The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler Read Free Book Online

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    Get up, he said. Quick .
    Lily sat on the edge of the bed as she read. The room was warm—stuffy, Nathan would complain when he got home from work—but she enjoyed the warmth on her shoulders, bare except for the straps of her slip. She’d been reading for a while, had lost track of how long. She closed the notebook as she heard footsteps again, lighter and quicker than Mr. Hausner’s. She slid the notebook underneath the mattress, touched up her lipstick in the mirror, fixed her hair, put on her dress.
    “Hello,” she said to her mother-in-law as she appeared in the kitchen doorway.
    “Hello,” Bella answered.
    Both women paused then, Lily in the entrance to the kitchen, Bella at the counter. It was the first they had seen of each other since breakfast.
    “I’ve made hamburgers for supper,” Bella said. An attempt at conversation that sounded—to both—like accusation.
    “I should have helped you. I’m sorry. I started to prepare something before I lay down for my nap, but then …”
    When Bella opened the icebox earlier she had seen, on the lower shelf, the full extent of the supper Lily had prepared: a plate of sliced cucumber, three hard-boiled eggs, also sliced and sprinkled with paprika, a bowl of blueberries with sour cream.
    “I don’t know what came over me,” Lily said. “I was suddenly so tired.”
    It was the same thing that came over her every day. The moment Lily finished the minimum allotment of chores and shopping that she deemed necessary to fulfill what was expected of her, she retreated behind the closed door of the bedroom. And to do what, exactly? Bella wondered. To nap, she said. To hide, it seemed to Bella. And from what? Or rather, from whom, more to the point, since Bella was the only other person in the house all day. But Bella was trying not to take it personally, trying not to see the closed bedroom door as a slap in her face, as a rejection of her overtures, of her offered friendship, kinship.
    “You feel better now?” Bella asked.
    Lily looked at her as if she had already lost track of the conversation they were having. She hadn’t, but how could she explain the feeling of strangeness that overwhelmed her when she was out of her room, trying to interact as a person normally would when buying bread in a store or talking to her mother-in-law in the kitchen or going about any other business of everyday life? She couldn’t, not even to herself. It was as if the world outside her bedroom was a stilted play she’d walked into and couldn’t walk out of again, a dream she couldn’t wake from, where everything was menacing in an intangible, slightly surreal way. She hadn’t felt this way during the war, when the dangers that she faced were real. Had she felt it then, she would not have survived, she thought; she would have given herself away with the sort of anxious glance or gesture that had been fatal to so many. Why now, then? she wondered. Was it a normal response to what she’d seen and been through, to the difficulties of a new marriage to a manshe didn’t know, a new life that could not yet be expected to feel like her own? Perhaps, but nothing about her existence felt normal. She was beginning to think the problem might lie elsewhere, in the very life she was trying to make, the life of another that was stolen, not really hers, not ever meant to be her own.
    “Since your nap …”
    Now she really had lost track of the conversation. “Yes,” she said automatically. “Thank you.” She glanced at the hamburgers that were sitting on the counter. She could no longer stand the sight of raw meat. The very thought of it in her mouth, the dripping fat, the charred, ground flesh … If she had to eat it she would vomit, she was certain.
    It was grief, Bella knew, watching Lily. It had nothing to do with not liking Bella. It was a shocked sort of grief that demanded time, space, patience and understanding. And a firm hand in equal measure. “You might feel better if you