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I had to admit, her terms and conditions of not publishing the story, of not going to the police made sense, as skewed as it may sound. Sadie was right. Now, Ann can never leave me. Better yet, she’ll be less likely to betray me again as well.
What can I say? Two birds, one stone.
EPILOGUE
I wish someone had told me: worry is a waste of time. The real troubles of your life will be things that never bothered to cross your mind. Nine months, three days, and nineteen hours, I’ve lived down the street from her. If you really think about it, a person can do a lot in nine months. They can gestate a fetus and deliver it safely into the world, and they can also plant roots and create an entirely different life altogether. That’s what she did.
Not that I realized it at the time, but in essence, that’s what she helped me do, too. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, as they say. Only she isn’t a bird. She can’t just fly away, the way she thinks she can.
She thinks she can migrate, start a new life elsewhere, someplace where she can be whatever she wants to be. In the heaviness of night, I know she is plotting her escape. Once I heard her whispering to Paul about moving back to the city where it would be easier for her.
Her recovery has been far worse than mine. Ann is angry. Combative. Paul has prescribed something for that. Sometimes she blames me and other times, it’s him. Never herself.
I realized all along what drew Ann to me. Partly, I was just a pawn in the sick game she plays with Paul. Not so different than the one Ethan and I played.
With Ann though, it was different. She wanted me to be her endgame. She wanted to be absolved of responsibility. That’s why she asked for my help. Again and again. She wanted me to be her mouthpiece. She wanted me to be her eyes and her ears, and now I am.
Obviously, this arrangement won’t last forever. She thinks I don’t know what she’s plotting. She thinks I don't know what she’s capable of. I know everything about her.
Also, she’s forgetting two things: wherever you go, there you are. And, there are people like me.
When I moved to this boring, homogeneous, monotonous little town, I did so with one intention and one intention only: to have a nice life. A quiet life.
That’s not how it played out. Not even close.
What can I say? I got swept up in it. She makes it easy. Her, with her impractical shoes and her perpetually sunny nature. For me, she has always felt a bit like spring in the middle of winter. She was then, and still is to me now, just about the most wonderful thing in the world.
But therein lies the problem. Nothing can last forever. And you always kill what you love in the end.
You do what you do. It is what it is.
You break wide open. Then you fix it.
Ann says we all have our own guidance system that lets us know what’s right. It’s there in the way we feel. She used to say that we can’t blame other people for what happens to us, even if it feels good to do. There is truth in that, I suppose. Her next book, her last, the one she’ll never finish, the one I’ve just finished reading talks about how we’re all writing our own parts in the stories of our lives. We make deliberate choices that then represent the way our storyline goes.
She is so very right about
that, and I have decided I can’t go another minute without letting her know.
At the top of the stairs, I will find her in her bed, third door to the right. By this time of night, she will be sleeping on her side, covers pulled halfway up. Her expression will be slack, but peaceful, for even in sleep women like her know only ease.
On the left side of the four-poster bed is a nightstand. On top of the nightstand rests the Bible she doesn’t read, the cell phone she’ll never reach, a glass of water she’ll never drink, the reading glasses she no longer needs.
I will attack from the right, stabbing her six times. I’ve mapped it out. Six stab wounds, one for each of the ways she has wronged me. In reality, it doesn’t take that much to kill a person. She probably knows this better than anyone. And if not, just in case, I want to make sure.
This time it will be different. I’m like still water, lost in the process, minimizing the moment, under reacting to everything. It’s not easy to get to this state. The hardest thing you can try to do is to be yourself when you’re doing something you really care about. It takes discipline.
I’ve worked hard. I’ve been disciplined. I had lots of time, caring for her, and before that lying there in the hospital, and then afterward in the rehabilitation center. So much time. So many hours to fill. Every single second I’ve spent in therapy, I worked. Every time, I fed her or helped her learn to navigate her new condition, I planned. I learned to perform well despite nerves and the physical symptoms that accompany them—trembling, wet hands, rapid heartbeat, a sinking feeling in the gut, and sometimes even a feeling that breathing is difficult.
I feel all of this now.
Ann says these physical symptoms of nerves are the products of inevitable chemical changes that occur inside the body during moments of high stress, changes like a shot of adrenaline. They’re outside our conscious control. So it’s a waste of time trying to avoid them.
Thankfully, this time, I don’t have to. She will not be surprised to find me in her room tonight. I am her caretaker. I am her children’s caretaker.
Paul is out of town again, as he so often is. Ann likes me to sleep in her room whenever he’s away, and tonight is no different. Sometimes we touch our own wounds to be punished. Still, she worries about him, I know. But as I lift the covers to her right and lean into Paul’s side of the bed, she sleeps soundly.
Until she isn’t. “Sadie?” she calls. “Is that you?”
