by Lisa Regan
Blake waited for the sound of the lock turning back before he spoke. “Why did you come?” he asked.
“This week it will be twenty-five years since our parents died. I wanted to see you,” she said. “I thought I owed you that.”
Blake laughed. “Owe me? You owe me much more than a visit in prison.”
Her voice was soft and low. “So you remember?”
The night his parents were murdered, he and Sarah had tried again to tell them that their grandfather was sexually abusing her. Again they chose not to believe their children. Blake had argued with them heatedly until his father threw him out of the house. At first he had walked aimlessly, letting the rage that had boiled over in the confrontation with his parents ebb and wane. He ended up outside the Bishops’ house. It was dark when he got there. He watched them through the windows until Kassidy and Lexie went to bed. He took note of which bedroom lights blinked on when they said good night to their parents and went upstairs. Then he walked home.
All the lights were on, but no one was downstairs. It was after ten. Everyone should have been in bed. He knew something was wrong as he walked up the steps. The door to his parents’ room was ajar. Inside, Sarah stood beside the bed. Her arm moved up and down in a scissor-like motion. Stabbing, stabbing, stabbing. The knife punched into their mother’s body with a muffled thwip sound each time. Sarah grunted in time with each puncture. Blake looked at their father, but he was already dead. There was blood everywhere. On the sheets, on the walls, on Sarah. As he went to her, she raised the knife up and the blood flew off the end of it, spraying him.
He didn’t say anything. He caught her arm on an upward arc and pried the knife out of her hand. He pushed her toward the door. He stood at the foot of the bed and surveyed their butchered bodies, wondering what to do next.
“Get cleaned up,” he told his sister.
She stopped in the doorway and turned to him. “What about my clothes?”
He knew what he had to do then. “I’ll bury them,” he told her. “Just get cleaned up. Then go in the basement and don’t come out until I tell you.”
For years, all he had remembered was calling the police and telling them to come because he had killed his parents. Later, in dreams mostly, he recalled standing at the foot of the bed, knife in hand, but that was all.
“When did you remember?” Sarah asked.
“Last month, although days, weeks and months seem to run together in here. Why didn’t you say anything?”
She shrugged. “No one would have believed that a thirteen year old girl did that.”
“Ah but rage can make you stronger than you are,” Blake said, thinking of the pastor in the airport bathroom.
Sarah nodded. “Besides, I thought you had done it for me.”
Blake smiled wanly. He sighed. “I did do it for you.”
Silence unfurled itself across the table between them. Then Blake asked, “So when I saw you before they sent me to juvy and you said ‘you made it worse’—”
“I meant you made it worse by taking the blame and leaving me alone. I didn’t realize that you didn’t remember until later,” she answered.
Blake took this in. Everything in his past had to be viewed with different eyes now. “When I came to your trailer and you asked me why I didn’t kill Grandpa—”
“I wasn’t sure if you remembered or not. You didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you kill him?” he asked.
Sarah met his eyes. He saw something in them that made his bowels uneasy. A kind of cunning. A black spark of malice. “What makes you think I didn’t?”
“He died of a heart attack.”
“He had a heart condition. He was taking pills for it. But one day the bottle was filled with vitamins instead of heart pills. He never even noticed.”
Blake nodded. A few moments passed, and she stood up to go. “Will you come back to see me?” he asked.
She looked back at him. “Sure,” she said.
