Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

  He was acting something out, she guessed. Maybe a TV show? But he was playing all the characters, and making all the sound effects, and sometimes singing the music, and it wasn’t that abnormal—all kids played pretend—but it seemed more fervent and urgent than the usual kid.

  Spazzy, Kate thought.

  She put her feet up and watched him for a while, smoking cautiously and flicking the ash in the way she’d seen in movies. She framed Dustin’s capering between her feet and curled and uncurled her toes. She had painted her toenails the color red that was called Soul Mate—it was a kind of dark magenta—but she felt that they still looked like boy’s toes. They were wide and squarish, and the big toes were especially fat and inelegant. And her legs had hair on them. Her mother said they couldn’t shave their legs until they turned thirteen.

  Dustin was still involved in his performance when she came down from the tree house, down the slats that had been nailed into the trunk to form a ladder, and he didn’t notice when she dropped the empty pack of cigarettes onto the grass. He was still babbling to himself when she walked right up to him.

  “Dustin?” she said. “What are you doing?”

  And it was as if she had snipped a cord and a helium balloon suddenly floated off into the sky. He stopped talking and gesturing and his face went completely blank for a second, and a little shudder went up his spine. She could see his body quiver with whatever was leaving it.

  “Huh?” Dustin said. “I’m not doing anything.”

  Kate considered this for a moment. “I was looking for you,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you. Wave is really mad at you.”

  “Wave?” Dustin said. “But? I didn’t do anything?”

  “She says that she saw you spying on her,” Kate told him. “She was smoking some of our mom’s cigarettes, and now she’s afraid that you’ll tell. She thinks you’re a tattletale.”

  Dustin made a hurt face. “I won’t tell,” he said. “I’m not a baby.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Kate said. She crossed her arms and frowned. “But you really did see Wave smoking?” she said. “You saw it with your own eyes? Why were you spying?”

  “I—” Dustin said. “I didn’t mean to! I was just playing.”

  “But you saw it,” she said. “You saw Wave smoking a cigarette in the tree house.”

  “Yes,” Dustin said. “I saw her. But I won’t tell.”

  It was the first time that she realized that Dustin’s imagination could be useful to her.

  —

  She loved him, though. She loved him. He was at the forefront of her mind during those months, those first months that they were living with Grandma Brody.

  Sometimes, she would catch him doing his little weird gestures, pantomimes: pretending to feed himself, or patting his eyelids with the pad of his index finger—left eye, right eye, left eye, right eye—as if making sure they were still there; putting his index finger to his lips like someone who is saying shhh, except that he would softly blow air up and down the length of the finger, as if he were trying to cool it off.

  She wished she could talk to Wave about it, but there was no warmth from that quarter. “I don’t know,” Wave said with disinterest. “He seems fine enough.”

  The three of them sitting there together, peaceably, watching Soul Train on TV. Maybe things between them were improving, Kate thought?

  And then Grandma Brody came limping down the hall with her cane. “Katelynn?” she called. “Waverna? I’m looking for you. I have some things I need you to do.”

  —

  Sooner or later, Kate thought, Wave would give in and they would make up. Even though she had new friends at school, Wave was stuck at home after school and on weekends. There was no way to get out. They were miles from even a gas station, and they weren’t allowed to talk on the phone. Kate watched with interest as Wave and Grandma Brody did battle over it.

  “It’s too expensive to have you girls a-chatting and gossiping on that phone. That’s not what it’s for,” Grandma Brody declared, and Wave, who was holding the phone, looked stunned.

  “It doesn’t cost anything to make a local call,” Wave said. “It costs zero!”

  “Do you pay the bills in this house?” Grandma Brody said. “When you pay for your own phone, then you can just gab and gab to your heart’s content!”

  Afterward, the three of them sat in the old bedroom of Vicki and Colleen, Kate on one bed, Wave on another, Dustin on the floor, and they stared at one another.

  If I could think of something that would make her laugh, Kate thought.

  She just couldn’t believe Wave would be so stubborn forever! She would have to soften eventually, Kate thought.

  “God!” Kate said after a while. “I can’t believe we aren’t even allowed to use the phone!” It was a kind of invitation: a shared complaint.

  Let’s talk about things that we both agree on. Let’s start a conversation.

  But Wave wouldn’t take the bait.

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “Why? Do you have someone you need to talk to on the phone?”

  “Yeah,” Kate said. “I wanted to call the stick up your ass? I have a message for him.”

  Wave snorted. It wasn’t a laugh, but at least it was an acknowledgment. At least it meant that she was listening.

  They sat and watched as Dustin dug through the haunted closet that had belonged to their mothers. He had found a cache of board games. He pulled out Yahtzee, and Operation, and Parcheesi, and Monopoly.

  “What’s Mystery Date? Have you guys ever heard of that?”

  “No,” Wave said. “Not interested.”

  “How do you pronounce O-U-I-J-I?” Dustin said.

  “Don’t touch that!” Wave said. She stood up, and she was very alert all of a sudden. “I fucking mean it, Dustin. Don’t you dare touch that!”

  And Kate agreed. Open up a Ouiji board in this room, who knew what would come?

  —

  Kate and Dustin sat by the swimming pool, and as she looked up at the sky she could feel her mind orbiting slowly around a slow realization.

  Rusty killed our parents, she thought.

  There was outrage, of course. Revulsion. But also the steadily chiming dread that if Rusty was the killer, she could be connected to him. That stupid pentagram, her acting out a scene from Michelle Remembers. Dancing with him to Black Sabbath. People would say that she was his accomplice. His accessory—wasn’t that what they called it?

  Kate reached her hand out of the chlorinated water and put it over Dustin’s. “I think both of us have been abused,” she whispered.

  She arranged herself so that they were kneeling on the cement beside the pool, their knees almost touching, and she took his hands in hers. Her palms up, his palms down. She stared into his eyes.

  “Do you remember any of it?” she said. “When we were at the graveyard?”

  His hands jolted a little against her palms, and he blinked a few times. For a moment, she thought he was going to protest—what are you talking about?—but then he just stared at her.

  “Yes,” he said at last.

  “It seemed like,” Kate said. “It seemed like you were almost hypnotized. Like you didn’t even know where you were. Like you thought you were just at home, watching TV.”

  “Um,” Dustin said.

  “It seemed like you were drifting in and out,” Kate said. She’d had years of practice in lying to him, and she knew where to pause, the places that she could let him fill in the blanks with his imagination, the places where she would need to prod or cajole him. “You took a lot of drugs.”

  “Well,” Dustin said. His brow creased. The look of someone who is trying to remember.

  “I tried to fight,” she said, and she leaned in, her hands tightening lightly around Dustin’s fingers. “I thought I tried to call out to you to help me. But it seemed like you were just…paralyzed.”

  “I don’t even know if I remember it,” Dustin whispered. “I mean
,” he said, “I kind of remember. In little bits and flashes.”

  —

  She woke up one night in the bedroom in Grandma Brody’s house and Dustin wasn’t there. She had never before had trouble sleeping, waking up over and over and feeling like something was watching, waking up with Dustin asleep beside her, mumbling and breathing against her like he was maybe dreaming of having sex? Dreaming of running from someone or chasing someone? Short, hitching pants.

  And then waking up and he was not in the bed at all.

  She sat up, blinking.

  Wave was sound asleep in the bed across from her. Dustin was gone.

  She heard the wooden slap of the kitchen screen door, and she got up. There was something wrong with him, she thought. Whatever had once been odd and kooky and kind of cute about him had become more pronounced. Like, almost a mental illness, she thought.

  Downstairs, the kitchen was aglow with moonlight. The little table had a plate on it and an almost-empty glass of milk, and several of the cupboard doors were ajar. So was the back door.

  It was wide open, and the old wooden screen door wavered, tapping lightly into the frame at intervals. The September wind blew some dry leaves and flotsam over the threshold.

  She could see him in the yard, wading through the weeds around the apple tree, walking like a sleepwalker with his arms held out in front of him, his palms up as if he were holding an object in each hand. He was singing in a high, clear choirboy voice. “Luckenbach, Texas”: It was a song that their parents had all liked. Mostly he didn’t sing the words of the song, just the tune. “Come to Luckenbach, Texas,” he crooned, and swayed. “Loo loo loo loo.” He swayed like one of those sea creatures, an anemone or a jellyfish, almost floating. The moon was out, staring blankly down at him, and she felt a prickle down her back.

  O Guland, she thought. She didn’t know who Guland was—a demon of some kind from Rusty’s Satanic Bible—but she wondered sometimes if she actually had summoned him when she called his name in the graveyard. He granted her wish: They had not gone to Yellowstone. And in exchange, she lost everything. Even now, she was still losing it.

  Guland, she thought. How delighted he must have been. She had done something terrible.

  —

  But she had not!

  She had done the right thing!

  Did it matter that Dustin hadn’t actually been there with Kate and Wave and Rusty and Trent? Did it matter that the story she told was a little exaggerated in places? That she pretended, at times, to be an innocent damsel?

  It didn’t—because she was very certain that Rusty killed their parents.

  She had been reading Michelle Remembers. Looking at the grainy black-and-white photos that were on stiff paper in the center of the paperback. One caption said: Michelle told Dr. Pazder of being taken to Victoria’s Ross Bay Cemetery. The lid of an old grave, such as the one above, was pried back, Michelle was lowered into the grave, and the lid was replaced.

  She said to Dustin: “Do you remember when you told me that Rusty and Trent put you in an open grave and wouldn’t let you out?”

  “Yeah,” Dustin said.

  “Are you sure that really happened?” she said, and Dustin stared for a long time.

  “Yes,” he said. “I definitely…I can picture it really clearly.”

  —

  She thought that most of the last part of Michelle Remembers, where Satan finally appears, was too extreme. Satan spoke in kind of awkward rhyming poetry, and she remembered the night that Rusty had snatched the book from her and started reading aloud from it in a fake English accent.

  “He was reading this weird poetry,” she told the police later. “He said it was something that Satan had spoken to him.”

  In Michelle Remembers, when the woman begins to recover repressed memories, she speaks in the voice of a five-year-old girl, and Kate thought this was kind of interesting. She tried on a childlike voice herself—not in a corny way, but just a little puzzled, softer and slower than she’d usually speak. Like she was in a trance as she was recounting these terrible things she remembered.

  They were sitting there in a room at the St. Bonaventure police station. It didn’t look like the interrogation rooms you saw on TV. It was like a little narrow break room, with a couch and a counter where there was a coffeemaker.  She sat on the sagging velour sofa, and the two policemen sat in folding chairs, and the social worker stood by the door with her arms folded.

  She had been worried that they would be questioned separately, and that was exactly what happened. They brought them in one at a time—Dustin first, then Kate, then Wave.

  —

  She and Dustin had gone over the important points. She had written it down in her notebook, and she read it aloud to him so they would both remember it right. So they were both in agreement about what had really happened.

  “There might be trick questions that people ask,” she told Dustin. “They might not want to believe what we’re telling them, so we have to match up.”

  1. That they had both heard Rusty, on numerous occasions, talk about killing Dave and Colleen. They had both heard him talk about burning the house down, and they both remembered that his previous foster family had died in a house fire.

  2. That Rusty claimed to be a member of a cult, and that his biological mother was a member of a cult, and that he listened to Satanic music and drew Satanic pictures, including pentagrams and pictures of the devil’s face. That he claimed to have been part of a cult that drowned a kid in a ritual at an irrigation canal.  And that he also participated in cattle mutilation and animal sacrifice.

  3. That he had driven them to the graveyard and tricked them into taking drugs that he gave them in Kool-Aid.

  4. That Rusty drew a pentagram and baby rabbits were sacrificed on it and they all were forced to pray to Satan.

  5. That Dustin was thrown down into an open grave.

  6. That Kate had been forced to take off her panties and spread her legs on the pentagram and Rusty and Trent put a crucifix between her legs and smeared the blood of the baby rabbits on her face.

  7. That Rusty had called on Satan to kill their parents.

  And she believed that most of this was not untrue. It was in the spirit of the truth, at least; it represented the essence of what they knew about Rusty and what he was capable of, even if it didn’t necessarily happen in that order.

  Wave was another issue. She might not remember things the same way.

  “But she might be kind of prejudiced,” Kate told the policemen and the social worker. She put her hands over her eyes, shuddering with embarrassment. “She was—I think—having sex with him. I don’t think she had anything to do with the murders, but I do think…she’s under his…sway.”

  Kate doubted whether Wave remembered much clearly, anyway. They were all on peyote, and Wave seemed to be tripping harder than anyone.

  According to Wave, there had been another girl there at the cemetery. “I think her name was Montgomery?” Wave had said.

  Kate looked at her skeptically. “Oh, really?” Kate said. “Are you sure?” She had been confident that Wave would eventually agree with her.

  She would have never believed that she and Wave would grow so distant so quickly. As if they’d never been sisters at all.

  —

  By the middle of October, Wave had stopped riding the bus. There was a boy who would give Wave a ride in the morning in his truck, sometimes driving up when Kate and Dustin were standing there by the mailbox waiting for the bus, and Wave would get into the passenger side without a word and leave them there. Sometimes Wave would be dropped off after school by a carload of girls, and you could smell the pot smoke seeping out of the windows from a hundred yards away.

  “This will not do!” Grandma Brody said, and limped after Wave as she went up the stairs to the bedroom. “I called that social worker, and he’s going to have a talk with you!”

  “I hope that they put me in juvie,” Wave said. “It w
ould be better than living here!” Kate and Dustin sat in front of the television, watching an old rerun of Bewitched.

  Dustin was entranced by it, didn’t even seem to notice the drama going on behind him. But Kate watched with fascination as her sister turned and faced Grandma Brody.  It reminded her of the fights that she and Wave had once had with their mother, which seemed so long ago. It felt like Wave was her old self once again.

  “You’re not my mother,” Wave called from the top of the stairs. “My mother hated you, you old witch!”

  Wave didn’t even slam the door, just closed it firmly, and Grandma Brody went to the forbidden phone and called the sheriff to complain. On TV, one of the witches had turned the husband into a chimpanzee. Dustin was watching with an openmouthed smile.

  —

  Kate went upstairs. She knocked very lightly on the door and said: “Wave?” No answer. “Wave? It’s me. Can I come in?”

  “I can’t stop you,” Wave said from behind the door, and so Kate opened it gingerly.

  Wave lay on the bed, facedown on her folded arms. There was a bedside lamp with a base in the shape of a prim ballerina, and it gave off an oddly garish yellow light. “What do you want?” Wave said.

  “I just want to talk,” Kate said. She sat down on the floor not far from where Wave was lying, but not so close that it would be intrusive. “I wish we still talked. Like we used to.”

  “Mm-hm,” Wave said. “I know.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” Kate said. “ ’Cause I’m on your side.”

  Wave looked down and smiled almost sadly. “Kate,” she said, “I don’t really want you on my side. I’m not interested.”

  “Why are you being like this?” Kate said. “We used to be so close. We used to do everything together. I don’t know what happened.”

  It was the first time she’d said something that made Wave laugh in months. But it wasn’t a nice laugh. “Oh, really?” Wave said. “You don’t know what happened? Maybe you need to recover your repressed memories.”

  Kate felt the hated color rise in her face. She was kneeling meekly on the floor like a child saying prayers, and she tried to will the blush away. She kept her face turned downward, and she could see a pink stuffed octopus staring at her from under the bed, an octopus made of felt with glinting white shell buttons for eyes. “I just want things to go back the way they were,” she said at last, and Wave let out another sharp laugh.