Camille, Claimed

by Ginger Talbot

  I won’t think about him. He takes up too much headspace already.

  But as our wedding date approaches, my mother is getting angrier and shriller. She’s so sure that I’ll ruin everything and scare Landon off that my stomach is twisting itself into increasingly tighter knots. I can barely eat these days.

  “Are you listening to me?” Her voice slices through my nerves.

  I’ve already had a bad morning. I woke up to find that two of my tires were flat. The car was parked inside my locked garage, and after my house was burglarized a few months ago, I put in an alarm system, so it’s not like anybody could have punctured them on purpose. But how could two brand-new tires be flat?

  It rattled me badly and made me late to work, at a time when things were already tense with my boss.

  “What is it now?” I say, with a little more snap in my voice than I meant, and the look of wounded martyrdom on her face tells me I’ll pay for that. “Sorry.” I force a bright smile. “Bad morning.”

  “What on Earth were you thinking, posting that on Twitter?”

  I give her a puzzled look. “I don’t have a Twitter account.”

  She thrusts her phone at me accusingly.

  An electric zap of dismay shocks me. There’s a Twitter account with my name on it, and my picture—the professional headshot that’s on the therapy group’s website. How? Who did that?

  I look at the posts. There are several tweets in a row that make up a long, rambling free-verse poem about doubt. The poem hints that I’m making some kind of terrible decision and I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life.

  It’s clearly hinting at my upcoming wedding.

  Alarm squeezes the oxygen from my lungs. I suck in a desperate breath. I didn’t do this, but it doesn’t matter. “I didn’t create that account, and I didn’t write that.”

  My mother looks at me as if I’m crazy. “Riiight. The account with a picture of you, and your name on it.”

  “Someone created a fake account!” My voice is rising defensively, and I’m hugging myself, just like I always do when my mother goes on the attack. I force myself to straighten up. Power posture! Act confident! If you act it, you’ll be it! That’s what I tell my patients.

  Damn, damn, damn. I have to call Landon.

  “Who would do that? And why?” Skepticism drips from every word.

  “I don’t know.” My heart races and my mouth goes dry. “Some of the people I see at my office are very troubled. Maybe someone formed an unhealthy attachment.”

  “What a surprise.” Her lips pinch together in disapproval, deepening the vertical lines around her mouth.

  She hates my entire profession, and hates even more that I volunteer to work with sex offenders one day a week. When I insisted on majoring in psychology, she cut me off financially, and when I managed to make it on my own by waitressing, selling my artwork, and getting scholarships, she didn’t talk to me for an entire year. Once she came back, it was like she was making up for lost time—clinging to me, invading every little nook and cranny of my life like a weed.

  “It’s a fake account. I’m going to contact Twitter immediately and get them to shut it down,” I say, furious.

  “I warned you about that job.”

  “Yes, you did. And you still do. Every day,” I snap, and her eyes go wide with dismay.

  She looks at me expectantly. For once I don’t apologize, so she shoves her chair back, scraping it dramatically across the floor. “Well,” she says frostily. “I imagine you’ll be extremely busy working on getting that fake account taken down, and also apologizing to Landon, so I’ll just leave you to it.” She rises to her feet, waiting for me to beg her to stay.

  Instead, I say, “Why would I apologize for something I didn’t do?”

  She spins on her heel and stalks off.

  I pull out my laptop and send a request to Twitter customer support, demanding that the fake account be taken down. Then I call Landon.

  My Landon. My rock. The best thing that’s ever happened to me.

  When I call him, he already knows about the Twitter account—because my mother told him. Dismay twists inside me. Why would she do that? Why does she encourage me and sabotage me in equal measure? He and I don’t argue often, but when we do, she’s usually behind it somehow, and she sides with him every time.

  When I tell him I didn’t create the account, he doesn’t sound entirely convinced. “The thing is, Camille, the poem makes it sound like you don’t want to marry me. Who would know you well enough to post something so personal?”

  I feel a deep, pained hurt.

  “My mother just implied I was lying to her,” I say. “Are you calling me a liar too?”

  “No, not at all,” he says. “Of course not. Never. It’s just…” He lets the pause stretch out a little too long. “I don’t understand why somebody would do this.”

  “Neither do I, but I work with a population of people with mental illnesses.”

  “If someone is cyber-stalking you, then you need to call the police,” he says firmly. “I’ll go with you. Tonight after work? I’ll be at your office at five to pick you up.”

  I love Landon, but I don’t love the way he makes plans and assumes I’ll go along with them. “The police?” I echo faintly. Cyber-stalking? Isn’t this an overreaction? There was one account with a few tweets. I contacted Twitter. Let’s just see if this ever happens again.”

  “If you didn’t write it, don’t you want to catch the person who did?”

  “If I didn’t write it?” I say, suddenly really angry. “Landon, if you think I’m lying to you, then we’ve got a serious problem. You’ve known me for a year. If you not only think I would spill my guts on social media like an angsty teenager but that I’d lie to you about it, then you shouldn’t be marrying me.” And I hang up the phone, my heart thundering in my ears.

  I force myself to eat some of my chicken salad sandwich, because I skipped breakfast and I feel light-headed. And two minutes later, my mother calls me, furious about what I just said to Landon. She’s yelling into the phone.

  I’m stunned.

  Landon called her?

  I try to interrupt her, to defend myself, but she keeps up with the shrill stream of abuse, every word tightening the vise around my insides, and my food rises in my throat. So I hang up. I block her number.

  And I call Landon back.

  “You called my mother and told on me? Really?”

  There’s a moment of guilty silence. “I wasn’t telling on you. I was communicating. I’m just concerned for you, that’s all. You’ve been acting different lately.”

  I feel as if the very air is shrinking around me, squeezing me until I can’t breathe.

  Part of me wants to apologize, to smooth it over, to call my mother back and beg for her forgiveness—the forgiveness she’ll never give.

  What would I tell one of my patients if they brought this to me?

  I would tell them to identify what I’m really feeling. I’m not sorry. I’m angry. And if I don’t stand up for myself, nothing will ever change.

  And I would tell them not to get married with major, unresolved issues hanging over their head.

  “No, Landon. Not acceptable. You and my mother talk about me far too much. You’re marrying me, not my mother. You know exactly how she is. You know how she judges me. You and I have talked about this.” I force the words from my mouth, even though I’m afraid they’ll choke me. “And yet you called her up with something that was guaranteed to set her off. You don’t have my back at all when it comes to her, Landon, you never do. I need a few days to myself. Please don’t call or text me, and I swear if you call my mother back and tell her I said that…” I hang up before I can say anything else.

  Pandora walks over to me and holds out a cupcake. “It’s on me. Looks like that was a bad phone call. Too bad we don’t serve alcohol.”

  I manage a smile. “It’s just as well. I’d be staggering back to work reeking of tequila and t
elling everyone what I really think of them.”

  Work’s already stressful enough. A month ago, one of the patients who I see on my volunteer day filed a false accusation against me, claiming I offered to cure his homosexuality by having sex with him. He was young and handsome and very convincing, and I was suspended from my job for two weeks with pay until they finished their investigation. Thank God my mother and Landon never found out about it.

  But I have absolutely no wiggle room for error at work now.

  I walk back to work, holding the cupcake in my hand and struggling to keep down the half a sandwich that feels like a brick of lead in my stomach.

  Chapter Seven

  Bastien

  There’s a faint chill in the early morning air as I trot through a thickly wooded area in a public park in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia.

  Camille is close to me. So very close… Philadelphia borders Virginia. The fact that my family has roots here in Virginia and Camille’s an hour’s plane ride away…is that some kind of sign? Is the universe nudging me toward her, telling me to take my vengeance at last?

  I’ve been in America for four days now. Simon and Antoine are in the process of setting up the local branch of Cyber-X, and on weekends, Simon is managing Dark Desires. He’s a kinky bastard, so he loves it.

  I visited them when I first got here, showed them my new face. Freaked them the hell out.

  Welcome to my world. Every morning when I shave, every time I pass a reflective surface, I burn with anger at the depth of my parents’ betrayal.

  They didn’t just lie to me my entire life – they stole my face. My new face is handsome, but it’s not mine. It’s an utter, shocking violation, and if my father were in the same room as me right now, I don’t know if I’d be able to refrain from beating him as bloody as a raw steak. The fragile bridge between us that they tried to rebuild over the years has been dynamited, blown to smithereens. They’re dead to me.

  So I told Simon and Antoine that for reasons I can’t explain, they are not to talk to my parents. If my parents contact them, they are to say they haven’t heard from me and have no way to get in touch with me.

  Of course I checked in with Emilie, on a secret encrypted phone. I told her as much as I could, speaking in our special code, the one we made up when we were kids. I let her know I’m all right, and that I’m in America checking up on our family’s past and she’s to say nothing to our parents. She’s dying to know more, but she agrees to be patient.

  Emilie is like our mother and father in some ways—married, respectable on the outside, a parent to three little boys. She has that hidden mean side, though. Her vicious streak is what I love about her, but unlike my darkness, hers is purely practical. If someone ever crosses her or anyone she cares about, she will cheerfully savage them and make them wish they’d never been born, but other than that, she’s sweet, generous, and kind.

  Her lust for vengeance isn’t normal, I know, any more than my actions are. Now I wonder if it’s genetic.

  She worries about her middle son, because she’s seen him do disturbing things to his action figures. I used to dismiss it as just child’s play, but I’m not so sure anymore.

  Is there a black thread of evil weaving its way through the men of our family? How far back does it stretch?

  Robert holds all the answers, and I’m getting impatient.

  I’m supposed to meet him at seven a.m. by the boathouse next to the large lake in the middle of the park, so I arrived at six a.m. to scope the area out. I would have come earlier, but the park doesn’t open until six, and I didn’t want to sneak in and risk getting busted by the cops who patrol the area.

  Robert has been communicating with me through a burner phone, so I haven’t been able to get in touch with him yet. What I have done is thoroughly research the history of my parents. The news stories are bizarre. My life feels unreal now. I grew up having been assigned a part in our family drama, and I acted according to the script. I was the dirty, perverted failure in a family of shining angels. I dutifully hated myself for it. I scourged myself with shame and self-loathing and I denied myself the releases I craved.

  Now I know that I was raised by liars. My parents are nothing like they pretend to be.

  But what are they like, behind closed doors? There’s an entire wing of the house that’s completely locked off to us. Do they kill people in there? Does my mother kill people, or was that just a one-time thing when she shot the pedophile?

  What strange forces created me?

  I need to know more. The newspaper stories barely scratch the surface. My mother worked as a summer temp for my father’s former business. He was a billionaire in his early thirties at the time—nobody seemed to know his exact age. He’d appeared out of nowhere in his midtwenties and made a name for himself as a corporate raider who consumed other companies for profit. He was seen at all the hotspots of the day with various socialites and actresses, whom he never seemed to date for very long.

  And then things got weird.

  First my wealthy playboy father was suspected of being responsible for my mother’s disappearance, and that of my mother’s neighbor, a woman named Heather. Then my father’s twin brother, whose name was Charlemagne, kidnapped my mother and tortured her to get revenge against my father for committing him to an asylum. And it turned out that Charlemagne, who also went by the name of Micah, was the one who’d kidnapped Heather, and he murdered her.

  After my mother was freed, she developed an obsession with some pedophile, stalked him and shot him to death. And she was being held in a psychiatric hospital when she escaped.

  Then my mother and father vanished from the public eye.

  It all reads like an overwrought soap opera, but it’s my fucking family history. It’s what made me.

  Follow-up news stories revealed that Joshua Smith was a pseudonym, and so was Charlemagne. There were no birth records for them anywhere. So my mysterious, distant cousin Robert is my best and possibly only chance of finding out the truth.

  As I walk, I hear a rustling in the underbrush and am instantly on alert. I swing toward the sound and push my way through thick branches. And then a wonderful thing happens. A man dressed in camouflage gear leaps out at me, with a knife in his right hand.

  As I swing toward him, a delirious thrill rushes through my body. I’ve never been afraid of physical harm. I crave the adrenaline rush of a good fight, and the only thing I hate about fighting is that I can’t tear my opponents into little pieces when I’m done.

  He makes his first mistake, rushing me. I let him get close, then drop to the ground and bring him down with a leg sweep. He’s flailing, the knife still clutched in his hand, but I’m kneeling on his arm with one leg, pinning it, and the other knee is in his stomach.

  Within a second, I’ve jammed my elbow into his throat.

  I’ve always had lightning-fast reflexes. I’m several moves ahead of everyone else in every aspect of my life. It makes chess boring, and it means my fights are always over quickly. Fighting feels to me like watching someone swing their fist in my direction, in slow motion, while I impatiently wait for it to get close enough to be a threat.

  “Who sent you?” I’m grinning like a maniac. God, this is fun. If only he were a little more of a challenge.

  “Fuck yourself,” he wheezes, and thrusts upward with his hips in an attempt to dislodge me. In the distance, I hear voices, people strolling, unaware of the little life-and-death drama playing out so close to them. The man tries to cry out for help, so I slam my elbow down, crushing his larynx. His eyes widen in horror.

  Does he realize he’ll never speak again, that his last words on this Earth were the obscenities he just spat at me? I find that hilarious. I’d like to share the joke with him, but it seems like a waste of breath. I don’t think he’d appreciate my sense of humor.

  He won’t be able to tell me anything now I’ve shattered his voice box, so he’s of no use to me anymore. I stare down at him as I increase the p
ressure. His face purples; his eyes go bloodshot then roll back in his head.

  I leap to my feet, brushing myself off. The tension that’s always twisting up my insides releases its grip on me, and I feel light and free and deliriously happy.

  I loved killing him.

  I haven’t killed a man since I cut up that Moroccan sailor ten years ago. I hear footsteps approaching and quickly slide behind a thick stand of greenery. Robert strolls down the path toward me, hands shoved in his pocket, with a look of polite interest on his face.

  My joy fizzles and turns sour. I stalk over to him, fists balled. I suppose I should be grateful to him for providing me with the most fun I’ve had in ages, but I’m getting sick of all the melodramatic cloak-and-dagger shit. He holds the truth of my entire life in his hands, and I hate how much power that gives him.

  He doesn’t say a word as he stands there, just looks down at the man regretfully. He nudges him with his toe after a minute, then looks at me. “You’re good. He was one of my best men,” he says.

  “That’s disappointing,” I drawl. “You should find a new employment agency.”

  Robert frowns down at the slack, sprawled body. Vacant eyes stare sightlessly at a pale blue sky. Then he looks up at me. “You could have just disabled him.” A tone of mild rebuke.

  “Yes, I could have. But that’s not who I am.”

  Robert favors me with a faint smile. “Exactly. I needed to see if you’re really one of us. If you’re worthy.”

  “Try this shit again, and you’re next,” I snap. “I flew to this fucking country because you said you’d give me answers. I’ve been here for almost a week. I’m getting a little tired of playing Spy vs Spy.”

  Most people stammer and cringe when I’m angry, but Robert is made of the same stuff I am. His indifferent, cold blue gaze meets mine. “Our family doesn’t let in just anyone, nor do we trust just anyone,” he says. “I technically didn’t have the go-ahead to invite you here. It’s a bit of a fraught time for us.” A shadow crosses his face. “They wanted me to wait until after…well, never mind.”