I nod numbly, while still trying to work out what Anna’s doing here and why she’s been talking to the police.
“They’ve even found her footprint in your blood,” cries Anna.
“Jesus Christ,” says Michael. “She’s set you up.”
“But … you … you…” I say, waiting for one of them to change into someone else because it just doesn’t make sense for these two people who have been paying me to listen to their life stories to be here together. “What the hell is going on here?” I say. “How do you even know each other?”
“She’s my wife,” says Michael bluntly.
“Anna’s your wife?” I gasp.
I think of all the stories he’d told me about the violence he’d endured and can’t even begin to compute that he was talking about the woman in front of me; the woman I’ve known for the past two months.
“But how? H-how can that be?” I stutter. “You told me your wife beat you. That she abused and humiliated you. That she … she…” I can’t list everything he’s accused her of; there are too many to mention.
“She did all of that,” he exclaims. “She’s still doing it.”
“He told you I was abusing him?” asks Anna incredulously.
I shake my head, unable to make any sense of what either of them are saying. I’d believed them both wholly and unequivocally when they were sitting on my couch, each telling me their own story. Why wouldn’t I, because why would they be making it up? But now, I have no idea who was telling the truth.
“You have proof in front of you that I’ve been telling the truth. I’ve been kept here for five days!”
“But how … I mean, how can this even be possible?” I turn to look at the woman who just yesterday was going to end it all. The same woman, I suddenly realize, who was screaming down the phone at me this morning, accusing me of having an affair with her husband.
“So you’re Vanessa?”
She looks at me; the eyes that had appeared to be dead with grief are now burning with a ferocious fire. Her mouth, with which only words of shame and self-reproach had been uttered, is pulled tight. She looks nothing like the woman I’ve come to know as Anna.
In the madness of the moment, I find myself searching her face for any resemblance to the little girl I haven’t seen for twenty-six years. Could Jennifer be in there? Has she been in there all this time without me realizing it?
My shredded brain runs over every conversation we’ve had, desperately looking for clues that she’s the sister I left behind. Does she have my mother’s eyes? Or the ravaged features of her drug-taking past? It seems she certainly has my father’s psychotic gene.
It could be her … and oh my god. Even as I’m thinking it, I’m wondering how I’ve missed it. It’s the biggest clue I could possibly have been given, yet it’s only now, as I’m piecing it all together, that it occurs to me what’s been staring me in the face all this time. Her New York accent; a characteristic so hard to disguise that she’d had to invent a whole backstory to pass it off without me realizing.
I remember the picture of New York that she’d given me, thinking it was Anna’s sweet attempt to make me feel more at home. But could it have been Jennifer’s warped endeavor to take me back there; to relive the horrors we endured?
No. I refuse to believe it. My own sister would never do this to me. Plus, I’m sure I would have recognized her in one of our many sessions together, that she would have slipped up.
“I’m going to call the police,” says Vanessa, edging herself away from me, looking terrified.
“You know I’m not behind this,” I say. “You know that’s not who I am.”
“I don’t know who you are anymore,” she says tearfully. “I trusted you. I told you everything and you repay me by having an affair and … and doing this to him.”
“Don’t listen to her, Naomi,” bellows Michael, as he raises himself onto his feet. I immediately wish that I’d kept him restrained—at least until I know exactly what’s going on. “She’s a goddamn liar.”
“You … you said that he’d hurt you … that he’d hurt the children,” I say, looking to her in shock and confusion. “But how could he have when he’s been here?”
“I thought he’d hid himself because of the anniversary,” she says. “I thought he just needed some time away—I was relieved because it’s what I needed too. But when he didn’t come home on Tuesday and again on Wednesday, I started to panic. I called the police because I was scared that he’d done something stupid, but they told me that it looked like he was having an affair.”
“She’s lying,” snarls Michael.
I shake my head, still unable to grasp what the hell’s going on.
“I was so upset,” she goes on. “And I desperately wanted to speak to you, needed to speak to you, but when you were there in front of me, I just didn’t know how to. I felt so foolish and ashamed; I never expected my husband to have an affair in an attempt to drown his grief.”
“So you made up the assault?” I ask incredulously.
She nods. “I didn’t know how else to explain why I was so hurt and upset. And then you were so kind it made me feel worse, but now I know why.” Her eyes go dark and she bares her teeth. “How could you?” she hisses. “How could you hold my hand and rub my back when all along you’ve been having an affair with my husband and keeping him here?”
“Naomi,” calls out Michael, “Naomi, you have to listen to me.”
I stand there staring into the abyss, transfixed by the insanity of the situation.
“Look at me, Naomi!” Michael yells, in an attempt to rouse me from my stupor. I numbly turn to him. “You know you have no part to play in this. You know that what she’s saying is completely untrue. She brought me here. She tied me up. And she has kept me here for the past five days.”
Vanessa snorts. “As well as being a cruel, coldhearted bully, you also have a vivid imagination.”
“So—what? You think I’ve done to this to myself?” he screeches, looking between us both. “Naomi, please, just think about what she’s saying. She’s exactly who I’ve told you she is. If you’ll just free me from this”—he nods toward the bars that with just one more strike will free him from restraint—“I promise I’ll prove it to you.”
I raise the hammer I’d forgotten I was holding and see the look of terror in Vanessa’s eyes. She screams as I bring it down with all my might and strike the bar one more time.
“You’re making a big mistake,” she cries, as Michael’s still handcuffed wrists are released. “You have no idea what he’s capable of.”
For a moment, I’m poleaxed, waiting for him to run or lunge at me, but he does neither. He just stands there with his shackled hands hanging in front of him.
“We need to call the police,” he says, looking at me.
I nod. “I haven’t got a phone,” I say, struggling to think clearly. “But there are police on-site, just a few hundred yards away.”
Vanessa stumbles backward out of the stables as I move toward the door, her face frozen in fear of what I might be about to do to her.
“Please,” she says, blinking rapidly as her eyes adjust to the sunlight. “Please don’t hurt me. I won’t stand in your way if you want to be together. I’ll do whatever you want, but please don’t hurt me.”
The smile she’d displayed less than an hour ago is replaced with a look of abject terror as I get closer. I have to make her understand that she’s got it all wrong.
“You came to my house with thank-you presents,” I say, suddenly remembering. “You bought me wine and flowers. Why would you have done that if you’d already been told that I was having an affair with your husband and was the prime suspect in his disappearance?”
“I wanted to look you in the eye and give you a chance to tell me the truth.”
I shake my head, struggling to believe a word she says.
“But you did better than that,” she goes on. “You led me here, so I could see for myself.”
“So you followed me?”
“Well, how else would I have known where he was?”