“Was it you? Were you up there, Imogen?”
She snorts. “You’re an idiot if you think I’d ever go back up there,” she says.
I mull that over. She could be lying. Imogen strikes me as a masterful liar.
She leans against the door frame, crosses her arms.
“Do you know, Sadie,” she says, looking pleased with herself, and I realize that she’s never called me by name before, “what a person looks like when they die?”
Suffice to say, I do. I’ve seen plenty of fatalities in my life.
But the question, on Imogen’s tongue, leaves me at a loss for words.
Imogen doesn’t want an answer. It’s for shock value; she’s trying to intimidate me. She goes on to describe in disturbing detail the way Alice looked the day she found her, hanging in the attic from a rope. Imogen had been at school that day. She took the ferry home as usual, came into a quiet house to discover what Alice had done.
“There were claw marks on her neck,” she says, raking her own violet fingernails down her pale neckline. “Her fucking tongue was purple. It got stuck, hanging out of her mouth, clamped between her teeth like this,” she says as she sticks her own tongue out at me and bites down. Hard.
I’ve seen victims of strangulation before. I know how the capillaries on the face break, how the eyes become bloodshot from the accumulation of blood behind them. As an emergency medicine physician, I’ve been trained to look for this in victims of domestic violence, for signs of strangulation. But I imagine that, for a sixteen-year-old girl, seeing your mother in this state would be traumatizing.
“She nearly bit the fucking thing off,” Imogen says about Alice’s tongue. She begins to laugh then, this ill-timed, uncontrollable laugh that gets to me. Imogen stands three feet away, devoid of emotion other than this unseemly gleeful display. “Want to see?” she asks, though I don’t know what she means by this.
“See what?” I ask carefully, and she says, “What she did with her tongue.”
I don’t want to see. But she shows me anyway, a photograph of her dead mother. It’s there on her cell phone. She forces the phone into my hands. The color drains from my face.
Before the police arrived that dreadful day, Imogen had the audacity to take a picture on her phone.
Alice, dressed in a pale pink tunic sweater and leggings, hangs from a noose. Her head is tilted, the rope boring into her neck. Her body is limp, arms at her sides, legs unbending. Storage boxes surround her, ones that were once piled two or three high but now lie on their sides, contents falling out. A lamp is on the ground, colored glass scattered at random. A telescope—once used to stare at the sky out through the attic window, perhaps—is also on its side, everything, presumably, knocked violently over as Alice died. The step stool she used to climb up into the gallows stands four feet away, upright.
I think of what Alice must have gone through as she climbed the three steps to her death, as she slipped her head into the knot. The ceilings of the attic are not high. Alice would have had to measure the rope in advance, to be certain that when she stepped off the stool, her feet would not touch the ground. She dropped by only a couple of inches at best. The fall was small; her neck wouldn’t have broken from the height, which means that death was painful and slow. The evidence of that is there, in the picture. The broken lamp, the claw marks, the nearly severed tongue.
“Why’d you take this?” I ask, trying to remain calm. I don’t want to give her what she wants.
She shrugs her shoulders, asks, with a blatant disregard for her mother’s life, “Why the hell not?”
I hide my shock as Imogen takes the phone and turns slowly from me. She goes back into her room, leaving me shaken. I pray that Otto, in his own room just next door, has his earbuds in. I pray that he didn’t hear that awful exchange.
I retreat to the bedroom where I change into my pajamas and stand at the window, waiting for Will to come home. I stare into the home next door. There’s a light on inside, the very same light that goes on at seven and off near midnight each night. No one lives in that home this time of year and I think of it,