Circled

by Anne McAneny

  “Tomorrow at nine!” Kevin shouted just before I let the phone drop into its nest. A brother who knew me too well, as if he sensed the phone was distant from my ear. I hung up. Now I’d never get back to sleep. I lurched from the comfort of my mattress and yanked the blinds up. Dust flew out from between the neglected slats and made me cough. I brushed it away but it hung in the air like tear gas. I staggered back to bed and curled into myself, knotted up on the inside, my eyes wide and wondering.

  Reopen my dad’s case? What the hell was he thinking? Where was he when the case was still fresh, when the people and places weren’t covered in denial and grime, the events untainted by their infamy? I knew where. Drunk in some godforsaken rented room, or sobbing it out with some tattooed hooker, always trying to forget. Maybe if Kevin could avoid prison after rehab, he could put his off-the-charts I.Q. to better use than trying to steer around a Subaru driven by a blotto, 17-year-old, lacrosse star. The young athlete had entered the New Jersey Turnpike going the wrong way on the same night that Kevin had decided to pay me a visit in New York City. Kevin had tried his damnedest to avoid the kid, but Kevin was a Fennimore; we never landed on the lucky side of the rainbow. According to the skid marks, Kevin had managed a masterful swerve followed by a NASCAR-worthy spinout, but he who doesn’t die in that pathetic scenario loses. Kevin’s blood alcohol level tested on the edge of New Jersey’s stringent legal limit. At least they’d gone easy on him and put him in mandatory rehab first. With good behavior and positive counselor reports, he might get a lighter sentence, but he still needed to pay the price for killing a teenager while under the influence. Hardly a first in our family.

  Chapter 3

  Allison… nineteen days earlier

  Of course I went to see my brother. The medium-security rehabilitation facility couldn’t have been more contradictory. Rusted, barbed wire fencing around a wildflower-dappled field. Armed guards stationed at posts festooned with climbing vines of trumpet honeysuckle. An architecturally impressive medieval building with the latest in bulletproof, wired windows. Confined freedom. Open space with restricted boundaries. Pretty yet ugly. Even the name fought against itself: Drywaters. A clever play on drying out and getting sober? Probably didn’t sit well with the guys who abstained from the liquid poison and opted for the straight-to-the-vein high. The whole place made me itch inside where no fingernail could scratch. As an inmate, I wouldn’t know whether to explore my inner feelings or hunker down in a paranoid corner and babble sweet nothings.

  I checked my face in the rear view mirror. Still me. I’d given up on make-up six years ago. No matter what I tried, people noticed my eyes. Enhancing them was like putting a banana split on top of a hot fudge sundae, and minimizing them meant overdoing everything else. With no desire to make any part of my existence conspicuous, I settled for a thin layer of moisturizer and a pinch of the cheeks. Besides, it was my brother in there. No matter what I did, I’d still remind him of Dad.

  A male guard with dirty fingernails and the odor to match searched my purse. A female guard with stubby fingernails and a butch haircut patted me down. I mused as to why a metal detector couldn’t replace them. Perhaps because it couldn’t grunt and give directions with dismissive head nods. After another dozen layers of security, including sign-in sheets, an actual metal detector, a relinquishment of the package I’d brought, and a verbal confirmation that I wouldn’t pass Kevin any illegal substances, the visiting room proved underwhelming. For all that trouble, I should have been wheeled in on a throne and offered a platter of hand-peeled grapes while Kevin sat on a velvet cushion at my feet. The fold-out tables and metal chairs would have to suffice.

  “Hey,” I said to my fatigued-looking brother, the only guy in the room aside from the bored guard. Kevin’s eyelids looked heavy enough to sink a ship, and the usually erect posture that added power to his six-foot frame seemed defeated. I performed jazz-fingers to show off my empty hands. “Brought you some brownies, and those gross hard candies you like, but some dude with a wonky eye is giving them a CAT-Scan. Making sure I didn’t slip an alternate life in there for you.”

  He gave his usual half-grin, the one where the right side of his mouth curled up to meet the far end of his right eye. When we were younger, I made it a challenge to make Kevin laugh. I mean really laugh. It was the only way to see his teeth. And he was handsome as anything when he flashed those choppers and let loose with an unguarded reaction to life. These days, those teeth had to be in deep hibernation, hidden behind pale lips on a face that desperately needed some sun.

  We’d never been the hugging type, at least not as adults, but Kevin did stand up and lift his chin as I approached. “Hey, Allison. Thanks for coming.”

  “Didn’t have much of a choice. You kinda played the I’m In Rehab card.”

  We sat down across from each other, the chairs scraping loudly in the cold, high-ceilinged room. No noise-reduction optimization from the architect here as the only soft thing around was the guard’s gut. The cavernous quality of the place made me feel like one of those mountain climbers who appeared as a mere dot in a panoramic shot of sheer rock. I should have packed some spare oxygen for this meeting.

  “Mom doing okay?” he said.

  “Sometimes. On my last visit, her caretaker hinted that my presence brings on more of her spells.”

  That made Kevin chuckle. “You and me. We bring out the best in people.”

  We discussed the assisted living community Mom was considering as her next residence. It would be quite a leap to go from a homey, inviting, four-bedroom house to a pre-furnished, pastel-colored community where walkers outnumbered strollers and her current acre of grass would morph into a professionally maintained spit of sod. Kevin expressed his disgust with her desire to stay in Lavitte. I expressed my disgust with the housing market. With the family business out of the way, I gave him the floor. He was the one who’d called for this meeting, after all. I let him ramble on for ten minutes about everything in our dad’s case that bothered him, like the lack of a clear motive for my father to shoot Bobby Kettrick in the middle of the night in his own auto body shop. Or why Dad claimed to have screwed on a silencer to shoot a gopher at six a.m., but not to shoot Bobby through the heart hours earlier. Kevin rolled his eyes multiple times over the utter lack of motive for our father to kidnap and kill young Shelby Anderson. With no history of violence against anyone except his own wife, our dad had become a notorious double-murderer of two teenagers in a town where people didn’t even break the 18 MPH limit. Now, finally, with the whiplash speed of a sloth, things seemed to bother Kevin.

  I offered as much to the conversation as the fly on the edge of the table. Kevin didn’t seem to care. He needed me because I could walk out of here. My hands could dig and scrape with abandon, and my mouth wasn’t confined to five-minute segments of freedom. I could be his eyes and ears, a tool in his hands.

  “Please, Allison. Just talk to a few folks. They’re all gonna be there.”

  “Who’s going to be where?” I said, wrenching my eyes from the fly’s frantic maneuvers to my brother’s fixed, intensive plea.

  “Enzo Rodriguez is going home for his cousin’s wedding. Smitty’ll be in town for the 15-year reunion, and to visit his mom and dad. They still live on Marshall. And Jasper Shifflett is nearby, I think. He might attend the reunion. If not, I hired a private investigator to dig him up.”

  “Tell your P.I. to try Mars.”

  Kevin laughed. “I know, right? Anyway, you have to talk to them. It’s the perfect combo. Enzo, Smitty and Jasper. They’ll be right there in Lavitte and that’ll make them more vulnerable. They won’t be expecting it.”

  “Expecting what?”

  “A confrontation about that night. Especially from you.”

  If I were the hitting type, I’d have slapped some sense into my brother. As it was, I settled for abject nausea and said one of the few words that still held power in my life. “No, Kevin. Just no.” I emphasized my point with a horizontal
slice of my hand through the air, like an ump calling a play safe, which this one surely wasn’t. “That’s the last group of people I want to see. Have you forgotten what our dad did to the town hero?”

  “I know. I know.” Kevin sounded more energetic than he had in the sixteen years since he’d left Lavitte. “Listen, you found a better way to deal with all of this than me. Maybe because you were younger.”

  “Yes, dealing with your dad’s murder trial at age fifteen is a walk in the park.”

  “Either way, you took the high road. I never rose above sewer level.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” I said with an uncharacteristic sensitivity that only Kevin seemed able to root out in me. “You send Mom money and you’ve always looked out for me.”

  “Not like I should have. But hey, nothing like involuntary rehab to sober you up. And now that I’m finally ready to confront some issues, I’m stuck in this shithole.” He lowered his head to utter his next statement, and I could see his mouth curling in embarrassment. “I, uh, I did some hypnosis in here, believe it or not.”

  “Not.”

  “Seriously,” he said, animated by my pessimism. “It’s amazing what they’ll spend your tax dollars on. I’m hoping for a total breakthrough. I gotta believe there’s something from that night that’ll piece it all together, maybe smooth out this rocky road I’ve been on.”

  The guy across from me sounded nothing like my brother and my scowl let him know it.

  “Look,” he said, “even though you think I’ve squandered all my potential—”

  “Squandered. Break out the SAT guide.”

  “Shut up.” Curvy grin. “I’ve learned a lot about human nature over the years, and there’s too much that’s not right about that night. One thing’s for sure: They lied.”

  “Who?”

  “Everybody.”

  “Conspiracy theory? Taking a page out of Jasper Shifflett’s book, are we?”

  Jasper Shifflett. Two years ahead of me in high school. Probably considered his own birth a conspiracy between his parents. He might have been right, too, because he sure hadn’t won the lottery with those two: Frail and Frailer. Jasper had been too smart for his own good. He’d hung around with Bobby Kettrick and Smitty in high school as part of a havoc-causing trio, playing the part of the smart, calm one or the evil genius, depending on the level of cannabis coursing through his veins. I never did understand his attraction to Bobby and Smitty; maybe their presence helped numb his overactive brain.

  “Here’s a universal truth,” Kevin said. “Everybody lies to save their own ass, or the ass of someone they love. As soon as Dad became the scapegoat, the whole town piled on to save themselves.”

  “Going all negative Zen on me now?” I said.

  “Live the life I’ve lived and you’ll learn: never put anything past anybody. I mean anybody.”

  I slanted forward far enough to stir the interest of the nearby guard, but he had too good a slouch going to follow through with anything. “That’s real breaking news, Kev. What else you got? That people suck?”

  “You’re gonna do this, right, Allie? I got a detective in Lavitte putting the files together from Dad’s case. Nice guy. Blake Barkley.”

  “Sounds like a cartoon dog.” An image of a bloated, burping detective in an ill-fitting suit filled my mind. With a hound dog face, of course. I pictured him standing over my diminutive father, beating a confession out of him while checking his watch repeatedly to see if it was time to go home and crack open a beer. He’d already have humiliated my dad by flashing pictures of the young victims—the cobalt-eyed, fast-footed Bobby Kettrick, and little, freckle-faced Shelby Anderson.

  “Here’s the thing, Kevin, Mom’s not gonna know otherwise even if you do discover some breakthrough.”

  “I’ll know otherwise.”

  My patience began a slow collapse. Discussing the past was not a muscle I flexed. Ever. The entirety of my remaining muscles tensed up with the sudden overuse of this atrophied one. I tried to shake it off with a measured glance around the room, taking in the dust dancing in the morning sun, and the crack in the wall behind Kevin’s head that resembled the east coast of the United States, but my eyes returned to the pleading, desperate expression of my formerly robust sibling. “Again,” I said, “why does it matter?”

  Kevin inhaled slowly, looked down at his fingers. I followed his gaze, shocked to see my father’s hands at the ends of his arms. The sight softened my snide expression. So that was it. Kevin was turning into my dad and he wanted a new ending.

  “There’s this empty space in my head,” he said. “It hurts like hell. All the time. And it rattles.” He shook his head so I could hear it, then smirked. “Whacko, right? How can empty space rattle? But that’s just it. It’s not empty. There’s something there and I can’t get to it. You know when you can’t think of a word?”

  “I know it too well lately.”

  “It’s that feeling, multiplied by a thousand, multiplied by sixteen years. Not knowing the details of that night is eating at me. It’s like the space has teeth, and it’s hungry—and it’s growing. I even feel it in my stomach. Sometimes at night, my whole body shakes.” He put up a hand to stop me from the predictable retort. “And no, it’s not the DT’s.”

  “Too easy,” I said. “Give me some credit.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “if I could wrap my mind around it—even if the truth is worse than anything we think—at least it would end this torture.”

  I guffawed. A worse truth? Like my dad left victims buried in shallow graves from Maine to Florida? That he fathered a secret family who all grew up to be killers themselves? Well, you never knew.

  Kevin bit his lower lip and looked me straight in the eyes. “I managed it all these years by drinking and drugging.”

  “Alert the presses,” I said, my sympathy meter in need of a serious jolt.

  “There’s a reason they call it serving time,” he said. “Too much time to think and nothing to numb that spot except dealing with it.” He drove the knuckle of his index finger into his head like he wanted to bore a hole and pull out the diseased emptiness. I could picture him yanking out a contaminated, throbbing blob with a grotesque mouth, and big, wet lips. It would scream at him: You wanna know what happened that night? You really wanna know? ’Cause I’ll tell you. And once I tell you, you can’t put me back. I’ll be out in the world to stay and I’m not easily dealt with. Still wanna know, sucker?

  I wasn’t sure how I’d answer the disgusting thing. I’d grown accustomed to life in denial and ignorance.

  “It’s like trying to do a Rubik’s Cube blind,” Kevin said. “You gotta be my eyes, Alley Cat. Can’t you at least try? I have money stashed away. I can cover you for—”

  “It’s not the money, Kevin!”

  “What is it, then?”

  “I got my own issues, you know. And when I do something, I really do it. I dive into this cesspool, I might drown.”

  “I’ll resuscitate you.”

  I sighed. “You know me. Writing ten-page essays when the teacher asked for three. Working five hours overtime when the boss asked for two. Besides, it’d be me against Lavitte.”

  “When’d you ever let that stop you?”

  He knew exactly what to say. We were cut from the same frayed cloth, after all.

  His face hardened, making his eyes glaze over. For a moment, he looked like my mother in one of her less aware states. “I don’t want to end up like Dad, you know?”

  I knew.

  ***Thanks for reading the sample. If you’d like to read more, just go here: Raveled***

 

 

 
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