The Stranger Inside

by Laura Benedict

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Kimber keeps her eyes closed, listening to Gabriel moving around the apartment. If he knows she’s awake, he’ll want to talk. Or make her breakfast. Or make love, which is something she might do just to forget. Every so often he speaks, but she can’t make out his words. Does he think I can hear him? Then she remembers Mr. Tuttle.

  Diana’s face. She can’t stop seeing Diana’s face. There had been no sadness or disappointment. Only hate.

  Some part of Kimber has always known the day would come. Every minute with Diana had been a gamble. It had been thrilling at first. A lark, to borrow a term her mother liked to use.

  She’d made friends with Diana in yoga class a few weeks after Kyle broke up with her. He’d often poked fun at the studio’s name, The Onion Flower, so it hadn’t been hard to find. That Saturday morning when she came by to pick up Diana for a day of Christmas shopping in quaint St. Charles, Kyle answered the door. It was perfect, the stunned look on his face priceless. She wore a fitted gray knit tunic and denim jacket, leggings, and the thigh-high black boots he’d bought her for her birthday—boots she’d modeled for him. When he looked down at them, she knew he was remembering her bent over the bed, wearing the boots and nothing else. Remembering the way she’d turned her head teasingly, eyes half closed, smiling sweetly as though she were there to sell him cookies.

  Taking off one black leather glove, she held out her hand. “Hi. You must be Kyle. Diana’s told me so much about you.”

  He asked quietly if this was some kind of joke, but her eyes looked past him, and her smile widened as Diana came up behind him and invited her inside.

  “Kyle doesn’t usually leave attractive women standing out in the cold. I’m sorry.” Diana laughed and introduced Kimber as the woman from yoga she’d told him about.

  He stood aside to let her in. “Have we met before? You seem familiar.”

  “No. I guess I just have that sort of face.” She grinned.

  A wave of self-loathing washes over her.

  Jumping up from the bed, she runs to the bathroom and is only just able to get the seat up and her hair away from her face before she vomits the remaining fragments of last night’s late, half-eaten dinner. She stays there, heaving, for several minutes, the tile ice cold beneath her knees. When the shaking stops, she reaches for some toilet paper to clean herself up.

  Gabriel stops in the doorway before she can stand.

  “Sorry.” She doesn’t look at him.

  “You’re sick. Let me help you.”

  “Dammit, Gabriel. No. Just stop. Stop trying to help me.” Now she does look up.

  He doesn’t speak, only watches her. She can’t bear the look of pity on his face. Mr. Tuttle stands beside him, also waiting. They look oddly well together.

  “I need to be alone for a while, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  It’s a nonjudgmental sure that makes her feel even worse. When he goes back to the kitchen, Mr. Tuttle following obediently, she thinks about calling Gabriel back and apologizing, but she can’t do it. Apologizing would mean explaining. She never wants to have to explain that Diana has banished her from her family’s life.

  Showered and dressed in her clothes from the day before, she makes the bed and neatens the guest room. It’s not like when she and Gabriel were together. She didn’t feel self-conscious back then. At least it’s only four or five days, until they meet with the judge. Lance Wilson might be out of her house permanently after that. Unless he tells them about how Michelle really died. Shows them the photos.

  She goes to the kitchen to find cleaning supplies to freshen the bathroom and discovers a note in Gabriel’s thin, angular handwriting on the island.

  Gone to the gym. I can go with you to the hospital late this afternoon if you want. —G.

  That won’t be happening.

  Suddenly her day is free. No work. No Diana to see. No house to go to. She is free, but she’s also royally screwed. Nothing is right. Nothing will ever be the same. And now she doesn’t even have the clothes and things she had at the lake.

  The broom closet at the back of the kitchen is just as neat as every other closet in the house, with the shelves organized by household purpose. At home, everything is crammed beneath her sink. She thinks about moving back into her ruined house. What else has he done to it?

  Sitting back on her heels, she stares into the closet. For the last week she’s been focused on getting back into her house. But does it really matter all that much? Maybe she should just sell it and move out of St. Louis. If she resigns from work, as they want her to, she could get another job somewhere else. Or there might be enough money from the sale to live on for a few years, if she’s careful.

  “What do you think, Tuttle? Should we find somewhere else to live?”

  Beside her, the dog cocks his tiny head as though he wants to understand.

  How many things in her life has she already let go of? Exactly the way her father let go of all of them.

  A cold, wavering feeling comes over her.

  Could I do it? Will Lance Wilson let me go?

  Lance Wilson is the unknown. Why won’t he come out and tell her exactly what he wants? Then it occurs to her that he might only be trying to frighten her off until he finds what he’s looking for in the house. It’s an idea that makes her feel slightly better. She doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but she half hopes he’ll find it and then just leave. Still, it doesn’t explain why he would hurt Kyle and Hadley.

  The paper-towel hook near the sink is empty, so she reaches to an upper pantry shelf stocked with towels to grab another roll. But several of them fall off the shelf and onto the floor.

  Mr. Tuttle backs up, barking at the bouncing rolls as though they’re attacking him. In truth, they’re almost bigger than he is. She scrambles to retrieve them and put them back on the shelf in some kind of order. But they don’t stay because something is in the way. This is more like dealing with one of her own closets. Unable to fit the rolls back in the way they were, she carries one of the counter stools over from the island and climbs up to see what the problem is.

  Behind the last two rolls of paper towels she finds something that might be a book, carelessly wrapped in black plastic, and her father’s gun.

  Kimber turns the brittle pages of the old photo album carefully. The snapshots aren’t faded so much as they feel flimsy, printed on thin, yellowed paper from the seventies and eighties. Most are glued in behind cracking cellophane, but a few stick out haphazardly from the crevices between the pages. There are similar albums at her mother’s house, albums like clocks that stopped the day her sister died.

  This album was in the box. Why hide it, Gabriel?

  The first few pages are filled with families and small children, all dressed up for a wedding: the women and girls with stick-straight or elaborately curled hair, men and boys in dark pants and short-sleeved shirts that look like they’ve been put on right off the store shelf. The men’s hair is long, and many wear thick mustaches. Then there’s another page with two girls and two boys in neater clothes, the girls in matching white peasant dresses, their hair crowned with chains of daisies, the baskets they hold also filled with daisies. The freckled boys stare gloomily at the camera, the question of when they’ll be released from this special hell plain in their eyes.

  There are a few older pictures too. Much older. A dark-haired, dark-eyed girl squinting into the sun, wearing a long cloak and holding a basket stuffed with flowers and baguettes of bread. Maybe a Little Red Riding Hood costume? In another, the same girl rests on the lap of a bearded man who is wearing a flannel shirt and a pair of eyeglasses with one lens taped up, hiding the eye. A serious child, she looks steadily at the camera.

  The girl, a teenager now in bell-bottom jeans and an embroidered peasant shirt tight around her substantial breasts, appears on the next page in front of a carnival tent, gazing up adoringly at a young man. Kimber holds the picture close to her face, studying the coupl
e. The man is tall and handsome, with a familiar, laughing smile, certainly close in age to the girl. He has one arm around her, and his other hand rests on the head of the giant blue stuffed dog sitting at their feet. Is he drunk or just giddy with pleasure? So young, so handsome.

  It’s her father’s face. Her father’s smile.

  Kimber’s stomach lurches. Will she be sick again?

  But if this is her father—and how can it be? Impossible! The girl is not her mother. This girl is gently rounded, and her mother, even at sixty, is all angles and finely arched brows and slender, pale hands.

  Not my father.

  Look closer. You already know. You already know all of this.

  This man’s hair is lighter, and surely he has more of it. That her father had begun losing his hair before he was thirty upset him. Her mother always warned her and Michelle not to tease him. Funny to remember that now. She doesn’t think of her father as a vain man. But what other kind of man would abandon his family so soon after one of his daughters died? He had better things to do than hang around her and her mother. They hadn’t been good enough, had they?

  The girl in the photo looks familiar too, but Kimber pushes the thought from her mind, reluctant to look too closely.

  I don’t want to see this. I need to put it back. Why can’t I put it back?

  She turns the photo over. The scrawled date is seven years and a few months before her parents were married. Ten years before she was born. Unless her father had a twin, she can’t deny that the man in the photo is him.

  “There they are. Wake up, Kimber. That’s Dad. See him?” Michelle’s face pressed forward, looking out the front windshield of the Audi. Michelle trying to convince her.

  No, not him. It’s not.

  Why had Michelle so badly wanted that man with the dark-haired woman to be their father? Why had she wanted to ruin everything?

  Kimber turns the pages quickly now. There are dates but few names on the photos. But when she comes to a formal portrait of the couple in wedding clothes in front of a small brick church, she stops. They are hardly any older than they were in the carnival picture. Not more than eighteen or nineteen years old. The bride wears a high-waisted ivory dress with bell sleeves and the man a pale blue tuxedo that might have made Kimber laugh if she weren’t already horrified. They look young. Ecstatically happy. Especially the girl, who looks up at Kimber’s father just as adoringly as she did in the carnival picture. Kimber can’t help but think of her own parents’ wedding photos: her father smiling comfortably into the camera, her mother looking prim and stiff in the snowy-white, custom-made gown Mimi had taken her to New York to order.

  The writing on the back of the photo is in a childish hand in red ink, and Kimber half expects to see the letter i dotted with a puffy heart.

  “Mr. and Mrs. John J. Merrill!”

  John J. Merrill. Not a stranger. Not a long-lost twin to her father, she’s certain. John J. Merrill was Ike W. Hannon. She knows it in her heart.

  “Why, Daddy?”

  Mr. Tuttle, thinking she’s talking to him, gets up from his sunny spot on the floor and jumps onto the couch to sit beside her. She stares at him, not really seeing him, thinking of her father.

  There are more wedding photos, but she speeds through them. Her father leaning against an ugly green compact car, a cigarette in the hand shading his eyes from the sun; the woman grinning up at the camera from a chair surrounded by pastel-wrapped gifts and paper decorations in the shapes of bottles and pacifiers and baby carriages, her pregnant belly like a giant ball hidden beneath her purple corduroy jumper.

  Then the baby. Kimber pulls out a stiff paper folder tucked among the pages. It reads BABY’S FIRST PICTURE on the cover, above the name of a small hospital in St. Charles County that’s still in business. A hospital that now buys advertising from the radio station. Inside is a color photo of a wizened, sleeping baby with a shock of dark hair. The blue swaddling around him is tight, and he looks like he’s emerging from a cocoon, head first. The date printed below the photo is six months before Michelle’s birthday, and beneath the date is the only other name in the album: Kevin Alan Merrill. Alan. Her father had told her that was his dead father’s name once when they were watching Alan Alda in a M*A*S*H rerun. Both of her father’s parents had died long before her parents were married. Or at least that’s what she was told. He had only aunts and uncles and cousins left. Were any of the people in this book her grandparents?

  Kimber follows the boy’s growth from tiny, grouchy baby to pouting toddler, to a long series of awkward school photos, just as awful and cringeworthy as her own in the albums in her mother’s house. Kevin Alan Merrill growing up, growing handsomer, braces on, braces off. Until finally, Kevin Alan Merrill in his high school graduation robe, smiling between his parents where they stand in front of a line of palm trees like overdressed vacationers. His father’s—her father’s—hand on Kevin Alan Merrill’s shoulder, the three of them beaming proudly for the camera. Despite the fact that this Kevin Alan Merrill is more than twenty years younger, this is the face she recognizes from her own front doorway and from the scene in Jenny’s yard.

  Lance Wilson really is Kevin Alan Merrill.

  The album falls from her lap, scattering loose photographs to the floor as she stands. She’s trapped here, imprisoned with herself and this new, hideous knowledge: Kevin Merrill is her half brother. Her father really did have another family. He wasn’t having an affair all those years ago. It was her mother who was the Other Woman. The extra wife who bore him bastard children. Kimber and Michelle were the bastards. Was their last name even real?

  Kevin Alan Merrill was her father’s first child.

  No wonder he wants my house, our father’s house. No wonder he wants everything I have.

  She almost feels sorry for him. But then there is Jenny. And those photographs he’d sent her. He was the boy Michelle was taking her to meet that day. The boy waiting in the woods. Watching them.

  Going to the window, Kimber presses herself against the glass, grateful for its sun-soaked warmth. She looks down at the street and the morning traffic. Never before in her life has she considered suicide. Until now. If she were dead, all her problems would immediately cease being problems. No one would hate her. Her secrets wouldn’t matter.

  She doesn’t feel crazy but simply weary with guilt. And now a new, endless heartache. When did guilt become her primary emotion? It had never been this way before. She’d rationalized everything: Michelle’s death was an accident. She’d only pushed her out of anger. Maybe she’d wished Michelle were dead, but she didn’t want to kill her. Surely there’s a difference!

  Gabriel was an adult. It wasn’t her fault he fell in love with her, then couldn’t let her go. That, afterward, he was weak.

  Surely the appearance of Kevin Merrill in her house was ultimately her father’s responsibility. He’d left her open to this danger, and what had happened to Jenny, to Kyle and Hadley, was the tragic fallout.

  Still, every questionable thing she’s ever done, she’s tried to answer with something good, something better, just in case. Balance. There was always some kind of balance.

  When she grew up some, she’d eventually supported her mother’s relationship with Don, hadn’t she? She’s been a pretty good daughter since then and never brings up the subject of her father. And when her father willed her the house on Providence Street, she was generous to her mother, offering her half if she wanted it. She’s been kinder, sometimes, to her mother than her mother has been to her.

  Yes, she’d married Shaun looking for security, but she did love him. She was a good wife, and when things fell apart, she never said a word against him, even when her mother called him all kinds of names. And after her affair with Kyle, she became Diana’s friend. No, that isn’t right. She has to be honest with herself. She wasn’t trying to make anything up to Diana. Befriending her started out as a punishment for Kyle.

  But Gabriel—hasn’t she done enough to atone? S
he’s tried. When he wouldn’t see her, she swore she would keep to herself and not get involved with any man until she was completely sure they were a good fit. Hasn’t she stayed true to the promises she made herself: diligently doing her job, returning to her house at night, alone?

  Everything changed when she saw the pain in Diana’s eyes, in that hospital hallway. That’s when she broke and understood that Michelle’s death, and her careless disdain for the wives and partners of the men she’d slept with, what she’d done to Gabriel, Jenny’s death—all of it counts. All of it weighs on her heart. Now Diana can’t bear to look at her. Hadley, an innocent child, is gravely injured. And she’s heartbroken at the loss of her best friend.

  Kevin Alan Merrill, the man who came into her life as Lance Wilson, is after her, and the things she’s done, the choices she’s made, have made him deadly to the people closest to her.

  If she steps off Gabriel’s balcony, everything she’s carried with her for so long will take flight with her body. The weight of her life—of her lies—would only help her meet the ground faster.

  Would it hurt? From fourteen floors up, not for long, she guesses. She puts her face in her hands.

  How in the hell did I get here?

  As she turns away from the window, her eyes rest on the scattered photographs, and in that moment, the spell of self-pity and regret is derailed.

  What are the photographs of her father, his wife, and Kevin Merrill doing hidden in Gabriel’s kitchen? Was it a misguided act of kindness or could there be some other reason?

  Resolved and feeling slightly less sorry for herself, she takes Mr. Tuttle for a walk in the park. For a week she’s been frantic and obsessed, but now at least she has a different way to look at her father. Her life. She and her sister and their mother had already been betrayed the day he married their mother. So many things that had puzzled her and worried Michelle were explained. A lot of questions have finally been answered. And now she has a whole other reason to hate her father. Or pity him.