by Julia Keller
But it fit. For her, it fit.
He and Bell had spoken only twice in the three years since the night of his injury. Their brief exchanges occurred in public, in the high-ceilinged, cold-floored corridor of the Raythune County Courthouse. Bell had been accompanied by a corrections officer; she was serving her own sentence by then, a two-and-a-half-year term in a minimum-security facility, to be followed by eight weeks of supervised probation and community service.
One of their interactions came during a break at the inquest for the fatal shooting of Danny Lukens. The second occurred just before the commencement of the civil suit for wrongful death brought against the county by Danny’s grandmother. On both occasions, Jake’s exchange with Bell was formal, stilted, and short. The first time, she looked into his eyes, looked down at his wheelchair, and then looked in his eyes again. She said, “Oh, Jake.” He replied, “Yeah.” That was it. The second time was similar: Her “How’re you doing?” was followed by his “Well as can be expected, I guess.” They’d always had their own system of communication—shrugs and sighs, mostly, and upraised eyebrows—and that system still adhered. They both sometimes found words to be impediments to true communication. They’d never discussed that—discussing it in words would have made them hypocrites, wouldn’t it?—but sensed it in each other. Words are superfluous and irrelevant, is how Bell would’ve put it. Words suck, would’ve been Jake’s way of expressing the same sentiment.
This morning, with the sheriff’s job offer still filling the air like a skunk’s how-do-you-do, Jake had found himself suddenly wanting to talk to Bell. Which was ironic, given the fact that their conversations had never been long or especially intimate.
And furthermore—talk about what? He didn’t know. He simply hoped she was planning to stay in Acker’s Gap now that she had the option to leave.
Was it, he wondered, just the desire of one wounded animal for the company of another? The solidarity of the damned?
He shook his head. Get over yourself, Oakes. The thought was too fancy. Too grandiose. There was an excellent chance he’d hardly ever see Bell Elkins even if she did stick around, as infrequently as he left this cracker box of a house.
He opened the Rolling Rock he’d been cradling in his lap. Drained it. It was too warm—the sheriff had overstayed—but that was okay. He felt better already.
Then he backed up his chair with a quarter-revolution of the wheels and executed a tight three-point turn—the only kind it was possible to make in here, the space was so small—and pushed himself into the kitchen to fetch another. He’d have to make up his mind about Harrison’s offer, such as it was, and weigh the pros and cons. He liked to say that his favorite consulting psychiatrist was Dr. Rolling Rock, who never charged extra for house calls.
Chapter Four
The phone rang and Ellie almost dropped her teacup. The ring startled her. Her mind had been drifting again.
She looked around the dark living room. Night had slipped up on her, startling her almost as much as the sound of the phone. Where had the day gone?
She’d spent most of it up in the doll room. That much, she remembered. But when the sun went down she had returned to the first floor and then she had … what? How had she spent her time?
Well, hold on. Surely she could remember.
Let’s see, she said to herself. She’d made a cup of tea, and then another and maybe another still—she’d lost count, the way she was losing track of a lot of things lately. She was preoccupied. She had so much to think about now that she’d decided, calmly and rationally, to do the worst thing in the world:
Kill her own child.
All at once, she remembered. After she’d made the second cup of tea she had left the kitchen for a minute. To find the gun in the garage. She’d taken it upstairs to the doll room. Settled on a good hiding spot. By the time she got back down to the first floor, her tea was tepid. She poured it out and made another cup. And then, somehow, hours had gone by. In the blink of an eye.
The phone. It was still ringing. Whoever it was, they were persistent.
She considered ignoring the call, but no. It might be Brett. He was out late again.
“Hello?”
“Ellie—hey. It’s Sandy.”
A neighbor. Across the street and four doors down.
Damn. Ellie didn’t want to talk to anybody.
Why hadn’t she checked the caller ID? She’d been in too much of a hurry to hear Brett’s voice, that’s why. She was so certain it was him. Calling from the bank. Another board meeting had run long, perhaps. Or something else. Some other duty. He belonged to a lot of local civic organizations—it came with the territory, with being vice president of a community bank. Rotary, Lions Club, Optimists Club. She always got mixed up about which meetings happened on which nights. He’d told her where he was going tonight—surely he’d done that, right?—but it hadn’t registered.
“Hi, Sandy.”
“Sorry to call so late. I hope I didn’t—”
“Not a problem. I was up.”
“Oh, good.” Sandy hesitated. “How’re you doing, hon?”
“Fine. And you and Rex?”
“We’re great. Busy. You know.”
“Of course.”
Once, a lifetime ago or so it seemed, they’d been very close, she and Sandy. They had so much in common. They were married to busy, successful men and they lived in the best neighborhood in Acker’s Gap. There had even been, long ago, some shared vacations: Myrtle Beach, Colonial Williamsburg, Disney World. Sandy’s son, Alex, had been a friend of Tyler’s in grade school and middle school. By the time they reached Acker’s Gap High School, though, drugs divided them, the brightest of bright lines.
Alex was a No; Tyler was a Yes. A big, enthusiastic Yes.
In the spring, Alex would finish up his sophomore year at West Virginia University. Ellie knew all about Alex’s academic progress not because Sandy had told her—that would be cruel, wouldn’t it, to hold up the example of her own perfect child as a contrast to Ellie’s sad loser of a son?—but because the whole neighborhood knew. Everyone took note when Alex came home, skimming his way into the Banville driveway in his red Jetta with the blue-and-gold WVU decal in the lower right corner of the back window. Ellie hadn’t seen the Jetta there in a while; Alex must be spending all of his weekends in Morgantown now. No more trips home in the middle of the semester. Too much to do. A bright, high-achieving kid.
Sandy was speaking again. Ellie forced herself to focus on the words.
“Listen, hon. We saw Tyler last night. After dark.” A pause. How to go on? Sandy’s pause said. “He’d just left your house and he was running down the street. Well—maybe not running. But walking pretty fast. He looked—agitated, I guess I’d call it. Kind of upset, to be honest with you. I know he’s back home with you all again. And that’s great. Really great. But is everything all—”
“Everything’s fine.”
Ellie confided in nobody because confiding was pointless. It changed nothing. No one could possibly understand. She considered it a miracle that Brett was able to do his job at the bank. Or that she kept the house going. Or that either of them could behave normally anymore.
“Well,” Sandy said, “I’ve mentioned this before, hon, but you know—I hope you know—that Rex and I are here for you. And the kids are here for you, too. I know Alex feels just terrible about Tyler, about the struggles he’s had. And Sara—she cares a lot about Tyler. She told me so.” Sara was their sixteen-year-old daughter. “If there’s ever anything we can do, you just have to—”
“There’s not. But thanks. Really.”
She ended the call. Just like that. Sandy wouldn’t get mad at being, in effect, hung up on. She couldn’t get mad. That was the only upside to living in the midst of a lurid, long-running family crisis that everybody knew about because you lived in a small town: People had to cut you a lot of slack when you behaved oddly. They knew your story and they would always forgive you—because they
pitied you.
They knew as well as you did that there was no solution. No remedy for the tragedy.
But that’s not true, Ellie corrected herself. There is.
And she had figured it out.
* * *
The doll room was different at night. Without sunlight, it seemed bland and ordinary. It didn’t enfold her. Wouldn’t take care of her.
It was just a room.
Ellie turned on the lamp by her chair—there wasn’t an overhead light—and stood in front of the bookshelf. She reached out to the row of books at shoulder-level. She had to make sure, one more time, that she had what she needed.
After hanging up on Sandy Banville she had climbed the stairs to the second floor, and then the next set of stairs to the attic. And entered the doll room.
She pulled a small object from behind the copy of My Side of the Mountain. The book had been Tyler’s favorite when he was a boy. She’d read it to him—how many times? Four, five times at least. Then, when he was old enough, Tyler had read it by himself. It was about a boy who runs away and lives in the woods.
She sat down in the chair and held the gun in her lap.
She reviewed the evidence one more time, just to be sure. Just to be really, really sure.
Life with Tyler was impossible. The shouting, the screaming, the fights, the daily duty of inventorying what their son had stolen from them most recently. So far, the list included their KitchenAid food processor, Brett’s new raincoat, his golf clubs, her jade necklace. And money—of course. As much as Tyler could find, as much as he could stuff in his pockets when they weren’t looking—or sometimes when they were. Small things, big things. Things he could sell. Things that weren’t missed right away or things that were missed right away—but what of it? Because by now he’d picked up on the fact that they didn’t like confrontations. He’d brazen his way through their attempts to make him acknowledge his thefts.
And so on it went: her earrings. Brett’s Montblanc pen. The Keurig coffeemaker. Assorted sheets and towels. “What the hell does he do with towels?” Brett had asked her last week. Her husband—an intelligent and capable man, a success in business, a man people respected in this town—had sounded as baffled and helpless as a child lost in the woods. “Who’d want to buy used towels? And sheets, for God’s sake. What does he do with sheets?” She didn’t answer.
Her private theory: It didn’t matter what it was. Or what he got for them. Even a few dollars was more than he’d started with. Any money he got, he could use to buy drugs.
At first they had asked him about the missing items, which only made things worse. Instantly he would go from drowsy and amiable to angry. Volcanically angry. The words exploding out of him: “Right. Right. So you can’t find some piece of shit and automatically it’s my fault, right? I’m the bad guy. Gotta be me. It couldn’t be that you just misplaced it, right? No. Fuck, no. Gotta be Tyler. Tyler’s to blame. For everything, right? Oh, yeah.” Alternately yelling and muttering, waving his arms, he’d march around the living room. His stealing was so obvious that the whole scene—every time—was like a bad play, Ellie thought, like an over-the-top melodrama in which the actors were deliberately hamming it up for their own pleasure.
Did she and Brett ask for help? Of course they did. Constantly.
When the counselor had first proposed Tyler’s return to their home four months ago, after his latest stint at the rehab place in Florida, Ellie said, “Okay, but we need some resources this time. Strategies—in case it all falls apart again.”
Promises. Oh, there were many, many promises. Promises from the counselor, and promises from Tyler. Their son was the absolute king of the enthusiastic pronouncement, the sincere pledge that begged to be accompanied by a flourish of trumpets or, at the very least, a flyover by the Blue Angels: “Mom—Dad—it’s gonna be different this time, okay? It really is. Find me a bible. I’ll swear on it. Find a whole stack of ’em. Gonna take things one day at a time. Let go and let God. I love you two, you know that? I really, really love you guys.”
He promised to attend a Narcotics Anonymous meeting every day. Every day! Sometimes twice a day. Twice!
And do chores.
And keep his room clean.
And get a job.
It was all crap.
Ellie knew it was crap—this time, every time—even as she listened to her son saying it. Still she found herself strangely fascinated by how he could declare all those things yet again, the homilies, the platitudes, the histrionic pledges, the things he’d said four, five, six times before—or was it ten or twelve or thirteen?—without stumbling or hesitating or breaking out in giggles.
This time, it took less than a week. Four days after he’d moved back in with them he was the Same Old Tyler—or at least the Tyler of the last few years. He stopped showering. Stopped shaving.
Combing his hair? What a laugh.
And then the mysterious phone calls had started up again, coming at all hours, whenever he was home. At first he didn’t have a cell—he needed to earn the privilege, the counselor told Ellie and Brett, advising them not to buy him one—but that meant he was dependent on their home phone. Before the initial ring had finished he’d grab it and punch the button, mutter a few words and then punch it off again, and then he’d be gone. They were supposed to let the counselor know about things like that—but why bother? Nothing was ever going to change.
If Ellie and Brett had refused, if they’d said he couldn’t live here this time, if they’d said, No, you’ve had too many chances already and you always screw up, if they’d said, We’re not bad people, we’re not selfish people, but we have the right to have a peaceful life again, don’t we?—then Tyler would have been sent back to the rehab facility in Florida. Their insurance company had finally agreed to pay for it, even though the price had made Ellie blink and go back over that section of the brochure, certain that she’d read it wrong the first time, certain that they’d added an extra comma. No—she’d read it right. The total cost of a two-week stay, she realized, could buy you a house in Acker’s Gap.
Or maybe he’d be sent to jail, if he’d been breaking into houses and cars again to get his money and/or his drugs.
And once he was finished with rehab or jail, Tyler would be right back here on their doorstep, anyway, because he had nowhere else to go.
It was all a big circle. An endless loop. Unless and until they were willing to throw him out for good—some parents, Ellie knew, had done just that—they were chained to the wheel.
* * *
She felt her hands growing colder. It wasn’t just the temperature, she decided. It was on account of what she held in her lap: a Ruger LCP.
Brett had bought the handgun a few years ago, after an epidemic of burglaries in this area of town had put everyone on high alert. Then the burglaries tapered off. Brett stowed the gun in a dark-green tackle box in the garage, and sequestered the tackle box on the top section of the gray metal shelving.
He hadn’t touched the gun in months. By now, he might have even forgotten where he’d put it.
She had not forgotten.
She could handle a gun. Her father, Big Dave Combs, had been a hunter, and he taught all his kids how to shoot. It was a rite of passage. The five boys went first. And then Ellie and her sisters, Theresa and Lillian, took turns stepping up to the backyard range. Big Dave handed out little buttons of orange foam for them to plug in their ears. The noise could hurt. At first their hands trembled. After a few rounds though, they didn’t tremble anymore. Their hands were steady.
But all of that was a long, long time ago. Ellie knew she needed to hold the Ruger for a while, to accustom herself once again to its weight. It wasn’t heavy—in fact it was surprisingly light, for what it was—but there was a somberness to this object.
If fate were a thing you could hold in your hands, she thought, it would feel just like this: dense, ponderous but not heavy, a crucial accumulation. She needed to renew her acquaintance with the odd,
thrilling experience of being in charge of a weapon.
It would be self-defense. No question. A jury would not, could not, see it any other way.
She had thought this through to its conclusion—she pictured herself in the immediate aftermath, calling 911, speaking calmly and clearly, handing the Ruger to the EMTs when they arrived, explaining what she’d done and why she’d done it—and she knew the ruling would be self-defense. There might not even be a trial. She had read somewhere that it sometimes happens that way: The authorities don’t even make an arrest, the court system doesn’t want to bother with it. Everybody just calls it a day and goes home. Because everybody agrees that the act was justified.
And that’s what would happen here. Because once they understood the circumstances, they would nod, and the gentle light of pity would come into their eyes, and they would talk softly to her.
We understand, they would say, and someone would put a hand on her shoulder and add, God knows you’ve been through enough already.
Yes. God knew. Probably. Truth was, she didn’t think much about God. Never did. Big Dave had made them all go to church, lining them up on Sunday mornings and checking their necks to see if they’d washed properly, especially her brothers, but church was just something you did. The idea of God was always superficial in her family, it never reached all the way down to her bones. If God existed, then yes, He would see what she did, and approve, and forgive her, although that part was entirely up to Him, and she didn’t really care one way or another.
Self-defense. Perfect word for this situation. She had a right to defend herself, and a right to defend Brett, too. Because Tyler was killing them. And he was killing her husband even faster than he was killing her: Brett’s blood pressure was frighteningly high, his diabetes was out of control, he ate too much, he drank too much, the stress was horrific, all the numbers on the little devices that defined his life were going haywire. Going headlong in the wrong direction.