Little Threats

by Emily Schultz

  Kennedy had gone out a foot onto the patio and now she stepped backward into the kitchen. She couldn’t tell if he’d come there to seduce her or to hurt her, and she realized that may have always been the flickering doubt in Berk’s eyes. Even now, he wasn’t adult enough to consider she may have had a sexual life in the last fifteen years.

  At the time he’d said he didn’t want her lawyer father to get some lawyer friend to go after him on account of her age. Instead, they would slow-dance in his room. A teasing kiss. Even a make-out. His fingers trailing lightly over her breasts, her thighs. But never sex. Kennedy had almost decided to but had not quite become convinced. He said he wanted to experience love like Buddha said: “Love is a gift of one’s soul so both can be whole.” His persona was equal parts Charlie Starkweather and Allen Ginsberg, in spite of his pampered upbringing. Berk had attended Virginia Commonwealth University but spent most of his time in bars instead of classes. He and Julian had dropped acid every weekend, shared their pot with anyone with budding breasts. Julian wasn’t as handsome, but he was tall and lean, with hair he wore in a long ponytail. She’d learned later that the apartment had been nicknamed Unplanned Parenthood by girls on campus. Carter had always said that all he wanted was to use her, and Kennedy had resisted that definition of the relationship. Use, what did it mean to use someone?

  Berk stepped toward Kennedy. “Like it or not, we’re in this together,” he said, his hand going for her shoulder.

  Kennedy flinched. She experienced a flicker of red, felt her veins throb, recalled the water around her ankles that morning in the woods when she touched her friend’s slippery, cold skin. “Little threats. That’s what it always was with you. If you’re going to make a threat, make it a big one.”

  His eyes narrowed under his brow. It was the same Berk she had seen in the car the night of the acid trip. Ballistic Berk. His face warped. Kennedy felt light-headed. She felt the steak knife fall into her hand and held it where he could see it under the patio lantern.

  “They say you know how to use that,” he said as he stepped toward her. His voice had a rough edge and the put-on indifference of his earlier gestures was gone.

  She swung the blade fast in front of his eyes, without touching him. “Stay away from me.”

  * * *

  —

  After he’d gone, muttering, “Whatever, Dead Kennedy,” and backing slowly into the dark, Kennedy returned to Gerry’s home office. The adrenaline buckled her and she sank into the office chair. She opened Gerry’s laptop.

  She had never seen Facebook but knew you were supposed to be able to find people on it. She knew she would need an email address, and although Gerry’s was right there in front of her, with no password on it, she wasn’t about to use his. She sat there staring at the glowing screen. She was still shaking with anger though, and wasn’t about to let her inexperience with this new medium stump her.

  After a few minutes she managed to create a Yahoo! address for herself and opened a Facebook account without uploading any profile photo or revealing information, just her name. She searched Berkeley Butler. Because she had no friends yet, the search box didn’t know which Berkeley Butler to reveal to her and half a dozen appeared. She scrolled through the tiny postage-stamp pictures. Her father’s laptop was slick and weird, and she couldn’t seem to make her finger move the way it was supposed to on the rectangular pad. Her vocational training in prison had been with a mouse and an ancient IBM clone. She fumbled the cursor again and again and clicked without meaning to. He was the last Berkeley: it had to be him. There was a photo of a preschool girl in the profile picture. He was married, worked at one of the grocery stores his family owned.

  He had come to the house at nine at night. After bedtime. Early enough to still get out, make some excuse of an errand, late enough that the child had been read her bedtime stories. Staring at the little girl’s blond bob cut into Kennedy’s heart. It was worse, knowing he’d come there to say those things to her when there were people at home waiting on him. It was too easy to imagine him coming after her, on top of her. She knew how fast he could move once. She knew the weight of his body even if he’d never been inside her. Kennedy clicked Log Out.

  He’d never loved her, she realized. Something about seeing that he had built a life, made a commitment, put the word married right there in print on his profile—along with the things he’d said, his cold tone just half an hour before—solidified that understanding for her. As a teenager she would have gone anywhere with him, made her life about him, with him, but it was a blind love. Carter had tried to tell her at the time, but she hadn’t listened. The appellate attorney had also said it. Berk had treated her as a stepping-stone to get to the next girl; the prettier girl; the less guarded, less careful one. All of the above. Haley. Kennedy turned in the swivel chair, looking around Gerry’s office for the box of Kleenex that Laine had always stationed in every room. But the maid service didn’t seem to make tissues as much of a priority, and as Kennedy sobbed, she found her sleeve would have to do.

  She took a shaky breath before she picked up the phone and called Carter. She didn’t say hello. “If I go to a website, is that part of the computer forever?”

  She wanted to tell her about Berk, but something in Carter’s brittle voice as she explained to Kennedy how to erase her history told her there was a part of their own past that needed to be erased. Already Carter didn’t trust her, and now, when she was just barely out, Berk was back in their lives again.

  In the morning, when Kennedy went out onto the stone patio, she saw the necklace was still there on the table. Berk had used Haley and she hated the way he was still using her. She picked the pendant up and turned it over between her fingers. It was cold and dewy. Kennedy was sure he had held on to it all those years to hurt her one more time.

  Chapter 11

  As Everett pulled up the long gravel path to his father’s house, he saw he was dyeing his hair deep black too, like Judy’s. Ted Kimberson now looked like a politician campaigning—country style—as he waved, standing inside the barn door in his fleece vest with a thumb hooked into new jeans.

  The barn wasn’t a barn. It was more like a private hangar, larger than the actual house on the property in the middle of the Cumberland Woods. Everett had invited himself out that weekend under the pretext of pulling out that tree stump whose roots were still growing into the weeping tile. The last two times he had come out to do that, he and his father had ended up sitting on lawn chairs inside the barn, Everett drinking beer, his father Diet Cokes, until it was late and the mosquitoes came for them and Judy said it was dinnertime in that voice.

  Everett was on his second Coors and the tree stump still secure in the ground when he said, “Kennedy Wynn got released.”

  “You know the state sent me that letter too.” His father shrugged.

  “Still got those boxes from the lawsuit?” Everett had already scanned the shelves in the barn, looking for that stack of banker’s boxes propped up next to the duck and swan decoys.

  “I’m not your mother,” his father answered without missing the opportunity for a dig.

  “Be nice, now.”

  “I’m not the one who made an altar to pain, if you know what I mean.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I mean that woman can go anywhere in the world and she still lives practically next door to Wynn. What’s she waiting for? A sequel? I think about Haley every goddamn day, but not the way Marly does.”

  Dee Nash had asked Everett if he had any access to documents from the civil lawsuit. It might be a way of getting at police files: there’s always crossover, she said, and things that shouldn’t be in civilian hands but often are. When she asked him to look he realized he wanted to see the reports too, for the same reason he needed to see Carter.

  “What do you want ’em for anyway?” his father asked.

  “I don’t know. I never
knew Haley.”

  “Funny way to learn.” Ted ran his hands over his jean knees, as if smoothing something away.

  * * *

  —

  The last time Everett had seen his sister was the funeral, held only four days after Haley was found, autopsied, and released to her parents with a shakily drawn signature. That week was a twilight between truths for Everett: after his mother’s screaming, but before Kennedy and Berk Butler were arrested. Strangers began collecting funeral money, and that soon grew into donated flower displays and funeral homes competing for the booking. The bank wouldn’t give the Kimbersons a credit card before Haley’s murder, but after they set up a scholarship fund in her name. The day of the service, crowds gathered outside the church, and seats were strictly assigned to family and Haley’s fellow students, though that didn’t stop rubberneckers from trying to get in. Kennedy and Carter did not attend, so they never saw Haley as Everett did, snug in a compact magenta casket—her favorite color. Her face was painted and sculpted unnaturally; she looked to Everett like a doll that might be sold on TV and noted for its heirloom quality. Whatever Haley had been—a girl with eyes that trusted everyone, a sister who still read to him as her Pantene-scented hair brushed his face—was gone.

  After Aunt Kathy walked Everett back to his seat, a detective set a strong hand on his shoulder. “Let us all know if anyone acts funny, Deputy Everett,” he leaned over and told the nine-year-old. “That goes for strangers or even someone you know real well, like your daddy.”

  Everett had been at home with Marly on July 5, already bored of the summer, when that same detective had shown up and asked her when was the last time she had seen her daughter, not telling them what was wrong. He asked where Ted had been the night before and Everett overheard his mother say some woman’s name. When the subject came up a couple of years later and Everett asked where he was that night, Marly said he was with his “alibabe” and left it at that. Everett figured that was why his father could move on past Haley’s death. Even when he was part of their family, he wasn’t. When Ted got sober he apologized to his son and said that his cheating was compulsive. “Hell, I don’t even remember half of them, I was so soused.” Everett accepted the apology but remembered thinking, Best of luck, Judy.

  * * *

  —

  Now Everett sipped his beer to empty and saw that his father was crying. He felt bad for the times he hadn’t trusted him, just like that detective.

  “You’ve been hanging around Marly too much.” Ted sniffled. “Why don’t you move out here? I can get you in at the shop. A job would be good for you.”

  Everett couldn’t tell him he needed to stay in the city, near Carter. Before he could think of a way to avoid the question they heard the sound coming in long and sharp from the house: “Teddy!”

  His father shrugged and tossed his empty soda can into a blue bin. “Time to face the judge. Set me up another one of those Cokes for when I get back.”

  After Ted let the barn door shut, Everett sprang out of his lawn chair so fast it fell over. He righted it and walked around the dark corners of the barn, looking for the boxes. He lifted a dusty bundle of camouflage netting and found one: water stained and heavy. He didn’t see the others and didn’t think he’d have time to get more than one without Ted knowing.

  Everett hauled the box outside the barn and into his car. He grabbed his jacket out of the back so that if his father heard the car trunk, he’d just assume Everett had gotten cold. But his father didn’t come back right away, and Everett sat again in the barn waiting, feeling like he should make it easy on his father and leave. Let him get on with a life that made no room for ghosts.

  Chapter 12

  Every morning, as week two slid into week three, Kennedy exited the house and walked toward the Macaulay estate at the end of the curve. She knew it was a mile from their house to the end of Silver Creek Lane because her mother and father used to walk it together to stay in shape. Her father’s firm had often taken work from Macaulay. Their offices were near each other’s. Here was the Hall house, there the Schofields and the Wilsons. Mrs. Wilson’s claim to fame was that she owned a dress that had been worn by Lady Di. The Johnsons were supposedly descended from some Confederate general, and Kennedy wouldn’t doubt it. The Cains were the only black family in Blueheart Woods, though the mom was white with blond hair. Kennedy’s walk turned into a jog. One crescent over, around Stonemeadow, and soon she’d gone two full miles. She felt fiery with exhilaration.

  She watched her shoes—a pair of puffy white Nikes she’d worn when she was competing in tennis back in 1991—the shape they made in front of her. I’m not the monster everyone thinks I am. I’m a human, she told herself. I can change, and heal. I still have this crazily beating heart at my center. Those are my feet, my legs. This is my body going forward. I’m just going to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  Having her twin doubt her made it hard to believe it.

  A For Sale sign swung in front of the Farrells’. She had no idea how many of these families remained anyway. The Farrells had a daughter three years younger than her and Carter, whom they’d liked to pick on. The Chamberses had a son four years older they’d both coveted—Daniel, who wore his shirts inside out so the brand wouldn’t show, even though everyone knew his clothes were expensive. For god’s sake, he drove a Lexus. Still, she’d thought it was sexy at the time, his taking a stand against consumerism. Things his mother wanted him to be pressed against his chest all day long: backward, inside out. His father wanted him to join the family business, but instead he worked summers at the employment office and helped students get jobs.

  When she was sixteen and he twenty—before Laine had landed her the job at the stationery store—he’d shown her how to fill out the forms to apply for part-time work. She’d hoped he knew how to get work in the city: a music store, a record store, Guitar Center, the Byrd Theatre, MAC Cosmetics. But being able to stare at him across the desk and list her accomplishments was good enough. She got calls back from the nearby hotel and a lawn care service, nothing remotely interesting or cool, and she wondered how she’d presented herself, to both Daniel and future employers.

  She’d fantasized about Daniel Chambers at least two dozen times in the decade since then. She could fall into his dark hair, his dark eyes. Where was he now? How stupid, fantasizing about a boy when she was now a woman. It was stupider even than thinking of a film star or celebrity. Maybe she had done it to avoid the image of Berk Butler. It was Daniel who’d introduced her to Berk and Julian one night when her band played in the city. A long, narrow café/bar called End of the Trip. Carter said it was a cell phone store now. At the time they’d been stoner college guys who knew every new indie band. Even in her mind, the name Berk Butler felt like the first few strums on her guitar, an exhilarated hum she’d never gotten past.

  She and Carter had sung three or four times in the bar. She’d told Carter that they would be like the Deal sisters—Kim Deal, who was in the Pixies and later the Breeders, and her twin, Kelley. The band was Kennedy on guitar, Carter on bass, and a paralegal named Kevin from their dad’s office who still wanted to play drums even though he had a wife and baby. His old band had opened up for the Replacements in ’88 at the University of Virginia. The other member was a nineteen-year-old guy, Robin, from their church. He played keyboards, and the twins couldn’t tell if he was gay or just Christian. They hoped gay because that might make the band cooler. Both guys in the band tucked their shirts into pleated pants and favored folky stuff and pop covers. Kennedy had to convince them to let her do the Pixies’ “Wave of Mutilation.” Carter had wanted to call the group the Ophelias, and Kennedy had suggested Head Like a Hole. The drummer said they couldn’t have a folk-industrial band and should just call themselves A Bloody Mess, which was pretty accurate in terms of how they played. It stuck for a few gigs—as long as they lasted.

  Daniel had been friends with
Berk, but later he’d told her not to be stupid about him. She could remember exactly what he’d said, there in his driveway when she’d asked for Berk’s number a couple days after meeting him: “No, don’t. Guys like that . . .” He’d shaken his head. She got the picture, but she also got the number. Not from Daniel. It was in the directory. She wondered now if all of it had been her way of trying to get her neighbor’s attention in the first place. But that wasn’t true. In retrospect, he was the first person to try to look out for her. And she’d gone and sexualized his nobility over the years. He’d been completely right about Berk.

  At the bar the first night she and Carter played, Berk had ticked a finger back and forth between them and asked, “Y’all want a beer?” nodding at the bartender. Kennedy and Carter had looked at each other and laughed. Carter then held up her wristband and Daniel explained they were still in high school. Robin, the keyboard player, had already loaded his Korg into his dad’s van and left.

  “We’re almost seventeen,” Kennedy had put in, a slight exaggeration, leaning one elbow on the bar, as though she belonged there. We. The questions and answers always with the pronoun we. We go to Liberty High. We learned to play when we were twelve. We live in Blueheart Woods. It totally sucks. We might take a beer, if we weren’t here. Do you know somewhere we can go?

  “Cute,” Berk said as the night went on, clucking into his beer bottle, his cheeks pinkening as he drank more. He threw his floppy golden hair back with a flick of his head. “I can just imagine you skipping through your little suburb holding hands.”

  Now she felt her face burn thinking about what Berk had said to her in the backyard. How presumptuous of him to come there. How predatory. He had been charming once, but he never had been fair. He’d always told her to bring Carter with her to his place. But Carter had never liked him, so she’d taken Haley instead. She’d put Haley’s necklace in between two sweaters in her dresser drawer, like it was something that needed to be hidden.