What She Told Me

The first thing Anna asked for after nineteen days in a coma was water, and Mom cried as if she had said something extraordinary. She had been asleep beside the bed with her glasses low on her nose and a paperback facedown against her chest, one hand resting near Anna’s hip. Dad had gone downstairs for coffee after draping his jacket over Mom’s legs, though she had complained twice that the room was too warm. I stood near the window eating pretzels from the vending machine when Anna made the small sound that became water.

Mom was awake before I reached the bed. She said Anna’s name twice, then once more, because for nineteen days she had been saying it to somebody who couldn't answer. The nurse had warned us not to give her anything to drink yet, so I wet one of the pink sponges beside the sink and touched it to her mouth. Anna sucked at it slowly. Her lips were cracked, and a thin line of dried blood sat in one corner. Without her earrings and with a section of hair shaved near the stitches, she looked younger than twenty-nine.

The nurse came in and asked the questions we had been told to expect. Anna knew her name and the year but not where she was. She recognized Mom immediately and seemed offended by the question, which made Mom laugh while wiping her face. Then the nurse nodded toward me. I told Anna not to embarrass me, and she studied my face long enough that I wondered whether she really had forgotten. “Evan,” she finally said. The monitor beside her picked up a little. The nurse glanced at it and continued with her questions. I reached for Anna’s hand, but she drew hers beneath the blanket before I touched it. There were nineteen days behind us in which almost anything could be blamed on medication, pain or confusion, so I chose one of those.

Mom developed a hospital routine within days. She arrived before eight with coffee for herself and Dad and something for me even when I told her I had already eaten. She learned which nurse Anna liked, which one moved her injured shoulder too quickly, when the doctors made rounds and how long the cafeteria kept breakfast out. Mom had always loved through maintenance. She remembered prescriptions, oil changes, birthdays and whether there was enough food in your refrigerator. When Anna and I were children, affection sometimes meant waking up to discover that the school uniform you had forgotten in the washer was clean and hanging from the bathroom door. She rarely announced what she had done. The thing simply appeared where you needed it.

Dad loved differently. He sat. He could spend four hours beside Anna without saying much, turning pages of a newspaper he wasn't really reading. When Mom became fixated on the shoe missing from Anna’s car, he tolerated the first call to the tow yard and objected to the second. “Denise, leave those people alone,” he told her. Mom said she was only asking a question, and Dad reminded her she had asked the same one yesterday. Later, while he was downstairs, Mom slipped me the number and asked me to call once more. I did. They still hadn't found the shoe.

The car had been found shortly after five on Sunday morning by a man walking his dog along Route 16. It had broken through a guardrail, rolled down the embankment and landed partly submerged in Miller’s Pond. The driver’s window shattered during the impact, and Anna somehow got her seat belt loose underwater and pulled herself through the opening. They found her almost forty feet away, unconscious in the mud, one shoe gone and blood dried along the side of her face. The doctors called her survival extraordinary. Mom called it God. Dad asked how long she had been in the water and whether her shoulder would ever be the same.

Anna and I had barely spoken for eleven months before the crash. Mom knew we were fighting but never knew why, despite considerable effort. She arranged dinners neither of us requested and once told us Dad needed help moving a dresser, only for me to arrive and find him watching basketball with no knowledge that a dresser required moving. Anna had discovered I was cheating on my girlfriend, whom she liked, and decided what I had done said something larger about me than I thought it did. We argued. I told her to stay out of my life, and she complied so completely that eventually I resented her for doing exactly what I had asked.

After the accident, resentment became difficult to maintain. I brought clothes from Anna’s apartment and dealt with the insurance company because Mom lost patience whenever someone asked her to repeat information. I intercepted relatives who believed nearly dying entitled them to visit. I learned how Anna liked the pillows arranged beneath her shoulder and which vending machine ate dollar bills. Once, when I retrieved her phone charger from behind the bed, she thanked me without looking up, her thumb tucked beneath her fingers.

She had done that when she lied since childhood. At eleven, she ate the corner from Dad’s birthday cake and denied touching it with the same thumb hidden inside her fist. At seventeen, I caught her taking thirty dollars from my wallet before a party. She insisted she was borrowing it, then tucked the money into her pocket and pressed one finger to her lips. “My lips are sealed.” She knew I wouldn't tell Dad. She was right. I never told Anna I'd noticed what she did with her thumb.

Detective Ramirez found me in the cafeteria two days later. Dad had said he wasn't hungry, which meant I was carrying two sandwiches because he would eat one if I put it in front of him. Ramirez sat near the window with a coffee and asked whether I had a minute. I told him probably one and sat across from him. He asked if I remembered Anna calling me the night of the accident. “When?” I asked. Eleven forty-two, he told me. The call lasted fourteen seconds. I said that sounded like Anna because she had always been capable of ending a conversation before the other person realized it had begun. Ramirez asked if she was older. Seven minutes, I told him, and he smiled and said it still counted. “According to her.” I glanced at the clock. Dad was upstairs waiting for food.

Ramirez asked what Anna wanted. I said I didn't remember. When he asked if I remembered anything at all, I told him I had probably been asleep. He turned the coffee between his hands and reminded me that the phone records showed I had answered. “I said asleep, not unconscious. I've answered calls I don't remember before.” I reached for the sandwiches, but Ramirez said he was only trying to understand what my sister needed from me eleven minutes before her car went through a guardrail. I asked if it had really been eleven minutes. Give or take, he said. I told him that if I remembered, I would tell him. Ramirez nodded. “I know.” I carried Dad's sandwich upstairs before it got cold.

The following evening, Mom and Dad went downstairs together for dinner, leaving Anna and me alone. The television was on without either of us watching it. Anna asked me to turn it off, then waited until the room settled into the hum of the air conditioner before asking whether I remembered Rebecca Lane.

Everyone remembered Rebecca. She had been twenty-six when she left a restaurant after dinner with friends and never made it home. She taught second grade and was the oldest of three daughters. The local news used the same photograph for months, one of Rebecca at the beach with her braids blown across one cheek. Mom had taught her years earlier and kept a missing-person flyer on our refrigerator until the corners curled. I remembered her asking Dad once why Rebecca had already stopped making the evening news. Dad said the police were probably still working the case whether cameras were there or not. Mom said she knew. She left the flyer on the refrigerator anyway.

“I found something of hers,” Anna said.

I asked what.

“Her driver’s license.”

“Where?”

“At your house.”

There were footsteps and voices in the hallway, but inside the room I could hear air moving through the vent. I asked what she had been doing at my house after nearly a year of refusing to visit. She said she'd gone for a pair of boots she left there before we stopped speaking. They were in the basement, and while looking for them she found a plastic container beneath my workbench.

“What was in it?”

Anna watched me before answering. “Pictures. Jewelry.”

I waited.

“IDs.”

“How many?”

She didn't answer. The door opened, and Mom came in carrying two takeout containers while Dad followed with the drinks. Mom noticed us staring at each other and asked if we were fighting already. “No,” Anna said, reaching for the water beside her bed. Her thumb disappeared beneath her fingers.

At two the next morning, I sat on the concrete floor of my basement with six driver's licenses arranged in front of me.

Rebecca Lane. Monica Hayes. Tiffany Brewer. Danielle Shaw. Erica Price. Lauren Mitchell.

The workbench behind me had belonged to Dad. He gave it to me after buying himself a new one, and there were still faint rings in the wood from paint cans he used when Anna and I were children. I picked up Lauren Mitchell's license. Her hair was pulled away from her face in the photograph and she wasn't smiling. I had first seen it three years earlier in Anna’s apartment, behind a row of books in her bedroom. Anna had gone to Atlanta and asked me to feed her cat. I was looking for an envelope where she said she'd left money when I found the license. Lauren had been missing for six weeks by then. Her face had been on television often enough that I recognized her.

I took the license home without asking Anna why she had it. That night, I put it back with the others and slid the container beneath the workbench.

By the following afternoon, police were inside my house. Dad was with me when we arrived, and he stepped between Ramirez and me before anyone explained why they were there. “That's my son's house,” he kept saying. Ramirez asked him to step back. Dad refused. I touched his shoulder and told him it was all right. He turned toward me, and whatever he found in my face made him stop arguing.

Police recovered the photographs, the jewelry and the licenses. They found blood in the basement too, traces I had believed were gone. Mom arrived without her purse and with her keys still in her hand. She asked Dad what was happening and then asked me. Nobody answered quickly enough.

I remembered being sixteen, newly licensed, standing in our kitchen while Dad told me what to do if the police ever stopped me. Keep your hands where they can see them. Don't reach for anything until you're asked. Mom had stood at the sink listening without turning around. She made Dad move my registration from the glove box to the visor afterward so I wouldn't have to reach for it. Mom had spent years worrying about what might happen to us outside the house. She hadn't spent much time worrying about us.

There were five women.

Monica Hayes was first. Rebecca Lane was last.

The newspapers arranged them chronologically. People who had known me for twenty minutes appeared on television to describe things they claimed had always bothered them. My childhood was searched for warning signs. My relationships were dismantled. The prosecution called the photographs and jewelry trophies. Eventually everyone had a word for everything.

Anna testified on the fourth day. She told the jury about the boots, the basement and Rebecca’s license. She told them about the fourteen-second phone call and about seeing my headlights behind her afterward. She remembered the first impact and then the second, the guardrail disappearing, the car rolling, water pushing through the broken window. She remembered getting free and crawling into the reeds before I reached the pond.

“I heard him calling my name,” she said.

That was the first time I learned she had been close enough to hear me.

Mom left the courtroom before Anna finished.

The licenses were entered into evidence later. Rebecca. Monica. Tiffany. Danielle. Erica. Lauren. Each was sealed in a clear bag and passed before the jury.

I was convicted of five murders.

Twenty-two months later, Anna came to see me. Her hair was shorter, and the scar above her eyebrow had faded into a pale interruption in her skin. She sat behind the glass and waited for me to pick up the phone before lifting hers. There was no hello. She said I had asked for her, and I said yes. I asked about Mom. Anna told me not to. I asked about Dad. She said I didn't get updates. Then she folded her hands on the counter between us, and her thumb disappeared.

“Lauren Mitchell,” I said.

Anna looked at me for several seconds. “I don't know who that is.”

“Her husband was Andre.”

She glanced toward the guard.

Andre Mitchell had been at our parents’ house once. Mom asked about him after he left because Anna had laughed too much at something he said. Anna told her they worked together. Mom said he was married. Anna accused her of being nosy, and Dad found somewhere else to be. I hadn't thought about that afternoon again until prison reduced my life to memory and time.

“I found Lauren's license in your apartment,” I said. “Behind the books in your bedroom.”

For the first time since she sat down, Anna seemed to forget where we were. She stared at me, then at the phone in her hand. “You went through my things.”

I laughed once before I could help it. Anna heard the absurdity too.

“You took it?”

“Yes.”

“And put it in your basement?”

I nodded.

“With the others?”

“Yes.”

Anna sat back. Her eyes moved away from me and stayed somewhere beyond my shoulder. When she asked why, there was no anger in her voice.

“I don't know.”

She looked at me again.

I had been given enough time in prison to think about why. I still didn't know.

“The police have it now,” Anna said.

“I know.”

She had seen it at trial. Evidence item forty-seven. She had watched the prosecutor hold Lauren's photograph in front of the jury and describe it as something recovered among my belongings.

“Were you sleeping with Andre?”

“Don't.”

“Did Lauren know?”

“You don't know what happened.”

“No.”

Anna looked up. I let the answer remain what it was.

“You killed five women,” she said after a while.

“Yes.”

“You tried to kill me.”

During the trial, my attorneys had disputed that part. They questioned her memory after the concussion, pointed to the lack of usable paint transfer on my car and suggested another vehicle could have forced her off the road. I had let them.

Anna waited.

I didn't deny it.

Her eyes filled, though nothing else in her expression changed. “You think we're the same.”

“No.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Say her name.”

Anna frowned.

“Lauren.”

Her hand tightened around the receiver.

“You haven't said it once.”

The guard announced that visiting hours would end in five minutes. Anna reached for her purse and stood. She said she was leaving. I told her okay. She said she wasn't coming back, and I told her I knew. She took two steps toward the door before stopping.

“What are you going to do?”

The police already had Lauren's license. All I had to do was tell someone where I had found it. Ramirez would listen. Somebody would find Andre. Somebody would reopen phone records, photographs and bank statements, whatever pieces of Lauren's life still existed. Perhaps they would discover Anna had killed her. Perhaps they would discover she hadn't. I had a driver's license and the way my sister refused to say a dead woman's name. I knew better than most what could be hidden between those two things.

The guard called time again.

Anna sat down and lifted the receiver. “Evan.”

I waited.

“Don't tell them.”

Her thumb was tucked beneath her fingers.

For a moment she was seventeen again, standing in my bedroom with thirty dollars of mine in her pocket and one finger pressed to her lips. My lips are sealed.

Mom used to tell us we had to look after each other because the world would not always do it for us. She said it when we fought, when I left Anna somewhere I was supposed to wait for her, when Anna let older kids bother me without stepping in. We thought she meant the ordinary things children understand: share, defend each other, call when you get home. Maybe that was all she meant.

“Go home, Anna.”

She stayed there another moment. Then I lowered the receiver.

The guard touched her shoulder, and Anna walked away without looking back. I remained at the glass after the door closed behind her. I knew where Lauren's license had been. I knew Anna had allowed a jury to believe it belonged to me. I knew that when I gave her the chance to deny whatever I had begun to suspect, she asked for my silence instead.

Everything else belonged to Lauren.

The guard opened the door behind me.

“Mercer.”

I stood. He waited while I pushed in the chair, then walked me back through the corridor.

I never asked for Ramirez.