Little Threats

by Emily Schultz

  * * *

  —

  During an appeal meeting after my conviction, when I had protested that Berk could never have been the one responsible for Haley, my lawyer let me read his deposition. I remember more of that transcript than I want to.

  Commonwealth Attorney: So Kennedy’s your girl that spring?

  Berk Butler: No. It wasn’t like that. Kennedy [pause]. You don’t touch something like that.

  CA: Like what?

  BB: I could do better than that, you know what I mean?

  CA: Of course you could. Haley was more attractive. That’s what you’re saying? She was the one you were after.

  BB: Yeah, you could say that.

  CA: The better teenage girl? Hotter. Pure, right?

  BB: Don’t. Don’t do that. I’m cooperating.

  CA: But Kennedy is jealous.

  BB: Yeah. Absolutely. You got it. She hated the fact her friend liked me. After that party—

  CA: The party at your apartment?

  BB: Yeah, that didn’t go so well. Kennedy left me a message, said she’d do anything for me. Other stuff too—she called my mom and dad’s place crying.

  (That was true. I did.)

  BB: I actually only hung around after that because I was afraid of what she might do.

  CA: Like what?

  BB: Kill herself, maybe. Guess she turned that feeling on someone else instead.

  CA: You don’t sound like you believe that.

  BB: I was trying to smooth things over, that’s why we were all together for the Fourth. Something low-key, friendly-like.

  He had told me that there were girls “meant for that,” and I wasn’t one of them, as if it were a compliment that he wouldn’t touch me. My appellate attorney said he was just using me to groom her. She stressed that he was a predator and even that prosecutor knew it in his line of questioning. She asked me if I had been molested as a child. I said no and my lawyer almost seemed disappointed. My appeal never made it past the court parking lot. It didn’t help that Berk still had a phone message of my yelling at him the morning after the party where he had hooked up with my best friend.

  Berk never came to court for the preliminary trial, or the day I made my plea. For the first year in prison I wished he would come visit: a thousand things I could say to him. But by the end of that year, when I closed my eyes at night, I didn’t see his face anymore, only hers—frozen in time, her eyes dim and her mouth open.

  —Kennedy Wynn

  Heron Valley Correctional Facility

  Chapter 14

  Kennedy opened her eyes again. Every morning when she woke it took her a few seconds to acclimatize. Remember where she was, when. The room was that of a sixteen-year-old but her body didn’t feel sixteen. She went into the bathroom and washed her face. She felt older, too, than thirty-one. As a teenager, she’d spent more time looking at her sister than she had into a mirror. Both their faces had changed, yet Carter’s still felt more familiar than hers. She stared at the new hair she had had to get for her job search. She still wasn’t sure it suited her. Her scraggly haircut had been turned into a variant of a pageboy. It felt very typical, nice. Girl-next-door. The $96 from her prison work was almost gone, but she would have her very own paycheck soon. As it turned out there was a telemarketing program that hired only ex-cons. It may not have been the first thing she’d have put on her to-do list in a new life, but it was something.

  She didn’t want to touch the Gerry money, but Kennedy had no idea what to do with the early hours of each day. For the past two weeks, she had been taking jogs through the subdivision every morning, but she felt self-conscious, as though above every immaculate lawn there was a window and someone behind it standing in a bathrobe, looking out and saying, “The Wynn girl. Where do you think she’s heading?”

  Even with the new haircut, even with the new clothes Carter had bought her, Kennedy was aware she was still a criminal—would always be, as long as she stayed here. And right now she had neither the means nor the method to be anywhere else. Neighborhoods like this were tight-lipped and judgmental, unforgetting. No matter how many divorces had passed, how many secret DUIs, daytime hustler visits, or relatively old-fashioned affairs and abortions. She reached into the closet and took out her old tennis shoes. She found a sweatshirt. In Carter’s old bedroom, which was now a guest room, there was a pair of yoga pants left in a dresser drawer.

  She paused for a second, glancing at the bed. She remembered long ago she and Carter had had a system: they would leave each other secret messages under the mattress or inside the seams of the comforters. Places to meet. Who would be there. Or sometimes just little reminders, jokes like: Don’t steal my best lipstick, bitch. Texts, essentially, before there were such things. But the bed wasn’t the same bed it had been. And that was long ago. Kennedy walked over and sat down on it. She felt under the mattress. There was nothing there. The comforter wasn’t like hers: it was expensive and didn’t unzip. She looked up at the blank ivory walls and wondered if she should start sleeping in here instead. It was a better mattress, and less dusty, that was for sure.

  Kennedy went back to her room, reached under her own mattress. She pulled the duvet from the bed and unzipped it, turned it inside out. She had a nagging feeling there might have been a message there. But the white comforter fell out of the purple linen, nothing with it, so she stuffed the whole thing back together. Probably it was nothing but paranoia.

  Kennedy looked at the messed-up bed. She took in the posters above. River Phoenix had overdosed during the investigation. Beside him on the poster, Keanu Reeves. They barely kissed in My Own Private Idaho, she remembered, yet it had been groundbreaking, a thing no one could stop discussing. She wondered now why it had been such a big deal. Then she jumped up on the bed and pulled down the movie poster. It made a satisfying sluicing sound as the paper collapsed. She folded it neatly and laid it on the desk. She plucked the tacks out of the Cure, Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction. At some point, she stopped folding them. Many were ephemera—left up but her passion for them over even before she’d gone. They cascaded to the bed and the floor and then she became less careful. She jumped as she took down the others. Johnny Depp’s face ripped in two as Edward Scissorhands came down, his somber expression torn so distinctly his own blade hand could have accidentally done it.

  Looking at the blank wall, the paint bright in rectangles where it had been covered all those years, she felt a rush of relief.

  Chapter 15

  Carter stared at the question on her phone for half an hour—Why are you going through with the show?—before she hit Send to “Rochester.” He didn’t return her text. She felt so tired she couldn’t think. She lay down and went back to sleep. What Everett had given her to help her breathe: it must have been Benadryl.

  When she woke up she phoned the Wynn house and got Kennedy. When she heard Kennedy’s voice, for a second it did lift her mood. Carter didn’t say why she was calling and didn’t mention the fight they’d had at the cemetery. They slipped into the ordinary routine of sisters and Kennedy made it easy on her.

  “I found a job in telemarketing.” Kennedy sounded happy, detailing her news like anyone would. “The entire room will be ex-cons who need a job within one month of parole.”

  Carter wondered if she should tell her about the TV show: Crime After Crime. She’d looked it up. But how could she tell Kennedy without telling her about Everett? She couldn’t. She could not. Carter could hear something playing in the background. Sinéad O’Connor, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. It was her tape and Kennedy must have found it there, squirrelled away in some drawer of track and field ribbons. Carter had listened to it a thousand times in her youth, fallen in and out of love a hundred times to the songs “Nothing Compares 2 U” and “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance.” When Sinéad sang about loss, Carter believed her. Until that point, Carter hadn’t known
any. The songs were about real relationships, the type of thing she could only imagine. She’d thought of no one special really: Boys who sat ahead of her and had eyes like jade or onyx—why had she always compared them to gems? Boys with skater bobs or their hair spiked to look like Morrissey. Boys whose names she could hardly remember. She had seldom spoken to them, only snickered or whispered behind her hand with Kennedy. Kennedy was the one who had made things happen. Kennedy had moved away from Sinéad though, toward grunge, then goth. Carter had followed her toward Kurt Cobain but stopped just short of Nine Inch Nails, opting for primal female voices like Tori Amos, Björk, and Sarah McLachlan. Later, Kennedy would talk to her passionately about Erykah Badu and Jurassic 5, sending Carter to the record store after their visits. Even in prison, Kennedy was still a tastemaker.

  * * *

  —

  She remembered at one of their gigs Kennedy sang the Pixies high and sweet, and not a whole lot like the original version. Their mom had videoed one of the gigs—the second maybe—and Carter wondered if the VHS had disintegrated or was still around somewhere.

  Kennedy had wanted her and Carter to form their own band—just ours, ditch these lame-os—though it was the guys in their band who’d gotten them the gig. The bar staff always tagged the girls with wristbands, a reminder that they were underage. Carter had said no to striking out alone, even though Kennedy pointed out they could bring Haley in. Three singers didn’t make a band, Carter had said. Kennedy was the only musician, Carter was so-so on bass, and Haley didn’t play anything. Kennedy sulked, then quit.

  Carter had never understood boys. Not the way her sister and Haley had. Haley had had her red hair that said look at me, soft thighs with faded pen hearts and boys’ names written on skin and showing through frayed jeans. She’d had full breasts she’d been unable to hide. Ryan Whittles and Ty Anderson had both dated Haley briefly—which meant walking through the hallway together at Liberty High, holding hands. Haley had said she gave her virginity to Ryan Whittles only for practice. “Why him?” Carter had said, repulsed.

  “Because he’s slept with everyone anyway so it almost doesn’t count, and besides,” Haley hissed with a rationale that was almost reasonable, “by the time I get to college I want to know what I’m doing.”

  Haley went to church every Sunday, but she said she could believe in God and still believe in pleasure. If she’d been a boy, Carter supposed, no one would have held arguments like that against Haley. But many things were held against her. Carter’s own father learned to sling mud of that sort in the aftermath, and the press didn’t shy away from the personal details.

  By springtime in eleventh grade, Carter began to feel in a club all her own, the Virgo Intacta club, or some other less polite name, so she pierced her nose at a kiosk in the mall and made out on the quad after school with Isaac Richmond, who wore plaid pants and eyeliner, though he never brushed his hair. Even Kennedy hadn’t made out with a boy who wore eyeliner yet. Isaac had cutouts from Nation of Ulysses zines pasted up in his locker. Carter hadn’t known what a zine was until he talked to her and then she mispronounced it. She knew he was far too cool for her and had only deigned to speak to her because she and Kennedy had a band and had played an actual gig. He tasted like Gitanes and tongued her so aggressively she couldn’t decide if she liked it, and when they parted ways she knew he’d never kiss her or talk to her again. Her stomach felt funny—half excitement and half nausea.

  “Holy god, Isaac Richmond!” Haley screeched at Carter, grabbing her hands, but Kennedy rolled her eyes.

  “He’s a snob. You can do better.”

  The second comment stung because it was something she herself had said to Kennedy only a couple weeks before when she’d met Berk.

  She remembered how she and Kennedy used to sit in the hallway at school and judge the girls who walked past: guessing whether they were on the pill by the size of their boobs and their butts—as if they themselves were above everyone else somehow because they’d found ankh necklaces, applied questionable hair dye, and divined the deeper meaning of the Stone Roses.

  When Kennedy picked out a large silver skull ring at the mall, Carter bought a heavy ring that featured theater masks, sad and happy. They had better jewelry at home: given to them by their mother, or aunts at Christmas. But they didn’t want good jewelry. They wanted to distinguish themselves. It didn’t seem to matter: people couldn’t tell them apart anyway. With Haley, it was as if they’d found a triplet—a bright streak between them as the three sauntered down the halls of Liberty High. When they whispered their secrets now it was into Haley’s ear, and a game of telephone began where the twins’ communications could be mangled. But not completely understanding one another made sense in a way. It was as if the two of them had been too intense before Haley—a circuit that was always burning out.

  Funny, Carter thought now, that such little things could divide them: whether they had sex, tried drugs, shoplifted, smoked cigarettes. Only a couple of years later, everyone, Carter especially, would do these things at college. But by the time school let out for summer, Carter was spending very little time with her sister and Haley.

  * * *

  —

  Carter realized they’d stopped talking. They were both listening to the cassette.

  “Do you want me to play it again?” Kennedy asked, and Carter laughed and said no.

  Kennedy surprised her. “Dad is definitely drinking again.”

  “Is he okay for driving you around?” Carter asked. “You’re going to need rides to work now.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “I could take the bus. Or maybe you could pick me up sometime.”

  Carter felt a hard knot of dread in her stomach but wasn’t sure if it was the idea of talking with Dead Kennedy, or because she was using the conversation as a way to avoid Everett: the desire to call him, the desire to go back there. She would have to go back for her Honda—tomorrow, probably. She couldn’t push it longer than that.

  When Carter didn’t respond to the request for a ride, Kennedy gasped.

  “What is that? That sound you’re making?” Carter sat up on the bed, alarmed. She knew what it was: it was crying. “Stop it, Kennedy.”

  Kennedy sniffed. “I don’t get it,” she said into Carter’s ear, sniffing back. “You don’t come see me for half a year and then you accuse me—” She stopped talking. “And then you call me, but you don’t want to be around me?”

  Carter walked over to her dresser, where she stared down at a framed photo of Mayan ruins. A younger version of herself, sun pinkened, not quite smiling, in front of it. She and her roommate from the single year of college she had managed to complete had gone to Belize. It was just after Laine died and her friend had said it would be good for her. She stared at the photo. Carter remembered sitting every day on a beach and trying not to cry. At school that year, two hundred miles away from home, girls in the dorm asked about her parents; it was a regular small-talk question. She wasn’t just Dead Kennedy’s sister there, like she’d been in Blueheart, but no one could really fathom what it meant to watch a parent die at that young age, to hold the jaundiced hand or hear the last whispers. After the trip Carter began using: one pill popped in her mouth at an all-night dance party that showed her a world without death, or Wynns, which by then meant the same for Carter.

  “I should have moved away,” she said, aware she wasn’t answering Kennedy’s question. “Gone to a big city like New York, or overseas or something.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Kennedy asked. “I told you hundreds of times that it would be better.”

  “It’s hard to take the advice of someone in prison. I mean— Sorry.”

  She didn’t have any photos of Everett. Now it was probably too late. Why hadn’t she thought to take any? She should tell her sister. She should tell her about the relationship. About Gerry’s finding the card in Everett’s pocket. Ab
out all the pain that would be coming. She pulled at her hair until it hurt, then swooped it up into a makeshift bun.

  When Kennedy spoke next Carter heard the hard edge creeping in. “You know, you’re nice, but then you pull away. You don’t get to punish me like this just because I’m your sister. You think I wanted to be the one to find her? You think I wanted to go to jail?”

  “Of course not.” She wanted to make Kennedy say it. She could hear the words on the tip of her tongue: Say you didn’t do it. But she couldn’t bring herself to ask a second time.

  After Carter hung up the phone, she hurled the picture of her nineteen-year-old self at the wall. It hit and the glass scattered. Another thing to clean up.

  The morning Kennedy had found Haley was the same morning they’d first learned about Laine’s cancer. Kennedy had walked into Carter’s room and found her crying, and later she said that she thought for a second Carter already knew about Haley.

  Looking back, her dying mother and Haley were now entangled in her mind: her mother wrapping a crimson scarf around her thinning hair to sit through the preliminary hearing, and the photographs of dark red wounds, Haley’s own hair brushed out by Kennedy’s hand.

  She looked at her cell phone for messages from Everett. No voicemail. No texts. She clicked open the sober app and saw the counter. Almost six months. The app provided a quote: Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. She set down the phone and went to get the broom.

  Chapter 16