The Queen of Hearts(92)

“. . . never stopped trying to contact you,” she was saying. “It was easy if he called and you weren’t there. If you were home, I just had to get to it first. I unplugged the phone in your room, and you never noticed, and when I was out, I unplugged the one in the living room too.”

The white walls of the bathroom gleamed with antiseptic brilliance, like an OR. I shut my eyes.

“Eventually he stopped calling. But by then we had e-mail accounts through the university, so I had to monitor that too. At home that wasn’t difficult, but what if you checked at the med school? It puzzled me for a while, but finally I hit on a solution: I created a new account in your name, and wrote him a short note instructing him not to try again. He ignored it, of course, and began sending e-mails to that account, sometimes multiple ones a day.”

This jolted me. “What did they say?”

“At first they were straightforward: he wanted to see you. He needed to talk to you. They were factual, to the point.” She leaned forward a little, concentrating on getting it right. “But then they began to change, becoming a little more . . . yearning, I guess. He wrote about loving you.”

I made a small strangled noise.

“Those were the hardest to read, initially, so I . . . I pretended they were written to me,” she said. “I began to . . . disintegrate a little, replacing every broken piece of me that splintered off with a new, manufactured piece, so I could function. I built a new Emma. And I convinced myself I was saving you from him—I knew he didn’t deserve you.

“After a while I began to enjoy reading the e-mails, because even though Nick didn’t know it was me in the correspondence, we developed this virtual relationship that was infinitely better than the real thing had been.” She’d stopped looking at me, her eyes pinpointed on some unfathomable wrinkle in time. “We never really talked before, but now he was sharing a part of himself with me I’d never seen—that he said no one had ever seen.”

I held up a hand. “You were writing him back,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And he thought this was me.”

“Yes,” she said again. “He did.”

“Why didn’t he look for me in person?”

“Because I told him I’d cut him off altogether if he ever contacted me—you—in any other way besides the e-mails,” she said. “He agreed, because what choice did he have? By then, the fact that we weren’t seeing each other in person gave us this feeling of freedom, the sense we could say anything, no matter how embarrassing, and there would be acceptance from the other person. Or maybe not acceptance exactly—I had to maintain some believable outrage, so he wouldn’t press to meet in person—but we reached a point where the e-mails took on a life of their own.”

The detached part of me kicked back in. “But you—I—must have known by that point he wasn’t really married. Why was I still mad?”

“Because he continued to let you believe he was married.”

“Why would he do that?”

“To spare you, I think,” she said. “He didn’t want you to endure the additional trauma of knowing we’d both betrayed you. Either way, he couldn’t win. And then I finally—you finally—told him never to contact you again.”

Emma’s face held the singular pull of some entirely new human emotion, her features curdled in a molecular rearrangement born of stress. The constant beatdown of her role in Eleanor’s death. Years of guilt from this monstrous deception.

“Why?” I squeaked finally. “Why go to those lengths?”

She directed a level gaze at me. “To me, you epitomized the thing I wanted most for myself: social acceptance. And I wanted Nick, or at least I wanted him to want me. But Nick wanted you. It devastated me.”

“I still can’t believe—”

“And,” she went on, as if I hadn’t spoken, “I guess I was resentful. Or at least uneasy. You knew about me. You’d seen where I grew up.”

“So?” I asked, indignant. “Are you suggesting I thought less of you because of where you were born? Because that’s crap. I’d never care about that. Are you saying you hated me?”

Emma gave me a strange look, almost resigned. She shook her head.

“I don’t think I can explain it.”

“Try.”

“No,” she said. “I could never hate you. It’s more like . . .” She trailed off. I waited, focusing on the blue of her irises: so pale and clear they inevitably summoned to mind a host of metaphors related to glaciers and ice and fathomless depths. She blinked, releasing me from the deep, and acknowledged what we were both thinking.

“I wanted to be like you.”

For a moment I marveled at the capacity of the human brain—the capacity of my brain, in particular—to register a bunch of conflicting emotions at once. A sting of remorse, accompanied by a surge of insight. The shock of the revelations Emma was laying on me. And even a geyser of irritation bubbling up alongside my hurt: how had I become mired in this sea of melodrama? Normally, if anybody found themselves embroiled in a fit of emotional dysfunction, it was me. Emma was supposed to be the stable one. Instead, she’d carried on a tawdry affair with my boyfriend and impersonated me in the process. What kind of psychopathology was required to bring all this about, and how had I failed to notice it?