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“So, then I went through the suitcase you keep in the attic. I always knew it was up there; I just didn’t think you had any interesting secrets. And there were some pictures in there, you with different men, quite a lot of men really. And there were papers. Important ones.”
My heart sank. I kept very little incriminating evidence from my past but there were certain things that were necessary to keep around. Especially if I ever needed to run. Gabrielle continued, still watching me as she smoked my cigarette with glee.
“I found the bank account documents. And each account had a different name: Jacqueline, Cecilia, Daphne. . .so many names, all with different last names too. Why would you have those? That’s the kind of thing criminals do. And I found an adoption certificate for James to a man named Geoffrey Van Rensselaer. That was from around the time the twins were born so I guess that was their dad. But he certainly wasn’t James’s.”
She smiled in that self-satisfied way teenagers have, like they truly understand the adult world and see through it all. My fists clenched and I could feel my painted nails dig into my palms.
“So, either you were married three times, or you never married James’s dad. Either way, that doesn’t look good. You lied to my daddy. You told him you were married once. But you were married twice. Maybe even three times. Or you had a baby without being married. And you’ve used different names and lied about your past. I don’t think he’d like that. I don’t think he’d like that at all.”
“Oh please, he knows all about it,” I bluffed. “Just because no one bothered to tell you doesn’t make it some big dark secret.” I hoped that I was a good enough actor to pull it off, but she just smiled and shook her head.
“No, I think it is a secret. A big one. I think you’ve done something very bad and you’re on the run. That’s why you keep changing your name. And I don’t think my daddy knows a thing about it.”
“He wouldn’t tell anyone though. A scandal would hurt his career,” I said carefully. Would Robert keep my secrets? There was already so much distance in our marriage, so much resentment. Even if he did cover this up, he would hate me for it. He might even demand a quickie divorce in exchange for his silence, a divorce that would leave me penniless. He might even be able to get an annulment because of all the lies I’d told him.
“Hmm, maybe you’re right. Maybe I should just go straight to the police,” Gabrielle offered, pointing at the telephone on her desk. She reached forward, her hand hovering over it, watching me for a reaction. I stood there stone-faced, holding her gaze without blinking. Was this really how it ended? Decades of secrets exposed by a teenage girl with an Electra complex?
“And if you didn’t?” I asked flatly. I felt as if we were playing high-stakes poker, but it was becoming increasingly clear that I didn’t have the winning hand.
Gabrielle sat back in her chair and laced her fingers together, a smile creeping across her face.
“Then I own you. From now on, there’s no curfew, no rules, no school unless I feel like it. If I want candy for lunch, you get it. If I want you to buy me beer, you do it. If I want to stay out all night at a party, you don’t say a thing. Any attitude, and I’ll tell Daddy and the police everything.”
The little shit was loving this. Although who wouldn’t love being a teenager giving that lecture to a hated stepmother? I’m sure Cinderella had a similar expression when she flipped her stepmom the bird and headed off with the prince.
“Fine,” I managed to say through gritted teeth. I turned and stiffly walked out of the room, shocked that I’d been outmaneuvered by a teenage girl. My stomach began to bubble with anxiety. Someone was finally on to my secret. And it was the worst possible person.
The next two weeks were agony. Gabrielle did whatever she wanted. When my husband wasn’t around, she would sit down at the breakfast table, pull a cigarette out of my pack and motion me to light it. She would sashay out the house with full bottles of wine, telling me next time not to buy the cheap stuff. My kids watched it all in shocked dismay and total confusion. Only Rose had an inkling and avoided making eye contact with me. I didn’t talk to her about it though. I didn’t want my children to know how precarious our situation was, how our lives now depended on the charitable impulses of a teenage sociopath.
Gabrielle would catch my eye and slowly smile, as if to remind me that I was now living on her charity and that she might choose to turn me in at any moment. And I knew that eventually, no matter what I did, she would call the police. Because Gabrielle didn’t want to live with me and my three kids; she only wanted her father. And once the novelty of controlling me wore off, I was going to prison.
I needed a plan. I had managed to escape sticky situations before: my hellish life in Lucan, my abusive relationship in Winnipeg, a life as a struggling single mother in New York. That was my secret power: I was a survivor.
But no matter how I thought about this one, I didn’t see a way out. I could let Gabrielle call the police and just try to brazen it out, act like she was a silly little schoolgirl who’d been reading too many Nancy Drew novels. But I’d only gotten away with it for so long because no one really paid much attention to me, and I’d never given them a reason to. Once you really started making a chronology of my life, it would be obvious that something was wrong. The police would notice that any man who got too close to me seemed to have a suspiciously early expiration date.
I could take my kids and run away, changing my name and starting over. But Gabrielle would still know. And sooner or later (probably sooner) she would tell everyone and then people would come after me, hunting me down like a dog. Because Gabrielle hated me. It wasn’t enough to get rid of me, I had to be punished.
If I went to prison, Robert wouldn’t take care of my kids, not now that he had his precious daughter. My kids would end up in foster care so fast it would make their heads spin. My babies didn’t deserve that. Why should they be punished because of my actions?
I stopped sleeping. After everyone went to bed, I would wander the house for hours in my silk robe, a ghostly trail of cigarette smoke following me up the stairs. I would wonder if this was my last night before everything changed, if by this time tomorrow I would be in a jail cell, no longer a mother, no longer rich, no longer free or anything that mattered at all. I was so exhausted that sometimes I felt as if I was hallucinating, as if the house and the trees outside were whispering to me, telling me that there really was only one way out. If I was willing to take that final step down to hell. . .
You see, Gabrielle didn’t realize what she’d done. She thought I had something to hide but she didn’t know the scope of my secrets. Gabrielle had cornered a killer and that’s when we’re at our most deadly. More than that, she was coming between a mother and her children, and that might be the most dangerous position of all.
The night Gabrielle stayed out and Robert told me to go find her, I was in a real bind. Robert expected me to enforce rules and keep Gabrielle in line, but I couldn’t, not with my vicious little stepdaughter calling the shots. And my nerves were shot from walking on eggshells for weeks, waiting for Gabrielle to make a move, endlessly running through scenarios in my head. I was stuck between a blackmailing stepdaughter and a husband who seemed to have lost all respect for me. The fact that both of them were controlling me, a grown woman who usually didn’t take crap from anyone, enraged me.
I drove for a few miles, running through every scenario of how I could escape this family with finances and freedom intact. Half-formed thoughts drifted through my head, each clever plan full of holes.
The road was dark. There were very few streetlights on these country lanes, and the trees and hedges crowded the edge of the asphalt, pressing my car into the center of the narrow road. Rickety tree branches appeared in my headlights, and I scanned the road intently through a cloud of cigarette smoke, nervous that I would slam into a deer leaping out of the hedges.
And then suddenly she was there. She was like a mirage in front of me, her skinny legs pedaling furiously, her bony back rising and falling with every exertion. I rolled my eyes. It was almost midnight and here she was, biking home from a big rager. I knew that later she would come sauntering through the door, carrying a swagger and insouciance that were completely at odds with her young age. It infuriated me. This little princess had never been scared in her life.
But here she was: the source of my problems, biking alone on a dark road. You have to admit, if you were in the same situation, you would be tempted. She was biking so fast that it was almost as if she was prey trying to outrun a predator. I hesitated for a minute. Killing a kid, even one as horrible as her, had never been the plan. Those were the kind of crimes that upset people, that cops made a priority, that communities never forgot. I worked best when no one even knew a crime had occurred. But I had gone through every alternative in my head, and I couldn’t see a way out of this where Gabrielle got to live. She had started this awful business and now I had to end it.
And then I was accelerating, my foot pressed against the floor of the car. There was a brief glimpse of her terrified, white face and then a very satisfying Whump! It was the opposite of poison, a brief explosion of sound and movement instead of the slow, shadowy process of gently leading someone to death.
The road was so empty, the world quiet, that I hazarded a quick stop just to confirm she was dead. I’d have had a hard time explaining myself to Robert if she had dragged her broken body through the front door, ready to point the finger. There are some problems too big for marriage counselling.
I stopped the car and hopped out, careful not to get my heels bloody. She was lying in a crumpled mess, her eyes white with pain. She took one last, jagged breath and then she died, her body coming to a great, shuddering halt. But in that last glance, I saw her recognize me and realize what I had done to her. In that moment, I saw fear in her face, the knowledge that her safe little world hadn’t been so reliable after all. Did I enjoy that moment? After eighteen months of disrespect and weeks of threats to my family? Not particularly. As a mother, the thought of killing a child disgusted me. And I do regret that things came to that.