The Only One Left

ONE

The office is on Main Street, tucked between a beauty parlor and a storefront that, in hindsight, feels prophetic. When I was here for my initial job interview, it was a travel agency, with posters in the window suggesting freedom, escape, sunny skies. On my last visit, when I was told I was being suspended, it was vacant and dark. Now, six months later, it’s an aerobics studio, and I have no idea what that might portend.

Inside the office, Mr. Gurlain waits for me behind a desk at the far end of a space clearly meant for retail. Free of shelves, cash registers, and product displays, the place is too vast and empty for an office staffed by only one person. The sound of the door closing behind me echoes through the empty space, unnaturally loud.

“Kit, hello,” Mr. Gurlain says, sounding far friendlier than he did during my last visit. “So good to see you again.”

“Likewise,” I lie. I’ve never felt comfortable around Mr. Gurlain. Thin, tall, and just a bit hawkish, he could very well pass for a funeral home director. Fitting, seeing how that’s usually the next stop for most of those in the agency’s care.

Gurlain Home Health Aides specializes in long-term, live-in care—one of the only agencies in Maine to do so. The office walls bear posters of smiling nurses, even though, like me, most of the agency’s staff can’t legally claim the title of one.

“You’re a caregiver now,” Mr. Gurlain had told me during that fateful first visit. “You don’t nurse. You care.”

The current roster of caregivers is listed on a bulletin board behind Mr. Gurlain’s desk, showing who’s available and who’s currently with a patient. My name was once among them, always unavailable, always taking care of someone. I’d been proud of that. Whenever I was asked what I did for a living, I summoned my best Mr. Gurlain impression and replied, “I’m a caregiver.” It sounded noble. Worthy of admiration. People looked at me with more respect after I said it, making me think I’d at last found a purpose. Bright but no one’s idea of a good student, I’d eked my way through high school and, after graduation, struggled with what to do with my life.

“You’re good with people,” my mother said after I’d been fired from an office typing pool. “Maybe nursing is something you could do.”

But being a nurse required more schooling.

So I became the next best thing.

Until I did the wrong thing.

Now I’m here, feeling anxious, prickly, and tired. So very tired.

“How are you, Kit?” Mr. Gurlain says. “Relaxed and refreshed, I hope. There’s nothing better for the spirit than enjoying some time off.”

I honestly have no idea how to respond. Do I feel relaxed after being suspended without pay six months ago? Is it refreshing being forced to sleep in my childhood bedroom and tiptoe around my silent, seething father, whose disappointment colors our every interaction? Did I enjoy being investigated by the agency, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, the police? The answer to all of it is no.

Rather than admit any of that to Mr. Gurlain, I simply say, “Yes.”

“Wonderful,” he replies. “Now all that unpleasantness is behind us, and it’s time for a fresh start.”

I bristle. Unpleasantness. As if it was all just a slight misunderstanding. The truth is that I’d spent twelve years with the agency. I took pride in my work. I was good at what I did. I cared. Yet the moment something went wrong, Mr. Gurlain instantly treated me like a criminal. Even though I’ve been cleared of any wrongdoing and allowed to work again, the whole ordeal has left me furious and bitter. Especially toward Mr. Gurlain.

It wasn’t my plan to return to the agency. But my search for new employment has been a total bust. I’ve filled out dozens of applications for jobs I didn’t want but was crushed anyway when I never got called in for an interview. Stocking shelves at a supermarket. Manning the cash register at a drugstore. Flipping burgers at that new McDonald’s with the playground out by the highway. Right now, Gurlain Home Health Aides is my only option. And even though I hate Mr. Gurlain, I hate being unemployed more.

“You have a new assignment for me?” I say, trying to make this as quick as possible.

“I do,” Mr. Gurlain says. “The patient suffered a series of strokes many years ago and requires constant care. She had a full-time nurse—a private one—who departed quite suddenly.”

“Constant care. That means—”

“That you would be required to live with her, yes.”

I nod to hide my surprise. I thought Mr. Gurlain would keep me close for my first assignment back, giving me one of those nine-to-five, spend-a-day-with-an-old-person jobs the agency sometimes offers at a discount to locals. But this sounds like a real assignment.

“Room and board will be provided, of course,” Mr. Gurlain continues. “But you’d be on call twenty-four hours a day. Any time off you need will have to be worked out between you and the patient. Are you interested?”

Of course I’m interested. But a hundred different questions keep me from instantly saying yes. I begin with a simple but important one.

“When would the job start?”

“Immediately. As for how long you’d be there, well, if your performance is satisfactory, I see no reason why you wouldn’t be kept on until you’re no longer needed.”

Until the patient dies, in other words. The cruel reality about being an at-home caregiver is that the job is always temporary.

“Where is it located?” I ask, hoping it’s in a far-flung area of the state. The further, the better.

“Outside of town,” Mr. Gurlain says, dashing those hopes. They’re revived a second later, when he adds, “On the Cliffs.”

The Cliffs. Only ridiculously rich people live there, ensconced in massive houses atop rocky bluffs that overlook the ocean. I sit with my hands clenched in my lap, fingernails digging into my palms. This is unexpected. A chance to instantly trade the dingy ranch home where I grew up for a house on the Cliffs? It all seems too good to be true. Which must be the case. No one quits a job like that unless there’s a problem.

“Why did the previous nurse leave?”

“I have no idea,” Mr. Gurlain says. “All I was told is that finding a suitable replacement has been a problem.”

“Is the patient . . .” I pause. I can’t say difficult, even though it’s the word I most want to use. “In need of specialized care?”

“I don’t think the trouble is her condition, as delicate as it might be,” Mr. Gurlain says. “The issue, quite frankly, is the patient’s reputation.”

I shift in my seat. “Who’s the patient?”

“Lenora Hope.”

I haven’t heard that name in years. At least a decade. Maybe two. Hearing it now makes me look up from my lap, surprised. More than surprised, actually. I’m flabbergasted. An emotion I’m not certain I’ve experienced before. Yet there it is, a sort of anxious shock fluttering behind my ribs like a bird trapped in a cage.

“The Lenora Hope?”

“Yes,” Mr. Gurlain says with a sniff, as if offended to be even slightly misunderstood.

“I had no idea she was still alive.”

When I was younger, I hadn’t even understood that Lenora Hope was real. I had assumed she was a myth created by kids to scare each other. The schoolyard rhyme, forgotten since childhood, worms its way back into my memory.

At seventeen, Lenora Hope

Hung her sister with a rope

Some of the older girls swore that if you turned out all the lights, stood in front of a mirror, and recited it, Lenora herself might appear in the glass. And if that happened, look out, because it meant your family was going to die next. I never believed it. I knew it was just a variation on Bloody Mary, which was completely made up, which meant Lenora Hope wasn’t real, either.

It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I learned the truth. Not only was Lenora Hope real, but she was local, living a privileged life in a mansion several miles outside of town.

Until one night, she snapped.

Stabbed her father with a knife

Took her mother’s happy life

“She is very much alive,” Mr. Gurlain says.

“God, she must be ancient.”

“She’s seventy-one.”

That seems impossible. I’d always assumed the murders occurred in a different century. An era of hoop skirts, gas lamps, horse-drawn carriages. But if Mr. Gurlain is correct, that means the Hope family massacre took place not too long ago, all things considered.

I do the math in my head, concluding that the killings were in 1929. Only fifty-four years ago. As the date clicks into place, so do the final lines of the rhyme.

“It wasn’t me,” Lenora said

But she’s the only one not dead

Which is apparently still the case. The infamous Lenora Hope is alive, not so well, and in need of care. My care, if I want the assignment. Which I don’t.

“There’s nothing else available? No other new patients?”

“I’m afraid not,” Mr. Gurlain says.

“And none of the other caregivers are available?”

“They’re all booked.” Mr. Gurlain steeples his fingers. “Do you have a problem with the assignment?”

Yes, I have a problem. Several of them, starting with the fact that Mr. Gurlain obviously still thinks I’m guilty but, without further evidence, has no legal grounds to fire me. Since the suspension didn’t drive me away, he’s trying to do it by assigning me to care for the town’s very own Lizzie Borden.

“It’s just, I’m not—” I fumble for the right words. “Considering what she’s done, I don’t think I’d feel comfortable taking care of someone like Lenora Hope.”

“She was never convicted of any crime,” Mr. Gurlain says. “Since she was never proven guilty, then we have no choice but to believe she’s innocent. I thought you of all people would appreciate that.”

Music starts up in the aerobics studio next door, muffled behind the shared wall. “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John. Not about aerobics, although I bet those housewives working out in ripped sweatshirts and leg warmers don’t care. They’re simply content to be wasting money fighting off middle-age pudge. A luxury I can’t afford.

“You know how this works, Kit,” Mr. Gurlain says. “I make the assignments, the caregivers follow them. If you’re uncomfortable with that, then I suggest we part ways permanently.”

I would love to do just that. I also know I need a job. Any job.

I need to start building back my savings, which has dwindled to almost nothing.

Most of all, I need to get away from my father, who’s barely spoken to me in six months. I remember with a clarity so sharp it could break skin the last full sentence he directed my way. He was at the kitchen table, reading the morning paper, his breakfast untouched. He slapped the newspaper down and pointed to the headline on the front page.

A floating feeling overcame me as I stared at it. Like this was happening not to me but to someone playing me in a bad TV movie. The article included my yearbook photo. It wasn’t good, as photos go. Me trying to muster a smile in front of that blue backdrop set up in the high school gymnasium that appeared muddy and gray when rendered in dots of ink. In the picture, my feathered hair looked exactly the same as it did that morning. Numbed by shock, my first thought was that I needed to update my hairstyle.

“What they’re saying’s not true, Kit-Kat,” my father said, as if trying to make me feel better.

But his words didn’t match his devastated expression. I knew he’d said it not for my sake, but for his. He was trying to convince himself it wasn’t true.

My father threw the newspaper into the trash and left the kitchen without another word. He hasn’t said much to me since then. Now I think about that long, fraught, suffocating silence and say, “I’ll do it. I’ll take the assignment.”

I tell myself it won’t be that bad. The job is only temporary. A few months, tops. Just until I have enough money saved up to move somewhere new. Somewhere better. Somewhere far away from here.

“Wonderful,” Mr. Gurlain says without a hint of enthusiasm. “You’ll need to report for duty as soon as possible.”

I’m given directions to Lenora Hope’s house, a phone number to call if I have trouble finding it, and a nod from Mr. Gurlain, signaling the matter is settled. As I leave, I sneak a glance at the bulletin board behind his desk. Currently, three caregivers are without assignments. So there are others available. The reason Mr. Gurlain lied about that isn’t lost on me.

I’m still being punished for breaking protocol and tarnishing the agency’s sterling reputation.

But as I push out the door into the biting air of October in Maine, I think of another reason I was given this assignment. One more chilling than the weather.

Mr. Gurlain chose me because Lenora Hope is the one patient nobody—not even the police—will mind if I kill.

TWO

It takes me less than an hour to gather my belongings. I learned early on that a caregiver should pack light. A medical bag, a suitcase, and a box. There’s no need for more than that.

The medical bag is filled with the tools of my trade. Thermometer, blood pressure cuff, stethoscope. My parents gave me the black leather tote when I was first hired by Mr. Gurlain. Twelve years later, I’m still using it, even though the zipper sticks and the leather is cracked at the corners.

The suitcase is filled with a toiletry bag and my clothes. Bland, inoffensive slacks and cardigans ten years out of date. I’ve long ago given up trying to be stylish. Comfort and thrift matter more.

The box is filled with books. Paperbacks, mostly. They once belonged to my mother and bear the loving wear and tear of a voracious reader.

“You’re never alone when there’s a book nearby,” she used to say. “Never ever.”

While I appreciate the sentiment, I also know it’s a lie. For six months, I’ve been surrounded by books, and I’ve never felt more alone.

All packed, I peek into the hallway to make sure there’s a clear path to the back door off the kitchen. My father came home for lunch, which he sometimes does when a job site is nearby. He’s now in the living room, watching TV and eating a sandwich while sunk deep into his La-Z-Boy.

In the past six months, the two of us have become experts at avoidance. Full weeks went by in which we never saw each other. I’ve mostly kept to my room, venturing to the kitchen only when I was certain my father was at work, asleep, or out with the girlfriend I’m not supposed to know about. We haven’t been introduced. I’m only aware of her existence because I heard them talking in the living room last week, surprised by the sound of another woman’s voice in the house. The next night, my father snuck out like a schoolboy, either too afraid to admit he’s started dating again or too ashamed to risk my bumping into his new lady friend.

Now it’s me sneaking out, moving on tiptoes as I make two trips to my car, one for the suitcase and medical bag, one for the box of books. On the second trip, I find Kenny leaning against my Ford Escort. Clearly, he saw me with the suitcase and came out of the house next door to investigate. Staring at the box in my hands, he says, “You moving out?”

“For now, yeah,” I say. “Maybe for good. I got a new assignment.”

“I thought you were fired.”

“Suspended. It just ended.”

“Oh.” Kenny frowns. Rare for him. Normally he only sports a horny, hungry look. “Quickie before you go?”

Now that’s the Kenny I’ve gotten used to seeing since we started sleeping together in May. Like me, he’s currently out of work and living with his parents. Unlike me, Kenny is only twenty. He’s my dirty little secret. Or, more likely, I’m his.

It started one afternoon when we were both lazing in our connecting yards at the same time, me with a Sidney Sheldon paperback, Kenny with a joint. We made eye contact across the lawn a few times before he said, “Not working today?”

“Nope,” I replied. “You?”

“Nope.”

Then, because I was bored and lonely, I said, “Want a beer?”

Kenny said sure. Which led to drinking. Which led to small talk. Which led to making out on the living room couch.

“You want to fuck or something?” Kenny eventually said.

A month into my suspension and full of self-pity, I sized him up. He wasn’t bad-looking, despite the mustache that drooped like a dead caterpillar under his nose. The rest of him was much better. Especially his arms, which were wiry, strong, and tanned. I could do—and have done—much worse.

“Sure,” I said with a shrug. “Why not?”

When it was over, I vowed never to do it again. I was eleven when Kenny was born, for God’s sake. I remember his parents bringing him home from the hospital, my mother cooing at him, my father slipping an envelope of cash into his dad’s sweaty palm. But when Kenny showed up at the back door two days later, looking like a stray dog seeking scraps, I let him in and guided him to my bedroom.

That’s how it’s been once, twice, sometimes three times a week. I know the score. This isn’t romance. Half the time we don’t even talk. And even though I feel guilty about it, I also know I needed something besides reading to get through the long, lonely days.

“My dad’s inside,” I tell Kenny. “And my new patient is expecting me.”

I don’t tell him just who that new patient is. I’m afraid of what he’ll think of me if I do.

“Sure, I get it,” Kenny says, doing little to mask his disappointment. “See you around, I guess.”

I watch him walk the short distance back to his house. When he goes inside without a backward glance, a pang hits my heart. Not sadness, exactly, but something mighty close. It might have only been sex, and it might have only been Kenny, but at least it was something and he was someone.

Now there’s nothing and no one.

I place the box and suitcase into the trunk before making one last trip into the house. In the living room, I find my father watching the noon news because that’s what my mother used to do. It’s a habit, and for Pat McDeere, old habits die hard. On the TV is a clip of President Reagan giving a speech about the economy while Just Say No Nancy stands primly beside him. My father, who hates all politicians regardless of party, lets out a derisive snort.

“Bullshit, Ronnie,” he mutters, his mouth full of sandwich. “Try doing something that’ll help guys like me for once.”

Standing in the doorway, I clear my throat. “Dad, I’m leaving.”

“Oh.”

There’s no surprise behind the word. If anything, my father sounds relieved.

“I’m back on the job,” I add when he doesn’t press for details. “My new patient’s a stroke victim. Lives out on the Cliffs.”

I say it hoping he’ll be impressed—or, at the very least, intrigued—by the idea of rich people trusting me enough to take care of someone. If he is, he doesn’t show it.

“Okay,” he says.

I know the one sure way to get my father’s full attention is to tell him the name of my new patient. Just like with Kenny, I don’t even consider it. Knowing I’ll be caring for Lenora Hope will only make my father think less of me. If such a thing is possible.

“Do you need anything before I go?” I say instead.

My father takes another bite of sandwich and shakes his head. The pang I’d felt outside returns with another kick. Harder this time. So hard I swear a chunk of my heart has broken off and is now dropping into the depths of my stomach.

“I’ll try to check in every two weeks.”

“No need,” my father says.

And that’s all he says.

I hover in the doorway a moment—waiting, hoping, silently pleading for more. Anything will do. Goodbye. Good riddance. Fuck off. Anything but this hostile silence that makes me feel like nothing. Worse than nothing.

Invisible.

That’s how I feel.

I leave after that, not bothering to say goodbye. I don’t want to be met with silence when my father refuses to say it back to me.

THREE

Duran Duran blasts from my car stereo as I follow a road that hugs the rocky coastline, climbing higher and higher until the Escort shimmies and the rough waters of the Atlantic become blurs of white crashing against strips of sand far below. In my rearview mirror is an area that is definitely the Cliffs. It practically screams old money, with massive houses clinging to the craggy bluffs like gannet nests, half hidden behind brick walls and swaths of ivy.

How the other half lives.

That’s how my mother would have described those cliffside dwellings with turrets, widow’s walks, and bay windows facing the sea.

I beg to differ. Not even the other half can afford to live at the Cliffs. The area has always been—and always will be—rarefied air. It’s home to the cream of the crop, perched over everyone and everything, as if God himself had placed them there.

“Yet here you are, Kit-Kat,” my mother would have said. “On your way to a job in one of these places.”

Again, I would disagree. Where I’m heading isn’t anyone’s idea of a prime destination.

Hope’s End.

Until today, I’d only heard it referred to simply as the Hope house, usually in that hushed tone reserved for tragic things. Now I know why. Hope’s End strikes me as a startlingly apocalyptic name for an estate. Especially considering what happened there.

My knowledge doesn’t extend far beyond the rhyme. I know that Winston Hope made a fortune in shipping and built his estate on the rocky coast of northern Maine and not in Bar Harbor or Newport because the land here was mostly undeveloped and he could have his pick of pristine ocean views. I also know that Winston had a wife, Evangeline, and two daughters, Lenora and Virginia.

And I know that one long-ago October night, three of them were murdered—with the fourth member of the clan accused of doing the killing. A seventeen-year-old girl, no less. No wonder I thought that morbid rhyme I first learned on the scrubby playground behind the elementary school was made up. It all seemed too Gothic to be real.

But it happened.

Now it’s town legend.

The kind of thing kids whisper about at sleepovers and adults don’t like to whisper about at all.

Lenora, the only one left, claimed to have had nothing to do with it. She told investigators that she was asleep during the murders and only knew about them after she woke up, went downstairs, and discovered the rest of her family dead.

What she couldn’t tell the police was who else could have done it.

Or how.

Or why.

Nor could Lenora explain why she wasn’t targeted by the killer, which led the police to suspect she was the one who did it, even though no one could prove it. All the servants had conveniently been given the night off, eliminating any possible witnesses. With no evidence physically linking her to the crimes, Lenora was never charged. But one need only look to that schoolyard chant to see what the public thought. The rhyme’s first line—At seventeen, Lenora Hope—fully establishes that she’s to blame for everything.

I’m not surprised. There’s no such thing as presumed innocence.

I know that from experience.

When the town passed judgment on Lenora Hope, she hid away in her family’s house, never to be seen again. But that didn’t stop people from trying. When I was in high school, it was common for groups of boys to dare each other to sneak onto the property and peek into windows, angling for a glimpse of Lenora. As far as I know, none of them ever got one, which earns Miss Hope some grudging respect in my book. I would love to be able to disappear.

Up ahead, the land rises even higher, and the road inclines to meet it. The Escort does another shimmy as I spot a brick wall in the sun-streaked distance. It’s tall enough to block out any hint of what’s behind it and old enough that the road curves around it, as if in deference.

I follow the curve, driving slowly until I see spray-painted words on the wall. The graffiti, neon blue on stately red brick, tells me I’m in the right place.

ROT IN HELL LENORA HOPE

I blink at the words, wondering if I should press ahead or drive away as fast as I can. I know the answer. It’s the one I can’t afford.

So I continue on, nudging the Escort closer to the ornate gate covering a gap in the vandalized wall. On the other side, the driveway slices across an emerald lawn toward the Hope house itself.