I unlocked the front door.
“Hello?” I said. Some guardian angel or helpful instinct prevented me—saved me—from calling out a name.
I walked into the living room. Stephanie and Emily sat side by side on the couch. I told myself: Focus, Sean, focus.
Emily said, “We thought this would be fun. Don’t you think it’s fun?”
I said, “What’s going on? Why are you here?”
“Ask Stephanie,” Emily said. “She’s the one who’s been living here.”
I looked at Stephanie. I thought, Tell her you’ve moved out. Tell her we’re not together anymore. As if that would save the situation. As if that would make any difference at all. No doubt Emily already knew.
“Where are the boys?” I said.
“Playing in Nicky’s room,” Stephanie said. “Let them be.”
Who was Stephanie to tell me to let my son be? I looked at Emily for support. It seemed unlike her to sit back and let another woman tell me what to do about Nicky. That was worrisome. And not just another woman. Stephanie was the fish we’d found to help us with Emily’s crazy plan.
Emily glared at me. Why was I asking Stephanie where Nicky was? Emily’s dark cloud of hatred and scorn glided over Stephanie and hovered above my head.
“It’s disgusting,” Stephanie said.
“What is?” I said.
“That you could have abused your amazing wife.”
“What? I never ‘abused’ her.” I couldn’t stop myself from hooking quotation marks around the word, though I knew it was a bad idea. “You know that as well as I do.”
“I saw it,” said Stephanie. “You slapped her in front of me.”
“You’re lying” was all I could say. It was two against one. He said, she said . . . and she said.
“And what about what you did to my sister?” Emily said. “How am I supposed to ever forgive you for that?”
I said, “I never even met your sister. How the bloody hell could you be married to me for six years and not even tell me you had a twin sister?”
Emily turned to Stephanie. “Don’t you just hate the way the British curse?” Then she turned back to me. Her eyes, which I’d always thought were so beautiful, which had once looked at me with what I’d imagined was love, had become two glittering disks of ice.
“You knew about her all along. You’d met her dozens of times. Your not knowing that she existed was another act. Another lie. I’m talking about how you treated her the last time we were all together in the cabin by the lake. And when she showed up unexpectedly at the cabin on your birthday weekend, you couldn’t have been more annoyed. You teased and baited her, telling her she wasn’t fit to live, that she should die, that she should do her sister a favor and die, that she had nothing to live for, that the world would be better off if she died. Until she finally believed you. It took months, maybe, but it worked. When I went back without you and met her there, in the middle of the night, when I was asleep, she took all those pills and drank all the booze in the house and walked into the water.”
“I was never there when your sister was,” I said. “You know that, Em.”
“Don’t call me Em,” my wife snarled. “I told you never to call me that. That was her name for me, and now because of you, she’s dead.”
I said, “I don’t recognize the person you seem to think is me. The monster you’re inventing, you, you—”
“You crazy bitch,” Emily said.
“You crazy bitch,” I said. “Your words.”
Stephanie gasped.
“Crazy bitches,” said Stephanie. “Did you hear him? That’s us. Crazy bitches.”
Emily and I wheeled to face her, both thinking, Shut up. So at least there was that. I felt as if I was gazing at the three of us from a great distance above. How small and pathetic I appeared, fantasizing about forgiveness, searching desperately for signs that Emily might still be on my side (we both wanted Stephanie to shut up!) when the ugly truth was Emily was making accusations that could get me put in jail.
“Tell that to the coroner,” Emily said. “Ask if they can date the time of death with that much precision. Ask if they can positively say that you weren’t in the cabin around the time Evelyn killed herself.”
I knew that what she was saying made no sense, that it wasn’t logical, that I could prove my innocence. But I couldn’t think. “That’s a lie. It’s all lies.”
“You’re the liar,” said Emily. “And I don’t want our son growing up to be a liar like you. You said we were in this together. And obviously we weren’t.”
“Sean, your doctor warned you that those sleeping pills could make you psychotic,” Stephanie said. “You could do things and not remember that you did them. You could take a trip and not remember. You could bully someone to death and have no idea that you did that . . .”
Emily looked at Stephanie like a teacher regarding a dull student who’d said something unexpectedly smart. Stephanie must have come up with the part about the sleeping pills on her own. If I had to, I could prove that my doctor didn’t prescribe them until quite a while after Emily disappeared. Would I really need to prove that?
“I want Nicky,” Emily said. “Now. Can I make that any clearer?”
I recoiled from the sight of Stephanie beaming at my courageous wife.
Emily explained why she’d returned, very calmly and coolly. She was determined to take Nicky. Stephanie was going to help her. They were both determined. Emily’s story would hold up. She had a witness. I’d slapped her. I’d hounded her twin sister to death. I’d forced Emily to disappear and pretend to be dead. I’d planned to defraud the insurance company, and I’d made my terrified, battered wife go along with my plan.
Having two women conspire against me was a classic male horror fantasy, but I never saw myself as the kind of male who had fantasies like that. I like women. I’d never been afraid of them—until now. In any case, this wasn’t a fantasy. It was real. These women would do anything to separate me from my son. They would lie. They would perjure themselves. God knows what they would do.
Stephanie said, “I’m only telling the truth. About what I saw you do.” And then, to my horror, I understood: She believed what she was saying. I had no idea how she’d convinced herself, but she had. It had been wrong, from the start, to put our fate in the hands of a woman who had no thoughts, only feelings.
“You can’t get away with this,” I said. “I’ll get a lawyer. There’s already an insurance investigation under way, and this time I’ll tell them the truth, no matter what the consequences are—”
I was bluffing, but so what? I half wished that Mr. Prager would ring the doorbell right then. He’d see the three of us together; he’d sense the mood, and he’d get it. He’d figure out the truth. Settle things once and for all. He was too smart to be fooled by Stephanie and my wife. It would be great to have another man present. Seeing all of us in the same room would crack his investigation wide open!
“Go ahead,” said Emily. “Get a lawyer. I’ve got Dennis Nylon’s legal staff on my side. They’ll tell the authorities that you threatened to take Nicky if I didn’t go along with your insurance-fraud scheme. And I agreed, out of fear. Or . . . there’s another version we could go with. I needed some time away from the family, and you panicked and called the cops. A huge miscommunication. Sorry! And the fact that you’d taken out the policy was just a coincidence. No fault, no blame. No payment. I’d be glad to go with the second version if you will just go away and leave Nicky with me.”
I couldn’t. I couldn’t give up my son and let my wife—my crazy wife—raise him. There had to be another way.
I said, “I’m just trying to understand. Look, can everybody just take a deep breath and slow down and—”
The two women exchanged long looks.
Stephanie said, “We know what you did to Emily. And Emily knows how she wants to proceed.”