Lizzie Borden (39 page)

Lizzie lay in bed listening to the sounds of the house. Abby was baking.
Baking!
In this heat! But then Uncle John was here, and she would want to go overboard to impress him, the way she always did.

Sometimes Lizzie felt sorry for Abby, always having to run harder to catch up with life, it seemed, and now she was old, and fat, and her hair was turning white, and she was still running, even though she was old enough to know by now that she would never catch up.

Lizzie heard Uncle John get up, use the slops pail, dress and go down for breakfast. She could hear the murmur of conversation at the breakfast table, and heard the front door close behind her father, her Uncle’s climb up the stairs to his room next to hers, then he, too, went out the front door.

Lizzie stretched. There was no real need for her to get up, was there?

A loud knock sounded on the front door.

Lizzie’s heart froze.
Beatrice
. Oh God.

She heard Abby’s heavy footsteps in the hallway. Beatrice would be standing on the step, glorious, waiting to embrace her friend who had gotten fat and had done nothing,
nothing
to deserve her friendship.

The front door opened. Abby did not call out to Lizzie, so it must be someone else.

Maybe it was someone coming to harm father. Maybe it was someone coming to blackmail him with tales of unnatural acts that Lizzie had committed with both Enid and Kathryn. Enid was certainly not above taking money for something that would thwart a friend, and Kathryn had no morals at all. Either one of them could turn a fast dollar with a discrete word that Andrew Borden’s daughter was a hell-bound freak, and Andrew, in his desperate attempt to keep from airing family laundry, would pay. He would pay, and he would pay dearly.

And Lizzie would pay for that.

She jumped out of bed, her insides agitated. She made her bed up tightly, and chose a blue wrapper. She knotted up her hair and went downstairs. Abby was in the sitting room talking with a woman that Lizzie had never seen before. She went straight through the dining room into the kitchen.

Biscuits. She took three, cut them open and ladled the hot gravy over them. Bridget was sitting in the dining room, her head in her hands, a cup of coffee before her.

“Maggie, are you all right?”

“Not so well, miss.” Even her brogue sounded ill.

“Eat something, then.”

“God no, miss, I couldn’t stand the sight or the smell of that mutton again. Not one more day.”

“It tastes all right.”

Bridget groaned and put her face down into the crook of her arm.

“Who is that with Abby?”

Bridget shrugged.

Lizzie ate her breakfast, which sat, heavy and greasy in her stomach. Soon the front door opened and closed and Abby came into the dining room, wiping her hands on her apron, as if she had gotten something on them by talking to that woman.

“There’s a birthing, and it could be trouble. I’ll have to go,” she said.

“You don’t look like you want to go,” Lizzie said.

“Well. Mr. Borden doesn’t like me to be going to that side of town. It would probably be best if I didn’t, but. . . Well, we’ll see.” She turned her attention to the maid, who looked pale and fragile. “Bridget, I need those windows finished today. John Morse is already here, and still the windows aren’t done.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Lizzie, are you going to iron that pile of clothes you dampened yesterday, or are you going to leave them to molder?”

Lizzie scowled. Abby took her plate into the kitchen and in a moment they heard her climb the stairs to her room.

Lizzie took the spoon from the congealed gravy and let the glop of gravy slide from it into the pot with a plop.

Bridget saw that, her eyes got large, and with both hands held over her mouth, she ran for the back yard and threw up.

Lizzie smiled. She piled the dishes for the poor girl to do before she got started on the windows, then set the ironing flats on the stove to heat. She pulled a magazine from the kindling box and sat down to thumb through it while they heated.

It was a
Harper’s
. She remembered looking at a
Harper’s
at Enid’s.

Enid.

She closed the magazine and threw it back into the kindling box.

The maid came back in, took a drink of water and spit out the back door. Then she clanged the bucket and got her cloths and things and went about getting ready to clean the windows.

Lizzie checked the flats. The fire must have gone out in the stove. They were barely warm. And it was definitely too hot to rekindle the fire.

“Oooh miss. You should see the carriage out here.”

Beatrice!
Lizzie’s heart stuck in her throat.

Lizzie jumped up and went to the little maid who was looking out the parlor window. Lizzie grabbed her arm. “Maggie, if someone should come to the door looking for me, tell her that I am not home and am not expected.”

There was a blank look on the poor girl’s face. Lizzie squeezed her arm until she chirped. “Do you hear?”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

Lizzie lifted the side of the curtain and looked out. It was a fine carriage, all right. Pure black. Black and fine, with liveried attendants. It looked like a carriage Beatrice would travel in.

Lizzie looked down at herself in her plain blue wrapper. She turned again to the maid. “I’m not home, remember?”

“Yes, miss.”

Lizzie ran through the dining room, through the kitchen, banged out the back door and ran across the small yard to the barn. She unlocked the door, slipped inside and stood silently, out of sight, and listened. She heard nothing. She went back under the pear tree and picked up several nice pears that had dropped.

Then she heard the knock at the front door and scurried backinside the barn. She climbed the ladder to the loft and looked out the loft window, but she couldn’t see the carriage from this vantage.

She paced.

Surely that was Beatrice, and here she was, after inviting her to visit, hiding like a coward in the barn. Anxiety gripped her chest in its talons.

Why should she be doing this? Why should she be the coward? What on earth had driven her to cowering in the barn loft?

The Fearful Self, she thought. The fear of inadequacy, the fear of Emma’s fate, the fear of being an old maid, the fear of dying old, alone and poor, the fear of being found out as an unnatural thing, the fear of the future, the fear of future pain, the fear of life. The fear of
everything
slowly began to turn to anger. The cold tips of fear she felt burrowing under her skin began to glow white-hot, and an unfamiliar fury began to take hold.

“It’s
her
fault,” she said, picturing Abby Borden in her mind. Somewhere that sounded vaguely familiar, as if those were words she had once heard Emma utter in one of her rages, but the familiarity was fleeting.

“It
is
. It’s all her fault.” Lizzie began to pace. “It’s her fault that Emma is the way she is. Without
her
, Emma would be fine, there would be no problem with a will, there would be no one poisoning our milk, there would be nothing to worry about, there would be
nothing to
WORRY ABOUT!”

Lizzie sat down, leaned against the hay, and as if her fingers had memories of their own, they unbuttoned her sweat-soaked clothes and found their way under her drawers, to that wonderful secret place. Lizzie groaned when the hate met the pleasure, creating a tornado in her soul.

She rubbed harder and harder, and then she saw Abby. Abby was changing the pillow slips in Uncle John Morse’s bedroom. She was humming to herself, the bag.

Lizzie crept up behind her.

Abby whirled around, but there was no one there. She could have sworn that she heard someone behind her.

She shook the pillow down into the case, plumped it up right—not the way that silly Bridget did it—and laid it nicely on the bed.

She smoothed it down, stood up and listened.

Bridget had answered the knock at the door, and Abby had waited for the call. She was expecting to be called a second time to the birthing, but had decided not to go. Mr. Borden would definitely not approve.

She went back to the task at hand, smoothing the pillow.

She whirled. There it was again, a presence. This time, though, she almost heard breathing. But there was nothing there. Nothing.

The hair prickled at the back of her neck and stood up along her arms. She rubbed it down, and walked around the foot of the bed.

Lizzie knew what the Other Lizzie was about to do. The idea of it excited her beyond anything Kathryn had ever done for her. She closed her eyes, arching her back, the pleasuring she was giving herself growing ever more fierce.

The Other Lizzie raised the little kindling hatchet.

Lizzie brought her knees up to her chest and whispered “Do it!”

The hatchet whispered through the air and glanced off Abby’s skull.

The first blow struck so hard and so silently that Abby saw the swatch of her scalp land on the freshly made bed before she actually felt it.

She wheeled around, but there was nobody there. There was
nobody
there.

Wait.

Was it Lizzie? She almost recognized—

She had a split-second to notice that even though she couldn’t see it, she could hear it, and then the unseen hatchet buried itself in the right side of her brain and the lights of the world were lost.