The Other Mrs.(46)

“There were claw marks on her neck,” she says, raking her own violet fingernails down her pale neckline. “Her fucking tongue was purple. It got stuck, hanging out of her mouth, clamped between her teeth like this,” she says as she sticks her own tongue out at me and bites down. Hard.

I’ve seen victims of strangulation before. I know how the capillaries on the face break, how the eyes become bloodshot from the accumulation of blood behind them. As an emergency medicine physician, I’ve been trained to look for this in victims of domestic violence, for signs of strangulation. But I imagine that, for a sixteen-year-old girl, seeing your mother in this state would be traumatizing.

“She nearly bit the fucking thing off,” Imogen says about Alice’s tongue. She begins to laugh then, this ill-timed, uncontrollable laugh that gets to me. Imogen stands three feet away, devoid of emotion other than this unseemly gleeful display. “Want to see?” she asks, though I don’t know what she means by this.

“See what?” I ask carefully, and she says, “What she did with her tongue.”

I don’t want to see. But she shows me anyway, a photograph of her dead mother. It’s there on her cell phone. She forces the phone into my hands. The color drains from my face.

Before the police arrived that dreadful day, Imogen had the audacity to take a picture on her phone.

Alice, dressed in a pale pink tunic sweater and leggings, hangs from a noose. Her head is tilted, the rope boring into her neck. Her body is limp, arms at her sides, legs unbending. Storage boxes surround her, ones that were once piled two or three high but now lie on their sides, contents falling out. A lamp is on the ground, colored glass scattered at random. A telescope—once used to stare at the sky out through the attic window, perhaps—is also on its side, everything, presumably, knocked violently over as Alice died. The step stool she used to climb up into the gallows stands four feet away, upright.

I think of what Alice must have gone through as she climbed the three steps to her death, as she slipped her head into the knot. The ceilings of the attic are not high. Alice would have had to measure the rope in advance, to be certain that when she stepped off the stool, her feet would not touch the ground. She dropped by only a couple of inches at best. The fall was small; her neck wouldn’t have broken from the height, which means that death was painful and slow. The evidence of that is there, in the picture. The broken lamp, the claw marks, the nearly severed tongue.

“Why’d you take this?” I ask, trying to remain calm. I don’t want to give her what she wants.

She shrugs her shoulders, asks, with a blatant disregard for her mother’s life, “Why the hell not?”

I hide my shock as Imogen takes the phone and turns slowly from me. She goes back into her room, leaving me shaken. I pray that Otto, in his own room just next door, has his earbuds in. I pray that he didn’t hear that awful exchange.

I retreat to the bedroom where I change into my pajamas and stand at the window, waiting for Will to come home. I stare into the home next door. There’s a light on inside, the very same light that goes on at seven and off near midnight each night. No one lives in that home this time of year and I think of it, empty on the inside, for months on end. What’s to keep a person from letting themselves inside?

When a car pulls into the drive, I can’t help but watch. The inside of the car becomes flooded with light as the door opens. Tate and his friend are buckled in the back seat, Will in the front beside a woman who is most definitely not a toothless hag but rather a shadowy brunette whom I can’t fully see.

Tate is bubbly, bouncy, when they step inside the house. He runs up the stairs to greet me. He proudly announces, “You came to see me at school today!” as he bursts through the bedroom door in his Star Wars hoodie and a pair of knit pants. These pants, like all the others, are too short for him, exposing ankles. Will and I can’t keep up. There’s a hole in the toe of his sock.

Will, half a step behind him, turns to me and asks, “You did?”

But I shake my head at Will. “I didn’t,” I say, not knowing what Tate means by this. My eyes go to Tate’s, and I say, “I was at work today, Tate. I wasn’t at your school.”

“Yes, you were,” he says, on the verge of getting upset. I play along, only to appease him.

“Well, what was I doing?” I ask him. “What did I say?”

“You didn’t say anything,” he says, and I ask, “Don’t you think if I was at your school today, I would have said something to you?”

Tate explains that I stood on the other side of the playground fence, watching the kids at recess. I asked what I had on, and he tells me my black coat and my black hat, which is exactly what I would be wearing. It’s what he’s used to seeing me in, but there’s hardly a woman in town who doesn’t wear a black coat and hat.

“I think maybe that was someone else’s mommy, Tate,” I say, but he just stares, saying nothing.

I find the idea of any woman standing on the periphery of the playground watching kids play a bit unnerving. I wonder how secure the school is, especially when the kids are at recess. How many teachers are on recess duty? Is the fence locked, or can anyone open the gate and step right in? The school seems easy enough to contain when the kids are indoors, but outdoors is a different matter.

Will ruffles his hair, says to him, “I think it’s about time we get that vision of yours checked.”