It was Helen, not Ronnie, who said they should take the jack-in-the-box back to the cabin in the woods, so people would believe Ronnie when she said Alice was there. Helen understood better than anyone what a good liar Alice was. But if one of Alice’s toys was there, if Ronnie told the part about the pool, and how they had gone home together-then, just then, people might believe Alice had done it. Helen had said, Helen had promised.
“I can’t undo what you’ve done,” she told Ronnie, holding her, stroking her hair. “But I can make sure that Alice doesn’t go unpunished. I can make it fair.”
Now, Ronnie knew. Alice had gotten what she wanted: She had made Ronnie go away. But she had to go away, too, and that was the grudge she carried to this day. Alice would not rest until she succeeded in banishing Ronnie again. Alice was the good girl, and Ronnie was the bad girl, and Alice would keep insisting on those facts. If she knew how Helen had taken Ronnie’s side, she would only become more fierce in her determination to drive Ronnie out. She would never let Ronnie be, which was all Ronnie really wanted. Just to be.
Ronnie’s hair, which she had piled on top of her head with a clip, was beginning to slip, and she sat up to rearrange it. Her elbow caught her father’s razor, knocking it from the ledge of the tub. Her mother must have used it to shave her legs, which always pissed her father off. Ronnie ran it along her own legs, which still showed the scars of her long-ago handiwork. Cutting herself hadn’t been a plan, not at first. She loved the sensation of breaking through her own skin, the taste of blood as it gathered beneath her fingernails. Surrendering that lovely habit had been the price of staying in Shechter Unit, but it had been hard. She missed the sensation of drawing blood from herself, of attacking the places that itched and taunted her. She had only stopped because she wanted to stay in Shechter. She could resume if she wanted to. Those rules no longer applied.
It proved to be hard work, opening her veins, but not as hard as it had been all those years ago, when Ronnie had scratched and bitten and clawed through her own flesh. The skin on her wrists reminded her of the almost transparent slices of Parmesan that her mother cut when she was making noodle casseroles. The cheese was so hard on the rind, waxy and hard to remove, yet so fragile once separated.
Finally, the blood began flowing and Ronnie leaned back, arms propped on the ledges of the tub. No one cuts me but me. She smiled at the memory of the shocked look on the detective’s face, her expression so similar to the one Maddy’s mom had worn all those years ago, when Ronnie’s fist hit her chin. It had been a good line.
If only Ronnie had more good lines, more words, better words, words that she could put together so people would understand her, know who she really was. If only she could be like Alice, who was never at a loss for what to say-who, in fact, came to believe everything she said so fiercely that her stories might as well be true. Alice would find a way to discount what Ronnie had told her tonight, would decide it was a lie, or that she hadn’t heard it right. She might come to accept that Helen had given Ronnie the jack-in-the-box, but not on that particular night or for that particular reason. Alice was so good at sweeping away the facts that didn’t fit her version of things. Ronnie saw her back in the cabin, sweeping the floor with a broom she had insisted on lugging there, indifferent to the fact that she was just moving dirt over dirt. And Helen would never admit that the jack-in-the-box was her idea, so-two against one. Even alone with Ronnie, Helen had not spoken directly of the truth that bound them, the secret that only they knew. “Between us” was another way of saying only between us.
Besides, nothing, not even Helen’s private sympathy, could change the central fact of who Ronnie was. She was the girl who had killed a baby. Ronnie, not Alice. She could say “I’m sorry” a million times over, could go to adult prison for the rest of her life, become a nun, work her way up to manage the Bagel Barn, marry and have her own children. She could do anything and everything, but she could not undo her past, despite the promises her doctor had made. It was what she was, all she was, and all she would ever be.
She was getting woozy, and her hair was trailing in the water again, but she no longer cared. Bit by bit, her upper body followed the strands of her hair. Her bath took on a pinkish hue, as if she had been using rose-scented oils. Ronnie wondered if she would fight the water as it came over her face, if she would change her mind at the last minute.
She didn’t.
Thursday, October 8
37.
“The date is wrong.”
“Excuse me?”
“The date. It’s wrong.”
“I think I know the day my daughter was born-October 8. Today. It’s why I’m here. Today is my daughter’s birthday.”
“No, the day she…the day that…the second date. July 17. That was the day she disappeared. But not-well, it’s not exactly right.”
Cynthia Barnes followed Nancy Porter’s tentative finger: July 17, seven years ago. The girl was right. How could such a mistake have been made? She and Warren had brought so much care to the task of burying their daughter. This, after all, would be the only ritual they would plan for her. There had been seemingly endless decisions-picking out a headstone, planning a service, debating the bas-relief lamb and whether it would be over the top to add William Blake’s familiar lines. No poetry, Cynthia had finally decreed. The short span of Olivia’s life was more eloquent than any couplet ever written.
So how had this oversight happened? Was Olivia dead to her parents from the moment she disappeared? Had Cynthia and Warren lost hope, and in doing so, lost their daughter? Cynthia was still not beyond such bouts of self-recrimination.
Which meant, she understood now, that she never would be, that she didn’t really want to be. Forget and forgive, the old adages advised, although most people switched the order, put the forgiveness cart before the forgetting horse. But if you were determined not to forget something, to remember a deed in all its stark horror, then you would have to be a saint to forgive it. Cynthia had never aspired to sainthood.
“It doesn’t really matter,” Nancy said. “It’s just that, well, I can’t help remembering the date.”
You remember for you, Cynthia thought, because it was central to your life. But she no longer availed herself of the privilege of saying whatever she wished. She might not be a saint, but she also wasn’t Sharon Kerpelman, thank God.