But that alone is disconcerting. Because it’s not natural for a child to be in pain.
“You think he’s being bullied?” I ask, but Will only shrugs his shoulders and says he doesn’t know. But he’ll call the school in the morning. He’ll find out.
“We need to talk to Otto about this,” I tell him, but Will says, “Let me do some investigating first. The more we know, the better prepared we’ll be.”
I say okay. I trust his instinct.
I tell him, “I think it would be good for Imogen to speak with someone.”
“What do you mean?” he asks, taken aback, though I’m not sure why. Will isn’t averse to therapy, though she’s his niece by blood, not mine. This is for him to decide. “Like a psychiatrist?” he asks.
I tell him yes. “She’s getting worse. She must be harboring so much inside of her. Anger. Grief. I think it would be good for her to speak with someone,” I say, telling him about our conversation this evening, though I don’t tell him what I saw on Imogen’s phone. He doesn’t need to know I saw a picture of his dead sister. I say only that Imogen described for me in detail what Alice looked like when she found her.
“Sounds to me like she’s opening up to you, Sadie,” he says. But I have a hard time believing it. I tell him therapy would be better, with someone trained to deal with suicide survivors. Not me.
“Will?” I ask, my mind going elsewhere, to a thought I had earlier tonight as I stared out the window toward the home next door.
“What?” he asks.
“The vacant house next door. Do you think the police searched it when they were canvassing the neighborhood?”
The look he gives me is confused. “I don’t know,” he says. “Why do you ask?”
“Just seems an empty home would be an easy place for a killer to hide.”
“Sadie,” he says in a way that’s both patronizing and reassuring at the same time. “I’m sure there isn’t a killer living next door to us.”
“How can you be so sure?” I ask.
“We’d know, wouldn’t we? Something would look off. Lights on, windows broken. We’d hear something. But that house hasn’t changed in all the time we’ve been here.”
I let myself believe him because it’s the only way I’ll ever be able to sleep tonight.
CAMILLE
There were nights I went to Will’s condo that I stood alone in the street, watching from outside. But Will and Sadie lived up too high. It was hard to see inside from the street.
And so one night I helped myself to the fire escape.
I dressed in all black, scrambled up six flights like a cat burglar in the night.
On the sixth floor, I sat on the steel platform, just outside his kitchen window. I looked in, but it was dark inside their home, the dead of night, hard to see much of anything. And so I sat awhile, wishing Will would wake up, that he would come to me.
I lit up a smoke while I waited. I flicked the lighter awhile, watched the flame burst from the end of the wick. I dragged my finger through the flame, wanting it to hurt, but it didn’t hurt. I just wanted to feel something, anything, pain. All I felt was empty inside. I let the flame burn for a while. I let the lighter get all heated up. I pressed it to my palm and held it there before drawing it away, smiling at my handiwork.
An angry round burn on the palm of my hand smiled back at me.
I got to my feet. I wiggled my sleeping legs to get the blood back to flowing. Pins and needles stabbed at me.
The city around me was bedazzling. There were lights everywhere. In the distance, streets buzzed, buildings gleamed.
I stayed there all night. Will never came for me. Because our life together wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows. We had good days, we had bad.
There were days we were a match made in heaven. There were days we were incompatible, completely out of sync.
Our time spent together, no matter how good or bad it may have been, came with the realization that he would never know me as he knew Sadie. Because what the other woman gets is another woman’s table scraps, never the full meal.
Moments with Will were hidden, rushed. I learned to steal my time wisely with Will, to make moments happen. I went to him in his classroom once, let myself inside the room when it was empty, took him by surprise. He was standing at his desk when I came in. I closed and locked the door behind myself, went to him. I hitched my dress up to my waistline, shimmied onto his desk, parted my legs. Let him see for himself that I had nothing on underneath.
