And that’s the way it is for me, like my proprioception for evil is broken, some defective circuitry I got from my dad. Problem is, when you’re broken to evil, somebody else pays the price. I’m the one who’s sick, but you’re the one falling.
After every one of Dad’s evil seizures, he vowed it would never happen again. But he was full of hidden fault lines, so no matter how tight he locked things up, that monster wormed its way in and all of us were smashed to the ground. My dad couldn’t stop evil from acting on him any more than people with those tumors can keep gravity from laying them flat.
Mr. Balch says researchers are all over the proprioception problem. Some scientist even mocked up a helmet that let patients stand and walk and lead a halfway normal life. I’m desperate for a helmet like that, one to help me resist evil no matter how ferociously it rears up. But no one’s studying any of that. Because, see, too many people think someone like me is evil itself. Which is like saying someone is gravity if gravity yanks them to the ground.
I’m broken and need help pulling free. But the cops and lawyers, judge and jurors, will take one look at those pictures of Daniel, what’s left of him, and not one of them will see it that way. If I hadn’t done the killing, I wouldn’t either. I’d want to tear the son of a bitch limb from limb. But that’s evil’s contagion, and all the more reason to help the susceptible resist. Like Mr. Balch said, “If enough people get sick with it, no one will be spared.”
There’ll be no help if I stick around. They’ll try me as an adult and throw me in prison where that monster can work on me full time, break me so bad in so many places that if they open me up, there’ll only be monster far as they can see. Then they’ll shake their oh-so-sad heads and say they knew it all along.
I can see it so damn clear, I truly must be a mystic.
* * *
—
IT WAS TIME TO DO THIS THING. I picked up a pen. First off, I apologized to the Balches: I’m sorry I killed Daniel. Which makes you want to laugh your guts out, right?—sorry about murdering your son. You can see the problem. But even if you puked up every word ever created, then gagged each one of those useless things back down and puked them back up in a new arrangement, even if you did that a thousand times, a million times, you’d never find anything that worked better. So I left it at that and told them where they could find their son.
When I’d gotten it all down nice and neat, when I could think of no further helpful detail, I wrote:
If I hadn’t been gutting the deer, if we hadn’t been drinking, if he hadn’t been on my case for so goddamned long, if he hadn’t said—so fucking casually—that he’d screwed the one girl he knew I cared about, the one girl in our entire lives who’d chosen me. If I hadn’t believed him. If I’d understood why he’d done it. Why she had. If I didn’t love him. Or her.
If. If. If. So many goddamned fucking ifs. Just a bunch of excuses. Who gives a shit, right? But here’s the thing: I didn’t know I wanted to kill Daniel until he was dead. That’s why I have to do this. I’ve got what Dad had, that monster that sneaks in, makes you do things you’d never do, things that make you sick. Dad didn’t want to hurt us. He loved us. And in the end, he proved it, didn’t he? There was only one way to save us from that monster, and he knew exactly what it was. He gave up everything for us. He’s a hero. He really is.
Mom, Nells, Red, how else would I keep you safe?
I love you,
Jonah
Was this fair to Daniel? How can I know? How can anyone possibly know? Because somewhere along the line, I’d started seeing with the monster’s eyes.
A few minutes later, I cut the note in two pieces. I kept the one-line apology and the directions to Daniel’s body, trying not to think of what they’d find. The rest of it—the part about Daniel and me and my dad—I tore into bits and flushed down the toilet. No one needed my excuses, and I couldn’t risk Red getting blamed.
* * *
—
I HAD DINNER WITH MY MOM AND NELLS AS USUAL. Later, when I saw Nells walking down the hall, I grabbed her like I was kidding around and hugged her hard. She shoved me away, saying, “Gross! Go take a shower, will you?”
I did stink. I hadn’t been paying much attention to that stuff. I took a quick shower and went to find Mom. She was doing the last of the dishes. I came up behind her and hugged her too, told her I loved her. She turned around looking scared, asked me if everything was okay, was I doing all right? I shoved my hands into my pockets and said, sure, I was fine. Why? I mean, I was worried about Daniel and all, but I was fine. Was she?
The way she was looking at me, you’d think instead of telling her I loved her, I’d just stuck a knife in her gut and was twisting it around. She didn’t say anything for a long while, just kept her eyes on me like we were having this whole conversation without saying a thing: that she loved me and always would, that she felt responsible for fucking up my life even though she didn’t know what she’d done wrong, that she wondered was there anything, anything at all she could do now to change things? Because she would do it, whatever it was. She would.
When she’d looked long enough to know that the pieces had all been played, that the outcome was certain and there was nothing to do but bear it, she said, “Yeah. I’m okay.”
“I’m glad, Mom. I’m glad.”
“You seem tired. Get some rest,” she said, and went back to the dishes.
When I got to the kitchen door, I stopped and said, “Good night, Mom.”
She nodded, but she didn’t turn to me, and she didn’t say good night.
62
After a month of ignoring my calls, Peter agreed to let me stop by. Though he pled not guilty to soliciting a minor, there was little doubt as to his guilt, and he made no attempt to salvage his position. Carol Marsten let it slip that five years earlier he’d been arrested with a prostitute. That time, he’d managed to keep his record clean with a pretrial diversion.
When I entered his house on a late-April morning, I was stunned to find it all but empty, only two folding chairs and his old recliner left. He patted the recliner and drew up a chair.
“Elaine and the girls got the rest. I wanted them to have it.”
“When did this happen?”
He thought back. “Remember that night you stopped by? The night I said Josie was here?”
I nodded.
“Elaine and the girls had left a few days before that. She’d already taken some furniture. I didn’t want you seeing my house torn apart. I kept thinking they’d come back.”
“Because of the affairs?”
“Yeah. She didn’t know about the other stuff. The same woman that went to Newland told Elaine.”
We sat with that awhile.
“Interested in a beer?” he asked.
“It’s ten in the morning. Got any coffee?”
“Sure,” he said, “but I can’t promise it’ll be as terrible as yours.”
I laughed. “I’ll manage.”
As he went to the kitchen, I checked him over. He hadn’t shaved in weeks but was otherwise groomed, his hair combed, wearing a new polo shirt and a clean pair of jeans. When he returned, I asked, “You growing a beard?”
He rubbed that distinctive jaw. “Thinking about it. Though what a pity to hide this masterpiece.”
We sat in silence then. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Like a clearness committee, only I didn’t know whether it was my committee or his. After twenty minutes, I asked, “Evangeline?”
His face remained strangely still. “No. Never with her. But I saw her once on the streets down there. I stopped, talked to her a little, but didn’t pick her up. She was clearly too young.” He said this with the same dispassion he used to relay administrative directives. He rubbed his jaw again. “See. I’m not quite the monster I’m made out to be.”
“Evangeline, she recognized you at s
chool?”
“She did.”
“And the boys? Did you see her with them?”
“Yes.”
“And you kept that from the sheriff because she might remember you.”
He nodded.
I’d been all but certain of these things. But when he confirmed them, a sorrow hit me, as if I’d peered inside him and found lesion upon lesion consuming him. A shadow swept across the room, gave the dark carpeting a burgundy cast, and I grieved for Peter and Elaine, for Hannah and Zoe and shy little Mia. I grieved that I’d lost my friend, that I hadn’t known he was ill, that somewhere along the line I had made the decision not to know.
We sat another half hour with silence between us, ice falling in the freezer, children shouting in a nearby yard, trapped there with a stale odor of male sweat and kitchen garbage that needed to be removed. I ignored the evidence before me and held him in the Light, pictured him glowing with the Divine that still existed in him. And he changed over those minutes, a falling away of the layers of not-God, not-love, of manmade cover, of an ego’s false protections. Then he was weeping. Silently shaking as tears spilled onto his cheeks.
We sat until he was still. We sat awhile longer. I stood and waited a few minutes more. Then I opened my arms.
He hesitated but came to me, and I held the Divine that he still contained, and I held the man with all his lesions, and I held myself for being there, reaching out, even as the not-God in me roared with an ache to inflict grievous harm on this man, to make him feel all he had inflicted on others.
When I had given everything I could, I pulled away. I left him before the not-love in me reared up, before it suffocated that of the Divine.
* * *
—
DURING THE NEXT MEETING WITH GEORGE AND THE OTHERS, we sat in silence. You’d have thought with my startling insight about Daniel’s cruelty I’d have gotten to the crux of what plagued me, but if anything I’d become more brutal, inflicting pain on Lorrie at her most vulnerable. Clearly something larger remained buried in my heart.
Thirty minutes in, I said, “I have no words tonight.”
“You don’t need words,” George said gently. “You know that.”
We sat in silence another thirty minutes. I opened my mouth to call it a night but instead found myself saying, “I don’t know God. I don’t think I ever have.”
If the Friends were surprised, their faces didn’t reveal it. Silence again descended on the room as the expanse of the problem took shape. Finally Abigail spoke, her voice kind and without motive. “What do you mean by ‘know’?”
I could recite the received wisdom, that there is “that of God” in everyone, from the most depraved criminal to the saint. Yet that external knowledge is no different than saying I know whales because I understand where they could be found. I let out a sigh of frustration. “I don’t know. Maybe when my heart goes wild or my limbs tremble or I see glowing lights. How can I say how I’ll know God when God has been hiding from me all these years?”
Ralph piped up. “So you’ll know God when you experience puppy love? Or some kind of parlor trick?”
George cleared his throat. “Ralph. May I remind you of the proper form of questions.”
“Of course,” Ralph said, dropping his head as if remorseful, but the corners of his mouth twitched upward.
George seemed on the verge of further instruction, so I cut him off. “Yes! All my life, I have seen the Divine rise through Friends, speak through them. All my life, I have waited for the One to rise in me, to channel through me, to . . .”
I fell silent. Not only had I revealed my falsity all these years by professing to hold myself to a higher standard, claiming to speak only at God’s insistence, but also by the childish absurdity of my required proof. Ralph had always seen me clearly.
I was refusing to “know” God until he clarified for me my specialness and presented it publicly to the world. The miracles of the world, the flowers and beasts and skies that blazed with light and color and the depth of darkness, the beating hearts of these dear Friends—all these manifestations offered to me in every moment would not do.
After many minutes, George said gently, “To channel through you to do what, Isaac? Can you tell us more?”
I knew the answer without further reflection. “To satisfy my ego. To prove I deserve my place as an elder, as a weighty Quaker after so many years—” I stopped, believing that each of these dear Friends would soon be another loss in my life. I swallowed and said, “After so many years as a fraud.”
We spent the remaining time in silence. There was no smirking, not even from Ralph. In that plain room with its industrial extension cord and long-wasted candle, with its four hard chairs and life-worn Quakers, I felt only love.
63
Evangeline had barely arrived home from Natalia’s that Saturday morning when George appeared with another Friend whom he introduced as Ralph. Red-faced and puffing, they carried a chest of drawers to her room and, with Isaac’s help, set about stripping the closet’s shelves. By noon, the closet was cleared and the men were beginning to measure a large hole in the outside wall. “For a window,” they said. She wouldn’t have guessed it, but once empty, the closet was big enough for a crib and a chair. A trunk for blankets and toys would fit in a corner. Drawers were already built in, so she’d have everything she’d need.
That afternoon, she checked on their progress and noticed a piece of shelving sticking out of a barrel in the room. She needed a shelf for her books, so she pulled it out, and as she did, something fell back in. At the bottom, covered in plaster dust, was Jonah’s bracelet.
“You want to keep that?” George said.
Her head popped up. “I’m sorry, what?”
“It’s a decent piece of wood. Might make a good shelf for your room. Ralph, you’d help me with that, wouldn’t you? Making a shelf for Evangeline?”
Ralph grunted that he would.
Evangeline peered at the bracelet and back at the men. “That’d be so nice.”
Isaac yelled that he could use her outside. She excused herself, thinking she’d dig the bracelet out later, but when she returned, the can had been emptied. She asked George where the trash had gone.
“Dumped it in the back of my pickup. Why? Something else you wanted in there?”
She said no but made an excuse to leave and wandered by the truck. The rubble was a good three feet deep. She’d need to climb in and dig around. If they saw her, she’d have to explain, and she couldn’t even explain it to herself.
How did she feel about Jonah? How had she ever felt? She had recognized him, and he had recognized her. And maybe that was a type of love, finding in someone the same river that flows through you, both of you sharing its banks. But what did it mean when that river boiled as if a million fish leaped against its current? When she imagined Jonah slashing at Daniel—which she had a thousand times—she felt that seething river rushing through his heart, surging up his arm into that swinging blade. Could a passion like that have been love if that’s what it produced?
She looked at the wreckage from the old house, then back at the yard where three men stared at the new hole in the wall. She walked away from the truck, from leaping fish and splattered blood and unanswerable questions, and headed toward Isaac and his friends.
* * *
—
TWO WEEKS LATER, the nursery walls glowed the same creamy lemon as her room and a warm spring breeze ruffled a gauzy curtain over the new window. The three Quaker men assembled a white crib. A fair dose of good-natured grousing accompanied the task, but laughing too filled the room. When they were done, Ralph hammered a nail into the wall and pulled from his daypack a framed picture of a colorful cartoon dog. When he hung it, he had the funniest little smile, as if the picture amused him in some tender, forgotten way.
After a late lunch of chicken salad,
the Friends said their shy good-byes. A half hour later, Lorrie and Nells arrived lugging a big wooden trunk painted in bold blocks of fuchsia and teal and canary yellow. Except for the Rufus emergency, Evangeline hadn’t seen either of them at the house since the first week of February.
They set the trunk in a corner of the kitchen. Lorrie clasped Evangeline in a fierce embrace, a little too long and too tight, as if making up for missed time. Evangeline almost cried for its painful relief, but Lorrie let go, turned her head vaguely in the direction of Isaac, and offered him a muted hello.
“I’m glad you could come,” he muttered, not sounding the least bit glad. He kept glancing out the window as if expecting someone else, obviously relieved when Natalia, Sophie, and their mother showed up a few minutes later. They swept into the house loud and laughing, bearing brightly wrapped packages.
Awhile later, Isaac produced a white cake with fluffy meringue frosting, store-bought but delicious all the same. At first he avoided talking to Lorrie, but by the time everyone left in the late afternoon, he’d had the presence of mind to ask her about her schoolwork and laugh when she made a silly joke.
As they were leaving, Lorrie said to Isaac, “Thank you. For inviting us.” This time, it was Isaac who gave a little nod, and though there was caution between them, Evangeline also sensed a remembered affection.
She realized the entire day had been a kind of baby shower and marveled at how Isaac had arranged it. She now understood that Lorrie’s absence in their lives had nothing to do with her. There’d been some painful rift between the adults. And that was the best present of all, because she could see how difficult it was for Lorrie and Isaac to be together, yet they had done it for her.
What Comes After Page 30
