“And that’s where her parents hung her picture? Pretty morbid, if you ask me.”
“It’s all morbid, Lennon. Within a few years of her death, they were facing financial ruin and they lost the house. Margaret wound up in an asylum. Years later, she supposedly made a deathbed confession to murdering her daughter.”
“Sick. Like a reverse Lizzie Borden without the axe.” He tosses his cigarette stub to the ground and crushes it under his black Doc Marten, then takes hers from her hand and does the same. “How’d you find all this information?”
“I went through real estate records for the house, and then genealogy records. I had to join one of those ancestry research sites.”
His eyes widen, and he looks away.
“What?” Stacey asks. “Why did you look at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like . . .” She touches his arm. “Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Whatever is making you act strange all of a sudden.”
He appears to be weighing something, then shrugs and gives a little nod. “I kind of thought you’d mention it the other day when I brought up looking for my birth father, and you didn’t. Not then, and not ever. So obviously, you don’t like to talk about it. And listen, that’s cool. You don’t have to. Not even with me, even though I get it, better than anyone. Maybe that’s why we’re so alike, you know?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea what . . . what don’t I like to talk about?”
“That one of your parents isn’t your birth parent, or maybe both aren’t, and you’re adopted.”
Jacob
Shaken by his encounter with Anna, by her denial, Jacob walks.
He smokes, and he recalls that sleet-pelted January night.
Even after twenty-five years, the details remain vivid.
The house had been dark when he arrived, but not deserted. No, they were home at 104 Glover on that last night of their lives, upstairs in bed, all of them: Stanley, Lena, Anna.
He knew where to find the hidden key to the front door. Anna had told him about it. Not because she thought he’d ever use it, but because sometimes when they were together, secrets came tumbling out. Not all of his secrets. Not even close. And not all of hers.
But she’d told him that Stanley had once locked her out overnight, furious that she’d left the house without her keys and thus failed to dead-bolt the door behind her. After that, Anna duplicated her key and hid it in a crevice behind a loose brick on the foundation beneath the steps.
That January night, he realized she must have shared that secret with someone other than him. With Ellie. Because when he looked for the key, it wasn’t there.
He walked around the block to Edgemont Boulevard. Back then, the corner brownstone was a private residence, dark and slumbering. He crept over the stoop railing onto the adjacent flat roof of the shed behind 102 Glover. From there, it was a short drop into 104’s walled-in property.
There was no hidden key among the ground level windows in the back brick foundation. Nor were there security bars. But the middle window had a broken interior latch. He jiggled the wooden frame, and it slid up.
He made his way through the dark basement and up the stairs, positioning his feet along the railing edge of the treads so that the steep wooden steps to the main floor wouldn’t creak. There was no way to avoid a telltale squeak when he opened the door to the kitchen, and he braced for confrontation.
All was still on the other side. The scent of overripe bananas and Comet hung in the air along with Stanley’s lime aftershave, barely perceptible, like a footprint oozing in mud.
He made his way in pitch blackness through the dining room, living room, hallway, up the stairs. The master bedroom door was ajar, flickering blue light from the television. It was tuned to a local newscast, yet another story about ice skater Tonya Harding, whose bodyguard had just been charged in the previous week’s attack on her rival Nancy Kerrigan.
Through the wedge of the doorway, he could see the bottom half of the queen-size bed. The bedspread covered a human form on the far side. The near side appeared empty, covers pulled back. A heap of clothing was just visible on the floor beside the bed.
He walked on down the shadowy hall. Anna’s bedroom was dark and still. He hesitated before reaching for the wall switch, heart pounding with bruising might.
Lamplight dribbled over bookshelves lined with paperback novels, clothes draped over doorknobs and filling a wicker hamper, stuffed animals arranged on a chair. There was a Nirvana poster her friend Ellie had given her, because Ellie loved grunge music and wanted Anna to appreciate it, too.
In a matter of months, Kurt Cobain would be dead.
And Anna . . .
Oh, Anna.
Anna was in the bed, huddled beneath the pink-and-white-polka-dot quilt . . .
Jacob has spent years trying to forget what she looked like when he left her that night. Yet his last glimpse of her remains indelible: dark, bullet-shattered head on a darker pillowcase that should have been pastel pink.
Above the headboard, Kurt Cobain hung like Jesus, staring through a straggly blond fringe of golden hair, and more polka dots, red ones, spattered over the poster and the white wall.
Blood. So much blood.
Anna’s blood.
The next day, Jacob returned to 104 Glover to find police cars, a medical examiner’s van, satellite news trucks, a throng of onlookers held back by yellow tape and barricades. He was there when all three bodies were carried from the house, shrouded on gurneys.
He was in Green-Wood Cemetery a few days later when they were buried. There were no mourners in attendance, only cops, reporters, and gawkers. He watched from a distance as the earth swallowed three coffins.
He’d witnessed it all firsthand. But even if he harbored a shred of doubt about anything he’d done or seen that January, there’s no denying concrete evidence. The internet is full of press coverage, details about the police investigation, autopsy reports, death certificates, unequivocal identification of the bodies at the morgue by next of kin . . .
Yeah, no. Anna’s death hadn’t been a figment of his imagination.
How about her return?
Maybe, when you spend two and a half decades thinking about someone, obsessing over her, really—maybe your brain conjures what it longs to see.
But if that’s the case . . .
If she’d sprung from his own mind, then she wouldn’t have said the words that had filled him with confusion. With rage.
Leave me alone . . . I’m not Anna . . .
Yes, she is.
She’s Anna, and he’s not going to leave her alone. Never, never again.
Nora
The Edgemont Grind is busy on this sunny Saturday afternoon.
Alone at a window table for two, Nora sips black coffee. Her laptop is open to a garden design website, but she’s watching the street. Watching for Jacob. Just in case he was actually here yesterday. Just in case he comes back today.