When I woke to hear Molly scratching at my bedroom door, the clock said 3:00 a.m. Molly didn’t ordinarily fuss to go outside in the middle of the night; but when she did, there was a reason, and I hoped it wasn’t a skunk that she wanted to harass.
I reached out to nudge Jep so he would go down and I wouldn’t have to face the literally rude awakening of the first raw blast of winter dawn, then remembered he had gone on another overnight trip. I got up, wrapped myself in my old robe, shoved my feet into slippers and followed the dog downstairs, ruefully waking myself with every step. I let her out through the patio door, leaving it cracked so she could come back in when she’d done her stuff, and shuffled into the kitchen to put the electric kettle on for a cup of chamomile tea.
The kettle boiled and I turned it off. Molly whined at the door, somehow having managed to close it. She followed at my heels, whimpering a little, the way she did sometimes. Back in the kitchen, I turned on the countertop light, got out a mug and a tea bag, filled my mug and flipped Molly a freeze-dried chicken treat, which she let fall at her feet. She ignored it. Molly wouldn’t let a rabid raccoon stand between her and a chicken treat. I should have known then.
When I looked up, the figure was standing in the corner of the room, ten feet from me. His hoodie was drawn down over his slender face, and his hands were jammed in the pockets of his sweatpants.
You wonder all your life what you’ll do if something like this ever happens, and you try to prepare. You talk to yourself about the pros and cons of running or fighting. You ask, will I open my mouth to scream and nothing will come out except a whistle of air? Will I advance, rage lending me unwonted strength, or submit to the inevitable, like a goat in the tiger’s jaws? I roared, grabbing up my electric kettle and throwing it at him, sending boiling water across his chest. He was the one who keened, some sort of strangled syllable, and took off out of the room, falling in the kitchen over a chair, rolling to his knees, as Molly growled and barked wildly and I heard Stefan come pounding down the stairs, just as the man burst through the patio door to the yard.
“Don’t, don’t, don’t!” I shouted at Stefan, as he shoved his feet into his shoes and bounded after him. “Just let him go! What if he has a gun or a knife?”
But there was no stopping Stefan. The young guy was fast, but Stefan was faster, and bigger by a foot. Turning on the porch lights, I saw him hit the guy with a textbook tackle before he could gain the alley of aspens that ran along the back of the yards. I grabbed the first thing that came to hand, a fireplace poker, and ran out after Stefan. I heard the “whuff” as he pushed the guy down on his stomach, and Stefan yelling, “What do you think you’re doing in my house, asshole?”
But the next voice I heard didn’t match.
It was small, tearful. I recognized it from a dozen phone calls.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she said. “Please. It’s Esme.”
15
Up close, she was so slight. The stuff of all my nightmares was just a girl, a tall girl, but so slender that her head looked too big for her body, her face shielded by her hood and the dark glasses.
Stefan pulled her to her feet and awkwardly brushed off the snow.
“What the hell is this?” he said.
She was crying hard by then, and the two of us stood there as she wrapped her arms around her thin chest and rocked back and forth, her knees slightly bent, as if she couldn’t support her own weight.
“Please let me come inside,” she said. “I’m scared.”
“You’re scared?” Stefan bellowed. “You’re the one who’s scared? Why are you stalking us? Who are you?”
A light flicked on at the Riboskys’ house. Saying nothing, I gestured for Esme to follow us inside. I needed to call 911 and fast, but if I said nothing, the police would just assume it was an accident and text me to confirm it.
“Are you hurt?” Stefan asked her, none too gently. “If you have broken ribs, you deserve it.”
“I know,” she said and pulled the hood back. Her dark hair was artfully shorn, no more than an inch long, her blue eyes strangely transparent. With her dirty cheeks and pointed chin, she looked like some medieval panting of Saint Joan of Arc. “I would deserve it. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Stefan looked at me, his face wide open and guileless. “It’s you!” he said. “It was you all along. There was no Unabomber. It was just you, the famous Emily. Do you know what she did? Do you even know what she did?”
“I do,” I said.
It was the girl from the pictures in Stefan’s room.
Stefan kicked one of the chairs over. It landed six inches from Molly, who yelped and jumped to her feet, before it skidded across the room, crashing into the wall. He pointed a shaking finger at Esme. “She...she...”
I had to get control of the situation long enough to find the phone, whatever Stefan thought he knew, whatever I thought I knew. And what if she was dangerous? What if I went upstairs to get my phone off the nightstand and came back to find Stefan with a kitchen knife in his ribs? Why didn’t I have some of those zip ties that criminals always seemed to keep at hand?
“I’m sorry, Stefan. I’m so sorry. I loved her so much...”
“And she loved me, you sick psycho!”
I had never seen Stefan like this, stupid with rage, tears and snot coursing down his red face.
“She did love you. She never loved me the way she loved you.” Esme straightened her spine. “I wrecked your life, Stefan. And I wrecked hers. It was my fault. If there was anything I could do to change it, I would do it. I wouldn’t care what happened to me.”
Stefan swung out of his chair and Esme half rose, I put my hand on her arm and she sat back down. I heard Stefan swear as he slipped and went down hard...why is there water all over the floor? From the kitchen, I could hear the sounds of Stefan filling a glass with ice and water, then unspooling paper towel to clean up the spill from the electric kettle.
“Are you hurt?” I said. “Are you burned?”
She said simply, “Yes.” She raised the hem of the hoodie and the pink tee shirt beneath it, to reveal an ugly mountain range of welted red flesh. She said, “I really only wanted to talk to you before I left, and I was just going to knock on the door. But it was the middle of the night and so I thought I’d just sit on one of the lawn chairs and wait until it got light. But I was freezing cold.”
Stefan came back into the room. “So what do you want with us? That you keep following my mother and breaking into our house?”
“I need to go upstairs and get my phone,” I told Stefan. I mouthed, call nine-one-one. But he didn’t seem to understand what I was saying. “Okay. I’ll wait here and watch her.”
Upstairs, I got my phone, pulled on a bra and some sweatpants and shrugged back into my nightshirt. And I almost called the police in that moment. But I knew that when I did, they would take over. I would never be able to ask Esme anything on my own. Rummaging in my medicine cabinet, I found the last couple of painkillers I’d been given after the woman split my lip in the lobby of the lecture hall. I got out a kit with first aid cream and a bandage roll. When I got back downstairs, I dabbed a thickness of the cream on the girl’s stomach and wrapped the bandage roll around it, tying it securely.
“How do you even know her?” Stefan said sharply to me. “You act like you know her. How do you know who she is?”
“I do know her, kind of. I’ve never met her, but, well, it’s a long story. Just give me a minute to talk to her.”
“Talk about what? I know why she tried to kill us on the highway. I didn’t know it was her, but she tried to kill me once before, Mom. And I really am aware that I didn’t need her help to fuck myself up with drugs, but she did help, Mom! She was the supplier! Always. For Belinda and me. She made it easy for us to get wasted. She hated me. That night, what she wanted was for me to die.”
“I know for a fact she wished you would die. She was obsessed with Belinda, but so were you, Stefan! So were you! It was like a bomb waiting to go off, the whole situation.”