Leslie couldn’t answer me. Snot blocked her nose.
“I bet you felt really guilty. I bet you felt just like Mommy. You tried for a whole year. But you hated being a mother. And so you wanted to quit.”
Leslie squeezed her eyes shut.
“But you can’t just quit motherhood, can you?” I sat back on my heels and ticked off the options on my fingers. “There’s divorce and refusing custody. But then Dave would have hated you, and you couldn’t handle watching your perfect husband see that you were not the perfect wife. Plus, there’s that annoying child support! So, suicide. But then you’d be just like Christine. That’s so embarrassing!” I clutched my cheeks. “And Dave would totally tell on you. Not like Daddy, sweeping it under the rug. He’d ask for support from his family members, like a loony. Then there’s option three—you could smother Eli and blame SIDS.”
Leslie gasped.
“Aw, see, too scared for that. You don’t like to get involved with the police. Unlike me.” I winked. “So you fell on option four. You decided to run away.”
Leslie twisted out from under me. I let her go. She fell against the bookcase, wiping her nose on her cardigan, leaving long runny tracks on the cotton.
“What I don’t get,” I said at last, “is what your plan was this time around. Without Frank, you couldn’t make it look like a real carjacking. What, you were just going to ditch the car and buy a cash plane ticket?”
Leslie shrugged.
I laughed. “Wait, was that really your plan?”
“I don’t know,” she said through cracked lips. “I just thought I’d…get out somehow. Leave.” She coughed. “I put extra money in Eli’s college fund. Before Clery. For when I was gone.”
“You didn’t think Dave would look for you?”
She shook her head. “He’s in love with Elaine. She’s a good mother. He’d have…what he really wanted. And then he wouldn’t know that I…He wouldn’t have to hate me. He wouldn’t have to know that I wanted to go. Because if he knew, he’d want to fix it, and I can’t fix it.” She spread her hands. “I am like her. Like Christine. I shouldn’t have had a baby at all. I should have known there was something wrong with me. If Dave knew, he would have to think about it every—every time he looked at Eli, every time he thought about me. It would make him sick.”
“He loves you,” I said. “I watched him. I saw. You found the real thing.”
Leslie looked away. There was a long pause. “Did she really kill herself?” she asked finally, staring at the carpet.
“Who? Mom? Of course not,” I said, climbing off her and running my hands over my jeans. “She found option five, thanks to you.”
“What’s option five?”
“I am.” I smiled. “I helped.”
51
Leslie
“Helped…what?” I heard my own voice in my skull.
“You know,” Robin said. “Helped her get out. Helped her shuffle off this mortal whatever.”
“You’re lying,” I said. I was shaking. “You’re messing with me again. Stop—stop it—”
Robin gave a little shriek of frustration and rolled around on the floor. “Oh my God,” she moaned into the carpet, slightly muffled. “I thought you were over this by now.” She sat up and glared at me. It was nearing noon and the study had been slowly brightening as we spoke. Little flyaway hairs glowed around her head. “You did this all through our teens and it really fucked with my head, you know, Leslie.”
She said my name exactly the way she’d said it when we were kids, with that condescending lilt. Like she’d said it on the phone message the night of my wedding. I love you. I love you, Leslie—
“You blocked it!” she yelled at me now. “You just”—she folded her arms and did the I Dream of Jeannie boinggg—“blocked it out of your head, like it never happened! Well, it did happen, and it was your idea.”
My stomach lurched. I got up, clutching my belly.
“Sit down!” Robin snapped.
“I have to—” I gasped. “I’m going to—” I ran into the back hall and flung open the door to the bathroom.
I was dry-heaving over the toilet when Robin came in. She sat on the edge of the tub, next to me. “You haven’t eaten anything today,” she said after a minute of listening to me choke. “You should probably give up on that.”
“I can’t stop.” But as soon as I said it, the nausea subsided. I sat back on the bath mat.
“See?” Robin said smugly. “Now are you going to listen to me?”
“I don’t understand anything you’re saying,” I whispered.
“I know you remember,” Robin said. “You just didn’t want to believe it. But it was your fault all along. I was only a kid. I followed you around. I practically worshipped you. And you said to me—”
“ ‘I wish Mom would die.’ ” I stared at her.
She nodded. “Exactly. That’s what you said to me. I just wanted you to be happy.”
“I was so tired,” I said. It was coming back in bits and pieces. “I was angry that she wanted to leave us so bad. She kept trying to…to leave us. And then Daddy would send her away, and she’d come back and hate us some more—so I wanted…I just wanted it to be over…” I focused my eyes again. “But you couldn’t have done it. You were only a kid.”
Robin snorted. “Mom weighed like eighty-five pounds, she was depressed, and they’d put her on downers. She was barely there. I found her half passed out in the bathtub, and I just…held her under.”
“No,” I whispered.
“Yes,” Robin whispered back. She laughed. “It wasn’t hard. She wanted to go. She didn’t fight me or anything.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t believe you.”
“Well, I can’t believe you!” Robin snapped. “When I told you about it, you said I was lying! I wasn’t lying!”
I stared at her. She was bright against the white of the tub, roundly healthy, pink-cheeked. Beautiful.
She couldn’t have killed anyone. She didn’t have it in her.
No…
The nausea returned.