Ironic, isn’t it? The Williams family hadn’t outlived their century, but their portrait endures, even surviving the catastrophic hurricane-inflicted water damage to 104 Glover in 2012.
It was hanging on the wall when the Toska family moved into this house in 1986.
Only eleven years old, Anna had already been through so much.
Her parents’ divorce had been a devastating blow. Her father lost a fierce custody battle because the judge believed a child belonged with her mother. Even if the mother was battling depression and anxiety. Even if the mother took out her frustrations on her daughter and had destroyed her marriage to a good man by having an affair.
But of course no one, not even Victor, knew about Magdalena’s psychiatric problems or Stanislav Shehu’s criminal activity.
And so Anna lived with her mother and stepfather, first in Nevada, then Arizona, until his 1983 arrest. After testifying in exchange for immunity and protection, he became Stanley Toska, her mother became Lena, and she became Anna.
During the first few years of the program, facilitators arranged visits for Anna and Victor. They both had to make several airplane transfers, accompanied by marshals, to meet at remote locations. Every time they parted, they wept. But she couldn’t bear to tell him about her mother’s mental deterioration and abusive behavior. There was nothing he could do to help her. She knew she could never go back to live with him, because that would bring the constant threat to her own life home to her father’s house. She couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to him.
By 1986, when the family had assimilated into their new identities and bought the house, they were essentially cut loose. Once Stanley was in control, there was no further visitation between Anna and her father. The last time she got to see him, she had no idea they were parting for many years to come, but he must have. He gave her a kitten, and told her to take good care of it, and of herself.
The tiny creature was the lone bright spot in her isolating new life. She was forbidden to make friends, participate in activities, couldn’t even go to school on class photo day. There were no pictures of her as she grew up, ever. They couldn’t risk someone recognizing her as Anastasia Montgomery and figuring out that Stanley Toska was the notorious Stanislav Shehu, marked for death by the transnational crime organization he’d helped to dismantle.
She no longer knew who she was. Even when she looked in the mirror, she saw a stranger whose eyes had seen too much, whose mouth had forgotten how to smile, whose nose had been smashed by her mother’s angry fist and left to heal without medical intervention, because there could be no doctors. Not for her, and not for her mother, consumed by depression one moment and rage the next, so volatile that her husband forbade her to leave the house, fearing she’d give them away and get them killed.
Sometimes, Anna wished it would happen.
She was growing up. Her kitten had long since grown up. One stifling summer day, he got underfoot and clawed Lena’s bare ankle when she stepped on him. She carried on as if she’d been mauled by a lion. The next morning, he was gone—vanished from Anna’s bed where he slept every night.
She searched the house in vain, and later overheard her mother and Stanley laughing behind closed doors, saying that it was a good thing it was trash pickup day, or theirs would really start to stink in this heat. Listening in horror to their conversation, she grasped that they’d destroyed her precious pet and tossed his body away like garbage.
It didn’t matter which of them had done the deed. Both found it amusing. Both covered it up.
Both were monsters.
College saved her. She won a full academic scholarship, and she made her escape. She was free . . . until the campus closed for winter break, and she was forced back into that household. Forced to see how her mother had deteriorated.
Lena’s silent, bedridden spells and physically abusive rages were increasingly interrupted by terrifying behavior. She’d sneak up behind Anna as if she was going to pounce, then scuttle away in silence.
Her decline culminated in a suicidal, murderous rage over Anna’s “abandonment.” She tried to hurtle herself down the stairs and take her daughter with her. Anna managed to grab the rail to save them both, and then fled the house, heading for the park.
That happened on January 16, the day—
“Anastasia.”
The name is a ragged whisper in Stacey’s throat.
She opens her eyes.
“Mom? Anastasia. Anna-Stacey. I’m named for her?”
Anna-Stacey . . . Anastasia.
Ellie-Nora . . . Eleanor.
“Mom, is this you?” Stacey is holding up the album, open to the final photo.
It isn’t on the last page. There are plenty of empty pages, lined with cellophane slots that will never be filled.
The handwritten caption reads favorite toy. The photo shows a cherubic little girl with a jack-in-the-box, one chubby hand blurred in motion on the crank handle.
She closes her eyes.
She hears “All around the mulberry bush . . .”
She hears Lena telling Victor that she’s leaving him.
She hears Victor begging her not to go, not to take his precious Anastasia.
She hears tinkling music as the handle turns faster and faster in an effort to drown out their voices, and the monkey is chasing the weasel, round and round, and—
“Mom?”
Pop!
“Oh, Stacey . . . I’m so sorry.”
She reaches for her daughter with the hand that had held a gun, and pulled a trigger.
“Mom? Is it true? Were you . . . her?”
The hand settles on Stacey’s shoulder.
“Yes. It’s true.”
It isn’t the whole truth. When you love someone as much as a parent loves a child—as much as a child loves a parent—you protect them.
In return for the lies Victor had told to save her, she’d shielded him once again, as she had years earlier from the death threat, and her mother’s abusive behavior. Now she was protecting him from her own darkest self. From what had really happened in the house that night.
The first time she’d held that gun, and fired it.
Pop!
First her stepfather . . .
Pop!
Next her mother . . .
Pop!
Finally Ellie, her friend.
Ellie, in her bed, in her room, in her place.
Earlier that evening, Anna had found her in the park in a bad way, shivering on a bench without a coat. She’d had a fight with her boyfriend and he’d thrown her out. Anna brought her to a diner to warm her up and get some food into her, then brought Ellie back to 104 Glover, late, after the lights had gone out in Stanley and Lena’s bedroom. She opened the front door with the key she’d hidden in the foundation, closed it without a sound, and fastened the old iron chain lock.