Don't You Cry(83)

Ingrid inhales deeply, trying to flatten her breath. It comes to her in fits and starts, and at times it seems it simply won’t come. There are moments when a look of terror crosses over Ingrid’s face. She can’t find air, she can no longer breathe, but then it arrives and placates her for a little while; she can breathe, she tells herself as she lays a shaky hand upon her chest and reminds herself to breathe.

Ingrid winces as Genevieve sits down beside her and lays the cold, hard steel against her neck, as she then hikes the cuff of a shirt up to reveal a row of blue-gray veins there on Ingrid’s fair skin, at the ready to be sundered. Death by exsanguination. That’s what it’s called. By definition, the draining of blood. Genevieve leans in close to Ingrid and hisses into her ear, “Hold still. You don’t want my hand to slip.” And then she says, “Please don’t tell me you’re going to refuse me, too, just like Esther did.”

I can’t stand by and watch this happen. Ingrid is a good person, I remind myself, though right now I’m having a hard time believing it.

Though I’m scared half to death, I try my hardest to remain cool, calm and collected. In control. “You haven’t hurt anyone yet,” I rationalize for Genevieve, though whether or not this is true, I really can’t say. On the outside I may look relatively relaxed, or as relaxed as is to be expected, but inside I’m guessing I’ll never be the same again. Something has changed. And it doesn’t have to do with just Genevieve, either, the woman who I thought for a whole forty-eight hours was the woman of my dreams. It has to do with Ingrid, too. I’ve changed.

“Ingrid is fine,” I tell her. “You and I are fine,” as I point a finger at myself first, and then at her. Inside, though, I don’t really know if I’m fine. “You can still change your mind. I’m not even sure you’d get in trouble, not with what she’s done to you, what your mother’s done to you,” I say. “Besides,” I tack on as I aim a finger at the razor-sharp item that glints in her hand, “that isn’t even a weapon. It’s a knife. Just a knife. For cooking. You see what I mean?”

I sit there on the sofa beside Ingrid. “The police are on the way,” I lie. “I figured it all out before I arrived. I called the police.”

In the distance is the sound of sirens, though they’re not coming here. I didn’t call the police. I could have called the police on my way from the library, but I didn’t. Instead, I came straight here. “The best thing you can do right now is surrender,” I say, hoping a subtle psychological tactic might work. “Or run,” I add. “You could run. If you go now, they’ll never catch you. I have money,” I say as I reach into a pocket and extend my hand. In it lies two twenties. That’s all. But I’m guessing it’s more than she has. Enough for a train ticket out of town. I peer out the window, and as I do, I see billows of thick, black smoke fill the air on the other side of town. A fire. Something is on fire.

But Genevieve only laughs, this hideous, unspeakable laugh that will forever haunt my dreams. Her muddy-brown eyes rove between Ingrid and me as she says, “Or I could kill you both right now.” Her words are fast. “I just need to be quick about it. Do it before the police arrive. Then I’ll take your money and run,” she adds, nodding at the cash in my hand.

I nod. My knees have begun to shake and I find that it’s hard to stand. But I can’t think about that right now. Right now I need to focus on the task at hand. “Or you could do that, too,” I concede. But I don’t mean it. Of course I don’t mean it. It’s a strategy, a scheme. I’m building rapport with Genevieve, trying to earn her trust. My words, my tone of voice, are slow and calm, hoping that Genevieve’s will follow suit. That Genevieve’s words—or more importantly her actions and behavior—will be slow and calm like mine. “You have every right to be angry, Genevieve.”

“That’s right,” Genevieve says as she draws closer to Ingrid, knife in hand. She stares her mother in the eye and says, “I’m angry.” And it’s the look of resignation in Ingrid’s eye that terrifies me the most, the fact that she could right now give up. Let Genevieve take her life. Ingrid looks to be tired, droopy, spent. Her body sags, her posture slumped, the wooden smile that usually commandeers her face now gone. She doesn’t even have the energy or desire to sustain a fake smile. She runs a hand through her hair making it stand erect, and in the course of ten or twenty or thirty minutes begins to age, decades at a time. Ingrid turns sixty, then seventy, and then eighty before my very eyes. She takes on the appearance of a decrepit old lady.

“Doesn’t matter, anyway,” says Genevieve. “Those sirens aren’t coming here,” as her eyes follow mine out the window to a mantle of smoke. The fire. There are flames now, what I imagine to be orange and red serpents that reach into the sky a mile or a half mile from here. But from where I stand, all I see is smoke. “Seems someone left the heater on in that old, abandoned home.”

And then she laughs.

She burned the dang thing down once and for all.

Ingrid then asks, “Where’s Esther?” her words coming out in a desperate whisper, and Genevieve laughs again, and says, “Esther is dead.” Esther. Is. Dead.

“No,” says Ingrid. “You wouldn’t. You didn’t.”