by Dan Chaon
“I always admire people who love their parents. ’Cause I hated mine. I actually hired someone to kill them, you know? But I always wished that I had parents that I loved.”
“Yeah,” Rabbit says, and when Xzavious releases him he feels a little dizzy and bleary.
I had this terrible dream about my dog, and in the dream the dog ran under a barbed-wire fence and he tore his skin, he ran to me crying and his skin was falling off his body and you could see the raw muscle of him beneath the fur coat, and I picked him up and tried to carry him and his coat kept slipping off, I tried to put it back, to cover him with it like a blanket. The high-pitched cry that dogs make when they are dying. That’s the sound of prayer.
A bug lands in my hair, and I swat vaguely with my fingers as Amy makes some lines on his CD jewel case and breathes one in with his silver snorter. Then he hands it to me, and I bend and take a hit.
And my brain makes a perfect, chiming chord. Something in the major key. I pass my hand over my mouth and the salt on my palms tastes amazing, I feel it running brightly through my veins and the beat of my heart lays down a track that goes along with the chiming. I feel an easy smile spread on my face. You don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know, I think, I don’t know why
Did Amy just say that he killed his parents? Rabbit thinks. But the girl comes forward and extends her hand with her fingers straight and tucked together as if she’s going to insert it into a small space.
“Have you heard the good news?” she says. “The Lord is coming.”
“Oh,” says Rabbit. “Cool.” He shakes her hand and then wipes the edge of his eye with his index finger. His legs feel wobbly and he sits in one of the ancient, dirty wingback chairs, which once upon a time was some kind of bright mustard color.
When I was stabbed to death I called out for my mother in my last moments. I said, “Mom, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” as if the knife wounds were just a mistake I could somehow be forgiven for.
You don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know. The man who stabbed me kissed me as I was dying, and I think it was meant as a final insult but it wasn’t. It was a mercy. He wasn’t even there anymore when he pressed his lips to mine, he vanished and I felt a hundred other kisses that I’d had in my life, all of them happening at once, chiming together like a chord.
“It’s good, right?” Amy says, and I nod. And then the three of us all laugh softly for a while.
And then I’m like: oh. “I was supposed to ask you something,” I say, and my voice sounds like it’s being filtered from underwater. “I was, uh,” I say.
“This guy,” I say. “This Gergely guy?”
“Ugh,” says the girl, who is stirring her soup or whatever over by the fire. And she and Amy exchange glances.
“I’m sorry,” Rabbit says. “I’m not really doing that well. I’m feeling kind of shitty, actually,” he says.
“That’s natural,” Xzavious says. “Under the circumstances, right?”
Rabbit sits there and the two of them stand looking down at him. Their eyes are avid, and Xzavious flexes his weight-lifter pectorals. The girl scratches a mosquito bite with her toe.
“I think I just realized that I’m truly fucked,” Rabbit says. He looks up at them, as if he’s surprised. As if he’s had an epiphany.
Some people are lucky to die this way: Your life splits into hundreds of hallways, and you can briefly grasp all the lives you’ve had and all the people you’ve been, even in your short span on this earth. You can see the infinite, never-ending math equation of it, and you realize that any way you tried to tell your life story would be wrong. You weren’t even one person! You aren’t even one person, even now, even as you
I touch the boy who whispered “Rabbit” and he shudders and slaps at the air like there are insects around him.
“I think,” I say. “Maybe he might’ve been the last person to see Rabbit alive? I think, I don’t know, I don’t know. I just wish I could—just some things that don’t completely make sense. Do you think Rabbit killed himself?”
Amy smiles kindly. “Does it matter?” he says. “I mean, you can’t help him now. I don’t even know if you can help yourself at this point.”
“Oh, wow,” Rabbit says, and he puzzles for a moment, as if he’s trying to do a math problem in his head and it won’t come out right. “I’m really not going to make it, am I?”
“Don’t freak out,” Xzavious says gently. “It’s okay. What can we do to help?”
A lot of people die screaming, and I’m not passing judgment on them. Some of them hold onto that one thread all the way to the end, clinging to that idea that there is a “me” to keep intact.
I think of the bright shrieks of my dog. Why won’t you answer? Why won’t you help me?
That’s his only question.
24
“DON’T THINK ABOUT a hamburger,” my mother said. “Don’t think about a bear. Don’t think about a bear dancing on a washing machine in a tutu.”
My brother and I laughed, because of course we imagined the bear dancing; we couldn’t help it.
It was a game my mom used to play with us. The don’t-think-about game, and of course it was a fun sort of brain teaser. How do you not think about something? The only way was to try to swiftly imagine something else, so quickly that it tackled the other thought.
And now I am playing it again.
Don’t think about Rabbit. Don’t think about Jim Beam. Don’t think about Jack Daniels.
Don’t think about Gergely.
—
“I don’t know that much about him, really,” Amy says. “All I know is that he pays guys to let him do various kinds of bondage and domination stuff. Duct tape. Mummification. Crucifixion. And apparently a lot more-extreme stuff, too. I think he actually had a streaming porn site for a while but it got shut down. It was on the border of snuff films.”
“But Rabbit didn’t say anything about him? The last time you saw him?”
“The last thing Rabbit said to me,” Amy says, “and I remember it, he said, I think I just realized that I’m truly fucked. And I was, like, no you’re not. It’s all right. Et cetera. But he was in a very worked-up state.”
“And you think he killed himself, right?”
Amy looks over at the girl again, and she lifts her eyebrow like she’s giving him permission to say something, and he shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “Probably. He was going to die soon, one way or another.”
Our eyes meet. He doesn’t drink from my aura this time; he doesn’t seem that mysterious even. He’s a drug dealer who works at Whole Foods and fucks fourteen-year-old girls and pretends to be a vampire.
“Look,” he says. “I don’t know the answer. I think that it’s seventy percent that Rabbit killed himself. And even if it’s like, ‘Oh shit, Gergely is a murderer!’ It’s still basically the same thing. I mean, you open that door and you made a decision, right?”
The young girl in the silver halter top looks over at us and licks her wooden spoon thoughtfully. She makes a face as if it’s bitter, and I watch as she lights a cigarette. “People say he’s a cop,” she says.
“So?” I say, and she smiles at me a little sadly.
“Did you ever hear on the news where the heroin junkie was sexually abused by a cop, and then he got a lawyer and went to trial and the cop eventually went to jail?”
“No,” I say, “I don’t think I heard about that.”
The girl shrugs. “Because that would never happen,” she says.
“Um,” I say, and for a few seconds I try to untangle the riddle she’s just told me. But I’m too high. “I don’t think I get it.”
“I know,” she says sympathetically, and she puts her small hand on my arm, and the pads of her fingers are very warm and damp like clay. The fire crackles as it reaches the insides of the Beanie Baby and the stuffing begins to pop and glow.
25
AMY HAD GIVEN me a lot of dope for a surprisingly l
ow price, so I was happy about that.
Truth was I felt almost giddy, which was kind of depressing because it made me realize that I was more of an addict than I thought.
“Shit,” I whispered. I was sitting in the car in the parking lot of House of Wills, a user among users, all of us lined up in our little private cells with our motors running, and I pulled out the index card with the address written on it. Rabbit left this for you to find, I thought.
So why not just drive over there and look at the place? I thought. “Stake it out,” isn’t that what the cops said? And if it’s nothing, you haven’t done anything wrong.
—
Bridgewater Road. Lyndhurst.
It’s on the east side. Not that far from home, actually, kind of almost on your way, and so you pull out onto East 55th and drive a few blocks to the interstates until you’ve pointed yourself east.
When you’re high, driving feels so good. You have your hands on the steering wheel and the world outside looks like a video game that you are controlling, and your eyes are sharp and focused but your mind is sifting out behind you like sand blowing off a dune; you feel it rolling away from you even as you move forward steadily. You are speeding along at 65 miles per hour and you can feel your tires hissing over the salted asphalt and see the blur of the corridor passing, you change lanes, you pass semis, the green interstate exit signs fly over you, but you are also not moving. You are sitting on the couch in your house playing a video game in which you’re driving along the interstate, and you are dozing in a warm bath imagining that you are sitting on the couch playing a video game. There are layers of thick, porous time between each of these things. You are aware of your eyelids lowering to blink, and when they raise again, you’ve traveled miles.
And then here is the place. Bridgewater Road. Who knows what time it is? After midnight, surely. The house is tiny, a white little box with vinyl siding and a red door, no trees on the lawn, no shrubs like the neighbors’. Nothing scary about it except it seems anonymous and abandoned. The kind of place that has a FOR SALE sign on the lawn that has been there for years.
I sit there and listen to Bob Marley sing “Waiting in Vain.” Which Rabbit would have said was too on the nose, and if he were in the passenger seat he would have reached over and turned the CD off. Come on, Sweetroll, he says. Why don’t you make your way back home?
—
And that is when my phone rings, and I fumble with it, press it to the side of my face.
“Aaron?” says my mom’s voice.
26
“AARON?” MY MOM said, and I said, “Uh?”
But I didn’t say anything else, because I was freaking out. I looked down at the cigarette I was holding and it was vibrating between my fingers, but otherwise I had nothing. No voice, no thoughts, just the bouncing cherry of my cigarette, and my chest getting tighter and tighter.
“You called me,” my mom said, and I couldn’t help it. I started to cry.
Wouldn’t that have been a breakthrough, back in the day? Back in the day—how long ago?—when my dad didn’t think I’d shed a sufficient number of tears, and he wanted me to see a shrink, he wanted me to take some medication that would help me get through it. He wanted me to process my grief.
“What the fuck?” my mom said. “Are you crying? Are you on drugs?”
“No,” I said defensively. I put the hams of my hands against my eyes, and a bunch of sparrows shot out of my forehead with a loud flapping of wings.
She sighed. “Aaron?” she said. “I hope you don’t think this is some sort of reunion, because it’s not. The only reason I’m calling you is because you phoned a number that you should have never been able to find. And I’d like to know how my number came into your possession.”
And then she spoke very slowly. As if to a child or an animal. “My name is Waverna Tillman,” she said. “You left a message for me.”
—
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
And the world tilted sort of back into position. “I’m sorry, I’m…uh,” and I blotted my eyeholes with my knuckles.
“My husband said that you told him that Rusty gave you my number?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. And I took a breath, because the disequilibrium was washing away from me only very slowly. “He, uh,” I said. “He said he thought I should talk to you, and he…gave me your number. He just gave it to me; I don’t know how he got it.”
“Okay,” she said. “But I don’t get why he would be talking to you in the first place.”
“I don’t know, either,” I said. “He called me. That’s all. He was out of prison, and…apparently you guys didn’t want to talk to him. He didn’t have anybody else, and so he called me, I guess. I wasn’t looking for this, you know?”
“Mm,” she said. It was the sound that you make when you have a pain in your sternum.
“I don’t even know how I got into this,” I said. “I really don’t.”
And it surprised me that she laughed. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s how we all feel.”
—
We were silent, and then her voice softened a little. “Shit,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. But you know what? Maybe I’ll just play along with it for a while. Because this has been eating away at me for a very long time. God! I’m coming up on fifty years old, and maybe I’m a little bitter. I hope you don’t mind if I’m bitter,” she said.
“Uh,” I said. “No? I’m not really…”
“You’re not really anything, right?” she said. “Of course you wouldn’t be. It’s so funny. Was he a good dad?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think maybe. Not terrible in any obvious way.”
“Yeah,” she said softly, and her voice was breathy but still very much like my mom’s. “That’s exactly right,” she said. “He was never terrible in an obvious way, but I do think—ugh,” she says.
“What?”
And I heard the movement of the phone as it shifted from one ear to the next. “Okay,” she said. “You know how my parents died, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you seen pictures of the crime scene?”
“I guess so. Yeah. Some of them.”
“And what do you think is missing from those pictures?” she said.
“I don’t have any idea,” I said. But I thought: Wow, she might be crazier than my dad!
“Do you know that I’ve hired people over the years? Investigators. Private detectives. Forensics people. And they all tell me the same thing. It was a murder–suicide. I have had some ideas over the years about why that might have happened, I think I have some solid theories—but it doesn’t matter. I don’t think that anybody will ever really know, exactly, but I’m pretty sure about the basic facts.
“The truth is this: My dad killed his brother, and then he killed my mom, and then he killed Dustin’s mom as she was trying to escape. In that order. And then he killed himself. The whole scene is really obvious.
“Except that there’s no gun, is there? The gun that my father must have put in his mouth and pulled the trigger of? It’s not there.”
“Um,” I said, and tried to fit a cigarette between my lips, but I kept missing the mouth hole.
I could hang up if I wanted. I knew she was going to tell me something bad. I could choose if I wanted to know it, or not.
—
“Your dad was the one who found them that morning,” she said, after a little pause. “I think he moved them around a little bit, probably. But the gun that was in my dad’s hand? He definitely removed that from the scene.”
“Why…” I said. “Why would he do that?”
“That is the question, isn’t it?” she said. “What was the motivation? I don’t think he realized what he was going to do when he took it. I think that he and Kate decided to frame Rusty later.”
She was quiet for a moment, but I could hear her breathing. “Uff,” she sighed. “Yeah, I’m still bitter
about it, I can’t believe it. They did it all behind my back, and it took years—maybe my whole life—to try to sort it out. And honestly I can’t forgive them for it. Maybe he was a good dad to you, maybe he and Kate are really different now, I don’t know. Maybe they’ve changed. But they did something very, very evil back in the day. You want to know the worst thing about your dad?” she said.
I finally fitted the cigarette between my lips, and it made me aware of the way that my fingers were still fluttering.
I could have told her to stop. But maybe it was just a sort of Bluebeard’s wife thing. You can’t help yourself: Open the door, you stupid bitch. Go ahead.
“What?” I said.
“The worst thing is that he thinks he’s the hero of this story, and he’s never, ever going to find out that he’s actually the bad guy.”
—
I considered this. Was it the worst thing to think that you’re a hero when you’re not? Was it even worse to never find out that you’re a bad person? Maybe it was a mercy.
I stared out at the house with its faded FOR SALE sign, the bright circle of porch light. “One of the things I keep asking myself,” she said. “When did he die? I think that’s an important question to ask, if you care about him. And it’s sad, because there’s no way for you to find out. He was dead long before you were born, I know that for sure.”
“Um,” I said. “I’m actually having kind of a hard time following you. I mean, literally, my dad’s, like, alive.”
“Really?” she said.
“I hope so,” I said. “Last time I checked. He was breathing, and walking around, and I—I get that you’re talking metaphorically.” The Death of the Heart: That was a book that my mother loved, a book that she was always telling me I should read, though I never did. “You mean like the death of the. The death of the heart.”