Little Threats

by Emily Schultz

  Everett put his palm on the top of the plunger. He squeezed the mechanism down, crushing water through the coffee slowly.

  “He said that if I run into Kennedy Wynn in the supermarket, I should run directly at her, cawing and flapping my arms like a bird. Said the only way to deal with a crazy person is to pretend you’re crazier.” She laughed.

  Everett hadn’t heard her laugh in such a long time.

  Marly put her fingers over her mouth. “Oh Lord,” she said, and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “Your dad never played the same bingo card as everyone else. Haley was like that too.”

  She’d told him this about his father many times, but Everett never saw it. He saw the firm, unrelenting parts. In Ted’s eyes, there was a way to squeeze a toothpaste tube, a way to make a bed, to tie a tie. Nothing could be out of place and he hated tardiness. It was probably why he’d called Marly early, just to see if Everett had arrived at the appointed hour. Even when Ted was a drunk, he’d been strict about the household rules—although he was the one who usually violated them.

  “He’s worried about you. Wants reassurance you’re not spending through all that money too quickly.”

  Everett puffed his cheeks, blew out a breath. What did it matter? His family’s finances had gone from dime-thin to swollen overnight, and the civil suit payout didn’t seem to have disrupted the Wynns’ balance sheet—Gerry continued to live in the same sprawling house and drive his red Acura on weekdays, and his other two cars on the weekends. Everett pulled the milk out of the fridge. As he closed the fridge door, a yellow-eyed Amur leopard gazed back at him, held up by a magnet from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. The door was covered in photos of animals from the World Wildlife Fund and children in faraway countries that his mother had sponsored. She’d spent her money as easily, though never on herself. Any charity that phoned could take her for an easy fifty.

  “We shouldn’t sit around the house,” Everett said. “Let’s drive out to Virginia Beach, walk on the boardwalk. Maybe get a pizza. Haley loved it there.”

  Marly nodded, both hands wrapped around a mug that read World’s Best Mom. Haley had given it to her. “The neighbors’ Labradoodle shit in our yard again. I was thinking we could pick it up in a plastic bag, drive it by the Wynns’, and fling it at their house.” Her mouth twitched in a way that wasn’t exactly a smile.

  Everett told her they’d do that on the way.

  * * *

  —

  They took his mom’s car so she could smoke; he didn’t want it to ruin his Mustang. Everett insisted he drive—Marly always went too slow, peering at the road ahead of her like a book with the print too small. As he backed her car out of the garage, he commented on the Spider-Man four-by-four he’d kept stashed there for two years.

  The handlebars of the quad were positioned almost like a dog perking up its ears. There were two sets of headlights, round, alert. The whole machine looked eager, ready to go at all times—though it had sat in the garage for almost six months, since the last time he’d ridden it. It had a good personality for an inanimate object.

  “I’m gonna sell that. It’s kid shit, really.” Everett felt hot as he said it, angry. He was surprised to discover the emotion.

  “Oh, don’t do that. You love zipping around here.”

  “I could get two thousand for it, twenty-five hundred maybe, enough for a trip. We should go somewhere, just us, like a family trip.”

  “There’s no point. Every place is the same.”

  “What about Italy?”

  Marly lit a cigarette and he put the window down. She glanced over and he knew she wanted it back up. His mother was always cold, even when it was fifty-five degrees.

  “Italy. That’s where you take your new wife, not your mother.”

  But he wanted to take his mother, he told her. He smiled. He tried his best. She was wearing an oversize hoodie that he’d bought for her from the college he’d attended for a year, its acronym puffed up over her chest. It was the one that everyone went to, the one that hadn’t really required high SATs. She glanced at the window again, and Everett pressed the button and back up it went. He signaled and moved toward the expressway on-ramp. “I have been sort of seeing someone,” he told her on an impulse. She didn’t need to ever know the real story. He could always tell her it didn’t work out later, that it was some college girl who had to move home, to North Carolina, or DC, or somewhere. He could see the lie like a thing of beauty.

  “That is the fastest way to heartbreak,” Marly said, lips drawing on her cigarette.

  They drove along awhile and then she said, “Do I know her? Is it serious? Will I get to meet her?” as if she’d only just realized what he was telling her.

  Everett shook his head and said, “Probably not.”

  He knew Marly wanted him to be happy, get a girlfriend, get a job, get married, give her grandkids. These were the things she recited at him, as if reading from the script for the role of the caring mom she’d once been. At the same time, she’d only come to see the condo once. She was surprised to see it was a tower; she said she’d thought a town house was more likely, and he wondered how closely she’d looked at any of the pictures he’d shown her in the months they waited for it to get built. If Everett did any of that big life stuff, he wasn’t sure she would really care. She’d given up a long time ago, and bringing her back was no easy task. Maybe that was why Everett didn’t want to go clubbing or meet girls through his friends, even though they expected him to. They said he was the good-looking one, the one who would bring the ladies scrambling toward them. There was no point. Everett knew he could do all the things a person was supposed to do, but at the end of the day, just like his mom, he was a little dead inside.

  With Carter, it was easy. He would get lost in a feeling that didn’t have a name—it was like a big wave carrying him forward.

  “Everett! You’re drifting,” Marly said. “And you’re driving too fast.”

  He pulled the vehicle back from the outer line. He didn’t know why he’d said that thing earlier, to Carter about her neck. Or why he’d phoned her right after she’d left. It was an impulse. Stupid. “Italy,” he said to his mother. “I was thinking of Italy.”

  “She has a name, this girl?”

  “Of course, it’s . . .” Everett squinted out the windshield. He took a moment to think as he reached for his sunglasses. “Jane.”

  “Jane. That’s nice. Don’t hear that name very much anymore. Is she older?”

  “A couple years, yeah.”

  “That might be good for you, Everett.” Marly nodded.

  * * *

  —

  There was a TV on the back wall of the pizzeria near the beach. A commercial was playing for a crime show. “They’ve been calling,” Marly said with a nod, and Everett followed her gaze. Crime After Crime, the spot read in large letters. Tuesdays at 9.

  “Who?”

  “You know these TV shows. I don’t want to be interviewed again—not after what they did on 20/20 before the sentencing.”

  His mother insisted Stone Phillips had made her cry on purpose. But of course his mom had cried. She would have cried no matter who was interviewing her or what they asked. Everett never understood why she was so embarrassed by the segment. He’d found it on YouTube a while back, a small clip anyway.

  Stone Phillips: The evidence is not that strong. The DA is now afraid to go to trial. A jury would never convict her. Do you think Kennedy did it?

  Marly Kimberson: All I need to do is look that freak in her eyes and know the truth. She killed her. I knew something was wrong when I came home and they were hanging upside down off the bunk bed, arms crossed and hair straight down. I asked what in the hell? And that Kennedy said to me: practicing being vampires. Well, practice makes perfect, don’t they say?

  His mother ran her hand over her red hair—lately she�
�d been wearing it super short so she didn’t have to deal with it. She squinted out the big front window of the restaurant. It was after two p.m. and the sun was streaming in.

  He was about to ask if she wanted him to stand up and fix the blinds when she said, “I always thought we got a raw deal—shoulda been both of them.”

  The server came then and the pizza tray landed between them. Everett waited until the server left, then, as his mom lifted her slice up, he said, “What are you talking about?”

  She chewed and didn’t answer right away. He took a few bites, then picked some of the mushrooms off. They ordered them because Haley liked them.

  “I’m not saying they’re telepathic, but c’mon, secrets with twins?” She shook her head. “There ain’t no secrets.”

  He felt himself flinch. What was it Carter had said that morning? It’s not that simple? Did that mean she included herself in what happened? He thought about the dreams she’d hinted at.

  Marly was chewing and staring out the window. “I always thought Haley could’ve been a lawyer, or something like that. Wouldn’t have been easy, the tuition. But she was so smart. Do you know what she got on her PSATs?” For once his mother didn’t rattle off the numbers but bragged instead. “And she had an internship with Doug Macaulay. You know, a law firm ain’t Arby’s.”

  “Wasn’t she a little young for that?”

  “It was a school internship.” Marly shook her head. “I knew we never should have taken her to that Clint Black concert. Too secular. That’s when it all started with Haley—the makeup, the dancing.”

  They were finishing up when the TV played the Crime After Crime spot again. This time Everett caught the whole thing. A young woman lay, unmoving, in a pool of blood. At that moment he turned away but could still hear. The narration carried through the half-empty restaurant: “Time doesn’t heal wounds. Justice does.”

  “Maybe we should do it, Ma.” Everett threw some bills down on the table. “It might help you feel better.”

  “Nothing helps.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll talk to Haley about it.” Everett knew that Marly went to the grave more than she said she did. It embarrassed Everett to think that she believed they could communicate with the dead. Prayer, he understood. Talking to a tombstone with his sister’s name on it, he didn’t.

  They left the pizza place and walked along the boardwalk. He wandered away at one point and tried to phone Carter, but she didn’t pick up. She was with her family—and they’d said they would never put each other at risk—but suddenly Everett didn’t care. The tenderness he’d felt earlier was gone, replaced by jitters.

  He went back and sat with his mom and listened to the waves rise and fall. Marly reached out and took his hand, something she didn’t normally do. Everett asked if she remembered the time he was the pirate in the school play and she said, “Of course, Everett. I was so proud of you.” Her voice warmed and she sat there, beaming at the water.

  He wondered if she was still proud of him at all—what it would feel like if she were.

  Chapter 7

  Kennedy peered out her window at Gerry below in the darkness. She had heard him shout sonofabitch. He was stacking the chafing dishes outside the door for the caterers to pick up in the morning and his hands were covered in lasagna splatter. She shut the window and lay back down on her bed. It was softer than she remembered beds ever being. Her bedroom and prison cell were the only two rooms Kennedy had known. She’d run back to the security of her room the moment Carter and Alex left. She was aware of the psychology behind her behavior immediately.

  Part of her plan for the morning was to visit her mother’s grave for the first time. Then she would start filling out employment search forms for her parole officer. Gerry had started his consulting company after he was semi-forced out of his law firm during the preliminary trial, and now he worked from home. Maybe she would find a coffee shop to do her employment work in. She wondered if the café they used to go to near Plan 9 Music was still in business. She and Carter had spent countless hours drinking cappuccinos, eating spanakopita, and staring out the large front windows at the shoppers and scavengers of Carytown, a mishmash of alternative kids who came for the used-book shops and bead stores, and affluent housewives who came for the craft shops and hair salons.

  The summer of ’92, Laine had said she thought Kennedy should keep busy and push herself, a phrase Kennedy had noticed was never applied to Carter. Laine had found Kennedy part-time work at a card shop that printed social stationery for the West End families. The store did calling cards, which were business cards without any details on them, as if you were automatically supposed to know where a person lived and why they’d come knocking; cocktail invitations and invites for tailgate parties; announcements for births and weddings and debutante coming-out balls—a phrase Kennedy would have snorted at, except she’d also heard it tossed around Blueheart Woods by some of her stuffier neighbors.

  Etiquette was something her mother had tried to impart to both of them, but once Kennedy was giving advice on formal wording and matching napkins to the ink color of the invitations, she grasped better what her mom meant when she talked about privilege. Privilege was a thing that always belonged to other people. Never mind that Kennedy worked because she wanted to, because it was “good for you,” because it would be a “growing experience.”

  For a second Kennedy thought she could apply for a job there again, but as a convicted felon handling money was out. What else was there? She couldn’t get hired for most jobs in the financial, legal, medical, and education fields either. In her state she could not even be given an exotic dancer license. Parole at thirty-one had effectively sentenced her to being a sixteen-year-old girl again.

  As she gazed up at the posters, she set aside that question and focused on the task she cared most about. What would she bring to her mother’s grave? Flowers would be simple, but she had left prison with only a one-month bus pass and a check for her four years of teaching work at five cents an hour: $96.00. She would have to ask Gerry for money eventually, but she wanted to wait at least a day.

  She decided she would bring the glass bulb from the garden.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, Kennedy got dressed in the same black dress from the day before. She couldn’t fathom wasting another outfit. She walked down the hallway toward the stairs. If Gerry was the same, he had slept in the recliner until midnight, then showered and gone to his bedroom. Teen girls memorized the movements of parents through suburban panopticons like prisoners knew guard rounds.

  At the front door Kennedy paused. Could it be that simple again? Opening a door and walking out? Before she could go out to the garden to retrieve the glass ornament she saw Gerry was standing in the foyer in his pajamas and robe, holding a cup of coffee.

  “Escaping?” he joked. Over the years he had become as quiet as the house, it seemed. He was part of it. Like the carpeting. “I want to talk.”

  In the family room they sat beside each other in matching recliners. Gerry had a shimmering blue folder in hand that he passed to Kennedy. “That’s for you.”

  Kennedy opened the folder. It was banking pamphlets and agreements.

  “It’s so you don’t have to worry,” he said.

  “Worry about what?”

  “Security.”

  Kennedy flicked through the pages and saw a balance sheet: $922,000.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “It’s a couple of things. I did work for some guys starting a K Street firm and they paid me in stock. Company got sold this year. There’s your mom’s insurance too. The important thing is it’s in an LLC. Numbered account. The Kimbersons are not going to steal this, okay?”

  Kennedy didn’t know what to say. For the last fifteen years money had had no meaning, and even as a teen she’d spent and st
olen with no consequences. Like other girls at Liberty High, Kennedy perfected the art of shoplifting, shoving eyeliners, mascaras, and boxes of OB tampons in her waistband. Sometimes, even skirts were walked out of stores underneath longer velvet skirts. It was, they rationalized, just sticking it to “the man,” but more often than not in privileged Blueheart Woods, their parents were the man.

  “The country is different now,” Gerry told her. “People don’t mind being famous for horrible things. There’s this woman from the Hilton family. She actually goes on the talk shows and promotes a tape of herself doing things. You know, with men. Anyone can say ‘look at me’ and then a camera spins around. It’s a whole industry and I don’t want you tempted by any of it. I want you to have a life again. A quiet life.”

  Kennedy looked up from the paperwork and realized that both $96 and $900,000 were amounts of money equally effective at limiting her ability to escape. Kennedy said thank you, and went upstairs and shoved the documents under her bed.

  * * *

  —

  She waited half an hour for the bus as the sky threatened her with rain. When it didn’t come she started walking toward the cemetery, out along Smoke Line.

  The woods stretched for fifteen hundred acres, between her house in Blueheart and Haley’s in Longwood, and beyond. She had a sudden memory: it was this stretch of road Kennedy had walked that last long-ago night after she and Haley got separated. She remembered walking home alone along Smoke Line, the three miles of sparkling darkness—every time she passed below a streetlight, her shoes sliding on black trails of light. The hot orange crackle of fireworks far away, like an aching tickle in her ear, and having no sense of time. Why she’d been walking, she couldn’t say.

  That night had started with a phone call from their mother. “They won’t let her leave,” Carter had told Kennedy in her bedroom as they were getting ready to go out that night. Laine had driven herself to the hospital with leg pain and they wanted her to stay overnight.