Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
“It destroyed me, too.”
“I know.”
“But I’m not the one who let it destroy us.”
She tries to swallow back the sob that rises in her throat. He’s right.
“Sorry. I was letting you talk. Go on.” Ben picks up his glass, takes a drink, swallows it hard.
Gaby’s eyes fill with tears.
She lost Josh. She lost Ben.
Now she’s losing Ben again.
“It hurts to be without you,” she tells him. “But I don’t think it hurts as much as it did when I was with you, after it happened. And I’m afraid that if we’re back together, it’ll go back to hurting that way again. I’m afraid we’ll never figure out how to forgive each other.”
“I already figured that out, Gabriela. I already forgave you. I gave it everything I had. You’re the one who didn’t try. You’re the one who can’t get past it. Not me.”
What is there to say to that?
He’s right.
She pushes her glass away, slides her chair back. “I have to go home.”
“Okay.” He pulls out his wallet, looking around for the waitress. “I’ll put you in a cab.”
“I can put myself in a cab.”
“Gaby, wait two seconds while I—”
“No,” she tells him, already on her feet. “I’m fine. I do it all the time. I go home by myself. I go to bed by myself. I get up by myself. I take care of myself. And I can, Ben. Did you know that?”
“No one ever said you can’t.”
“I take care of myself, and I’m used to it. I’m used to being alone. That’s the way it is now. That’s the way it’s always going to be.”
She was a fool to think it could be any other way.
She heads for the door.
He’s on his feet, too, coming after her. “Gaby—”
“Sir?” Behind him, the waitress materializes.
“I need the check, please. Gaby—”
She keeps walking.
There are no cabs on the quiet side street outside the restaurant, and she doesn’t dare stop and wait until one comes along. He’ll have caught up to her by then, and she doesn’t want to continue this conversation tonight.
She doesn’t want to continue it, ever.
It’s over.
As she zigzags cross-town and uptown blocks, her phone in her pocket buzzes with an incoming text.
Probably Ben.
She ignores it.
It vibrates again as she reaches the subway station for the west side local. She leaves it in her pocket and takes out a Metrocard instead, casting a glance over her shoulder as she hurries through the turnstile, half expecting to see Ben behind her. The platform below is crowded. Good. It means she didn’t just miss a northbound train, and she can lose herself in the crowd, just in case Ben really does show up.
But then, why would he?
This isn’t his line. He’d have walked over to Union Square to catch an east side express train.
No, he’d have taken a cab, and would probably have expected her to do the same at this hour.
He always used to worry about her on the subway at night.
But she’s not his problem anymore, is she? He should be relieved, and so should she.
The train roars into the station. The doors open, spilling far fewer passengers than are waiting to board. As Gaby wedges herself into a car, she catches a glimpse of Ben at the opposite end.
Her heart skips a beat. So he
did
come looking for her. That means—
It means you’re delusional
, she realizes, seeing that it’s not Ben after all. It doesn’t even look that much like him.
But if you really want to see something . . .
She closes her eyes and turns away.
After letting herself into the house with the key hidden under the back doormat—
Fool
! Alex thinks again—she begins to feel her way through the darkened, airless rooms on the first floor. The place smells stale, as if it’s been years since the windows were open with a fresh breeze blowing through.
She bumps her hip on the hard edge of a table and winces.
If she had been thinking more clearly when she left the house earlier, she’d have remembered to grab her headlamp before setting out on this evening’s mission. Even just a flashlight would have come in handy.
Rubbing her hip, she listens, hoping the slight thump didn’t wake Mr. Griffith. But all is silent above. He must be sleeping by now—especially if he took one of those pills the doctor prescribed for him.
The pills were, initially, the reason she’d decided to come here tonight, right? She just needed something that will help her to relax and sleep.
God knows that prescription will do the trick without leaving her groggy tomorrow morning the way some over-the-counter medications do.
Oh, who are you kidding?
This isn’t just about stealing a bottle of sleeping pills. It’s about alleviating this pent-up anger and frustration the way she did years ago, when she unleashed it on her mother-in-law.
Carmen never suspected the old lady’s death hadn’t been a tragic accident. No one did. And even if they had, they never in a million years would have connected her to what happened.
No one will connect her to this either.
Slowly, Alex makes her way to the staircase. She’s glimpsed it so many times from the front door when she dropped off his medications. She knows that it’s steep, and that the steps are carpeted with a worn runner, the better to muffle her footsteps.
She bumps into something parked at the foot of the steps: Mr. Griffith’s walker. It hits the wall with a clatter. She freezes, listening, poised to bolt through the door at the slightest hint of movement from above.
All remains still.
After a long wait, just to be sure, she carefully pulls the walker upright again. Then she begins the long ascent, one step at a time, poised on each tread to listen for movement above.
She did this in her mother-in-law’s house, too, years ago—how long ago?
Dante was a baby then, so at least, what, ten years? Twelve? No—more. Dante has been gone a long time.
How long?
What does it matter?
As she nears the top of the flight, she can see a night-light plugged into a baseboard socket in the short hallway.
There was one in her mother-in-law’s house, too.
It illuminated the human shadow standing at the top of the stairs. The old woman had heard something and was out of bed to investigate.
“Quién es?”
she’d called, and Alex knew enough Spanish by then to know that she was asking:
Who’s there?
Alex didn’t answer, just kept coming up the stairs, hands clenched into fists, thoughts spinning.
Carmen was away on another endless business trip.
Her mother-in-law had done nothing but intrude.
“You go ahead. Go up to bed. I’ll take care of the baby,” she’d said earlier, cradling Dante to her breast.
“He’s my baby. I’ll take care of him.”
“You should get some rest . . .”
She had realized, in that moment, with a stab of horror, that her mother-in-law was trying to get her to leave so that she could nurse Dante.
Alex didn’t know how it was even possible, but it was happening. She was certain of it. Carmen’s mother was sneaking around nursing her baby. Little by little, she was taking her place in her son’s life.
She couldn’t let that happen.
There was only one way to stop her.
Long after Dante had been safely tucked into his crib and her mother-in-law went home with a promise to return first thing in the morning to “help,” Alex found Carmen’s key to the house down the street and slipped out into the night.
She had to leave Dante alone while she was gone. It wasn’t a good idea, but of course, she wasn’t thinking clearly that night. Anyway, it was her only option, and it wouldn’t be for very long.
Her plan was to smother the old lady in her bed with a pillow as she slept.
As it turned out, that would have been a bad idea. She hadn’t considered the potential consequences, hadn’t considered the fact that smothering wouldn’t have looked like an accident.
Not like a fall down the stairs.
No one—not even Carmen—ever suspected that the old woman hadn’t tripped over the hem of her nightgown that night, or that she hadn’t been alone when she drew her last breath at the foot of the stairs. No one ever knew about Alex’s bitter confrontation with her mother-in-law at the top of the stairs before she mightily shoved her to her death.
She didn’t die right away, though.
Alex descended to find her lying there on her back, bleeding and moaning.
She remembers grabbing fistfuls of the shirred fabric bodice of the old woman’s nightgown and lifting her upper body off the floor so she could look closely into her black eyes.
They were open; filled, Alex thought, with hatred and accusation.
“
My
husband.
My
son,” Alex had hissed. “
Mine
. Not yours!”
Then she slammed the woman backward with all her might, so that the back of her skull hit the hardwood floor and cracked open.
She left her there. The next afternoon, she called Carmen to say she was worried because she hadn’t heard from his mother all day, which was usual, and that she’d tried to call to make sure everything was all right.
“Did you go over there, Alex?” he asked.
“No. I wanted to, but it’s storming and I don’t want to take the baby out in this weather. I’m worried about her.”
“Don’t leave the house. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you! Shhh, you’re going to scare the baby.”
“I’m going to call the police to go check on my mother.” Carmen hung up abruptly.
Alex saw a patrol car go down Cherry Street about ten minutes later, heading toward her mother-in-law’s.
A few minutes later, as she was changing the baby, she heard sirens.
She was nursing her son a little while after that when a pair of officers came to the door. There had been a terrible accident, they told her. She stood in the doorway feigning shock and sorrow, cradling her swaddled son against her breast—
her
breast.
Now, she pushes the memory aside as she ascends the dark stairway in Mr. Griffith’s house.
She can hear a faint, steady snoring sound.
There are three open doors off the hall; the fourth, nearest to the head of the stairs, is closed. The snoring is coming from behind it.
She reaches for the knob, clasps it, turns it. It makes a clicking sound.
The snoring is disrupted.
Frozen in place, she stands with her hand on the knob, listening for creaking bedsprings or footsteps on the other side of the door.
After an agonizing, endless moment, the snoring resumes.
She waits, making sure it’s steady, before turning the doorknob again—only a fraction of an inch this time.
She waits.
Listens.
Steady snoring.
She turns the knob another fraction of an inch . . .
And so it goes, until she can open the door with a slight push, still holding the knob as it arcs inward over the carpeted threshold without so much as a creak.
The snoring, uninterrupted, is louder now.
Alex slips into the room and stands just inside the door, waiting for her eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Moonlight spills through the sheer curtains at the window. Between that and the reflected glow from the tiny bulb in the hall, she can just make out the bed, and a lump beneath the covers.
There’s a small table on either side of the bed.
Both have drawers.
In one, she knows, is a loaded gun.
But which one?
If she makes it all the way across the room to one side of the bed and opens a drawer without waking him, and the gun is in the table on the opposite side . . .
Can she close that drawer and make it around the bed to the other table before he stirs?
And what if he wasn’t even telling the truth about the gun in the first place? What if he only says it’s there to throw people off, like the Beware of Dog sign?
But why would he lie to her?
He told her there’s really no dog. Why would he tell her there’s a gun if there isn’t?
He wouldn’t.
There’s a gun. She just has to pick a side of the bed and hope it’s the correct one.
She tiptoes stealthily to the left, reasoning that it’s on the right to someone lying in the bed. She can’t remember whether the man is right-handed, but most people are, and would want the gun to be on that side.
Always shoot with the dominant hand.
It’s what her foster brother said years ago.
She can’t remember what his name was. Eddie? Teddy? Something like that.
They crossed paths for a few months in a crummy farmhouse overrun by kids and pets. They were the only two teenagers. Eddie or Teddy used to sneak the old man’s revolvers out of the shed where he kept them, and taught her how to shoot in the woods behind the house. They’d take turns aiming at empty beer bottles on tree stumps.
“You’re pretty good for a girl,” he told her.
One day he tried to kiss her. She resisted, but he forced himself on her, shoving his disgusting wet tongue down her throat. She went along with it because he was bigger and stronger, and decided then to do some strength training and maybe take martial arts, too.
The next time he handed her the revolver for target practice, she aimed it squarely at him.
“Don’t ever touch me again,” she told him. “Because I’m pretty good for a girl. Got it?”
Yeah. He got it.
Not long afterward, when the farmhouse burned to the ground, she and Eddie—it was Eddie, she remembers now—were moved to new homes. She never saw him again, and good riddance. But if not for him, she wouldn’t know how to handle a gun, so . . .
The old man in the bed snores steadily as she reaches the table. She nearly trips over a second walker, positioned beside the bed. He must keep it at the top of the stairs for use here on the second floor.
After stepping around it, she reaches out and tugs the drawer open slowly, slowly . . .
It’s too dark to see what’s inside. She feels around gingerly, the layer of latex on her fingers making it hard to tell what’s what. She finds what she thinks is the curved metal barrel of a pistol, but it’s just a flashlight. Then, as her hand closes on the unmistakable handle of a handgun, she realizes the snoring has come to an abrupt halt. Her blood runs cold.