The Watcher

by Jennifer Pashley

  So I took a hundred dollars from her drawer, from the envelope where she set aside money for bills, for groceries. She never directly confronted me. We had a standoff in the hallway. The envelope of cash in her hand. Her body already showing her pregnancy with Birdie that we had also never talked about. She glared at me. I pushed past her to get outside. I wanted my own things. I wanted my own means.

  The first time I rode that bike, I went halfway to Mount Snow and stopped, breathless at the top of a hill where you could see miles and miles of New York State stretch out below, quilted greens and browns meeting the sky.

  I could never tell him how many times I’d wished I had just died in the fire.

  Or how sometimes I thought I had. That I’d been a living dead boy all these years, stuck in the house with her.

  “You’re lucky to be alive,” Bear said.

  “I don’t know about that.”

  He looked surprised. “You could have died from a burn that large,” he said.

  “I meant the lucky part,” I said.

  He touched my hair, and it took restraint not to flinch at his hand. “You wouldn’t be here,” he said.

  I couldn’t tell him it was the luckiest I’d ever felt. I didn’t want to jinx it.

  “How did you get out?” Bear asked me. We sat up in the bed. I pulled the covers up over my chest. I couldn’t keep my hand from the hair on his stomach.

  “My mom,” I said. “She pulled me out with her.” That’s what she’d told me. I couldn’t remember it myself. Sometimes I had dreams about the stairway in the farmhouse, the walls licked with fire, the smoke filling my lungs. I’d feel the slap of flame on my back, hear screaming. Sometimes in the dream it was my dad. He was the one screaming. Most of the time, it was me.

  “I was in the hospital for like a month,” I said. “Because of the burn, and because of some breathing issues, but I really don’t remember it. Bits and pieces sometimes.”

  “Where was your mom?” Bear asked.

  “She was in the hospital too,” I said. “I don’t think as long. The beam broke part of her back, and she needed surgery. And then she was out, but we lived with my grandparents, and she had, like, a brace she had to wear. And they had arrested Park, and all that happened while I was in the hospital.”

  “Park is your dad,” Bear says.

  “Yeah.”

  “And your sister?”

  I closed my eyes. I should never have said anything.

  “She’s not your dad’s,” he said.

  “No.”

  He waited, and I felt his ankle wagging under the blankets. I could hear Buddy snoring on the floor in front of the fireplace.

  “She’s a secret,” I said.

  He repeated it to me.

  “Yeah. I’ve never told anyone about her. Like, anyone,” I said, “ever before. My mom has never taken her to the doctor, never registered her for school. She doesn’t have a birth certificate.” I rolled my eyes upward. Saying all of it aloud felt like that stairway again, narrow and closing in with fire.

  “Why?” Bear whispered.

  “She’s terrified of my dad,” I said. “She’s afraid he’ll find out—that, that she had another kid, and didn’t wait for him? I don’t know. She’s super paranoid,” I said. “But to her credit, he did try to kill us.”

  “Who’s her father?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where was she born?”

  “At home,” I said.

  “Were you there?” he asked, like he couldn’t believe it, and when I said yes, he just said, “Jesus.”

  This was why I didn’t tell. That one word, like it was all too much. To have been burned alive in a fire your dad started. To have watched your mother give birth to your secret sister. It was too much.

  The window was open just enough to hear the wind through the pines outside, like a cold, soft whisper. I saw Buddy rouse and lift his nose and sniff the air as it came in. The air was sharp. But the bed was warm.

  “You could get out of there,” Bear said.

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  “But?” Bear asked.

  “I can’t leave her behind,” I said.

  “Your sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your mother did that to her, not you,” he said.

  “She’s just a baby,” I said.

  “It’s abusive to both of you,” he said. “It’s just as bad to expect you to keep the secret, to live with that, as it is for her to keep her.”

  I was quiet. I didn’t disagree with him; I just didn’t know what to say. How do you leave? How do you leave behind that little pudge-legged curly-haired baby?

  “What if it kills you both?” he asked.

  “It didn’t, though,” I said. “What was supposed to kill me didn’t.” I chewed at my lip, thinking. “We should have all been dead,” I said. “But we’re not. I’m not, and now she’s here. I can’t just leave her.”

  He sat up and turned his back to me, checked his phone, then put it facedown on the nightstand. He had million-dollar skin. Not a blemish, not a scar. No one had ever clocked him upside the head or set his house on fire while he was sleeping. I didn’t think he had so much as a split end in all that beautiful hair. His teeth were blinding white.

  He looked over his shoulder. “I get it,” he said.

  “You do?”

  I’d been braced for rejection. For fury, or coldness, or anything other than understanding. He got under the covers and lay on top of me, his elbows on my shoulders and his arms alongside my face so I couldn’t move at all. I jumped, captive. My whole body wired and taut. When I jumped, he said, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I closed my eyes, because it was too much, the sight of him, the proximity, the weight. He kissed me. He put his thumbs at the corners of my eyes and waited for me to open them, to look at him.

  “I’m going to help you,” he said, and smiled a little, the way he did, like a cat. “It just might not be pretty,” he said.

  * * *

  In the morning, I nudged Bear’s shoulder in the dark.

  “I have to go to work,” I whispered. “It’s five-oh-five.”

  “Take the car,” Bear said.

  “Your car?”

  He rolled over. “I don’t need it,” he said.

  I was wide awake, already thinking about the things I had to remember to do at the diner. “Are you sure?” I said.

  Bear laughed. “It’s just a car.”

  Buddy knew I was up. He nosed the side of the bed, and I got dressed and let him out the back door before I left. I filled his water bowl and gave him a scoop of food, which he plowed through, his head wagging from side to side, kibbles flying. I wanted coffee but didn’t know how to use the machine Bear had. It was like a glass-and-metal sculpture. The only coffee he had was whole, oily beans that he ground fresh for every pot.

  I took the key off the hook. It was on a short lanyard with a bear print on it.

  I told Buddy to be a good boy. I knew he would bound back to the bed with Bear.

  I thought, this is not my life.

  * * *

  After work, I drove home. There were things in Bear’s car I didn’t know how to use—the sunroof, the heated seats, the electronic adjustments for the seats and mirrors. I sat for a long time moving the seat in tiny increments with a lever on the side. The radio was on North Country Public Radio.

  I looked in the mirror before I went inside. I felt different at a cellular level, in my spine, in my bones. I wondered if someone might be able to see it.

  But then I jumped out of my skin and whacked the mirror with my hand. I must have looked like an old cartoon cat where the skeleton startles outside the fur.

  A sound boomed that set my teeth on edge and filled my mouth with metal like the tip of a pencil. My ears fuzzed over with ringing.

  Then it happened again.

  I watched a flush of birds scatter over the top of our house, but I couldn’t hea
r them. I just saw their black wings, the sway of branches above the leaves, falling down in their wake.

  I went inside the house, working my jaw, blinking hard to try to get my ears open, but it was no use. My hearing was white noise. My mother stood facing the kitchen window, which was loose in its casement like it had been pried out, and Birdie was screaming.

  My mother swung around with the shotgun and pointed it at me. I dropped Bear’s keys and held up my hands, shouting, “Mom!”

  She butted it against my chest, hard, the metal nose of the gun against bone.

  What if it kills you both?

  “Don’t yell at me,” she said.

  Birdie let out a shriek and ran for my legs, gripped my knees, her face pressed into my thigh.

  “Mom,” I said, and swallowed. I put my hand in Birdie’s hair. I tried to guide the gun away from my heart. I had arrived in a strange car. I was lucky she hadn’t shot me.

  “You think I have that for nothing?” my mother said, and pointed at the TV. “I know when there’s people lurking,” she said.

  “There are people in the woods all the time. We’re on a trail,” I said. “You can’t just shoot at people going by.”

  “This wasn’t a hiker,” she said. “No one hikes in a fucking suit,” she shouted.

  I let go of the barrel and she let it down, pointed at the floor.

  “And I don’t know where you decided to sleep last night,” she added. Then she looked out the front door at the Land Rover, parked in the gravel, and whipped around. “Who is here?” she yelped. “Shannon, who did you bring here?”

  “No one!” I shouted back. “I’m driving that,” I said.

  She peered again.

  “The hell you are,” she said. “Whose is it?”

  “He’s my friend,” I said, and hesitated just an instant.

  “Uh-huh. Your friend drives a fucking Land Rover?” Her eyes scanned my clothes, but I was wearing my own. “Since when do you have a friend with a Land Rover?”

  Birdie sniffled, still holding on to my knees.

  “She’s scared,” I said softly to my mom.

  “She should be,” she said.

  I patted her on the butt, and she headed into my mother’s room for toys or books, or maybe to cry herself to sleep, and my mother pulled the gun back up and held it across her chest like a shield.

  “What does he know?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” my mother said

  “Nothing, Mom,” I said. “I haven’t said anything.”

  “You were there all night.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We spent all that time talking about my crazy-ass mother and my secret sister.”

  She swung the barrel of the gun at me. I ducked, but I heard it whip past my head.

  “You don’t remember,” she said, “what it’s like to have someone try to kill you. Because you were little, because your brain did you a favor and blacked it out for you.”

  “Mom,” I said.

  “But you will,” she said. “And when you do, remember that I warned you.”

  * * *

  I took the gun with me. I wanted to give her the impression that I was taking care of something. I also didn’t trust her with it. I laid it in the back of the Land Rover, tucked under Buddy’s blanket, and left the car parked in town. No one hikes in a suit. I knew only one person who even wore a suit.

  I walked. It had been warm in the sun, and as it got dark, a sharp wind blew through. The trees shivered with gusts. I pulled my collar around my neck. The flannel wasn’t enough.

  I was afraid of finding him. Always. Whenever I went there, I feared walking in on something awful. A crime scene. Blood. His body, stiff and blue in the bed.

  They had found my great-uncle Marion that way. Hanging from the rafters in the basement of the house we lived in now.

  My mother told me his friend found him, days later, black faced and bloated.

  Not his parents. Not even my grandmother, his only sister. They were only ten months apart in age. His friend came looking for him.

  “Who was his friend?” I’d asked my mother more than once.

  “Some hillbilly queer,” she said, shooing me away. “Don’t get romantic about it.”

  But now, when I pictured the friend going into the cellar, it was me, cutting the rope that held Baby Jane, holding his blackened face and cradling his head, weeping.

  He had a heavy sadness to him. Like an old saint or an icon even, with the big sad eyes and the gaunt mouth.

  When I got to the house, there was blood on the doorknob, and it was locked. When I wiggled it, I got the blood on my hands and left my prints on the door.

  I could hear movement within. “Baby,” I called. “Open up.”

  I would break in if I had to. I could get the screen out of the window. I could break the glass.

  He flung the door open, holding his arm. “Don’t,” he said.

  He was wearing a gray suit jacket that was torn through at the bicep and soaked with blood.

  My mother had shot him.

  “Why were you at my house?” I asked.

  “Where have you been?” he asked in return.

  He stood with his feet planted in the doorway, trying to block me, but I pushed past him.

  “What’s it to you?” I snapped. “Not sleeping on top of the covers,” I said.

  I pulled at the jacket, and he let it slide off most of the way, until it stuck to the wound. “You need a doctor.” I pressed at the tear in the fabric, and the blood oozed fresh.

  Baby drew in a sharp breath.

  I tried to see. I thought he needed stitches; it needed to be cleaned; he might need antibiotics.

  “Don’t touch me,” he said. He hissed it through his teeth, his jaw tight.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said.

  His face was pale but set. His lips a straight line.

  “Sit down,” I said. I forced him to sit on the love seat. There was blood on my hands, on my shirt. It had dripped on the floor.

  “It’s all over you,” he said.

  “So what?” I said. “My mother tried to shoot you.”

  “She did shoot me,” he said. “She tried to kill me.”

  “Why were you there?”

  “Why weren’t you there?” he shot back.

  “You can’t come looking for me,” I said. “That’s not how this works.”

  “Wash your hands,” he said.

  “Why?” I shouted. “This is what you’re afraid of?” I took the wet blood from my hands and smeared it on my face. “Who fucking cares?”

  “Shannon,” he said, shrunk into the love seat. His face was wet with tears but also sweat. “It’s dangerous,” he said.

  I laughed at him.

  “I’m dangerous,” he said.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” I said, and rolled my eyes. He was living like a hermit, like a monk, alone without TV or a phone. And then I thought, so am I.

  EIGHTEEN: KATERI

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 24

  Shannon’s prints show up on everything inside the house and out, including the ax. There are hair samples from what looks like both kids, blond and kinked red, and Pearl’s. And a fourth that Kateri cannot identify.

  She has saved those—fine, straight, and black—bagged and ready for the lab. There are another set of prints in the house that are not quite readable, like they have been left with gloves, smudged with plastic in between. They measure the size of an average man’s hand. But they don’t leave a whorl.

  Hurt says, “They’re probably Shannon’s. He probably used some kind of gloves, or even just plastic wrap, thinking it would protect his identity.”

  He hovers his hand over the print, the impression left by the unreadable hand, and it’s just slightly smaller than his own.

  No weapon has been found near Craig O’Neil. And all of Craig’s items—his badge, his cuffs, and his gun—were taken by the killer.

>   “Why wouldn’t he run?” Kateri asks.

  They sit at the table in the investigation room, the pictures on the board looking back at them.

  “It’s a thrill,” Hurt says. “Sticking around, watching us try to figure it out. Playing the game.”

  She’s never seen it go that way. Her cases have been rage killings and domestics. Nothing that ever felt like a game.

  “You have enough,” Hurt says.

  She looks at the image of the fingerprints on the ax.

  “In the meantime,” he says, “let’s get a warrant to search Miller’s house.”

  * * *

  She asks Shannon in to look at evidence. It feels dishonest, leading him there to get him to talk, but both Hurt and Chief Whittaker are breathing down her neck to arrest him.

  He leans to the side in the overstuffed chair, his body slack, tired. Lying is hard on the soul, even the body. She’s seen suspects fall dead asleep after confessing, so relieved to not be holding it in any longer. The way he tilts his head, she can see his neck better than last time. The bruises are fading.

  He complicated everything, she thinks, ahead of herself. Hurt kept telling her not to worry beyond the arrest. The rest is not her job.

  She had thought for sure he could get a self-defense plea. She needed him to admit to the abuse. She needed him to talk more about the girl.

  But in truth, nothing about the case is simple. There hasn’t been enough of Pearl’s body found to satisfy Kateri. Her killing and the burning of the body point at premeditation. So does ambushing the cop to get to the girl.

  She looks at the hollows of his eyes. She’s not convinced he has it in him.

  “When’s the last time you saw your sister?” Kateri asks him.

  “At home,” he says.

  “You didn’t visit her in the hospital,” Kateri says.

  “I didn’t even know she was in the hospital.”

  “Her legal guardian signed her discharge papers.”

  “Who the fuck is her legal guardian?” Shannon shouts. “Am I? She’s not my kid.”

  Kateri shrugs, cool, and then Shannon’s face turns to fear.