Little Threats

by Emily Schultz

  The game went to commercial and Berk muted the volume. “Lions are playing like a bunch of ballerinas,” he said, sipping his beer. The Lions weren’t his team and it was more an attempt at small talk with his father than an expression of genuine despair. His father, Oz Butler, sat across from him in a matching recliner and said nothing in return, only nodded.

  Oswald Butler had been a local celebrity in the years before Berk was arrested. Oz appeared in commercials for his own stores: a voluble figure describing weekly specials on honey hams and pecan pies, even enacting sketches where he was being committed or arrested for his crazy prices. Berk’s arrest changed Oz, brought on the gravity of old age decades before it should have, and the commercials stopped. Berk remembered his father picking him up at the courthouse with three lawyers, one of them a former commonwealth attorney, and the swell of WASP hope making him burst into tears: Daddy was here. He’d make it all go away. But in the car on the way home there were no hugs or pep talks. Berk started to tell his father what he remembered of the night. Oz stopped him cold. “You don’t remember a damn thing,” his father commanded him.

  That tone between them had stuck since, and Berk long ago had figured out why. Even after the murder charges were dropped, and his two-year possession sentence expunged, a part of his father still believed he did it. It was one of the reasons Berk had briefly considered going on the crime show—that and the hope of a payout. But since his meeting with Dee Nash, Serenity had convinced him that none of it would benefit him. Even though he’d kept many of the details from her, she was right: he’d only be exposed all over again. When the producer from Crime After Crime had called again he had slammed the phone down.

  “Have you thought any more about the house?” Berk asked Oz. Outside Berk’s house a For Sale sign had been swaying in the wind for months. The mortgage he’d taken for the three-thousand-square-foot monster was crippling, given his manager salary and empty trust fund, but it was the same size as his brother Wyatt’s house, and that mattered.

  Oz chortled. “Warned you. No such thing as a sweetheart deal. A bank don’t send chocolates after the first year. They send the sheriff with a new lock.”

  As real estate brokers had turned Berk down—the McMansion was dead, they said—he’d turned to his family, offering to sell it for what he’d paid, just to get the hell out of the mortgage. He lived in the subdivision of Bittercress; he’d thought it was like Blueheart but apparently no potential buyers thought so.

  “You helped Wyatt out this year,” Berk whined. The game was back on but he left the volume off.

  “Wyatt can afford his house.”

  After his sentence at Morgantown had ended, Berk had left his home city, like Kerouac, he thought, but for real and not like some poseur. Berk had been in prison after all. Club Fed, it was called, but it was still a prison. He promised his parents he would finish college but wanted to disappear for a year and wait for the Kennedy business to die down into forgetful politeness. His family agreed, but the one year turned into ten: tree planting in Washington (which he was fired from for being too high); teaching English in Taiwan (where he lied about his degree and was caught); card dealer school in Nevada (which turned out to be a scam). Each turn in his life made more of a mess of his résumé. Each new city was farther away from Haley, but he never stopped thinking about her: her smell, her body, his anger at the girls that night, and how stupid absolutely everything was in retrospect.

  During that time Wyatt had taken over the family business, looked at the competition from Walmart, and made moves: he’d added pharmacies to the stores and ended racist hiring practices. Each Butler’s location would serve its community, he pledged. Wyatt inherited the keys to the city. Berk got complaints about the okra.

  “Where’s Shiloh at?” Oz asked. Berk had been tasked with watching his daughter while Serenity went to the Butler’s nearby for more Thanksgiving supplies. Oz doted on the girl and Berk knew he could always swing the family Thanksgiving to his place because of it.

  “Probably in the doll room.” Berk sighed as he stood up out of his recliner.

  “Probably ain’t the same as sure, so find her.” Berk felt the absence of trust behind every word his family said to him.

  Berk walked up the carpeted steps from the family room to the main entrance. “Shiloh,” he said. There was no response. He went up another flight of stairs toward the bedrooms and Shiloh’s playroom.

  He had never connected his desire for this house with his memory of the summer of 1993, but the layout was a mirror of the Wynns’ house, and made by the same developer.

  He glanced into the doll room, which creeped him out on the best of days. The figures looked back at him. There were Bratz dolls, with their long hair and stiletto boots. There were at least forty Barbies of different vintages and baby dolls in tiny strollers. On a shelf across from the door, two Cabbage Patch dolls from the eighties caught his eye, their round plastic heads with loops of yarn hair, colorless smiles on doughy bodies. Serenity could sit on eBay like a tiger in the night. Berk vaguely remembered a doll like these at Kennedy’s place the one or two times he’d been in her room. He’d teased her for still having kid stuff like that.

  A large pink house with hinges stood in the middle of the playroom. When he walked behind it, expecting to find Shiloh crouched and moving small pieces of furniture around, there was no one there except an American Girl that looked uncannily like his daughter. The blond doll lay on its back staring up at him, her arms up over her head, her small jean skirt peeled back over her belly, exposing her. Shiloh wasn’t in the room.

  Berk took off as he went down again, toward the kitchen, shouting Shiloh’s name.

  Through the patio doors he saw Shiloh at the far end of the yard, the part that ran against the back of Blueheart Woods. She was talking with a red-haired woman and then, briefly, they held hands. A few people had stopped to look at the house since he’d put the sign up, but Thanksgiving Day was a bit rich for a browse, and why was she touching his kid?

  He ran into the backyard in bare feet. “Can I help you?” he barked, sounding like the grocery store manager he was. She didn’t look up when he called out. As he got closer he saw that the woman was only a girl. He realized she was in a yellow blouse.

  “Haley?” he said as he stopped. The girl let go of Shiloh’s hands, turned, and walked into the trees. He reached his daughter, crouched, and examined her.

  “Who were you talking to? What did she say?” he yelled.

  “I was just singing,” Shiloh said, and then began to cry. He looked down and realized he had dug his thumbs hard into her shoulders in his panic.

  Without thinking he picked Shiloh up and ran back to the house. As he brought her in, she was still howling.

  “Everything all right up there?” Oz shouted from the sunken basement where the big screen was.

  “We’re okay,” Berk shouted, but he didn’t feel okay. His breath was still coming fast. He set her down on the kitchen counter. He lifted her chin with his finger, forced her to look him in the eye. “Tell me what really happened,” he whispered. “I swear Daddy won’t get mad.”

  She stared at him, still sniffling.

  He quieted his voice. “Did that girl do anything to you?”

  His daughter shook her head.

  Berk grabbed a tea towel off the counter and mopped it along his hairline where he’d begun to sweat. “Don’t tell anyone.” He squeezed her against him until he heard Serenity come back in.

  When his wife asked what was going on, Berk said that Shiloh had gone in the backyard by herself, given him a scare. Serenity glared at him like he was an idiot, but it was better than Oz’s telling her.

  Later, after the relatives had left and his wife was asleep, Berk went into the spare bedroom, opened the closet, and rummaged around. He pulled out what he called his “evidence.” Proof, in his mind, of who Kennedy Wynn re
ally was. Proof of what Haley looked like when his memory failed to revive her.

  He looked at the pictures and compared her face with the face of the girl in the backyard. It couldn’t be a ghost, he thought. Must have been some sick joke of Kennedy’s. She’d probably paid some high school kid to dress up and come by. Someone who looked exactly like Haley the last night of her life.

  Chapter 17

  Carter called in to the pharmaceutical advertising office where she temped and asked for a half day off. No text had come from Everett. She called and he didn’t pick up. She tried to go get her car that morning, but when she came within view of the condo tower she began to tremble. She felt sick to her stomach. She went and stood at a bus stop, using her scarf to wipe her tears. Just go get it, she said to herself. But her body wouldn’t move. An old man beside her offered her a handkerchief without speaking. It looked dirty and she didn’t take it.

  It wasn’t just Everett or heartbreak she was afraid of—it was everything coming back. When the bus finally pulled up, she got on and rode, looking out the window, wiping her nose on a very old Kleenex that she’d scrounged from the bottom of her purse. The bus rattled past a florist shop, rows of glass, a sign that said Vases on Sale.

  Carter had a flash, an image of Haley in her mind, a garage sale table in front of her strewn with knickknacks. Florist’s vases. A macramé lampshade. A decorative bowl made from a coconut. Somebody’s basement had clearly been rid of its lingering seventies and eighties paraphernalia. A box of games: Operation, Speak & Spell, a Donkey Kong board game, Bargain Hunter, Trivial Pursuit, Sorry!. A few Atari cartridges but no console. A ThighMaster. A wok. An old tape recorder. Kennedy had grabbed the recorder. Behind it was a wood-handled jackknife in a box, a four-inch blade. Haley picked it up, and Kennedy peered at it, said it was cool. Carter interjected that carrying a weapon was more dangerous than not having one. Haley said that she’d take it camping and bought it for five bucks. At the time, it bothered Carter that Haley seemed as though she’d do anything Kennedy said was cool.

  She’d been Carter’s friend first. Earlier that year, just after Carter got her license, they’d driven around in Laine’s Taurus listening to the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack. Kennedy and Carter had seen it with their parents in New York at Christmastime the year before, and although Haley had never seen it, she’d learned all the words. She sang “Think of Me,” changing the lyrics to “Think of me fondling . . . ,” belting it at the top of her lungs with the windows open, making a diddling motion with her hand, one pinky out, but never losing the key through the other girls’ giggles. Silly things like that.

  Now, when Carter thought about the knife, she felt ill. She wondered if the universe had sent her a premonition, if she’d known something that day, when she told Haley not to buy it. She thought again of Kennedy stabbing the ground at the graveyard with the ornament stick.

  * * *

  —

  When she returned to work at noon everyone in the office was cold to her—although they were never warm. The real receptionist was on family leave and would be back in four more weeks. She heard another girl gossiping that if Carter was going to take mornings off, they could just pay her more and she’d gladly be the one to do the phones. She didn’t know why they were being so grumpy about it. She had taken only a single sick day since she began. It was the first day back after Thanksgiving and everyone was gearing up for the December holiday parties and gearing down on work, anyway.

  She worried their attitudes were because of the article that had appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about Kennedy’s release. Carter had seen it two weeks before, below the fold, her sister’s Department of Corrections photo, their faces the same except for nature-versus-nurture differences: Kennedy’s age-darkened hair and ghostly jail skin. Carter had stared at it, as if the words were foreign, before walking to the kitchen to get the Windex. She’d used the same newspaper to clean the bathroom mirror and every window in her apartment, rubbing until the black ink of her twin’s sulky face smeared and beaded and surfaces came clean.

  No one in the office had asked her directly whether she was related. Carter answered the phones, and sometimes she helped proofread name tags for medical conferences against a list, making sure the names of the doctors who’d registered to attend were correct. The foyer was filled with posters of drug company names floating on images of blue sky and clouds, or birds beside water—as if their products would put a person closer to nature somehow, lift them up. She needed medication. The irony of her present occupation wasn’t lost on Carter.

  She tried to work, but her thoughts were stuck on Everett, like a CD skipping. If Everett was intent on going on the show, doing this thing that he knew would hurt her family, why had he held her and rubbed her back like that? Why kiss her as he put her in the cab? Was that the ending—the last kiss, not even on the lips? It wasn’t fair.

  Carter left a message asking her therapist, Dr. Brathwaite, if she could have an emergency appointment after work that day. Was she in crisis? he asked when he phoned back.

  “Yes,” Carter breathed quietly into the phone. “But I mean, I’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t understand. Tell me what that means,” Dr. Brathwaite said.

  Carter sighed. She glanced around the foyer but half the staff was in a meeting and the others were cloistered in their offices on their own phones. “Well, I think I’ve been in crisis the whole time I’ve been seeing you. All fall at least.”

  She heard a long pause, then he said tentatively, “Okay,” and she wondered how tightly controlled she’d kept herself. When they’d first started the sessions she’d told him she wanted to talk about the breakup with Alex and her sister’s release, some depression. She had never mentioned Everett except in the past tense. Had she really not let him see how vulnerable she was?

  * * *

  —

  Perseverance. Carter stared at the word on the poster in her therapist’s office.

  “I think I had a series of panic attacks,” she told Dr. Brathwaite, not looking at him out of shame. “I left my car in a parking lot. I honestly don’t know when I can make myself go and get it.” Not to mention everyone at work was treating her weird—so far it was just the one article about her sister’s release, and it was small. Would there be more? she worried. She took a breath, looked down at her lap, her hands, which she’d scrunched up in knots around each other. “I think I need medication for anxiety.”

  Dr. Brathwaite leaned forward and said, “Let’s break this down. Where is the car and what happened just before?”

  Carter’s heart pounded and she thought she might be sick as she stared at the large area rug that covered most of the room. It was patterned with lime-green and gray diamonds. “I’m sleeping with someone.”

  “This is an ongoing relationship?” Dr. Brathwaite’s voice was steady even though this was obviously something Carter had omitted in their sessions.

  Carter wouldn’t look at him. She explained it had been maybe serious, maybe not, for a while—and how the day before he’d told her about his intent to see the investigation reopened.

  Dr. Brathwaite didn’t dwell on the particulars but got right to the important thing. “This person . . .”

  Carter dug her fingernails into her palms until there were crescent-moon marks left on her skin as she unfolded them. “The brother. Haley Kimberson’s brother.”

  Dr. Brathwaite didn’t speak for several moments. She thought he might be silently going through the stages of therapist disbelief, first thinking, What the hell just came out of this fucked-up girl’s mouth? before arriving at something speakable to a patient. He made a slight humming noise in his throat. “It’s possible you went to him for forgiveness.”

  “But why? I only knew him when he was eight or nine, a kid. And mostly his sister spent time at our house. It was one of those fast, intense friendships with
Haley. I got to know her in history class, and then Kennedy had to be friends with her too, she had to see what I saw in her, if you know what I mean? Haley was smart, funny, serious, and wild. They had eleventh-grade English together. Kennedy made the teacher move their desks next to each other. That was how the whole Jane Eyre thing started.”

  Dr. Brathwaite didn’t ask what Carter meant by “the Jane Eyre thing” so she assumed that like everyone, he’d read about the crime—that it wasn’t just the two of them in the room, as he’d always said. The media was there too, even if silently.

  “I ran into Everett when I was out for dinner with Alex. Even before I knew I was going to break up with Alex. He took me to Heritage, of all places.”

  It seemed odd to Carter that anyone could name a restaurant that, but Alex had made the reservations. The Wynns had come from Ohio originally, and even though Kennedy and Carter had been born in Virginia, they were still treated like outsiders. Heritage: it was a word the South used to divide the uses from the thems. The Wynns were well-off, but they weren’t among the generations-deep white families of the city. She remembered that a strange number of the newspaper articles surrounding Kennedy’s arrest contained the detail that the Wynns were from Ohio, as if to say “not us.”

  Heritage hadn’t exactly delivered a romantic evening. Alex complained about the prices, and by the time the mains came he proposed that they should move in with Gerry to save money until he got work again. He had a big empty house, Alex pointed out, more than anyone needed.

  “Some houses are empty for a reason,” Carter told him. She excused herself to the bathroom, but when she got up she went directly to the bar.

  Carter didn’t recognize Everett until they’d already started a conversation. She remembered his face that night—before she realized who he was. She saw a man in a well-fitting gingham shirt, laughing with his friends. His head was tipped back. He looked beautiful. Later she’d learn they were celebrating his move into his new condo.