She could not have given Stefan a better present.
* * *
I forced myself to do the things that ordinary people without morbid obsessions did. One of those things was forcing myself to put in some hours every day on my book. To my surprise, the book, which really amounted to a knitted-together series of my class lectures, was nearing the home stretch. My thesis was that in life and in fiction, women who’d lost someone—a child, a husband, a sibling, a love—felt incomplete, in ways men in similar straits did not, and were therefore vulnerable to desperate and even doomed adventures. Whether raving or retiring, desperate women make for a dramatic narrative and soon, their familiar stories captivated me all over again. Only two chapters remained unfinished, then I would give the whole thing a polish and it would be ready long before the summer deadline.
Inevitably, I thought of Esme, recently silent. What if I was wrong about her? Well, I thought, things would then be no worse than they already were. We would go on. I knew that I would always be drawn back and back and back to the night Belinda died. Whatever we knew, we could never know enough, we could never forget enough. What if Pete Sunday never found Esme? What if Stefan remained in danger, our never knowing its source? Back then, I wished for safety; he wished for peace. Neither of us knew then that we were wishing for the wrong thing, and I could include Esme in that too. By the time Esme next reached out to me, her fate had already begun to overtake her. One day, there Esme was, her text jumping up on my phone screen, again with the strange familiarity, as if we’d just spoken an hour before.
How is Stefan? Is he okay?
I replied, He’s fine. Very busy.
Good. As long as he never tells!
I think we should get together, I replied. And then she was gone. Infuriated, I called Pete Sunday and gave him the latest in Esme’s string of phone numbers.
When I saw Stefan later that night, I said, “That girl. That girl who texts me. Esme. If she ever contacts you, tell me. The police think she might be part of this harassment thing. I think she’s just barking at the moon. But let’s be safe anyhow.”
“I could not care less about your whacked-out callers, Mom. I’m trying to move on.” While he still missed Belinda, that was something he had accepted he would always feel. So he was filling his time with his business and getting ready to start school this coming semester, reading letters for the next Healing Project, seeing Will and Will’s friends. “I’m the person who only looks forward.”
That night, I got a text from Esme. It read simply, I am going away. I will call you.
My sleep was restless afterward. My phone didn’t ring, but I dreamed that it had, and I quickly answered, noticing that it was Esme’s number. But when the caller spoke, it was Belinda. I woke up fuddled, and stumbled through my days.
I don’t believe in ghosts. But now, with what I hoped would be a reckoning so near, Belinda was everywhere. A figure walking away from me on a quiet street transformed as if made of water into Belinda, her spine neat as a viola, her stride, her long bright hair. The TV picture faded to a shadow but the outline of her face seemed to waver in the dark glass. A voice in a crowd set itself apart from the others, raised in a cry. Was that how Belinda cried out when Esme attacked her? My mind shied from the thought. There were nights when she seemed especially close, when small strange things happened. A curtain of shells that hung mostly forgotten from the porthole window in my room began to clatter and shiver, without the breath of a breeze to stir it. I lay down in the gloaming to read and I felt a warm breath at my cheek. Portents are another thing I don’t believe in, but it was as if Belinda herself wanted something from me. I knew full well that this was a delusion. I also knew that it felt true. And it scared me.
It reminded me of when I was a new mother, going through a phase of being afraid of the dark. Jep and I traded sides on the bed so that he was nearer the door and could protect me from what he teasingly called “the black rectangle of doom.” Now, two decades later, I shamefacedly asked him to do the same thing, not sure why it made me feel better to know that an assailant would have to take three extra steps to cut my throat, not certain why the assailant wouldn’t just cut Jep’s throat instead. I didn’t ever want to see that slight young guy in the hoodie again. But I wondered what he was up to if it wasn’t scaring me.
“I keep waiting for somebody to do something else to us. What are they waiting for?” I asked Jep one morning, as we ate our oatmeal. “But I guess, it makes sense, if you were going to really hurt somebody, would you do it while that person was on guard or when that person was confident that the worst was over?”