He didn’t like the sound of a list. He tried to imagine what reason Casper could possibly have to make one. What could he be unhappy about? What could he blame me for? Paranoids make lists. That wasn’t Casper’s problem, that was Friedrich’s problem. The world was Casper’s oyster that fall, not his enemy. Friedrich went back to his family and the tulips.
They were almost done. There were just six bulbs left, one for each of the Friedrichs to plant. Nora and the children were on their knees, dropping the bulbs into the last of the holes they had dug—small hands burying spring’s promise. Friedrich’s back was starting to hurt. He’d used muscles he’d forgotten he had. He stood behind them, leaning on a spade, smiling down on his family. If it all turns to shit, we can always become farmers, was what he was thinking but didn’t say.
Wanting to build on the day, not undercut it, he kept his doubts to himself and decided to kiss the mole on the back of his wife’s neck instead. He was just about to drop the spade when the slow thump of a single-cylinder engine caught his ear.
When he turned his head he saw Whitney’s black Triumph motorcycle heading their way. Helmet on, goggles in place, the biker was careening up the wrong side of the street. The motorcycle wobbled, the driver in danger of losing his balance. Friedrich guessed Whitney’d been too loaded to remember that Friedrich had told him to call him at the office for an appointment.
Friedrich didn’t want to talk to him. He was relieved when the motorcycle passed him by. He let the shovel fall and went back to the idea of kissing Nora’s neck. But the motorcycle turned around. Whitney had seen them. The motorcycle rolled to a stop two houses down, opposite side of the street. He got off the motorcycle, put down the kickstand, then took off his helmet and goggles and reached into his pocket. Friedrich realized it was Casper at the same time he saw the boy was holding a gun. Casper was on their side of the street. It was too late to run.
Friedrich took a knee next to his wife. But instead of putting his lips to the beauty mark on the nape of her neck, he whispered, “Don’t look up and don’t say a word.”
“What are you playing at?” Nora thought he was trying to sound sexy.
“It’s Casper.”
“So . . .” She started to turn her head.
“Don’t look. He has a gun.” Friedrich whispered, but Casper seemed to hear him. Keeping his finger on the trigger, he shoved his revolver into his jacket pocket. It was still pointing at the Friedrichs.
“What? Why would he . . . ?”
“I’m serious, just do what I say.”
“Whispering’s not polite.”
“You’re right, Fiona, it’s not.” Friedrich pretended he didn’t see Casper. “Come on, everybody, let’s go inside.”
“I don’t want to go inside. It’s boring inside.”
“What is going on?” Nora was scared and angry.
“Whitney called. Says Casper has a list of people he blames.” Friedrich looked up and, in the glass of the picture window in front of his house, he saw Casper’s reflection staring at their backs. He was walking toward them now, mouth open, his lips pulled back like Homer’s dog when it was ready to bite.
Nora put her arms around the children. “It’s time to go in the house now.”
Lucy stood and turned around before Friedrich could stop her. “Hi, Casper. Want to plant tulips with us?” Casper was on their lawn now. His right hand still gripped the pistol in his pocket. Friedrich could only assume he wanted to get so close he couldn’t miss. Friedrich armed himself with the shovel and waited for Casper’s response.
His clothes were wrinkled, and there was a grass stain on one of his knees. His hair hadn’t seen soap or a comb in days. The finger of his left hand clawed at the side of his head; he looked like his old self.
Lucy took two steps toward him. “Is that your motorcycle?”
Casper stopped walking.
“Can I go for a ride?”
Casper slowly shook his head no.
Friedrich forced himself not to glare at the boy or look him directly in the eye. He focused his gaze on Casper’s chest, slowly moved his hands to the end of the shovel handle. He’d only have one chance to break his neck with a blow to the head. That’s what he intended to do. “Lucy, don’t bother Casper now.”
The seven of them stood frozen in misunderstanding until Jack suddenly stood up, made his fingers into claws, screwed on his scariest face, and growled. Casper turned and walked back to his motorcycle. Helmet and goggles on, he kick-started the engine, clicked it into gear, and pulled away from the curb. He ignored the children as they waved and shouted, “Bye.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Fiona inquired.
“I’m not sure.” Nora roughly yanked the children through the front door.
Friedrich stood on the lawn, shovel in hand, hyperventilating fear even after Casper and Whitney’s motorcycle disappeared down the street.
“Lock the doors and the windows, and take the children upstairs.” Friedrich’s voice was calm as he dialed the operator.
“Is a storm coming?” Willy shouted.
“No . . . maybe . . . yes. Operator, get me the police.”
“How could you let us be out there if you knew . . . ?” Nora was crying.
“I didn’t know.”
“Yes, you did.” Nora slammed the window so hard the pane cracked. The police were on the line now.
“This is Dr. Friedrich. I live at Ninety-two Hamelin Road. I want to report a boy on a motorcycle. He was just here. His name’s Casper Gedsic.”
“What’d he do?”
“He stole a motorcycle and he’s got a gun.”
“He stole your motorcycle?”
“No, the motorcycle belongs to his roommate. Look, none of that’s important. The point is . . .”
“Whose gun?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he point it at you?”
“The point is, I’m a psychologist, he’s a patient of mine. I think he’s having a psychotic episode and is a threat to himself and others.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“I’ve been told he has a list of people he blames.”
“For what?” The cop was taking notes.
“He’s not happy with the treatment he received. Look, I know the president’s on the list. . . .”
“The president of the United States?”
“No, Yale. His name’s Griswold. And I think Dr. Winton might be on it. I tried to call her, but it’s busy. She lives up on Ridge.”
“We’ll send a car to Winton’s.” Friedrich hung up the phone and dialed Winton. The line was busy.
An hour later the doorbell rang. Nora was reading to the children from Charlotte’s Web. The spider had just begun to speak. Friedrich peered through the drawn curtains before going downstairs to answer the door. Two black-and-white patrol cars were parked at the curb.
Nora held Jack in her arms as she looked down through the curtains and watched Friedrich talk to the cop who stood on the front step. After a very few words, a complex sentence at most, Friedrich hit his forehead with the palm of his hand, staggered, then grabbed hold of the railing to keep himself from falling and slowly lowered himself down onto the stoop.
Her husband came up the stairs slowly and grabbed a sport coat. “I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
“Are we safe?”
“No.” One of the patrol cars stayed parked in front of the house while Friedrich drove off with Sergeant Neutch.
She was still holding Jack. He was getting heavier. Jack yawned and nestled his face into her neck. Nora told the others she was going to go down and make Jack a peanut butter sandwich before she put him down for bed.
Fiona picked up Charlotte’s Web where she left off, reading aloud to Willy and Lucy in her most grown-up voice.
By the time she got to the kitchen Nora was feeling a kind of exhausted that scared her and made her dizzy. The weight of Jack suddenly seemed unbearable. It took all her strength t
o open the refrigerator door. She felt impossibly tired, as if life were a weight pressing in on her on all sides. She forgot why she’d come there, how she’d gotten to this point in time and place. She put Jack down and leaned back against the stove. The pressure increased. Breathing seemed scary. She wished she didn’t have lungs. There was no safety from anything, not even this. She imagined that this was what it felt like if she were a diver on the bottom of the ocean who was getting ready to drown, who had already given up.
It was the same feeling Nora had had the other time, when she’d felt so overwhelmed by the inevitability of disappointment, the pointlessness of enduring, that she could not lift her hands or open her mouth to stop Jack from reaching into the frosting and upending the five-pound bag of sugar onto the floor. She watched him turn and move toward the door. Her eyes were open, but her brain would not tell her what she saw.
As Friedrich and Sergeant Neutch turned up the hill, an ambulance wailed by, lights flashing, sirens on. Three state police cars and a second ambulance were parked haphazardly on the cobblestone circle in front of Winton’s house. Car doors were open. A police radio crackled.
The stepdaughter was in the back of one of the cruisers. Friedrich and Sergeant Neutch heard her scream as they walked beneath the rustle of the blighted elms. The girl kicked and flailed at the doctor who held the hypodermic aloft like a knife.
Neutch filled Friedrich in. The stepdaughter had come home from a tennis lesson and found her father in the front hall, crumpled facedown at the foot of the stairs. She thought he’d fallen, knocked himself unconscious, until she rolled him over.
Thayer’s face was covered with blood. A .22 caliber bullet had entered his head just to the left of his nose and exited through his jaw—Thayer had been in the ambulance that had screamed past them.
“Sorry to see you again under these circumstances.” Neutch was talking, Friedrich wasn’t listening.
“We’ve met?”
“I was there when the parrots showed up.” They shook hands again. Friedrich didn’t know what to say.
A flashbulb exploded in Friedrich’s face as he followed Neutch into the house he once envied. A police photographer was taking pics of the crime scene. Chalk outlined the spot where Thayer had nearly drowned in his own blood. A state cop with a cauliflower ear told Friedrich more than he wanted to know. “He was still here when the daughter came home.”
“Who?” Flashbulbs, blood, and fear disoriented Friedrich.
“Casper Gedsic. The kid on the motorcycle you called about.”
“Oh yeah, right.”
“You think someone else was involved?”
Friedrich stared into the library. The crime photographer was taking pictures of Winton now. She was sprawled back in her chair behind her desk. Her head was tilted to the side, inquisitively. The desk drawers had been rifled. Rating scales were scattered across the floor. One of the state cops was standing on a piece of graph paper that illustrated their success. Winton’s eyes were wide open. She returned Friedrich’s stare. She looked . . . surprised. They didn’t see this coming. There was a bullet hole in her throat.
“Dr. Friedrich, I asked you a question.” The cop with the cauliflower ear was still waiting for an answer.
“What?”
“Do you think someone else had a hand in this?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
The state cop who’d been on the car radio came in and announced, “They just found the motorcycle behind the bus terminal.”
“You have any idea where he might be going, Dr. Friedrich?”
Friedrich shook his head no.
“We talked to the Bouchard kid whose motorcycle he stole. He said Gedsic had a death list. You were number one, Winton was number two. Any idea why he didn’t do this to you first?”
Friedrich was still shaking his head no.
“Well, you’re lucky.” Friedrich did not feel that way.
Neutch drove him home. Gray called out hello as he and the cop walked across the freshly planted tulip beds. The other cop who’d been left watching over the family was in the kitchen, eating canned spaghetti with the kids. Willy was asking to see his gun. Fiona was pestering the officer with questions. “Have you ever killed anyone? Would you kill anyone? What if you shot an innocent bystander?”
Lucy was drawing a picture of the tulip bed in full bloom to cheer Daddy up. Nora had told them their father had gone to help someone who was sick.
As soon as Friedrich made eye contact with his wife he began to weep. Willy burst into tears and ran to him, clutching his leg. Fiona had her arms around his waist. Lucy sat in place, tears streaming down her face, trying to draw a picture that would make everyone stop crying.
Nora’s lower lip trembled. A tear careened down her cheek as she wrapped them all in her embrace. “We’re going to get through this.” Neutch and the other cop averted their eyes from the intimacy of this resolve.
Lucy stared out the window. “There’s a man in our garden.”
Neutch ran to the window. “Where? I don’t see anything.”
“I only saw his shadow behind the pricker bushes.”
Friedrich’s world swirled around him. “Where’s Jack?”
Fiona looked under the table, Lucy checked the bathroom, Nora ran into the backyard. Friedrich was right behind her. He was still calling his son’s name when Nora wailed, “No!”
The birdbath in the heart of the tulip moon had been pulled off its pedestal. It had fallen at a puzzlingly oblique angle. Jack’s face was lifeless in two inches of water. The bruise on his forehead continued to swell and darken even after Jack was pronounced dead.
BOOK II
My first distinct memory is looking for myself in the family photo album. It was 1958 and I was four and a half. The album was as thick as a Bible, bound in leather; its leaves were stiff with snapshots pasted on imitation parchment, oversized pages in a fairy tale illustrated by Kodak, waiting for a text.
My hands could barely grasp it. Homer, my father’s older brother, was sitting next to me on the couch. My brother Willy, then nine years old, had twice the vocabulary of Homer, who was forty-two and had a beard that was worthy of a nineteenth-century statesman. Silky and black, it hid the cave in his jaw where the mad doctor had tried to cure him of his simplicity by pulling teeth.
Homer gave himself a one-armed hug as he rocked back and forth, repeating the same phrase over and over again. With his free hand he helped me flip the pages without ripping them: “Careful. If we tear the page, the page will be torn.”
That day I was wearing my favorite shirt—cowboy. It had pearly plastic snaps instead of buttons and Roy Rogers embroidered on the breast pocket, tossing a lasso over my heart. Homer sported a tie and suspenders, his pants coming almost to his armpits. Fiona was thirteen going on fourteen then. The night before, while drying the dishes, she was reprimanded by my father for calling Homer retarded. My father said he was “special.” Back then that word wasn’t thrown around the way it is today.
As it is with all memories, some of this I did not remember but learned later; I embellished it, colored it in with information garnered from undigestible tales regurgitated over family dinners, from conversations and arguments that helped pass the miles on family car trips, and from looking at the snapshots my father was taking of that day as I sat with Homer and Lucy on the couch. The future ferments the past, some memories become more intoxicating with time, others evaporate. It’s hard to separate what you think happened from what you know happened. Especially in our family.
All I know at this first moment of recall is that the couch smells like Homer, scents I will later come to identify as Old Spice and baby powder. A double hernia forced Homer to wear a truss that looked scary and chafed. Lucy sat on the other side of Homer. She looked older than twelve and had told me she had just gotten her first bra. She couldn’t decide whether it was tragic or beautiful that Homer would never know how handsome he was. Homer, at that point in t
ime, did in fact bear an uncanny resemblance to Montgomery Clift in the part of Sigmund Freud released four years later as Freud: The Secret Passion.
Homer and my grandmother were visiting from Illinois. It was the first time they had ever been east. Ida, as my grandmother liked to be called, had hennaed hair, a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet in her purse, and a Ouija board in her suitcase. She called my father “Sonny Boy.” And though Ida talked not unlike the farmers who rode wagon trains west on Million Dollar Movie (we had a TV now), my grandmother had a homespun, haughty elegance and a habit of holding your face between her thumb and her forefinger to make sure you were looking her in the eye, all the while chain-smoking Pall Malls through a red Bakelite cigarette holder.
As Homer and I flipped through the pages of the photo album, Fiona showed off at our new baby grand piano, Beethoven, “Für Elise.” My mother passed a tray of iced tea. A pair of big liver-and-white ticked pointers stood guard just inside the front door and began to bark as the boy next door approached our door. His name might have been Bud; I definitely remember he wanted Willy to come out and play catch.
Homer laughed when Gray, the parrot who lived on our front porch, called out the dogs’ names in my mother’s voice, “Thistle, Spot: Hush.” The dogs minded the parrot better than my mother. Homer was still helping me flip the pages. They’re crowded with tiny black and white snapshots with crimped edges. There were pictures of everyone but who I was looking for—me.
Homer seemed to sense my anxiety, or perhaps he just got tired of warning me about tearing the page. Whatever, his serious baritone reassured me: “We’ll find you. You’re here, so you’re here.”
Sure enough, when he turned the page there was a photograph bigger than all the rest in the album. I recognized the cowboy shirt I was wearing. Homer tapped the picture with his long, white finger. “There’s Zach.” That was my name: Zachariah Wood Friedrich.
“Look,” I shouted to the room. “There’s me!” Sometimes, when I dial up this first moment of self-awareness, I hear my father’s voice telling me, “That’s not you; that’s your brother Jack.” Other times it’s my mother who gives me my first hint about how much I don’t know about what I think I know. They must have mentioned Jack’s name before, but this was the first time I heard he was my brother.
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