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“How long?”
“I felt so bad for the longest time,” she says at last. “Doing what we did behind your back. But the things he told me about you…”
I remember that feeling: the justification of it. The guilt, the indignity, overridden by the stories I told myself. The stories about Allison I decided to accept in order to make myself feel better: thattheyweren’tus. It’s a form of self-preservation, really. We are nothing but what we choose to believe, but it’s all a mirage, bending and warping and shimmering in the distance, changing its form at any given second.
Showing us exactly what we want to see when we want to see it.
“How long?” I repeat, my resolve settling back in and hardening in my stomach. “How long have you been with Ben?”
The house is quiet in a silent standoff. Finally, she sighs.
“Two years.”
Two years.Two years.For two entire years, Ben has been seeing someone else. Before Mason was taken. Before he even took his first steps.
I count back in my head now, trying to determine how old he would have been.
“Six months,” I say, muttering to myself. Mason would have been six months old when they first got together: the age he was when I started working again. When I took off for a few nights every month, driving to North Carolina and Alabama and Mississippi, trying to chase those little moments of meaning that were ripped from me all those years ago.
“You were always leaving,” Valerie says now, still trying to justify it. “He was lonely, Isabelle. You left him and your son for days on end—”
“Hewas lonely?” I say, a sudden burst of anger surging through me. “Is that what he said? He said thatIwas always leaving? ThatIwas the one who was never around?”
“I saw it,” she says, her voice suddenly sharp like venom. “I saw the way he had to take care of Mason by himself. Don’t deny it.”
“You saw it—” I whisper, the room starting to spin. “Oh my God. He brought you to our house?”
I take a few steps closer, into the center of the room, my mind racing.
“He brought you to our house, around our son, and he was growing up,” I say, speaking faster. “Mason was growing up, just starting to talk. Pretty soon, he would have started saying something, right? Saying something to me about the other woman who came over when I wasn’t there?”
I think about that story I always tell to the audience; the one meant to ease the tension and elicit a laugh. Mason and Ben and the mobile above his crib; how he would try to sound out the words—Tyrantosnorious—getting better and better every single time.
“Don’t you think Ben thought about that?” I ask. “Don’t you think herealized—”
I stop, stare, understanding settling over me slowly. All of these little pieces that never added up, never made sense, until now. I can feel the blood drain from my face, like someone ripped out a plug from beneath me, bleeding me dry.
The truth is right here, right in front of me. I have literally been staring at it, ather, this entire time.
“What did you do?” I ask, my voice a whisper. “What did you do to my son?”
Valerie is quiet, eying me. It really is striking how alike we look, especially at a distance. The tanned skin of her arms, her legs; the coffee-brown shade of her hair and the wide, unassuming eyes. I imagine her walking down the street at night, late, leaving my house at the end of a few days spent with Ben. She would have parked somewhere far away, I’m sure, to keep a cover from the neighbors. Ben would have insisted—for appearances’ sake. Always for appearances’ sake. And I can almost picture it: her, striding past that streetlight, feeling the life leaking from her skin with every single step, knowing that I was on my way home to him. Knowing that we would be sleeping together that night while she was in this sad little house, alone, her eyes on the ceiling and her mind on us. It was the same way I felt when Ben would stand up from that barstool and return home to Allison: the gut-wrenching knowledge of being something he kept hidden, secret, like a dirty habit he only broke out at night.
And then: the creak of a rocking chair. The realization that she wasn’t alone. A glance to the side and an old man sitting on his porch, cloudy eyes on her.
“I’m Isabelle,” she would have said, stopping, smiling. Letting herself believe it. Letting herself shed her own skin and slip into mine for just one more second. Letting herself beme, Ben’s wife, the way I had always wanted to be Allison. Like if she just said it out loud, willed it into existence, it would somehow be true. “Your neighbor, Isabelle Drake.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Valerie is still looking at me, unwavering, and I can feel the bile claw its way up my throat.
“Yes you do,” I say, my voice trembling. “You took my son.”
I imagine her letting herself into my home with her key—the key Ben had given her, swiping it from beneath our mat that day and slipping it into her palm, closing her fingers—and the quiet stillness of the house as Roscoe ambled up to her in the dark. He would have recognized her after an entire year of her coming over; she wouldn’t have been a stranger anymore. I can imagine the hushed whispers as she calmed him back to bed, rubbed behind his ears. Her footsteps down the hall, into Mason’s nursery. Creeping into his bedroom, covering her fingers with the fabric of her sleeves, and sliding the window open. Letting in a cool, damp breeze as she picked him up and carried him back out the front door, locking it behind her.
I wonder if Mason felt safe with her. I wonder if that’s why he didn’t scream.
