Genevieve’s feet tread back and forth across the room. Her steps are measured steps, while on the sofa, Ingrid and I sit. She is fairly composed; I am anything but. Ingrid is scared, yes, though it’s a relenting fear, a telltale sign of defeat. She gives up. She sits gingerly, posture straight, her hands folded in her lap. Her hair is tame. Her eyes remain on Genevieve the entire time, never straying, hardly blinking. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t ask to be let go, while I, on the other hand, want to do all of these things, but I don’t. I can’t. I can’t speak.
I see then the similar shape to their eyes, their noses, the lack of a smile. It’s there in the minute details: the thin lips with their sharp angles, the upturned noses. The angular diamond structure of their faces, the broad cheekbones, the pointy chins. The color of their eyes.
“You have to understand,” Ingrid says, her voice shaking like a wooden maraca. “I did the very best I could. I tried everything. Everything,” she repeats. Genevieve’s feet continue to tread along the floor. I could run and tackle her or subdue her in some other way, but there’s no telling where the knife would land. My lungs, my kidneys, my abdomen.
“Things were different back then,” Ingrid says. “These days every child is diagnosed with some disorder. Autism, Asperger’s, ADHD. But it wasn’t the case back then. Back then these kids were just bad kids. You, Genevieve, you were a bad girl. These days I would’ve brought you to a psychologist and they’d slap a diagnosis on you and make you take some pills. But that wasn’t the case back then, over twenty years ago.
“There was so much talk, Genevieve. About the things you did, the things you didn’t do. The things you did to the children at school. People were talking. At only five years old, they’d say, imagining what you’d do as you grew older and more callous and calculated. People were afraid to imagine. I was afraid to imagine.
“And you know what they did when you misbehaved? The teachers, the neighbors. They looked down on me,” Ingrid explains as a tear wiggles loose from her eye and runs the length of her cheek. It hovers there at her trembling chin, hanging on for dear life. I watch on, still trying to process the repentance in Ingrid’s words, the fact that she’s not in the least bit surprised a living, breathing Genevieve is standing before her in this room. She knew all along that she was alive, that the body she purportedly toted back from a hotel was not that of her dead daughter. She let the townsfolk bury an empty box, let them believe Genevieve was dead. She let them feel sorry for her.
Meanwhile, she gave Genevieve up just like that.
What kind of mother does that to her child?
It’s not easy, she told me, being a mother.
“You were hard enough to handle,” she says, “but that was before I had Esther. We both know how you felt about Esther, Genevieve. The things I saw you do to that girl... She was only a baby. How could you do those things to Esther?” she begs, and with that her voice trails off to nothingness. Just vapor. Air. She doesn’t speak and for a moment the room grows quiet and still.
In time Ingrid goes on, her words clipped like the clickety-clack of typewriter keys, banging out the story for me. Genevieve was more than a headache for Ingrid. More than a pest. She had a mean streak in her, a crazy side, a fit of rage. That’s what Ingrid says.
“You remember the things you did to Esther?” Ingrid asks. “Of course you do. You must.” And then she reminds her, in case somehow she’s forgotten. She reminds her of the time Genevieve attempted to suffocate baby Esther while she slept soundly in her cradle. Were it not for Lady Luck steering Ingrid to Esther’s crib just in time, the baby would have succumbed to the weight of the pillow, the diminishing air. That’s what Ingrid says, her words now plaited with anger. She tried hard to make excuses for it at the time, to tell herself that Genevieve didn’t know what she was doing as she laid that pillow on the baby’s dormant face and pressed, but somewhere inside she knew that Genevieve knew what she was doing. Even at the young age of four or five, Genevieve knew that this one small act could make that baby go away. And that was exactly what she wanted; she wanted the baby to go away.
Silence befalls the room. Everything is quiet. Everything except for the sound of Ingrid’s subtle cry. That and a clock on the wall, the sound of the rapid tick, tick, tick—to accompany my own brisk heartbeats—as that secondhand moves its way around the face of the clock. And then, like that, a tiny door opens and a bird emerges. A cuckoo clock, warbling out twelve o’clock. It’s noon. And the room is no longer quiet. Chirrup. Chirrup. Twelve times. Across the street, the café is imaginably busy, people coming and going, completely unaware of what is happening here. My only hope is with Priddy. That Priddy is packing lunch for Ingrid as we speak: a BLT with a mountain of fries and a pickle on the side.
“I knew that I couldn’t keep you. It was dangerous for Esther, dangerous for me. I did the very best I could. I found a reputable adoption agency and they found you a good home. Your adoptive family, Genevieve, they were good people. They could take care of you better than I ever could.”
“Or maybe you just didn’t bother to try,” Genevieve snaps.
“I tried,” whispers Ingrid under her breath. “Oh, how I tried.
“How did you find us?” asks Ingrid then, reaching shaking fingers out to touch the pearl bracelet on Genevieve’s thin wrist. Pearl. The bracelet is pulled taut, the elastic showing through the beads, cutting into her skin. “You have that still?” she inquires, telling or maybe reminding Genevieve, “I made that for you. When you were just a girl. You still have it,” she says, and this time it isn’t a question. Ingrid made that pearl bracelet for Genevieve when she was a girl.
Genevieve ignores this. She yanks her hand away from Ingrid’s gentle touch. “What you mean to ask is how did Esther find me? Yeah, that’s right. It was Esther who found me. She found me online. She reached out, but then just like that, she wanted me gone. She tried to pay me to go away. Can you believe that? But you see, I didn’t want to go away. I wanted to be with my family. With you and with Esther. And when Esther refused, I thought maybe I could just be with you. If I looked like Esther, if I acted like Esther, then maybe you’d love me, too. Especially if Esther was no longer around.”
“What did you do to Esther?” asks Ingrid in distress, and Genevieve shrugs her shoulders and says, “You’ll see,” and then she urges Ingrid to go on, to finish her narrative about how she ended up bringing a phony casket home from that hotel, claiming the little girl was dead in a tragic bathtub incident.
“This doesn’t change the fact that your potential adopters, Genevieve, your new parents were exemplary. I saw the paperwork. I was there behind the scenes the first time you met. He a doctor and she a schoolteacher. They would take care of you. I thought this was for the best. I thought they would take better care of you than I ever could.”
“You told me you had an errand to run. You left me with some man I didn’t know. Be a good little girl, you said. And then you were gone.”
“I was there, Genevieve. Watching through the window. I saw them come, and shortly after, I saw you go. Your new mother held you by the hand. She held your hand as you left. And I...” she stammers, trying again, “I...” Her voice trails off before she completes the thought, sagging against the weight of the sofa cushions, her rigid body becoming sloppy. “I’ve never felt so relieved. You were gone,” she says, and, “It was through.”
“It was never through,” says Genevieve as she rises from the sofa and again begins to pace. “You left me. You gave me up. You picked Esther over me—that’s exactly what you did. All you cared about was Esther. Esther, Esther, Esther. But never me.”
“I didn’t think that you’d remember,” Ingrid confides. “You were too young to remember what I’d done. I thought that you’d be happy.”