I try desperately to abort a bad situation. “Tell me what I can do for you, Genevieve. Is there something you need? Something that will help you escape?” I ask, my voice louder than the other two, but still, losing composure as before me the scene falls to pieces. I tell Genevieve that I have a friend who is a pilot, a man who owns a small private jet, and how he might be able to help her flee. There’s a small, regional airport in Benton Harbor, just two or three miles from here. I’ll put in a call. I’ll ask my friend to meet us there.
Genevieve looks at me then and spits out, “You’re lying, Alex. You’re lying. You don’t have any friends,” and my breath catches, thinking a knife wound would have felt better than that.
You were my friend, I want to tell her. I thought you were my friend. But those words won’t help. I need to stay rational, and forget that in the mix of all of this, I, too, have been hurt. This isn’t about me. This is about Ingrid, Genevieve and Esther. It’s their story, not mine.
“Genevieve,” I say instead, trying to catch her attention like a game of Capture the Flag. For one split second out of the corner of my eye, I think I see a shape in the window, a pair of eyes looking in at me. Chalky-white skin, hair dyed a faux red, a menthol cigarette perched between a pair of thin, chapped lips, clouds of smoke seeping into the autumn air. Red.
But then it’s gone.
“Genevieve,” I say again, steering my words around Ingrid’s desperate keening, which is doing much more harm than good. “Genevieve. Listen to me, Genevieve. I’ll help you get out of here,” I tell her. “Where do you want to go? I’ll take you anyplace you want to go. I can get you there.” I say it once and then I say it again, quieter this time. “I can get you there.”
But nobody is listening anymore to what I have to say. We’ve all turned our attention to Genevieve. Genevieve, who regales us with the tale of the night she scaled an apartment building on Chicago’s north side and forced her way in through a bedroom window. The window was closed, but she got herself in, anyway, with the help of a slotted screwdriver and some elbow grease. She climbed through the window frame and into the bedroom and there, sound asleep in her bed, was her baby sister, Esther. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen her, of course. They’d met before, an attempt at reunification that failed miserably when Genevieve threatened to expose Ingrid. From that moment on, Esther didn’t want a thing to do with her. She wanted Genevieve to go away. But Genevieve didn’t want to go away. She wanted them to be a family.
“Esther,” Genevieve spews. “Esther,” she says again with an abhorrence on her tongue. “Esther refused. She wouldn’t do it, she said she couldn’t do it, to you,” she says, staring into Ingrid’s desperate eyes. “You’d get in trouble, she said, if people found out I wasn’t ever dead. What would people think if they knew? Esther asked me. Do you think I care what anybody thinks?” she asks.
“And so,” she says, hands up in the air as if admitting to something careless, negligent, a simple mistake, an easy oops—having forgotten a carton of milk at the grocery store or leaving a candle unattended for too long, “I killed her.” She draws that knife across her very own neck—close, but not close enough to lacerate the skin or leave a mark even. “Like this. This is what I did.”
And then for five long seconds the room goes quiet and still.
Five, four, three, two, one.
Bang.
Ingrid moves first, charging from the sofa like a linebacker and into Genevieve, though neither of them falls to the ground. Neither one falls, nor does the knife slip from Genevieve’s grip. I watch and wait and hope that it will happen, that it will happen soon, but it doesn’t. They grapple for the knife, two women locked in a gauche embrace, fighting for the weapon. And when it doesn’t happen, when the knife doesn’t fall, I know I need to move quickly, I need to act quickly, I need to do something. Save Ingrid! a voice screams in my ear. Save Ingrid! I’m keenly aware that Ingrid is on the verge of losing this fight. I can’t sit idly by and watch Ingrid die. Ingrid is a good person; she is. They struggle for a single second before I join the scuffle, three bodies united with a knife wedged somewhere in between.
It’s inevitable that someone will get hurt.
It’s bound to happen.
It’s then, as the knife slips through my skin with the ease of a foot sliding into a pair of socks or a shoe, that I hear it: the sublime sound of police sirens hollering through the streets of town, coming to save me.
It’s as the blood begins to seep from the aperture of my skin that I feel it: a searing pain that immobilizes me. I can’t move, though all around me the others have begun to drift away, watching on with round, agog eyes, mouths parted, fingers pointing. Before my eyes, Ingrid and Genevieve, the both of them, begin to blur. The knife remains inside me, protruding from my abdomen, and at seeing the knife, I slowly smile. After the commotion is through, I’m the one who’s managed to walk away with the knife.
I’m the victor, for once in my life. I won.
The room around me begins to wax and wane like the lake at high tide. And this is what I see: the lake, Lake Michigan, my anchor. The cornerstone of my existence, my mainstay.
They say that your entire life drifts before your eyes in those last few minutes before you die.
This is what I see.
The room around me turns blue and begins to ripple from the walls, across the wooden floors, a breaker coming at me, my feet sinking into sand. I sink into the water then, the blue water of the lake threatening to drown me, or to carry me home perhaps. Home. The lake, Lake Michigan, my home.
Before I know what’s happening I’m three years old again, toddling along the beach for the very first time, gathering beach rocks in a plastic pail. Geodes and lightning stones and quartz. Rocks, all rocks, making my pail grow heavy with time. My mother is there, loitering where the water meets sand, sitting on the beach, her feet lost in the lake’s surge. The sand sticks to her feet, her legs, her hands. She wears cutoff denim shorts and a frumpy T-shirt, one that once belonged to Pops. The shorts she made herself, sheared a pair of jeans off between the waist and the knee so that the edges turn to rags. They fray at the hem, white threads falling from the denim shorts, trailing the length of her gaunt legs.
What she loves is the beach glass, and so when I find it, I collect it in my uninhibited hand and run to her, tiny fragments of beach glass in my sandy palm, pale blue and a washed-out green. My mother smiles at me, this timorous sort of smile that says smiling doesn’t come with ease. But still, she smiles, a forced smile that tells me she’s trying. She runs a hesitant hand along mine as she takes the pail from my hand. She invites me to sit down beside her, and together we piece through the rocks, sorting by shape, and then by color. My mother has a rock for me, as well, a tiny tan saucer that she sets in the palm of my grimy hand, telling me to Hold tight; don’t lose it. An Indian bead, she tells me. Crinoid stems. I’m far too young for words like this, and yet they’re ones that wind their way to my heart like a tree’s sinuous roots, anchoring me to the ground, feeding my soul.
I hold tight; I don’t lose it.
And then, like that, I am eight years old. Eight years old and sad and alone and awkward, a boy too tall for his lanky frame. Sitting by myself on the beach, kicking bare feet at the sand, my eyes obliviously searching the sand for crinoid stems. I watch the way the granules of sand rise up in the air and then fall, dispersing through the air like dandelion seeds. Again and again and again. Rise up and fall, rise up and fall. I dig myself a hole in the ground with an old toy shovel some other kid left behind. I think I might just want to bury myself inside. Bury myself inside and never come out. All I want is my mother, but my mother isn’t here. I stare at that place where the water meets sand, where the waves come crashing onto the shore. I do it to be sure, but sure enough, she isn’t there. She’s nowhere.