telltale sign of defeat. She gives up. She sits gingerly, posture straight, her hands folded in her lap. Her hair is tame. Her eyes remain on Genevieve the entire time, never straying, hardly blinking. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t ask to be let go, while I, on the other hand, want to do all of these things, but I don’t. I can’t. I can’t speak.

I see then the similar shape to their eyes, their noses, the lack of a smile. It’s there in the minute details: the thin lips with their sharp angles, the upturned noses. The angular diamond structure of their faces, the broad cheekbones, the pointy chins. The color of their eyes.

“You have to understand,” Ingrid says, her voice shaking like a wooden maraca. “I did the very best I could. I tried everything. Everything,” she repeats. Genevieve’s feet continue to tread along the floor. I could run and tackle her or subdue her in some other way, but there’s no telling where the knife would land. My lungs, my kidneys, my abdomen.

“Things were different back then,” Ingrid says. “These days every child is diagnosed with some disorder. Autism, Asperger’s, ADHD. But it wasn’t the case back then. Back then these kids were just bad kids. You, Genevieve, you were a bad girl. These days I would’ve brought you to a psychologist and they’d slap a diagnosis on you and make you take some pills. But that wasn’t the case back then, over twenty years ago.

“There was so much talk, Genevieve. About the things you did, the things you didn’t do. The things you did to the children at school. People were talking. At only five years old, they’d say, imagining what you’d do as you grew older and more callous and calculated. People were afraid to imagine. I was afraid to imagine.

“And you know what they did when you misbehaved? The teachers, the neighbors. They looked down on me,” Ingrid explains as a tear wiggles loose from her eye and runs the length of her cheek. It hovers there at her trembling chin, hanging on for dear life. I watch on, still trying to process the repentance in Ingrid’s words, the fact that she’s not in the least bit surprised a living, breathing Genevieve is standing before her in this room. She knew all along that she was alive, that the body she purportedly toted back from a hotel was not that of her dead daughter. She let the townsfolk bury an empty box, let them believe Genevieve was dead. She let them feel sorry for her.

Meanwhile, she gave Genevieve up just like that.

What kind of mother does that to her child?

It’s not easy, she told me, being a mother.

“You were hard enough to handle,” she says, “but that was before I had Esther. We both know how you felt about Esther, Genevieve. The things I saw you do to that girl... She was only a baby. How could you do those things to Esther?” she begs, and with that her voice trails off to nothingness. Just vapor. Air. She doesn’t speak and for a moment the room grows quiet and still.

In time Ingrid goes on, her words clipped like the clickety-clack of typewriter keys, banging out the story for me. Genevieve was more than a headache for Ingrid. More than a pest. She had a mean streak in her, a crazy side, a fit of rage. That’s what Ingrid says.