Exhibit Alexandra

by Natasha Bell

  I stopped myself. I hadn’t meant to say that.

  “Big thing?” Marc said.

  “I knew there would be an investigation,” I said more quietly, “but I thought you’d trust the evidence. I knew you’d never believe it if I made it look like suicide, so this was the only way. I thought you’d make peace with the fact I was gone.”

  Marc looked like he wanted to spit at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  We sat in silence, our bodies still.

  “Can I get you a cup of tea?” I repeated.

  I guess those words snaked through his ears and sank their fangs into his brain. Something snapped. “Tea? You’re offering me tea? You ran away from our life, left me for another woman, made me think you were dead, and now you’re offering me a cup of tea?”

  I froze. “No! I’ve never—I would never—there’s no one else, there never has been.”

  “What about Amelia?” he said, his fists clenched.

  “Marc, I’m Amelia. Amelia is me.”

  Marc stared at me like he was trying to figure out what on earth he was looking at. I made myself still. I wasn’t a person in that moment, but some strange, distasteful object. I watched Marc’s jaw move back and forth, his neck thicken with tension. Slowly he began to move his head from side to side. “No,” he said. “No.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “No,” he said, a little louder this time, but not exactly to me. “I’ve read her letters. I’ve seen her show.”

  “It’s kinda complicated,” I said, slipping into my American twang again. The only time I’d had to switch like this was when my mum’s phone number rang. My heart had pounded every time the blue and white Skype logo filled my screen and I had to answer as Caitlin. I thought lying to the police would have been the hardest part, but even with my vowels flattened and my fingers muffling the microphone, my biggest fear was that Marc would recognize my voice.

  Just like those phone calls, I waited now, terrified and excited, for my husband to piece it all together. I’d never said any of this aloud, but I’d been rehearsing this explanation for years. It sounds strange, but it was almost a relief.

  “I made her up before I left Chicago,” I said. “It was going to be my final project to try to construct an identity, see how easy or hard it would be to get a work permit and a Social Security number.”

  Marc looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. I turned away, spoke to the wall. I needed to say this. “We met that summer and I couldn’t stop thinking about you when I went back. I still worked on my project, but my heart was no longer in it. Then you turned up at my dad’s on Boxing Day and I knew I wasn’t going back. I didn’t want to. I knew that for certain, but it was still a hard decision. I wanted to keep hold of something. I’d set almost everything up already. I’d even taken a driving test in her name. At each point I kept thinking that this was where I’d get caught, but I wasn’t. So by the time I returned there were only a few tweaks left to make, which I managed from England.”

  I finally looked at Marc. His face was pale. “What are you saying?” he said. “You faked an identity?”

  “Borrowed one,” I said. “I found a girl who died of crib death the year I was born. It was perfect: she hadn’t registered for anything, and nobody except her parents had really met her. They’d moved shortly after she was born, so she’d died in a different state and there was no cross-referencing between birth and death offices. So I applied for a certified copy of her birth certificate.”

  Marc looked like he was about to throw up. I cleared my throat.

  “You’re allowed to request that. It’s legitimate. Then I used the birth certificate to get a driver’s permit and all this other stuff. I even managed to register her for my classes. My plan was to—”

  “I don’t care,” Marc said, cutting me off.

  “I want you to understand.”

  He held out his hand, palm flat toward me. “I don’t care any more, Alex. I don’t care about your stupid whims and all your fucked-up ideas. All I’ve cared about for more than a year is finding my wife.”

  I was silent. I didn’t know whether to believe him. I’d wanted to tell him this for years. I knew I couldn’t without ruining our marriage, but the stupid thing was I’d always felt he was the one person who’d get it. If he could put aside his pain for a moment, I thought he’d see the magnitude of what I’d achieved. I thought maybe he could be proud of me.

  “There was always this big deal made about how good SAIC would look on our résumés,” I said. Marc shook his head in disbelief, but I carried on. “Everyone in the art world clings so preciously to their work because that’s their identity, their justification for being, but I wanted to question how fragile those identities were. If I could make Amelia seem like a real student, I thought I could start this discussion about the irrelevance of the person. I managed to confuse the administrators so much that they merged our student records. Every grade I got was actually being given to someone who didn’t exist.”

  I couldn’t tell if Marc was listening. He sat perfectly still, his gaze focused on the mess of broken glass on the floor. I should clean that up, I thought, but didn’t move.

  “She was ready,” I said. “But then I stayed in England and we began our life together. I felt so far away from it all that it didn’t seem important to tell you about some silly project I never completed. But I kept thinking about it, and it niggled and niggled until I started wondering if I could still do it. I wanted to see if I could make Amelia graduate. I still had to come up with these pieces she could make for her final year without me being there. It was tricky. Another project I’d been working on was this idea that I could write to my future self. I’d set up this network of mail forwarding addresses so I could post a letter and it would go halfway around the world and boomerang back to me after a month or so. That way, I could be in epistolary contact with my past and future selves. I’d send a letter to England and it’d be sent around Europe and then to New York, where someone would forward it to a box in Chicago, where I’d pick it up. I tweaked my system a little so things ended up in York and it became me writing to myself as Amelia to Alex. It turned into a useful tool for me to work out her projects and imagine the life she was living. It gave her a firmer identity.”

  He let me drone on. I could tell he wasn’t listening. Something was occurring to him. “Your mother,” he said.

  I snapped my head toward him. My first thought was panic, then pity. “You found out?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, realizing how pointless my apologies were at this stage. “I hated lying to you. I really did. But Mum dying, it was convenient. It coincided with my—I mean Amelia’s—work really taking off here. She was becoming a big deal and I needed to come out here more often. I told my mum about Amelia that first weekend we spent together. I don’t know why, but it was so emotional and she was talking about being married to my dad and it just came out. She was supportive. Right at the end, she was the one who suggested I keep her alive. She said she was the perfect alibi. She also said I could never tell you, you’d never understand.”

  “She was right,” he said, folding his arms.

  I sucked my teeth, decided to persist. “It was a little project to begin with. Just something to occupy my mind while you were at work and the only people I had to talk to were the mums at toddler group who just wanted to discuss potty training and their precious darlings’ first words or steps or whatever. I needed something creative. It was fun, and harmless. I set up projects over the Internet, got people to post the results in chat rooms. I felt like an invisible puppetmaster. I had this virtual life as well as my beautiful real one.”

  “Why keep it from me?” His voice was softer now. It undid something in me.

  “You were so scared in the beginning,” I
said. “You studied me every second you could, looking for signs I’d changed my mind. Sometimes I felt like you thought I wasn’t real, thought I might dissolve in the rain or wash down the drain. I didn’t want to worry you. I didn’t want you to think you weren’t enough.”

  “I obviously wasn’t.”

  “No, you were. This was just something I did for myself. I never expected Amelia to do well.” I paused. “But this one piece blew everything up. Suddenly she was being offered grants and gallery spaces, and these journalists were trying to figure out who she was. It was a nightmare in a way. I had to figure it out on a much grander scale. I got myself a second phone, learned how to cover my tracks online.”

  Marc frowned.

  “You found me with it once, remember? Not long before—I guess I was getting sloppy.”

  “Wait,” Marc said. “The iPhone at our party? I thought you were acting strange, but you hate iPhones, you refused—”

  “I wanted to keep things separate. Amelia had all these skills, all this knowledge about proxies and encryption, because she had to. She needed them to survive. But Alex didn’t. I liked switching off from all that, asking you to fix things when the Internet cut out, living physically in our world.”

  Marc pinched the bridge of his nose, his face screwed up like he was in pain.

  “I was terrified of getting caught, of course. Not just by you, by journalists or gallerists, anyone. But it was exciting too. All that attention. It was everything I’d once dreamt of.”

  “So you decided you’d kill off Alex and be Amelia?” Marc snapped, looking at me now. “Her life was more exciting, was it?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said.

  He shook his head and stood up again. I held out my hand, panicked he would leave. I wanted him to stay.

  “I was doing both. I hated lying to you, but it made me feel alive being able to have it all. We were happier than ever and you didn’t have to know that every few months I went to New York, not Dorset. I felt like I’d won the lottery. I hadn’t had to sacrifice a thing. If anything, being Amelia some of the time made me a better Alex. Having that creative outlet meant I could be a better wife and mother.”

  “Because that wasn’t all you were?”

  “Don’t say it like it’s a bad thing. Do you know how many times I heard some woman at a PTA meeting or bake sale wish she’d done more with her life? Not wish she hadn’t had children or hadn’t married, but wish she’d done something that mattered to the outside world.”

  “Why couldn’t you just tell me?” he said. “I’d have supported you.”

  “Would you?” I searched his face. “You think you would and you’d probably have tried, but we wouldn’t have had what we did if you’d known. We’d have been torn between each of our ambitions. I changed when I met you. I didn’t set out to, but I did. I wanted to be what you wanted, what you needed. What you thought I was. And I never stopped wanting that. But the reason I could keep doing it was because I still held on to a little piece of what I was before. I felt secure in my identity. If I hadn’t kept Amelia alive, I’d have reverted back eventually. I’d have resented you for the changes I made in myself. I’d have been grouchy and miserable just like everyone else with failed dreams. We wouldn’t have been as happy as we were.”

  “But you’re telling me we weren’t,” he said, raising his voice. “If we were happy and our life was perfect, why the fuck would you leave?”

  I was quiet for a moment and faced the window when I finally answered. “Because of the girls. I realized that when I was younger the future held promise. I believed I was heading for happiness. I knew I might not get there, but I never imagined I’d stop trying. Then I sat in our office one day and realized I’d settled. There I was, writing a proposal for a PhD I didn’t want to do, while journalists and curators all over Manhattan were vying for Amelia’s attention. I was caring about school fetes and buying the right kind of cereal, when a whole world of war and famine, race and gender, politics and protest was going on beyond the A64.”

  I heard Marc inhale as if he was about to speak. I turned to face him, talking quickly in case he interrupted. “However much I loved you and the girls, I realized it wasn’t enough. Because Charlotte and Lizzie were watching me live this half-life. Some of it was magical, of course, but the bits in between: the daft conversations about television programs, the office politics, the minuscule dramas of my students, the endless committees and meetings, the packed lunches that needed making every day, the house that always had to be cleaned—it all felt so insignificant. What kind of example was I setting?”

  I grew conscious of my flailing hands, let them drop to my sides. I expected Marc to laugh or shout, but he just stared at me.

  “I felt more like an actor when I was being Alex than Amelia,” I said. “And that was so stupid, because not only was Alex a terrible role model for our girls, half the time I didn’t even feel like she was a good mother. I tried to turn myself into this smiling, subservient wife, but I just kept getting it wrong, I kept—”

  “You’re making me sound like some 1950s monster,” Marc said, cutting me off. “Do you know how hurtful this is? I never wanted you to be a smiling, subservient wife.”

  “I don’t mean it like that,” I said. “It wasn’t you. I wanted to be that wife. I told myself being there for you and the girls made me happy. Then one day Lizzie said she wanted to be like Fran and I felt like I’d just been shaken awake. I realized I’d been telling myself stories about how happy I was in order to make myself so. If I had a bad day, then the next day I’d just rewrite my memory, tell myself yesterday had been great. So each time I did have a wobble, wondering if everything I was doing was wrong, I’d think about my memories and realize how perfect my life was, how momentary and insignificant this feeling must be. I was living in a kind of self-constructed fairy tale.”

  “Jesus,” Marc said. “This is ridiculous. Can you hear yourself?”

  “It’s what I felt. I wanted us to be happy so much that I devoted myself to making it so. But I also started to have nightmares about breaking down and confessing everything, ruining all that we had. I didn’t want to do that, but I worried about the damage I was doing to the girls by erasing so much of myself, by denying what I truly felt. I started thinking about making Amelia full-time. It was a fleeting fantasy at first, and I felt guilty for even entertaining the idea. But I kept wondering about it. I’d daydream during boring seminars where my hungover second years gabbled about essays they’d only read the introductions to. I didn’t know if it’d even be possible. But the more I thought about it, the more miserable I grew as Alex.”

  I saw Marc wince.

  “Not miserable,” I corrected. “Certainly not with you and the girls, but restless. I couldn’t imagine the future. All I could see was me gradually dissolving into the resentful woman I would have been had I never created Amelia. And Lizzie and Charlotte growing up thinking that was okay. I started working out how I could make it happen with the least amount of pain.”

  Marc snorted.

  “The hardest thing was to get Amelia a passport,” I said. I had to say this or I never would. “I’d always used mine when traveling, but that’d be no good if I wanted you to believe I’d died. The paperwork took forever and at one point I was worried it wouldn’t be ready in time, but Amelia had been making Social Security contributions for the past few years and she had an untarnished record, so in the end it was issued. The rest of the plans were pretty simple. I’d given myself a year to organize it. I rented this apartment and began to tie up loose ends. I wasn’t sure I’d go through with it, right up to the last minute even.”

  My voice fell away. We heard another siren, but it didn’t pass as close this time. I listened to the cars on the street below, the occasional horn.

  After full minutes of suffocating silence Marc spoke, taking pains to keep h
is voice measured. “Do you have an idea of the utter devastation you have wrought upon our family? Upon our children?”

  I opened my mouth but shut it again without speaking.

  “It’s destroyed me,” he continued. “You’ve destroyed me. Look what I’ve become.” He gestured to his scuffed jeans and four-day stubble. “I’m running around New York trying to come to terms with having lost the woman I love, while she’s wining and dining the city’s art critics. While I’ve been in police stations and making public appeals, comforting our daughters when there’s no comfort to be had, you’ve been scrawling quotations on gallery walls and paying actresses to stick their tongues down people’s throats. It’s absurd.”

  I blinked at the mention of the gallery and Erin. I couldn’t speak.

  “But, like you said, we’re insignificant.” He shook his head. “Everyone changes, Al. It’s life. It’s being a fucking grown-up. Do you think I got everything I wanted? Do you know how tiring it is living with someone who refuses to take anything seriously? How much I wanted an adult conversation sometimes? A blazing row even! I’m not a violent man, but sometimes I wanted to slap you. It was like having another child in the house. And all this, you think it’s better for our girls? You think you’re a good role model now? What sort of role model can you be when they think you’re dead?”

  “I was going to—” I let out a sob.

  “What? What were you going to do?”

  I took a breath and wiped my eyes. “I was going to wait until they were older. Then I’d come back, show them what I’d done.”

  “And you think they’d—”

  “I know they’ll never forgive me,” I said quickly, cutting him off. I didn’t need him to spell out how much I’d sacrificed. “I know I’ll never be able to undo the hurt, but as adults I think they might find a way to understand, to be proud of me, and to see how important all of this is.”