Tides
Kennewick, 1999
I came because I was told to, to wind-combed knolls and marshy views, to tidepools crammed with crabs as brittle as the dollparts
clicking in my mind.
You came here too . . .
LUCKY LUCKY ME . . .
a blue-lipped daughter of a blue-lipped man
who took my hand
and showed it to the briny stench and sea-salt of a slack tide.
I left some knucklebones
behind—they must be white as scallop shells by now. My parents left behind an ovulating daughter,
all rotten beachplums on the vine,
and my sister, just turned the tender age of murderers, went swimming past the breakers with a boy, and came back all alone,
while seabirds circled overhead for what’s been killed
and left between the ocean and its edge.
Kennewick was in southern Maine, a vacation spot split up into several sections. Kennewick Harbor. Kennewick Beach. Kennewick Center. I was familiar with it because, as a child, my family would go on vacations at the nearby town of Wells. I was also familiar with Kennewick because it was where Ted Severson and his wife, Miranda, had been building a summer house when Ted was killed in the South End of Boston.
But what really interested me about the poem was the stanza devoted to the speaker’s sister. And by speaker, I meant Elizabeth Grieve because this was clearly a confessional poem that had reimagined an actual event. It had even been dated. I assumed that calling her sister a murderer and mentioning a boy who drowned was all metaphorical, but I jumped onto my computer anyway, began to research drownings in Kennewick during the year 1999. I didn’t find anything, but I did find a drowning that had happened in the year 2000. A teenage boy named Duane Wozniak had gone swimming late at night from the Kennewick jetty and drowned. The article mentioned the girl he’d been swimming with had alerted the hotel staff at the Windward Resort, where he’d been staying. The name of the girl hadn’t been stated. It bothered me a little bit that the drowning had happened in the year 2000 when the poem had specified 1999, but I wrote poetry myself, and my guess was that Elizabeth Grieve changed the date because 1999 looked better on the page than 2000, which still sounded to me, and maybe to her as well, like a science-fiction date.
I found one follow-up article on the drowning and it said that Duane had been staying for a month at the resort with his parents, Pat and Evelyn Wozniak, of West Hartford, Connecticut, and his cousin, Richard Seddon, from Middleham, Massachusetts. I searched for a Richard Seddon from Middleham but didn’t find anything else besides that one mention. But the name was familiar to me, and on a whim I went to my closet and got out the cardboard box again where I’d stored that part of my life. There was a pristine copy of the Middleham-Dartford yearbook from 2003 that had been sent to me by Maureen, my department head. I flipped through the graduating seniors and there he was, Richard Seddon, in three-quarters profile. Thick black hair and a face like a blade. He was borderline handsome, but I knew he’d been a bit of an outcast, an odd kid, tall and skinny, who kept to himself.
I knew I hadn’t had him in one of my classes, so I was trying to remember how I knew him, when it came to me. He’d been friends with James Pursall, the shooter who had killed Madison Brown and then himself in my classroom. In fact I remembered that Richard Seddon was pretty much James Pursall’s only friend.
I stared at Richard Seddon’s picture, tapping my finger on the glossy yearbook page, wondering where he was now, and how I could find him.
Chapter 23
Richard
Richard loved to think about that summer in the year 2000 when he’d first met Joan, and when they’d lured Duane to the end of the jetty. Every detail of that week was accessible to him. But for some reason he rarely thought about senior year of high school, the year he’d talked James Pursall into shooting Madison Brown at school and then killing himself. When he thought about it now the memories were filled with blank spaces, in the same way that his childhood was now largely composed of just a few vivid, unforgettable moments unmoored by any context.
The best memories of senior year had been his meetings with Joan in the Middleham town library. They’d met seven times, always an hour before closing time, and together they’d talk about what Joan sometimes called the Madison Brown problem, and how James Pursall was the perfect person to solve it. She was the one who first thought that Richard could talk James into shooting Madison. This was after Richard had told Joan that James had two semiautomatic weapons that he’d purchased at a gun show with a false ID, and that James talked a lot about going on a shooting spree and then killing himself. It was a persistent fantasy, and Richard had told him that it was his fantasy, too. Not that it was, but Richard couldn’t tell him that he’d already killed someone, his own cousin, and how that had felt.
“Could you get him to kill Madison Brown and then himself?”
“I don’t know,” Richard had said. And at the time, although he’d mostly forgotten this, there was a part of him that thought: Am I a murderer? Pushing Duane into the ocean was one thing, but Joan was talking about guns. And then he let it go, because if it was okay with Joan it was okay with him, as well.
“You could make a pact with him. He has two guns. You could form a plan, that the two of you would use them at the same time in different rooms at school. You wouldn’t kill anyone, but he wouldn’t know that.”
“So you think I should just say to him that I have a plan. He needs to kill Madison and then himself, at the same time as . . .”
“No, no, no, no. This is what you say. You say you had this really cool thought. That you’d sneak guns into the school. That you’d both go on a hunt. He’d pick a target for you and you’d pick a target for him, and that you’d need to shoot and kill this person at the exact same time, and then kill yourselves. Don’t talk about it like it’s a real plan, just talk about how cool it would be in theory. Two targeted school shootings with no survivors left. Don’t ever suggest doing it for real. Let him do that.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“Then we’ll find another way to fix the Madison Brown problem.”
Richard had done exactly as Joan had suggested. James was over at Richard’s house. They were both in the basement playing Violence, but mostly just listening to their current favorite band, As I Lay Dying. Richard had made the suggestion, not surprised when James reacted exactly as Joan had said he would. He’d loved the idea, excited to pick the person who Richard would need to kill. He kept changing his mind, finally narrowing it down to between another senior, Danny Eaton, and a particularly horrible science teacher named Mr. Barber. “Who would you want me to shoot?” James had asked.
“I’ve thought about this a lot. I’d definitely want you to shoot Madison Brown.”
“Oh, wow,” James had said. “Oh, yeah. She’s a fucking bitch. You know I’m in a class with her. Honors English. It would be easy.” James had pointed his finger and cocked his thumb, making imaginary shooting gestures.
Meeting with Joan in the library on a cold night in January, at the beginning of their final half year in high school, Richard had said, “There’s just so many ways it could go wrong. It’s not like what we did with Duane.”