Page 81 of City of Liars

I heaved a sigh. “I screwed up, okay? I know that. But I didn’t keep the lawsuit from you for any reason other than that I was embarrassed as hell. I didn’t want my messed-up family to touch you. I wanted to keep you safe from all of that. Instead, you became collateral damage, and it fucking wrecks me, Liv.”

“Thank you for telling me,” she said, her voice soft. “And you don’t have to be embarrassed. God knows my parents’ behavior lately hasn’t been anything to be proud of.”

“What do you mean?”

She shook her head. “Never mind. Let’s go. I don’t want to keep Grandma waiting.”

Dropping my hand, she turned, and I followed her inside.

Back on the couch with Ella, who’d gotten a cup of tea in our absence, Liv turned the pages of the diary once more. Leaning forward, elbows on my knees, I braced myself to listen.

Today Susi came to see me, alone. She looked most desolate, and confided her mother was once again in Kings Park. I pressed funds upon her, and though she was reluctant to take them, out of necessity she did so.

I can afford to part with the money, though not as freely as I did before, Liv went on. The stock market’s crash has affected us all, and never have I been more grateful for the cautiousness that led me to squirrel cash away. The banks have collapsed, and even chaps such as Arthur James and JP Morgan have suffered terrible losses. Several of my friends took their lives, and I must confess I am moved to do the same. But not due to the loss of funds, as financially, we are fortunate to remain quite stable.

No, my misery is due to something else entirely. I cannot stop thinking of May Dressler, rotting away on a ward at Kings Park. I went to see her; but such was the horror of the place, with women lying on the floor like insensate slabs of meat, others wailing, and still more staring motionless at the walls, that I did not have the strength to see which of these categories May might claim for her own, and instead fled back to the city without ever laying eyes on her.

I am a coward, as well as a cad.

Air hissed through my teeth. I couldn’t help but imagine what my own fate might’ve been if I’d been born a century ago. Would this have been what happened to me?

Liv reached across her grandmother and laid a hand on mine. “We’re almost finished,” she said. “Hang in there.”

“I’m okay,” I told her, willing it to be true. “Go ahead.”

Three years have passed since we brought our sweet child home from Chicago—the little girl that we may be deluding ourselves by claiming as our own. And though I have done my best to atone for this sin, tonight the chickens have come home to roost.

May Dressler is dead.

Susi came to tell me. I hardly knew what to say, and stupidly offered money for May’s burial. But Susi told me her mother had been buried in an anonymous grave at the asylum. She wept bitterly, and I stood there, helpless to offer comfort, for I feel as if I have murdered the woman myself.

Liv’s voice cracked, but she pressed onward, speaking faster than before, as if desperate to get to the end of the journal.

Tonight we are meant to go to a charity ball, but I cannot face it. All I can think of is the frivolous evening that awaits me, while May lies rotting in her grave.

How can I ever pay for what I’ve done? It seems my life is the only fair recompense. A life for a life, as Lizzie and I have conspired to take May’s own.

One could argue that Lily is indeed better off with us, but no such argument can be made for what befell May Dressler. Perhaps such melancholia and neurosis as she suffered would have afflicted her regardless of our actions. But I cannot help but feel our behavior brought it to the fore, much as the ideal temperature and soil composition might coax a reluctant seed to bloom.

The guy was a fucking poet. Good for him.

I feel as if I have been walking a tightrope between my wife’s blind insistence—driven by love, but blind nonetheless—and May’s rightful misery. I could not allow the child to be torn apart between them. And if there ever was any hope of reconciliation, now it is gone.

The last time I saw May, she spat at me and uttered a phrase that seemed more dire than all the rest. I had never asked Susi to translate her mother’s words before, but I did then.

“What did she say to me, that last time?” I asked her, doing my best to recall the words. “Zol er kre—something.”

Susi gave me a look that mingled grief and calculation, as if unsure she should tell me. But at last, she surrendered; I suppose she thought the worst damage had already been done.

“Zol er krenken un gedenken,” she said. “She cursed you. It means, Let him suffer and remember.”

A shudder ran through me. I cursed him, May had said in my dream. You will see.

Liv gripped the book tight, her fingers trembling as she read the journal’s final words.

Since the moment I first laid eyes on May Dressler, I have done little else. I am a man truly cursed. And the woman who cursed me has passed beyond the veil; there is no way for her to undo what she has visited upon me, even if I deserved such a thing—which I do not.

There is no way out for me, save one. Let the curse end with me; if the child that sleeps in the room down the hall is not my daughter by blood, then let me see my darling Ella again; let me not meet May in the world that lies beyond this one.