Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

  He stood there in the doorway looking at her and she continued to read peaceably. She had an odd habit. She would take the corner of a page between her thumb and forefinger and begin to turn the page over before she had read it all the way, craning her head a little to catch the last couple of lines. He didn’t understand why she didn’t just finish the page before she flipped it.

  They had been married twenty years and they had never once talked seriously about getting divorced, although there were long periods of silence in their marriage where they were living more or less like roommates. Companionably aloof.

  “It’s hard for me to concentrate when you’re staring at me,” she said now, glancing up as he came in and lay down on the bed beside her.

  “What are you reading?” he said.

  She showed him the book cover: Despair, by Vladimir Nabokov.

  “Oh,” he said. “That sounds fun.”

  “It’s actually hilarious,” she said.

  He rested his chin on her shoulder, glanced at the top of page 73:

  shine, sea waves. A nice cosy life. Can’t understand why you should

  criticize

  He pressed his face down into the soft shirtsleeve crease of her arm, right above her breast. Breathed in, smelled, and her chest rose slowly and she rested her hand on the back of his head.

  “I have something weird to tell you,” he said.

  He closed his eyes. Her fingers ran lightly across his hair.

  “I have something I need to tell you, too,” she said.

  “You go first,” he said.

  He felt her draw in a long breath and hold it.

  “No, you go first,” she said, and there was a thin line of tension in her voice, almost like she was gritting her teeth. Was she mad at him? Had he done something inconsiderate?

  “How was your doctor’s appointment?” he said, and when she didn’t speak he lifted his head to look at her face.

  17

  From: Aqil Ozorowski (Ozorowskiag@yahoo.com)

  Sent: Fri April 8 2012 1:26 AM

  To: DrDTillman@outlook.com

  RE: Crazy

  Dear Dr. Tillman,

  I hope I didn’t come on too strong today as if I was trying to push things down your throat or so forth. I know I have had my moments of seeming “off the wall,” but I think we’ve got a good enough relationship that you can tell when I am going down the rabbit hole and when I am being real.

  This is the real deal.

  First of all, let’s just put aside the weird coincidence with the dates. It’s just too much, right? It makes me sound like one of the conspiracy guys with the tinfoil hats! So put it aside.

  Instead, just think for a minute about the facts that tie all these deaths together. What sets up a flag for me is all the stuff that’s missing. The evidence investigators didn’t find. Right? The only obvious connection is the extreme amount of alcohol consumption by each victim, and since the corpse is always recovered in a local waterway the cause of death is always assumed to be drowning, with death assumed to occur on the night the victim went missing.

  So we cops look at this and we say, simple. An accidental drowning. “Death by Misadventure” is what we put on the report. Case closed. It’s sad, but no further investigation is needed. Binge drinking is an epidemic on these college campuses, and when you have that amount of drunkenness somebody’s going to die, right? It’s just the odds.

  But then look at the actual circumstances. The blood alcohol level in many of these cases is crazy. So they would have to be consuming very quickly. Most of the time they are in a crowd, at a party or a bar, and then suddenly nobody has seen them for a while. They’ve gone off somewhere. I won’t use the word “vanished.”

  Now, as drunk as they supposedly are, somehow they negotiate their way to a riverbank without a single witness seeing them.

  Then “happen” to fall into the water. “Help!” they yell. “Help! Help me!” Nobody hears them. Unheard and unseen.

  Are any of these kids troubled, accident-prone alcoholics? Not really. Most of them are A and B students, a lot of them athletes in good physical health, lots of friends and good stable family relationships. Not to say that kids like that don’t also die. But you might expect some flags with deaths like these. Not a single one of these was ever listed as a suicide. There’s no evidence of that.

  And why is it that most often their bodies aren’t found immediately? Instead, it’s days, weeks, months later, downstream of the “accident.” There are never any signs of FOUL PLAY but there are also no signs of AN ACCIDENT. Whatever happened to these kids happened without witness or evidence. Every time.

  Which is one of the things that makes me think that maybe there’s something purposeful about these deaths. Almost like they’ve been arranged.

  Am I crazy? Everything I say to my court-appointed shrink, he comes back at me with “delusions of reference.” He’s looking at me for signs of mania, paranoia, some diagnosis he can pin on me.

  And maybe you think the same thing. But I trust you more, Doctor. I could tell right away when I met you that you were a kindred spirit.

  Will you be my second set of ears and eyes on this thing? I’ll give you all the files I have; I’ll lay it all out for you. Then, if you don’t agree, explain it to me. Tell me there’s something I’m exaggerating. Something I’m “projecting” too much into. If you say that I am delusional, I will believe you.

  I do remember your little saying, Doctor. “Sometimes a dead bird is just a dead bird.” That story you tell. But these are not birds, Doc. They are dead young men. I just want somebody to think about it with me.

  Help me.

  I am, most humbly, your patient,

  Aqil Ozorowski

  18

  “IT’S ABOUT THE size of a grapefruit,” Jill told him. “Dr. Watanabe could literally press down on my stomach and feel it. I can’t believe it. I’ve been walking around for…years?

  “Probably years. And I didn’t notice anything.”

  “So maybe it’s nothing,” he said. They were sitting cross-legged on the bed, facing each other, holding hands, and it must have looked, he thought, like they were children, like they were reciting a rhyme together. “Before we panic,” he said, “let’s look at the most optimistic side.

  “These things can be completely benign.”

  In his mind, the tumor was really a grapefruit. It was yellow and had a thick, pocked skin, and it was full of pink quarter-moon chambers.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I know,” she said.

  They both lifted their heads and listened. From down the hall, they could hear the music of their sons’ video-game console. The two boys side by side on Aaron’s twin bed, their thumbs and forefingers twitching over their controllers, their eyes fixed and aglow.

  “Will you go make them go to sleep?” Jill said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  He lifted his hands from her grasp. Their palms had grown sticky.

  “I don’t want to tell them anything until I’m ready,” she said. “Okay?”

  It occurred to him that he had not told her about Kate’s call, about Rusty. And then for some reason he thought again about the dead boy in his Halloween costume, under the ice.

  It makes you curious, doesn’t it, Doctor?

  “Okay,” he said.

  19

  Sometimes a dead bird is just a dead bird.

  Jill told him that, back when they were first dating. They had been walking together along the main street of town, holding hands—it was the first time they had held hands, and when their fingers clasped she had looked at him and raised her eyebrows and grinned

  And then a robin fell on the sidewalk in front of them.

  Apparently it fell out of the sky. Possibly a bird of prey had accidentally dropped it, they decided later. But at the moment they were both astonished. They stood staring at the limp body, and their handhold fell away.

  “Fuck,” Jill
said. And then, without another word, she grabbed his hand up again and held it tightly.

  “Listen,” she said fiercely. “It’s nothing. Sometimes a dead bird is just a dead bird.”

  —

  Which he had always remembered. It was one of those little private phrases that married people take up and repeat to one another; it had become a mantra for him, though Jill had no idea that it was also an anecdote that he sometimes told his patients—one of those humorous but poignant personal stories that you introduce to help build trust, et cetera.

  “Sometimes a dead bird is just a dead bird,” he would say. “When Jill told me that, I felt something kind of…unlock inside me.”

  And he’d look at the patient. Thoughtful. Puzzled for a moment.

  “I realized,” he’d say. “I realized that I had the choice. I could give this moment a meaning, or I could choose to ignore it. It just depended on the kind of story I wanted to tell myself.”

  He could feel himself smiling earnestly, as if he’d never thought of this before.

  “We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves,” he’d say.  Sometimes he would make a gesture that was almost like a touch, though he actually rarely made skin-to-skin contact.

  “But we can control those stories,” he’d say. “I believe that! Events in our life have meaning because we choose to give it to them.”

  RUSTY BICKERS WENT walking through the fields at dusk, Rusty Bickers with a sadness and nobility that only Dustin could see. He’d dream of Rusty Bickers at the kitchen table, eating Cap’n Crunch cereal before bedtime, his head low, lost in thought; Rusty Bickers, silent but awake, beneath the blankets on his cot, his hands moving in slow circles over his own body, whispering, Shh…shhh…hush now; Rusty Bickers standing in the morning doorway of the kitchen, watching Dustin’s family eating breakfast, his shaggy hair hanging lank about his face, his long arms dangling from slumped shoulders, his eyes like those of someone who had been marched a long way to a place where they were going to shoot him.

  Dustin heard his mother’s bright voice ring out: “It’s about time you got up, Rusty!”

  —

  Dustin was eight years old, and Rusty was fourteen, an orphan, a foster boy. All that summer, Rusty slept on a folding bed in Dustin’s room, so Dustin knew him better than anybody.

  Rusty was beginning to grow a man’s body. His legs were long and coltish, his feet too big; hair was growing under his arms and around his groin. He had his own tapes, which he listened to through enormous, spaceman headphones. He had a souvenir ashtray from the Grand Canyon. He had some books, and photographs of his dead family, and newspaper clippings. Rusty sometimes wet the bed, and it was a terrible secret that only Dustin and Dustin’s mom knew about. Dustin’s mom said that he should never, ever, tell.

  —

  Sometimes, late at night, when Rusty thought that Dustin was asleep, he would slip into Dustin’s bed because he had peed in his own. He curled his long body against Dustin’s smaller one, and Dustin stayed still. Rusty put his arm around Dustin as if Dustin were a stuffed animal. Dustin could feel Rusty quivering—he was crying, and his tears fell sharply onto Dustin’s bare back. Rusty’s arm tightened, pulling Dustin closer.

  Rusty’s last foster family—the mother, father, and two younger brothers—had died in a fire. Some people—Dustin’s older cousins, Kate and Wave, for example—some of them whispered that they heard that Rusty had started the fire himself. Anyway, he was weird, they said. Psycho. They stayed away from him.

  —

  Before Rusty had come to live with them, Dustin’s father was in a bad accident. He had been working as an electrician on a construction site when a roof collapsed. Dustin’s father and his father’s best friend, Billy Merritt, had fallen through three floors. Billy Merritt had died instantly. Dustin’s father had broken both legs, and his right arm had been severed. His fall had been softened because he landed on Billy Merritt.

  Now Dustin’s father had a prosthetic arm that he was learning to use. The prosthesis looked like two hooks, which his father could clamp together. For example, Dustin’s father was learning how to grasp a fork and lift it to his lips. Eventually he would be able to turn the pages of a book, or pick up a pin.

  —

  There had been a settlement for his father’s injury, a large sum of money. The very first thing Dustin’s father did was to go and speak with the people at County Social Services. He wanted to take in a foster boy, he said. This had been one of his dreams, something he’d always wanted to do. When he was a teenager, Dustin’s father had been sent away to a home for delinquent boys. After a while, Dustin’s father had run away from that place and joined the Army. But he still vividly remembered that awful time of his life.

  Dustin’s father loved Rusty Bickers. Rusty’s story was so sad that perhaps it made Dustin’s father feel better. He felt that he could help Rusty somehow. He wanted to provide an atmosphere of Love and Happiness.

  —

  There was so much money! Dustin had no idea how much, but it seemed bottomless. His father bought a new car, and a pool table, and a huge stereo system; his mother got her teeth fixed; they began to plan an addition to the house, with a family room and a bedroom for Rusty.

  When they went to town, to the big store at the mall, Dustin and Rusty were allowed to pick out a toy—anything they wanted. While their father looked at tools and electronic devices, Rusty followed Dustin through the rows of toys: the pink and glittery aisle of girls; the mysterious and bookish aisle of games and puzzles; the aisle of action figures and toy weapons and Matchbox cars; the aisle of baby stuff—rattles and soft-edged educational devices that looked like dashboards, things that spoke or giggled when you pulled a string. Rusty stopped for a long time in the aisle of sports stuff, the aisle of BB guns and real bows and arrows. He touched the sharp razory tips of the arrows with his thumb.

  —

  “Nobody knows what they want, not really,” Rusty Bickers said, sometimes, when they were in bed at night. Dustin didn’t know whether Rusty had made this up or whether he was quoting some movie or song. He said this when he was talking about the future. He was thinking about becoming a drummer in a rock band, but he worried that it might be pointless, living out in western Nebraska. He thought that maybe he should live in New York or L.A., but he was worried that if he was in such places, the black kids would be always trying to beat him up.

  “They hate white people,” Rusty told Dustin. “All they want to do is fight you.”

  Rusty had met black people. He had lived with some black boys in a group home, and he’d had a black teacher.

  Dustin hadn’t yet seen a black person, though he wanted to. There was a cartoon on TV called Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, about a group of black children who lived in a junkyard. This was Dustin’s favorite show, and he longed to make friends with a black child.

  “You can’t make friends with them,” Rusty said. “All they want to do is kick your ass.” Dustin disapproved of this, but he didn’t say anything. They weren’t allowed to say ass.

  But Rusty didn’t even seem to notice. He was thinking of where he would like to go, if he could go somewhere. He closed his eyes and leaned back, playing drums on the air above his head.

  —

  It was a summer of parties. They were happy times, Dustin thought. Friday. Saturday. People would begin to wander in around six or so, bringing coolers full of icy beer and pop, talking loudly—Dustin’s uncle and aunt and cousins, his father’s old friends from work and their wives and kids, his mother’s high school friends—thirty, forty people sometimes. They would barbecue, and there would be corn on the cob, bowls of potato chips and honey-roasted peanuts, slices of cheese and salami, pickled eggs and jalapeños. Music of Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Crystal Gayle. Some people dancing.

  Their house was about a mile outside of town. The kids would play outdoors, in the backyard and the large stubble field behind the house. Dusk seem
ed to last for hours, and when it was finally dark they would sit under the porch light, catching thickly buzzing June bugs and moths, or even an occasional toad who hopped into the circle of light, tempted by the halo of insects that floated around the bare orange lightbulb next to the front door.

  Rusty hardly ever joined in their games. Instead, he would stake out some corner of the yard, or even a chair inside the house, sitting, quietly observing.

  Who knew what the adults were doing? They played cards and gossiped. There were bursts of laughter, Aunt Vicki’s high, fun-house cackle rising above the general mumble; they sang along with the songs. After he got drunk, Dustin’s father would go around touching the ladies on the back of the neck with his hook, surprising them, making them scream. Sometimes he would take off his arm and dance with it. Sometimes he would cry about Billy Merritt.

  The night grew late. Empty beer cans filled the trash cans and lined the countertops. The younger children fell asleep in rows on the beds. If he was still awake, Dustin would sometimes gaze out the window, out to where the last remaining adults stood in a circle in the backyard, whispering and giggling, passing a small cigarette from hand to hand. Dustin was eight and wasn’t supposed to know what was going on.

  —

  But Rusty told him. At first, Dustin didn’t want to believe him. Dustin had mostly heard frightening things about drugs—that wicked people sometimes put LSD in Halloween candy, to make the children go crazy; that if you took angel dust, you would try to kill the first person you saw; that dope pushers sometimes came around playgrounds and tried to give children pills, and that, if this happened, you should run away and tell an adult as soon as possible.

  Rusty had smoked pot; he had also accidentally taken LSD, which someone had given to him in a chocolate bar.

  Dustin wasn’t sure he believed this, either. The depth of Rusty’s experience, of his depravity, seemed almost impossible.