But I didn’t tell Zorbas that. It was too personal and had nothing to do with anything that had happened.
“We got to the car. Clark got in behind the wheel. Martin opened the back door for me.” I’d been hoping he’d get in with me and sit beside me and hold me all the way home. But he didn’t. He got in the passenger seat up front, and Clark leaned over and whispered something to him. Martin shoved him away. He looked angry. I wanted to ask him what was going on, but I didn’t think he’d tell me, not with Clark sitting there. So I kept my mouth shut. “Then Martin got in the front passenger seat. I still didn’t see anyone else around.”
I said that because the cops kept asking me: Are you sure, Tegan? Are you sure you didn’t see anyone? I kept telling them the same thing: “I didn’t see anyone. I was looking at Martin. He was digging through the cds Clark kept in the car, trying to find something to play on the way home.” I remembered his impish grin as he teased Clark for his terrible taste in music. Then Clark turned and gave him a look I couldn’t decipher. Martin’s cheeks turned pink. He glanced from Clark to me. Clark nodded at him, and Martin sighed. He turned to say something to me. But before he got a word out, his eyes shifted from me to, I think, the driver’s-side window. BOOM!
BOOM!
BOOM!
“All of a sudden I heard a bang, and I saw Martin slump forward.”
“Martin,” Detective Zorbas said, as if he was hearing it for the first time. He frowned, just like he did every time I said it. “What about Clark? What was he doing?”
“I don’t know. There was another bang right after that. Then another.”
Something had stung my cheek. It turned out to be a shard of glass.
Something splattered all over my face and my hair and the front of my coat. It turned out to be blood and brains and tiny pieces of bone.
Someone screamed. It turned out to be me.
“But it was Martin who slumped over after the first shot?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see who did it?”
God, was he ever going to actually listen to me?
“No,” I said. “He must have taken off right after he fired the shots.”
“He,” Detective Zorbas said. “You keep saying that. You said ‘he’ to the first officers on the scene. You said ‘he’ to me at the scene. If you didn’t see anything, how do you know it was a he?”
“I—” I shook my head. It was a good question. “It just felt like a he. I mean, that’s usually how it turns out, right? When someone gets shot, it’s almost always a guy who did it. Right?”
“Are you sure that’s what it is? Are you sure you didn’t see something—a hand, maybe—that made you think it was a male? Or maybe you peeked out the window while he was running away. Maybe you got an idea if he was tall or short, thin or stout. Maybe you saw if he was wearing a jacket or a coat, shoes or boots. Maybe you saw which direction he ran, if he was headed for a car or if he ducked down an alley. Anything you can tell us will help, Tegan.”
“I didn’t see him.” Jeez, I’d said it again: he. It just kept coming out. “I mean, I didn’t see anything. I didn’t see anyone.”
FOUR
Kelly
INT.—TYRELL LIVING ROOM—DAY
KELLY is standing in the middle of the living room in pajamas and Cookie Monster slippers. Her hair is tousled. She faces the camera.
KELLY
Tegan told her story to the police four times, not the “dozens of times” she whines about. She told Mom too. But did it occur to her to tell me? Of course not.
CUT TO:
INT.—TYRELL FOYER—DAY
The door opens. TEGAN and MRS. TYRELL enter. MRS. TYRELL has her arm around her daughter, whose eyes are red from crying. KELLY rushes to the door.
KELLY
What happened? What did the cops want, Mom? Why didn’t you call me?
MRS. TYRELL
Not now, Kelly. We’ve been up all night. Tegan needs to get some rest.
KELLY
What happened, Teeg? Did the party get busted?
KELLY turns to the camera.
KELLY (CONT’D)
It wouldn’t surprise me. Those parties are drug central. It would serve them right if they all got busted.
MRS. TYRELL
Not now, Kelly!
KELLY
Teeg?
TEGAN
(in a weary monotone)
Not now, Kelly.
MRS. TYRELL and TEGAN climb the stairs, leaving KELLY to stare after them.
CUT TO :
INT.—TYRELL LIVING ROOM—DAY
KELLY, still in her pajamas, continues to address the camera.
KELLY
Tegan was too shaken up to tell me what happened.
Too exhausted.
She throws an arm over her eyes and strikes a dramatic pose.
KELLY (CONT’D)
Too traumatized.
She drops her arm and sighs.
KELLY (CONT’D)
I’m not as insensitive as she thinks I am. I know she was exhausted. I know she was traumatized. Who wouldn’t be after a thing like that? She could have been killed. In fact, it’s probably a miracle that she wasn’t. The cops think it was the tinted windows that saved her. They think the killer didn’t see her. But, still, she could have taken a few minutes to brief me. She could have told me herself what happened instead of letting me find out the hard way.
CUT TO :
INT.—TYRELL KITCHEN—DAY
KELLY, still in her pajamas and her Cookie Monster slippers, is sitting at the table pouring milk into a bowl of cereal.
KELLY
Jeez, what a family. Mom gets a call from the cops in the middle of the night. She races out of here. She’s gone all night. Tegan, who went out, never comes home. But did it occur to either of them what I must have been thinking? Did anyone even think to call me? Have they told me what happened yet? No, they’re upstairs together. Tegan is crying. Ten to one, she got busted.
A radio is on, and a newscast begins. KELLY gets up and reaches to turn the radio off but suddenly freezes.
NEWS READER’S VOICE
…Dead are Clark Carson and Martin Genovese, both eighteen, both students at Lakeside Collegiate. Police are investigating but so far have no motive for the shooting. Sources say there was a third person in the car at the time of the shooting, but police have not released that person’s name. The investigation continues. Turning to other news…
KELLY stares at the radio. Her face is pale. She reaches out slowly and shuts the radio off. She stares at the ceiling above her. Then she gets up and heads for the kitchen door.
KELLY
(shouting)
Mom!
FIVE
Kelly
INT.—TYRELL LIVING ROOM—DAY
KELLY is curled up in an armchair in front of the window. A textbook is open on her lap, but she does not look at it. Instead, she is staring, glassy-eyed, through the living room and the dining room beyond and out the window into the backyard. She is jarred out of her thoughts when the doorbell rings. She makes a move to get up, but before she can rise, her mother bustles out of the kitchen. KELLY hears the front door open. She hears voices.
MAN’S VOICE
Mrs. Tyrell? My name is Tony Genovese. Martin’s father.
MRS. TYRELL
(sounding breathless and nervous)
Mr. Genovese, I’m so sorry for your loss.
KELLY
(to herself )
What does he want?
MR. GENOVESE
Thank you. I was wondering, Mrs. Tyrell, if I could speak to your daughter.
There is a long pause, and KELLY leans forward in the chair, straining to hear.
MRS. TYRELL
Tegan? She’s…Of course. Of course. Please come in, Mr. Genovese.
MR. GENOVESE
Please, call me Tony.
&
nbsp; MRS. TYRELL
Louise. Please come in. I’ll go and get Tegan.
MR. GENOVESE and MRS. TYRELL appear in the doorway to the living room. MR. GENOVESE is a short, wiry man dressed in black chinos and a sport jacket. He looks weary. MRS. TYRELL, by contrast, looks nervous and jumpy.
MRS. TYRELL
Please sit down. I’ll be right back.
MR. GENOVESE enters the living room. MRS. TYRELL disappears up the stairs. MR. GENOVESE is halfway to the sofa when, startled, he notices KELLY sitting in the armchair at the window. KELLY stands up, embarrassed.
KELLY
I’m Kelly. Tegan’s sister. I knew Martin. I’m sorry about what happened.
MR. GENOVESE’S eyes tear up. KELLY, even more embarrassed now, starts to sit down but seems to change her mind. She remains standing. She and MR. GENOVESE look at each other. Neither seems at ease. MR. GENOVESE looks over his shoulder at the stairs. Footsteps are heard off-camera. KELLY breathes a sigh of relief and sinks back down into her chair.
SIX
Tegan
After what happened, I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I didn’t even want to leave my room. But things never work out the way I want. Never.
The day after it all happened, my mother knocked on the door to my room. She pushed it open and poked her head inside, even though I told her to go away.
“Martin’s father is here,” she said.
My stomach tied itself into a knot. I had met Mr. Genovese a couple of times. He was a contractor, a real success story. He had started out as a common laborer after dropping out of high school at sixteen to help support his family. He was smart, Martin said, but he wasn’t book-smart. He was street-smart, money-smart, people-smart. According to Martin, his dad had worked sixteen-hour days the whole time Martin was growing up. It had paid off. Martin’s family lived in the best neighborhood in the city, in a house that Mr. Genovese had built himself. There were five kids—four girls and Martin. It had always been Mr. Genovese’s dream that Martin would come into the business with him and eventually take it over. But Martin had other ideas. Mr. Genovese was disappointed, but just a little.
“He likes the idea that I’m going to be the first Genovese to go to university,” Martin told me. “He really likes the idea that I want to be a doctor. But, boy, he doesn’t understand why I don’t want to be a rich specialist. He doesn’t understand me. But…” Martin always shrugged when he got to that part. If you ask me, he was exactly like his dad: he was enormously proud of what his dad had accomplished, but he didn’t understand him any more than his dad understood him.
Now Martin was dead. I didn’t think I could face Mr. Genovese and his grief.
“What does he want?” I asked my mother.
“He says he wants to talk to you.”
I felt like I was going to throw up.
“What did you tell him?”
“I said I would come and get you. What else could I say? That poor man, Tegan.”
“Can’t you tell him I’m asleep?”
“I know how you feel, honey—”
No, she didn’t. She absolutely didn’t. She had no idea how I felt.
“Tell him I took a sleeping pill and you don’t know when I’ll wake up. Tell him—”
“You have to talk to him, Tegan. It’s the least you can do.”
The least I could do? What did she mean by that? Did she think there was something more I could do? Something more I could have done?
“I’ll put on some coffee. I’ll tell him you’ll be right down,” my mother said. She closed the door softly and floated down the carpeted hall and the carpeted stairs.
I sat up in bed, but it seemed like half a lifetime before I swung my feet over the side, and another whole lifetime before I stood up. I was wearing sweatpants and a ragged old sweatshirt that should have gone into the Goodwill bag three seasons ago. I thought about changing into something else. Then I thought, What’s the point? Who cares what I’m wearing? Mr. Genovese wouldn’t even notice.
Mr. Genovese was neatly dressed in black slacks, a white shirt and a charcoal-gray sports jacket. He wasn’t wearing a tie—Martin said he only ever wore one for weddings and funerals—but he looked professional anyway. His shoes looked either brand-new or freshly polished. His thick hair, flecked with gray, sat neatly in place above his closely shaved face. He had bags under his eyes, which were glazed from lack of sleep. He stood up when I entered the living room. My mom was there too, setting a tray on the coffee table. So was Kelly. I glowered at her. Why didn’t mom shoo her away? Mr. Genovese had come to see me, not her. I looked pointedly from her to the stairs, but before she could take a hint, Mr. Genovese started talking to me.
“Tegan,” he said. The warmth and sympathy in his voice overwhelmed me. I thought he would be angry with me because of what had happened. And because I was still alive. “Thank you for agreeing to see me. I know how hard this must be for you.”
His tone was so gentle that I felt like crying. No wonder Martin adored him.
“Please sit down,” he said, as if I were in his living room instead of the other way around. He waited until my mother had poured us each a cup of coffee. “I had to talk to you, Tegan,” he said. “Martin spoke of you so often. I know you were special to him.”
Special? Any other time, under any other circumstances, I would have been thrilled to hear that and to know that Martin had actually talked to his father about me. The way Mr. Genovese talked, I knew Gina was wrong. For as long as I could remember, I’d been just Tegan, one of the gang, someone he’d known for years, a non-flowering shrub in his daily landscape. But now it looked like I’d been right and that Martin had finally started to feel about me the way I’d been feeling about him.
“The police told me you were with Martin when it happened.”
That was all it took for my eyes to cloud with tears.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He leaned across the coffee table and took my hands in his. His fingers were long and spidery, just like Martin’s, but they were calloused, not smooth and soft. He held my hands firmly until I got my tears under control. Then he let go and sat back again, his sorrow-filled eyes on my own. “The police said you were in the backseat of Clark’s car. They said—” His voice broke. He shook his head slowly. “I need you to tell me what you saw, Tegan.”
And there it was—the thing he’d come for. The thing I couldn’t give him.
It took me a few moments before I could swallow the lump in my throat and say, “I didn’t see anything, Mr. Genovese. I’m so sorry.”
His eyes held mine, the sorrow in his eyes now transformed to a steely determination to get at the truth. I don’t know why, but I suddenly pictured him staring down a supplier who was trying to pass off inferior products.
“I had a long talk with the head of the homicide squad, Tegan. He explained a lot of things to me. He told me, not that he needed to, how terrifying it can be to witness something as horrific as what you witnessed.”
“Mr. Genovese—”
“He said that when something like that happens, most people tend to react the same way. They tend to think of themselves and their own safety. They wonder: am I going to die too? Am I next? He said people have described it to him as freezing up. Some people have told him that they’re aware they’re doing it—they feel themselves freezing even when their brain is telling them they should be doing something else: running, screaming, fighting back, anything except just sitting there waiting to be the next victim. But they can’t help it. They’re in shock. Their systems shut down, at least for a while. He says it’s a perfectly normal reaction. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Nothing to be ashamed of? What did that mean? What was he implying? Did he think I was ashamed?
“I’ve never been in your position, Tegan. But I understand people. That’s one of the reasons I’m where I am now. I can read people. I know what they want and what they’re afraid of. It sounds silly, I know, but people who are building a h
ouse, or renovating one, have a lot of fears—is the contractor honest, have they made the right choice, will they be cheated? I understand that. So I think I understand as much as anyone can who wasn’t directly involved in…what you experienced…how it must have felt, what it must have been like. But this detective I spoke to, the head of the homicide squad, he told me that when the shock starts to wear off and people have time to think and to process what happened, they often remember something. It might not be something big or important. But he said that even the smallest thing, the seemingly most insignificant thing, can help.”
His eyes hadn’t left mine for even a moment. He continued to stare at me, waiting for me to say something like, Well, now that you mention it, there was this one thing…
“I didn’t see anything, Mr. Genovese. I’m sorry.”
Impatience flashed in his eyes. His jaw stiffened. But his voice remained calm and soothing.
“I know that’s what you think, Tegan. I’m just asking you to concentrate for a minute. Maybe close your eyes. I know it’s hard, but if you could just put yourself back in that vehicle…”
Close my eyes? Put myself back in that vehicle? He knew that was hard?
“I didn’t see anything.” I was fighting back anger, and I hated myself for it. He had lost his son. His only son. “I was looking at Martin. He was in a good mood, you know? So he was fooling around, and I was looking at him. Then it just happened.” BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Louder than I ever would have thought possible. “I didn’t see anything.”
She Said/She Saw Page 2