That night Clara did the dishes; hot soapy water bubbled up between her long fingers. Usually she wore dishwashing gloves, but after that bio lab she would never wear them again.
Evil Lynn, in a striped red-and-black kimono, sat watching TV in the living room on the couch she had reupholstered herself. Clara had liked the old, faded, wheat-colored fabric, despite several large holes shredded around the edges; Kim used to say it looked like a stray cat had snuck in during the night. Now the couch had a dark floral pattern Clara had never warmed up to. Over the years Evil Lynn had done other things to the place that seemed, well, out of place. A piece of yellow silk draped over the back of her dad’s favorite blue chair was an obvious mistake, because it kept sliding down. A huge rug from a flea market, disgusting. Who knew anything about the people who’d owned it before? And hanging up a patchwork quilt—why would anyone put a blanket on the wall? Blankets belonged on beds.
On-screen Clara saw a young woman who looked sad and scared and lost.
“What’s wrong with her?” Clara blurted out.
Evil Lynn turned, surprised to see Clara standing behind her, even more surprised that Clara was speaking to her. She cleared her throat. “She thinks her husband is still in love with his first wife. This girl is rather plain and awkward, and terribly shy, and the first wife was sophisticated and gorgeous.”
Clara stared at the actress. She was actually very pretty, with soft, swept-back brown hair and beautiful dark eyes, but she looked so deeply unhappy, even as she insisted to her husband, “We’re happy, aren’t we? Terribly happy?”
Clara’s dad had met Evil Lynn at a bus stop. They’d both been waiting for a long time before someone showed up and told them the bus stop had been moved to a different street because a water main had burst. Together Clara’s dad and Evil Lynn had walked to the temporary bus stop, taken the bus, begun dating, and were married only a few months later. At which point he said this was partly for Clara’s sake! “I didn’t want to introduce you to a string of women,” he’d said, smiling gently. “I wanted something everlasting.”
There was a photo in the living room of Clara’s real mother, her hair a mass of dark-brown curls, head tilted, crinkles at the corners of her eyes, laughing. She hadn’t been everlasting—she’d had thyroid cancer, one of the cancers with an incredibly high survival rate except for the few who were unlucky. Clara used to touch her throat, where the thyroid is, and hum, trying to feel this thing that had killed her mother. As for the thing that had killed her dad, all she had to do was hold her hand over her heart. But she didn’t do it.
“Plus,” her dad had said about her stepmother, “I saw something amazing in her right away. There’s a quality there—very unusual.”
Clara had never seen it, not a glimmer. Not then, not now.
“What’s her name?” Clara asked about the woman on-screen.
Evil Lynn kept her eyes on the TV and spoke. “She doesn’t have a name.”
“That’s not possible.”
“The movie is called Rebecca—”
Clara folded her arms. “Then her name is Rebecca.”
“Rebecca was the first wife, who died.”
“But everybody has a name!” Clara had moved closer to Evil Lynn, without thinking, and caught the smell of lavender.
“She has a name,” Evil Lynn said. “We just never learn what it is. Maybe because she lives in the shadow of a ghost, the ghost of Rebecca. The girl thinks Rebecca must’ve been the perfect wife, but it turns out Rebecca was vindictive and cruel and used people dreadfully, and the husband never loved her. In fact, it turns out he ended up killing Rebecca. In the movie it’s an accident. In the book it’s definitely murder. So you see, not everyone is what they seem. Sometimes you think somebody’s wonderful but she’s not, and the opposite can be true, too—”
“Does the new wife have a name in the book?” Clara didn’t care about any of the rest of it.
“No, she narrates and we never learn it there, either.”
But a name was—well, important. It gave you a place on earth that was yours alone. Clara stood there in the living room, watching and waiting and longing for someone to call this woman by her name, but no one ever did. There would have been so many just-right names for her—Rose, for instance, which was so simple but contained so much, beauty plus a thorn to protect her.
CHAPTER 18
There was a Post-it on the kitchen table the next morning: Don’t forget—appt. today.