Don't You Cry (27 page)

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.”

“Oh,” says Genevieve, smiling a cruel smile, “but I did.”

And that's when the situation begins to quickly dissolve, any hope of being salvaged lost. Ingrid begins to whimper, crying out over and over again, “My baby! My baby!” while Genevieve screams at her wildly that she was once Ingrid's baby. She was Ingrid's baby, too. But then Ingrid abandoned her, and it's as this betrayal is rehashed a second, third and fourth time that Genevieve loses her rationality and becomes more angry, more mad. I try hard to get her attention, to refocus on other things instead. The money in my hand, the fact that Genevieve has yet to harm either one of us, the fact that she could still run. It's Hostage Negotiation 101: let Genevieve speak her peace, but also keep her calm. Don't let her spew. Spewing can only lead to a loss of control, an impetus or a catalyst, the inciting factor that makes her lodge that knife into Ingrid or my midsection in a moment of passion and recklessness.

But Ingrid isn't using good hostage negotiation tactics. She's drawing from despair, from this sudden knowledge that Esther is dead. Ingrid screams aloud, “You killed my baby,” a poor choice of words that makes Genevieve reel.

I try desperately to abort a bad situation. “Tell me what I can do for you, Genevieve. Is there something you need? Something that will help you escape?” I ask, my voice louder than the other two, but still, losing composure as before me the scene falls to pieces. I tell Genevieve that I have a friend who is a pilot, a man who owns a small private jet, and how he might be able to help her flee. There's a small, regional airport in Benton Harbor, just two or three miles from here. I'll put in a call. I'll ask my friend to meet us there.

Genevieve looks at me then and spits out, “You're lying, Alex. You're lying. You don't have any friends,” and my breath catches, thinking a knife wound would have felt better than that.

You were my friend
,
I want to tell her.
I thought you were my friend.
But those words won't help. I need to stay rational, and forget that in the mix of all of this, I, too, have been hurt. This isn't about me. This is about Ingrid, Genevieve and Esther. It's their story, not mine.

“Genevieve,” I say instead, trying to catch her attention like a game of Capture the Flag. For one split second out of the corner of my eye, I think I see a shape in the window, a pair of eyes looking in at me. Chalky-white skin, hair dyed a faux red, a menthol cigarette perched between a pair of thin, chapped lips, clouds of smoke seeping into the autumn air. Red.

But then it's gone.

“Genevieve,” I say again, steering my words around Ingrid's desperate keening, which is doing much more harm than good. “Genevieve. Listen to me, Genevieve. I'll help you get out of here,” I tell her. “Where do you want to go? I'll take you anyplace you want to go. I can get you there.” I say it once and then I say it again, quieter this time. “I can get you there.”

But nobody is listening anymore to what I have to say. We've all turned our attention to Genevieve. Genevieve, who regales us with the tale of the night she scaled an apartment building on Chicago's north side and forced her way in through a bedroom window. The window was closed, but she got herself in, anyway, with the help of a slotted screwdriver and some elbow grease. She climbed through the window frame and into the bedroom and there, sound asleep in her bed, was her baby sister, Esther. It wasn't the first time she'd seen her, of course. They'd met before, an attempt at reunification that failed miserably when Genevieve threatened to expose Ingrid. From that moment on, Esther didn't want a thing to do with her. She wanted Genevieve to go away. But Genevieve didn't want to go away. She wanted them to be a family.

“Esther,” Genevieve spews. “Esther,” she says again with an abhorrence on her tongue. “Esther refused. She wouldn't do it, she said she
couldn't
do it, to you,” she says, staring into Ingrid's desperate eyes. “You'd get in trouble, she said, if people found out I wasn't ever dead.
What would people think if they knew
? Esther asked me. Do you think I care what anybody thinks?” she asks.

“And so,” she says, hands up in the air as if admitting to something careless, negligent, a simple mistake, an easy oops—having forgotten a carton of milk at the grocery store or leaving a candle unattended for too long, “I killed her.” She draws that knife across her very own neck—close, but not close enough to lacerate the skin or leave a mark even. “Like this. This is what I did.”

And then for five long seconds the room goes quiet and still.

Five, four, three, two, one.

Bang.

Ingrid moves first, charging from the sofa like a linebacker and into Genevieve, though neither of them falls to the ground. Neither one falls, nor does the knife slip from Genevieve's grip. I watch and wait and hope that it will happen, that it will happen
soon
, but it doesn't. They grapple for the knife, two women locked in a gauche embrace, fighting for the weapon. And when it doesn't happen, when the knife doesn't fall, I know I need to move quickly, I need to act quickly, I need to do something.
Save Ingrid!
a voice screams in my ear.
Save Ingrid!
I'm keenly aware that Ingrid is on the verge of losing this fight. I can't sit idly by and watch Ingrid die. Ingrid is a good person; she is. They struggle for a single second before I join the scuffle, three bodies united with a knife wedged somewhere in between.

It's inevitable that someone will get hurt.

It's bound to happen.

It's then, as the knife slips through my skin with the ease of a foot sliding into a pair of socks or a shoe, that I hear it: the sublime sound of police sirens hollering through the streets of town, coming to save me.

It's as the blood begins to seep from the aperture of my skin that I feel it: a searing pain that immobilizes me. I can't move, though all around me the others have begun to drift away, watching on with round, agog eyes, mouths parted, fingers pointing. Before my eyes, Ingrid and Genevieve, the both of them, begin to blur. The knife remains inside me, protruding from my abdomen, and at seeing the knife, I slowly smile. After the commotion is through, I'm the one who's managed to walk away with the knife.

I'm the victor, for once in my life. I won.

The room around me begins to wax and wane like the lake at high tide. And this is what I see: the lake, Lake Michigan, my anchor. The cornerstone of my existence, my mainstay.

They say that your entire life drifts before your eyes in those last few minutes before you die.

This is what I see.

The room around me turns blue and begins to ripple from the walls, across the wooden floors, a breaker coming at me, my feet sinking into sand. I sink into the water then, the blue water of the lake threatening to drown me, or to carry me home perhaps. Home. The lake, Lake Michigan, my home.

Before I know what's happening I'm three years old again, toddling along the beach for the very first time, gathering beach rocks in a plastic pail. Geodes and lightning stones and quartz. Rocks, all rocks, making my pail grow heavy with time. My mother is there, loitering where the water meets sand, sitting on the beach, her feet lost in the lake's surge. The sand sticks to her feet, her legs, her hands. She wears cutoff denim shorts and a frumpy T-shirt, one that once belonged to Pops. The shorts she made herself, sheared a pair of jeans off between the waist and the knee so that the edges turn to rags. They fray at the hem, white threads falling from the denim shorts, trailing the length of her gaunt legs.

What she loves is the beach glass, and so when I find it, I collect it in my uninhibited hand and run to her, tiny fragments of beach glass in my sandy palm, pale blue and a washed-out green. My mother smiles at me, this timorous sort of smile that says smiling doesn't come with ease. But still, she smiles, a forced smile that tells me she's trying. She runs a hesitant hand along mine as she takes the pail from my hand. She invites me to sit down beside her, and together we piece through the rocks, sorting by shape, and then by color. My mother has a rock for me, as well, a tiny tan saucer that she sets in the palm of my grimy hand, telling me to
Hold tight; don't lose it
. An Indian bead, she tells me. Crinoid stems. I'm far too young for words like this, and yet they're ones that wind their way to my heart like a tree's sinuous roots, anchoring me to the ground, feeding my soul.

I hold tight; I don't lose it.

And then, like that, I am eight years old. Eight years old and sad and alone and awkward, a boy too tall for his lanky frame. Sitting by myself on the beach, kicking bare feet at the sand, my eyes obliviously searching the sand for crinoid stems. I watch the way the granules of sand rise up in the air and then fall, dispersing through the air like dandelion seeds. Again and again and again. Rise up and fall, rise up and fall. I dig myself a hole in the ground with an old toy shovel some other kid left behind. I think I might just want to bury myself inside. Bury myself inside and never come out. All I want is my mother, but my mother isn't here. I stare at that place where the water meets sand, where the waves come crashing onto the shore. I do it to be sure, but sure enough, she isn't there. She's nowhere.

But there are other mothers who are here, other mothers that I take in one at a time, wishing each and every one of them were mine.

And then it's nighttime, and the world around me is nearly black. I'm twelve years old, staring through a telescope lens with Leigh Forney at my side. She doesn't touch me, and yet somehow, in some way, I can feel her skin, barely, just barely, the nebulous sensation of skin on skin. I've never felt this way before. This is different; this is new. And it's not bad at all. I like the way I feel as I stand there on the lake's shore, looking at the sky, listening to the waves, reminding myself to breathe. It's a night committed to memory, the particulars stored someplace safe to draw on in times of need. Leigh's romper, a purple gray thing with shorts and a T-shirt conjoined at the center with a drawstring waist. Her feet, barefoot. A pair of sandals dangling over a single finger so that it stretches too far one way. On her hair: a headband. In her eyes: excitement and fear, like mine. The night is dark, save for the stars. The moon is foggy and vague. And Leigh says to me in a voice that is both playful and pure, “Bet I can beat you to the carousel,” and like that, we're off and running, feet sinking in sand, through the parking lot, over the orange partition and onto the sleepy carousel where it's there, as I climb on a sea serpent chariot and the dormant carousel begins to spin, that the world around me ebbs from view.