The Other Mrs.(69)

Mouse climbed the steps.

But on the way up, her nose began to tickle.

Poor Mouse had tried so hard to be quiet, to not make any noise. But a sneeze is a reflex, one of those things that happens all on its own. Like breathing and rainbows and full moons. Once it began, there was no stopping it, though Mouse tried. Oh, how Mouse tried. There, on the stairs, she cupped her hands around her nose. She pinched the bridge of her nose. She pushed her tongue all the way up to the roof of her mouth and held her breath and begged God to make it stop. Anything she could think of to stop that sneeze from coming.

But still the sneeze came.



SADIE


The space is typical for a cemetery. I drive along the narrow graveled path and park my car at the chapel. I open the car door as a gust of wind rushes in to greet me. I climb out and walk across the graded land, sliding between headstones and full-grown trees.

The plot where Alice is buried has yet to be covered with grass. It’s a fresh grave, filled in with dirt and scattered with snow. There is no headstone, not until the land settles and it can be installed. For now, Alice is identifiable only by a section and lot number.

Imogen sits on her knees on the snowy earth. She hears my footsteps approaching and turns. When she looks at me, I can see that she’s been crying. The black eyeliner she so painstakingly applies is smeared across her cheeks. Her eyes are red, swollen. Her lower lip trembles. She bites on it to make it stop. She doesn’t want me to see her vulnerable side.

She looks suddenly younger than her sixteen years. But also damaged and angry.

“Took you fucking long enough,” she says. Truth be told, there was a moment on the way here that I thought about not coming at all. I put in a call to Will to let him know about the photos Imogen sent to me, but again the call went unanswered. I was headed back to the ferry when my conscience got the better of me and I knew I had to come. The bottle of prescription pills remains closed, lying beside Imogen on the ground.

“What are you doing with those, Imogen?” I ask, and she shrugs nonchalantly.

“Figured they had to be good for something,” she says. “They didn’t do shit for Mom. But maybe they could help me.”

“How many did you take?” I ask.

“None yet,” she says, but I’m not sure I believe it. I move cautiously toward her, lean down and snatch the pills from the ground. I open the cap and look inside. There are pills still there. But how many there were to begin with, I don’t know.

It’s thirty degrees out at best. The wind blows through me. I raise my hood up over my head, plunge my hands into my pockets.

“You’ll catch your death out here, Imogen,” I say, a poor word choice given the circumstance.

Imogen doesn’t wear a coat. She doesn’t wear a hat or gloves. Her nose is a brilliant red. Snot drips from the tip of it, running down to her upper lip, where, as I watch, she licks it away with a tongue, reminding me that she is a child. Her cheeks are frosty patches of pink.

“I couldn’t be so lucky,” she says.

“You don’t mean that,” I say, but she does. She believes she would be better off dead.

“The school called,” I tell her. “They said you’re truant again.”

She rolls her eyes. “No shit.”

“What are you doing here, Imogen?” I ask, though the answer is mostly clear. “You’re supposed to be at school.”

She shrugs, says, “I didn’t feel like going. Besides. You’re not my mom. You can’t tell me what to do.” She wipes at her eyes with a shirtsleeve. Her jeans are black and torn, her shirt a red-and-black button-up, unbuttoned, over a black T-shirt.

She says to me, “You told Will about the picture. You shouldn’t have told him.” She presses up from the ground and rises to her feet. It strikes me again just how tall Imogen is, tall enough to look down on me.

“Why not?” I ask, and she tells me, “He’s not my fucking father. Besides, that was for your eyes only.”

“I didn’t know it was a secret,” I say. I take a step backward, regaining my personal space. “You didn’t ask me not to tell him. If you had, I wouldn’t have mentioned it,” I lie. She rolls her eyes. She knows I’m lying.

There’s a moment of silence. Imogen is quiet, brooding. I wonder what exactly she’s brought me here to do. I keep my defenses up. I don’t trust her.

“Did you ever know your father?” I ask. I take another step back, bumping into the trunk of a tree. She glares at me. “I was just thinking how tall you are. Your mother wasn’t very tall, was she? Will isn’t particularly tall. Your height must come from your father’s side.”

I’m babbling now. I can hear it as well as she.

She claims not to know him. And yet she admits to knowing his name, the name of his wife, that he has three kids. She’s seen his house. She describes it for me. She knows that he has an optometry practice. That he wears glasses. That his oldest, Elizabeth, who’s fifteen, is just seven months younger than she is. Imogen is smart enough to know what this means.

“He told my mom he wasn’t ready to be a dad.” But clearly he was. He just didn’t want to be Imogen’s dad.

I see it in her expression: the dismissal still stings.

“Thing is,” she says, “if my mom wasn’t so fucking lonely all the time, she might’ve wanted to live. If he’d have loved her back, maybe she would have stuck around a while longer. She was so tired of putting on a happy face all the fucking time. Miserable on the inside, but happy out. Nobody believed she was in pain. Even her doctors. They didn’t believe her. There was no way for her to prove that she hurt. Nothing to make her feel better. All those fucking naysayers. They’re the ones who killed her.”