Killer's Cousin

by Nancy Werlin

  “You were thinking of needling Julia, and you know it.”

  “Oh, and you’re so perfect yourself!” Then her voice changed. “I’ve said I was sorry. I’ve said it again and again … to Vic, to Julia. I couldn’t be sorrier.”

  “Julia found out?” I asked, even though I already knew. It explained so much.

  “Naturally,” said my father.

  “Shut up, Stuart,” said my mother. “Yes, David, she found out. Kathy told her—yelled it at her—in the middle of a fight.”

  I could picture it. Perhaps they had had that fight right here, in this living room. Perhaps Julia had said, Your father and I … and Kathy had flung back, Dad doesn’t agree with you! He agrees with me! Do you know what he does? Do you know …

  It was odd. I could almost hear her. Almost see her as she screamed at Julia, her shoulders stiff like Lily’s so often were. Kathy? I thought. Kathy, are you there? Are you here?

  I heard it then, plainly. Clearly. The humming.

  “David?” said my mother.

  I looked up. “Yes?”

  “Julia has never forgiven me,” my mother said. “But I am most sincerely sorry. I’ve told her. I told her then, and after Kathy … and I’ve written …” Her voice trailed off.

  “I understand,” I said.

  “I thought I meant well. But your father is right, too. Julia and I … I’d gotten into the habit of, well, I was always trying to score points … It went too far. I went too far. I know that.”

  I said, “It’s okay,” and I heard her sigh. I listened as my mother told the rest of the story.

  After the incident over the rent, Kathy had begun paying for real. Julia collected the checks, and kept a sharp eye on the checking account to ensure that Vic gave Kathy no extra money. My mother believed that this, and not Kathy’s death, was the true beginning of Vic and Julia’s estrangement. And then Kathy’s new boyfriend had entered the scene.

  “He wasn’t a nice Catholic boy,” said my mother. “Or even a nice Jewish boy. But I don’t know a lot about it. My brother … wasn’t talking very much to me right then. He had long hair. The boy, I mean.” Her eyes skittered away from my own hair, longer than it had ever been. “An earring too. Of course no job. And of course they were …” She gave me a quick look, swallowed, and finished bravely. “… having sex.”

  It was an odd moment to realize I loved her, my sturdily Catholic—despite the conversion—mother. I grinned at her. For a second, as our eyes held, I thought we might both laugh. Then she ducked her head. “Well. It was all perfectly ordinary, really. Julia overreacted. Anyway, it only lasted three months. But by the end, nobody was talking, even to argue.”

  Nobody talking. Typical Shaughnessy. Typical Yaf—

  I said quickly, “And then Kathy died.”

  “Yes,” said my mother. “Yes.”

  That was all.

  After a while, my parents went to bed, and I flung myself onto the sofa. Then I got up, and prowled into the bathroom; looked at the tub. It needed a good scrubbing. I had never bothered.

  If I closed my eyes I could almost see Kathy there. See the shadow; hear the humming.

  All at once I couldn’t bear being in the house. I put on my running clothes and headed out, fast.

  The Shaughnessy apartment was dark. The only indication that Vic and Julia were there was the fact that their bedroom door was closed.

  Lily’s door was also shut. For some reason I paused outside it for a few seconds. It wasn’t all Lily’s fault that she was so odd. Terrible things had happened in her short life.

  I was halfway down the stairs when I realized that I hadn’t asked my parents about Lily. What had been going on with her while Kathy quit school, got a job and a boyfriend, and fought with her parents? Very likely my mother and father would not have known. What was there to know about a seven-year-old? That she had been in second grade? That she had liked to sneak into the attic where her big sister lived, to play at being grown-up?

  I should live here, Lily had said of the attic, on the day I moved in. It’s all wrong.

  And then I wondered: Why would she want to live in the place where she’d seen her sister die?

  CHAPTER 19

  On Monday, I found myself whistling as I arrived at medieval history. Raina had kissed me, gently, the night before when we got back from seeing the student films. For a long moment it confused me. I couldn’t respond. And then I could.

  It was so sweet.

  I barely knew Raina. I didn’t believe she could honestly be attracted to me. Most importantly, more deeply, it felt wrong to think I could be with her. Or anyone. Very wrong; evil, almost. There would always be Emily, and what had happened.

  What I had done.

  Still, irrationally, I felt amazingly good. I decided not to talk myself out of it yet.

  I entered the classroom a full three minutes before the bell, and found Frank Delgado already slouched in his chair at the front. He was reading. Just as predictably, no one else, not even Dr. Walpole, had yet arrived.

  “Hey,” I said.

  After a pause, Frank dog-eared a page and closed the book. After a longer pause, he nodded hello. Over his shoulder, I squinted down at the title of his book. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

  On impulse, I pulled out my Star Market card and offered it to him. He stared at it, and for a moment I thought he might not know about swapping. But then he grinned—nearly everyone did when you offered to swap—and pulled out his wallet. I gave him ELLIS O’DONNELL and he gave me JOANNE STANBRIDGE.

  “That’s new,” I said, indicating the Zen book. “How are you doing with that other guy? Abu-something.”

  “Abulafia. Fine. What about you? Have you finished The Guide for the Perplexed yet?”

  “I’m listening to it on tape,” I said. “In the original Arabic.” And then I laughed because, after all, Raina had kissed me.

  Frank stared at me. I sat down next to him. I picked up the Zen book and looked through it a little. “You believe any of this?”

  Frank said, “I want to believe.”

  It was a near-perfect imitation of David Duchovny as Fox Mulder. I almost choked. Frank looked at me blandly.

  “You watch The X-Files?” I asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought it would be your kind of thing,” I said.

  “Why not? Too weird?” His mouth twisted. “Not weird enough?”

  I stifled another laugh. Frank noticed but didn’t seem to mind. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought there was the start of a smile on his face. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s TV. I guess I’m surprised you’d watch TV.”

  Frank stretched out his legs. “Why’s that?”

  “I’d have thought you’d think it’s all crap,” I said.

  “A lot of it is crap,” said Frank. “So I usually read something while I’m watching.”

  Now that was not a surprise. “I’m hooked on The X-Files,” I found myself confessing.

  Frank said, “I’m into Looney Tunes. I’ve seen every Road Runner cartoon multiple times.”

  I looked at him. He looked back. And then, as if on cue, we chorused together: “Wile E. Coyote. Supergenius.”

  “Brilliant stuff,” said Frank.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  But later that afternoon as I climbed the stairs to the Shaughnessy apartment, I was feeling itchy again, wary. Relief flooded through me when I didn’t see or hear Lily. I had run into Lily the night before, when I came up after Raina kissed me.

  Lily had been sitting on the floor of the living room, headphones jacked into the stereo, bare toes just visible beneath the hem of her flannel nightgown as she hugged her knees. Neither of us said a word, but I was conscious of the soft murmur of voices in the other end of the apartment. Vic and Julia, of course.

  Lily’s eyes tracked my progress across the room in the near-dark. I felt them on the back of my neck as I fumbled with the doorknob o
f the attic stairs. I fancied that Lily could smell me from across the room. Could smell Raina’s perfume. Incredibly, I’d felt a fiery blush rise on my neck and face. It seemed to take forever to get the door open and closed behind me. And even after I’d gotten myself upstairs, I’d imagined Lily listening from below, hearing my footsteps on my floor, which was her ceiling.

  Why did Lily make me feel so uneasy? I had to get hold of myself. Had to be mature. I couldn’t go on tiptoeing around, hoping not to see her. She lived here, and so did I. We were going to see each other. It was just a fact.

  As I changed to go running, I thought again of my cousin Kathy. I pulled out the photo and looked at her. It was a senior-year photo; she had been my age, more or less. There was a certain defiance in her smile. I wondered about her boyfriend, the one with the long hair who’d dumped her. I wondered if she’d ever brought him home. I bet she had, especially after she’d begun paying rent. I bet she’d enjoyed bringing him home, leading him upstairs under the noses of Vic and Julia.

  Had Vic and Julia been talking to each other then? Had Lily carried messages for them? What had the seven-year-old Lily thought of her big sister, the favorite child who had finally managed to lose her parents’ favor?

  And as I straightened up from tying my running shoes and leaned against the wall at an angle, balancing for calf stretches, an answer to my own question floated into my head. She was glad. She was thrilled. Don’t you see, she was suddenly the favorite.

  I couldn’t help myself; I whipped around. And I saw—I swear I saw—the faint outline of the figure I’d seen and sensed many times before. A slender girl. Kathy. I knew now it was Kathy. I recognized her. I took in several deep, shallow breaths.

  Then the figure was gone. I stared at the place it had been. I stared until my eyes felt raw. The late-afternoon sun sent weak rays through the windows and onto the floor. There was nothing there. There had never been anything there.

  Ghosts were for entertainment. For television. For The X-Files. They were not part of real life. I, for one, emphatically did not believe. Ghosts could not be real. For if they were, I would surely not be haunted by my cousin Kathy. I would be haunted—as I deserved to be—by Emily.

  I grabbed my keys and bolted down the stairs to run all the craziness out of myself.

  CHAPTER 20

  Over the few weeks that remained in the year, I saw Raina once or twice a week. It was casual; she did not kiss me again. Part of me was disappointed, but a larger part was relieved. I certainly made no move.

  It was good, though, just hanging out with someone. We spent some hours together in her apartment, Raina drawing or painting, me working on college applications—due by January 15th. Even as I kept myself apart, I got to know her a little. She loved her myriad step- and half siblings, but was wary of her mother. She was fully capable of unplugging and forgetting her telephone for days on end. She ate canned soup every night with undiminished enjoyment. She’d had two significant boyfriends, one of whom she still had feelings for. “But, you know, he’ll never leave El Paso,” she said. “And I had to.”

  Raina didn’t seem to need to discuss exactly what our relationship was, or where, if anywhere, it was going.

  There was only one really bad incident. Once, I looked up and found that she was sketching me, in charcoal, when she was supposed to be working on a still life for school. I was furious—literally saw red—but she seemed sincerely surprised to discover what her hands had been doing. She stared at her drawing for some moments as if it astonished her, too.

  And I—thank God, thank God—calmed down. Quickly. The red faded from before my eyes; the abyss receded. Nothing had happened. No reflexes had kicked in. I had not even moved. Nothing.

  I knew then that Frank was right. Fear was never far from me.

  “Come look,” said Raina, oblivious.

  After another moment, I did.

  The still life she’d been working on was a winter piece: bare branch, pinecone, shallow bowl of water, a dried chrysanthemum. However, a broken face was intertwined with it. An eye blinked from the center of the pinecone. A nose lay alone on the table beside the branch. A mouth gasped for air at the bottom of the bowl of water.

  My features. My face. One glance was enough. I looked away.

  Raina moved her shoulders. “Well. You can have it.” And she gave it to me. “I’m sorry. I told you I wouldn’t do this.”

  Once I got upstairs, I tore it up and burned the fragments in the sink.

  Outside, the days were short, the temperature dropped well below freezing and stayed there, and it snowed with extraordinary frequency and ferocity for Boston in December. Once or twice a week I shoveled the driveway and sidewalk with Vic, who insisted on joining me even though I said I could handle it.

  “I’m not that old,” he told me. “And with you helping, it’s the right amount of exercise.”

  Vic was looking great. There was an air of cautious contentment about him. He held his shoulders straighter. And Julia, too, seemed different. She smiled at me on the few occasions I ran into her, and asked me about my day, and how my parents were.

  “I can’t believe you’ve always done the shoveling by yourself,” I huffed at Vic. The latest snow had been wet and heavy. It stuck to my plastic shovel and was difficult to shift. “Haven’t you ever thought of buying a snowblower?”

  “Well, Lily often helps,” Vic replied. He dumped his own shovelful of wet snow with an expert, economical arm movement. “You wouldn’t think she could do much, but she’s not bad.”

  “Oh,” I said neutrally. Lily had not been conspicuous with a shovel after the last few storms. I heaved more snow onto the hillock we’d built at the far end of the driveway.

  “Bend your knees more, you Southern boy,” Vic advised me. He laughed when I misfired, tossing the snow into the street instead of on our mound. He said genially, “You’re wondering where Lily is today? Well, I asked her to come out, but she said no.” He looked a little sad, but then brightened. “It’s to be expected. She’s growing up. And she’s been a little moody lately. Before you know it she’ll be into those teenage years.”

  We continued shoveling in silence. I wondered if that truly was Vic’s interpretation of Lily. A little moody. Were he and Julia blind? Didn’t they understand that their reconciliation had upset Lily? Changed her life?

  Involuntarily, I glanced up at the second floor of the house, where I could see the floral curtains framing the living room windows. I didn’t really know if Lily was up there, watching Vic and me. But I thought so.

  The very next night I came face-to-face with her.

  I had spent the evening defending Fox Mulder on alt.tv.x-files, and then following a craving for potato chips over to Star Market. Coming home, I trudged upstairs in my boots as quietly as I could.

  I saw Lily as I shucked my coat in the Shaughnessy hall. She was standing outside her parents’ bedroom, with a drinking glass pressed between her ear and the wall.

  I couldn’t believe it. She was eavesdropping. No. She was spying.

  She snapped around to face me. Slowly she lowered the glass, her fingers tight around it. For a second I thought she would hurl it at me. Instead, she gritted her teeth. She was in her threadbare flannel nightgown again.

  “Lily?” I said softly. I held out my hand. “Give me the glass. I’ll put it away.”

  For a long, long moment she didn’t move. Then, still clutching the glass, she tilted her chin and walked slowly to the kitchen.

  I followed uneasily. I watched her carefully rinse out the glass and place it in the dish drainer. There was only a night-light on by the sink; Lily was a gray shadow. I said her name again, quietly. “You shouldn’t eavesdrop on your parents,” I said. “It’s wrong.”

  She didn’t turn. Her voice even softer than mine, she said, “Who are you to tell me about right and wrong?”

  Her words struck me in the throat like a knife.

  “I don’t care if you tell my parents
,” she added then, and the childish comment eased the pain her first had caused. Partly.

  I forced myself to focus. Julia and Vic had a right to know about the kind of spying Lily was doing. But … well, this was all very tough on Lily, too, and her parents didn’t appear to realize that. I said, “I won’t tell them.”

  “I don’t care if you do,” Lily insisted. She straightened her shoulders, and turned, giving me a straight look before wrapping her arms around herself. She was shivering; it was too cold for her to be standing barefoot on the linoleum.

  “Go to bed,” I said. “You have school tomorrow.”

  Lily ignored me. “Do you know what they were doing?” she said. “Do you?”

  Until that moment it actually hadn’t occurred to me to wonder. I had assumed Lily was listening to a conversation, but … a picture formed in my mind.

  “You do,” Lily accused. She took a step toward me.

  I groped frantically for something to say. “Look, Lily,” I finally managed. “The best way to deal with, uh … parental sexuality is, uh, not to think about it.”

  Lily’s face twisted with contempt. “You are just a jerk,” she whispered. She took another step toward me, eyes narrowing. “Maybe your parents”—her voice slipped into perfect mimicry of mine—“experience parental sexuality. But mine fuck. That’s what they’re in there doing, right now. Okay?”

  Something about hearing that word from Lily. And imagining Vic and Julia—

  My shock must have been apparent. Lily laughed, scornfully. But then the scorn faded from her expression, and that other look returned. The betrayed look. The vicious look. And beneath all of that, the despair. The fear.

  I wanted desperately to go upstairs to the attic, to crawl into bed and unconsciousness. I didn’t understand Lily. I didn’t trust Lily. She unnerved me. But—

  Tomorrow, maybe, I’d talk to Vic. Find some gentle way of suggesting a therapist for Lily, who clearly needed to talk to someone.

  “They never used to do it,” Lily said, almost as if to herself. “But—they do it now. Why? Why?” She stared at me accusingly.