When she read something about Jill’s dating violence protest group, SAY, it was the key to her lock. She reached out to Jill who took Emily under her wing. “I knew Belinda, so it was like I knew Jill. I guess I adapted to her. And having me around made Jill feel closer to Belinda. At first I would just demonstrate with the other SAY members back when Stefan was still in prison. Then it got to be like I would have dinner with Jill and sometimes sleep over. And then I moved in.”
Emily started to cry then. Her own mom died in a terrible road accident when she was six, ruining her dad so utterly that he no longer even seemed to know that Esme was there. With Jill, there was again some of that barely-remembered state of refuge—a text asking if you were okay when you were fifteen minutes late, soft carpets instead of cast-off throw rugs, someone who knew you liked brown sugar but not raisins on your oatmeal. And so Jill sharpened Emily into an instrument of her own wrath. She made her do things she hated doing. She did them because she wanted Jill’s love.
“It was all you, then,” I said. “Every bit of it.”
“It was all me.”
Emily egged our house and wrote threatening messages on our garage doors in red paint. She tore up our roses and scattered the contents of our mailbox in the street. Jill once suggested that she poison our dog, but she refused. It was Emily who broke in and blacked out Stefan’s eyes on our family photos, who entered our house surreptitiously half a dozen times, stealing small things, my grandmother’s opal watch, my tiny marble bust of Pallas with a raven on her head and the inscription, Nevermore, my first edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She stole my dark pink Pauline Saucedo scarf, the one Jill was wearing in a news photo I later saw. I had never quite figured out why I kept staring at that photo like those drawings of hidden pictures from my childhood. Can you find the teaspoon, can you find the mitten...
Before she could go on, Stefan spoke up. “What if you had killed us on the road that time?”
“It was never supposed to go that far,” Emily said.
Following Jill’s orders, Emily disguised herself as a male figure in a hoodie, with mirrored sunglasses. “Just to scare you.”
“But you couldn’t control something like that! In a blizzard! You could have killed yourself too. Would Jill have wanted that?”
She dropped her face in her hands.
“She got totally ruthless,” Emily admitted. “She didn’t care what happened to Stefan. She pushed me. She wasn’t as nice anymore.” When Emily balked at trying to hurt us on the road, Jill said such niceties shouldn’t really matter to someone who’d already attempted murder.
What did Emily mean by that, I thought?
Knowing that she was betraying Jill, but unable to bear the shame any longer, Emily assumed the Esme persona and started texting me, warning Stefan to keep quiet. Insinuate yourself into Stefan’s life, was Jill’s next mandate. But that backfired: It was during those months spent chatting online with Stefan under a fake name and profile, pretending to be a college junior and trying to con him into liking her, that her compassion for Stefan’s true grief overtook her. She felt rewarded by his trust and protective of his broken vulnerability.
Stefan said, “You were that girl? You were the one who stood me up?”
“I was.” The pictures she sent Stefan were of her friend Olivia. To me, she said, “I called myself Stephanie, just so I wouldn’t forget the name. But he thought it was funny, us having almost the same name.”
“You’re pitiful,” Stefan said. “You’re a vile human being.”
He got up and stepped over the back of the chair to stand at the kitchen window, where sleet now spattered the dark glass with a sound like the tsk of disapproving tongues.
He added, “It’s not because you stood me up. I would hope even I could do better than you. No, it’s because everything you did, you meant to do. It wasn’t an accident.”
“That’s not true,” Emily said. “I probably am a vile person. But you have no room to talk.”
Which face of Emily should I believe in? I could recall the cocky scolding attitude of the hooded figure, who tried to run us off the road and then kept coming back to haunt us. Or was this shamed, fragile girl the real Emily, no more than Jill’s pawn? Jill’s motives, if deplorable, were at least comprehensible. Further, all Jill had to do was to conceive of those things, not carry them out. So who was really the more ruthless? No matter who coerced her, what she had done to us on the road a year ago was attempted murder. She belonged in jail, and she would go to jail. I thought of Jill, that arctic morning outside the prison gates. Jill, there to make sure that her handmaiden was ready to perform as instructed. Jill, there to make sure her will be done. What would become of Jill, if this whole tale turned out to be more than just a ruse? What was Jill’s culpability here? Should I call Jill, right now, bring her here? Didn’t she deserve to be in on this? Should I wait a few minutes after I called the police and then, when they were almost here, summon Jill, so that Emily believed that I would give her into Jill’s hands?
Maybe.
Still, there was no reason to alarm Emily, at least for the next few minutes.
Whether or not I called Jill, I was nearly ready for that other call—to the police. Emily was relaxed, almost drowsy, her cheek resting on her open palm. She seemed to trust that I would not really turn her in. Or, maybe she didn’t care if I did. Maybe that was what she wanted all along. I was the one who said there were no accidents. Did Emily already know when she knocked on our door that the only place she would be going tonight would be the police station?
“Okay,” I said. “I need you to go back and tell me about that night. Every single thing that happened.”
Stefan said, “This sucks. It’s sick, Mom. I don’t want to hear this anymore.”
Early in the evening, Emily asked Stefan to stop by her place so they could go to Belinda’s together.
“It was too cold to walk, and I told him I scored something special just for him. Something different.”
I got up quickly, banging my knee on the kitchen table. Just to get away from her, I crossed to the living room and sank into the couch. A blast of wind shoved the back door open and I heard the pulsing growl of thunder. Emily followed me and sat down gingerly across the room, on the small caned chair next to the fireplace. “I got what we usually got when we’d go out dancing. Molly and some coke and a little meth, too. But I also got an eight ball for Stefan.”
“An eight ball?”
“Heroin and crack. I wanted to give it to him before we picked Belinda up. It might make him sick, but it would definitely make him act crazy and that was something Belinda would really hate. She was still scared of drugs. Every time she did them was going to be the last time. She said they made her feel like her head was filled with glitter. But Stefan really liked them. He never said no. I knew he’d try anything.”
Anything, I thought? I didn’t know Stefan at all.
“Why that night of all nights?” I asked.
Emily sighed and gently touched her stomach. “I couldn’t stand it, back and forth, back and forth. He would come up, we would go out dancing, he was a really good dancer, and he would be so nice to me. I would put up with him so Belinda didn’t hate me, and Stefan would say how nice it was that Bindy...he called her Bindy...”
“I know what he called her,” I said.