Little Threats

by Emily Schultz

  “He was family too.”

  “She said you never liked him.”

  “I like him. He’s normal now.” When Carter had first met Alex he was in a band and wore a leather jacket and eyeliner.

  The bell rang and Gerry left. Kennedy could hear them making small talk in the foyer. She walked over and plucked one of the sour candies from the dish. In her mouth, it felt like the past, sugary and sharp.

  She walked upstairs to her bedroom, drew in a breath, and lingered in the doorframe. She hadn’t expected it to be the same.

  As she slowly edged into the room, her gaze went immediately to the faraway boy handwriting on a cassette case on the floor. Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions for Kennedy. Repressed. What had any of them repressed? She had loved Berk with an intensity she didn’t understand, and he’d seen that love—bright and pure—and turned away from it. He’d loved, instead, her best friend. It was why Kennedy, even though she’d continued to see him, had never given him the mixtape in return.

  There had been a creative writing assignment she’d done for the instructor at the prison about growing up in her home. Some of the other inmates wrote about trauma, moving constantly or in the middle of the night, being homeless, hunger. Comparatively, the piece Kennedy scribbled was light and full of adolescent longing, and she realized now that she’d painted the past with an optimistic brush. She had forgotten how the walls of the Wynn house could feel like they were leaning toward her. “Close your eyes,” the instructor, Christina, had said. “What do you see? What do you smell?”

  Kennedy suddenly leaped over the detritus, catlike, onto the purple duvet of the bed. She stared up at the posters, and between them the blank spots where investigators had taken others they deemed “objects of interest.” The movie poster for Basic Instinct had been removed by police because it was about a serial killer. Laine and Gerry had objected to the image of Sharon Stone’s fingernails tearing into Michael Douglas’s back. There was another poster their parents detested that had gone too: the Red Hot Chili Peppers, naked except for tube socks they wore over their penises, as though having a teenage-sized amount of desire automatically made a person suspect. The detectives had seized Kennedy’s diaries. The copy of Jane Eyre. Some poems she had written. They’d taken school textbooks from both girls with graffiti inside the covers that had been scrawled by numerous hands over the years, hoping to divine secret plots out of the palimpsest of sluts, gross, penis-breath, love him (with hearts), and hottie.

  One officer had held up a CD by My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult as though it were evidence, exclaiming in his rural accent, “Woo boy. Got something here.” The album was Confessions of a Knife and it was not a good look.

  The week of the killing the investigators had shown Kennedy photographs to try to jolt her: the wounds blunt, flat, with dark bruising around them, as if they’d been punched into Haley. “Now, who did this?” they asked, waiting for her to implicate herself or Berk. She spat tears, not words.

  At the pretrial they did their best to find a fiction that would support Kennedy having a motive. The prosecutor even read aloud from her copy of Jane Eyre after dramatically taking it out of evidentiary plastic. He called Haley a “Christian martyr, like Helen Burns in the book. And like Helen, Haley died at the hands of a sick, evil cult.” He read Kennedy’s own annotation in the book, blown up and projected onto a slide. “‘Haley is our Helen, methinks.’ That, Your Honor, is the defendant plainly grooming a sacrifice.”

  Kennedy always felt she had written it to show that Haley was her best friend, that they would stand up for each other, the bond unbreakable. But she never got to tell them that. They were already preparing another slide: a page where she had circled Lowood, the name of Jane and Helen’s school, and written in Longwood beside it, the suburb where Haley had lived.

  The defense attorney rose and argued: “Your Honor. We’re prepared to have several scholars from UVA testify that interpretation of Jane Eyre is without merit and simply ridiculous. The character of Helen Burns died of consumption, no violence whatsoever. The works of Charlotte Brontë should not, cannot be entered into this trial’s evidence.

  “If Haley is Helen, then please tell me: who in this scenario is Rochester?” her attorney railed. “Find Rochester and you’ll find her killer!”

  Even at that young age, Kennedy had realized what lawyers did: waste a lot of time.

  Now Kennedy jumped off the bed and dodged across the room for the bathroom. She made it to the toilet before the dry heaves began. After, she rinsed her mouth with Scope and went back in her room and lay down, shivering. Foolishly, she’d thought the crime would be gone after serving her sentence, but finally being in her teenage room didn’t bring freedom, only frightening reminders.

  Chapter 3

  Everett Kimberson leaned his elbows on the sill of the bedroom window looking out at the downtown. It was one of the only condo towers in the city, sleek, shiny, and modern amid the wide white-pillared historical buildings Richmond prided itself on. He’d bought it with the money from the civil suit against the Wynns and gotten the key half a year before. In his early twenties, every time he’d planned for an apartment, or a room away at school, it had somehow gotten short-circuited. As move-in day grew closer, Marly Kimberson’s face would take on that behind-glass look, as though parts of her were being permanently pinned down. She never told him not to go. She would say that if Haley’s death meant her surviving child could live a better life, then Jesus meant for something to come out of the pain. That method was more effective and he always pulled out, angering his friends and losing deposits.

  The condo was something she’d been able to come to terms with gradually—his mom could see it unfolding in a solid and predictable manner, the amount of time it took for them to finish the building while Everett showed Marly photos and conceptual renderings on a website. It didn’t mean his departure was really permanent.

  He used the apartment more as a clubhouse with friends than a living space, a place to drink and let off steam. It was furnished, but the drawers and closet were half-empty, as he often returned to his mom’s house in the suburb of Longwood. For the amount his family had struggled to get what they deserved for their suffering—the long duration of the civil suit against the Wynn family had driven his parents finally apart, if Haley’s death hadn’t done that already—it did seem like he ought to have been able to bring more happiness into the place. Everett had had a Budweiser flag as a curtain on the large window—it was his only decorating decision—but the condo association had made him take it down. There was really no other use for the condo, except sex. But that he felt worse and worse about.

  “Don’t go,” Everett said over his shoulder to the woman in his bed. He knew she wasn’t asleep even though she’d been lying there for over an hour. “I don’t want you to.”

  He heard her stir, the rustle of sheets as she sat up. A moment later she was standing behind him, her arms around his waist, one hand on his chest. She’d come the day before and stayed over, something she hadn’t done yet. Everett could feel the smooth touch of her underwear and the warm press of her against his back. She left a kiss low on his shoulder blade as she put her face and her hair against him. Everett watched the white trail an airplane made across the steely November sky. He knew she hadn’t meant to sleep over. Carter had places to be.

  “Why shouldn’t I go?” she asked. “It’s what I’m supposed to do. I have to be with them.”

  Everett turned to face Carter. He put a hand against her light brown hair and looked down into her eyes. “Once you go, you go.”

  Carter stood on tiptoe and reached her arms around Everett’s neck, kissing him on the mouth. When he pulled away again she sat down on the bed and began to tug her jeans on.

  “Do you know when we were young I used to have her dreams?” Everett watched her retrieve a pale pink bra from the floor and put it aroun
d her shoulders. It was a front-loader, and she pushed her breasts into the cups and secured them. “Not her dreams exactly. More like things that had happened to her that day, even if I wasn’t there for them. Sometimes stupid things. Her playing with a neighbor’s dog with a rope knot, or writing something on the chalkboard and the class laughing. She peed her pants in first grade because she’d been holding it in; she was ashamed to use the bathroom because they had fussy locks and she thought someone might walk in on her.”

  “I don’t think I want to hear about Kennedy’s dreams.”

  Carter was seven years older than he was, and her body showed it. She was attractive when dressed, but when naked her torso and hips showed a quilt of weight wars won and lost—lovely but also loose in places. So why did he feel overwhelmed every time he looked at her? He adored her to the point where even her faults fascinated him. The shiny, pale white stretch marks on her outer thighs seemed more like mermaid scales.

  Everett remembered when she and Haley were friends, just glimpses: the way they used to walk past him playing in the yard and head up to Haley’s room, or the times Kennedy was there too and the Wynn twins would bet him ten bucks that he couldn’t tell them apart. He always could—their voices, their hair, their different-colored tiny backpacks were all giveaways, though they never paid him for his discerning eye. That was kid stuff, forever ago. At the time, Carter had had dyed black hair and pimples along her temples, a rebelling sterling silver ring in her nose where now there was only a freckle.

  He remembered too that there had been a choreography to their interactions. The girls would finish each other’s sentences in a way that he and Haley couldn’t. He’d watched the twins speak for each other, and although they were infinitely different they were also the same: gleaming, confident, righteous.

  Carter zipped up the jeans. She always wore jeans when she was around him, tight low-rises that hardly covered the hip, as though it could close their age gap. The difference was that even her jeans were 7 For All Mankind and cost $300. He’d tried to step up his game in the months they’d been seeing each other—to spend more, dress better—though he still felt like a redneck kid from Longwood, the poor relation to Blueheart Woods. This city, he decided, was where all kinds of Americans came together to politely dislike one another. Everett sat down on the bed beside her and almost asked if she ever dreamed about Haley. Since they’d begun sleeping with each other they had avoided the names of their respective sisters.

  “What if I don’t let you go back to them?” Everett said. He didn’t like to think about her away from him, becoming a family with the people he hated most. And then, although he knew he shouldn’t, he grabbed Carter by her wrists and pushed her backward onto the bed. He gripped her hard but kissed her softly, feeling the moment her lips parted. He loved her teeth, so straight and white. Expensive teeth. He ran his tongue over them, which he knew drove her crazy.

  “You weren’t supposed to happen,” Carter said into his face. Her lips curled up on one side, like she didn’t trust the words even as she spoke them.

  Everett didn’t answer her because it was an argument they’d been having for a long time, ever since he ran into her at the bistro around the corner, Heritage. She’d gone and broken things off with her live-in, Alex, but Everett knew she still wasn’t his. He didn’t feel it, not yet, and maybe never would—not with either of their families.

  Everett kissed her again and unbuttoned the jeans she’d just done up. He licked her smooth belly, downward. He knew she wouldn’t say no.

  * * *

  —

  Afterward, they lay again on the bed, Carter with a soft look on her face as she gazed up and out into the sky, the sunlight brightening into afternoon. She had asked him to stay inside, which they didn’t usually do.

  He rolled on his side. “Did I tell you I tried reading Jane Eyre?”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did. I am. I use Google for the weird words.”

  “You’re using Google to read Jane Eyre?”

  “Trying.”

  He had been so young during the preliminary trials, it was hard to recall all the details. He’d never been brave enough to go digging into them as an adult until he started sleeping with Carter. What Everett remembered was his father turning to stone, his mother into a pile of sand.

  The one thing he remembered was the stuff about Jane Eyre. Because it was more like a story they were telling and less about his sister’s being gone. The prosecutor kept insisting the girls were embroiled in an elaborate fantasy, a day-to-day kind of game that had led to Kennedy’s obsession with Haley.

  When the prosecutor had to admit to the judge that they had not found the murder weapon, Everett saw his parents shake with disappointment. Despite assurances from the lawyer that people could testify Haley carried a pocketknife with her at the time, and likely her own knife had been used against her, Everett began to sense the case was getting weaker and weaker as the preliminary hearing went on.

  * * *

  —

  Carter sat up. She breathed deep. She stopped talking and pulled hard on her hair, twisting it around her hand. “My sister was dropping acid every week. She wasn’t sane. She was sick.”

  “My pa was a drunk. Yours too. And I can’t stop you from talking about your coke days when you get going about them.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “A hit of acid didn’t kill Haley. You’re making excuses.”

  Carter let go of her hair and it fell around her face. “I can’t make it better, what happened.”

  “You’re not her.” He sat up with her. “I know that’s simple, but it’s true.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “You should check your phone,” Everett told her as he shrugged on some clothes and checked his own cell, though no one had called him. “Didn’t you hear it?”

  Carter found the phone in her purse. There was only one number, but it had called three times. “Gerry. Shit.”

  She’d known her father would call, Everett pointed out, and she said she had but that she just couldn’t stand him—his nervousness and his controlling nature, which canceled each other out, leaving behind an inertia. In their youth he’d been a partner in a small law firm, but after years now of working from home, Gerry Wynn had acquired the habit of running dialogue, she said. Like a toy car that had been wound up and let go, he possessed a tight energy that came from the tiniest mechanism inside him. She didn’t think he knew when he was doing it or what he was saying. She got up off the bed and went into the shower.

  “You’ve made a mess of me,” she said as Everett got in with her.

  The shower was covered in tiny chocolate-colored tiles and was the same size as the entire bathroom at his mom’s place. Before he stepped into the shower with her, Everett glanced into the mirror and saw, for a second, a shadow of his sister in his own face, something about the way they both held their mouths. As Everett joined Carter he said to her soapy shoulders, “I think I miss her but then I think I barely knew her.”

  Haley had had hazel eyes like his, almost green, but he’d turned out dark haired and olive in complexion like their father and she’d always been pink, with their mother’s kinky auburn hair. Occasionally Everett caught himself making a certain face—he didn’t need to see it, would just feel it forming—and he knew it was an expression he’d picked up from his older sister. Other times, the memories seemed to be getting further and further away, in part because he was older now than she’d ever be, yet in his mind she was still somehow older and more knowledgeable. Everett wondered if she would dress like Carter now, the way she’d always tried to when she was a teenager.

  Carter had shown up in their lives, whipped out a credit card, and bought Haley things the Kimbersons could never have afforded. Like magic she came home looking like someone else and showed everything off to him, saying, as s
he always did, Don’t tell Mom. As if their mother would overlook the Ray-Ban sunglasses, the tickets to Lollapalooza up in DC, the ten-hole Doc Martens on Haley’s feet. The Wynn twins convinced her to get Glamour Shots done with them at the mall. To them, it was ironic and hysterical. To Haley, she could put on earrings and find the glimmer of everything she’d never had. The photo showed her with a hand hovering near her hair, a scrunchie half-ponytail on top of her head, and a large gold-link necklace, her lips painted with chocolate-brown lipstick. It wound up being used as her funeral photo.

  He still thought of things they could do together if Haley were alive, what kind of adult siblings they might have been like, but it was nothing more than a mental exercise, and trying to conjure her up made Everett hurt in a place that was deep in his body but also not his body at all, a kind of infinite pain like the universe was throbbing all around him.

  When the mismatched couple had gotten dressed, Carter sat and phoned her father and Everett put frozen waffles into the toaster. He went to the espresso maker he’d only purchased that week. She hadn’t noticed it yet. Everett realized he didn’t know how to use it.

  Carter played a message on her cell, and Everett could hear Kennedy’s voice. He hadn’t expected it to punch him like it did. Carter’s sister was there, breathing, talking, on the other side of the receiver. Today was as hard for him as it was for Carter, he thought, but all morning he’d wanted to take care of her and she didn’t seem to grasp that. Everett listened as Carter called Gerry back. He gathered they were at the house in Blueheart Woods now. He listened as she explained she wasn’t feeling well, that she’d been dizzy and almost had a car accident. The conversation only lasted a few minutes, then the toaster popped loudly, and she glared at him. She said she’d be there soon and she clicked off.