Killer's Cousin

  “Also what?” Vic said.

  I didn’t want to go on, but I was stuck. “I … twice at night I’ve heard this noise … a buzz or a hum …” I stopped again. I thought I felt Lily’s eyes on me, but when I looked across, her face was hidden behind the flowers.

  Julia said, “Aren’t you sleeping well? Why not?”

  I could feel all their eyes. “I sleep fine,” I said quickly. “It’s just sometimes I hear this noise … I think it must be the wind.”

  “Yes,” said Julia. “This is an old house, which you’re—” Her eyes narrowed. “Not used to.”

  Vic nodded. “Old houses have personalities. Especially wooden houses. They creak.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Silence again. Vic reached once more for the bread basket, but I had finished the last slice. I was still hungry. I had carried the tureen to the table for Julia, so I knew there was plenty more. I looked at Vic, and his plate, and then at my plate once more. I looked at Julia, who was patting her mouth with her napkin.

  Suddenly I almost laughed. Please, sir, I thought, I want some more.

  “Is there any more stew, Julia?” I said boldly. “I’d like seconds.”

  “Of course,” said Julia. “Pass me your plate.”

  She didn’t look at Vic. She didn’t ask Vic if he also wanted seconds. She hadn’t, I suddenly realized, said a word to Vic all evening. Or he to her. They hadn’t exchanged a single glance, either.

  I’m imagining things, I thought. Shadows, noises, atmosphere … I looked at Vic again, and Julia saw me do it. She said smoothly, “Lilian, ask your father if he’d like seconds.”

  I blinked. I received my plate back. Lily said, “Dad, would you like some more stew?”

  “Yes, please, Lily,” said Vic.

  I watched as Vic passed his plate to Lily, who passed it on to Julia, who filled it generously and passed it back via Lily to Vic.

  “Thank you,” said Vic to Lily.

  “He says thanks,” said Lily to Julia.

  “He’s welcome,” said Julia.

  “She says you’re welcome,” said Lily to Vic.

  I opened my mouth. Then I closed it. I looked from Vic to Julia. Vic was eating again and couldn’t, wouldn’t, meet my eyes. Julia did, though, for the barest second, before lifting her chin and looking away again.

  No. I was not imagining this, at least. Vic and Julia weren’t talking to each other. They were communicating through Lily.

  Was I responsible for that, too?

  I looked up and saw Lily, smiling sweetly at me. She had leaned sideways to have a good view.

  “More bread?” she asked. “I can get you some from the kitchen.”

  “No,” I said. “Thank you, but no.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The next morning I went to school. It was a half day; I was supposed to register, pick up my class schedule, sign up for activities. It felt peculiar, getting ready for school by myself. The attic apartment was too quiet. As I ate cereal I remembered how my mother had always insisted on cooking a big breakfast for me on the first day of school. I remembered her ritual questions at dinner: What were your impressions of your teachers today? Your classes?

  My father always had something more pointed to say. The same thing every year, delivered seriously and with full focus: What are your goals this year, Davey? I never got away with less than three.

  Almost exactly a year before, I’d had a pocketful of conventional goals: grades and college applications and sports. And a new, unstated goal, just as orthodox, involving Emily. I’d been sure of getting whatever I wanted. I’d left the house early that morning and driven to Emily and Greg’s to pick them up. We’d all crammed into the front seat. Greg, high, was full of noxious comments about everyone and everything. This may have been when Emily and I began to realize that he rarely wasn’t high. He was utterly oblivious to the fact that Emily and I were holding hands. I’d known Emily always, of course—she was Greg’s sister—but that summer … well. I’d wondered casually when she would get around to telling him. Or if he would ever notice on his own. Greg was ten months older than Emily, but that summer he had begun to seem like the younger sibling.

  You were my friend first, he said to me later. Like a spoiled child.

  I wrenched my mind from a picture of Greg’s hate- and despair-filled face the last time I had seen him. In the courtroom, sitting next to his parents, listening as I was acquitted of killing his sister. Maybe he called me jealous—obsessive—violent—because that was how he felt. I don’t know.

  On the stand, his hands shook.

  I pushed away my cereal. It was time to leave.

  I went downstairs quietly, half expecting to find the first-day-of-school rituals being played out with Lily. But Lily’s bedroom door was closed and I remembered that her school didn’t begin until the following Monday. Maybe her parents would be talking to each other by then.

  Vic had given me directions from North Cambridge to the Charles River, where St. Joan’s was, and I drove there easily enough, parking in the small student lot. I got out of my car and watched my new classmates pour off a city bus and amble toward the stretch of buildings. At my old school, in the suburbs of Baltimore, most of the seniors had driven. It didn’t look to be that way here. Should I ask Vic about bus routes tonight? Even the thought depressed me. As long as I had my car, I had the illusion of an easy escape. Anyway, there was no sense trying to fit in.

  I had expected to feel lonely, but I didn’t. I felt detached.

  I walked past idle clumps of talking kids and went through the main doors of the school. The packet I’d been mailed said to report to the cafeteria. I did that. I stood in line before a table marked T THROUGH Z, and waited my turn, watching, listening to the hubbub around me. Finally I got to the front of the line. When I said my name, the woman looked up at me, something she hadn’t done with the kids before me. But her hands riffled automatically through the box and whipped out a piece of paper. “Here you go, Mr. Yaffe.” I might have imagined the emphasis on my name.

  “Thanks,” I said politely, and turned away.

  I reported to another table and got my free St. Joan’s T-shirt. It had white lettering on a dark pink background. For a few seconds I thought about advising Dr. Walpole that she’d have more success recruiting boys if the school colors changed. Ha. Like I cared.

  There were tables for clubs and activities. When I saw the one for cross-country, my stomach tightened. But I walked up, nodded to the girl behind the table, and signed my name to a list. And then, as I turned away, I saw the skinhead.

  He was easily six and a half feet tall, and thin as a flagpole. He wore heavy laceless combat boots without socks, camouflage shorts, and the pink, glaringly new St. Joan’s T-shirt. His white head bobbed precariously on a reedlike neck as his watery blue eyes scanned the room. Briefly, as if feeling my gaze, his eyes met mine and then slid down to the schedule clutched between bony fingers.

  He stood alone in the cafeteria. The students parted smoothly before him and rejoined behind, as if he were Moses at the Red Sea.

  I turned back to the cross-country table and said to the girl, “Excuse me, but who is that?”

  She followed my gaze and her mouth twisted a little. “Oh. Frank Delgado.”

  The fact was, you didn’t see a lot of guys my age who shaved their heads. When you did, they didn’t wear combat gear. Unless …

  “Is he …” I paused, not certain whether I wanted to say it. But the girl caught my drift and finished for me.

  “… really a skinhead?” I nodded, and she shrugged. “Who knows? He’s a weirdo, that’s for sure. New last year.” And with that she seemed for the first time really to see me. Her face brightened with interest; she leaned forward and smiled. “Hey, you’re new too, aren’t you? I’ve never seen you before. I’m Michelle Grafton. I’m a junior. What’s your name? What year are you?”

  Before I could reply she grabbed the clipboard and looked at where I had
signed my name. There was a little pause. Odd how even the top of someone’s head can be expressive.

  “David Bernard Yaffe,” I said distinctly.

  She looked up. Her mouth was frozen in a little O. I gave her a warm smile. “Nice to meet you, Michelle,” I said. She quailed.

  I felt like Dracula. It was not entirely unpleasant.

  CHAPTER 6

  I had nothing else to do at school, but I didn’t want to go back to Vic and Julia’s. I left my car in the student lot and walked the half mile to Harvard Square. There I walked some more, listening to street musicians, reading posted restaurant menus, finally settling for a couple of slices of pizza. I went into a big discount bookstore called Wordsworth and browsed their science fiction section. I bought a CD at Tower Records. I watched Blade Runner at the Brattle Theater.

  When the movie ended, it was nearly seven o’clock. I got my car, stopped at the Star Market for groceries, and arrived back at Vic and Julia’s just as dusk was settling into full dark. All over the neighborhood, lights were on, illuminating the rooms and people within. Vic and Julia’s windows gleamed softly above my head. I realized then that I had hoped they wouldn’t be home. I did not want to talk to them.

  On the porch, I looked at the dark windows of the first-floor apartment where Raina Doumeng lived. I wondered if she really had recognized me. I wondered if even now the girl from the track table was telling her friends about meeting me. I wondered why the skinhead at school chose to expose his differentness so openly.

  As quietly as possible I went upstairs to the second floor. The television blared in the Shaughnessy kitchen at the back, and I heard the soft clink of cutlery on a plate. I headed up the hall toward the attic stairs.

  Vic and Julia’s bedroom door was closed. Lily’s was open, however, and I was unable to pass it without looking in. On the bed, Lily was lying on her stomach with her chin on her hands, staring at the doorway, at me, as I went by. No book, no music to occupy her. And no expression on her face, not even boredom. As we looked at each other for a split second, her expression did not change, even as I forced myself to nod at her.

  Lily. Speaking of different.

  The attic felt like a haven. If only I didn’t have to go through Vic and Julia’s to reach it.

  I unpacked the groceries and then my backpack, tossing the St. Joan’s T-shirt to the floor. Below, I fancied that Lily was now staring up at me through the ceiling. Automatically, my eyes calculated the exact spot on the floor below which she was located.

  Ridiculous. I was being ridiculous. And it was undoubtedly because I was hungry. I went and got the crackers and peanut butter, but I’d bought salt-free, fat-free, cholesterol-free crackers by mistake. I threw the box away and ate some peanut butter out of the jar. I put on a CD but then, impatiently, turned the boom box off. I listened to the silence. Tomorrow there would be classfuls of Michelle Graftons. And in each class, a roll call in which I must respond to my name.

  There was nothing I could do about that. Nothing I could do about anything.

  My phone rang. It was my mother, with a modified version of first-day-of-school questions. My father was still at work, she said. I accepted the excuse, or pretended to.

  As soon as she slowed down, I cut in. I couldn’t help it. “Did Vic and Julia really invite me here?” I demanded. “Or did you engineer it?”

  “What?”

  “Whose idea was it in the first place, to have me come here?”

  There was a telltale moment of silence. Then: “What does it matter whose idea it was? David, I assure you, Vic was only too happy …”

  I doubted that. “Well, Julia is not happy,” I said. “And if you want to break up Vic’s marriage, this might do it.” I didn’t say, And imagine how I feel. She clearly wasn’t interested in that.

  My mother said, “What are you talking about? What about Julia?”

  “Julia is not happy about my being here,” I repeated. “She’s so mad at Vic about it, she’s not talking to him. And he’s not talking to her. And,” I added, suddenly inspired, “if that’s not enough, think of Lily. They’re making her be the go-between. It’s not psychologically healthy for a kid. I’m messing them all up. I shouldn’t be here.”

  “Vic and Julia aren’t talking to each other?”

  My mother is not usually slow. “That’s right,” I said patiently. And I told her about the dinner. I gave her the long version, with details: the way she likes her information. Then I paused. “Hello?” I said finally.

  “I’m thinking,” said my mother.

  I waited another minute. “Look,” I said, “you do see that my being here is messing them up and that it’s not comfortable for me, knowing—” I stopped. I didn’t want to go on.

  “We had this conversation,” my mother said. I could hear the strain in her voice. “You need to finish high school. Nothing has changed. Not for you. Or us.

  “As to Vic and Julia,” my mother continued, when it was clear I wasn’t going to say anything, “I know you will find this difficult to believe, but I suspect … well, I doubt their quarrel is about you.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Really,” said my mother. “I’ve had a feeling for a few years now that things weren’t right. From what Vic has said—or maybe hasn’t said …” She sighed. “I didn’t want to know about it, but I did. Things haven’t been right for Vic and Julia for a very long time. Since Kathy died, at least.”

  With that, I remembered the dining room wall downstairs. Not a single photo of Vic and Julia’s older daughter.

  “It’s not you, David,” continued my mother. “You’re not … you can’t make things worse for them than they already were. Are.” She sighed again.

  Maybe she was right. Maybe I wasn’t the problem. But how could my mother think my presence wouldn’t make things worse? I was suddenly overwhelmed with tiredness. It was terrible, I suppose, if my uncle and aunt had come apart over Kathy. Worse, obviously, than if they had recently fought only about me. But I didn’t care.

  “Look,” I started again. I wasn’t clear what my point was, what I wanted. I guess I knew I couldn’t leave; knew there was nowhere to go. But I needed her to hear me.

  Instead my mother burst in with a torrent of words. “I’m just so glad you’re there for them, David. My poor big brother. And little Lily. Even Julia, she can’t help who she is. Maybe you can help them.

  “Listen,” said my mother. “Maybe in a little while Vic will be able to talk to you. Oh, I know he won’t really talk, but, you know, that male bonding thing. You can bond. It could really help Vic, that you’re there. Even if he can’t talk about Kathy.”

  I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. Didn’t she—my God, she was my mother!—didn’t she understand a single thing about me? About what had happened to me? “Mom,” I started.

  But she cut me off. “David, I don’t think Vic would have offered to have you if he didn’t want you. You’re family. Vic always wanted a son.”

  I already have a father, I thought, but I couldn’t say that. I tried to say something—anything—else, but could not.

  There was no way to explain that I wasn’t the kind of person Vic would want as a son. That the thought of more family bonds—more people to disappoint—terrified and angered me. Even if there had been, there was no one to listen or understand. No one in this world.

  I suppose I had never really thought there was.

  CHAPTER 7

  The skinhead—Frank Delgado—was in my senior history seminar. On the first day of class he wore the same camouflage shorts with the now-limp pink T-shirt. He sat down at the front of the room, propped his legs up on a desk beside him, and closed his eyes. Against the backdrop of the chalkboard, his bald head gleamed as if he’d polished it. He did not polish his boots, however. They were encrusted with dried mud.

  It was the last class of the day, and I had arrived early—right before Delgado—and sat down at the back of the small classroom. The rest of th
e kids, as they trickled in, appeared to find this distribution a problem. They chose seats clustered together in the middle of the room. They talked to each other, but were conscious of me. They stole glances at me whenever they dared. Delgado they ignored.

  When I had a choice, I was and always had been the kind of kid who sat at the back. It made even more sense here; once class was in session, everyone would be facing forward and not looking at me. But after a few minutes I stood up and moved to the seat on the other side of the skinhead.

  I couldn’t tell you why.

  I had spent another uneasy night. Despite the fact that I hadn’t been aware of sleeping, I had a confused dream in which Emily chased me down the corridors of my old high school. She was laughing, and so was I, but I was also terrified and I knew I needed to keep running. If she caught me she was going to tell me something I didn’t want to know. Then she grabbed me by the arm from behind, and her strength was extraordinary. She swung me around hard, slamming my back against the lockers. And it was not Emily anymore. It was Lily. Lily, hair aflame. Powerful, angry, demanding. And somehow also … crying.

  At that point I’d known for sure that I was dreaming, known also that I was close enough to the surface to wake up. It was then I’d heard the humming again, insistent. And I’d opened my eyes in the gray dawn.

  For a second in the doorway across the bedroom I saw that shadow again—but this time it was distinctly human. A girl—a woman. I struggled up onto my elbows and said fuzzily, frantically: “Emily? Emily!” even though I knew, I knew, it was not Emily. But then the shadow had … not disappeared, but dissolved.

  And the humming had stopped.

  In short, it had been a nasty night, a rotten preliminary to my first day of classes.

  I glanced sideways at Frank Delgado, glad of his presence as a distraction. What was this raggedly dressed skinhead kid doing at an exclusive prep school? Was it really that difficult for Dr. Walpole to enroll boys? Of course, she’d enrolled me. Probably the skinhead had a desperate family, too, willing to pay any price.