“I don’t know, dude, maybe he would’ve killed me too. Why’d I hide in the living room? We could’ve held him down together. My hands were shaking like crazy. I couldn’t dial the cops. I looked over just as he threw her down. I can still hear her head cracking on the ground. I was paralyzed. Suddenly he was up on his feet, staring down at her like he’d forgotten why he’d come in the first place. Like I wasn’t even there anymore. A second later he was gone. Left the door wide open. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen. I went to her to see if she was alive. She wasn’t breathing. There was blood all around her head. For a while I just held her. I didn’t know what to do …”

  Scornful, tearless, he stares at me. With his good eye he says, “You believe me so far. You buy all this.”

  If I don’t believe him, it isn’t because the alternative (suicide) makes more sense but because it’s foolish to trust someone who’d lie about something as trivial as his first name. And I don’t put money down on something I can’t afford. This, no less, is an expensive thing to be wrong about.

  “Go on,” I prod him.

  “I started thinking about what the cops would find when they came here. Me and her. No one knew I lived here, and she’d just been murdered. Would they believe me, especially when I told them that the Fire Captain’s kid did it? I was scared. But I decided that I had to do the right thing. My nerves had settled some by then, too. I’m not sure how much time had passed. It must’ve been a bit because right when I was about to call, someone started knocking on the door. Not banging hard, just tapping. I figured it was Jeremy coming back to finish me off. I grabbed a knife from the silverware drawer, looked through the blinds. It was Travis, that’s Monica and Jeremy’s dad. He was alone. I cracked the door, and he asked if he could step inside. He said Jeremy had told him what’d happened, that he wanted to check on me. This guy hated me more than anything and so I didn’t trust him. But what was I supposed to do? I let him in. He went to the kitchen, saw what his son had done, and just scowled. That’s it. Like Jeremy had totaled his truck. Like ‘look what he did this time, that darn Jeremy.’ My hands were covered in her blood. I couldn’t talk. I thought that was it for me. He had me. He’d wanted like hell to get me out of his daughter’s life, and this was his chance. Then he looked me over, told me to go wash myself up good. I did. When I got back from the bathroom, he said, ‘Go out and wait in my truck.’ Said, ‘If you don’t get out of this house right now, I’ll leave you with her.’ So, I ran out the door as fast as I could. But there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d wait for him in his truck. What, so he could drive me to the boondocks and kill me? I ran as far as I could. I even passed Police Chief Doleman in his police car on the way. No flashing lights or nothing. Like it was any other day. Cruising around. You know, Travis and Doleman go golfing all the time, vacation together, all that bullshit.”

  He lights the third cigarette with the butt of the second, which he snuffs out on his pant leg. He gulps down the rest of his coffee and drops the butt into the empty bowl. Then he paces in and out of the living room again, his hands on top of his head, his elbows sticking straight out on either side of him.

  “I hid out in the woods for a few nights before I came back. There was blood in the kitchen, but her body was gone. I waited for them to come arrest me. Nothing happened. No calls, no texts. It was a while before I realized what was going on. I think they wanted to pin it on me, but they couldn’t do that without risking a bigger investigation. The investigation might involve people Doleman and Travis couldn’t control. County or feds. Maybe someone would find out there was a third person there. Then it would come back to Jeremy and why the Fire Captain was the first person on the scene. Doleman got the body over to the funeral home the night she was murdered. By the time I got the nerve to go over there and ask about her they’d already cremated her. The easiest way to cover it all up was to say it never happened, that it was an accident, or better even—a suicide. Even if that meant they couldn’t lock me away. That’s what they did.”

  “Okay …”

  “But I didn’t know that right away. I went to Travis myself. Met him at the fire station because I didn’t want Monica knowing what was going on. What if they started a real investigation and I’d said something to her? She’d wanna lie for her family, or they’d make her. I thought it over a billion times. I had to talk to Travis. I went to see him at the fire station, and he acted like he had no idea what I was talking about with Jeremy. Like it was obviously a suicide and he’d never even come out to Miss Bonnie’s place. It was the only time he’d ever been decent to me. He might’ve even felt a little shitty that I’d lost her. I kept telling him that I knew what’d happened and that I wanted justice for her. He acted all confused. ‘Maybe you should get some counseling, Heath. Maybe someone at the school will talk to you about what you’re going through. I’m so sorry, kiddo.’ When he called me kiddo, I knew he was fucking with me. I wasn’t sure what to do after that.”

  He drops his third cigarette into the bowl on the floor.

  “That night Travis came to the door with some meathead who slammed me up against this door and pulled my hair out and smashed my face to a pulp. Afterward Travis told me that if I kept barking up the wrong tree he’d come back. So, I’ve just been here since then. I’d have already left Sibley if not for her. Like I said, I love her. I love her, dude. I don’t know what to do. We were supposed to leave town last weekend but she up and changed her mind at the last second. I’m trying to talk her into it again.”

  He plucks another joint from the case, his non-swollen eye tired, glassy, emotionless.

  “Spencers are everywhere. Like a cancer. A lot of them volunteer for the fire department and work up at the dealership. They all played hockey here. That’s all they talk about, the glory days. They got the town in a chokehold. Whatever you got, they’ll take from you. Where you going?” he asks as I rise and start toward the front door. I’ve heard enough. “You can’t …”

  “Can’t what? Gonna shoot me with your imaginary shotgun? Anyway, I’m not telling anyone you’re here. I need to get some fresh air and think a little.”

  “You leaving town?”

  “Maybe.”

  Heath steps in front of the door. He must really not want me to go because he hasn’t lit his joint yet. “Don’t talk to anyone.”

  “We’ll see—”

  “You gotta believe me.”

  “I don’t, actually. I’m gonna figure out exactly what happened. If it’s like you say I’m gonna raise hell all over. Miss Bonnie meant the world to me.”

  He points the joint at my face. “You think you’re special? Another one of her big tough foster boys? You’re no different than me. You’d have stood in that living room while she died, just like I did.”

  “Move.”

  Suddenly, with some amusement in his voice, he says, “I know you. Murphy’s half-brother. The Mute. Daddy died in the bathtub.”

  I look him over. “You’re thinking of someone else.”

  I shove him aside and open the door.

  “Make sure you follow the news!” he yells. “If you hear about how I hung myself, you’ll know just what happened! Once Jeremy finds out you’ve been talking to people, I’m dead! You don’t understand—!”

  I shut the door in his face. I cross the street, climb into my truck, start it up, and take one huff of rank cab air before starting for the dealership.

  It’s ten minutes away. I have ten minutes. Ten minutes to think of what I’ll do when I get there. I came to pay my respects. Now I can’t leave without the truth. Without helping a boy who lied to my face. About what exactly, I’m not sure yet. Gavin, Jordan, the like, they’ll be there. Remember, they’re no better than me. More importantly, they’re no worse. Just people. Not devils, just sinners. They are what in my darkest moments it’s apparent I am too.

  Emma is there. Minutes away. I’ll talk to her alone if I can. Talk only to her if I can. Gotta wrap my head around seeing her, lifting the lid off that rotting coffin not knowing much about what’s inside except that it wasn’t dead when we buried it.

  To my shame, I thought her virginity proposal over. Meanwhile, Murphy kept at it. “Snooty bitch,” he’d mutter. It almost came to blows on my day off. That sweltering, cloudless afternoon at Lake Sibley beach. The half-mile path down, narrow and boggy, teeming with flies, mosquitoes, poison ivy. We drank Hamm’s on partially inflated floaties in the shallows. I’d have gotten a swing or two in before he drowned me. Assuming he spared my life, he’d have never let me forget how wound up I got defending her. Almost as wound up as I got denying that I cared about her at all. Suzie and Jane from the grade below came out to the beach. Two-pieces thready. He and Jane went back to her car. Suzie and I eeled around in two feet of water. She kept bugging me about the long sleeves I wore to cover up my handiwork. She ran her cool, pruny fingers up my chest because she wanted me to do it back, as I’d done before. She unzipped my cutoff jean shorts and reached inside. She kissed me. Her top was tied in back like a shoelace. I tugged loose a string. She’d already pulled her bottom aside. I stopped it all, wishing I didn’t know why.

  One afternoon that summer Gavin parked his truck on the street and walked toward the house alone. At first, I didn’t recognize him. He was wearing a collared shirt, tie, black slacks. Like a Bible salesman. Murphy watched from the window, a sentinel. I met Gavin at the picnic table, he shook my hand, and for half an hour he jabbered about how he didn’t wanna be the asshole he was in high school and how much he respected me and how he wanted to be better and how he wanted to change and he was sorry he’d driven by so many times but he’d been gaining the courage to sit down with me and apologize if he ever did or said anything to make me feel less-than. He said he’d already talked to Danny and Colton and Joey Fisher and Jeffer Splutze. He said he wanted to earn Emma back. He might’ve been warning me. If so, he must’ve believed his warning was working because I just sat there straddling the picnic table bench and staring down between my knees, mute. Not a word.

  As soon as Emma came clean about her designs on me, I should’ve told her she couldn’t change how she felt about herself, much less improve it, with sex. But I didn’t. Not right away, not for another month, when Miss Bonnie went on her weekly grocery run and my siblings were out back playing tag and so I had the basement to myself. Her tank top straps were already hanging near her elbows. Bare shoulders broad, lean, bronze. Her lips were already on mine. Plump and firm and damp and warm. Her exhales these wafts of hot, moist peppermint. She asked again and again what was wrong.

  The insult didn’t hit me until then. Until then I somehow didn’t see myself the way it seemed she did. A rite of passage. Sterile. Disposable. Afterward I’d be even less than that. But that’s not what I told her. Instead, I gave a better reason not to lose it to the foster boy townie. She’d feel like shit about herself later. I told her I didn’t mean anything to her, that if I did she wouldn’t have arranged to lose it to me for no other reason than to know she’d lost it to someone. She didn’t respond at first. Her shoulders slumped. She didn’t bother to put her straps back up. I’d embarrassed her. I shouldn’t have let it get to that point, the kissing and all, but I did. She talked about Carissa then. About the trip to the clinic. Emma told Carissa about her summer plans and Carissa told her she could trust me. Here I didn’t ask for clarification because I figured it’d only get more complicated. Trust me to what? To be respectful? To keep the secret? To be good at it?

  She left for college. She studied accounting and took a poetry course and lost her virginity to a Rastafarian who planned to pay tuition by playing ukulele in Twin Cities coffee shops. They dated for a while. Her parents weren’t excited to hear about him. She emailed me poems about everything. About the campus’ “gorgeous brick buildings” and her “beyond pretty” roommate and coursework and infected nose-ring and “ragtag” intramural basketball team. About finishing school and having children and working from home as an accountant. About breaking up with Chaz and quitting the team and dropping out and coming home again. About how immature the boys were and how bummed she was. How grateful she was that I called her out “for trying to use” me. How special our summer together was. How she missed me. How she daydreamed about my body. Two or three emails a week.

  I never replied. I wished she’d stop writing. I wanted the strength to not read them but I always gave in, as eager to hear that she cared about me as to ensure that she didn’t, couldn’t, never would. So there was never a moment when thinking of her didn’t torture me. Hope and despair both. The last one I received, before she came home for Christmas break, wasn’t an update. It was a confession. The subject: “How it could work.” It gave me that gut-drop dread I get sometimes. I deleted it before it could entice me further. Over the break I ignored her calls. Then she came to my new place. The unfinished basement of Kenny Benson’s duplex, three blocks from Miss Bonnie’s house. It was his former private mixed-martial-arts dojo. Grey rubber jigsaw tiling on the floor. A boxing bag hung from the ceiling. I sat there staring at it as she slammed her open palm on the egress window behind me and yelled, demanding an explanation for why I never emailed her back, what was so wrong with her in my eyes, how I could be such a dick about things. Rage, bewilderment, exasperation. Rage.

  Supposing I could speak, who was I supposed to say? The truth? That I was a lot more like Murphy than whatever she took me for? Not as loud as Murphy, maybe. Not as vulgar. Not as violent. But closer to his type than it might seem from the outside looking in. The broken cannot explain their brokenness to the unbroken. At least I couldn’t. Not then. It’s more than imperfection. Deformity. Metal coat hanger wallops on the neck. Mommy napping with bags of frozen vegetables on her mushy face. And me rooting for Daddy because I hated underdogs. Curling up on the sleeper-sofa in Grandma’s basement while she guzzled mouthwash and hallucinated for hours on end, telling me stories about the goldfish in her scummy tank. Grandma with her brittle black teeth, always screaming because her voice couldn’t go any softer. Dementia got so bad she turned to spitting on me when I visited her at the nursing home in Saint Cloud. Things actually got worse when I realized all in all it would’ve been better if my dad never hurt my mom and my mom never hurt my dad, if nobody ever hurt anyone, because then there was the embarrassment of knowing it was once all so everyday. How normal, how mundane it’d been once upon a time, before I knew I was broken. Cruelty felt and cruelty dealt.

  She left Kenny’s duplex. The emails continued, one per month now.

  After his first deployment, Murphy crashed with me. The room reeked of Murphy’s no-sun-for-days BO. He brutalized the hundred-pound bag for six three-minute intervals, handed me the gloves, and sat pretzel-legged with his elbows on his knees, panting. He said he expected to die during his next tour. He pulled out his kit, said he needed to tar up to escape the desert, like that wasn’t all he ever talked about when he wasn’t too stoned for talking. The numbing warmth mellowed me. I could see it, what he described. Fields of poppy plants that from a distance looked like squat cornstalks but that up close were otherworldly. The bulging tips of the plants stretching skyward like the arms of so many beggars, flowers brash red and pink and orange. He told me it was easier to get heroine than morphine, something both here and there have in common. He walked through the fields, head down, watching his steps carefully, enraged because though drug profits supported the enemy, he couldn’t bring himself to step on one single plant, snap or crush it. Not because it would’ve been futile or because his superiors said not to but because those plants were the only beautiful things to see in the whole desert.

  “Why’d we hate Miss Bonnie so much?” he asked then, out of nowhere. The question wasn’t for me. For a moment the silence was the type that makes your ears ring. The punching bag hung there, the uvula of a suicided man. He cackled, his voice throaty, weak. “Whatever the government paid her, it wasn’t enough. Her job is a fuck-ton harder than mine.” “We’re fucked, you know that, right?” he asked. “Totally fucked. Thing is, we didn’t have a clue about how fucked we were until she showed us.” He said, “Like learning you got cancer because the chemo started. We were used to cancer. But chemo, her love? That’s what set us off.”

  The night before he was supposed to leave for his third deployment, he called from Santa Fe. He was with a girl. I said I was worried about him. He said he was worried about me. We had a good talk about not tarring up anymore, about treatment. His flight was early the next morning so he couldn’t talk long. He stayed in a hotel room for three days. According to the girl who called Miss Bonnie on the morning of the fourth, a maid had found him dead. Overdose.

  Gavin and Emma were back together by then. He’d found her emails so Jordan and Gavin and two of his college buddies came to Sibley, smelling of dirt and vodka. In high school Gavin had a receding hairline. Now he’d shaved it all off. I climbed down off the roof I was working on and sat down on the lawn. Just sat there. His nose points upward, so I could see into his nostrils even when he squatted down on his haunches to look me in the eye. I didn’t listen to what he said. They held me down while Jordan choked me. I blacked out, woke up with snapped ribs and a bruised cheek. They probably would’ve done worse if the rest of the crew hadn’t scrambled down to run them off.

  I’m almost at the dealership. Heath’s full of shit. But which part is the lie? Which part is the truth I can’t leave without? And what am I gonna do about it? Heath, the boy who once adored me, the boy I couldn’t look at once I learned he’d been the victim of something I just as easily could’ve been.

  Gavin and Jordan will be there. I’ll talk to Emma alone and won’t give her any reason to suspect I know about the emails. To suspect that this is about me and her.

  ***

 

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