He was afraid of Apple. Who wouldn’t be? Finally, one day, Mr. Crudup flat-out disappeared, but Newie said the chief let it slip that he got locked up someplace that had pillows for walls and served lots of pudding. Mr. Crudup didn’t have any family, and no one’s ever come to sell his house. It’s still there, cold and empty, with its shades drawn and dark stains on the front porch.
The lower half of Margo Freeman was found at a third home, where a girl with Down syndrome lived with her mom. Margo’s creamy white legs were sticking out of a pillow of straw, with twigs for arms and hay for hair. That morbid piece of human folk art was placed neatly in their garden, nestled between a display of gourds and pumpkins. I guess the girl’s mother didn’t believe her about the scarecrow with the pretty legs. She completely ignored her daughter as she walked her to the short bus that morning—the one that takes kids like her to the state school in Bellingham.
Her mother believed her once she walked back home and found Margo’s pretty legs for herself.
When all the pieces were found and Margo Freeman’s body was identified by her grief-stricken parents, a very stressed out Chief Anderson came over to our house and spoke quietly to my family in the living room.
I still remember the more he lowered his voice, the more Becky wailed and tore at her beautiful ginger hair. No one could calm her down—not even my grandmother, whom she loved more than anything.
Then she started in with that maniacal laughter that turned into obscenities.
“You fucking think I did it, don’t you, you fucking cocksucker cop,” she snarled at the chief as she crouched on the ground and foamed at the mouth like a rabid dog. “Maybe you did it,” she cackled as she pointed her finger at him. “Maybe it was you.”
“Rebecca Ann,” my mother cried, but it wasn’t Rebecca Ann she was talking to anymore. It was Not-Becky, a new personality born out of the shock of knowing that Margo Freeman was brutally hacked to death. Suzie Zickle was gone. So was the obsessive, Bible-toting nun. Now it was only this evil thing that looked like my sister, but wasn’t.
The chief was so blown away, he didn’t know what to say—and trust me, startling that beast into silence is a rare feat.
“Every cock in town’s had the chance to break that bitch in two,” Not-Becky laughed. My face burned. My father and my grandparents were varying degrees of white and red. “So what? Someone finally split that whore wide. No fucking loss.”
I couldn’t believe those words were coming out of my sister. Margo Freeman was her best friend. How could she be talking like this?
It only went on like that for a short time. She spun in circles, pulling hunks of hair out of her head, and screaming in ways that would embarrass even the bikers at The Gin Mill. Finally, the chief pulled my father aside and told him that he should bring her to a hospital and get her a sedative or something.
He kept saying, “Think about the boy. Think about the boy.” I’m not sure what he meant by that, because I was fine. I mean, it was weird that Margo died and all, but I wasn’t the one going nuts over it.
Becky was.
Finally, my father agreed, and my mother called 911. They came and took her away for a while.
Becky was never right after that, and the episodes got worse and worse and creepier and creepier. Somewhere along the way, my parents stopped believing what the doctors told them about my sister. They refused any diagnosis of hysteria or dissociative identity disorder. Instead, they came up with their own conclusion about what was wrong with her.
It involved the Devil.
Now, two long years later, here I am, staring through a barred window at my ruined sister, sobbing in her duplicate bedroom.
How does she know about Claudia Fish?
My heart wants to break, but I think there’s a layer of icy fear over it that’s making it practically shatterproof.
“Becky, what can I do?” I ask her as she cries. Finally, she stretches out her legs and lies back on the bed.
“Can’t you come in?” she pleads. “I want to show you something.” My face begins to tingle. I don’t want to go through that door. I don’t want to see what she has to show me.
“I don’t think so,” I murmur.
“Please,” she begs. “It’s important.”
She sounds so pitiful that I finally give in, even though I’m probably being a major idiot. I go to the stairs, take the key off the nail, go back, and open the door.
Becky’s still lying on the bed, rubbing the yellow T-shirt she’s been wearing for at least the last three days. A dirty stink rolls off of her, along with the funky stench of the casserole that I served her for dinner. The plate is sitting on the floor. It doesn’t register until I am already at her side that she hasn’t touched it at all. The spoon is still clean. The mound is still a mound.
Her medication is still inside.
Her medication.
Becky’s bony hand shoots out and grabs my wrist. I try to pull free, but her strength is so furious that even Newie wouldn’t be able to break free. As the sweat pops out on my forehead, her eyes roll up in her head.
“It’s important,” she gasps.
With her free hand, she lifts up her shirt over her belly button, rolling it back over her white skin. “I have to go now.” In a flash, she’s gone, and Not-Becky is there instead. It starts laughing and whooping like it’s just pulled the best trick ever. It drops my hand and howls as I stare down at my sister’s bare midriff.
In the skin, in angry red welts, it says the words, Five will die, and I know immediately what Becky is trying to tell me.
After all, this is autumn in Apple.
Five will die this year—five in all.
12
NOT-BECKY IS STILL laughing as I bound up the stairs to the kitchen. I leave the plate of food on the floor. Maybe it’ll eat the casserole after all, and the drugs will ooze through its body and soothe the madness.
One can only hope.
The house is quiet. My mother has retreated to her bedroom. She’s probably changed back into her sweatpants and my dad’s T-shirt and is now huddled on a bed that has no sheets.
My father’s disappeared into the garage. I won’t see him again until tomorrow morning, when we’ll both grab breakfast in silence. He usually eats cold cereal, so I know I have to quickly ride my bike to the BD Mart up by the gas station to get milk.
It’s not a real market like Tenzar’s, where Annie’s mother works. It’s just a place where you can get cigarettes and condoms and the other absolute essentials for a place like Apple.
First, I head up the back stairs to the second floor, knock on the door, and slide in to collect my grandfather’s dinner plate. He’s watching a game show on television. Rather, he’s sleeping in front of the moving pictures, his stomach full and his mind empty. I tiptoe into the living room where he’s dozing and take the plate from him. Then I turn off the overhead light and leave him to slumber in the soft glow of a table lamp that has a shade with Canadian geese on it.
Sometime later, my grandfather will wake up and maneuver himself into the bathroom, then into his bedroom. One day soon, I suspect that I’m going to find him on the tiled floor next to the toilet, or beside his bed, because he reached out the wrong way or bent over too far. He’ll be laying there with a broken hip, or worse. When that happens, I’ll know that it’s the beginning of the end for him.
I’m not sure what I think about that. I suppose I’m conflicted. Everyone gets old, but when is someone’s life not worth living anymore? Is it when they first stop leaving their home? Is it when they begin to lose their mind, and simple things, like the names of the people in their family, disappear out of their brains? I don’t know, but I do know that when my grandfather eventually slides away, my father will get even quieter, and my mother will become that much more detached. Who knows abo
ut Becky? If she’s herself, maybe she’ll cry. If she’s Not-Becky, maybe that thing will laugh or let loose with a foul eulogy that will make my face burn hot.
Back downstairs, I finish the dishes and dry off my hands with the faded dish towel. When I’m done, I quietly open the back door and carry my bike off the porch and down to the ground. My mother doesn’t care if I leave. My father would care if he knew, so I won’t tell him. I’ll only be gone twenty minutes at most. The BD Mart is only across Main Street and up a couple blocks.
It’ll be fine, I tell myself. I’ll be okay. Besides, I know it’s understood that my mother isn’t doing any of the things that a mother should do, like grocery shopping or making dinners, or doing the wash, or even cleaning the house. Deep down, my father knows it’s me who’s doing all those things, but as long as he doesn’t see me doing them, he doesn’t have to acknowledge how screwed up everything is under his roof.
Maybe that’s why he leaves grocery money on the counter every week, instead of giving it to my mother. She wouldn’t know what to do with it, anyway. As for me, I take the cash and keep it inside a tin of saltines in the pantry, because nobody in the house eats saltines. They’re one of those foods that everyone has but no one eats, like wax beans and bouillon cubes—or those big tubs of Crisco. No one uses that either, but everyone seems to have a can in their house.
It’s not that cold out, so I don’t take my jacket. The air is still, and the night has closed in around Apple, making me feel almost claustrophobic. I madly peddle my K-Mart mountain bike down Vanguard Lane, cross over Main Street, and pump feverishly up the slight incline to where the BD Mart and the gas station sit like lonely sentinels on opposite corners at the top of the hill.
As I peddle, I see things in the shadows. I imagine dark creatures crouching in the bushes and figures with hooded eyes, gazing at me from underneath porches or fading into the shadows next to cars. These are the images that are going to haunt my dreams tonight, filling them with heinous visions of bloodcurdling deaths that can only be imagined and executed by someone with a seriously messed-up mind—deaths that include maimings and gougings and rough-cut amputations—burnings and beheadings and all manner of pain.
I pump my legs harder, not stopping until I come to the top of the hill, peddling my wheels too quickly into the BD Mart parking lot, skidding to a stop in front of the big glass window.
Julie Dopkin is working inside. She’s a senior at Apple High, too. Julie plays field hockey, and I’m guessing she wants to be a gym teacher someday.
“Yo, Jackson,” she says in her gruff man-voice when I walk in, out of breath from my mad cycling up the hill.
“What’s up?” I ask her.
“Did you hear?”
My heart flip flops in my chest. I’m sure she’s going to tell me about Claudia Fish, but she’s going to say Crawdaddy Fish, because that’s how everyone knows the ugly girl with the wide-spaced eyes. “Hear what?” I ask, feigning indifference.
“About Annie Berg?” she says. “Geez. I thought you guys were dating.”
No, not Annie, I think. Nothing can happen to Annie. My mind reels with the thought of someone breaking into her house, stepping over her drunken, worthless father, and taking a knife to her in her upstairs bedroom, splattering the walls with her warm, red life.
“What about Annie?” I ask a little too quickly. My eyes open wide. I swear I can hear the blood pumping through my veins and sloshing between my ears.
“Chill,” she says. “It’s nothing bad.” Julie reaches down and pulls out a piece of paper. I had forgotten that Annie filled out a work application at the end of the summer, before school started and the murders began.
“She got the job here,” says Julie. “Three nights a week.”
I’m so relieved that I almost hug her right on the spot.
I know it’s only a minimum wage job, but it means more than that to me. Five will die this year, but not Annie. She’s going to be working. She’s going to be too busy to die. That’s what I keep telling myself as I pull a carton of milk out of the refrigerator, drop a few crumpled dollars on the counter, and thank Julie for the news.
I even whistle a little as I zoom down the dark hill at night, heading toward Main Street with the carton clutched in one hand.
Five will die, I keep telling myself, but not Annie. She’s going to be working at the BD Mart.
13
BECKY HAS EATEN dinner. She’s curled on her bed with her chains looped lazily around her legs, like snakes basking on hot rocks in the sun. I’m too tired and too wired to retrieve the plate from inside her room. Instead, I sit on the bottom step of the basement stairs and call Annie on my cell phone. I usually text, but I think I need to hear her voice. Normally I’d call in my room, but Becky is dead to the world, so it doesn’t matter.
“Hi,” she says as she answers the phone after the first ring. “Why didn’t you text?”
“I just didn’t,” I tell her. “I wanted to talk to another human being, so that counts my family out. Are you okay?”
She’s quiet for a moment. “Okay because of Claudia?”
“Well, yeah.”
Annie sighs through the phone. “I was, until you just reminded me. I guess you’re not?”
“No. Not really.”
There’s a brief pause on the other end of the phone. Then Annie says, “Jackson, it’s not your fault, you know. You didn’t kill her.”
The problem is, there’s a small part of me that thinks I did. “I know,” I say. “I can’t stop thinking that I wish I was nicer to her.”
“She’d still be dead,” says Annie.
“I suppose,” I say, as I sit in the gloom of the basement. “I guess.”
I don’t really believe my words. I didn’t know Claudia Fish, but maybe underneath all the ugliness, she was a really nice person. Maybe we could have been friends. That way, she wouldn’t have been caught alone in the woods. She would have been with me and Annie and Newie, making her way through High Garden and scaling down the Giant Steps like the rest of us.
She’d still be alive.
“My mother wants us to move in with my aunt in Springfield,” says Annie. “She says Apple’s a death trap.”
“Yeah, because Springfield’s such a safe place,” I grumble. “Isn’t that where that crazy guy stabbed that girl in the bus station because she laughed?”
“He thought she was laughing at him,” Annie reminds me. It’s true. She laughed. He thought she was making fun of him, so he gutted her in front of her friends, then sat and ate Funyuns while people screamed and the police came.
“Crazy is crazy,” I tell her as I steal a glance at Becky’s door. “She could have been laughing at lint. He still would have messed her up.” Annie doesn’t say anything, so I change the subject to one that’s probably as depressing as Claudia Fish. “How’s Daddy-Prick? He was pretty hammered when we dropped you off.”
Annie sighs through the phone. I can almost hear her rolling her eyes. “It takes a lot to get my dad wasted,” she says. “He’s had lots of practice. I think he’s built up a tolerance.”
“Yeah, but have you?” I ask in all seriousness. “How do you stand it?”
“Same as you,” she says. “How do you stand the freak show you live in?”
“Good point,” I say. “Becky was off the wall when I got home.” I tell her about my mom and dad and about Becky yelling and screaming, but I don’t tell her about the welts on her stomach. I don’t want to scare her, and part of me doesn’t want to believe her warped message anyway.
Five will die.
“Newie’s dad called and talked to my father,” Annie whispers.
“Really? What happened?”
“The chief told him about Claudia and about how we found her. He said my dad should keep an eye on me until everyt
hing blows over.”
“Yeah, right. What did your dad say?”
Annie licks her lips. I can hear her do it through the phone. “He said, ‘What’s to watch?’ and that I’m too much of a piece of white trash for a murderer to waste his time on.”
The words hang in the little space between the phone and my ear, and in that split second, I have a debate in my head about which one of us actually has it worse at home, me or Annie. In the end, I decide that we both have it pretty bad.
“I’m sorry, Annie,” I say. The truth is, I’m sorry for both of us.
I think she starts to cry, but if she does, she puts her hand over the phone so I can’t really tell for sure. Finally she says, “I wish we could just leave.”
“You and me both,” I say. “But go where?”
“I don’t know,” she murmurs then says it again. “I don’t know.”
The truth is, I would love to leave Apple. I would love to leave all this craziness behind and have a do-over, maybe in a place like Longmeadow or Littleham, where we both come from nice homes with nice families, and each of us has golden retrievers or one of those spastic little lap dogs that look like a fuzzy rat. Annie can be a cheerleader, and I can be on the soccer team, because I don’t have to take care of everyone.
In my fantasy, Annie and I are still together. I guess that’s the one good thing I have going for me in my life right now. I have Annie.
“Next summer,” I tell her. “We’ll both be eighteen. Then we’re out of here.”
“To where?” she asks me in all seriousness.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Cape Cod, maybe. There’s always work on the Cape.”
“Oh, okay,” Annie laughs. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Or maybe we’ll get married,” I say.
Annie laughs again. I love when she laughs. It’s about the only thing that brightens my day. “Get married?” she says. “Sure, why not. Then I can plop out about a dozen rug rats and get really, really fat.”
Bloody Bloody Apple Page 6
