When I still didn’t take it he said, “Fine, more for me.”
He cracked the can open. The pop-top clicked and carbonation whistled out. He tipped the thin can in my direction.
“You sure?” he said. “Last chance.”
What emerged from my mouth was unfiltered and unrefined, even though I had subconsciously rehearsed it in my mind a hundred times in the last minute. Be honest and frank anyway. There was no more hesitation.
My lips parted and I said matter of factly, “Shoddy, I killed Duncan.”
The can in his hand tipped forward from his suddenly limp, outstretched hand and clattered to the ground. It lolled around for a second before settling in the oil puddle amidst my drops of blood.
I didn’t move. I waited for his reaction.
“I know,” he said.
I don’t know what I expected him to say, but it wasn’t that.
His eyes caught my own. His arms hung down by his side, limply hanging on to the plastic bag. But he never broke the stare.
“When?” I said softly.
“When what?”
“When did you figure it out?”
“I didn’t know for sure until now. But don’t forget, last Friday night I was there. Well, for most of it. I was the one who brought you back in the alley behind Primal Bar. Nobody else was there at the time. Then I left you to go to the store for water. A little while later, you stumbled up the street covered in garbage and God knows what else. I guessed blood. I’ve seen blood before, Auggie and you were smudged in it. When I read the Providence Journal Saturday morning in the car and saw the story about the body they found behind Primal, I made a few educated guesses.”
He paused, picking through his vocabulary for the right words.
“The dead kid in that article, beat up behind Primal, the description sounded like Duncan. I’m the only one who knew you were back there. And he’s the only one you would ever hurt. To that extent, anyway. Years of rage must be a powerful weapon. It had to be you who finally did it.”
He emphasized the last three words. Then he continued.
“You’ve been off all week, Shaw. I said it to you before. Something wasn’t right with you. There was all the Lindsey bullshit but that’s been going on for months. I knew there was something else.”
“You don’t know how right you are,” I said. I shuffled my feet a little. I reached up and wiped my hands down over my face from my forehead to my chin. Blood was caking my right hand and I must have smeared some on my cheek. I didn’t care.
“Don’t worry Auggie, I’m not going to tell anyone,” he said quickly, most likely reading my gesture to be fear. It wasn’t. It was mostly relief. “I know you don’t have it in you to actually murder someone. It must’ve been an accident. You’ll be fine, we just have to get home and figure out the next step.”
The moment wasn’t over. There were more steps to take than Shoddy could ever imagine.
I looked over at Lindsey still asleep, her head pressed against the window.
I thought of that fucking red paper again. I was in a dark cave and it was a torch, ready to illuminate the monsters that lurked in the shadow. Not a beacon of light but a terrifying tool of truth. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. Half of the guilt was out there. No reason to stop now. I was finally gaining control. It started here.
“You know, in some sick way I think I knew it was going to come to this,” Shoddy said. “The kid pushed you and pushed you and pushed you. I’m not saying he deserved whatever you did to him but there’s probably someone, somewhere that would say you were justified. I mean, come on, it was Duncan.”
“And Lily,” I said.
Shoddy dropped the plastic bag again. Two more cans rolled out and into the same oil puddle.
“What?”
“I killed Lily, too.”
He looked like a sunfish pulled from a pond by a teenager. His mouth puffed open and closed, eyes bulging huge. He finally mustered enough energy to stammer out a few words.
“I didn’t know that.”
Chapter 4
Lily Conroy was born in Hartford, Connecticut. Her parents named her Lily, not Lillian, just Lily. Her mother was a high school English teacher at a prestigious preparatory school and, being a devout lover of all things literature and all things relating to her Irish heritage, she looked to the Emerald Isle’s great writers for baby-name inspiration. She found it, ironically, in James Joyce’s story The Dead. She always loved the layered, complex tale but it was always the supposed innocence and purity of the housemaid Lily that she connected with. Joyce based the nomenclature on medieval art and architecture a time when white lilies symbolized the Virgin Mary and her infinite purity. He only somewhat meant it in that way. Whether Lily’s mother fully understood Joyce’s intentions was debatable. She mostly liked the sense of superiority that came from explaining the name’s roots to her less educated Connecticut housewife friends.
Regardless, Lily loved her name. Turned out when she got to high school and read James Joyce, she found the author dull and stuffy and admitted to me once that she never actually finished one of his works. Not The Dead, not Ulysses, nothing she was assigned in high school or college. She made me promise to never tell that to her mother. I was an English major. I had read them all cover to cover. It was sort of refreshing that Lily hadn’t.
Lily’s family had money, the inherited and the earned kind. Her father was some sort of insurance guru; I never understood exactly what and never really cared to. He packed up his young family early on and moved to a suburb called Lyme. I found out from a Trivial Pursuit card that Lyme, Connecticut was where Lyme disease was first discovered. At the time it was useless knowledge but I figured that if it comes from a board game it has to be true. I used the tidbit to start conversation with Lily at dinner once early on in our relationship. She was put off and a bit insulted. Perhaps, I learned, trivia wasn’t the best icebreaker.
Her family was one of those families that I had always heard about but never encountered. Their house could have been on the cover of my mother’s housekeeping magazines with their crystal chandeliers and enormous spiral staircases leading up to umpteen bathrooms and a labyrinth of bedrooms and hallways. I never went there but Lily described it perfectly, having spent her youth getting lost in the many cupboards and closets on purpose, just to scare her mother or the nanny. Just for the fun of hearing them hustle from room to room, sobbing in frantic search for the young girl. Her best and only memories from her youth were these unplanned hide and seek games she orchestrated without notifying the other participants. She’d leap out at just the right time, as they were dialing the police department to report a missing child. She said the terrified, ashen face of her nanny made her laugh. Her mother’s rosy-cheeked relief made her feel warm, wanted and welcome in the drafty house.
Lily had a normal but relatively strict upbringing. Her parents, to their credit, deflated any of the snooty rich-people air of entitlement that I saw in many of the other Connecticut trust-fund babies walking the halls at college. Lily was taught manners, etiquette, polite upper-society lady things that I thought only existed in James Joyce books. The only way you’d ever know it was by watching her walk. She always held her head high, never slouched, her body in perfect symmetry and balance. She was grace and dignity personified. But all her elegance couldn’t totally hide that taste for disrupting the status quo, that wild-eyed abandon that made her hide in closets just to scare her caretakers.
After high school, where she was obviously and understandably the popular girl, she escaped south to college in one of the Carolinas or Georgia. She never told me exactly where or the name of her school. Within one year she grew bored of her surroundings and by sophomore year she had transferred back north to Providence College. She always used to say the Deep South wasn’t the right place for a Northern Belle.
I could never forget the night when I first met Lily. The memory remained one my most vivid
for a long time. When I recalled it to the forefront of my cortex, all five senses kicked into overdrive.
It was early on sophomore year. A seasonably cool breeze carried on it the smell of the vomit that was hurling from a freshman girl leaning into the bushes. I was sitting on the steps in front of McVinney Hall watching the young campus newcomer hug the landscaping. Her friend, standing with her, told me said she took too many diet pills before going out drinking. I didn’t really show much interest other than the entertainment value. Her friend soon left her, probably looking to get her night started: a night that would probably end with the friend in a similar position to the girl in the bushes. That aspect was the most entertaining.
Earlier that night I drank in my room alone. All of my friends left campus and went home or stayed in studying. I had no reason to go home and no tests to study for so I poured a few drinks, watched a movie and when the cabin fever set in, took a walk to enjoy the cool autumn night. A slight buzz warmed my body and I stopped at the steps for the view. McVinney Hall was elevated on a minor hill and one could see a large chunk of the college from its front stairway.
I think I remember the vomiting girl so clearly because I saw Lily standing a few yards away right under the street lamp on the walkway: and Lily was something to remember. I never thought that I’d see anything as attractive as she looked that night. She was a true beauty. Not the kind of beautiful that the drunken guys hunt after a few hours of slamming down Buds. But rather the kind of beautiful that should be made into a marble statue. She was the kind of beautiful that made you want to just sit on a bench and stare at every curve in her body. The kind of beautiful that made going to an old stuffy museum worth every second.
At first, all I did was observe. This beautiful creature was out of my league. Plus, she probably saw me sitting next to a vomiting freshman girl. Not the best pick-up scenario in the word. Lily didn’t know the freshman girl was not my responsibility; that I didn’t want to get involved with that train wreck.
So I sat watching the slim redhead under the humming streetlight with no intention other than to snap a few mental pictures. I had never seen this girl before, which wasn’t that strange. It was a big campus but not that big. One would think that after a year I could at least recognize my classmates. No matter, later I’d look through the student directory given to us last year and try to match her face to a name.
After a few minutes, though, watching the redhead under the street lamp became more than just a way to waste away the evening. She intoxicated me. The strange part was that my desire was so much more than sexual. Obviously she was gorgeous, but she was not the kind of beautiful that makes you want to club her and drag her to your cave like most of the Neanderthals around campus.
I must have looked like a dirt bag sitting on the steps watching her chest heave in and out with every breath. Earlier in the evening, before the cool breeze came, it had been warm. She wore a yellowish sundress that hung loosely from her body and blew in the soft wind that now crept across campus. A green ribbon ran from the back of the dress, around and underneath her chest, tying in a bow at the front. It pushed her breasts enough so they bulged slightly, the tops protruding from the spaghetti strap dress.
She tossed her long red hair to the side when she called to her friends further down the path. Lily was very Irish. She was very cute and very Irish. Whisper-pink freckles dotted her pale, cream-colored skin up her bared arms. She had a small nose soft rolling cheeks, spattered with the same airy pink freckles. Her mouth was small and round when closed, like a cherry. Colored that way too, naturally light red and unadorned with heavy lipstick. When she talked her lips stayed small and full. But then she smiled and they blossomed open, scrunching her little nose ever so slightly and forcing her cheeks to purse inwards, giving her dimples.
No feature entrapped me more than her eyes. Emeralds in a basket of pearls, they sparkled lightly set in her creamy skin. The inimitable green color radiated unaltered by the moonlight, the fluorescent lamp above or any other environmental influence.
That night she was wearing a silver headband that tamed the wild red flaming hair roaring out from her head. It fell softly, without effort onto her shoulders, partly to the front and partly to the back. It blazed under the headband like a campfire under a crescent moon.
She was a piece of art: a single brush stroke away from perfection. I just wanted to look at her, maybe even talk to her at some point. The hopeless romantic in me fantasized in that few minutes about a house on a lake and the long summer nights out on a boat under a starry sky. The fantasies never last as long as you want. Then again the fantasies are never as good as the realities.
I sat on the steps debating whether or not I should walk casually down and introduce myself. Forget the mental pictures and the student directory. I should just break out of my comfort zone and approach her. It was the first time Lily would insight in me the avant-garde. It should have been an easy choice, what with a vomiting girl to my side and an angel in front.
In the time that I spent observing Lily a small crowd had gathered around the sick girl, including the resident assistant and a group of EMTs. The crowd swelled so that people were now stepping over me to see the situation in the bushes. They interrupted my daydreaming and I began to feel uncomfortable and claustrophobic, but still unreasonably interested in the tableau.
I got up, and made my way down the stairs unconsciously in the direction of the redhead under the streetlamp—she was the one reason I was still there. Like a mosquito, I was drawn to the lamplight.
I was like a mosquito smacking a bug zapper when I realized I was within a breath of Lily. She hadn’t moved since I first saw her from the steps, but now I was standing on the other side of the very lamppost that illuminated her.
I tilted my head just enough to catch a glimpse of red in my eye and finally I turned my head to look at her.
She paid no attention to the average guy leaning against the lamppost. It didn’t bother me, I was just happy for the chance to stand near her. Something inside me, though, kept telling me to say something. Say hello, you fool. I got this so much, the constant debate over what to do within my own brain. Now it was a slightly less strenuous debate but they were not all this frivolous.
Just turn around slowly and brush up against her and get her attention. She’s beautiful and you want to talk to her so start with that nice guy thing you have going.
My brain was actually making sense, and if it weren’t for my heart I would’ve done it. Something in me told my brain to silence the debate and to just be patient and assess the situation.
Suddenly, without warning the girl in the bushes darted out from the crowd, screaming at the top of her lungs. I glanced up from my cognitive debate just in time to see her bound down the stairs directly towards us, arms flailing uncontrollably. I stepped back away from the lamppost, into a mud puddle, and onto a rock. The girl came crashing into Lily who had not even noticed the frantic girl speeding towards her. The girl’s hand, which was clenched in a fist, slammed onto the side of Lily’s face sending her careening down towards the puddle and rock I was standing on. Without a thought I jumped down, throwing my body underneath hers and catching her in a trust falls reminiscent of summer camp.
The flailing girl had knocked Lily on the head inadvertently and continued her rampage down into the parking lot. The resident assistant and EMTs bounded after her, yelling and tripping over the orange medical bags they dragged so cumbersomely.
I lifted Lily to her feet and dragged her over to the stairs that I had been sitting on earlier. There being no more vomit or yelling the crowd now dispersed, even though there was an injured girl lying in my arms directly in front of them. I sat down next to her and propped my left arm behind her for support. After years playing hockey, and after taking a few whacks to the helmet, I was wise enough to know it could be a concussion; the vomiting girl had a hefty build and she dealt a powerful blow.
Lily’s eyes were open but sh
e had a glazed over look about her that scared me. I was now left alone with her because her friends had followed the yelling girl into the parking lot to deal out some vengeance for their fallen friend. I found out later that they were escorted home by the resident assistant and never even asked about getting help for Lily.
What do I do now? I thought. I don’t know where she lives and I can’t bring her back to my room. Or could I? Would she be freaked out?
Everything I ever thought about right and wrong entered my mind at that moment. Everything I ever learned about treating other people came into question. I knew Lily would be fine, but I knew I should get her some ice and have her sit somewhere inside. The situation was minimal compared to what went on at that campus daily but it set off a shopping list of cognitive controversies in my brain that affected my very character. I wanted so much to help this girl. I wanted more than anything to carry her off to my room sit her in my chair and put some ice on her head. I wanted her to come back to reality and see me sitting next to her and thank me with a big hug and her undying love.
But I couldn’t. Lily didn’t even know me. That little voice in me screamed, “red flag, red flag.” What if I scared her? What if she screamed like the vomiting girl? I would never forgive myself.
She wasn’t hurt badly; I could have yelled after the EMTs or ran and got one of them. They would have helped her. I would have walked away and never met her. I never would have spoken to her. I would have continued admiring her from a safe distance. The series of nighttime events that changed the lives of so many people would never have happened.
But as Lily so often did, she caused me to break from my comfort zone. I didn’t call for help. I decided I would be the help.
I knew she wasn’t hurt that night because within a few minutes Lily opened her eyes. She did it slowly. The emerald flicker was weak, but it was there. It took her a minute to focus but as soon as she did our eyes locked for a second. When she realized she didn’t know me she shot up frantically and moved a foot to my right.
Stone Angels Page 3