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“She’s okay. She’s sleeping. She’s safe.”
He gives me water in a cup with a straw and I take a sip. I sit up, wincing
When Jack found Charlie and me, he called the ambulance and rushed us to the hospital. He didn’t look for Bronwyn beyond inside the house. She lay on those stairs for close to fourteen hours before she was found, with a broken back.
Alive.
But she’s in bad shape. Well, you’d hope so, I guess. She’s in the ICU and Jack tells me that when they brought her in, she was conscious long enough to tell the police what had happened. I’ve been planning to kill them all. I’ve gone crazy, I’m insane. I’m jealous. I’m sick, I bragged that I bought oxycodone online and was going to use it to fake Jack’s suicide. The police found the bag of pills taped behind my bedside table, just where I’d told her they were. But I changed my mind, I’d decided to kill them all and kill myself. I bought the gun, I was waiting for Jack to come home so I could kill him, I tried to kill Charlie, I tried to kill myself. The only reason we’re all alive is because of Bronwyn. It’s Bronwyn who lured me out of the house, away from Charlie. She fought me for the gun. She didn’t know it wasn’t loaded. She’s not sure what happened then, only that I pushed her. But she saved Charlie’s life and almost died in the process.
And that’s when I remember. Memories burst inside my head like flashes going off. They are so violent and freakish that at first I don’t think they’re real. Me screaming at the sight of Charlie unconscious on the couch. Bronwyn slapping me. Me in the armchair, holding the gun. Me crawling outside, shouting for help.
“No, no, no!” I’m pulling the wires off me, shouting, pain exploding behind my temples, an ocean of noise in my ears and finally I realize what he’s saying as he holds my wrists.
“It’s okay!” He stares into my eyes. “I know you didn’t do it. I know. It’s all right, Laura. We know what really happened.”
It’s Charlie who saved me. Charlie, Jack, and the urban wildlife monitoring project. I didn’t know what the monitoring part of the project was. I never asked. I was too busy going crazy.
The monitoring part involved small, motion-triggered cameras that Jack and Charlie hid outside, nestled in trees along the crumbled stairs, where there was enough vegetation on the hillside to attract a squirrel or a raccoon, or maybe even a coyote.
Our entire interaction on those steps was captured by those cameras and stored on a server somewhere. All of it. Bronwyn describing how she killed my mother, her own father, what she did to Jenny, what she wanted to do to Charlie, to Jack. It’s all there. She’s under arrest now, with a police guard outside her door. They say she’ll probably never walk again. She certainly will never hurt anybody again.
And then Jack cries. He cries with his forehead on my shoulder. He is sorry he wasn’t there. She didn’t want you there, I say. That was the point. She wouldn’t have done it if you were there. He is sorry he didn’t believe me sooner. But you believed me in the end, that’s all that matters.
FORTY-TWO
It’s Thanksgiving weekend and I’m in a different art gallery, opening a different package. This gallery is my own. I am dressed in overalls, painting the walls white, or I was until the courier came.
Am I thinking of Bronwyn? Yes, although I try not to think about her anymore. I’m getting better at it. It’s been two years now. In that time, we sold Jack’s house in Queen Anne, the house Bronwyn had planned to kill us all for, and moved to Carmel, where we bought a beautiful house by the sea. Then a year ago, we got married. It was the most perfect wedding in the lush garden of a Victorian-style home in Monterey, with all our friends and Jack’s family. How could it be anything other than the perfect day after what we went through?
Sometimes, I can go for three days, maybe more, before realizing with a start that I haven’t thought of Bronwyn at all. The fact that she’s dead helps. She died from her internal injuries three days after I pushed her down those stairs. I killed her. The prosecutor declined to file charges as a conviction would be unlikely. The whole world has seen that video by now. Everyone says I was protecting my family. Some even called me a hero.
Apparently, had she been found sooner, she might have lived. If someone had stood at the top of those stairs and craned their neck, they might have seen a leg, a foot, they might have called for help. But nobody stood there and nobody looked, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t deliriously happy about that.
I have wondered sometimes what she might have been thinking about, stuck on those stairs with a broken back for fourteen hours. Did she lie there and think,I was on a good ticket with Jack. After I send Laura to jail with my made-up evidence, would Jack want to get back together with me? Of course he would. He’s never stopped loving me. Anyone can see that. I could help him get his business back on track, which would simply entail not emailing potential clients pretending to be Jenny the babysitter. I could redecorate the house back to the way it was before Laura got her dirty hands on it: tasteful and elegant. We could renew our vows. I’ll wear something spectacular; we’ll go on a second honeymoon. To Paris, maybe? And I’ll send Charlotte to boarding school because that child is really demanding, and of course that would mean no babysitter in the house.
But we’ll never know what she thought because she’s dead. Jack even joked once that when she was threatening to kill him, the best I could come up with was to go and get Harold next door. Sweet, old, slow, very slow Harold with his walking stick and his hearing aid and his poor eyesight. But when Bronwyn threatened to hurt Charlie, I turned into some raging beast, a cross between King Kong and the Incredible Hulk, picked her up like she was made of straw and threw her down the stairs.
“Thanks a lot,” he quipped, rolling his eyes. I don’t think it happenedquitethat way, but I know he’s trying to help me stop the nightmares, reclaim the nights where I sit up screaming and claw at an invisible ghost.
Sometimes I dare myself to imagine what would have happened if Jack and Charlie hadn’t installed their wildlife cameras. The amount of evidence against me was staggering. Even the small bag of OxyContin had my fingerprints on it, and only mine. I wondered if that’s what she was doing upstairs while I pretended to be asleep in the armchair: carefully retrieving the Ziploc bag from her underwear drawer and sticking it behind my bedside table. The gun, of course, had supposedly been purchased by me. And there was plenty of evidence of my irrational behavior, my paranoia, my jealousies about Bronwyn, about Summer, and let’s face it, I can’t even blame Bronwyn for that. Not for all of it, anyway.
But it doesn’t matter. These days when I think of Bronwyn, I think of her as some warped version of the Evil Queen from Snow White. I can just see her gazing into her funhouse mirror.Does everybody love me? Am I the best? The most admired?And if she caughtanyonenot bestowing upon her the attention she felt she deserved, they had to die.I don’t make the rules.She got it wrong, though. The three people she killed that we know of for sure – there are rumors there may be others – presented exactly zero threat to her.
Because something else happened: a month ago, my father died.
I hadn’t seen him in years, decades even. Firstly, I didn’t like him, so there was that, but even if I’d gone, he wouldn’t have had a clue who I was.
I went to the nursing home where he lived to pack his few belongings, which consisted only of his clothes and a Bible. I donated it all to the facility for other residents who might find some use in those few things, but as I held the Bible, a letter fell out from its pages.
My hand was shaking when I bent to pick it up, because I’d recognized my mother’s handwriting on the envelope, without even having to think about it. And yet if you’d asked me five minutes earlier what my mother’s handwriting looked like, I would have said I had no idea. I just couldn’t remember.
I went outside, sat on a bench overlooking the lake and opened the envelope.
Frank.
I told you a long time ago now that if you wouldn’t get help I would have no choice but to leave. That time has come. I am not doing this for me, but for Laura. It’s not right for her to grow up in a house filled with nothing but rage and anger, where she is afraid to speak her mind, afraid of being in the same room with you, afraid of you. I want her to have a normal and happy childhood, whatever is left of it, as happy and normal as I can give her. She needs to feel free to be herself, she needs to laugh, she needs love.
A friend has helped me find a house for Laura and me. Once we are settled, I will call you. If you accept my decision and promise not to argue for our return, I will give you our address if you wanted to visit her.
