Little Threats

by Emily Schultz

  Everett glanced down at the mic clip on his jacket and said he was. Best bits. Everett tried not to turtle into himself at the language of a guy with a clipboard. He straightened his shoulders, let his neck elongate.

  “Tell me what happened that day,” Dee started.

  The first question was basic but not, as Everett realized he’d never really told anyone his part of the story. Suddenly he didn’t feel like a twenty-four-year-old man in a tie and coat but a puny kid.

  “I had this information and I didn’t tell my parents,” Everett said, his voice weaker than he meant for it to be. He cleared his throat.

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” Dee said, as if he needed directions.

  “This is the beginning. She called that morning. Kennedy Wynn—” Everett adjusted his stance in the chair they’d seated him in and followed Josh’s rolling hand telling him to keep going. He wanted to do a good job and he’d thought he would be better at this. “Kennedy Wynn phoned that morning and asked where my sister was. She sounded weird. We didn’t know Haley was missing then. Kennedy asked me not to say anything and I didn’t—all day. My parents must have already found out from the police that she was . . .”

  He stopped. He realized his eyes were getting shiny. Already. He had thought he’d get further in before that happened. He’d rehearsed various versions of answers at his condo in front of the bathroom mirror, but they’d been about what happened after, information told to him during the investigation, nothing as basic as start at the beginning. Nothing as obvious as his own role.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to Dee, who nodded. Over by the camera, Josh rolled his hand again, although this time with a look of sympathy on his face. “They’d already found her body before I told anyone about the call. I remember I didn’t even know that she was, uh, gone. I mean, I sort of did, but . . . My mom was crying and then— They—my parents, I mean—pushed me into a car with a neighbor and the neighbor drove me to my grandparents’ place.”

  Dee interrupted. “Let’s go back. Let’s talk about that call. What did Kennedy say?”

  “She asked to talk to Haley. And I said, ‘I thought she was sleeping over at your house.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, she is. Never mind. Forget I called. Don’t mention it to your parents.’ ‘Don’t mention it to your parents’—that was exactly it. Not ‘Don’t mention it to Haley.’ Because she knew. She knew Haley wasn’t alive anymore.” Everett paused. He said it because it was what he’d thought for years, but he didn’t think it anymore.

  “So you think she was making an alibi for herself?”

  “I did.” Everett realized from the tilt of Dee’s head she wanted more. “At the time I thought she was trying to make an alibi, but now I’m not so sure. She was an easy choice for them: Kennedy was the last one with her and the first one there.”

  Dee had a slight smile on her face. It was clear she liked the answer. “The easy choice?” she echoed.

  Everett sighed. He wasn’t sure how much he was supposed to reveal. The tissue he’d shown to Dee would be tested. He’d agreed to it that morning before the interview.

  “What if Kennedy wasn’t the last one with her?” Everett said simply. He looked down at his lap, feeling like he’d just betrayed his mother, by doubting what the Kimbersons had called truth for years.

  Dee let the moment linger and didn’t press him. He could hear the buzz of the spotlights they’d set up. After another half minute she said, “They kept asking about boyfriends, didn’t they?”

  “Sure. They took dogs and they sent a search team into the woods. They found her pretty quick. I don’t know if they looked at the right people though.” He shifted in the chair.

  “Let’s pause here,” Dee said to Josh and the camera guy. She leaned over. “We can’t point fingers at anyone for legal reasons. You’re doing great, Everett. Do you think you can talk generally about Haley at that time? Give people an impression?”

  He said he could and they were rolling again.

  “She was a typical teenager. She loved music, dancing. I would hear her talking on the phone, giggling with Kennedy or Carter—” Everett felt himself visibly flinch as he said her name. It was another Carter in his mind than the one he’d spent time with. This Carter was bigger than him, with eyeliner, a nose ring, a beaded necklace, and hair that had been dyed dark and flat-ironed. Beneath her black baby-doll shirts lived a mystery. She wore loose jeans or peasant skirts, the crinkling folds a universe of color.

  The Mole-Richardson lights were hot, aimed almost directly into his eyes. He smiled suddenly, in spite of himself. Why was he smiling?

  “When you’re a kid, you sort of read people differently than adults do. You see things simply. You sense things.”

  “What did you sense?”

  “Carter was soft. Kennedy was hard. They were like these bookends, my sister in the middle, these opposite forces.”

  Dee nodded for him to keep talking.

  “Kennedy could pressure a person, make Haley feel like she had to compete or something. I remember Haley getting mad one time, saying something like, ‘I’m more experienced than either of them understand.’ Stressing that word.”

  Everett felt his brow crease. He’d assumed she meant it about Berk Butler, but now he wondered if it had to do with other things. “You know, I don’t want to talk about this. I’m realizing it makes my sister sound bad. She was just a kid.”

  Dee nodded and said of course, but when Everett glanced in the direction of the camera he noticed a sneaky look on Josh’s face and worried the show would use the footage anyway. Maybe Marly had been right. The one thing he wanted was to make things better for Haley, do right by her. What if he’d done the opposite?

  October 27, 2008

  Assignment 5:

  Write about a moment you shared with a friend.

  Haley and I were the first to show up at Berk’s Memorial Day party. We had only been to high school parties before, where parents were going away and the rituals of exclusions, food, and sourcing alcohol were planned over days, as if by generals preparing for war. It was still daylight when we showed up at Berk’s crumbling apartment building. He wasn’t even home and we sat in the shade on a thin grassy strip. “I’m seeing someone,” Haley blurted out while looking up at the sky. “I don’t know if it can be called that actually.”

  “Are we talking about Berk?”

  Haley laughed and shook her head, but I wasn’t sure it meant no. I knew they’d been talking on the phone as much as or more than he and I did.

  I looked at my friend, who only a year before had spent her time dancing to Billy Ray Cyrus and volunteering at her church. Something had turned on inside of Haley. Haley needed boys and men, their approval and attention. It was her sunlight. I wanted Berk, but I didn’t hunger for adoration from the world. If anything, my heavy eyeliner and dark lipstick, obsessively applied and reapplied, were meant to repel as much as they were to attract.

  I knew Haley was about to tell me more about this new guy when Berk’s Jeep pulled up. He opened the rear flap and began stacking twelve-packs of Budweiser. “No problem. You two just enjoy the day,” he called to us, flipping his hair back with a head toss. We stood, shaking the grass off our legs. We carried one pack each up the stairs with our girl arms as thin as spaghetti.

  People came in and out of the party that night, never more than nine or ten people there at a time. There were lots of parties held by students who lived near campus after classes had ended: older students who ran campus radio, or taught, or worked at the cafés and bars. Students who actually talked about books. At the beginning of the night, before he got drunk, Berk snapped a Polaroid of everyone who showed up, placing the washed-out images on the dusty fridge in the kitchen and securing each with one of the many magnets he’d collected from head shops, bars, and sporting events.

  Haley and I sat in a corner by ourselves on a forl
orn futon—in awe of this new world and annoyed that it made us feel like girls, inexperienced and uncertain how to act. The music got worse the drunker Berk got. He was playing the Jesus Lizard, loud, and talking with a group of men on the couch about how last month at the Flood Zone the singer had dived from the stage and his boots had caught Berk in the head. He was proud of strange things.

  Haley wasn’t having it. She made an ugh sound and started digging in her purse. She brought out a cassette and went to the stereo. The swirling, high-pitched guitar noise ended with sudden silence. Haley pressed Play on Madonna’s “Erotica.” When the go-go beat started she danced over and pulled me up from the futon by my hands. Haley swayed back and forth against me. I couldn’t dance as naturally as Haley, so I flicked my hair around, back and forth, and made dramatic arm moves in the air, things that would show I didn’t care what I looked like when, in fact, I desperately did. The men of the room whooped and the two women at the party stared in shock, noticing Haley and me for the first time.

  “I just read that essay about Madonna by bell hooks,” one of the women said to the other.

  “How old are they?” the other cut in.

  Berk took his camera and started flashing photos of us as we danced with each other.

  Haley ran her tongue up my neck. Her lips stopped at my ear. “I’m so fucked up,” she said, a little too loudly. The statement cut through the alcohol and music filling my head. My swaying stuttered.

  I saw one of the women, wearing a ski hat in spring for some reason, get up and begin arguing with Berk’s roommate Julian. “How old are they?”

  Haley kept dancing when I yelled back in her ear, “We should go. I’ll get us a ride.”

  Haley’s eyes widened and she started laughing until she couldn’t dance anymore.

  —Kennedy Wynn

  Heron Valley Correctional Facility

  Chapter 27

  They were calling for snow. Virginia never got snow. Sitting in the restaurant waiting for her family, Carter scrolled through the news feed on her phone. It must have been why traffic had been crazy—people ran out to Butler’s and Food Lion, buying the stores out of milk and bread, stocking their shelves with pantry goods as if the apocalypse would come because there was a layer of frost on the ground. At home Carter had some cans of soup, dry pasta but no sauce, four half jars of jam of dubious ages, and a bin of wilted greens. Perhaps she ought to have been more concerned.

  She pulled up her sobriety app, which told her: Focus on a dream. Carter sat there staring at the four words. She’d really never had a dream—unless disappearing counted. She’d disappeared from her life in a swirl of addiction, then she’d climbed out and disappeared into Alex. Then, if she were honest with herself, she’d disappeared into Everett, into the thrill of a secret. The only time a man could be considered a dream, she thought, was when Austen and Brontë were writing. But even their characters were given jobs and struggles.

  She should go back to school, she knew. She needed a career, a direction. She’d always thought she would become an actress, move to New York, but she was too old to start something like that. An English teacher, she thought. It was something she’d considered when she was in high school, but it hadn’t seemed like a grand enough ambition, coming from where she did. At that time, Gerry and Laine had expected the girls to break records, compete for the Ivy League, become stars or leaders. Carter set down her phone and stared out the window: she’d make a great a teacher, if she could stand to go back, begin again.

  The pregnancy test had come up negative. A slim minus line. She didn’t know if she should consider herself lucky. It had never occurred to her to want a baby before—which she knew made her different from other women. And Carter didn’t know if she wanted one now, but now the idea was there, in her thoughts as a possibility where it never had been before.

  She looked up before Kennedy came in, as if her shadow had a familiar shape outside the glass. Her sister was underdressed for the restaurant, in an oversized shirt, low-slung jeans, and a black knit cap, but she had on the mid-calf boots that Carter had picked for her. She shrugged off an anorak and fell into the chair across from Carter.

  “He’s circling for parking,” Kennedy said, meaning Gerry, and accepted the menu Carter slid at her.

  “Hey, I’m sorry if I fucked up,” Carter said. Since she had started on the medication from Dr. Braithwaite, an SSRI called Lumalex, she found it easier to say what she really felt.

  “It’s okay. It’s all fucked up. Like every day, I’m trying to navigate living with a whale without any water. If you’re on edge, he’s really on edge.”

  “Gerry? Gerry just does Gerry. You’ll be okay. He suffers from anxiety, like me. It’s hereditary.”

  A few minutes passed in silence.

  “Is that a new jacket?”

  Kennedy said yes, she’d gotten her first paycheck. She hunched at the table in a way that Carter guessed was a prison habit. She scratched up under her hat but didn’t take it off.

  Kennedy glanced at the door but there was no sign of their father. “I have a boyfriend now. Sort of anyway. I don’t want Dad to know.”

  Carter leaned in. She hadn’t considered that Kennedy would begin to have a life so quickly. “What’s he look like?” She realized they were whispering.

  Kennedy said like Matt Dillon if he dressed like Eminem. She always had liked dark-haired guys, Carter commented. How had she ever wound up with Berkeley Butler?

  Kennedy tore off the hat and bunched it between her hands suddenly. She pushed a hand through her hair, not as if she wanted to arrange it, but as if she couldn’t believe it was even there it bothered her so much. “Berk’s been in the house.”

  Carter bit her lip. “Berk broke into our house once before.”

  Carter watched as her twin began to rapid-blink—the response Kennedy only had when under stress, times she’d had to get up and speak in front of the class. Suddenly, Carter wondered if she’d misjudged her sister. Berk had always been a master manipulator.

  “He broke in before? What do you mean?” Kennedy asked. She looked shaken.

  Carter had a flash of the comforter being lifted off her sleeping frame, how at the time she thought groggily it must be her sister, since Kennedy had snuck in with her when they were younger, if she had a secret, a dream she wanted to tell. Instead, she’d felt the bed move under the weight. Male weight. She’d lain there, frozen, as she heard his breath and smelled the burnt scent of him. She’d chosen to play dead, fast asleep, hoping whoever it was would leave. He swiped her hair off her neck and put his lips against her skin as her heart hammered in her chest.

  She smelled booze. Please don’t be my father, she thought, and she was horrified that she could think it. Please don’t be an intruder.

  A hand came around and stroked her nipple over her long cotton shirt, as if he had radar in his fingertips that determined the location of her areola, could tell where its exact point was even in the dark. Carter’s whole body went rigid with anger.

  “Get out,” she whispered, her voice louder than she expected as she summoned every bit of strength she had, hoping she wouldn’t wind up strangled or raped.

  “I thought you’d be happy to see me,” the man breathed in her ear. It was Berk Butler.

  “I’m Carter,” she hissed as she started pushing him away.

  He didn’t move his erection from her back immediately, nor his hand from her chest. If anything, he twisted his fingers a bit, and she heard herself gasp involuntarily. Only one boy had ever touched her breast before, and that was Isaac Richmond that time on the quad. It wasn’t fair.

  “Get out before I scream.”

  “So uptight,” he slurred. On wobbly legs, Berk rose off the bed. She could see him now clearly in the dark, his broad shoulders outlined by the blue light coming in through the partially opened blinds. He backed away, his han
d out in a stop sign. “Which room?” he begged.

  “Get the hell out of our house!” Carter heard her voice harden in a way she didn’t know she was capable of. She smashed herself into the farthest corner of bed and wall, feeling tears glaze her cheeks, and relieved he couldn’t see them.

  She heard him out in the hall, whispering Kennedy, then, when no response came, creeping down the stairs. She listened as the back patio door clunked softly in its frame. She had thought about waking her mother but opted to lock herself in the bathroom instead, falling asleep on the tile after wondering a million times whether he’d meant to be in her room and if so, whether she might have done something that would encourage it. She remembered how she’d stared at Kennedy the next day, not sure how to bring the words to her lips, feeling for some unknown reason ashamed of herself.

  Looking back on it now, she saw that as an illogical feeling. She’d done absolutely everything right, and she’d short-circuited his advances. Today Carter realized she ought to have felt proud and powerful.

  “I’m sorry I brought that piece of shit into our lives,” Kennedy said when Carter finished recounting the incident. As the door to the restaurant opened and Gerry entered muttering, Kennedy leaned in. “We can’t talk right now.”

  They both watched him come in. He looked exasperated—still jangling his car keys in his hand, bopping them up and down as if they would turn into a yo-yo. Parking always stressed him.

  He ordered a Kentucky Gentleman, and Carter said, “Dad!” which prompted him to change the order to a Bloody Mary. Kennedy could drive, he said as he took off his coat. She didn’t have a license, Carter argued. It would be a parole violation. She’d done her written portion that week, Gerry argued.

  Carter wanted to ask more about Berk Butler, why Kennedy thought he’d been in the house, but she knew they couldn’t talk about it in front of Gerry.

  The server came with drinks and they ordered food. She asked for the shrimp salad, and Gerry said, “Eating meat now?”