THE RIGHT TIME TO DIE

by Jason Whitlock

At home, Dojcsak raked the snow-flattened front lawn, not so much dismayed to know Jenny was smoking but that she did so in such utter defiance of him. He tilled soil in the garden, even though it was far too early in the season to plant, and enjoyed the scent of a lilac bush in early bloom. A burst of color had appeared in one errant patch of the yard: enthusiastic yet premature daffodils?

  They reminded Dojcsak of a painting: Monet. Or was it Manet? No matter, an Impressionist at any rate. Or was it Realist? He had been to the Met once, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of few weekends over twenty-five years of marriage that he and Rena had managed to spend away. They had walked, admiring the ancient and more recent artifacts, taking lunch in the cafeteria so as not to lose time by leaving the premises, remained late until the doors closed. Afterward, they’d walked Central Park, dined at Tavern On The Green (though he could hardly afford it, Jenny at the time having only recently arrived) then made love upon returning to the hotel. (All this at a time when Dojcsak was capable. Or willing? He was never sure which, or if there was a difference.)

  The sun was warm on his face. Carefully, he trimmed back the cedar trees that had encroached on the space in his driveway and front walk. Feeling ambitious, Dojcsak struggled to pull an extension ladder from the garage. He set it at a precarious and dangerous angle against the house and with much huffing and grunting hauled his bulk thirty feet and twenty-eight rungs to reach a clogged gutter. Within minutes, he abandoned the effort, finding the task overly arduous and ultimately futile. Perspiring and breathing heavily, he returned the thirty feet and twenty-eight rungs back to terra firma, making a mental note to have someone tend to the gutter before the arrival of the heavier, spring rain.

  Dojcsak finished in the yard, collected his implements, hosed down the drive and the front walk, replaced the garden hose and entered his home to quickly shave. He retrieved a beer from the icebox. While inside, Rena commented: “You look like death, Ed. As if you’re having a stroke.” (If she truly believed this, she didn’t bother to telephone 911.)

  Outside, Dojcsak collected his Saturday New York Times from the front stoop, where he remained to read. Renewed violence threatened the Middle East (what else is new?) and Obama threatened to extend the War on Terrorism from Iraq to Iran. The Greeks were threatening to repudiate the Euro and, for good measure, ten billion dollars worth of outstanding international debt obligations. In Paris, Marine Le Pen was threatening to force legislation requiring the registration of all Muslim immigrants.

  Dojcsak reviewed an advertisement for a flaxseed based dietary supplement proclaiming three bowel movements a day to be necessary to the maintenance of good health. If I had three movements a day, Dojcsak marveled, my asshole would sting like an open wound. In an article titled, Children Beaten on Video, he read how the combined forces of the FBI, the U.S. Postal Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had smashed a child pornography ring involving at least ten people who produced and traded videos depicting the physical and sexual abuse of children, some as young as four years old. Many of the indicted families were located in small communities throughout New York State and Ontario, Canada with many parents subjecting their own children to the abuse. According to an FBI spokesperson, the investigation was ongoing.

  In the early days following the death of Missy Bitson, Dojcsak perceived a sense of quiet anxiety settle like a bad smell over the citizens of his own small community. But not fear. By now, most—like Dojcsak and Keith Chislett—accepted, almost welcomed, the notion that Missy’s fate had more to do with her own behavior, possibly even the interminably twisted roots of her own family tree. (Did they recall Maggie, pregnant at fifteen and married to Eugene a year later, the outcome of that union estranged now and living in New York City?) What could the killing possibly have to do with them? There was a sense of false security, Dojcsak believed, fueled by the twin necessities—at times like these—of gossip and commiseration.

  They were wrong of course. Dojcsak knew this with certainty. Families at risk—those having daughters between the ages of ten and say, fifteen or sixteen—remained at risk, notwithstanding the reputation of the dead girl or the part it may have had in her murder. As father to such a daughter, Dojcsak had witnessed first-hand the possible consequences of female adolescence (though he himself had failed miserably to manage the hormonal metamorphosis that occasions the tumultuous transition through puberty).

  Jenny, for instance, had begun to scar her body at an early age. Before passing from grade school to junior high, she had started the ritual of disfiguring self-abuse, cutting her skin with a variety of common and easily attainable household utensils or school supplies; at the dinner table idly hacking at her fingers with a butter knife, or perforating her skin with a ball point pen while doing homework. With their disposable income tied up in the care of Luba, the Dojcsaks could ill-afford the services of a child psychologist for Jen. They relied, instead, on Henry Bauer for guidance.

  Sitting in Bauer’s office one day while the doctor referred to a six-inch thick medical text, Dojcsak half-listened while Henry explained.

  “Deliberate Self-Harm Syndrome they call it, a form of self-injury or mutilation. Ah, here.” He opened to a page halfway through the volume. He read: “Some psychologists claim self-mutilation is an attention seeking action, a cry for help or a way of getting revenge.” Over half-glasses, he studied Rena and Ed for a reaction. Both Dojcsak and his wife remained impassive. Bauer continued. “It is estimated there are over two million chronic self-injurers in America today. Common to the overwhelming majority of cutters is mounting anxiety, anger and agitation, reaching a point, ultimately, where they experience an intolerable and uncontrollable situation from which they feel there is no escape other than perhaps to cut. They experience an irresistible need to cut, seeing no alternative. The cutting is done alone and in private and followed always by rapid, but only temporary, relief.”

  “Are we to blame?” asked Rena.

  “Your preoccupation with Luba may have something to do with it,” said Bauer, adding for the benefit of the parents, “though I suspect it may have more to do with the simple fact Luba is dying.”

  Dojcsak said, “But the girls aren’t close. Why is Jenny so upset?”

  “With children, it’s difficult to know how or why identical circumstances affect some one way, others differently. You’ll need to keep an eye on her, be vigilant. Usually it’s only surface tearing, but in extreme cases patients may cause themselves serious harm.”

  However well intentioned, Bauer’s advice did not prevent Jenny from carving a patchwork of rudimentary patterns on the flesh of her forearms and inner thighs alternately resembling a layout for tic-tac-toe, or plaid. Dojcsak was helpless to adequately manage in his daughter this relentless struggle, this display of defiance capriciously dispensed or hysterically applied. Uncomfortable, embarrassed, and unable to understand even slightly, Dojcsak sought not to understand at all. In truth, he hadn’t much tried, ceding the responsibility and subsequent accountability early and often to Rena, practicing a policy of avoidance, at all times seeking to maintain an appropriate distance between his maturing daughter and him. As far as Dojcsak knew, Jen had stopped cutting. Not having seen her in so much as either a tee shirt or short pants for almost seven years, he couldn’t say for sure.

  “Daffodils are looking good, Ed; did you fertilize?” It was his neighbor, Kate, the Registered Nurse who had recommended to Dojcsak to wear orthopedic shoes.

  “May have,” he replied without really knowing, his thoughts returning to his yard.

  “The warm weather has encouraged the bulbs,” she said, observing the budding display of tulips and crocuses. “It’s early though; I hope we don’t get snow.”

  “Or frost,” Dojcsak added, thinking it more likely, though this far north it wasn’t unusual to experience a modest or even heavy snowfall late into spring.

  “Or frost,” Kate agreed. “Not feeling well? You look flushed.”

  “The sun,
” Dojcsak said.

  “Or your blood pressure,” Kate ventured. Before he could object, she continued. “I saw Henry at the house this morning. Luba not feeling well either?”

  “Come on, Kate.” Dojcsak was abrupt. “She isn’t now, and we both know she won’t ever be.”

  “Sorry, Ed. Only asking. But she is doing better. Yesterday was the best I’ve seen her in months. Be thankful for that. Be more optimistic, appreciate the good days for the small mercy they are. She doesn’t have many left.”

  Kate moved close, sitting on the step nearest to Dojcsak. Not yet noon and already drinking beer; breathing heavily, as if his rib cage were pressed too tightly against his lungs; and smoking freely, from four feet away the odor of tobacco obvious. Was it only she who considered his compulsion to shave—What; three, four times a day—an aberration?

  Kate had arrived to Church Falls from Albany in the mid-eighties, having survived an unexpectedly acrimonious separation from her husband of only eighteen months. She first rented and ultimately purchased her small bungalow with the proceeds from her eventual divorce. Settling in next door to the County Sheriff and his wife had proven an unexpected blessing, particularly given the harassing telephone calls her ex had chosen foolishly to make in the months prior to the granting of a final decree and to which Ed had thankfully put a quick stop.

  At the time, lonely and in a strange town, Kate thought she might like to seduce Dojcsak. More than once she had ineffectually tried. Once, when her sister visiting from Colorado had said to Dojcsak, “So, you’re the one Kate’s always gushing about. Are you happily married?” Kate had reached out instinctively and protectively for Ed’s arm and replied brazenly, “If he’s going to cheat on his wife with anyone, it’s going to be with me.”

  She looked at him now, feeling more pity than lust, though her subsequent friendship with Rena had convinced her that pity was not a concession to which Ed was necessarily entitled.

  Kate said, “It’s a tragedy about Missy isn’t it?” Her gaze shifted instinctively across the street to the home of the victim’s relations. “I saw her only last week, when I was leaving here. It was the day she died,” Kate said as if realizing it for the first time. “I told this to Chris Burke. Do you have any idea who did it?”

  Dojcsak set aside his newspaper, resigned to finishing it later.

  “I don’t—we don’t. There are no witnesses. We have no concrete evidence. The pathology, as well as the forensics, is inconclusive.”

  “I shudder to think it’s someone I know. If it isn’t a transient, it must be.”

  Dojcsak shrugged. “Could be your next door neighbor, Kate.”

  “You’re my next door neighbor, Ed.”

  “I’m speaking metaphorically, not literally.” Dojcsak reached for his newspaper, holding it out to Kate. “I’ve been reading the Times. Have you read the Times?”

  “The war?”

  “The family,” Dojcsak clarified.

  “I’m a registered nurse, Ed. I know all about the family.”

  “Then you know what’s happening in the home. Children battered, murdered by members of their own family. Fathers, brothers, even mothers. None of us are above dishing out a measure of torment and abuse.”

  “I can’t imagine what motivates such people. What kind of madness drives someone to commit such an act against his or her own flesh and blood?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Kate, though I’m beginning to believe it’s inherent, passed down not by family, but a condition of the species.”

  “Well, we are the only animal that kills from desire, and not necessarily need.”

  “I don’t know, Kate. I wouldn’t say that murder is necessarily an act of free will.”

  Kate pulled herself from the stoop. “Ed,” she said, “you don’t think it’s the father, do you?”

  “Is there a reason you ask?”

  “She came to me last year, Missy, to the clinic, looking for contraceptives. I couldn’t help her of course, she wasn’t yet sixteen and we’re not permitted to dispense to minors without a parent’s consent.” Kate seemed to be recalling. “She was twelve, not yet thirteen. A child. Naturally, my first inclination was to ask her why. ‘Not having sex, are you?’ I asked, more or less jokingly. She denied it, said it had to do with her period, which made me wonder if her mother knew of the visit. She said yes, and I said, why didn’t she come with you? She shut up then.”

  “She was alone?” Dojcsak asked.

  “She was with her cousin, Jordy.”

  Dojcsak leaned in to Kate, elbows to his knees. The white of his eyes were discolored, like egg with a runny yolk. A network of purple vessels radiated across his cheeks like a bruise.

  “The clinic is a zoo, Ed,” Kate said, turning away. “She never returned.”

  “But you’re sure it was her cousin?”

  “I see the boy almost everyday.” Kate indicated Jordy’s home across the street from Dojcsak. “He hardly attends class anymore. Most days he sits out on the front stoop, smoking, waiting to be picked up by friends. It was Jordy, I’m sure.”

  Confirmation from a third source, Dojcsak thought, that Missy and her cousin Jordy were close.

  Afterward, he watched as Kate crossed the lawn to home, thinking how life might be, the life of Ed Dojcsak in particular, had he chosen her and not Rena as a partner. How would life be had she borne to him sons to carry on the family name, and not daughters? And how would life be if the children were healthy: robust, active and charming and not sickly and loutish? They would attend college of course, Dojcsak providing them the opportunity he himself had been denied. They would graduate Summa Cum Laude, one becoming a doctor, the other a practicing attorney or possibly, an engineer. They would live successful and happy lives and bear Kate and he grandchildren: perhaps four, or six, or eight. Dojcsak would live to an old age, caring for Kate, Kate caring for him.

  How would life be had he chosen Kate? Dojcsak supposed his own poor self-image prevented him from thinking too deeply in these terms. And as he was not aware even of the existence of Kate Bouey when he first met Rena and as Dojcsak was convinced his personal troubles had begun long before he married, he did not devote an inordinate amount of his energy or his time to the cause of this idle speculation.

  Dojcsak folded his newspaper, tucked it beneath his arm and, though it was not yet noon, decided he was hot, hungry, thirsty, and that he needed a cold beer, though not before a cold shower. For the third time that day he would shave. As with many things and despite his best effort, Ed Dojcsak was locked into a pattern of simple behavior that, even had he been aware of it, he was powerless to change.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  THAT SAME AFTERNOON, Christopher Burke rolled to his belly from his back, ostensibly to complete the newspaper article he had been reading but in fact to prevent Renate St. Jacobs from grappling with his now dispirited penis; Burke’s organ burned from overuse. The small bedroom reeked of cheap marijuana and sex, and Burke would need to shower before returning home, perhaps twice.

  “C’mon, Chris,” Renate said. She easily straddled Burke’s buttocks like the dancer she was, an acrobatic peculiarity that to him had come as a pleasant surprise. He’d never before been made love to by a dancer.

  Renate was one half of the pair he’d observed earlier in the week, dangling her feet over the water by the Oasis. After leaving his colleagues that day, Burke had driven his vehicle languidly along the Hudson River shoreline, unhurried and unenthusiastic about questioning the instructors at Missy’s school, planning to smoke a joint, smoke a cigarette, and listen to some tunes before fulfilling his duty.

  He hadn’t made it half way before he discovered her sitting alone by the river, idly tossing small pebbles into the water. Her low-rise denims exposed a silky pink thong, the thin fabric of her tight white top revealing the curve of an ample breast. Christopher parked. He watched, riveted by the undulating flesh visible beneath her arm as she raised it, pulled back, and brough
t it forward again in a quick release. Later, they’d smoked drugs and had sex, in a secluded spot by the river, in the back of Burke’s cruiser.

  Renate had told Burke she was a former student of Missy’s dance instructor, Marie Radigan. Renate had been in private lessons and not a classmate of Missy.

  “Marie was nice, but loopy. She was envious of us girls, competing with us, pushing us to be better, then finding ways to sabotage our progress, you know, as if she were afraid of the competition. I was good, Chris; could have been really good. I quit after four years. It was too much; got so she was driving me loopy, you know?”

  “Anything else?” he’d asked.

  “Well,” Renate said, “some of us in her private class showered after our lessons; the girls. Not many, most were too shy to strip in front of the others. You know how it is; girls, we mature differently.” At this, Renate smiled knowingly, fondling her breasts. “Anyway, those of us who did got the feeling we were being watched, spied on, you know? That someone was looking at us while we were doing our thing.”