The Secret Society of Demolition Writers

by Marc Parent

  Who took that photo? Who covered the bodies? Who called the police?

  Shouldn’t somebody do something?

  Crime photos are usually badly composed. You get a first impression when you look—in this case, the visible ear, the wisp of hair from beneath the sheet of the female victim (the mother, her mother), the soft features of the teenage girl—but you’ll guess wrong. The bodies look as though they were dropped from a height onto the floor, though they only fell from ordinary human height. The daughter looks as though she’s just walked in the room.

  He saved the file and ordered a copy from the newspaper’s archives.

  The newspaper stories about Samantha’s death—my death, Babe thought, not as in when I died but the death that belongs to me—were not accessible online. In this way Babe was like a teenager. He had come to believe that a thing that was not mentioned on the Internet might never have happened at all. A search for “Samantha Kent” turned up plenty, an African American studies professor, a missing go-go dancer, a talented sixteen-year-old long distance runner in Overland Park, Kansas, a fictional character in an interactive porn story, any number of people who weren’t her. He was glad for that. There was a theory in physics that, as he understood it, posited that there were endless universes with endless possibilities. You need never worry about what your life would have been like if you hadn’t, say, met a chubby brunette woman who had a birthmark shaped like a blueberry muffin on her left hip, who chewed bubble gum way past bubble-gum-chewing age, who worked in a stationery store and was absent-minded enough to look left and then right but fail to look left again before crossing a street, who was hit by a midsized car, possibly according to an eyewitness a blue sedan, a woman who died instantly. In some other universe, right now, she existed but you didn’t, or she existed but the birthmark didn’t, or no one had invented bubble gum. In some other universe, the two of you had never met. When he idly Googled her name, which he didn’t do often, he liked to pretend that all of those other people with her very common name represented the dozens of universes where she was still alive and well and had never met him, and good for her, he thought, good for her.

  Babe kept the flowers, Gerber daisies according to Hilary the pharmacy assistant, on the front counter. He tried to keep them going. He changed their water daily, and when they dropped their petals to the counter, one by one, it seemed like every bad movie montage he’d ever seen that described the passage of time and the death of something ineffable.

  She came back the next week, in black Mary Tyler Moore stirrup pants, and asked for antacid advice.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He meant about the heartburn. She nodded as though receiving sympathy for a great deal more. She stood wide legged at the counter, bent at the waist. She shifted her hips as though she were about to swing her foot onto the counter like a limbering dancer.

  “Your wife’s dead,” she said. She’d been doing some research of her own.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” he said. An inappropriate joke, a tic, really, from the days back about six months after Samantha’s death when he mistakenly believed his sense of humor had returned, bounced into his mouth. “Did you kill her?”

  Connie nodded in a forward direction. “Nope,” she said, “nope, that one I woulda remembered.” Then she laughed her hooting laugh.

  The next week it was acne medication.

  Then she had athlete’s foot, then rosacea, then psoriasis.

  That was the summer of there had to be a reason. Everything was innocent, of course! She was married! He was a decent guy! There had to be a reason she killed her parents, a reason she believed in God, a reason she sought him out. Neither of them understood. They met only at the pharmacy counter in the middle of the day, when business was slow, beneath the red letters that said CONSULT. If he were in the middle of a consultation, she browsed in the makeup section. There was a brand of very cheap, highly glittered preteen cosmetics that she loved: she would stripe the back of her hand with the testers (blue, pink, lilac, the Flag of Connie) and wait for him to finish. He spoke to her with paternal caution, the kind of wary, passionate tenderness he imagined people had for their teenage children. Pride, worry, rigor, joy. She depended on him in her stunted way. They had jolly, pointless conversations.

  “Hey Babe!” Connie would holler as she passed through the automatic doors near the front of the store. “How’s the pill and potion business?”

  She made the teenagers who stumbled through the store after school laugh, but they made her laugh, too. She couldn’t get over the pants! The underwear purposely pulled up to the waist with the pants belted around the hips!

  “I just want to—” She clenched her hands and mimed yanking someone else’s pants down. “You know? I want to pants them.” She hooted. “Seriously, that’s what would have happened in my high school!”

  A kid passed with the rolling walk that Babe attributed to overloose pants, overweight shoes, possibly shoplifted items stowed in underwear. His skin looked maloxygenated. His brown eyes looked trapped and nervous. “Can I ask you a question?” Connie asked. “I just have a question.”

  Babe could almost feel the pharmacy counter rise up around him. Then he realized he was dipping below the counter in embarrassment and fear.

  “Why the pants?” Connie asked the kid. “I mean, come on! You can hardly walk in them.”

  “Oh God,” said Babe. But the kid smiled, the kid displayed the great grillwork of his braces, which were paved with McDonald’s French fries. He gave a hitching shrug. “They’re cool,” he said.

  “Oh!” said Connie. “Yeah? What’s cool about them?” She really wanted to know. She examined the drape of the leg.

  “Hey man,” said the kid. “They’re just cool. Weren’t you ever young?”

  “Me?” asked Connie. She scratched her chin and winked sideways at Babe. “Not sure, man. I’ll definitely get back to you on that one.”

  OF COURSE THERE were theories.

  She was abused by her mother, the doctor. She was abused by her father, the head of a small Catholic charity. She was abused by her parish priest. She’d had a head injury and was never the same after that. She did drugs and had a psychotic break. She had seizures. She hallucinated. She snapped.

  She was abused by her mother the doctor under the guise of medicine, in the medical office that was, like the kitchen, an addition off the back of the house: she was abused on an examination table, she was abused with medical equipment, she was made sick with medication so that her mother could get the sympathy of a sickly child, she was a sickly child. She was abused by her father, the head of a small Catholic charity, and when she told her doctor mother about it, her doctor mother refused to believe it, her doctor mother slapped her. She was on drugs. She was covering up for someone else.

  She killed them for no reason.

  She confessed to the murders. That was a fact. She said the same thing to everyone, the lawyer paid for by her grandparents (both sets), the police, the social workers, the psychiatrists: “There’s nothing I can say.”

  HIS FIRST MURDERESS. His first Christian, for that matter, at least his first Born Again. Did that explain the daffy expression on her face? Maybe it was just all the corrections he’d made to his initial impression of her, a cheerful dork in a snowflakepatterned sweater. (Even that sweater seemed tragic to him now, fifteen years out of date. She clung to the knitwear of her youth.) Then an insane woman. Now a murderer, but what kind? She killed people. She believed in God. Babe didn’t know which was more unfathomable. Connie of the bad sweaters, Connie of the flowers.

  Connie, why did you do it?

  The teenagers who hung around the store became human to him, because of Connie. She was fascinated by the boys and disdainful of the girls, like any girl who for whatever reason hadn’t attended her high school prom. “They’re so big and quiet!” she said of those boys. In their raised sweatshirt hoods, they were a race of muffled men, lea
ning hood to hood to communicate, a branch of the military service in some mumbling country, on leave here on the shores of the strip mall. They examined batteries as though they were foreign trinkets, bags of Fritos like they were the local delicacy: delicious, possibly lethal, worth the risk. They never raised their voices, except, occasionally, to laugh. One had the laugh of a movie genie. The sound could shake you apart.

  Sometimes the European little old lady would ask for pharmaceutical advice when Connie was there. “Excuse me, darling,” she would say, putting her hand on Connie’s elbow. “Excuse me, sweetheart.” She’d wedge herself in at the consult counter, using her breasts as a lever, and Connie would try to step away, but the little old lady wouldn’t let her. She’d hook her arm in Connie’s. “No, darling, sweetheart, a moment, I wouldn’t bodder you but. Excuse me sir! I am wondering perhaps vhere is somessing for ear vax.” Who knew where she was from? Maybe there had been a moment in her life when she wished she had the nerve to swing a candlestick.

  “Listen,” Babe told Connie later, in the hosiery aisle. “You don’t have varicose veins.”

  “I don’t? Cool!”

  “No, listen. You don’t have acne. You don’t have psoriasis. You don’t have athlete’s foot. What do you want?”

  “I’m just worried about you,” she said. “That’s all. I worry.”

  “I’m all right,” he answered, insulted, ecstatic.

  She was so innocent. Not technically. She’d killed her parents, no suggestion of accomplice or mitigating circumstances. As a person, though, innocent and pure of motive. She brought flowers to everyone who treated her with kindness, even the guy at the McDonald’s. Imagine the guy at McDonald’s, a skinny Haitian teenager with walleyes and a shy smile, receiving a bouquet of flowers! She thanked people for the smallest favor. She seemed frozen at fifteen, as though she were the one who was killed, as though Babe were being haunted by the memory of a long-ago lost child.

  He tried to imagine the night of the murders and failed every time.

  You’d have to be that innocent, Babe thought, to kill your own parents. How could a girl with a guilty conscience manage it!

  DID YOU LOVE your parents?

  Yes.

  Did you love your mother?

  Yes, I said so, I just said so.

  But particularly your mother?

  I loved both my parents the same.

  But you killed them?

  Yes.

  Why?

  [Silence.]

  There has to be a reason.

  I didn’t mean to.

  Constance. Connie. The murder scene—

  I was there. You don’t have to tell me.

  Do you consider yourself a good person?

  I don’t consider myself anything.

  Do you consider—

  I don’t consider myself anything. There’s nothing wrong with me.

  SHE WOULD HAVE told him, as best she could, though no one would understand. She didn’t understand, either. If you’d asked her on October 10, 1982, if she ever could have killed anyone, she would have said no, of course not, and she would have believed it. But she was rageful. No one knew that but her parents, and even they didn’t know the depths. She was fifteen and furious. At night she whipped her thoughts around until she felt she could smash through the window and fly through the streets of the town, bursting into bedrooms. People were asleep like storybook children. They never woke up or looked at her while she pummeled them to death. Usually she dreamt of one bedroom visit a night, but sometimes she flew to two or three. She flew wrapped in garbage bags because of blood splatters, in bathing caps to avoid shedding hairs, in wigs so as not to be recognized. She flew concocting alibis. Usually she was righteous, but sometimes she killed people for bullying reasons, the girls who didn’t know how to dress, the boys with bad skin who made her nervous.

  She understood this as fantasy. She’d always gone to sleep with dreams of flight, since she was a little girl. They were the way you calmed yourself.

  What happened with her parents had nothing to do with that.

  BABE WAS CONSULTING a woman who had perioral dermatitis but thought it was globally antisocial to take antibiotics. At the end of aisle six (First Aid, Cough & Cold, Pain Relievers) two teenage boys walked up to Connie.

  “Can I ask you a question?” said one of the boys, the boy Connie had asked about the coolness of his pants. Only fair: of course he could.

  “Sure,” said Connie.

  “My friend says you killed someone.”

  “Shut up!” said the other boy.

  “Shut up!” answered the first. “No, seriously. We heard you killed someone.”

  Connie held still. She bit the side of her thumb. “Yeah,” she said at last. “I did.”

  The first boy shoved both hands deep in his pants pockets: the force of the admission seemed to knock him at an angle. “Get out!” he said. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” she said, casually, but now she wouldn’t look them in the eyes.

  “Like, how?” said the second boy. He grabbed at her elbow to get her attention. “Like, with a gun?” He raised his hand to hold an imaginary gun parallel to the ground and made a consonant-rich gunfire noise, a single shot.

  “Who’d you kill?”

  “Or didja go psycho on them with a knife? Ee-ee-ee-ee!”

  “No seriously, who’d’ja kill?”

  “Or like run them over!”

  “Leave her alone!” said the little old lady, who’d come to the rescue, but from a distance. She was afraid of the boys. She aimed her tiny shopping cart at them as though prepared to use it as a weapon.

  “It’s all right,” said Connie, exhausted.

  “Go away,” the little old lady commanded, and the boys were about to, until Connie said, “My parents.”

  “Your parents?”

  “Fu-huck.”

  They took a step back to look at her better.

  “Darling, you don’t have to tell them anything.”

  “She is a psycho,” said the second boy.

  “She’s a fucking psycho!”

  “Fuck!”

  Did Connie think they’d like her, if she told them, or did she just want to testify? The boys looked at her as though—well, as though she’d just announced she’d murdered her parents. One of the boys laughed a sudden run of nervous silver laughter: a giggle really. He put his hand to his mouth. “C’mon,” he finally said to his friend. “Let’s book.”

  But they didn’t turn and leave. Instead, they walked past Connie as though she’d become invisible. So invisible, in fact, that one knocked into her on either side, a girl in their way for whom there was no reason to expend any energy whatsoever, not even to step around her.

  “Pharmaciss!” called the old woman. She hailed Babe like a cab. “Pharmaciss!”

  Connie leaned on the end-aisle display of on-sale contact lens solution. The old lady stroked her arm. “Tugs,” she said. “Common tugs, sweetheart.”

  “I know,” said defeated Connie. The circles beneath her eyes looked like tarnished silver.

  “You’re a goot girl,” the woman told her.

  “That’s not true. You know, I did it.”

  “Not you, sweetheart.”

  “Me. I killed my parents.”

  “So long ago,” said the little old lady. She looked as though she were about to crawl into Connie’s lap. “Not you. Someone else, so long ago. You know? Ziss is life. Pharmaciss,” she said to Babe. “Cheer up the girl.”

  “What a command!”

  “Yes, please,” said Connie, and then she added, “pharmaciss.”

  “OK,” he said.

  “Good boy,” said the little old lady.

  HE THOUGHT OF dark-haired breasty serious Samantha, his kind, late wife. He heard her make fun of him: you have a crush on a Christian murderess.

  “Go away,” he thought, for the first time.

  A person who can do that is not a person. It’s not a crime
of passion, a person who can do that feels nothing, least of all passion. Think about her grandparents: they lost their children, and even so they tried to save their grandchild. Can you imagine what that feels like?

  No.

  She’s not more saintly for having been so bad before, you know. Real saints start out saintly and stick with the program.

  Oh, Samantha, let me have this. Surely this is the exception to every single rule. She wants to save me. I promise I won’t let her do it, but let her try. Let her do her best.

  Sam—

  Promise.

  Promise.

  HE TOOK HER to the spinning restaurant on top of the Holiday Inn, another childish pleasure for childish Connie, the definition of a place that would cheer you up. The place revolved once an hour. Every table was its own minute hand: you could keep time by yourself, quarter past, half past, quarter of. The diners couldn’t tell they were turning, they only knew that the scenery changed. In his pre-Samantha youth, Babe had waited tables there, a disaster considering his sense of direction. Eventually he took to wearing a compass around his neck, though how did that help? A four top would be pointing north for the appetizers, south-by-southwest for the entrées. He took Connie there for the same reason doctors prescribed Ritalin, a CNS stimulant, to hyperactive patients to calm them down. He figured they’d be less disoriented there. Sometimes they’d look out and see the downtown. Sometimes the highway. Somewhere there was a universe where her parents were alive.

  He thought the scenery, north, northeast, east, southeast, all the clockwise way around, would distract them. Where’s the mall? Where’s my house? Neither of them knew where the other lived. Mightn’t this be a way to explain your life in a place, up above and rotating. There’s where I was born, there’s where I get my car fixed, there’s where I met my wife, there’s my opticians, there’s where I cried, they tore down my parents’ house, there’s Mal’s Donuts, there’s where you and I met, there’s where I lost my wife, you can’t really see it, but right there, you see, left of the green neon, right of City Hall.