Little Threats

by Emily Schultz

  Now Kennedy didn’t respond. She pulled her knees up against her chin. Carter watched Kennedy watching her, her mouth suddenly firm. There was no arguing with Kennedy. There never had been, really. Carter always knew what she would say, so an argument was pointless. Carter heard the breath come hard through her nostrils.

  “I’m not a violent person,” Kennedy said finally, as if she’d had to assess all angles of the statement before deciding on its truth.

  “I believe you,” Carter replied, not looking at Kennedy. It was as practiced as Kennedy’s saying she didn’t remember anything. Though Carter couldn’t admit it to herself until the last visit, she had always doubted Kennedy. Gerry was an absolutist about Kennedy’s innocence, as much as the Kimbersons were absolutists about her guilt. For Carter, doubt felt honest, liberating. It was probably doubt that had brought her and Everett together.

  Carter scooted off the bed and walked out. She went and retrieved the wicker laundry basket from the spare room—her old room. She stood in the blank room and took three long breaths, before she brought it back in and laid it down beside Kennedy on the bed. She told her Gerry had paid for them—wouldn’t let her put them in the room, of course. Carter reached out and unfolded two blouses. She showed her sister the pants, which sat low; the thick belt, which could be worn with the buckle off to the side. Kennedy’s eyes went from hard to dewy.

  “These are nice,” she said, reaching out to touch the sleeve of one of the shirts. It was the one Carter had known she would most like.

  When Carter told her to try it on, Kennedy said maybe later, and Carter wondered if she didn’t want to be naked in front of her.

  “What are you doing for work?” Kennedy asked.

  “Nothing real. Temping. Pharmaceutical advertising, but it’s just answering phones really. Do you remember Ryan Whittles?”

  “Ryan Shittles from your history class?”

  Carter nodded. Haley had come to Carter’s rescue in history class. That was how they’d all become friends. Ryan Whittles had been teasing Carter relentlessly, calling her tight-ass, asking why she couldn’t be more like Kennedy.

  Carter told Kennedy that at her last job some coworkers had gone out for nachos on a Friday. When she and her manager went up to the bar to order more food and beverages there was Ryan Whittles. In front of her manager he’d put his finger right in her face, drunk, and yelled, ‘You can change your name, but you’re still a fucking Wynn.’”

  They didn’t see Gerry standing in the bedroom doorway. “What was wrong with being a Wynn?” he asked. The women turned. Neither answered him.

  * * *

  —

  Gerry opened up a beer for himself and announced it was the one drink a day he’d negotiated with his doctor.

  Kennedy exchanged a quick glance with Carter; they called it their radio: those moments when they had simultaneous thoughts. It was the first type like that to pass between them in years.

  Gerry began to pace around the sitting room again as Carter asked whether they could eat yet. “You showed her the clothes. What should we do about her hair?”

  Kennedy answered that she hadn’t really thought about hair or clothes much. The biggest concern the other women had inside about fashion was how to hide their WP tattoos for their parole hearings.

  “What does that mean, WP?” Carter asked.

  “‘White Power,’” Kennedy said as casually as if she were discussing a new movie. “But Heron Valley is easy time. We never had a big problem with the gangs. Just when country girls transferred in and caused shit.”

  Gerry looked at his daughters with horror. None of these words had been said in the Wynn house in any context before.

  “What kind of shit would they cause?” Carter asked.

  Gerry choked on his beer. He coughed and set the bottle down to thump his chest. When it had passed he said, “Don’t talk about that stuff when the guests come. Talk about good things.”

  “What good things?” Carter asked, knowing it was what Kennedy was thinking.

  “She got her diploma. Taught classes. Wrote short stories.”

  “It’s not like I was a TA at Sarah Lawrence,” Kennedy interjected.

  “Just be Kennedy for them. Normal Kennedy.”

  Kennedy and Carter glanced at each other.

  Kennedy tipped her head back and looked at the ceiling. “No one is coming.”

  Alex said, “I showed up.”

  Gerry gestured with two hands out, as if the young man’s presence reaffirmed everything. “They’re coming.”

  “To hang out with the reason they’ve been embarrassed of their name? No one is coming and I don’t need them. You do,” Kennedy said.

  Carter watched the firm set of Kennedy’s jaw. She could almost feel her back teeth grinding. It had only taken an hour for the breakdown to begin.

  * * *

  —

  As they ate the now-tepid lasagna (one with meat and one without, for Carter), Alex said and did nothing but look at her. The only one talking was her father, a little louder than necessary to make up for everyone else’s silence.

  “It’s a fine name, Wynn,” Gerry argued, picking up on what they’d said upstairs. “I never understood why you took your mother’s name. Nothing to be ashamed of. Now, Emmett Kimberson. That’s a name to be ashamed of.”

  “You mean Everett.” Carter touched her clavicle.

  “What?”

  “His name. You got it wrong.”

  Kennedy looked at Carter. Another radio moment that was a surprise for both of them.

  Gerry jabbed at the air with his fork. “I’m just saying, here’s a fool that’s representative of the way this country is going. Do you know what he wasted the money on? Turned twenty-one, got one of these sucker mortgages, no money down, preapproved. That’s not how you buy property.”

  The women watched Gerry cutting his lasagna with a knife even though it was so soft by this point it seemed unnecessary. He said Everett Kimberson was the whole damn reason the market was collapsing, people who think they can have anything and not work for it.

  “Who are you, uh, talking about?” Alex said, possibly worried that Gerry was now talking about him.

  “Haley’s brother,” Kennedy answered before Carter could respond.

  Carter’s phone began buzzing and she knew who it was without looking. She dug into her purse below the table with steady hands. She found the phone and held the buzzing thing—Rochester—between her legs, squeezing, trying to silence it.

  Chapter 5

  Berk Butler was never on time for work but that day he was meeting someone from TV. He parked outside the grocery store that bore his surname, looked in the rearview, licked his fingers, and smoothed his thick eyebrows. With his hair gone it was the last thing on his body he could remotely style.

  He entered through the automatic doors and went to the office, though he mostly worked on the loading dock and only sometimes floor managed, taking care of cider displays, samples, and banners. Come on, everyone, push them apples, his younger brother, Wyatt, said whenever he did a walk-through at the store—their flagship and one of twenty-four in the state. With each repeated instruction about fruit sales from his boss, Berk imagined Sisyphus pushing a giant, soul-crushing apple up the hill.

  He wanted Dee Nash, the host of Crime After Crime, to see him in the office. Wyatt was at this store only a couple of hours a day and would never know Berk had passed off this desk as his own. As he waited he played with his tie, which the younger guys had already teased him about. Dee Nash was punctual. At five minutes to one o’clock he saw her arrive on one of his brother’s monitors. A black woman in a well-tailored pantsuit, she moved with a cop’s authority past the registers and inquired with the floor manager.

  Berk drew some papers to himself and picked up a pen as she entered the office. He had no idea wha
t he was signing so intently when he looked back up.

  “Mr. Butler?”

  “Detective.”

  “Former detective. So it’s just Dee now.”

  He’d watched one episode of Dee Nash’s show. It began with a young woman, unmoving, in a pool of blood, the kind of image he would switch off if he could. The camera angle cut to a victim’s-eye view, and they showed Dee Nash walking across a gritty parking lot toward the camera, police tape blowing in the wind. I lost my sister to violence when I was ten. That’s when I knew I had to dedicate my life to helping other victims. Time doesn’t heal wounds. Justice does.

  The phone on the desk began lighting up and Berk realized he didn’t have a plan for that. He let it ring.

  “Berkeley,” Dee began, “I don’t believe in a lot of small talk.” She glanced at the blinking phone lines. “And you’re a very busy man.”

  “Twenty-four stores I run. Failing or succeeding because of the decisions I make every day. Lucky I even get to see my little girl at all at night.”

  Dee asked how old his little girl was, and Berk said four, born after he’d met his wife, Serenity, and they’d wed in Vegas. His daughter was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

  “We do it all for them, don’t we?” she said.

  “Sure as money is money.” Berk leaned back in the chair, almost too far.

  “And I want to thank you for taking the time to talk with us about going on camera.”

  He leaned forward in the executive chair. “So how much does this pay?”

  “I’m sorry if there was any confusion. We don’t pay interview subjects.”

  Berk made a sound like she’d slugged him in the gut. “Then I’m wondering what it is I can do for you. My memory might not be so fresh.”

  “You have a very personal interest in telling your story. You were closest to Haley Rae Kimberson.”

  Hearing her full name was like being accused of things all over again. “I wouldn’t say close close.”

  “I’m not concerned about the age difference. Those were different times.” Dee set her bag on the floor. She took out a small notebook.

  “I’d feel more comfortable without that,” Berk said, shifting in his brother’s chair. “My words got used against me before.”

  Dee put the pen down. “Old cop habit. And after what they put you through I should have known. A good man like yourself. Never got to tell your side to a jury.”

  Berk nodded at the flattery.

  “So what would you say was most important? If you were trying to explain what happened to someone who’d never heard of Haley Kimberson or you or Kennedy Wynn, what would you tell them?”

  Berk had brought a Polaroid of Haley with him to work that day, like a talisman. It was from the moment she’d walked into his off-campus apartment only a couple of weeks before she died. He’d tugged it out from hiding spots and looked at it over the years. It didn’t quite capture how she could see right through his bullshit, that she knew his knowledge of philosophy and world religions would not stand up to the most basic interrogation. Or that he never read the books stacked on the floor in his bedroom. On their first all-night phone call he’d asked Haley what she was reading. She said W. S. Merwin. He laughed and said he wasn’t into mom poetry. “Try some Bukowski. That’s the real stuff.”

  She’d found the Merwin in the thrift store in Blueheart and it intrigued her. He knew she didn’t have a lot of money to spend on new books. When Berk offered to drive her up to Washington, DC, to go book shopping at cool bookstores like Politics and Prose, she hedged.

  “Everything ends up in a thrift store one day,” she replied. “That doesn’t make it less real. Just that everything had its time. Even your books.”

  She had touched his shallow soul by reading him poems all night on the telephone, and now the Polaroid was the last of her. Haley, full cheeks, light freckles, white tank top, necklace at her throat, her red hair spilling from a sloppy bun, her eyes slightly closed as she laughed, red-lipsticked mouth.

  The only part of Kennedy in this photo was her hand, on Haley’s upper arm. When he’d put it in his pocket that morning, he didn’t know if he would show it to Dee or if he just wanted it near him. His fingers grazed its edge, then he took them away and put his hand back on the desk. It felt too intimate.

  “I can see you’re still a little hesitant, but I flew in from Los Angeles just so we could talk. I hope that shows how committed I am to telling the truth,” Dee said.

  He scoffed. “Hesitant? No, just thinking things through. That’s what bosses do.”

  The phone began ringing again.

  “You do know Kennedy Wynn was released today? We filmed her being picked up by her family,” Dee said.

  “That today? Didn’t write it down in my daybook, I guess.” Berk smirked.

  Dee reached down into her bag and pulled out a camcorder, not much bigger than a pear. She set it on the desk in front of her, flipped the screen, and offered to play the video for him.

  He could feel himself sweating through the collared shirt he wasn’t used to. “Are you going to talk to Kennedy?”

  “We’ll talk to anyone involved who wants to tell their story. That’s why it’s important to tell yours.”

  Berk thought about what Kennedy would say about that summer. All the lies coming back. Maybe this hadn’t been a good idea. “This is going to be like a documentary, right? Not an investigation?”

  “We have some questions that we think weren’t asked at the time.”

  “What questions?”

  “Haley was stabbed nineteen times. Three of her ribs broken.” Her voice was flat as she recited the facts. “Was Kennedy a strong girl? Tall? Maybe our height?”

  Five-three, he thought, five-four maybe. Berk tried to remember, then realized where she was steering the conversation. “Not so tall. No.”

  “Those are the kind of questions we’ll ask.”

  “Questions about height?”

  “And other things.”

  Dee took out her notebook again and scribbled. When Berk glanced across to see, he thought it read, little white vampire girl: not tall, though it was hard to tell from his side of the desk. The office door opened. It was Liam, one of the peach-fuzzed stock boys. “Hey, Berkoff, what are you doing in Wyatt’s office?”

  “I’m having a meeting, can’t you see that? And this is a shared office.”

  “Your wife’s on the phone,” Liam said.

  Liam left and as Berk picked up the receiver he glanced at Dee. She held on to her notepad as if to say she would wait. Berk punched the line and the full force of Serenity’s voice hit him.

  “Are you an idiot?! You’re meeting with those crime show people, aren’t you?”

  “We can talk about this later.”

  Dee heard the other side of the call, or could at least read Berk’s shame. She gathered her things and slid a business card across the desk to him, excusing herself silently.

  “Stop talking,” Serenity commanded him. “Go phone your dad. Now! Or get a lawyer. Jesus Christ, Berk. Leave the past in the past.”

  Chapter 6

  Although Marly had phoned Everett earlier, she hadn’t managed to make it out of bed or get dressed. Everett leaned into the bedroom and said, “I’m here,” then went down into the kitchen, where he put the coffee on. There were too many times he’d wondered if he would walk in and see the shape of her under the covers, the blankets twisted up and her body unmoving, and he’d listen: breath. She was breathing.

  He watched the kettle rasp. When Marly was younger, she was a different person. As he scooped coffee into the Bodum French press he’d given her, he remembered how, years ago, she’d spent three weeks bent over her sewing machine making him a pirate costume for a play. Every detail had to be right: the ruffle on the shirt, the embroidered velvet jac
ket. When she had it done, she boiled up some coffee. Everett watched as his mom poured pot after pot of coffee into a large plastic tub. She submerged his beautiful jacket and shirt—staining them. “A pirate is someone with fine things that have gone bad,” she said. Everett didn’t trust her—he knew how much she’d spent on the fabric, a whole week’s grocery bill—but when she pulled it out and dried it and he put it on, he stood, four feet two, a real living, breathing pirate before him in the mirror. She clapped the loudest of anyone that night.

  The kettle screamed and Everett reached out and turned the gas burner to off. He poured the water, watched the steam rise.

  “Your dad called this morning,” Marly said, and when Everett turned she was standing in the doorway in her bathrobe. His mother’s eyes were sunken, dark. Marly Kimberson took things for the depression, but sometimes she went off them. Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro, Lustral, Luvox: they all sounded so professional. She said they made her fat and forgetful. He never understood what his mom needed to remember though, or why she needed to be thin.

  “Y’all never talk. Surprised he remembered the exact date.”

  She nodded. “Some things you don’t forget. Judy was having herself a shopping day.”

  His mom had only met his father’s new wife once but she made firm judgments. When his dad and Judy visited they took Everett and Marly out for barbecue. Judy wore fuchsia lipstick. She had dyed black hair and impractical shoes that meant she had to be dropped off right in front of the restaurant. She called his father Teddy in a high pitch instead of Ted, and she was always touching him, as if he’d get away if she let go for even a minute. Everett never really minded Judy though. He’d had to see her more than his mom had. Judy grabbed the hard edges of his dad and shook them out.