“What did you want to ask me?” Tiffany said.
“Would it be all right if we lay down?”
“Hell yeah—I mean, of course.”
The girls lay facing one another on the bed. Alex advanced until their foreheads touched, limbs and fingers entwined, holding on.
“How does that feel?” Alex wanted to understand the difference between their experiences, what made Alex not Tiffany.
“This is weirdly intimate,” the girl said.
“It feels secure to me.”
“I make you feel secure? That’s a riot.”
The blood hummed under their skin from the caffeine or something else. As soon as they wondered about it, the distinction didn’t seem to matter.
“You didn’t kill Erika,” Alex said.
“How do you know?” Tiffany said. “Maybe I’m not happy to see you. Maybe that’s a knife in my pocket.”
“You’re happy to see me.”
“Hold me tighter, yeah?”
That was it, Alex’s defense for Tiffany Dennys—the girl’s affection, her candor and compassion, an authenticity beyond what Alex had read was possible for sociopaths. And a true sociopath had been at work in the woods, amassing kids to perform old rituals, evil magic. Real or imagined, that wasn’t of consequence to the case. Maybe it was, but Erika Summerson’s murder felt so much less important this close to Tiffany. Alex’s brain warmed and dripped contentedness, thick as honey, down the back of the throat, going for the heart. It was terrifying. Alex swallowed, pulled Tiffany nearer. Intelligence demanded faulty paradigms be shattered. For now, that meant accepting that a friendship could be worth more than renown for one’s genius. So far, Alex had been careful to keep members of the group at a distance to prevent attachment from mucking up an objective view of the facts. It was obvious now that no accurate judgment could ever be made without intimacy with a subject. Alex remained dedicated to the case, having gained, during that languid afternoon in bed with Tiffany, a greater notion of why it mattered.
So, yes—Alex had shrugged when Greg implied that the ability to kill proved the killer’s fearlessness and Doug admitted to having glimpsed the potential murder weapon. For one, if everyone who cared about something also knew the fear of losing that thing, the killer did, too. Even if that were the loss of his own life. Otherwise, why return to camp night after night to search the grounds for the strange diary? And two, a detailed description of the weapon was of far less use to the investigation than noting the reactions of the potential suspects after its mention.
•
Alex’s indifference made Greg sweat like never before. She’d shrugged—the group’s math whiz, whom he’d watched rise to lukewarm applause during so many school assemblies and be given enough blue ribbons and engraved plaques to decorate an entire team of brainiacs, as if thinking too hard were a sport. The group’s work had made Greg uneasy from the start. Between John and Alex and the dork they called the genius, Greg worried that the group might actually find a trail of evidence that led to Erika’s killer and be hacked to pieces for their heroism.
And now Alex shrugged as if it didn’t matter. And the Dead Man stood with his back turned like he was giving up, too. The guy retreated into the shadows behind the tree. Instead of relief, Greg was on the brink of heartbreak, as if losing Erika all over again.
He and Josué had talked about her all afternoon. They’d eaten enough McDonald’s french fries to stuff a small mammal, then hit Penny Park to shoot hoops. Josué wasn’t bad. He put up each shot too stiffly and with great force, and the ball bricked off the backboard the same way each time. Even after a few games, the kid never limbered up. Some guys didn’t have it. But J. smiled a lot and took the losses better than any kid Greg had ever played against, always making it a point to hand Greg the ball after the winning basket and to shake his hand and say, “Was a very good game.”
Each win made Greg feel worse. Not for J. For her. For the fact he’d never kiss the girl’s glossy pink mouth. Never feel her breath or run his fingers through her hair courtside on a hot summer night. He’d never hear her say, “Greg … Oh, Greg—” Because the girl was cold in the dirt at Resurrection Cemetery. He knew this because he’d been there, twice already, stood over her grave and all that weak shit, hands clasped in front of his hips all formal, then behind as if waiting for a game from the sidelines. Neither position felt right. What do you do in a cemetery but imagine weird shit, like speaking to the dead, her voice seeping from the headstone, “Greg … Greg …” Tiny, thin as the breeze. Then the night of her murder. The voice choked or shrieks.
Greg turned up the music in his headphones until he couldn’t hear their gym shoes grind the asphalt or J.’s bricks off the backboard or his own thoughts. He wanted Erika out of his head, to bury her for once and for all, to move on. He began to regret following the Dead Man into the woods where he was constantly reminded that the girl he’d been obsessed with, maybe even loved, didn’t exist anymore. He’d even asked Tiffany out to lunch today to help him forget Erika. She’d said no. That hadn’t been an easy thing for him to do or hear, especially since she was the only girl but his mom that he talked to regularly. Pretty fucking defeated was what he felt, so Greg had to hand J. the ball and sit down on the curb and catch his breath. He was panting too hard for an easy game.
J. had noticed the guy’s heavy breathing, of course, and said, “Better if Tiffany were here, no?”
“It’s fine. Fuck her. It’s … whatever.”
“Genius … He’s a real genius, eh? Tiffany—oh, man,” J. said to bring Greg out of his sadness.
“Girls are messed up like that,” Greg said. “Erika was the same way. Running with guys who treated her like garbage. The genius is a fine dude. But look at him. Against you or me? It doesn’t make sense. Do they have eyes? Girls drive me fucking crazy. Give me a shot. I’m a nice guy. I am. Like a nice guy for once. I’ll worship you. What more do you want? All I want’s a nice, pretty girl to eat with and see movies with who won’t judge me, won’t think I’m nothing and never will be something, won’t give up on me. Know what I’m saying?”
Greg wasn’t thinking of Tiffany, but his mom. Neither she nor Greg respected the guy she’d remarried. He had a stable job and he paid for things. Yet she was cheating on him, and some nights would take Greg cruising with her boyfriend, who they picked up from the YMCA parking lot, and they’d all see a movie. The guy carried an old Chicago Bulls duffle bag and wore stained T-shirts and jeans like a deadbeat, but he was OK. He let Greg smoke cigarettes when his mother wasn’t around and, unlike his stepdad, didn’t ask him to do shit around the apartment, like take out the garbage and shampoo carpets when the untrained dogs unloaded hot piss in the corners, stuff that a man was supposed to take care of because it’s his house. Greg missed his real dad, a burly man with a blonde beard and a hairy belly soft as a teddy bear. His dad didn’t look like a deadbeat. He was one because of his drinking. But he’d never disrespected Greg and always said how much he loved him and his mother, would never abandon them. If the man had ever threatened her, it was because she’d refused to see him through tough times. Instead, she ran off with the first guy that could support her, then to a boyfriend to keep from regretting her poor life choices. It was pathetic, no different than Tiffany running to the dork, who was a wimp, a loser, a nobody.
“Yes,” Josué said. He didn’t understand all that Greg had said, as he’d spoken quickly. Josué watched the boy talk with great passion on the subject of women and nodded in sympathy. It seemed he had been hurt by Erika and still he felt this. All Josué’s aunts were very smart about relationships, so much that their boyfriends, which changed like the seasons, never dared to argue with them. Josué believed women always knew more than men on the subject of love, more than he or Greg would understand. Women would do always what was best, and sometimes that was you and sometimes that was a short, pale pendejo with an overbite. There was no point in crying over it, as if shaking one’s fist
at the rain. What could bring happiness always? This came from a place inside. He’d been told so by his religious aunt who had more cats that followed her around than lovers. Josué didn’t know where inside exactly and understood that trying to describe it now would not help Greg.
“It’s not easy,” Josué continued in sympathy.
“Did you want her real bad, too?”
“Tiffany?”
“No.”
Josué recalled Erika’s laugh in English class. It sputtered when she held joy inside for too long. That sound was hers and had made him happy. That was gone.
“Yes,” he said. “Bad.”
“Same, man. And now …”
“It is not right. It’s sad.”
“Would you kill for her?”
“Sí,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“In defense? Oh, yes.”
Greg could laugh—how insane these kids were, with their quick and thoughtless superhero talk and phony detective crap. Were they using their heads? They would all die out there. Greg didn’t laugh, though. He listened. He really tried to hear J., as the kid somberly listed all he’d loved about Erika, all that was good and unique to her, his mouth a determined line daring the world to say otherwise. They shared the same hurt. The only difference was that Greg wanted to exorcise the pain of wanting Erika from his heart by hating her. He wanted nothing more to do with her or the woods. J. and the others could throw away their lives on the dead girl; he was going to despise and bury and forget. He was going to live. A guy couldn’t always do the right thing to survive, and Greg couldn’t see any other game plan to beat his misery for the good life he deserved.
“I want to hurt somebody,” Greg said aloud. The kids around the campfire looked up immediately. The flames roared at the hearty logs in the pit. Greg wished no one had heard his blurt, his accident, though it felt as if he’d never said a truer thing his life.
“Me, too, amigo,” Josué said, more to the group than Greg.
“Fucker hasn’t taken everything from us.” Tiffany pointed at the image that remained on the Big Tree, the portion that Doug had painted, Erika’s pink flats breaking beyond the dome of stars into the heavens.
“Not yet,” Alex said.
“Right,” Tiffany said.
•
“We’re all at risk of becoming a victim,” E. said. “Everybody who visits this place is at risk while that monster—while evil is out there. So … we can fight back.” The group could hear E. deciding her life was worth the endeavor. The comment remained a choice for the rest of them. She wasn’t leading the group to battle or asking for their help.
Supporting John through chemotherapy that afternoon had finished the transformation of E.’s life study. She’d biked him home as she’d done all week, the boy perched on the handlebars not drunkenly smiling today, but sunken in his too-heavy coat like a sick bird shunning the morning glare of the white sun over the streets of Palos Hills. In his driveway, he’d touched her tensed forearm and asked if she had time to accompany him to the hospital and “know him outside of the woods.” She told herself to quit imagining that his affections were warming on her and said, “Please.” He’d been there when she’d needed him and wouldn’t again let a cry for help go unanswered. “I’m here however you need me,” she said with a little embarrassment, trying on the words of a caretaker, visited by a purer sentiment akin to what John had once said about love being bigger than the word. “I knew I could count on you,” he’d said, then warned it wouldn’t be easy.
John’s mother had her purse over her shoulder and keys jingling in hand when they shuffled into the house. The kids were disheveled and dirty and stank of woodsmoke. Beside a trophy case in the foyer, they waited for her to comment. The shelves were full of propped plaques and medals and wide-mouthed cups alongside photographs of the boy in action or posed, grinning with a bat over his shoulder on sunny days or shaking hands with adults in suits. His accomplishments were furred with dust.
“You’ve about made us late,” the woman said, the blame in the “you’ve” part directed at E. The look of the young girl made his mother’s mouth dry up—a weakling child, bookish, redheaded, and those black clothes, poorly fit to hide an awfully full chest for someone her age—not the quality of person she’d pictured being the first flower her son brought home. “Johnny, sweetheart, I’m happy you’re getting out of the house. But this Boy Scouting—you need your rest if you’re going to beat—”
“Mom,” John unzipped his coat as he passed, “E’s my friend and she’s coming with.”
E. trailed him into the kitchen.
His mother stopped in the doorway and looked in at her patronizingly, as if the girl had misunderstood the nature of the appointment as anything that might resemble a date. “Dear, you don’t want to go to a hospital.”
“If you want me to continue—” John took two gulps of orange juice from the container while clutching the refrigerator door handle as if he’d otherwise collapse “—she’s coming.”
John’s mother didn’t challenge him.
It was terrible to watch the nurses work. They put two wide-mouthed needles into the boy’s arms, clicked a gray button on a machine, and pumped a brackish liquid inside him. His hands made boney fists as his veins burned without the aid of painkillers. He needed to keep his mind clear, he’d insisted.
“Why are you being so difficult about this?” his mother said. After ten minutes of reproach, she left for the waiting room. Not before glaring, heavy-lidded, at E., distaste showing in the lower whites of her eyes. E. sat bedside with the boy. The blanket slid down his legs and his chair creaked as he writhed side to side.
“You’re very brave,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“You’ve risked so much for my sister when you’re …”
“I won’t live.”
“Don’t say that.” E. was quiet for a while, unable to think of one good reason why he shouldn’t. His calves and biceps were thin belts strapped to his bones, and his skin was see-through. Ornate webs of blue veins decorated his temples and chest. He could go at any time. “If someone had told me two weeks ago I would be here today, I’d never have believed it,” E. said. “Or how proud I’d be. You brought us together, got us to care. That’s an amazing gift.”
“I try because I’m scared,” John said.
“To me that’s enough.”
“I want this to mean something.”
He gritted his teeth against the burning.
“It does to me,” she said.
“What?”
But after half a bag of treatment, he couldn’t stand the pain. John asked for E.’s hand as a tall nurse stuck him with a morphine drip that vaulted his mind out of the room. “I don’t … Don’t …” His head tipped back, grip loosened. E. watched him float in silence for an hour. The boy was still beautiful. She studied the patterns in his vein-threaded forearms; the dimple in his chin, yet hairless; his wide, cracked lips; his fine eyelashes and their brush-like tips—the marvelous minutiae behind the force of John’s charisma. He was more than that, too. E. closed her eyes, still tethered to him, his hand laid in hers, lukewarm and light as a nesting bird, and she listened to him breathe, to the cord of life being pulled in him, threatening to break, soundlessly, irreparably. Until she heard him, what he was saying by bringing her here.
“I’m fighting,” E. said to her friends around the fire. She smiled as if having shed a great burden.
“No,” Doug said.
E. met his disapproving glare and her buoyancy did not falter.
“The killer, he’ll put one of us … there, in the fire … You next maybe.”
“I know what the monster is capable of, Dougy.” E. spoke past him, to the group. “We all do. No one should stay here for my sake. I’m not saying that. If something did happen … I couldn’t take another loss like that. Serious things have happened here. You’re right. He’ll kill again if we let him. I can’t let that contin
ue. I couldn’t live with that, either.”
“Then let’s get help,” Doug pleaded. “Tell them … the police—everything. They’ll catch him for us—arrest him … lock the killer up.” Doug checked John’s reaction to his plan, still unconvinced that he hadn’t somehow been the figure in the cloak and Erika’s killer. The guy was a mere outline beside the Big Tree.
“The genius is right,” Greg said. “Isn’t he?”
“Obviously,” Doug said.
“Nope.” Tiffany prodded the logs, which shot up an arching flare of sparks. She threw her poker into the darkness and looked at the group meanly. “I’m not afraid of some little shit dressed in a cloak. And I hate cops. We’ve done a better job than them, anyway, in getting close to this guy. Haven’t we?”
“Correct,” Alex said.
“But the risk … dying,” Doug said. “The police can do the rest.”
“This decision, we all need to make,” Josué said, “together.”
“Also correct,” Alex said.
“So which?” Josué said. “The cops? Or we fight?”
The kids each knew what path they wanted. They stared into the flames, waiting for someone braver to voice it. On both sides, there was doubt. They hoped an argument would be made to dissolve their fear, even if it wasn’t the safer option, or to convince them otherwise.
“Fear,” John said, “or freedom.”
The boy looked over his shoulder at the group. One of his hands gripped the stony trunk. In the flickering light, it appeared to quiver under his touch like a living thing. His words didn’t move their hearts to action. Indecision showed plain in their folded arms and downcast eyes.
John disappeared behind the tree.
•
“The guy … he’s not right … in the head.” Doug whispered to the group.
Into that Good Night Page 17