by Julia Derek
I went into the Mexican joint about a minute after he’d disappeared inside. By then I thought he’d gotten a table or a place in the bar, deciding to stay there. Sometimes, people changed their mind about a place and came back out. The last thing I wanted was to bump into my son as he was on his way out.
When I’d entered the dark, loud bar, it had taken me several seconds to spot him among all the people there, making me worry that maybe he’d left through another exit. But then I saw him at a table in the back, talking to a waitress.
I sat down on a barstool, ordered a beer, and got ready for a great show.
25
I hate Ariel almost as much as I hate Shane. I can only thank my lucky stars that I’m such a good actress and am able to hide my true feelings. The evening I met Ariel, which was a little more than four years ago now, I was in a trendy bar down in Tribeca, drowning my sorrows in a dirty martini. Well, in several of those; one was not nearly enough to dull the pain inside me. All of a sudden, the movie company that had optioned my screenplay had decided to pull the plug on the movie. It’s not a good time for such a dark subject matter, Larry Levy, the executive producer, had explained to me over the phone. But things change. Maybe we’ll pick it up in the future. I’m sorry. Shortly after that he’d hung up the phone. The decision had come out of nowhere and there was nothing I could do about it until the option expired or they came to their senses. I wasn’t about to return the million bucks they had given me; I had already spent a good chunk of it. By the time Ariel approached me in the bar, I think I was on my fourth dirty martini, I was so upset.
I’m the kind of person who can get away with being very drunk. People are rarely able to tell just how shitfaced I am. I have used this fact to my advantage on many occasions.
I also rarely suffer from blackouts during my drinking bouts. I have an excellent memory. That is another advantage, as that means I’ll never forget if someone screws me over. I never ever forget and I certainly don’t forgive. It is a great quality to possess. Think about it. No one will ever be able to do something to me and get away with it. I always make sure people pay for fucking with me, and that they pay dearly. I’ll wait forever till I’ll get my chance. I know I’ll get it eventually, and I’m not one to be careless. This approach is how I have managed to stay incognito for all these years. And I’m planning on keeping it up in the future as well. Trust me, I’ll get to that executive producer eventually. He’ll regret pulling the plug on the movie then.
Only amateurs get caught. And I’m no amateur.
The first person who screwed me over was a girl in kindergarten. Her name was Kate. Kate spilled soda on a picture I was drawing, completely destroying it. She claimed it was an accident, but I knew better. She had done it on purpose. Not that I let on to anyone that this was how I truly felt. I pretended I believed her stupid story, and I told her and everyone else that I forgave her. That was how, three years later, I was able to feed her peanuts and hide her epinephrine auto injector. Her peanut allergy soon got the best of her and no one suspected for a second that I’d had anything to do with Kate choking to death. It was an amazing feeling, being able to trick everyone.
A small part of me had been annoyed by the fact that I had to keep quiet about my deed, though. I wanted other people to know about it, know that you didn’t screw with Jennifer Hanson. I had dealt with my frustration by writing about it in my big blue journal instead. I dramatized it so it seemed like a story. A very short story.
I’ve kept a diary of sorts since my brother started to sexually abuse me at age seven. Okay, maybe I began about a year or so after he came to see me at night. It took me a while to get up my writing chops to make much sense. I drew dark pictures in the meantime. Not that anyone thought much about them. My life might have turned out differently if someone had taken more of an interest in me and my pictures.
My older brother Jack had free reign over me. Not only was he six years older and much, much stronger than me, but I spent a lot of time alone with him when he was babysitting me. To this day, I don’t think my parents have any idea what he did to me. But I took care of him. My boyfriend at the time beat him to death for me several years later. I was the one who set up the bar brawl, so I consider myself responsible for his death. My boyfriend was merely the tool I used to make it happen.
Jack became the first male killing in my journal. Before him, there were only girls. Four girls. The first girl I entered was Kate. She earned a combined score of seven. I used three different categories to score my revenges, all of them receiving a number between one and ten. The first category is how good it made me feel, the second how difficult it was to complete, and third, how creative it was.
See, I like to come up with unique ways to get revenge on people, and they don’t necessarily have to involve immediate death. Sometimes, making someone suffer a long, long time before they die is more rewarding. Like, for example, what I’m doing with my son Shane. It was a lot more rewarding to make everyone believe that he is a psychopath and responsible for murders I’ve committed. As you can imagine, what I put Shane through deserves almost a ten in all three categories. You have to admit, it was pretty damn clever! If only I had managed to get him to stay behind bars till he died, it would have been a full ten, but, as you know, the little bastard got out. Oh well. I’ll soon get him back where he deserves to be.
Back to Ariel. He couldn’t have shown up at a better time. Had he come up to me even a day before, I would have just blown him off. But now that my movie wasn’t going to be made and there was nothing I could do about it for another four years unless I paid the movie company back, I had to come up with another plan. There was no way in hell that I was going back to my old life, editing bad novels for Lovestruck, which was my old job. The money my husband Peter had left me was almost gone, and soon the million I had gotten for the movie would be, too. I needed another source of income if I wanted to keep living my new, luxurious life.
Ariel was the perfect person to make that happen, as rich as he was.
It had taken me a few seconds to make out who the short, old, ugly man bothering me was. But when I had, my spirits lifted considerably. Yes, he was an unattractive man, but he was also filthy rich. I had recently read a piece about him in The New York Times in which his rags to riches story had been featured. He had come to the United States with very little and had managed to turn his life around, becoming nearly as rich as Donald Trump, an even more successful real estate mogul. The best part had been that, apparently, Ariel was interested in me.
When this fact filtered through my alcohol-ridden haze, I put on my best smile and from that day onward, Ariel and I were a couple.
The only good part about Shane being released from jail so quickly is the fact that I will use him as the fall guy for Ariel’s death. It would be much too obvious if he died otherwise, the little Israeli. With the exception of his heart, he was healthy as a horse despite his rather advanced age. His latest physical hadn’t found anything wrong with him and our doctor thought it was a good chance that Ariel could live to be a hundred. That is, as long as he could avoid stressing his weak heart. He did have an unusually weak heart, but since he was aware of it, he always took precautions not to bother it, so it wasn’t that big a deal really.
Well, I sure hadn’t counted on having to spend another twenty-five years having to give this cheap, fat prick a blowjob most nights. See, the man wasn’t so stupid that he’d married me without an ironclad prenup. If I left him or he decided to divorce me, I would get practically nothing.
The only way I’d get my hands on all his money was if he died. And that was something Shane would help make happen.
26
My son is in severe need of psychological treatment. In fact, he’d likely benefit from spending a few days at a good psych ward. This dawned on me the day I visited his apartment in Astoria to plant some evidence that would tie him to Ariel’s soon-to-happen murder. (I never got a chance to plant anything, unfortu
nately. Shane returned home sooner than I had anticipated.) I discovered then that he was experiencing visual as well as auditory hallucinations. That was the only explanation for the incident with the imaginary person he was talking to out in his stairwell. He was clearly convinced of the fact that a girl, a good-looking girl in his mind, was standing outside his door, near the top of the stairs.
At first, I had been dumbfounded by his strange behavior, but it didn’t take long before I understood. I understood what was going on thanks to my years of studying psychology. When I was working on getting my revenge on Shane, I took my Master’s in psychology. I wanted to seem super sincere about wanting to help my son develop into a functional, good person. Cure his supposed psychopathic tendencies. I’m anything but not thorough. I’ve come to find that all that studying in the field of psychology was one of the best things I ever did in my life. All that knowledge I stuffed my head full with came handy once Shane was imprisoned. I was able to pick up on signs that he was getting increasingly paranoid even though he tried hard not to reveal this to me. The kid may be a little shit who should never have been born, but he’s no idiot. He has finally learned that it’s wiser to share as little as possible about himself with me.
Toward the end of his stay at Ramsdale, he became so paranoid he couldn’t look me in the eye for more than a few seconds before his gaze began to flicker. I could tell what he really wanted to do was turn his head and verify that no one was coming up behind him to do something to him. The smallest sound made him jump. I could tell he barely slept because he was forgetful, clumsy, more depressed than usual, and he could hardly focus. He looked remarkably well for someone who didn’t sleep much, though, fresh-faced and clear-eyed. Ah, the benefits of youth!
I was surprised that the counselor he was working with didn’t seem to have picked up on his paranoia and poor sleep. Clearly, that person was not very good at his or her job. Or maybe the counselor just didn’t care.
Whatever the reason, I was pleased with Shane’s developments. I wanted him to be a wreck when he got out on parole. And he was. He didn’t even bother to hide his ticks during the car ride to his new home in Astoria. His eyes kept flickering and he drummed his fingers impatiently against his knee. He struggled not to yawn. He was jumpier than ever.
I had no doubt he would stay this way now that he was out. Knowing me, he had reason to remain truly paranoid at all hours; I was mad that he had gotten out so soon, even though I pretended to have forgiven him. He wouldn’t be able to relax any time soon.
What I hadn’t counted on was that his sleep deprivation and paranoia would lead to him developing hallucinations. But, hey, now that I could see that it had, I was going to make the most of it. It was like I had been given a well deserved bonus out of nowhere. My first step had been to turn Ariel against Shane. Well, technically, it was the second step in my plan; the first had been to make Ariel develop a fondness for Shane, which had worked out marvelously. As a matter of fact, it had worked almost too well, them getting a little too close for comfort and it all happening a touch too fast for my liking. But then I had been able to rectify that when my friend Beth all of a sudden canceled on me one evening. Come to think of it, I should thank her for doing so. Send her a nice gift.
If it hadn’t been for Beth, I don’t think I would have been prompted to begin stalking Shane myself, and doing so has been a game changer. I would have kept using hired stalkers for who knew how much longer. These people are either acquaintances from when Peter and I were actively killing people together, or they are suckers I have managed to convince my son needs to be watched for his own good. I told them I worried about him doing things that could get him in trouble. Those people are truly naïve with too much time on their hands. I pay them very little for their efforts.
Anyway, at first I assumed that Shane was using Bluetooth on his cell phone as he left his apartment building that night. It didn’t take long, however, before I began to suspect that he was talking to his imaginary friend Sophie instead. Or some other imaginary friend. I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
When I spotted him at the table deep inside Papi’s leaning forward, talking to someone who supposedly sat across from him, I was 100 % certain he was once again hallucinating. And I wasn’t the only one who thought it was fascinating to watch him drink all those margaritas while he kept talking and eating. The waitress and a couple of her coworkers were witnessing that happening as well. I was impressed by how well the waitress kept it together while serving Shane. I don’t think she let on even once how crazy he was behaving.
Given the fact that she didn’t bother to card him, I don’t think she kept it together so well because she was such a professional. No, it was more likely she was entertained by his freaky behavior and wanted to see what he was going to do next. I sure was.
The next day I called Otto and told him it had been brought to my knowledge that Shane had been seen at a bar in the area, drinking margaritas with a friend. I thought he should know what was going on so he could make good decisions about my son’s future.
I was only taking a chance that Shane had been out with Sophie in his head that night. I never heard what he was saying, so it could have been another imaginary person. But when I had asked him how Sophie was doing, his reaction had told me everything I needed to know and more. Something was going on with Sophie and he was convinced I had something to do with it.
When he claimed I knew why he hadn’t seen her lately, the fury making his eyes bulge, I just kept going with it. Pushing him, prodding his delusions until he couldn’t keep it together any longer and not only accused me of having killed Sophie, but also throttled me.
The evening couldn’t have ended on a more expedient note. Shane’s crazed attack on me was all Ariel had needed to flip back to his old views, the ones that didn’t trust Shane, feared that he was a dangerous creature. Too bad for Ariel that he’s gotten it backwards.
I’m the one he should fear, lol.
27
“You’ll be telling his parole officer about his behavior, no?” Ariel asked me as we had breakfast the following morning. Neera was still sleeping after having stayed up later than normal the night before, so this was the first time my husband and I got the chance to discuss Shane’s outburst and what to do about it. Anger issues or not, he was still my son.
I broke off a piece of the croissant on my plate. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, dear. He didn’t mean much with it. He has a flair for drama. He gets that from my mother. She overreacts and jumps to conclusions all the time, as you very well know.”
He glanced at me over his cup of coffee that he had been about to bring to his mouth. “I do know that your mother is a drama queen, yes. But I think this is not the same. Your mother never accused you of killing another person.”
“No, that she never did,” I agreed and stuck the flaky piece of bread into my mouth.
“That’s why you have to tell the parole officer and let him decide what to do with Shane. If Shane should go back to jail.”
It was important that Ariel didn’t start mouthing off to people, specifically not to Otto, about what Shane had done. Combined with him getting drunk at Papi’s, the outburst was likely to send him back to jail. I couldn’t have that happen yet. Not before Ariel was dead. So I said, “Ariel, please don’t be so hard on Shane. He’s not doing well mentally right now. That’s why he lashed out at me like that. Remember, I’m a licensed psychologist. He didn’t mean what he said. See, this Sophie person is just a figment of his imagination.”
Ariel glanced at me uncomprehendingly. “A figment of his imagination?”
“Yes. She’s not real. Shane’s experiencing hallucinations. I did follow him the night I was out with Beth. Well, Beth canceled when I was already out, so I decided to go pay Shane a surprise visit. I got lots of things confirmed that I had suspected, one of them being the fact that his friend Sophie exists only in his mind.”
“Huh… And why does he say t
hat you killed her?”
I shook my head wearily and sighed. “I don’t know. He harbors a lot of anger toward me for him ending up in juvenile detention. Losing the bulk of his teen years.”
Ariel huffed and slammed down his coffee cup on the table. “Why would he be angry with you for going to jail? The boy killed people! He should be happy he’s not still there!”
“I know, Ariel. I know. But children don’t always think rationally. Remember, he was only 13 when he was on trial. He thought I should have done a better job protecting him. Part of me agrees with him.”
Ariel tsk-tsked and reached for a cracker on a plate. “Unbelievable.”
“It is and it isn’t. I understand why you feel that way. But I also understand him. He’s my son. I know him so well. So I understand what happened yesterday. After I have spoken to him, he will understand what’s going on, that he needs to pull himself together. But right now, he needs a few days on his own. Let all the anger diffuse. He’ll calm down and be ashamed for accusing me of something so callous. For laying hands on me. Deep in his heart, he knows I could never kill anyone. If we’re lucky, Sophie will make another appearance, and then he’ll see with his own eyes what the truth is. He’ll see I had nothing to do with her missing.”
“But what if… what if Sophie tells him you did something to her and wants him to punish you?” Ariel looked like he believed this was very much a possibility. He was making a good point actually. That was a plausible scenario and I should prepare for it.
I didn’t want to rattle Ariel, however, so I said reassuringly, “I highly doubt she’ll do that. His mental issues aren’t such that he would ever imagine that. Right now, he’s deeply ashamed of what he’s accused me of and, frankly, if Sophie does make another appearance, it’ll be to tell him what a bad person he was for accusing me of such awful things. Hallucinations are all about projection, Ariel. Trust me, I know my son. He’s feeling horrible right now. He won’t try to do anything bad to me.”