by Steven James
“It’s a versatile word.”
“Now it means, what, cool?”
“Sure. It’s like stupid. If I say, ‘That was just stupid,’ it means it was awesome, righteous, wicked.”
I looked at her curiously. “But if you say, ‘That’s stupid-’”
“I mean it’s stupid.”
“Oh. So, stupid means brilliant and sick means sweet.”
“Pretty much.”
“That’s stupid.”
A tiny smile. “Now you’re catching on.”
Tessa set down the book.
She was totally curious about what had gone down last night between Patrick, Amber, and Lien-hua, and she wanted quite badly to ask him about it but wasn’t exactly sure how to bridge into the topic.
Patrick took a seat on a footstool across the room from her. “Are you still mad about earlier today, at the motel when I had to leave?”
“Naw. It’s all good.”
“So the winter session class at U of M, that was, what, kind of stupid-in the stupid sense of the word?”
“Yeah. But it was nice to see some of the spots Mom used to visit. Dad too.”
Ask him about Amber.
No, start with Sean.
The lights in the house flicked off then on, and a moment later Amber’s voice floated down from the top of the stairs. “Sean? We should really bring in some more firewood, in case the electricity goes out.”
“He’s still shoveling,” Patrick called up to her. “But I can get some for you.” Then he made eye contact with Tessa, and she realized that was probably not a good sign. “Tessa and I will get some.”
“Seriously?” she said unenthusiastically.
“Seriously. Come on.”
A few minutes later she was dressed for the weather and meeting him outside the patio door. He was wearing his snazzy new camo jacket. “Promise me you’ll leave that here when we go back to Denver,” she said.
“Deal.”
He clicked on his flashlight, and they started trudging through the driving snow toward the woodshed.
After a few steps she said, “Patrick, what was it? Whatever happened between you and Sean?”
“What do you mean?”
“Something happened. It’s always there, between you two. A wall. Was it an argument or something?”
He didn’t answer right away. “It wasn’t an argument.”
“What then?”
“Life,” he answered vaguely. “Schedules, work. His family and my career. Hey, I was really hoping we could talk about-”
“That’s weak.”
“Weak?”
“Every family has that stuff. You either choose to stay close through it all or you don’t.”
For a few moments he walked in silence through the night, holding his flashlight steady against the weather. “I guess we never did.”
“So you’re saying you never did, or that you both never did?”
“Tessa, this isn’t really-”
“Okay, whatever.” She waited. It wouldn’t be long.
She started counting to herself to ten, made it to six before he said, “All right.”
They reached the shed, and he muscled open the snow-sealed sliding door but didn’t enter. “When I was seventeen, Sean and I were driving home from a party one night. The roads were icy and I was dozing off. He swerved. We hit another car and”-Patrick took a small breath-“tragically, Tessa, a woman was killed.”
“Oh, my God.”
Her words weren’t glib or impudent but filled with sympathy, and I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have told her the news.
On the other hand, it was probably time she knew what’d happened. I gestured for her to go inside the shed, then I followed her. “Sean always said he was trying to avoid a deer, but I, well… I wondered if maybe he’d had too much to drink.”
“Did they do a Breathalyzer test?”
“I don’t know. It would’ve made sense, but if they did, it didn’t raise any red flags.” There were no lights in the woodshed, so I handed Tessa the Maglite, then started scooping up split logs. “I’d seen him drinking at the party. When I asked him about it later, he told me he’d only had two beers.”
“So not nearly enough to get drunk-not for a big guy like him, not over the course of a whole night of partying.”
“No. Not if it was only two beers.”
The way she held the light I could see her face, and she was looking at me questioningly. “What do you mean, ‘if it was only two’? You didn’t believe him?”
“I didn’t see any deer tracks, Tessa.”
“Deer tracks?”
“By the side of the road.” Clutching the logs against my chest with my left arm, I used my right to add to the stack. “I looked for tracks, but I didn’t-”
“Yeah, well, you just said it happened at night. How can you be sure you didn’t just miss seeing ’em?”
“Tessa, it was-”
“He’s your brother. You don’t just distrust someone like that-unless, did he lie to you all the time?”
“No. Not at all.” I finished gathering as many logs as I could. “Are you going to get any?”
“Well, there you go, that’s it, then.” She picked up a few logs, but instead of carrying them herself, she added them to the heap in my arms. “No wonder he pulled away from you. You were the only one who was with him that night; he probably needed you more than anyone else to believe him.” She shook her head disparagingly. “Big surprise things didn’t turn out so peachy for you guys.”
I’d had similar thoughts at times over the years, but I’d never let myself articulate them as bluntly as she’d just done; however, that didn’t mean I was particularly thankful to her for pointing all this out.
She grabbed a couple more logs, laid them on top of my stack so that now it reached my chin, then said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get the flashlight.”
Then she picked up two small branches and left the shed.
Wow, great job there, girl. Way to blame him for all the problems he’s ever had with his brother. Nicely done.
So, she’d royally screwed up this conversation, and they hadn’t even gotten to the topic of Amber.
Tessa aimed the flashlight’s beam onto the snowdrift-littered trail to the house.
As she thought about what Patrick had just told her, she couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to accidentally kill someone like that. But then she realized that she shared something macabrely significant with Sean-both of them were responsible for taking the life of another human being.
But you shot a man on purpose; he killed a woman by accident.
You shot a man on purpose.
She tried not to think of that night, of the warm spray of blood splattering the back of her neck, or the soft thud of the man’s body landing on the floor behind her, or the worst part-the iniquitous satisfaction she’d felt squeezing the trigger.
Her answer to the psychiatrist rushed back to her: “It feels like I’m sinking into a place I can’t climb out of on my own… like it’s getting harder and harder to breathe, to see a place where hope is real again.”
A place where hope is real again.
Yeah, that would be nice.
Even now as she remembered firing that gun, she sensed it again, savage instinct climbing up through the ages and spreading through her like fingers from an outstretched hand. Something primal, that unspeakable part of human nature that feels comfortable in the dark.
A shiver ran through her, and it was not because of the storm.
“Tessa.” Patrick’s voice disturbed her thoughts. “How did you sleep this week?”
“How did I sleep?”
“Yes.”
Sean and Amber’s house had been built half into a hillside with the basement and garage on the lower level. Since the fireplace was upstairs in the living room, she headed up the hill toward the patio door. “Pretty much like always.”
“You’ve never gotten into a figh
t at school. Not once since I’ve known you.”
A fight?
Oh, I get it. This is about Sean. He’s mad you said that about Sean.
They reached the house, and she propped the door open. “No. I don’t get into fights.”
“But yet I can see you’re really good at beating people up.”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to beat you up or anything, I was just-”
“No, Raven. It’s not me I was talking about.” With the wood in his arms, he had to turn sideways to make it through the doorway. “It’s you.”
For a moment she stood there, speechless, frozen in place by his words, paralyzed by her past.
Beating herself up?
Yes, yes, she was.
And for good reason too!
She entered, closed the door.
Sean was still shoveling the driveway out front, and Lien-hua and Amber were talking in Amber’s bedroom, so Tessa quietly followed Patrick through the vacant living room to the fireplace.
He bent to deposit his logs. “I’m just saying, I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”
“You think I’m being too hard on myself.”
“Yes.”
“For killing someone?”
“I was the one who shot that man, Tessa. I was-”
“Don’t do this, Patrick.” She set her branches down and helped him unload his wood onto the pile that was already waiting by the fireplace. “I told you before I’m the one who pulled the trigger of the-”
“Tessa, he turned the gun on himself. He knew it was over for him. He knew he would spend the rest of his life in prison. So he-”
“Tried to put me into another kind of prison. So you’ve said.” She let out a sigh. “Forget it.”
“No, wait-”
“I said forget it. It doesn’t matter.” She gave him back his flashlight. “Is that gonna be enough wood?”
“We can get more later if we need to. And it does matter. This has been eating away at you for months, and it’s something we need to deal with.”
“I’m gonna get changed.” Tessa knew that her words had barbs to them, but she didn’t try to remove them at all.
As she left to stow her winter clothes, she did her best to shake off the thoughts of that night when she’d fired the gun and-whether it was really that guy’s intention or not-had plunged out of reach into her own private little prison.
73
Tessa and I met downstairs again, sans jackets and boots.
I chose the footstool, she returned to the sofa.
Though she didn’t seem like she wanted to talk about that night, now that we were into this, I wasn’t ready to drop the conversation in the middle. “Let’s say for a minute that I believed you, that it wasn’t a suicide attempt, that, just as I shot him, you turned the gun on him and squeezed the trigger.”
“Yeah, but you don’t believe it, though.”
“How would it change things if I did?”
She was wearing a gray hoodie and began unconsciously toying with the hood’s string. “What do you mean?”
“Is that what it would take for you to leave this behind, to stop revisiting it?”
“For you to believe me?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean like with Sean?”
“That’s different.”
“Oh. I see.”
“But maybe,” I backpedaled. “I don’t know. Maybe, yes. Like that. Like if I would’ve believed Sean. Would things be different?”
She stood and walked across the room, pausing beside a framed cross-stitched picture of a whitetail deer hanging on the wall near Sean’s minibar. “You remember that guy in San Diego like a year ago who tried to… well… force himself on me?”
Even now the memory burned hot and intense. “Of course.”
“Well, what would it mean for me to forgive him? Do I have to be able to go up to him one day and chuck him on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, by the way, it was no big deal that you tried to rape me back there. How ’bout I friend you on Facebook?’”
“This is serious. Don’t be flippant about it.”
“I’m not being flippant. It’s the same as what you were saying-what would be different if I forgave him? That’s what we’re talking about. What does forgiving someone even mean?”
“I think in some way you need to be willing to let go of what happened. Whenever you don’t forgive someone-”
“Don’t even say ‘you end up hurting yourself.’”
I was quiet.
“Were you gonna say that?” She didn’t sound spiteful, and I almost wished she had. More than anything she sounded lost. “Were you going to throw me an overworked cliche?”
She stared at me, waited for my response.
“My point is, it’s not helping anything for you to live in the past.”
“I’m not living in the past,” she said sharply, “but I can’t help being affected by it. Right?”
I didn’t know what to tell her. Talking through issues like this, finding deep answers for a hurting teenage girl, I felt like I was way out of my league. “You’re right,” I agreed, “yes, the past affects us. It affects everyone.”
“So is that what it means then? To forgive yourself-is that what you’re saying? To just stop beating yourself up for the past, to stop hating yourself?”
“Or in this case, hating him, I don’t know. But that’s not exactly what we were discussing. Forgiving someone else is one thing, but we were talking about you, and I’m telling you, I don’t think you need to forgive yourself for what happened that night in DC. That man was threatening to-”
“All right.” Her tone was stiff and certain. “One last thing, then. That school shooting in Oklahoma last year, remember that?”
“What does that have to do with-”
“Just, do you remember it? Those two sophomores and the sixteen other kids they… well…”
“Yes. I remember.”
“Well, afterward I heard this guy being interviewed on Fox News; he was, like, some kind of youth motivational speaker or something-you know, who travels around telling kids at school assemblies not to use drugs and to have positive self-esteem, stuff like that. Anyway, on Fox News they asked him why he thought those two kids did it, why they killed those other students.”
Of course I remembered the incident and the nationwide search for answers that followed it. “What did he say?”
When she’d mentioned self-esteem, it sent my thoughts flying to the videos I’d been watching earlier and made me think of Lien-hua’s comments on the submissive role of Basque’s partner: more easily dominated, lower self-worth.
The knives would hold different meaning to him-or none at all.
In the videos, Basque was “The guy”-Tessa said, crossing the room toward me again-“he was like, ‘I can tell you this much, those two kids didn’t have any answers. They were lost, they hated their classmates, hated themselves.’ And the anchorwoman, she leans forward and says, ‘But what is the answer?’”
“And did he have one?”
Only Basque was filmed. So who would stand behind the camera, the dominant partner or the submissive one? I wasn’t certain, but my inclination was that the person behind the camera would be the one calling the shots.
Unless that’s his signature, recording the murder of women “No.” Tessa looked at me. “The youth speaker guy was, like, ‘I don’t really know, but I know kids oughta feel good about themselves.’”
“Self-esteem again,” I said, still struggling to follow both her train of thought and my own.
The locations of the victims matter.
It’s always about timing and location.
“So here’s the thing: go to any auditorium full of teenagers and ask ’em if a coach, a teacher, a counselor has ever told them to feel good about themselves, how many hands do you think would go up?”
“All of them.”
DNA from two victims was found on a knife in Reiser’s t
railer, but no videos of their deaths.
Torres arrived the day before you did. Lien-hua was in Cincinnati…
The psychosexual background would show a close association between sex and violence…
“Right.” She tapped her finger against the edge of the couch. “So then, ask the kids if they already know that’s not the answer. Guess how many hands go up then?”
“All of them,” I conceded, still unsure where she was going with all this.
The videos were planted. That’s why that person returned to Reiser’s trailer Wednesday night…
“Exactly.”
You need to follow up on any other cases with videos of people being killed during the years of Basque’s imprisonment, see if the person who filmed him might have used a different partner in the intervening “Because,” she went on, “they know they’ve done stuff they shouldn’t feel good about. That’s the thing-any idiot can see that just feeling good about yourself isn’t the answer, and I’m tired of being told that it is. I’m tired of being lied to. Are you even listening to me?”
Her words scattered my thoughts of Reiser and his murderer. “Yes. Sorry, I am.”
“You get it, right?”
I wished I had a quick fix for her, a way to heal her emotional scars, but I didn’t. Honestly, I had the feeling that anything I said would only come out sounding trite or cavalier. “No one likes being lied to. Especially about something as important as dealing with a heavy conscience.”
It wasn’t a great reply, but she accepted it, then let out a soft breath. “You can’t just make it go away, Patrick. It’s there-guilt or shame or whatever. And trying to feel good about yourself isn’t gonna solve it, not if you’re trying to be honest with yourself at the same time-honest about what you’re capable of. Denial is too cheap a cure for what I did.”
Having her finally open up like this meant a lot to me, but also left me feeling awkward and ineffectual because I could hear her desperation and brokenness and I had no real answers for her. “Even if you did kill him, Tessa, wouldn’t that be a sign of courage, not weakness?”
“How would it be courage?”
“He was unjustly threatening the life of an innocent human being, and you saved her; it’s just that in this case the innocent person happened to be you.”