A Question of Will

by Craig Spector

  And she fought her killer every step of the way...

  That was when Julie snapped: standing and pacing the room in tight circles; a caged animal, trapped in the unspoken ugliness of the truth. "Oh, God," she said. "Oh God, oh God..."

  Paul and Buscetti watched her, afraid to breathe, or move. They were each in their own way willing supplicants to a battle-weary belief: that in a world full of bad guys and bullshit, the innocent would be saved. The guilty, punished. The system would work. And justice would somehow prevail. "We’ll get him, Julie," Stevie said. "I promise."

  "Yeah," Julie snorted bitterly. "And then what?"

  "He’ll go away for a long, long time."

  "Sure he will," Julie murmured, looking right through them. "But that won’t bring my baby back, will it?"

  Buscetti met her gaze, then looked away. "No, it won’t."

  Julie nodded. It was too much. She withdrew from the room. A moment later they heard her sobbing in the living room, Eleanor murmuring vain comfort.

  "I’m sorry," Buscetti murmured to Paul. Paul nodded as Buscetti closed his little notebook. They rose and moved toward the rear door, through the mud room. The space was small, a bulky washer and dryer squatting along one wall; the air chill and dark, an icy draft pressing through the weather-stripping surrounding the back door, making the plastic lining the glass expand and contract, as if breathing. Buscetti shuffled, not entirely from the cold.

  "Look," he said at last, softly, "I didn’t want to bring this up in front of Julie, and we haven’t made this public, but there was alcohol in her system."

  "Meaning what?" Paul asked, indignant.

  "Meaning nothing, except she’d been drinking shortly before it happened."

  This was news to Paul. He looked at Buscetti questioningly, hackles rising. "So what are you saying?" he said. "My daughter engages in a little underage drinking, and for that she gets the death penalty?"

  "Whoa," Buscetti put his hands up, backing off. "I’m not saying anything like that. "Kyra was a good kid. This guy’s a fuckin’ sicko, and swear to Christ, I want him as bad as you do," the detective said. "But I need to know, is there anything else you can tell me?"

  "Like what?"

  "Like anything," Buscetti said. "Son of Sam was nailed from a parking ticket, Paulie. Right now we’re looking for anything that might help us catch this guy." Paul shuddered, pulled himself together. He shrugged -- there was nothing.

  "Okay," Buscetti said. "You think of anything, you call me."

  "Yeah," Paul said, utterly miserable. "Sure."

  There was nothing more to say. Outside, the night was brutally cold, starless. Wind whispered through naked branches. The detective flipped his collar up and walked off, into the shadows. Paul heard receding footsteps crunch on the crushed stone of the driveway. A car door open, then shut. An engine, grunting and rumbling to life. Only then did he lock and double-lock the door, make his way back inside.

  Back in the relative warmth of the kitchen, Paul glanced over to the table, saw Kyra’s things, splayed out like a second autopsy. Scattered remnants, leaving many questions, and precious few answers. Anything, Buscetti had said.

  But Paul didn’t know anything. Which was worse -- the knowing or the not knowing? Impossible question, begetting impossible answers. He looked around the room, heard Julie crying in the background...He decided not to tell her about the drinking -- not now. What purpose would it serve?

  On the refrigerator, Kyra’s picture stared back, her whole life ahead of her -- what little remained of it. Now, gone.

  Paul stared, his thoughts spinning.

  Then he cried, too.

  SIXTEEN

  The morning of the funeral rose, slate-gray and damp. Mourners turned out by the hundreds: crowding the pristine grounds of Glendon Gardens cemetery, encircling the mound of freshly turned earth, rendering it tiny in perspective. The sun was a pale and distant ball of fire, obscured by heavy cover; low overhead, a News Four helicopter made slow looping passes around the perimeter, providing channel-surfing filler for that night’s update. Marginal consciences prevailed, and the chopper kept just enough distance to avoid drowning out the services in prop-wash.

  On the ground, the assembled milled in loosely concentric circles, ranked according to proximity to the deceased. On the outermost edges were news crews and reporters, followed by concerned citizenry and nearly the entire student body and faculty of Glendon Hills High. The school had taken the day off in observance of the tragedy, inadvertently transforming Kyra’s burial into a kind of macabre field-trip. Each student in attendance held a tethered helium balloon with a personal message scrawled in magic marker, courtesy of a crack psychologist called in to do emergency bereavement counseling. The brilliant idea had been advanced that each child should write their wishes for Kyra on the colored rubber skins, then release them to fly up to Heaven. It gave the scene an absurdly cheerful air; indeed, the whole affair had taken on a pomp and circumstance reserved for dead celebrities, which in a way, she had inadvertantly become.

  Still, a charge of genuine emotion telegraphed through the throng. Dozens of wreaths and bouquets of flowers rimmed the headstone, irises, lilies and pink roses, Kyra’s favorite, pale colors splashed on a gray tableau. Teachers and students who had never known Kyra openly wept alongside friends and family, and it seemed everyone was swept up in the swelling gestalt of grief.

  Closer in, the Glendon Fire Department had sent an honor guard, which was virtually unheard of for the death of a family member. The Police Department had similarly volunteered a contingent, headed by Steve Buscetti, in a stunning display of interdepartmental solidarity.

  At the inner circle, family and close friends huddled. Dondi, Tom and Joli were there in their dress blues, according their friend’s daughter their every measure of respect. Their loved ones clustered beside them, shivering with cold and palpably crushing waves of pain. Even Wallace Clyborne was on hand, looking genuinely aggrieved.

  Paul and Julie stood closest the grave, flanked by a stoic Ted and Eleanor. Julie’s black and diaphanous veil did little to conceal her ravaged emotions; she looked brittle, drained. As the priest delivered the liturgy, she shuddered and wept bitterly.

  Paul held her, felt her anguish meld into his own. His thoughts scattered at random; shock and grief coursing narcotically through his veins. He felt like a perfect replica of himself fashioned entirely of sand, inwardly crumbling against some dark, leeching tide.

  A neat apron had been laid on the ground surrounding the grave, to mask the brutish truth of its purpose. Father Riley, a stately and laconic man not much older than Paul, was saying how God, in His infinite wisdom, had decided that He needed Kyra in Heaven. Paul grit his teeth.

  As he spoke Paul stared, transfixed, at the mahogany casket hovering above the mouth of the moist and neatly excised hole. Pictures came: unbidden, psychic snapshots, flash-frozen in time. Dreams and fears, intertwined and grown together; feeding on desires, on deepest feelings of the essential rightness -- or wrongness -- of life. Gossamer things; fleeting, ethereal. Yet powerful, singular. Epiphanous. Images, of how things were. And how they were meant to be.

  Seventeen years ago. The word still fresh from Julie’s lips, echoing over a supper of pasta and cheap Chianti. Pregnant. Paul’s heart skipped and halted, as if some unseen hand just hit the pause button on his life, waiting to see how everything would shake out. Or at least, how he would.

  "Are you sure?" he had asked, and she’d nodded. Her eyes were full of expectation. It was different for Julie. Somehow Julie just knew, like it was encoded into her DNA, secreted on some cellular level, passed telepathically from generation to generation. But for Paul, the wisdom was harder to come by.

  To his eternal regret, his immediate reaction had been unmitigated selfishness. Paul felt not joy but dread, the imminent loss -- of youth, mobility, freedom. Choice. A dozen desperate arguments sprang to his defense. It wasn’t a good time for kids. They were too young, too b
roke, too unsure of themselves, their futures, each other. He couldn’t imagine being a father. He just wasn’t ready yet.

  The moment lasted barely a second, and he masked it as well as he could, which was not very. But it was enough. Julie’s gaze lowered. She got up and left the room.

  The shame of it still stung.

  Later, after much groveling and apologizing, Paul came to bed. Laying in the dark, he placed his hand against his wife’s belly, felt the gentle cadence of her sleeping breath. Something was dreaming there, just beneath the soft surface of her skin. Becoming someone. Waiting for its moment to arrive. And he knew then, that all the love he felt for this woman had taken root, was now personified in the tiny bit of matter growing in her womb. It was then that Paul realized: he could embrace this as a blessing, or reject it as a burden, or run from it altogether. They could grant it the chance or erase it outright. But there was no escaping the truth: that whether they had meant to do this or not, from this moment forward -- no matter what else happened -- his life would never be the same.

  And he’d damned well better get used to that.

  Paul had changed that night; from then on, he embraced impending fatherhood with the fervor of the true penitent, as though his zeal could wash away his shame. He did Lamaze classes, scored an antique crib at a Jersey City junk shop and meticulously sanded and refinished it to glowing perfection, bought a second-hand camcorder and stuffed animals by the fuzzy dozens. Before he caught the first grainy glimpse of his daughter courtesy the ultrasound screen, he loved her beyond measure, or belief. By the time he held her in his hands, Paul could not imagine a life without her. He swore to make the world perfect for this little stranger, his baby girl, his Kyra. He had always pictured a world of possibility for her.

  But he had never pictured this...

  A box. A dank and open hole, into which his hopes and dreams were about to be laid to untimely rest. His little girl was in there, just behind that polished veneer. Just before they’d closed the lid at the funeral home, Paul had kissed her cheek, saying one last goodbye.

  "Sweet dreams, baby," he’d whispered. "Daddy loves you."

  A tear had fallen, stealing through a stray chink in his armor; it touched her cheek and trailed down, so that it almost looked as if she were crying, too.

  How much he wished, in that final parting moment, that he could have awakened her with that kiss, like some second-hand prince in a cut-rate fairy-tale. And maybe then she would have told him that she loved him, too, and always would. Maybe she would have said that she forgave him for not being able to save her, for not protecting her from the real monsters that prey on the innocent.

  Or maybe, at least, she would have been able to tell him the answer to the one question that burned in his heart.

  Why?

  Father Riley was wrapping up the sermon. "Ashes to ashes," he intoned, genuflecting over the grave. "Dust to dust..."

  He glanced to Paul and nodded ever-so slightly. A cue. Cupping his wife’s arm, Paul and Julie stepped up, laid fresh white roses on the immaculate, polished lid. The inner circle followed suit: stepping forward to lay their scented offerings in kind, then turning away, to join the other mourners. As the flowers landed, beads of dew struck the smooth surface of the coffin and skittered off into the waiting earth.

  Julie turned to her waiting parents, sank into their embrace. Paul stood, staring at the box. He could see his reflection, skewed in the casket’s gleaming curves, distorted and grotesque, a ghastly funhouse refraction.

  The casket creaked on the winch, began its final descent into darkness. The milling throng rustled like a breeze through autumn leaves; and with a shared murmur the host of balloons were released, dots of color drifting up and into the leaden sky. In the distance, someone cheered, and Paul wanted to kill him.

  With every winding click of the gears, Paul felt his soul constrict like a tightening coil. As the coffin passed his sightline and was absorbed by shadow, the mourners turned away, the crowd breaking ranks to offer lasts bits of comfort. Paul glanced past the black-garbed gatherers; past the grave-diggers, quietly smoking and joking by the backhoe that would soon get down to the business of burying the dead.

  His gaze skimmed blankly across acres of neat granite, arcing out and up the low hill that marked the southern edge of the cemetery.

  And that was when he saw him.

  The dark figure hovered by an outcropping of statuary, some three hundred yards away. He was conspicuous in his distance, even more so by his apparent interest. Even from so far away, it seemed that he was no mere passerby, but a watcher, intent. Paul caught a glimpse of slight build in jeans and leather, a dark mass of hair obscuring pale features. Though it was too far to tell, it seemed the stranger’s eyes met his and held, then...

  "Paul," a gentle voice, behind him. A gentle hand on his shoulder. Paul turned to find Dondi, Stevie right behind him, concern etched deeply across both their features. "Hey, pal..."

  "You see that guy?" Paul asked, his voice low and urgent. They stared at him uncomprehendingly. "What guy?" Buscetti asked.

  Paul gestured back to the crest of the hill. "There’s somebody up there." He pointed. "Right there..."

  But the stranger was gone.

  "Well, he was there not two seconds ago," Paul insisted, neck craning as he scanned the horizon. "He was watching us."

  Dondi and Stevie traded uneasy glances. "Paul, there must be five hundred people out here today," Dondi said.

  "Yeah, well, I don’t know this guy."

  "You don’t know half the people here," Dondi said, appealing to his reason. "Whoever he was, he was probably just paying his respects."

  Paul paused, pulling himself together. "Yeah," he said, sighing heavily. "I’m sorry. Just having a lousy day, I guess."

  Dondi and Paul embraced, and Paul clung to him briefly, a shipwreck survivor clutching a passing life-ring. Dondi patted his back, murmuring.

  "We’re here, buddy. We’re here."

  "I know," Paul whispered. "I know." The two men disengaged, and Paul glanced at Steve Buscetti, who was watching the crowd of mourners disperse and stroll through the rows of stone. For a moment it seemed that he, too, was looking for something.

  Buscetti glanced back to Paul and Dondi. The three men exchanged a wordless nod of understanding, then turned their attentions to their loved ones.

  And got on with the business of burying the dead.

  SEVENTEEN

  Life, such as it was, went on. The days went by. The crime faded in the public eye, subsumed by the endless parade of fresher horrors. Wars and rumors of wars rumbled in far flung lands; disasters, natural and otherwise, claimed their hapless human toll. Glendon made its own contribution to the body count, via disease, old age, drug o.d.s, gang drive-bys, domestic disputes, shootings, stabbings, DUI crackups and just plain bad luck. Just as it always had.

  On the flipside, babies continued to be born, new life entering to replace that which had shuffled off this mortal coil. The earth stubbornly continued to circle the sun. Just as it always had.

  But for Paul, it might as well have stopped entirely.

  The time immediately following the funeral was punctuated by well-meaning friends and neighbors appearing at the door, bearing sympathies and casserole; by fitful nights giving way to shell-shocked awakening. Julie’s grieving had become numbness, settling like a leaden cloud, going through the motions of each new day like an automaton. Ted and Eleanor stayed through the week, run blocking and generally being supportive.

  But by week’s end, the flow of human kindness had begun to recede; tragic as it all was, there were still bills to pay, mouths to feed, lives to live. Halloween came and went with porchlights off and curtains drawn: neighborhood parents accompanying eager trick-or-treaters whispered and steered clear; even the youngest Power Ranger or friendly Casper seemed to pause in mid-sugar high to give the house wide berth, the spectre of real ghosts all-too painfully apparent.

  On the first
of November, the local Hispanic community celebrated la Dios de la Mortes, the Day of the Dead. Area residents danced to Latin grooves and dead relatives as their children munched traditional candy skulls, tiny faces painted in garish reaper hues. Later in the day, after the traffic had died down, Ted and Eleanor packed their bags and bade their reluctant farewells. In the end everyone knew, some damage could only be healed from within, some could never, and the mere presence of such heightened compassion had become almost as burdensome as the pain that inspired it. Julie’s parents left amidst many tearful embraces and promises to stay in touch, along with assurances that, somehow, everything would be alright

  Leaving Paul and Julie, to what was left of their home. To pick up the pieces.

  ~ * ~

  It was all about control.

  Paul strained, exhaling through gritted teeth. One twenty-three, one twenty-four, one twenty-five... Sweat beaded off his forehead, soaked his back until it stuck to the black vinyl surface of the slantboard. Dank heat filled the claustrophobic confines of the basement, fogging the tiny windows, making it hard to breathe; Paul ignored it, his arms folded over his chest, his face a mask of iron resolve. One forty-six, one forty-seven...

  Pain laced through his abdominal muscles, knitted into the burn in his lower back. One forty-eight, one forty-nine...

  "...One fifty," he said, then exhaled heavily and lay back. The board was black steel and foam-padded, the words LifeGear stenciled in jaunty blue letters on the cover. It was a birthday present, a dry holiday poke in the love handles, though given his physique it was more symbolic than actual; underneath the brand name was the over-achieving slogan GET YOUR LIFE IN GEAR!

  That was the general idea.

  "One... two... three... four..." Paul laced his fingers behind his head and started again, twisting from side-to-side as he came up, blood thudding in his temples, heart pounding in aerobic overtime. The board had been in the basement storage for months, forgotten in the press of day-to-day life. After the funeral, Paul dragged it out of its hiding place, blew the dust off, and began.