The Imposter by Marin Montgomery (ebooks online reader txt) 📕

the sheets in a jumbled heap. If it’s one of the inmates, I’m going to have to be ready to fight back. I peer over the bed at the figure lying on the floor. Expecting it to be a masked intruder, I’m dumbfounded to see the shape of a barely buck-ten woman, middle aged, holding a sharp kitchen knife.

“What?” I stammer in confusion. “What are you doing?”

Silence looms, and I’m uncertain if the air is suffocating me or if I’m struggling to catch my breath because of the panic rising in my chest.

“You just stabbed me?” It comes out as a question.

My mother lies on her back, panting. Suddenly, she lets out a low moan. “Who are you?”

“What?”

“What have you done with my daughter?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I shriek. My hands move forward in a defensive gesture, and then I delicately touch my shoulder blade, where the stabbing pinpricks pulse as if I was repeatedly attacked by a bee.

With the knife tightly curled in her hand, my mother jabs the air. “Who are you, and where did you come from?”

I jostle my back against the windowpane, as far back as I can go without falling out the window, careful not to press the wound into the wall. The moon doesn’t even shine in the room, as if scared to illuminate the tragedy. Openmouthed, I stare at her, one hand resting gingerly against my shoulder, the other waiting for her to spring up and attack me for a second time.

Her eyes are a malevolent force, but her screams are worse. “What did you do with her?”

“Who?” I screech. “Who are you talking about?”

We both let loose a string of expletives and squeals; it’s unclear who is causing more of a commotion, both of us in a contest to outshout the other.

“You know who!” She explodes up as if blasted out of a cannon. “You’re not Sibley—you’re Soren!”

She keeps chanting this, and I’m confident her mouth is going to open and expel green bile like in The Exorcist. Her brown eyes are dilated, but they also have a vacant gleam, like they belong to an otherworldly species. This crazed lunatic doesn’t resemble my mother.

“I’m not Soren. Who is Soren?” I beg. “Why do you keep calling me another name?”

She looks daggers at me.

“Mother.” I inch sideways off the bed. “You’re scaring me.” Carefully tiptoeing toward the corner of the room, I refuse to break eye contact. “Are you having a seizure? Did something happen?”

“No,” she gasps. “I don’t know why you’re in her room.” She nods toward the bed. “You shouldn’t be in her room.”

“Whose room?” I’m puzzled. “I’m in my room.”

“You convinced her to leave me, and now you want her room?” She kicks her legs against the hardwood floor with such force I’m worried she’s going to break them. “You can’t have everything! You can’t have me all to yourself. She’s all I had, and you ruined it.” Then, launching into a tirade, she says, “This isn’t your room. You don’t have a room in this house. Stop lying to me. You’re not her. Get out, Soren!”

“Mother,” I implore, “I could’ve slept downstairs on the couch if you preferred.” Or have stayed in a hotel, I think, knowing I’ll never feel safe in her presence again. Rubbing my face, I’m traumatized; the full weight of what happened hasn’t fully sunk in yet.

I can’t believe the next words I utter. “But you didn’t have to stab me over it.” Even monotone, the weight of her actions is unimaginable.

In my career, I’m used to calming unruly clients and aggressive colleagues. Lately, I’ve fielded manipulative coworkers with their own agendas, but even that is new territory for me. It’s implausible my own mother could and would stab me with a kitchen knife. This has to be a misunderstanding, a foolish mistake.

Yes, she thinks you’re someone else.

The fight I had with Fletch that ended our friendship all those years ago floods my brain with warning alarms, dinging loudly.

Jonathan didn’t just fall out of a loft and die. He was murdered by your mother.

When Fletch tried to tell me Jonathan hadn’t had a freak accident, I was somewhat relieved. The blame and guilt I felt, not to mention the responsibility, were a lot for a seventeen-year-old girl. I’d wondered if I was the cause of his drinking, of his pain. Maybe he’d hated his life so much he had to lessen the pain daily. But then Fletch started throwing around the word murder, and that didn’t sit well either. Especially when he implied my mother was the direct cause of it.

No one could blame her, Fletch told me. Everyone knew he was abusive, apparently everyone except me. It was a secret the adults shared, and children like Fletch overheard it when their parents whispered about mine.

Call it lack of awareness or childish immaturity, but I never saw Jonathan raise a hand to my mother until the last time I saw him alive. True, my mother tiptoed around him, but she was always soft spoken and timid. She acted like a domestic servant, but most of the wives on the farms had specific gender roles. I can’t say the expectations laid out for her were any different from those of the parents of anyone else I knew. Our households mirrored each other.

I shudder. My last memory of him is when he dragged her to the barn by her hair.

I stare back at my mother as a shattering cry racks her body. She speaks softly to the ceiling. “I thought you were dead.”

I hesitate, unsure if I should engage. “Why would I be dead?”

“Because you died at the hospital.”

“How do you figure?”

Now catatonic, she doesn’t move.

Gawking at her, I feel a trickle of blood running down my elbow. It’s not a heavy flow, but it’s steady enough to coat the wispy blonde hairs on my arm.

Crouching down, I whisper, “Will you please hand me the knife?”

“What knife?” she says as her left hand grips