The newscast drones on in the background.
Some time later I reach for Melissa’s hand, but she pulls it away. I look up at her and now there’s no mistaking the expression on her face—it’s fear.
The next day I call in sick to work. Soon I wish I hadn’t, because the phone is ringing off the hook. Reporters. Hundreds of them, from all over the country, some from as far away as England and Italy. They want to ask me questions about my brother. I thought I was numb beyond surprise or shock, but some of the questions they ask get my chest burning, make my forehead break out in stinging beads of sweat.
What did your brother have against the counselors at High Hopes? they ask me.
Nothing, I say.
We’ve learned your brother was being treated there on an outpatient basis, they say. Why would he suddenly turn on them?
I don’t know, I say. He’s got things wrong with him. He always has.
Was there some sort of significance, they ask, to the use of the Virgin Mary statuette as a murder weapon?
A sudden anger bubbles up, and I want to say, I doubt it. Probably the first thing he got his hands on, but I know this would not be true, and even though Melissa won’t come near me and I’ve already gotten some sidelong glances and whispered comments from the neighbors and the people at Joseph’s Deli this morning as I was buying the orange juice I meant to get last night, I say, very evenly, How in the world would I know?
And then, very, very gently, I hang up the phone. But the moment I put it down, it rings again.
Over the ringing, I hear Melissa turn on the water in the bathroom. This is the third time she’s showered today.
My parents haven’t left their house since the murders. It’s been two weeks. My father hasn’t emerged at all, but at first my mother was determined not to be judged guilty by association, and she went without a word right past the group of reporters and cameramen who’d camped out in their front yard. She went to the grocery store and the bank and her Thursday night cribbage group.
But people started saying things around town, and pretty soon those things made their way into the newspapers. By now the national media had packed up and gone home, but the murders were still big news locally, and the front page was littered with rumors and accusations—of theism, closed-door worship, Christianity. This my mother could not take. So she stopped going out, and now I am doing their shopping and running their errands for them.
Today I had their cable TV turned off and canceled their newspaper delivery, at my mother’s request. The looks I get from people on the streets and in stores have changed now from naked curiosity to compassion. That poor boy, they say to each other. To have to grow up in that house. Imagine.
Mike, who has been a friend of mine since grade school, comes to my house one evening with a meat pie from his wife.
Mike, I say. Why are people telling these lies about my parents?
I don’t know, he says, shaking his head. They’re just trying to make sense of this, you know? Find some sort of reason for all of it. They can’t believe your brother could be so…they don’t see how he could do something that…well, you know. Unless something bad had happened to him.
This is something else, now, that I’ve noticed—the few people I’ve talked to are very careful in choosing their words, as though they are afraid to say the wrong thing to me. What they don’t seem to understand is there is no right thing to say.
I wish Mike wouldn’t do this along with everyone else. We’ve been friends long enough, he can just say whatever comes to mind. But he won’t.
Mike, I say. You know how my brother is. How he’s always been.
Yeah, Mike says, and he’s shaking his head again. But, I mean, why? Where did he get these ideas about a god? He must have learned them somewhere, right?
I take the pie and set it on the kitchen counter and thank Mike. I tell him to thank his wife. I almost add, Give her a hug for me. But then I think better of it.
I’m trying to be patient with Melissa. I’ve given her space. I sleep on the sofa. During the day I spend a lot of time outside in the yard, even though it’s getting colder and autumn is passing into winter.
We haven’t made love for a month. Once, a few days ago, the two of us were talking and drinking tea and something I said made her smile. It was a good moment, so I ventured a light kiss on her lips. But when I pulled back I saw goose bumps on her arms, and all the blood had drained from her face. I haven’t touched her at all since then.
She has nightmares. I hardly sleep at all, so I lie awake on the sofa and listen to her moan and whimper. I want to go to the bedroom, wake her by smoothing her hair and speaking gentle, reassuring words. I want to bring her back to the real world and see the relief on her face when she opens her eyes and realizes it was just a bad dream. I cannot do any of this.
Even though I don’t want to, I have to go back to work. My supervisor told me to take as much time as I needed (no one seems to know what the appropriate bereavement period is for this sort of thing), but the bills are piling up and Melissa’s still not talking much, so I go to work.
My job is in quality control at the Chinet paper products factory. I punch in and go to my station and watch paper plates go by on the belt and remove the ones that have visible flaws. After four hours the whistle sounds and I go to lunch. Mike, who works in shipping and receiving, meets me in the cafeteria. The two of us sit at a table with Fred and Duke. I poke around in the bag lunch I packed for myself; Melissa didn’t get out of bed to make my lunch as she used to. Mike and Fred and Duke talk about football. The Patriots are having another terrible season. Duke made the mistake of betting on them against the Packers last Sunday and lost fifty bucks. His wife is going to kill him, he says. If she finds out, he says. Then they mix in some talk about the war, the losses in the Pacific. It doesn’t look good, they say. The three of them make an effort to include me in the conversation. They address questions directly to me. They want to know what I think about this and that, who looks to be the toughest team in the AFC, whether or not Trent Jackson will be able to hold the line in Mexico against the Evo-Psychs. But I haven’t been keeping up with football this year, and the war seems as distant as Pluto, so I don’t have much to say.
At one point, after I mumble something in reply to a question, the three of them are quiet for a moment, exchanging looks they think I don’t notice.
After lunch my supervisor calls me into his office. He has me sit down and asks how things have been, if there’s anything he can do. He is a good man. He came up from the factory floor himself, so he knows what it’s like, and he cares about his workers.
My door’s always open, he says, if you need to talk.
And suddenly my throat tightens up and my vision goes blurry and I want to tell him everything: about Melissa and my parents and how I just want things to be the way they were before, but I clamp my teeth down over the words and say nothing, because control is paramount—I must maintain at least the appearance of normalcy if I ever want things to go back to normal.
Thanks, I say to him, and leave the office quickly before the tears spill out onto my cheeks.
Melissa’s sister Lacy comes by a lot. The two of them sit at the kitchen table and talk and smoke cigarettes. Melissa drinks her tea. Lacy makes herself coffee with the jar of instant stuff we keep around. They keep their voices low. Even when I’m in the next room, I can’t make out what they say.
One day while Lacy is visiting, I go outside in the red-and-black-checked wool jacket my grandfather gave me years ago, before he died. I put on a pair of work gloves and set about pulling up the remains of the small garden I and Melissa planted and tended this year. The corn, which was a bug-infested disappointment despite the extra attention I gave it, comes up easily. I pull the stalks and shake the loose dirt from the roots and throw them aside. Then I move on to the two big sprawling zucchini plants. These were a boon. It seemed like every day when I came home this summer there were two or three ne
w zucchinis washed and drying on the kitchen counter. Big ones, too. All summer long Melissa made stuffed zucchini and zucchini bread and zucchini parmesan. The two of us ate dinner and joked about never wanting to see another zucchini as long as we lived. Still, the plants kept producing more at an amazing, impossible rate.
And now, even with their stalks knocked flat by frost and their leaves dead and wilted, the plants cling stubbornly to the soil. I dig around the roots with a hand spade and work the plants back and forth, trying to loosen their grip on the earth. I’m not making much progress. Then I hear the screen door slam and I look up and see Lacy standing on the porch. She has her jacket on and her car keys in her hand. She is looking at me.
Damn things don’t want to die, I say to her as she comes down the steps and approaches me.
Why don’t you just leave them? she asks.
It’ll be a real mess in the spring, I say, if I don’t pull them now.
I go back to digging, scooping dirt away with the hand spade. I feel strange with her just standing there, watching me dig, and neither of us saying anything.
Lacy is quiet for a moment longer. Then she says, You’ve got to do something. My sister needs you.
I look up. What am I supposed to do, Lacy? I ask.
She crosses her arms over her chest and says, I don’t know. Something. She’s coming apart, and you’re out here gardening in the middle of November.
I get to my feet. She treats me like I’m a leper, I say. She needs help, sure. She may even want help. But she sure as hell doesn’t want it from me.
I’ve drawn myself up to my full height, a good six inches taller than Lacy. She eyes the spade in my left hand. Then she looks up, into my eyes. I know what she’s thinking. And even though I shouldn’t, I speak in anger.
Go ahead, I say. Think whatever you want. Be afraid of me, like your sister is. But I’m not my brother. I haven’t done anything.
Lacy takes a slow step backward, then another. She says, Maybe that’s the problem. You haven’t done anything.
Then she turns and goes to her car in the driveway.
I watch her get in and turn the ignition and back out. I glance at the house and think for a moment that I see Melissa’s face behind the kitchen window: ghostly, watchful. But it’s just a reflection in the glass.
My father eats very little. Some days he doesn’t bathe, doesn’t even bother gettting dressed, just shuffles around all day in his pajamas and bathrobe. Unlike my mother, he accepted what he thought was his part of the responsibility for what my brother did. That was before people started accusing them of worship.
If something is repeated often enough, with enough conviction, it doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s true. It becomes the truth. So mostly my father sits around in his pajamas and bathrobe and doesn’t do much of anything. He might flip through a book or a magazine. He glances out the windows occasionally.
Some days he doesn’t get out of bed.
My mother has started going out again, doing some light shopping, having her hair done. She went to her cribbage group one time, but says she won’t anymore.
The trees are bare and my parents’ yard is covered with a thick layer of leaves. The leaves were bright orange and red and yellow but have been lying around for a while and are all gradually becoming the same dark brown color, from rain and rot. A section of vinyl siding has come loose from the corner of their house and flaps back and forth in the November winds, slapping against the wall. A week ago someone tossed a rock through a window on the second floor and the pane hasn’t been replaced. I patched the hole with a piece of particle board to keep the cold out, and no one, not me or my mother or my father, said a word about why someone might have done it. I prefer to think it was marauding kids, still jazzed up from Halloween and looking to cause trouble. So that’s what I think.
One night Melissa is having her nightmares and the only sound in the house is her whimpering and crying and I do it—I get up off the sofa and go to her in the bedroom. I sit down carefully on the bed next to her. The room is dark except for silvery moonlight filtering in through the window but I can see some of her hair is clinging, tangled and thick with sweat, to her face, and I brush it away gently with just two fingers.
Lissa, I say to her, it’s all right, baby. It’s okay.
I say, It’s me, Lissa. Nothing’s changed, honey, it’s just me, same as always.
Wake up now, I say. C’mon Lissa, wake up, baby.
She doesn’t wake, but her crying stops and she nestles against my thigh in her sleep. I put a hand on her head. I watch the moon make its way slowly past the window. It’s like watching the hour hand on a clock. I am very careful not to move.
My brother’s trial lasts only four days. He is found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to the state mental hospital in Augusta. Soon after, most people around town go on with their lives and forget about him and what he did. Every time they see me, though, their eyes flash, and they’re reminded.
Winter comes. The first snow turns my parents’ yard from brown to thick, pure white, and thankfully it stays. The flap of siding still hangs loose and the window on the second floor is still broken, but with the snow things don’t look so bad.
My mother makes plans to go to Florida for the winter. She meets with a travel agent a few towns away and calls a realtor in Palm Beach. Every morning she pesters my father until he showers and puts on pants and shoes and a clean oxford. I don’t have to do their shopping or run errands for them anymore; my mother does these things again. She goes from place to place with her head up and her back straight and stiff.
Melissa and me have been sharing our bed again for a while. One night she asks me to make love to her.
Are you sure? I ask.
I think so, she says. I need to try. I need to know.
I roll onto my side and face her. I put a hand on her bare shoulder and feel her start underneath my touch. I move on top of her and she kisses me, over and over, quick and desperate. She is trembling beneath me. When I move my hands to her face her cheeks are wet. She kisses me and her tears pour down warm over my knuckles.
Afterwards we lie apart on either side of the bed.
How could he have done that, Jim? Melissa says, and she is still crying a little. To those poor women?
My parents are gone. I helped them close up the house, and they left three days ago for a condo in Palm Beach.
Melissa is gone. She went up north, to her father’s place in Presque Isle, where she will be snowed in and safe until April. She said she will be back sometime. It’s not over, she said. I just need to get away for a while.
Tonight I drive to Augusta through a blizzard. The speed limit on the interstate has been dropped to 45 because of the weather. I can’t see beyond the scrim of thick heavy snowflakes illuminated by my headlights, and it takes nearly an hour to cover the twenty miles there.
I am going to see my brother. There is something I need to do, to relieve me, and Melissa, and my parents, and my brother, of the burden his crime has become. For this I’ve brought my blackjack, another gift from my grandfather, an iron dowel wrapped like a sausage in scuffed leather. My grandfather used it to crack the heads of rowdy GIs when he was an MP in the army. Because it is deadly, the blackjack has been illegal for years, but I’ve kept it as a memento. And now I have a use for it.
There is something else I need from my brother, something I have to ask him, something I need to know. A few days ago, after my parents left and I went back to my empty house, I sat down on the sofa and put my head back and fell into a doze. Through the haze of sleep came something which felt like memory: I was a boy of six or seven, in an overgrown field behind the abandoned fire station near my childhood home. A friendly wrestling match with another boy, an older, stronger boy, had suddenly turned serious. I was pinned down; I could feel the sharp broken reeds of the straw grass pricking my back through my shirt. One hand held me down at the shoulder, another hit me repeatedly across the
face, clumsily, flailing, but hard enough to draw blood from my lip. I squirmed and pushed but could not throw the older boy off of my chest, and so I cried, and even though this was the only thing left to me, the only thing the older boy could not keep me from doing, I still felt shame even through my fear.
And then my brother, who was much bigger and stronger than the older boy, appeared seemingly out of nowhere. He wound the fingers of one large hand into the boy’s hair and lifted him. For a moment the boy hollered and squinted against the pain, reaching up blindly to grasp my brother’s wrist, and then his cries were cut short by the impact of my brother’s other hand, balled into a great fist, against his nose. Blood exploded from the boy’s face like the bursting of a water balloon, and he went down, and my brother straddled his chest and now the older boy was the one crying and begging for mercy, while my brother spoke frightening words over and over in a voice I did not recognize, and even though my brother beat him badly enough to scare me and would not stop even when I screamed and pulled at his shirt there was a part of me, still is a part of me, that felt glad and proud to have a brother so big and strong and loyal, a brother I could count on.
But when I came to fully on the sofa, in the empty house, with Melissa gone, my parents gone, I couldn’t tell whether this was just a dream or if it had really happened long ago. It bothered me, that I couldn’t tell. As the days passed and the memory/dream persisted, grew stronger and more vivid, it bothered me more, until I finally decided this afternoon to go see my brother and ask him if he remembers.