At first I think no one is staying there. Nothing is out of place, no mug on the kitchen counter, no book on the coffee table, not even a dent in the couch cushions. In the bedroom, though, a suitcase sits on the bench at the foot of the bed. A Louis Vuitton roller bag. It takes me a second to recognize it as the one I arrived with—
Because it was never yours.
I run my hand over the embossed leather surface. I have never owned anything so fancy. Why didn’t I question where I had gotten it?
But I can picture it now, sitting at the bottom of the stairs, all packed and ready to go. I’d simply picked it up on my way out. I open the suitcase and see the neatly folded clothes. Laurel’s clothes. Why hadn’t I wondered how I’d ended up with them?
Because you didn’t want to remember I was dead.
The red veil begins to fall but I blink it away. I see myself walking up the stairs, my feet sinking into the wet carpet. I can feel myself going back in time, to the moment when I woke in the tub with Peter’s hands on my shoulders. I shy away from it—
Because he tried to kill you.
Yes. I force myself not to retreat from the thought now. I watch myself walk up the stairs and into the bathroom. There’s blood everywhere, pouring over the rim of the tub, staining the bath mat and the baby blanket—
The baby blanket.
It’s lying on the floor and Chloë is lying on top of it. She’s crying. I pick her up. Her playsuit is soaked. The blanket is soaked. I hold her to me and look down into the tub and see—
Myself.
Because you thought you were back in the moment when Peter tried to kill you.
I blink and my face becomes Laurel’s face. Her eyes are open, staring sightlessly at me, her lacerated hands float palms up in the water as if she were holding her arms out for the baby I hold in my arms. She doesn’t want me to give her the baby, though. She wants me take her, to save her. She’s telling me that if I have to think of her as my Chloe to save her, then that is what I should do.
“That’s why I took her,” I say, turning to Edith. “That’s how I could think of her as my own. I had to in order to save her.”
But Edith isn’t looking at me. She’s looking past me to the doorway, her green eyes wide as if she too has been confronted by a ghost from her past. I turn around and find Sky Bennett in the doorway.
“I thought you’d show up,” she says. But she’s not talking to me, she’s talking to Edith.
Edith steps forward with a smile on her face. “Of course I came back to you!” she says. “I always come back to you, Libby.”
Edith’s Journal, November 7, 1971
Libby says if I go to Nurse Landry at the infirmary she’ll have to call my parents. “And besides,” she adds, “it’s probably too late to do anything about it. When was the last time you were with Cal?”
I think back to that night at the lake—our “last” and only time—and tell Libby the date in June.
“Over five months,” she says. “That’s too late. They’ll send you home to have the baby. Will your parents be cool with that? Aren’t they kind of religious?”
I tell her no, they will not be cool with me having a baby out of wedlock. And yes, they are religious. Papa is a Baptist preacher. Mama teaches Sunday school.
“So they’ll probably ship you off to some home for fallen women,” Libby says. “Then they’ll give the baby away. Maybe your fella, Cal, could help out.”
I started to cry then because in my last letter to Cal I told him I was thinking I might want to go to Europe after college and I hadn’t heard back from him since.
“What a wet blanket,” Libby said. “But don’t worry. We’ll go away somewhere where you can have the baby and then we’ll find some nice people to raise it. You don’t want it, do you? I mean, we can’t very well travel to Europe with a baby.”
I told her I didn’t want it. It made me feel sick saying it, like the baby might hear me, but I could tell that’s what Libby wanted me to say and I need Libby to help me. And she does want to help me. When I asked her why, she said a true friend helped you when you didn’t even know you needed help.
She says we have to wait for Christmas break so she can go home and get some money hidden at her house. She’s says she’s got some money hidden away up in the old tower. We’ll go get it and then we’ll hide out in the Catskills until I have the baby. There’s an old cabin on the property where we can stay. She’s friends with some of the guards at the hospital, who will bring us food. When I asked her if she wasn’t afraid of living so close to a mental hospital she said that was a very close-minded question. A lot of people in mental hospitals were just misunderstood creative geniuses. Hadn’t I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? She was friends with a lot of the patients and many of them were great artists who simply didn’t fit into bourgeois society.
That’s when I guessed that her “artist” must be one of the patients. No wonder she didn’t want to marry him.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I wait for Sky to deny that she’s Libby but instead she opens up her arms. Edith rushes into them and they embrace. There are tears in Sky’s eyes when she lets Edith go. “I’m so glad
