“I loved her,” he said.
“I loved her too,” said Esme and then, “I’m going to throw up. Please.”
I stood quickly and ushered her into the bathroom. We could hear her retching, water running, more gagging.
“Wait,” I said, in a low voice I hoped would still command him. “Look at me. I have to tell you something.”
But just then Esme came back out into the kitchen. I gave her one of the painkillers with a glass of milk. Then I made her a piece of toast to eat so she wouldn’t throw up the medicine.
Finally, I sat down. “If you loved Belinda, why did you kill her?”
“Kill her?” Esme struggled to her feet, gasped at the pain and fell back down in the chair. “Are you serious? Why did I kill her?”
“I’m completely serious.”
Stefan said, “What the fuck are you talking about, Mom?”
Esme cried out, “I didn’t kill Belinda! I would never have hurt Belinda!”
“Then who did kill her?”
“Are you out of your mind? He killed her.”
“Were you there when he killed her?”
“I wasn’t in the apartment. You know he killed her. Look, I came here to say how sorry I am. I came because it’s my Healing Project, right?”
Stefan said, “How do you know about that?”
“I saw it on TV, like everybody else,” Esme said. “And I thought wow, you’re doing such a good thing. So I wanted to do something good, too. I wanted to admit it. It was partly my fault. I got him into a frenzy. I told him that Belinda was breaking up with him. And everything else, since he got out, that was my fault too. I just came to tell you that it wasn’t my idea. It wasn’t my idea to scare you, ever.”
“If it wasn’t your idea, whose idea was it?”
“It was Jill’s.”
“Why did you...why would you...” I stammered. “How do you even know Jill?”
“Jill is like a mother to me,” Esme said. “She doesn’t know about me and Belinda. Our relationship. She doesn’t know about me giving Belinda and Stefan drugs, I hope you never tell her. It would break her heart.”
“What?” I still couldn’t comprehend all this. Esme knew Jill, but Jill didn’t know who Esme was to Belinda?
“She just knows that I was one of the first volunteers,” Esme said, with a lilt of pride she couldn’t seem to suppress. “I helped her with it from the beginning.”
“Are you really from Chicago?” I asked her. “Did you come up here just to torment us?”
“I was born there. My dad is still in Chicago.”
“Do you live in Black Creek now?” I asked then.
“I did,” she said. “Not now. I live with Jill. Or I did, until tonight.”
Trying hard to get a good breath, I looked down at the phone. Then I thought, ten more minutes won’t matter.
I only wanted a moment to see the night Belinda was killed through the eyes of one who was there. I owed Stefan that much. I owed Belinda that much. I owed myself.
“Tell me how you knew Belinda,” I said.
“Why do I have to hear this?” Stefan said. “Why does this matter at all?”
“Stay here,” I told Stefan. “I am going to call the police. I still think that there’s a good chance she really did kill Belinda. She has every reason to lie. But I need you to be here too.”
Softened by the painkiller, Emily, for she said this was her real name, told us that she met Belinda at a cheer camp in Wisconsin Dells. One day, they took a picnic to Kettle Pond. They kissed. The power of their connection scared both of them. Emily had known all her life that she was gay, but she was not out, not even to her family. Belinda was the first girl she ever loved, and Belinda confessed she had a deepening crush on Emily, as well. Belinda called her Esme when they were alone and wrote poetry about her.
But then Emily found out about Stefan.
“If I had left Belinda alone right then, she would still be alive.” Instead, she pleaded; she threatened; she cajoled. Belinda, though conflicted, maintained her loyalty. They didn’t see each other for a while. Slowly, though, Emily wore her down and they started up again. Emily pressed her hard: Did Belinda want to live a lie? Did she think that loving a girl was something to be ashamed of? Did Stefan deserve more than a limited love? At last, Belinda agreed at least to be frank with her mother and with Stefan about her new love entanglement.
“Did you know then?” I asked Stefan.
“I had already guessed as much,” Stefan said. “But I wasn’t going to give her up without a fight.”
Abruptly, Belinda switched from her plan to go to Thornton Wilder for college. She needed space, away from everything familiar to explore all the feelings she was experiencing for the first time, or so she told herself. Suddenly, she wasn’t just Jill’s daughter and Stefan’s girl. Stefan panicked, then he despaired. How could he face losing his Belinda, I thought? She was his light, his only. He told me as much now.
“I knew that if I pressured her, it would give her an excuse to break up with me,” he said. Much as his purloined heart drove him to grovel for her affections, he didn’t want to betray how much more he needed her than she seemed to need him. Stefan decided to pretend to be more tolerant of Emily than he ever felt. What we thought was exhaustion from the endless commute was something much more serious.
Teetering on the edge of despair, Stefan never let on to us or to Belinda.
“I had relatives in Black Creek. When I was a little girl, after my mom died, I went there summers to stay with my aunt and my cousins. I talked her into going there. I said I would go there, too. I promised not to pressure her. I never went to school. But Belinda didn’t know that.”
She lied to Belinda, too. August came, and Belinda fell into Emily’s arms. If Belinda had believed she was going to Black Creek for needed space, she now knew that wasn’t true. The space between Belinda and her storied Esme was the space of a breath. The next weeks were a euphoria. First they were ardent, then completely abandoned, then consumed and consuming. Their love was like a tropical disease. While I didn’t doubt then, and I don’t doubt now that Belinda still loved Stefan, it was in Emily that she first found the fullness of sensual delight. First freedom, first rebellion, first sexual passion; there was no more flammable a brew. Emily couldn’t eat or sleep or breathe, either. There was nothing she wouldn’t do.
Only Stefan stood between them.
“They had private jokes,” Emily said, wincing at the memory, if not the burns on her belly. “She would say, green peppers or something and they would just crack up for half an hour. He had her in the way I really wanted. But I guess I had her in the way that Stefan really wanted.”
Still, Stefan reasoned that history was on his side—not just their history as a couple but Belinda’s history as a conservative Christian. Jill would never approve. He had to wait for this passion to burn itself out.
After all that passion went up like gas lightning that awful freezing night, Emily’s rage and grief found their natural target in Stefan.
“I wanted him to pay for what he did,” she said. Prison could not be cruel enough; she hoped that some evildoer would slash his handsome face. She hoped he lived in fear, as she did. Consumed with the notion that Belinda would come back to haunt her, she took to sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor of her bedroom, so that the bed was between her and the door. She made me remember Stefan’s early weeks at home, the way he slept on his bedroom floor. She forgot to eat. Sometimes, she forgot to breathe and had to remind herself that she wasn’t at the bottom of a pool. “I lost maybe thirty pounds.”