I look online and this is what I come to learn. For thirty-four smackers, I can request birth and death certificates from the State of Michigan’s vital records office, but I have to mail in a request, pay twelve bucks more to have it expedited and then wait. I don’t have time to wait. I need the answers now. By the looks of it, the vital records office may or may not even send me the information I need; seems much of it—birth records, in particular—is confidential. I don’t really need Genevieve’s birth certificate, anyway, but her death certificate would come in handy, something to help me understand why that casket is empty.
I try another angle. I research the old house, hoping to find some sort of chain of title so I can track down the family that once lived there. Unfortunate thing is, that house has been abandoned so long it predates the world of Zillow and Trulia. The bankruptcies and foreclosures I pull up online all happened over the past couple of years, a dumpy duplex on the west side of town, a slummy home on the east and a couple dozen more listings in between. A sign of the times, I guess. It’s sad, all those people tossed out of their homes because they can’t pay the bills. Pretty soon, Pops and I will be there, too, standing on some busy four-way intersection, bearing cardboard signs that read Homeless and Please Help, feeling grateful for a buck or two.
I do a quick scan for Genevieve’s obituary online, hoping to find a name there for next of kin. But this is what I find: nada, nothing. I type in her name followed by the word obituary, and then check twice to be sure I’ve spelled the words correctly. I add in the name of our tiny little town to narrow the search field, but it comes up empty. Well, not empty, per se, but it pulls up a whole bunch of trash I don’t want or need: a middle-aged lady from Hamilton, Ohio; a Dominican nun from Nashville, Tennessee, dead at the age of eighty-two. Not my Genevieve. Far as I can tell, there isn’t an obituary for the little girl anywhere. Maybe it’s just that it’s been twenty-some years since she died, or maybe it’s something else.
A librarian passes by and I inquire about microfilm, hoping I might find a two-decade-old obituary from the local paper stored there. She stands before me with a pair of bifocals dangling from a golden chain, her hair a latticework of white. She might just be the oldest person I’ve ever seen, and while I follow her through the library and to the microfilm reader squirreled away on the other side—passing two younger librarians who are no doubt faster and more technologically adept than she and thinking this is all a colossal waste of time—it turns out she’s exactly the person I need.
Before we ever even make it to the microfilm machine, she asks of me, “Doing research?” and I say, “I guess you could call it that.”
“What kind of information are you looking for?” she asks in a helpful sort of way, not nosy, and though I hesitate, I tell her. “I’m trying to get some information on that old abandoned home out on Laurel Avenue.”
She stops. “What kind of information are you looking for?” she asks. I have her attention, and whether or not I want it, I don’t know. But I don’t have the first clue how to use a microfilm machine, and so it seems I’m going to need her help with this.
“Just trying to figure out who used to live there,” I say casually, like this is no big deal at all. But her answer is completely unexpected. Her voice and her demeanor change, and she looks at me like I’m either a complete idiot or I’ve been living under a giant sedimentary rock.
“You don’t need a microfilm machine for that,” she says, leaning in close, the smell of her Aqua Net hair spray making me want to retch. “I can tell you who used to live in that house,” she says, her face just inches away so I can see the eroding teeth, the transparency of her corrugated skin, and though I’m expecting the obvious, for her to say something cryptic and obscure about the ghost of Genevieve, what she says turns my world on end and makes me question everything I once thought I knew was true.
My Dearest,
You took my family away from me, and now you need to know how it feels to lose something you love. It was your fault I had to go. I want to be sure you know. They told me I was a bad girl, and that was why I couldn’t stay. But we both know that’s not true.
It wasn’t that girl’s fault. You should know that. It was yours. I wish I could say that I care that she’s gone, but I don’t. It had to be done. It was simple, it really was, a sleight of hand: swapping the flour while you were at work. You really must get better locks on your doors, my dear. You don’t want strangers skulking around your home when you’re not there.
It was priceless, too, watching from my vantage point as you scooped that flour into a bowl, and then fed it to your poor, unsuspecting friend. The grasping at her neck, the vomiting, the scene spiraling so quickly out of control. Better than I could have ever imagined. Priceless, it was. Just priceless. I had to wait days for you to serve that fallacious flour, but it was well worth the wait. Well worth the wait as I watched the scene play out before me, like a performance I had scripted myself. Absolutely perfect.
Unfortunate, really unfortunate, too, that I’d done away with the girl’s EpiPen. That would have come in handy, wouldn’t it have? It’s mine now.
It’s your fault I came back, you know. You’re the one who found me. You could have just let me be. Were it not for you, I never would have discovered that I was already dead.
If only you could see me now, sweet Esther. If only you could see what I’ve become.
I’ve been watching you for a while now, long enough to know your habits, your customs, your routine. I’ve been trailing you to work, to school. On your errands. Did you see me? Did you know that I was there?
I shop where you shop and I dress how you dress. The same shoes, the same coat, the same hair. It wasn’t hard to do. Once you were the only Esther Vaughan, but now I am Esther, too.
You thought that you could change your name, that you could simply disappear. That you could pay me to go. How naive.
You were always her favorite, but if I’m you, then maybe she’ll love me, too.
All my love,
EV
Alex
All the way there, I run, my feet hammering against concrete, though I’m completely anesthetized. I can’t feel a thing.
I pound on the door when I arrive—once, twice, three times—watching as the metal portal shifts in its casing from the momentum of my blow. And then again and again.
She opens the door with a quizzical look on her face, and stands before me, her hair pulled back from her eyes, her gentle hands folded over her abdomen.
“Alex,” she says in a way that is both a question and a statement as I let myself inside and push the door to. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Everything all right?”
I can’t reply. There are no words. I fight to catch my breath as Ingrid slips down the foyer and into the kitchen. I listen to the sound of her footsteps as she goes, unable to speak because I can’t summon the breath to speak. I double over, dropping my sweaty hands to my knees, and then, when that doesn’t do it, I squat down to the floor. “Let me get you some water,” Ingrid says from a distance, and before I can say a thing, I hear the sound of a kitchen faucet spilling water into the sink; the jarring noise of ice cubes plummeting from an ice-maker and into a glass; the seagulls outside, cawing in the distance over the sound of a truck that passes by on the abandoned street, the bobbing of tires as they yoyo over the quarried stone. Breathe, I tell myself. Just breathe.