Ree
[emailprotected]:
I know what you’re reading.
I sleptin the downstairs office. Bram left early with a soft click of the door, and even though his departing was as quiet as a whisper, it might as well have been a gunshot. Our first fight. The first big earthquake of our marriage. I had envisioned we would squabble about annoying things like who left the cap off the toothpaste. Never would I imagine it would be about a woman.
Last night I dreamed of that woman. Astrid Montenegro haunted me as proficiently as a ghost. I dreamed of her milky white teeth, the sound of her grating laughter as she looked up at my husband. I could see the lust in her eyes, feel the electric wanting of my husband oozing from her pores. This was a viral disdain brewing deep inside of me for this woman. A hatred that has ignited a rage I have tried to suppress for so very long.
The email from my old friend Twokidcircus leaves me unfazed. As shock is prone to do, it had thrown me from dissecting it further. Of course, that asshole knows what I’m reading. I’m reading the garbage they insist on sending.
No sooner do I pull back into the driveway than I glance in the direction of my sister’s home and note the curtain falling back into place. I can feel my mother’s evil gaze set on me like a branding iron sizzling over my flesh.
I head on inside, so many damned thoughts vying for my attention, all of them shitty. Bram is cheating. It couldn’t be. He said Astrid and he were both at the bar separately and I believe him, but Simone sits on my shoulder like a devil, like a questionable angel screaminglook what he did to me!
I set my purse on the counter and dig deep until I come up with that article I pulled out of her journal. The newspaper clipping about the children felt sacred, so I left it where I found it—but this one, the one about the potential serial killer made my skin crawl.
New York Times. A string of copycat murders leaves police questioning whether or not there is a serial killer on the loose. Three prostitutes were strangled to death, two with wires set so tight around their necks it led to a near decapitation. In each case, the women were found to be missing the fifth digit on their left hand.
The article goes on to spotlight each of the women. All found in the city, all so very close to the midtown hotel where Bram and his paramour were staying that day Simone found them. Could she have been one of them?
The prostitute from the fundraising night comes back to me as does the prostitute from the hotel Bram was staying at last month during his conference, and as much as I want to dismiss them, I can’t. It wasn’t really Astrid I wanted to confront him with, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to ask your husband about another woman than grill him over the death of a string of prostitutes. A part of me refuses to believe it. Bram is sweet, sensitive, loyal to a fault. And more than any of that, I can feel his love for me.
My eyes flit across the street, to that hovel my demon of a mother is holed up in. For so long she withheld real love from my sister and me. For so long we were force-fed a false adulation, praise for the illnesses we never had. She coddled her own delusions and whored us out in an effort to keep the lights on, to fund dream vacations and a short-lived stint on the talk show circuit. I’ve looked them up and they’re still alive and well, available for anyone’s viewing pleasure on YouTube. Those gullible commentators are still offering prayers for me.
I was my mother’s favorite to showboat. Lena was sickly too, but for whatever reason she preferred my gauntness to hers. She sheared my hair, washed me out with pills, chemically starved me, and what food I could keep down wasn’t worth much. She would have killed us as soon as she had no real use for us. We were getting older, our bodies too clunky to haul around for her heavy, panting fame.
I very much believe that death was the next prescription Dr. Van Lullen had ordered. She would have smothered us in our sleep. Scratch that. She would have researched methods to murder us in ways that were undetectable to the coroner. Something food-related, E.coli, food she smeared with her own shit. That sounds about right. She would have sent a dozen different produce products forced into a mandatory recall. She has no regard for a company’s bottom line, nor her daughters’ lives—not to mention her dead sister. I am still very much convinced that my aunt’s death was at my mother’s hands. A harbinger of things to come.
My feet carry me upstairs, past a smiling Isla and Henry, into the master bedroom, to the closet where my mother knows what I am reading, straight to the gun safe Bram brought into our marriage. He made sure I knew the code. 0307: the date of our first meeting. He knew I would never forget that. The mouth of the safe yawns open, and I give a quick glance inside to see the gun silently waiting like a dutiful guardian, the unused clip sits by its side like the forever companion it is. I shut the safe once again with a click and keep my hand on the cool metal just to feel the burn. My eyes wander behind me to the place I’ve stored Simone’s journals. It feels sacred like a gravesite.
The sweaters I had neatly lined on top of the box sit in a jumble on the floor, and my heart kick-starts to life like a defunct motor.
“Oh my God,” I whisper as I fall to my knees and yank open the box, only to discover it empty, barren of all of its treasures.
Every last journal is gone.
