I didn’t kill Leland Ernest. I daydreamed and nightdreamed of killing him, but I didn’t. The killer and me though, there was a lot of overlap in our logic. Carrying out the crime on garbage night. Leaving Leland’s sliding back door open and dropping meat by the door so cats and skunks could ransack the crime scene. I favored slimy chicken; he used ground beef. Insane minds think alike. Same method, too. Blunt force trauma. We both had the rage of protective parents.
The barrette James found in Leland’s house? I’m not sure about that. I don’t remember wearing one the day I broke into his house, but Chloe could have snuck it in my hair that day. It’s equally possible the barrette fell out of my hair while I was working in the yard, and Leland picked it up from the grass.
What I thought was a sliver of Leland’s bone in my skin must have been a tiny fragment of the coffee cup I shattered at work. Or perhaps a freakish rogue hair.
I have been out of the hospital ten days now. My abdomen is still achy, but I’m stronger.
Also, I completed the full series of rabies vaccines, so that slow and painful death is off the table.
James stands barefoot behind his screen door with a cigarette in his mouth and a beer bottle in his hand. No gray T-shirt today. Uniform in the washing machine? He’s wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with a scattering of tiny holes at the crewneck from cigarette ash. Or maybe he bites his T-shirts. His posture and expression are both intimidating and troubled. The small foyer and hallway behind him are shadowed, and I can’t make out a single plant, coat rack, or coffee table. Strange, I have never been in his house.
I always made him for a boy scout, a do-gooder who would have been horrified by the monsters lurking in the dark corners of my mind. Of course I could be the source of his unhinged air, I’m undoubtedly the source, but maybe he’s always been troubled. If he’s a house-smoker, he’s knowingly exposing his daughter to secondhand smoke. Not very puritan.
What I’m trying to say here is, Man, he looks good. I was dating up. I can’t do better than James.
“What?” he says, bored, no intimation of opening the screen.
Since the porch I’m standing on is a step lower than his house, I have to aim my gaze higher than usual to find his eyes. “I wanted to tell you, thank you. For taking care of me. Calling an ambulance. Calling my mom. She said you stayed with my kids until she got there.”
“Anyone would do the same.”
“That’s not true, but OK.”
He takes a drag from his cigarette, turns his head, and blows smoke. “I didn’t tell anyone you broke into your neighbor’s house. I didn’t tell anyone you thought you killed Leland.” His voice shrinks and he gazes down because he can’t meet my eyes. He’s embarrassed for me, or for himself. “And the Boones, they never mentioned your name either. You’re in the clear if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Oh. OK.” I want to tell him I’m a good person. Most of me is good at least.
If I had met James one week earlier than I did, I would not have harassed Natalie and Ethan, I would not have broken into my neighbor’s house, I would not have considered murdering my neighbor or convinced myself I did. I truly believe that. Which is alarming and breathtaking. Some of us are that adaptable or weak; our potential for violence hinges upon one or two seemingly inconsequential variables.
I want to explain to him how lonely and terrified I felt. I want to describe my level of sleep deprivation. I want him to know that under normal circumstances, I am normal.
None of these explanations will excuse my actions, not in his opinion. He cannot comprehend that I was certain I killed Leland, yet went on with my day-to-day activities, sex, joking. Even if he could forgive my delusions, he could never get past me storing his spooge in my fridge. That one’s a sticking point. So why bother?
He takes another drag and drops the butt into his beer bottle. “So you’re feeling better?” He is only going through the motions. He wants me gone.
“Yes. I’m better. It was my IUD. My explosive device,” I joke. His mouth remains a hard, unforgiving line, and my joke withers. “They tell me it could have caused a number of my symptoms. It messed with my hormones, which messed with my brain and body in all sorts of interesting ways. They’re also convinced that my sleep deprivation combined with my meds induced psychosis. Like you said.”
“You were right about the Boones,” he says. “You heard?”
I did. Preschool teachers’ lounge gossip.
It was opioids. My god, it’s always opioids these days. After her back injury years ago, Natalie got addicted. When her doctor stopped supplying, she convinced her dear sister to be her supplier. Ethan found out and gave Natalie an ultimatum. She quit the pain meds, went through one week of vomiting, shaking, and mind-rattling pain. Her withdrawal scared the hell out of him; he wasn’t sure he could go through with it. Instead of flushing the meds down the toilet like she instructed him, he hid the pills in their one-year-old’s room. Ava’s room. Ava wasn’t walking yet, and Ethan hid them up high in the closet. No way could she get to them.
Natalie stayed clean for years, Ethan forgot about the bottle of pills, and in the meantime, Ava grew.
She loved playing make-believe, that little girl. Unicorns and super puppies and princess cats and tea parties with sea creatures. She was excitable and loud and talked a mile a minute and loved to dance on the couch and sing in the bathroom, but it also wasn’t uncommon that she’d play quietly in her room for two or three hours at a time.
When her parents found her cold, lifeless body that evening, the empty prescription bottle bearing a stranger’s name on the floor, and a couple pills set out like candy on her tea party plates, they knew someone in their family would go to prison. Natalie worried it would be her sister, Sarah, a single mother who worked the night shift as a hospice nurse, consoling families. Sarah, whom Natalie had coerced to be her drug supplier.
Late that night Ethan Boone buried Ava in the Springhill Valley Forest Preserve a few hours south. No cairn. No cross. No flowers. No trace.
Every time I brought up the possibility Ava was alive, it must have torn them apart.
“I heard about it,” I say.
“I didn’t tell anyone you solved it. I figured you didn’t want the credit or attention,” he says, his head cocked, his eyes drifting up. He’s sour. Huh. James is competitive. An alpha. He likes to be the smart one. Hindsight, that explains his attraction to me, at least partially. I came across as unremarkable, pathetic, and overly emotional. I made him feel like he had his shit together.
“That’s right. Thanks,” I say, humbly, because even though he likes having the upper hand, I feel sorry for him. No one in his department could solve the case, he couldn’t solve the case, but an unhinged single mother of two nailed it pretty quick from the outside.
But how could he compete? One unhinged, desperate parent can spot another unhinged, desperate parent. It’s like looking in the mirror.
“Will they go to prison?” I say.
“Too soon to tell. I think they’re charging Ethan with involuntary manslaughter and concealment of homicidal death. Very likely he’ll serve time.”
I lay my hand against the cool siding to counter dizziness. It’s not your fault. Police would have figured it out eventually. But I don’t believe that.
“Natalie will probably avoid prison,” he says. “They’re both claiming she didn’t know the meds were in the house, she thought he’d flushed them, and that he threatened her to stay quiet about the burial.”
Thank God. Being responsible for her smallest child’s death will torture her ceaselessly; at least she will be around to parent the other two.
“The sister. Sarah?” I say. Single mom with a heart of gold and no backbone, always trying to make everyone else’s life easier.
“She’ll lose her nursing license and her job, but she might avoid prison,” he says.
My greatest fear, the fear that steered my actions—losing my kids—has beco
me a real possibility for these people.
He rubs his jaw, and his eyes burn with thought. He’s trying to figure out the clues he missed with me. “Please don’t come by my house again.” If it hasn’t already, it is dawning on him now. He dated down.
I walk to my car, worried I may have ruined his life. He will never be a confident detective. He will second-guess his ability to read people. He might end up working as a patrolman or maybe a high school cafeteria security guard.
What’s worse is, I didn’t only kill his career. He might never trust another woman again.
He is a good guy who deserves to be happy. Despite his competitive alpha nature, he is calm, generous, and willing to compromise.
I was right though about just being someone he was fucking. James really liked me, sure, but if he had been my kids’ father, if he’d been in it for keeps, he would have stayed. My psychosis, my stalking, my perceived violent moment, my stash of his seminal fluid, wouldn’t have been deal breakers. He would have stayed for our kids, and, over time, he would have forgiven me and loved me again. Eventually.
Hell, in a year or two, we would be joking about my semen stash in the crisper. Something like, “Can you grab the carrots? They’re in the crisper next to the slick toilet paper.”
The eroders of a marriage’s vitality are also the eroders of abhorrence: sex, routine, shared experiences, shared jokes, and time. Like water and wind weakening jagged, angular rocks, they smooth intense emotions and they desensitize. For better or worse.
* * *
I’m on a twisted scavenger hunt, and my list is simple and cruel:
1. Visit one of your victims.
2. Visit another of your victims.
I park several houses away from the Boone house.
A man is scrubbing spray paint off their garage door. Red words on a white garage.
Child Killer.
A bucket at his feet, he’s scrubbing the letter K, but it’s no use, the shadow of smudged letters bleeds through. Whatever he’s using isn’t going to cut it. That garage is going to need primer and paint. Several coats.
The man is not Ethan Boone. I don’t know who he is, but I’m guessing he’s a neighbor. The low sun berates his back. With the inside of his forearm, he wipes his eyes. Maybe he’s crying. Maybe he’s sweating. Maybe a little of both.
The Boones have been tagged, marked as the worst type of people in something semi-permanent and glossy and lipstick-red from the hardware store. Their mailbox is in the grass, tipped on its side, the post standing bare. Grass needs cutting. Egg yolk clings to their front window, thick as dried phlegm.
But they aren’t here to see it.
They are gone. Word from the preschool teachers’ lounge is that they’ve fled, are living in a rental while Ethan sits in a jail cell, awaiting trial.
The community might have been able to forgive the child’s accidental overdose, depending on how the story was pitched, but the community could not forgive the Boones’ lying, their pleas for help, their playing the role of desperate parents begging for the return of their child.
The Boones’ betrayal stung. How dare you let us lose sleep, let us ruin our shoes to wade through muck for hours on end, our fingers cold and stiff? How dare you let us waste our time answering phones, making casseroles? How dare you let us worry ourselves sick about our own children?
My betrayal of the Boone family is a deeper pain, lasting and gnawing, like a surgery screw twisted into bone that aches with the changing barometer. It will be inside my bones, a part of me, and will endure even as my body ages and deteriorates.
62
BRING ON THE DRUGS AND DRAG RACING
Tony Durtato murdered Leland Ernest.
Leland had been harassing Tony’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Emma. He had sent Emma aggressive love notes and texts when the Durtato family lived in this house, my house. When Emma didn’t reciprocate his interest, dead animals showed up on the Durtatos’ back deck. Mice. Bunnies. Parakeets. Goldfish. That stain on the back deck Tony was eyeing as we talked about why he was moving? I’m planning to give it a serious scrubbing.
Tony Durtato never bothered filing police reports. Maybe he’d considered violence as a possible resolution from the start, daydreaming about it like I had. He put his house up for sale and bought a house thirty miles away. Tony and his wife had solid jobs near their first house, my house, so they didn’t want to move much farther.
Thirty miles wasn’t far enough. A month ago, Leland found Emma. He left notes in her car and trapped under her wiper blades, and showed up at the Olive Garden where she worked. Third time he showed up, Emma was fired. Even her sleazy, cocaine-jazzed manager was not willing to expose his staff and customers to that type of risk.
Tony, who sold me this house to escape, could not get his family away, could not keep his daughter safe. Somehow it escalated into a confrontation in Leland’s house with a pipe wrench. I don’t know the full story, and I don’t want to know.
My mind is unable to process the homicide. Strange, but I can only consider it superficially, as if it’s a tidbit from the board game Clue.
Tony Durtato killed Leland Ernest with a pipe wrench in the bedroom.
Lou’s daughter, Rachel, directed detectives to the Durtato family. Rachel and Emma were friends; they stayed connected on Snapchat. When detectives started circling her dad, swooping down to peck and rip him apart, Rachel spoke up. Told them she wasn’t the only girl Leland had harassed. Told them Leland had cost Emma her waitressing job only weeks ago.
James and Ariana cornered a fragile, traumatized Emma, and she couldn’t stop crying.
I think back to that last night James and I were together for just a few hours. He was upset about the case. He mentioned that a kid could refuse to talk to police. He had probably spoken to Emma that same day.
Desperate to spare his daughter from further interrogation, Tony stepped forward and admitted guilt.
One parent protects child; another child protects parent—the family preservation instinct can be savage.
But to know your parent violently killed another person—what an anchor on that child’s mind.
The thought stops my heart. What if Wyatt and Chloe knew I was capable of that violence?
Like Ethan Boone, Tony is awaiting trial. Taking Leland’s harassment into account, he will probably get a light prison sentence. But still. Prison.
And that yellow shovel, that sock, that Shopkin? I don’t know. Probably Chloe’s. Probably left in our yard like so much of her other crap, then gathered and tucked away by Leland Ernest.
I kind of regret that it wasn’t me who killed Leland. I know that makes no sense. Tony will go to prison; I am free to enjoy my children. But I want to be Point Bird. I want to be a fearless protector of my children and other people’s children. The type of person who walks into an escalating argument instead of shuffling to their car and pretending the injustice happening around them is none of their business.
Whatever you want to call my neurological condition, it has passed. Call it bat-attack PTSD. Call it Sleep Deficit Syndrome. Call it Sleep Deficit via Media Terrorists and Finding a Child’s Totems Under Suspect’s Mattress COMBO Syndrome. Call it amphetamine-induced paranoia and psychosis. Call it Major IUD Hormone Fail. Regardless of label, it’s gone. I still worry and I may be tired until the day I die, but I am no longer hallucinating.
I try to keep my distance from my laptop, taking a break from the heavy worries of Third World starvation, sex slavery, and horrific war deeds. I don’t watch Ava’s video. The Boones’ tragedy is a maelstrom, a strong whirling force capable of pulling me down and drowning me. Instead, I read romance novels before I fall asleep.
My new neighbors are moving in today.
Everyone wants to know who bought the murder house. The whole neighborhood is crossing their fingers for someone good. Living near the murder house carries stigma. It’s bad for home prices. It carries a reckless vibe, like hey, there’s already mu
rder in this neighborhood, bring on the drugs and drag racing.
I don’t fear the vibe. I’m optimistic.
Peeking from behind my window curtains, I yearn for a starter family.
Professional movers—men with horrifically heavy items strapped to their back—walk with their chests at right angles to their legs.
Whoever is moving in has enough cash to hire movers. A good sign. I’d rather be surrounded by people making better decisions and more money than me. It’s humbling, maybe humiliating, but makes for a safer environment for my kids.
63
UNDER MY SKIN
Brownies are done, cooling in a pan on the stovetop. The house is warm. Chocolate is rich in the air. Nate is sitting on the front porch, laughing with Chloe.
She’s got one of those battery-operated bubble blowers. She’s shooting bubbles into the air for Hulk, who is chasing the bubbles down to eat them.
I hesitate behind the screen and listen to them enjoy each other. “Hulk totally loves bubbles,” she says, giggling. “Look at her. She loves bubbles so much.”
Chloe’s wearing a tank top and shorts with a winter hat and mittens. Everything about her outfit is weather-incongruous. It’s the first day of October. Sunny, slightly cool. She’s wearing Wyatt’s old cowboy boots, which are two or three sizes too big. Any second, she’s going to take off running for something.
She’s going to fall, but she won’t die. Let it go.
I step out onto the porch.
“Smells good in there,” Nate says. He’s not here to take the kids, he’s here for a visit.
Weeks ago, Nate’s infidelity was gigantic, overbearing, and inescapable. Like Christmas at the mall. His cheating doesn’t seem ubiquitous anymore. I’m not sure what it seems like. Maybe a small, awful gift hidden behind the couch. A ring box full of spiders, their spindly legs glazed and glistening with gonorrhea. Gross and offensive, yet easy to hide. Easy to lose.
“We’re going to bring brownies to the neighbors,” I say. “Which means, the neighbors will probably get five or six, and we’ll eat the rest.”
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