The door squealed and I stepped into the kitchen. A faceful of cool air struck me with enough force to turn my skin to gooseflesh, which only tightened more when I got a look at the sliding glass door just off the breakfast nook.
Broken. Not opened; shattered.
A pile of glass lay scattered on the floor around the table, the remains of the door that led from the nook to the deck outside. The light from over the stove puddled in it, manifold sharp edges of broken glass catching the light and reflecting it to irregular twinkles. I looked to either side, stopped and listened. Nothing. I shuffled forward, moving past the little hooks where we hung our car keys, and I froze.
A set of Ford keys dangled from the hook. Allie’s Explorer; her keys hung right there, where they always did. And that was fucked up, because those keys were supposed to be in Pennsylvania.
What are they doing there those keys aren’t supposed to be there did she drive home did she drive all the way home tonight why didn’t she call me WHAT ARE THOSE KEYS DOING THERE
And what about my rifle? I looked down in my hands and I wasn’t holding it anymore. I looked all around and didn’t see it anywhere.
I was unarmed.
My brain jammed then, overloaded with too much conflicted information. It froze, and the rest of me froze, and in that instant I felt the huge arm wrap itself around my neck, I felt the tip of a blade poking into my side and I knew who it belonged to—the Bald Man. He’d gotten the drop on me.
Dr. Koenig slung his legal pad down on the coffee table and shook his head. He leapt up from his seat and reached across to grab me by the lapels.
“Don’t do this now! You can handle this!”
“Where’s my gun?” I asked weakly, not understanding. “It disappeared. Why are Allie’s keys…”
“Don’t think! Just go!”
Back in my kitchen.
The forearm crushed my windpipe, wiry hair abrading my chin. The knife dug into my side. I felt where the tip had actually pierced my skin, but I was so hopped up on adrenaline that it didn’t hurt, not yet.
Bobby? Cried my panicked mind. Bobby, what do I do here? Come on, man, help me!
No answer from the Bobby in my head. The man with his arm around my neck said, “Be cool, man. Chill. I ain’t gonna hurt you.”
A deep, gravelly voice. A calm voice.
A familiar voice, one I had heard before. On the radio. And on the telephone.
“I ain’t gonna hurt nobody. You stay cool, you’ll be alright.”
My struggles weakened, not so much because of what he said but because my muscles suffered from lack of oxygen. I didn’t understand where my rifle had gone, not then, but my empty hands twitched at the air as if trying to grab it. I wanted them to reach up for the hairy arm, but they didn’t listen to me. I wanted them to drive elbows into the chest of this person pulling me into him, but they wouldn’t do that, either. I wanted to fight and nothing would cooperate with me.
My body had mutinied; I’d just come along for the ride.
“You fight me, I’m gonna have to cut you. So be cool, man. Just do what I say.”
I stopped struggling then. My hands fell to my sides. Obeying him, not me.
I had never felt so terrified in my life. I screamed orders that no part of me obeyed. A man—a bald man. He was white and he was bald and I knew this without looking at him
How how how do you know this Kevin how do you know what he looks like when you’ve never seen him before
My mind upended then. Cannons and capstans and lifeboats ripped away from my listing decks and splashed into a black, frozen ocean. And just when I thought I had sailed over the edge of mindless terror, I heard a sound that told me know, I hadn’t; I didn’t know what mindless terror was. Not yet.
“Kevin? Is everything okay?”
Allie. Calling up to me from the basement.
What what what the fuck
“Tell her yes,” the man hissed. “Tell her everything’s cool.”
Call 911, run, run, run, grab Abby and go out the back get out NOW
But my mouth had deserted me, too. I understood then that the mutiny was total. I commanded nothing.
“Everything’s cool,” I called back.
I understood what was happening now. Oh yes I did.
43.
“Go back,” Dr. Koenig said again. “I know it’s hard, but I really need you to push through this, okay? We’re out of time. We’re completely out of time.”
Midafternoon. Nobody on the bench outside, although it looked like the nicest of days. I felt then like I wanted to go out there and sit on that bench. I decided that I would. Later.
I unrolled my battered Southern Rifleman and plopped it down on the coffee table. I pursed my lips and looked down at it, squinting. I breathed deeply, but I did it through my nose. I closed my eyes.
I opened them.
I remained in Dr. Koenig’s office.
“Kevin?”
I looked up at him and shook my head.
“I don’t know what’s going on here,” I said. I was lying, but just saying that felt good. I felt like if I said it enough, it would become true again. “But I’m done.”
“Oh, you’re done?”
“Yeah,” I said, reaching for my magazine again and rolling it into its familiar tube shape. “It’s been nice knowing you, but we’re done here. I’m going back to work.”
I rose, but his voice reached out and cracked like a whip.
“Sit down.”
I stopped. Not so much out of any fear of him, but because he’d never spoken to me with such a firm tone before.
He shook his head, covered his face. Breathed so loudly that it qualified as a groan. Then he stood up. I started to rise, too, but he held a hand up.
“You stay right there,” he commanded. “Right there. I don’t want you leaving that couch.”
“Uh…okay.”
He walked briskly over to his desk and picked up the phone. He pushed a single button, waited. Then he said, “It’s Wheeler. This isn’t working.”
“What’s not working?” I asked. “Who’s Wheeler?”
He ignored me. He turned to one side—not away, not to where he couldn’t see me, just to one side to make it clear he didn’t want to hear what I had to say right now—and continued talking into the office phone. “I tried your way, now we’re using mine. We’re out of time here. I can’t wait any longer.”
Pause.
“It’s less than twenty-four hours away. Seriously, we reconvene in the morning.”
Pause. Then:
“Yes. Absolutely. Okay. If it doesn’t go well, I’ll call for you.”
He hung up the phone and walked, slower now, back over to his easy chair. True to his orders, I remained on the couch.
“What was that?”
“Okay,” he said. “We’re going to try a different tack.”
I felt like I’d just stepped into the Twilight Zone. “Uh…okay.”
“Tell me something; what do you think happened just now?”
“You talked to somebody on the phone.”
“No. With your house. The guy trying to choke you, Allie’s keys. The rifle disappearing from your hands, what do you think all that was?”
I swallowed. Ki breath.
“I’m suffering from a particularly serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder,” I replied. The words came out slippery, diarrhea from my mouth. “My anxieties have grown so strong that I’ve blurred the line between reality and fear. I’m having a nervous breakdown. I’m mentally ill. I need medication. I can’t tell reality from bullshit. I should probably be committed right now. I’ll sign myself in wherever you want, you just let me know…”
He reached into his briefcase. At that moment, stark fear stabbed into me with the speed and violence of a killer’s blade.
His hand came out. In it rested a fresh, unmolested copy of Southern Rifleman. My issue.
“I ordered this some time ago,” he said.
“Had it sent to my house. And when I got it, I flipped to the back and discovered a significant difference between what you recited to me at our first meeting and what is written in this issue. Would you like for me to read the Hero of the Month article to you?”
My eyes narrowed. My heartbeat quickened again. Ragged now, so many times had it started and stopped in the past few minutes alone.
He flipped to the back. He began to read.
“Kevin Braxton,” he read, “an active-duty member of the United States Marine Corps and a veteran of the Iraq war, successfully defended his Woodbridge, Virginia home on the night of February 1, 2010 after Leon Pinnix and Trayshaun Ramseur gained entry through an unlocked window in the basement. And this man’s name is Braxton, by the way. Not Swanson.”
He looked up.
“Says here that Sergeant Braxton had a Smith & Wesson Model 629 revolver with a 6-inch barrel,” he said. “They never made it out of his basement. He got them on the stairs.”
My hands began shaking. My stomach twitched once, twice, in a very credible threat to evict everything I’d eaten that day. I looked out the window and noticed that the character of the light had changed. Late afternoon now, very late. Not too far from a point where you’d have to start calling it night.
“That’s fucked up,” I said in a voice that shook in time with my hands. “That’s one hell of an error on the printing line, I’ll tell you that. I bet some heads rolled for that one.”
“Sergeant Braxton had a wife and a daughter about Abby’s age. So all that matches. But there’s no mention of Burlington, North Carolina or a lawyer named Kevin Swanson anywhere on this page. Anywhere in this magazine, in fact. And oh, guess what kind of rifle that is on the cover?”
I didn’t answer.
“It’s an AK-47,” he said.
I didn’t respond to that, either. I didn’t respond because I couldn’t breathe.
He laid the magazine down on his shitty coffee table. He appeared to be thinking, but then I got the idea that he just didn’t want to look at me for a while. He closed his eyes and took a ki breath of his own—apparently, I didn’t hold the patent on that technique. Then he continued.
“If you want to read anything about you,” he said, “you have to get your hands on a back issue of the Burlington Times-News from February 4, 2010.”
“No,” I whispered.
He reached into his briefcase again and pulled out a folded-up newspaper. “Do you want me to read this to you?”
I closed my eyes and willed myself to slide. When I opened them again, I hadn’t gone anywhere.
“I’ll summarize it for you,” he said in a softer tone. “What it says is, on the night of February 1, 2010, a single intruder broke into the home of attorney Kevin Swanson off Highway 62 in southern Alamance County. It’s kind of a dry account, as newspapers often are. Gives the bare minimum facts. A lot of quotes from community members. The February 4 issue is the first story. There were other stories in newspapers across the country, but this was the first one. Because it happened here. In Burlington.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tried to say. But the words hung up in my throat.
Bobby? I cried out.
No answer.
“I can give you a lot of detail,” he said. “I’m privy to a lot of the facts here, most of which aren’t properly reflected in the newspapers’ accounts. Kevin Swanson didn’t have an AK-47—he actually didn’t have anything, because he never felt like he needed to keep firearms in his home. The question had just never come up for him. So when he was downstairs in his basement, watching the end of the Carolina-Virginia Tech game with his wife and thirteen-year-old daughter, he didn’t have a gun safe to go digging around in when he heard a strange noise upstairs.”
“What’s going on here? What are you doing?”
“Kevin Swanson is six feet tall,” he continued, “and well within his physical prime. He had taken several years of martial arts training in his youth and felt generally confident and secure. Had he actually owned a firearm, it probably wouldn’t have helped him that night, because the deciding factor there was his mindset. Kevin thought something had fallen in the kitchen. He wasn’t thinking there was a burglar. He thought, something fell, I’m going to go see what it is. Even if he’d owned a whole slew of semiautomatic weapons, he wouldn’t have taken one with him into the kitchen because he wasn’t thinking that way.”
I began to rock back and forth on the couch. I lifted the front legs with every backward roll. I shook my head—but he kept talking.
“Kevin Swanson believed in a civilized world,” he said. “He lived a good life, a happy life. He got up every morning, he went to work, he supported his family. He lived right. And he had every reason to believe that if he continued to live right, if he continued to do the right thing every day, life would continue for him the way it always had.”
Now I began to cry.
“That’s important. People need to understand the way Kevin thought, and they need to understand that his mindset predetermined the choices he made that night. Because it’s easy to judge somebody after the fact and point out the things you think they did wrong. It’s really easy. Unless you’ve been there.”
What choices did he make? What did he do?
More to the point, what did he not do?
“When a man named Travis Wayne Arnold accosted him from behind in his kitchen,” he continued, “he overpowered Kevin with a surprise attack, but the way he really gained control there was by relying on his victim’s innate belief that everything would ultimately turn out okay if he just stayed cool. He didn’t know anything about Kevin Swanson, but he didn’t need to; that’s a common reaction to something like this. A robber sticks a gun in your face, whips out a knife, whatever, most people just hand over their wallets. Nobody ever fights. They just go along with it. Hope they don’t get killed. Most of the time, they don’t.
“Travis Wayne Arnold told Kevin everything would be okay if he just stayed cool. And Kevin believed him. He let Travis Wayne Arnold handcuff him, because Travis Wayne Arnold said the only thing he wanted was electronics, jewelry, other valuables. You just be cool, Kevin, and everything’s going to be okay. So Kevin stayed cool. He let Travis Wayne Arnold take him down into the basement, and then he told his wife and daughter to stay cool, too. And Travis Wayne Arnold handcuffed them, as well.
“And then he raped them.”
My stomach upended. I leaned forward and opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Apparently, I hadn’t eaten anything that day; I couldn’t even upchuck acid.
“He raped Kevin’s wife and he raped Kevin’s daughter while Kevin laid there on the floor watching, listening to it happening for the better part of the next day.”
“No,” I choked.
“Yes.”
“No. No.”
He reached out and grabbed my hands. They shook, and they didn’t stop when he touched them.
My head swam, but I didn’t pass out. I didn’t slide, either. I was beginning to understand that that was so much bullshit.
A question rose in my throat and although I didn’t want to ask it, I couldn’t stop it.
“Where are they?” I asked. “Allie? Abby? Where are they staying? When can I see them?”
He looked away from me again.
“Where am I?” I cried. “Doc? Can you please explain this to me, because I don’t…”
“I’m not a doctor, Kevin,” he said. He looked at me with sad compassion, and it sickened me because I didn’t want anybody looking at me like that. Ever.
“I never said I was a doctor, okay? We’re in your doctor’s office, yes; he’s allowed us to use it so that we can get away from all the hooting and hollering out there. I’m a prosecutor. Dr. Koenig is your psychologist here at Magnolia Plantation. My name is Daniel Wheeler. I’m the Assistant District Attorney working on your family’s case.”
“What kind of case is it? It’s a…a rape case?”
> He shook his head.
“Not just that,” he said. “Rape and double murder.”
44.
He said: Bobby is dead, too. Dead for several years now, the victim of a roadside bomb in Iraq. He said: your wife is dead, your daughter is dead, your brother is dead. Kate, she’s still alive. She’s your legal guardian.
But Bobby couldn’t have been dead, because he came to see me that night. I lay in the bed, drugged, and saw him standing by my window. He must have entered through that same window, because they told me that I stayed now in a lockdown ward—like Brandon Cross, and his roommate Kenny.
Guess where? Ta daaaa! Magnolia Plantation.
“They want me to testify,” I said.
Bobby snorted. “Yeah, I guess they would.”
“And I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
“No, Bobby, I’m telling you, I can’t. It doesn’t seem real to me, everything they’re saying, but I think that if I have to get up there and say all this shit that it’s going to become very real very quickly and…”
“You know why I really joined the Marines?” He interrupted.
I fell silent.
“I joined,” he said, “because the recruiter said it was hard as shit. Said out of all the services, Marine Corps basic training is the hardest. Some dudes can’t make it in the Marines. Might make it other places, but not there. Because the Marines are hard.”
He smiled out the window. I wondered what could possibly make anybody smile in a world like this, but then I understood that the things he saw didn’t exist on the other side of the glass. They existed somewhere else entirely.
“Greatest thing about finishing Basic,” he said, “wasn’t the uniform or the benefits or the chance to shoot machine guns and throw grenades. Wasn’t even the right to walk around knowing I was a Marine, saying I was a Marine, being a Marine. The greatest thing was knowing that I could do absolutely anything in this world. Because I could. I said, I made it through Parris Island. They didn’t wash me out. They didn’t run me off. And now I can do anything. Impossible doesn’t exist anymore. Not for me. This world bends to my will. This world does what I tell it to do.”
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