I’d never done anything like this before, hadn’t so much as bruised my sister, but you don’t need to be a mystic to know where it came from and where it will lead. Like my dad says, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I’m evil. My dad wasn’t either. I buy what Mr. Balch said about evil being a force and all. But it does seem some people are prone to seizures of it, and I’m guessing my dad and I are ones.
In biology sometimes Mr. Balch would tell us about weird disorders, like tumors that make you lose your proprioception, that thing that lets you know where your body is in space. With a tumor like that, gravity really messes with you. You’re always falling down.
And that’s the way it is for me, like my proprioception for evil is broken, some defective circuitry I got from my dad. Problem is, when you’re broken to evil, somebody else pays the price. I’m the one who’s sick, but you’re the one falling.
After every one of Dad’s evil seizures, he vowed it would never happen again. But he was full of hidden fault lines, so no matter how tight he locked things up, that monster wormed its way in and all of us were smashed to the ground. My dad couldn’t stop evil from acting on him any more than people with those tumors can keep gravity from laying them flat.
Mr. Balch says researchers are all over the proprioception problem. Some scientist even mocked up a helmet that let patients stand and walk and lead a halfway normal life. I’m desperate for a helmet like that, one to help me resist evil no matter how ferociously it rears up. But no one’s studying any of that. Because, see, too many people think someone like me is evil itself. Which is like saying someone is gravity if gravity yanks them to the ground.
I’m broken and need help pulling free. But the cops and lawyers, judge and jurors, will take one look at those pictures of Daniel, what’s left of him, and not one of them will see it that way. If I hadn’t done the killing, I wouldn’t either. I’d want to tear the son of a bitch limb from limb. But that’s evil’s contagion, and all the more reason to help the susceptible resist. Like Mr. Balch said, “If enough people get sick with it, no one will be spared.”
There’ll be no help if I stick around. They’ll try me as an adult and throw me in prison where that monster can work on me full time, break me so bad in so many places that if they open me up, there’ll only be monster far as they can see. Then they’ll shake their oh-so-sad heads and say they knew it all along.
I can see it so damn clear, I truly must be a mystic.
* * *
—
IT WAS TIME TO DO THIS THING. I picked up a pen. First off, I apologized to the Balches: I’m sorry I killed Daniel. Which makes you want to laugh your guts out, right?—sorry about murdering your son. You can see the problem. But even if you puked up every word ever created, then gagged each one of those useless things back down and puked them back up in a new arrangement, even if you did that a thousand times, a million times, you’d never find anything that worked better. So I left it at that and told them where they could find their son.
When I’d gotten it all down nice and neat, when I could think of no further helpful detail, I wrote:
If I hadn’t been gutting the deer, if we hadn’t been drinking, if he hadn’t been on my case for so goddamned long, if he hadn’t said—so fucking casually—that he’d screwed the one girl he knew I cared about, the one girl in our entire lives who’d chosen me. If I hadn’t believed him. If I’d understood why he’d done it. Why she had. If I didn’t love him. Or her.
If. If. If. So many goddamned fucking ifs. Just a bunch of excuses. Who gives a shit, right? But here’s the thing: I didn’t know I wanted to kill Daniel until he was dead. That’s why I have to do this. I’ve got what Dad had, that monster that sneaks in, makes you do things you’d never do, things that make you sick. Dad didn’t want to hurt us. He loved us. And in the end, he proved it, didn’t he? There was only one way to save us from that monster, and he knew exactly what it was. He gave up everything for us. He’s a hero. He really is.
Mom, Nells, Red, how else would I keep you safe?
I love you,
Jonah
Was this fair to Daniel? How can I know? How can anyone possibly know? Because somewhere along the line, I’d started seeing with the monster’s eyes.
A few minutes later, I cut the note in two pieces. I kept the one-line apology and the directions to Daniel’s body, trying not to think of what they’d find. The rest of it—the part about Daniel and me and my dad—I tore into bits and flushed down the toilet. No one needed my excuses, and I couldn’t risk Red getting blamed.
* * *
—
I HAD DINNER WITH MY MOM AND NELLS AS USUAL. Later, when I saw Nells walking down the hall, I grabbed her like I was kidding around and hugged her hard. She shoved me away, saying, “Gross! Go take a shower, will you?”
I did stink. I hadn’t been paying much attention to that stuff. I took a quick shower and went to find Mom. She was doing the last of the dishes. I came up behind her and hugged her too, told her I loved her. She turned around looking scared, asked me if everything was okay, was I doing all right? I shoved my hands into my pockets and said, sure, I was fine. Why? I mean, I was worried about Daniel and all, but I was fine. Was she?
The way she was looking at me, you’d think instead of telling her I loved her, I’d just stuck a knife in her gut and was twisting it around. She didn’t say anything for a long while, just kept her eyes on me like we were having this whole conversation without saying a thing: that she loved me and always would, that she felt responsible for fucking up my life even though she didn’t know what she’d done wrong, that she wondered was there anything, anything at all she could do now to change things? Because she would do it, whatever it was. She would.
When she’d looked long enough to know that the pieces had all been played, that the outcome was certain and there was nothing to do but bear it, she said, “Yeah. I’m okay.”
“I’m glad, Mom. I’m glad.”
“You seem tired. Get some rest,” she said, and went back to the dishes.
When I got to the kitchen door, I stopped and said, “Good night, Mom.”
She nodded, but she didn’t turn to me, and she didn’t say good night.
62
After a month of ignoring my calls, Peter agreed to let me stop by. Though he pled not guilty to soliciting a minor, there was little doubt as to his guilt, and he made no attempt to salvage his position. Carol Marsten let it slip that five years earlier he’d been arrested with a prostitute. That time, he’d managed to keep his record clean with a pretrial diversion.
When I entered his house on a late-April morning, I was stunned to find it all but empty, only two folding chairs and his old recliner left. He patted the recliner and drew up a chair.
“Elaine and the girls got the rest. I wanted them to have it.”
“When did this happen?”
He thought back. “Remember that night you stopped by? The night I said Josie was here?”
I nodded.
“Elaine and the girls had left a few days before that. She’d already taken some furniture. I didn’t want you seeing my house torn apart. I kept thinking they’d come back.”