Back in your room at the boardinghouse, you riffled through your roommate’s things and learned what it really meant to be Stanford. You and Stanford actually did look alike, which made it a little easier to forgive the fact that all the white people had trouble telling you apart. You were the same height, the same light-brown complexion, the same lanky build. You, Abel, did not arrive dressed for an English winter, so you had even taken to wearing Stanford’s clothes.
Of course, you thought of your family. Your wife, Vera. You thought about the two life insurance policies you’d purchased. The one she’d made you take out before you left, and the one the company made mandatory. You decided that you were worth more to her dead. Vera was beautiful. She would find a new husband, a richer one; the children were young enough to embrace a new father, and they would finally live the life Vera thought that she deserved, the one she had no qualms about constantly demanding of you.
Stanford had little family. No wife. No children. That was what clinched things for you. Stanford was raised by his grandmother, who was in her seventies and losing her eyesight. You could continue writing her letters, sending her a little money, and there was no bother there. What surprised you was how right it felt. At least then.
When you met Adele shortly after you became Stanford, you connected with her immediately. Like you, she was Jamaican and had left her family to work in England, though at nineteen, she was almost fifteen years younger than you. You were as drawn to her as you had been to your first wife, and she to you. The difference was that Adele did not try to remake and mold you. When you told her the truth, the very first night you spent together, that you had taken your friend’s name, she did not try to dissuade you. Instead, she avoided the subject until you proposed, and she said yes on the condition that you live in America. As if leaving that country would leave the lie behind.
Later, the guilt would hit her first, a few years after coming to the U.S. She had started to go to church multiple times a week and suggested that you atone. You remember having laughed at the thought that getting down on your knees could redeem you. But since the day that she collapsed in the store, you’ve been thinking about your past. You’ve been thinking about that word, fake, and you decided you were right to never use it to describe what you’ve done. You are a thief, pure and simple. It wasn’t Stanford’s life you had stolen, for he would have lost that regardless. It was his death. Where is his soul now? Circling the world, looking for a grave that does not yet exist? Isn’t it about time you give him his due?
Your granddaughter has taught you to use the computer to kill some of your idle time. It was easier than you thought to find your first daughter, to track her journey from Jamaica to New York.
You are thinking of the grave that bears your real name and all of the people who needlessly mourned you when Irene finally arrives, the daughter who thinks you are dead. She is under the impression that she has been called to your house to care for an old man in a wheelchair. That old man is you. You didn’t realize just how little you’ve thought about her all these years until you watch her climb the stoop, and all the feeling you should have had for your firstborn suddenly rushes through you.
When she enters, you see her mother Vera’s wide, obstinate mouth, her large, slightly bulbous hazel eyes, her flaring nostrils. You can sense immediately, before she even speaks, that she also has her mother’s brutal tongue. You are intimidated. She has a look that says she is a frayed rope one tug away from snapping, and it occurs to you to wonder if, when you tell her the truth, she will kill you. In that moment, your death—your real death—flashes in your mind.
You have never had a premonition before, but now the certainty of it causes you to slump forward in your wheelchair. You have a vision of a woman supporting your weight as you make your way up the flight of stairs, bringing you all the way to the top, and then just