Read The Imposter Bride for Free Online Page A

still not returned with her quart of milk.
    My father was called. The police. The apartment began filling up with family, friends and neighbours, every one of whom knew that a young mother who did not return to her baby after going out to buy a quart of milk was a young mother lying dead in a ditch or abducted by a maniac or pinned under the wheels of a streetcar.
    In the meantime I was still crying, so Ida Pearl went to the kitchen to see if there was any formula. She opened the fridge and it was then that she saw the full quart of milk, as well as several bottles of formula arranged neatly behind it, a finding she reported to the police officer, who didn’t have time to listen to a busybody’s meddlings when there was a young mother missing and a possible maniac on the loose.
    “Excuse me,” Ida Pearl said again to the investigating officer, who was asking Elka about any suspicious-looking characters she might have noticed lurking around the street or building when she arrived. It could well have been me, Elka thought, sobbing now at the thought of her own near miss, herclose encounter with the dark force that had brushed past her just moments before sweeping Lily into its deadly embrace. “Excuse me,” Ida Pearl interrupted yet again, quite a bit louder now, and she drew the police officer into the kitchen towards the fridge, which she opened. The police officer still didn’t see why Ida had interrupted him, so she pointed to the full quart of milk that stood right in front of the bottles of pre-measured formula. A different line of investigative inquiry was immediately launched, one that led, not much later, to the bedroom, where resting on my father’s pillow was a note. Forgive me. Yours, Lily .
    A FAIRY TALE . That’s what that story had always felt like to me. Now, though, it became the only story I wanted to hear. And the old versions no longer satisfied. What did she look like? I wanted to know. What did she say? Tell me again. Why did she leave? What do you mean she didn’t say, you don’t know for sure? What do you know not for sure? Who was the note to? How could everyone be so certain she wouldn’t come back?

CHAPTER 3
    L ily sat on the bed and listened. It was three o’clock on a hot summer day and it was quiet, as quiet as it ever got before midnight. She and Nathan had been married almost three weeks now and were still living with Bella and Sol in the family apartment on Clark Street. “It’s just for a few months,” Nathan promised her. Soon they’d have a place of their own. She smiled as she thought of that promise; he repeated it every night. “I don’t mind living here,” she responded every time he said it. “It’s your poor brother who won’t relax until you remove me from his home.” At which Nathan too would smile.
    Sol was so ashamed of what he had done that he barely showed his face. He ate his evening meal out and then stayed out until late at night, creeping in under the cover of darkness to sleep on the cot behind the piano in the living room that had become a bedroom for both him and his mother while Nathan and Lily occupied the real bedroom. “He’ll get over it,” Nathan would say every night about Sol.
    Through the open window she could hear drifts of people’s voices, children calling, the clanging of the streetcar from a few blocks away. From inside the apartment: nothing, though Bella was home. Bella would be in the kitchen this time of day reading the afternoon paper over coffee or tea. Lily knew she should join her. She knew she should get up off her bed, open the door and join her mother-in-law in the kitchen, but she couldn’t force herself to take those actions. She pulled the notebook from under the mattress where she kept it and began to read.
    October 1943
    I begin with a dream. I’m running through a city. It’s a city I don’t know. I’m running along streets of stone, trapped between the high stone walls that rise on either side of the street.