The smacking sound.
Serene turned the knob and went inside. What she saw made no sense.
“Oh good, you’re back,” a woman Serene had never seen before said and reached to take Jesse from her arms. Serene pulled her son away, looking down to find he wasn’t there. She was carrying a bag of groceries. A girl ran up to tell her someone named Cuppa had phoned twice and texted about the Earl Grey tea. Had she seen the texts?
“Mom. Earth to Mom,” the girl said. This girl wasn’t her daughter. She wasn’t Barbara. Who were these people?
“You okay?” The woman said, taking the groceries from her. She had very short hair and a muscular build. Where was Barbara? Why was this kid impersonating her daughter and where were Sara and Jesse?
“Mom? Is something wrong?” For the first time, Serene noticed the teenage girl sitting on the sofa and the fact that her house was different. Everything was different from the floors to the walls to the furniture, and that girl. That girl over there, sitting on the sofa, she… was she Barbara, grown up somehow? And so, the other girl eyeing her must be… Serene stood frozen.
“Dora,” the muscular woman with very little hair said. “Did something happen? You look like you’ve had a shock.”
Dora.
Oh, please god, no. Dora. Dora had made her disappear. Dora had done all this.
57
Serene - November 2019
Dora had robbed her of six years, too many years to process and no one to fill her in this time. Serene tried to fake it, tried to keep the terror from consuming her, everything she’d known and could count on dashed in a matter of moments, a matter of walking out the door and back in. Walking out of one world and into another.
Barbara was still her same patient, helpful self, but she’d missed all the years of her daughter turning into a young woman. Sara and Jesse were unrecognizable, fully functioning beings. Steve. Her Steve, gone. He’d replaced her with a young brown-eyed woman, Tera, who dressed like a yoga teacher. And she had remarried. A woman. Well, Dora had, not her.
Dora had a business that Serene had no idea how to operate. Always the entrepreneur, Dora. Dora ran every day, for miles, apparently. Serene learned this during the second day of her new life, bumbling around, pretending along like she always did, but this time the changes were too stupendous. She had gone to bed the night before like a zombie, lying in the arms of her wife––Erica, she was called, pretending exhaustion, pretending sleep, trying to sneak out of bed at five in the morning.
“Have a good run,” Erica had mumbled and Serene had grunted back a reply, quietly opening drawers until she found the workout clothes to play the role, hoping they were hers and not her wife’s. They fit and she was out the door, heading she didn’t know where, exactly, just somewhere, anywhere that was away from this impossible nightmare that her life had become in the blink of an eye.
Dora.
Who was Dora?
The question prompted Serene to begin the jog. Something’s terribly wrong with me. The thought came like a lightning bolt of understanding. All these years she’d been trying to hide Dora when she should have sought help, professional help. This horrible thing she was experiencing was like that episode on the Oprah Winfrey Show Serene had watched years ago, about the woman who thought she was being stalked, but it turned out she was stalking herself. What was that woman’s condition? Something to do with other people living inside her. Serene had been struck by that story, Dora coming to mind, but seven years had gone by with no Dora and Serene thought she’d finally been rid of this bizarre alter ego that took over her life from time to time. She’d thought of seeking help way back then but had then dismissed it. Now, here she was, six years gone, obliterated, just like that. Her children raised by Dora. Her marriage ruined.
Serene’s feet pounded the ground beneath her. It was amazing how in shape she was, how fast she was going without feeling out of breath. “In through the out door,” she muttered to herself, the cover of the old Led Zeppelin album flooding her mental imagery.
When Serene returned home, Mara stood on the front steps, hair pulled back in a ponytail, in fitness attire as well, holding paper bags of bagels, leaning in to kiss the air near Serene’s ear.
“How many miles have you done today?”
Serene stared at her blankly. What was she doing here with bagels, acting like they were best friends?
Mara didn’t seem to notice Serene’s lack of response––she was already letting herself into the house, talking all the while. She went into Serene’s kitchen and said hello to the odd British woman, Cuppa, who also lived in Serene’s house. Serene was still trying to figure out how she fit in, exactly, with the family. Mara pulled out a cutting board to slice the bagels and pop them in the toaster, then rummaged around in the fridge as if she lived there, too. Did she?
Mara, who used to be Julie, who changed her name the year following Tayler’s death.
Mara the murderer.
“… And I told him,” Mara was saying, “there are so many great clothes now for men, but it’s like Enzo’s stuck in the nineties. You’d think with him being Italian, how he always liked to dress well…” And on she went. Cuppa had left the kitchen, gone upstairs where Darpan used to live. Serene remembered renovating the apartment when Barbara was four. She and Steve, side by side, ripping up the floor, putting up the drywall to make two rooms out of the massive one bedroom, the shelves Steve had later lovingly constructed for Barbara’s book collection. Cuppa, the high-strung British woman, now lived in
