Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

  “I sort of—I tried to be honest,” she says. “I told him that you were impressionable when you were a kid. Gullible. I told him that you believed what you said but that what you said might not be entirely true.”

  I don’t say anything. I blink. Here is the poorly shoveled driveway, with the shovel still stabbed into a snowbank at the end of the path.

  —

  I can remember the last thing Aaron said before he left.

  —

  “So,” he said. “Can I ask you a psychology question?”

  “Of course!” I said.  I grinned. “Are you taking a psychology class?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Neat,” I said.

  “So,” he said. “The thing I wanted to ask you. What do you call it when someone can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not real?”

  16

  “THAT’S SO WEIRD,” says this boy I don’t remember. Mike Mention. It’s a little past six in the evening, and I’m sitting at Aaron’s desk, looking through the drawers. “I just talked to him, like, last weekend,” Mike Mention says, in the polite, pleasant voice you might use to speak to an acquaintance’s father. “We watched some of these old videos that him and Rabbit and me made. I don’t know whether you remember back when we were in middle school and we were doing all these little movies?”

  “Not distinctly,” I say.

  Aaron’s desk is a cheap computer desk from Staples, laminate over engineered wood, and when I pull out the keyboard shelf there is a dried Mountain Dew spill that has grown a pelt of dust, and a Skittle is stuck to it. There are some rolling papers. A plastic straw. A souvenir eraser from Mammoth Cave, which we’d visited when he was twelve.

  A three-by-five index card, with Aaron’s sloppy, spiky, teenage-boy handwriting:

  R.

  3216 N Sissaro Ave

  Chicago IL 60641

  “So we were just reminiscing about Rabbit, basically,” Mike Mention says. “But that was really the last time I talked to him.”

  “Can you,” I say. “Can you think of anybody else he might be staying with, maybe?”

  Mike Mention pauses for a moment, thoughtfully.  “Umm,” he says. “Not really. I don’t know that much about who he hangs out with now that Rabbit—passed away.”

  He hesitates again, then sighs, and I open the large bottom drawer on the left—the one that’s meant to hold hanging files. There is a high school photo of Jill on top of a pile of haphazardly stacked papers.

  “Listen, Mr. Tillman,” he says. And his voice is surprisingly kind. “Look, I know that you and Aaron were, like, really close or whatever, but, you know. Sometimes I don’t talk to my mom for, like, weeks. I don’t think you need to be really freaked out or anything. It’s just, you know. Like I tell my mom, she gets so mad when I don’t call her back and I’m like, ‘Mom, I grew up.’ You can’t stop it from happening.”

  I lift up the photo of Jill.

  —

  I’m aware that somehow the phone call has ended, and I put the phone down on the desk and peer into the drawer.

  He has accumulated a little cache of Jill’s possessions.  At first the word stolen comes to me, but then I think—stolen from whom?

  He has collected a few casual snapshots from Jill’s high school and college years—the kind of fuzzy, poorly lit photos you’d get when you and your friends snapped pictures at a party on a disposable camera. You’d drop them off at the drugstore and pick up a packet of glossies a couple of days later, and a third of them would be nothing—a blurry close-up of a finger or an overexposed group shot where everyone’s eyes are red and their teeth all look like the teeth of skeletons.

  But I can see why he wanted them. They’re not posed. No one is looking at the camera. It’s almost as if he could get a glimpse through a pinhole of a time when his mom was alive and he wasn’t, a time when she was his age. Jill, barefoot and in shorts, drinking beer on someone’s porch. Jill, sixteen years old, laughing as if she has heard the funniest joke. Jill in a dorm common room, sitting on a couch with a boy and pretending like she’s squeezing his breasts. A different part of his mother’s life, which he would never know. That I hadn’t really known, either.

  He has taken her law school diploma and the chunky, brightly colored necklace that had been made by natives of some tropical tribe in Africa or South America or Malaysia, which the boys had given her one Mother’s Day. There is a Christmas-tree ornament that Aaron made when he was four or five, a turnip-shaped piece of construction paper that had been decorated with glue and glitter, and in Magic Marker is written: MERCIFUL TO FORGIVE OTHER

  Here were a handful of letters that she’d kept.

  There is one from the college years in which photo collages have been taped to the envelope, and there is one that is obviously addressed in her mother’s handwriting, and there is one that is more recent, the addresses printed in anonymous laser-printer font, and I pick up that one because I don’t know the sender.

  It is dated September 27, 2009.

  Dearest Jill, it says. Wake up! You say that you’re going to confront the problems in your marriage when the boys are out of high school, but that is literally years. The things that you’ve shared with me about Dustin have made me concerned that

  And I stop reading and put the letter in my pocket.

  17

  “WHAT DO YOU think Rusty told him?” I say to Kate.

  “I don’t know,” Kate says. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know, either,” I say.

  It’s about eight o’clock now and I’m sitting in the living room with my laptop and my phone and my Moleskine notebook spread out on the coffee table. The desire to feel as if I’m accomplishing something. There is a fire in the fireplace. There is the large thirty-by-forty studio portrait of our family, taken about four years ago now, and Jill looks down at me. We are both silent for a long time. Uncomfortable. My eyes find the ceiling and up there I can see a bullet hole.

  Or—no, it’s smaller than a bullet hole. My guess is that someone had once mounted a hook of some kind. For hanging a plant, or a mobile. Some kind of pendant light. Odd that I never noticed it before.

  “You would think,” I say, “that he told him something about the trial.”

  We were on the border of a territory that we hadn’t crossed into since the early days when we were staying with Grandma Brody. After Wave left, we had deliberately stopped speaking about it; it was a tacit agreement, as they say, and broaching it gives me a woozy, nauseated feeling.

  “I guess he would say that we lied, right?” I say, and Kate makes a disapproving sound.

  “Everything we said was basically true,” she says. “At worst, maybe a little poetic license.”

  “Hm,” I say.  I look at the fire, and then back to that hole on the ceiling. I wouldn’t have been surprised if an insect with a lot of legs came crawling out of it. “Have you thought about—”

  A mud dauber wasp? That was the insect that I hated the most. They make these horrible nests—clusters of tear-shaped cells, made of mud but as smooth as if they’d been cast on a pottery wheel and baked in a kiln.  The wasp paralyzes its prey and lays its eggs on it, and then seals it into one of the mud chambers. The trapped prey will still be alive when the eggs hatch.

  —

  “What?” Kate says, after my silence has extended. “Have I thought about what?”

  “Well,” I say. “If Rusty didn’t do it, who did?”

  She sniffed. “I still think he did it,” she says. “I don’t care if he was acquitted. I tried to read about—the documents, about why he was acquitted? Dustin, they don’t even make sense. I don’t know whether you looked them up online?”

  “No,” I say. And I’m aware that I have gone for a year and a half without reading a single thing about Rusty’s release from prison. Maybe if Jill hadn’t died, maybe if I hadn’t gotten involved with the investigation, I would have been able to forc
e myself to read it. But even in ideal circumstances, I’m not sure.

  “You’d have to be a lawyer to understand it,” Kate says, and I look away from the hole. I try to imagine her apartment. What’s she’s doing right now?  Looking out the window?

  And I touch the envelope. It’s still in my pocket. Burn it, I think. She’s quiet.

  “Besides which,” she says, “I thought we’d decided we weren’t going to talk about it. That was sort of the rule, wasn’t it?”

  “I wish there was some way for me to talk to Wave,” I say.  “I just feel like—if I knew what kind of contact she had with Rusty, and with Aaron, if I knew what they were saying, I would be able to have a better sense of what was going on in Aaron’s mind.”

  “I have her P.O. box number,” Kate says. “In Wonder, Oregon. So you could write her a letter. She says she doesn’t have a phone. She calls people from a pay phone on the highway.”

  I can picture Kate at the front window of her apartment. A limo is pulling up in front of the Scientology Celebrity Centre hotel. She brings the filter of her cigarette to her lips, and she French inhales, letting the smoke drift out of her mouth and into her nostrils, and I let this play in my mind’s eye for a while because that particular kind of movement of smoke is beautiful. Billowing.

  “I think he might have told Aaron that I did it,” I say at last. “That’s what I’m worried about.”

  She doesn’t say anything. And I can’t imagine what she’s doing. I don’t know if she’s standing at the window. I don’t know if she’s at the kitchen table, or reclining in bed with the ceiling fan turning slowly over her, or on the couch with her remote pointed at the TV. The hole looks down at me from the ceiling.

  “Well,” she says at last, pensively. “Did you?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m pretty sure I didn’t.”

  18

  EIGHT IN THE morning on Sunday and Aqil calls me. I shift under the blankets and brush up against the shape of Jill, and I know that it’s just a pillow that occupies the space she used to in our bed but I still touch it apologetically, as if the phone might have awakened it.

  I blink.

  The letter—the unread letter—is folded in half on the nightstand next to the old lava lamp that doesn’t work anymore.  The things that you’ve shared with me about Dustin have made me concerned that If I was smart I’d have burned it before I had the chance to wake up and reconsider.

  I remember talking to Mike Mention.  I remember talking to Kate.

  I think he might have told Aaron that I did it

  —

  I have a mug that Jill got me for Father’s Day. It says, BEHIND EVERY SUCCESSFUL DAD IS A FAMILY WHO LOVES HIM! and the mug shows a cartoon father being followed by a loving mom, who is followed by an adoring older son and an eager younger son and a tail-wagging dog, and they follow the father all around the circumference of the cup. And even though we didn’t have a dog, I always felt connected to that image. To that idea. The memories of happiness.

  —

  “So, listen,” Aqil says. “I have some information for you.”

  “Okay,” I say. I sit up, and I can see myself in the mirror of Jill’s dresser, sitting up and holding my phone to my ear.

  “I entered your wife’s car’s license plate into the database,” Aqil says. “And this morning I got a couple of hits. Traffic and parking violations, from the last few days.”  He cleared his throat.  “In Chicago.”

  —

  It is not that unexpected, I guess.  It clicks into place the way a game of solitaire can; you know the cards will all begin to move toward their final pile, and there is that tingle of recognition.

  We had known Rusty was in Chicago for a long time. We knew his whereabouts, his address. Aqil had told me that summer before Jill died, well over a year ago. I’m a cop; I have my sources, he said.

  I’m aware of the index card that Aaron had in his desk. R. 3216 N Sissaro Ave Chicago IL 60641

  I know that he’s been talking with Rusty for a long time—bonding with Rusty, I think.  And then Rusty told him to call Wave. And Wave—maybe? Wave told him—what?

  What do you call it when someone can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not real?

  What has Aaron heard about me? What have they been telling him? There is that feeling when your own story is out of your hands. Someone else is making you up behind your back, and it gives you a shiver of

  The folded envelope looks at me. Folded into a hunched, sullen origami troll. It had been in Aaron’s room. He’d read it.

  —

  “I think I’m going to have to go there,” I say.

  Aqil lets out a breath—maybe exasperated. “Dustin,” he says. “Why would you do that?”

  “It’s not true,” I say. “What Aaron thinks is true is not true.”

  “Well,” Aqil says. “If Aaron is in Chicago—if he’s visiting this guy, your brother? Do you think he might—would you say that Aaron is in any danger? That your brother might harm him?”

  Strange that this is something I never considered. Even though I’d thought of him for years as a murderer, even though the abuse—for some reason I don’t imagine that he would hurt Aaron.

  I think that Aaron has gone there of his own free will—that he knows something, believes something about me. Something Rusty told him. He’s a pawn, not a target. I feel my head shake.

  “No no,” I say. “I don’t think—I don’t think he’d hurt Aaron. That’s not what he’s…”

  I hesitate. “The tickets,” I say. “Are they on Cicero Avenue?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Aqil says. “Some of them on Belmont.”

  “I guess I need to go there,” I say.

  “What?” says Aqil. “You think he’s actually with your brother? Sleeping on Rusty’s couch or something? Why would he do that?”

  I imagine Aaron: I am talking to someone….Just not a fucking therapist.

  “Because they’re friends,” I say. “They’ve been talking for over a year. I’m guessing that Rusty’s the closest friend he has now that Rabbit’s gone.”

  “And how do you know that?” Aqil says.

  “I have a good intuition for these things,” I say. “You said so yourself.”

  “So,” Aqil says. “You’re just going to drive—what—six hours? Just to check on a hunch?”

  What else can I do? I think. Wait here?

  “I’m going to get up and shower,” I say. “And I’m going to pack a little bag. I want to go there today.”

  “Um,” Aqil says. “Really?”

  “Would you be willing to come with me?”

  19

  WE ARE TRAVELING along. Driving in my car.

  I am behind the steering wheel and we pass through a tollbooth and then we are on I-90 west, and I try to focus only on the road. When the semis go past me in the left lane, they send a blinding sheet of muddy slush across my windshield, and it feels aggressive, it feels like one of the video games the boys like to play in which you are being attacked but you have to keep pressing forward.  White, snow-covered, et cetera, on either side. No scenery.

  —

  The memory of happiness: I am driving and Jill is in the passenger seat and we’re playing some kind of license-plate game. “Keep an eye out for pornographic messages,” she says.

  The boys are in the backseat, still very young—under five—asleep, and I keep a lookout until I see a truck that says V1B3 R8R, and we both start laughing even though it isn’t that funny. We’ll stop at a motel and rent a room with two double beds and we’ll carry the babies in so softly that they don’t even stir and then we’ll try to have quiet sex on the bed across from them, but she keeps whispering in my ear—“Vee one bee three arr eight arrrrrr”—and I chortle so loudly I wake up the kids, but it doesn’t matter.

  I believe she loved me. I believe it in every part of myself.

  —

  Aqil is silent.
He is very involved with his device, and out of the corner of my eye I see him frowning, swiping his thumb to the left across his screen. Once, twice. Six times. Then a swipe to the right. Maybe he’s playing a game?

  He clears his throat.

  “I need to stop at a rest area,” he says. “When the next one comes up.”

  “Yes,” I say, and I brace myself as a semi carrying a rack of cars appears in my rearview mirror. “Okay.”

  “Do you want me to drive for a while?” Aqil says.

  —

  Yes. Okay.

  I lean my head against the cold passenger-side window, and I can smell the thick dusty warmth of the defroster. He plugs in a CD and mumbles along with it.

  “What is this?” I say, and we are passing Cedar Point amusement park, and I used to take the boys there. There was a water park.

  “Modest Mouse,” he says, and I nod.

  I take the letter out of my pocket and unfold it. The return address tells me that it is from someone named Alice Fish in Buckingham, Pennsylvania—whom I have never heard of, though apparently she and Jill shared close personal information.

  Wake up! You say that you’re going to confront the problems in your marriage when the boys are out of high school, but that is literally years. The things that you’ve shared with me about Dustin have made me concerned that he is not just emotionally unavailable but incapable of

  And I glance up and we are hurtling through a landscape of white and black. Asphalt, snow, fences. A bare tree in the middle of a field. A sudden explosion of grackles, curving through the air. A frowning, dead Pizza Hut, watching us with arched eyebrows from an abandoned mall. If you read further, all of your happiest memories will be taken away. All of it will be stripped and recolored.  All of the moments that you think of as important will suddenly shift and distort, and whatever you thought you remembered will be gone.

  But at least you will know, I think. Right?