murdered Daisy’s father and then dumped the body in the lake. But I suppose that’s the point of it all, for Vanessa: to throw herself into the world she wants to inhabit in the hopes of forgetting the one in which she really lives. Who am I to say she’s wrong to try? We all build our own delusions and then live inside them, constructing walls to conveniently hide the things we don’t want to see. Maybe it means that we’re crazy, or maybe it means that we’re monsters, or maybe it’s just that the world we live in now makes it so hard to separate truth from image from dream.
* * *
—
Or maybe, as Vanessa more bluntly puts it, “It’s just a way to pay the bills.”
* * *
—
We’ve spoken about Michael only once, one night when we’d had a little too much to drink. She and I were sitting in the library—now missing a half-dozen pieces that had been sold to cover expenses (that horrible painting of the prize horse was actually a John Charlton, and brought $18,000 at auction)—and watching Daisy sleep on the baby monitor. Out of the blue, Vanessa reached over and gripped my leg.
“He was evil,” she said flatly. “He would have killed us both if we hadn’t killed him first. You know that, right? Because we had to do what we did. We had to!”
I looked down at her hand, the fingernails clipped maternally short now, but still buffed and polished to a shine. But the gun wasn’t loaded, I wanted to say. Maybe we could still have found another way. “Don’t you feel…bad?” I asked, instead.
“Well, yes! Of course.” Her eyes looked yellow in the flickering firelight. “But I feel good, too, if that makes sense? I feel more…self-assured, I think. Like, I know I can trust my own instincts, finally? Though maybe that’s just the meds that my psychiatrist’s making me take!” A giddy little laugh, an echo of the manic, unpredictable Vanessa that had mostly disappeared since I’d returned. Then she leaned in and whispered: “I do hear his voice sometimes.” When I turned to stare at her, she pulled her hand away from my leg. “But it’s not like Benny’s voices, I swear! It’s like, he’s there as a whisper, trying to get me to doubt myself; and I just ignore him, and he goes away.”
I wanted to ask her, What does he say? Because I hear him, too, sometimes: his soft, false burr, cutting through my nightmares, whispering bitch, cunt, liar, murderer, nobody. But I was too afraid to know about the dark things that lived inside her head; my own were hard enough to take.
* * *
—
Yesterday, I started working on a guest room on the third floor. It was dusty and filled with cobwebs, and little of the furniture in the room had any meaningful provenance. But when I lifted one of the dust sheets I discovered a cabinet filled with brilliantly painted Meissen birds that gazed brightly at me from behind glass. I cleaned a few off and admired them before deciding that they were too cheerful to leave hidden up there in the dark.
I brought the collection down to the nursery and arranged them on a shelf near Daisy’s crib. I picked up Daisy from her swing and held her on my hip, letting her look at the goldfinch in my hand but keeping it just beyond her grasp.
Vanessa appeared in the doorway—dressed up for a photo shoot they had planned in the garden, her hair up in a casual bun, a sundress that revealed just the right amount of breastfeeding cleavage. She stopped short at the sight of us.
“It’s OK. You can give her the bird to play with.”
“She’ll break it. It’s worth a lot.”
“I know. I don’t care.” Her lips were set in a tight line, forcing themselves into a smile. “She shouldn’t be afraid to live here. I don’t want this place to be a museum for her, I want it to be a home.” She took the bird from my hand and handed it to the baby, who grabbed it with fat fists.
There are moments when I want to believe that Vanessa and I might someday be real friends, but I don’t know if the ravine between us will ever be small enough to close. We might look at the same thing, but will never see it the same way: a child’s toy or an objet d’art; a pretty bird or a piece of history; a meaningless bauble or something that might be sold to save a life. Perspective is, by nature, subjective. It’s impossible to climb inside someone else’s head, despite your best—or worst—intentions.
The fears that keep Vanessa awake at night are not, and never will be, the same as mine; except for the one nightmare that we both share. That one is big enough to tie us together for now; it’s the bridge that helps us cross that ravine, as precarious as it may sometimes feel.
Vanessa sat down in a rocking chair, and clutched her baby to her chest, her skirt settling around them both like a cloud. Daisy lifted the goldfinch with two greedy fists, inserted its beak in her rosebud mouth, and began to suck. “See?” Vanessa laughed, delighted. “It’s a teething toy now!”
I could hear tiny teeth clicking against the porcelain, the rhythmic rasp of baby breath. Daisy’s pale blue eyes, so eerily like her father’s, gazed calmly at me over the bird’s head, and I swear I could see the thought in her head: Mine.
Vanessa looked up to see me watching, and smiled.
“Where’s Benny?” she asked. “This would make a good photo.”