“I remember feeling surprised, how easy it was,” he says, his eyes drilling into the countertop. “My hands on her throat, and the way the movement just … stopped.” He pauses, looks at me. “Do you really want to know all this?”
“Cooper, you’re my brother,” I say, reaching my hand out to cover his. Right now, touching his skin, I want to vomit. I want to run away. But instead, I force myself to regurgitate the words, his words, that I know work so well. “Tell me what happened.”
“I kept expecting to get caught,” he says at last. “I kept expecting someone to show up at our house—the cops, something—but nobody ever did. Nobody even talked about it. And I realized … I could get away with it. Nobody knew, except…”
He stops again, swallowing hard, like he knows these next words will hit harder than any that came before them.
“Except Lena,” he says finally. “Lena knew.”
Lena—always out late, by herself. Picking her way out of her locked bedroom before running outside, wandering into the night. Seeing Cooper in that car, creeping slowly behind as Tara walked down the side of the road, unaware. Lena had seen him. She didn’t have a crush on Cooper; she had been pushing him, testing him. She was the only one in the world who knew his secret and she was drunk with power, playing with matches the way she always did, getting closer and closer before the fire singed her skin. You should pick me up in that car of yours sometime, calling over her shoulder. Cooper’s rigid back, hands punched into his pockets. You don’t want to be like Lena. I picture her lying on the grass, that ant creeping up her cheek—her, motionless and still. Letting it crawl. Breaking into Cooper’s bedroom, the smile that twisted across her lips when he had caught us—that knowing grin, hands on her hips, almost as if to tell him: Look what I can do to you.
Lena was invincible. We all thought it, even she herself.
“Lena was a liability,” I say, trying hard to swallow the tears crawling up the back of my throat. “You had to get rid of her.”
“And after that”—he shrugs—“there was no reason to stop.”
It wasn’t the killing that my brother had craved—I know that now, looking at him hunched over my countertop, decades of memories swirling around him. It was the control. And somehow, I understand it. I understand it in a way only family can. I think back to all of my fears, the lack of control I constantly imagine. Two hands wrapped around my neck, squeezing tight. It was that same control I feared losing that Cooper loved to take. It was the control he felt in the moment those girls realized that they were in trouble—the look in their eyes, the quiver in their voices as they pled: Please, anything. The knowledge that he and he alone was the deciding factor between life and death. He had always been that way, really—the way he had pushed his hand into Bert Rhodes’s chest, challenging him. Walking in circles on the wrestling mat, his fingers twitching at his sides like a tiger circling a weaker rival, ready to sink in its claws. I wonder if that’s what he was thinking when he had his opponents by the neck: squeezing, twisting. Snapping. How easy it would have been, the pulsing of their jugular beneath his fingers. And when he let them go, he felt like God. Granting them another day.
Tara, Robin, Susan, Margaret, Carrie, Jill. That was a part of the thrill to him—choosing, fingers outstretched the same way you would choose an ice cream flavor, perusing your options behind a glass case before making your decision, pointing, taking. But Lena had always felt different, special. She had felt like something more, and that’s because she was. She wasn’t random; she was taken out of necessity. Lena knew, and for that, she had to be killed.
My father knew, too. But Cooper had solved that problem in a different way. He had solved it with his words. Eyes wet, pleading. Talking about the shadows in the corner, the way he had tried to fight them. Cooper had always managed to find the right words, using them to his advantage—controlling people, influencing people. And they had worked. They had always worked—on my father, using him to set himself free. On Lena, letting her believe that she was invincible, that he wouldn’t hurt her. And on me, especially on me, his fingers pulling the strings attached to my limbs, making me dance in just the right way. Feeding me just the right information at just the right time. He was the author of my life, always had been, making me believe the things he wanted me to believe, spinning a web of lies in my mind—a spider pulling in insects with his crafty tendrils, watching them fight for their lives before devouring them whole.