His twin sister, Jamie, had attacked him.
Once he knew the terrible truth, he tried to forget it, because it was too horrible. For years, he couldn’t even remember anything about that night. Now, bits and pieces come back to him, though most of the time, when his mind tries to think about it, he can push it away.
Sometimes, though, usually late at night, when he’s lying awake in his cell, the terrible truth sneaks back into his head, and he can’t get rid of it.
It’s the same with Doobie Jones, the big, mean inmate who lives in the cell next to Jerry’s. He talks to Jerry in the night sometimes, and Jerry can never seem to shut out his voice. Even when he pulls the thin prison pillow over his head and presses it against his ears, Doobie’s voice still seems to be there, on the inside, saying all kinds of things Jerry doesn’t want to hear.
Sometimes, Jerry wonders if Doobie is even real.
Jamie wasn’t.
That’s what the cops told him, and so did his lawyer, and the nice doctor who came to talk to Jerry a lot back when he was first arrested.
Everyone said that Jamie had died years ago, and now only lived in Jerry’s head.
It was hard to believe, because Jamie seemed so real, walking and talking, and bringing Jerry cake . . .
“That was you, Jerry. You said and did those things,” the cops said on the awful day when Jerry found Mama dead in the bedroom, and Jamie ran away just before the police came to the apartment . . .
That was what he thought had happened, anyway. But when he told the policemen that the bloody dress and the bloody knife belonged to Jamie, they didn’t believe him.
“Jamie only exists up here.” Detective Manzillo tapped his head. “Do you understand, Jerry?”
He didn’t at the time.
Even now, when he thinks about it, he’s not quite sure he understands how someone who only lives in your imagination can go around killing people.
Maybe that, too, is because Jerry’s brain is damaged.
Anyway, it’s not his fault that he is the way he is.
You can’t help it.
That’s what Jerry’s lawyer told him, and that’s what she told the judge, too, and the jury, and everyone else in the courtroom during the trial. She said Jerry shouldn’t worry, even though he had admitted to killing people and signed the papers, too.
“You were not responsible for your actions, Jerry,” his lawyer would say, and she would pat Jerry’s hand with fingers that were cold and bony, the fingernails bitten all the way down so that they bled on the notebook paper she was always scribbling on.
“You’re going to be found not guilty by reason of insanity,” she said. “You’re not going to go to prison. Don’t worry.”
“I won’t,” Jerry said, and he didn’t.
But then came the day when the judge asked the lady in charge of the jury—the tall, skinny lady with the mean-looking face—“Have you reached your verdict?”
The lady said, “We have, Your Honor.”
The verdict was guilty.
The courtroom exploded with noise. Some people were cheering, others crying. Jerry’s lawyer put her forehead down on the table for a long time.
Jerry was confused. “What happened? What does that mean? Is it over? Can I go home now?”
No one would answer his questions. Not even his lawyer. When she finally looked up, her eyes were sad—and mad, too—and she said only, “I’m so sorry, Jerry,” before the judge banged his gavel and called for order.
Jerry soon found out why she was sorry. It was because she had lied. Jerry did go to prison.
And he’s never going to get out. That’s one of the things Doobie says to him, late at night.
He scares Jerry. He scares everyone. His tattooed neck is almost as thick as his head, and he’s missing a couple of teeth so that the ones he has remind Jerry of fangs.
He’s in charge of the cell block. Well, the guards are really supposed to be in charge, but Doobie is the one who runs things around here. He decides what everyone else gets to say, and do, and watch on TV.
Tonight, though, the same thing is on every channel as Doobie flips from one to the next: a special news report about the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
After shouting a string of curses at the television, Doobie throws the remote control at the wall. When it hits the floor, the batteries fall out. One rolls all the way over to Jerry’s feet. He looks down.
“Touch that, and you’re a dead man,” Doobie warns.
Jerry doesn’t touch it.
He’s sure—pretty sure, anyway—that he doesn’t want to be a dead man, no matter what Doobie says.
Doobie is always telling him that he’d be better off dead than in here. He tells Jerry all the things he’d be able to do in heaven that he can’t do here, or even back at home in New York. He says there’s cake in heaven—as much cake as you want, every day and every night.
He knows Jerry’s favorite thing in the whole world is cake. He knows a lot of things about Jerry, because there’s not much else to do here besides talk, and there aren’t many people to talk to.
“Just think, Jerry,” Doobie says, late at night, when the lights are out. “If you were in heaven right now, you would be eating cake and sleeping on a big, soft bed with piles of quilts, and if you wanted to, you could get up and walk right outside and look at the stars.”
Stars—Jerry hasn’t seen them in years. He misses them, but not as much as he misses seeing the lights that look like stars. A million of them, twinkling all around him in the sky . . .
Home. New York City at night.
The thought of it makes him want to cry.
But the New York City they’re showing on television right now doesn’t bring back good memories at all.
He remembers that day, the terrible day when the bad guys drove the planes into the towers and knocked them down. He remembers the fire and the people falling and jumping from the top floors, and the big, dusty, burning pile after the buildings fell, one right after the other.
“Sheee-it,” Rollins, one of the inmates, says as he stares at the footage of people running for their lives up Broadway, chased by the fire-breathing cloud of dust.
“I was there.”
All of them, even Doobie, even Jerry, who had the exact same thought in his head, turn to look at B.S., who uttered it aloud.
B.S. is small and dark and antsy, with a twitch in his eye that makes him look like he’s winking—like he’s kidding around. But he’s not. He told Jerry that he always means what he says, even when everyone else claims he’s lying.
“I don’t care what they say, because I know I’m telling the truth,” he told Jerry one night after lights-out. “You do, too, don’t you?”
“I do what?”
“You know I’m telling the truth, right, Slow Boy?”
That’s what they call him. Slow Boy. It’s just a nickname, like B.S. and Doobie.
Doobie says nicknames are fun. Jerry doesn’t think they are, but of course, he doesn’t ever want to tell Doobie that.
As nicknames go, that’s not the worst Jerry has had. Back in New York, a lot of people called him Retard. And in the courtroom, during his trial, everyone called him The Defendant.
“That’s a big ol’ pile of bull,” Doobie tells B.S. now. “Just like your name.”
“No!” B.S. protests. “I was. I was there. I was a fireman.”
“You wasn’t no fireman in New York City,” Rollins tells him. “Sheee-it. You from Delaware. Everyone know dat.”
B.S. is shaking his head so rapidly Jerry thinks his brains must be rattling around in his head. “I climbed up miles of stairs dragging my fire hose, and—”
“Your fire hose was miles long?”
“Yeah, yeah, it was long, like miles long, and I got to the top floor right before the building collapsed—”
“If you were up there,” one of the other inmates cuts in, “then how the hell are you sitting here right now?
How’d you get out alive, you lying mother—?”
“I jumped. That’s how. I jumped, yeah, and the other firemen, they caught me in one of those big nets.”
Jerry regards him with interest as the others shake their heads and roll their eyes because they’re thinking B.S. makes things up all the time.
Jerry usually doesn’t know if B.S. is telling the truth or not, and he doesn’t really care. He talks all the time, especially at night, and Jerry usually has no choice but to listen. Like Doobie, B.S. lives in the cell next to Jerry’s, but on the opposite side.
But this time, for a change, he’s interested in what B.S. is saying.
“I was there, too,” Jerry says, and they all turn to him. “When the terrorist attack happened.”
“Yeah? Did you jump out the window too, Slow Boy?” someone asks.
“I wasn’t in the building. But I was near it. I saw it burning. I saw . . .” Jerry’s voice breaks and he swallows hard.
He squeezes his eyes closed and there are the red-orange flames shooting out of white buildings, gray smoke reaching into a deep blue sky, black specks with flailing limbs, falling, falling, falling . . .
There are some terrible things that, despite his brain injury, he has no problem remembering.
September 11 is one of them.
That was the day before he killed Kristina Haines, the other lawyer, the one who didn’t like Jerry, said at the trial.
“On the morning of September eleventh, The Defendant was teetering on the edge . . .”
At first, Jerry thought the lawyer was confused. He tried to speak up and tell everyone that he wasn’t in the towers on that morning. A lot of people were teetering on the edge up there, but he wasn’t one of them.
But he found out that you aren’t allowed to just talk in the middle of a trial, even if you’re The Defendant and what they’re saying about you is wrong.
Anyway, Jerry soon discovered that the lawyer wasn’t talking about teetering on the edge of a building.
Sanity: that’s the word he kept saying. Teetering on the edge of sanity.
“When those towers fell,” he told the courtroom, “a lot of people lost their already tenuous grip on sanity. Jerry Thompson was one of them.”
He told everyone that Jerry stabbed Kristina Haines to death in her own bed because he was angry with her for turning him down when he asked her out.
The lawyer was right about that.
Jerry did ask Kristina to go eat cake with him.
He was angry with her when she said no, especially because she gave him the finger as she walked away, and—
“Tell us more, Slow Boy.”
Doobie’s voice shoves the memory of Kristina from Jerry’s mind. “What?”
“Tell us what happened in New York that day.”
He doesn’t want to look at Doobie, or at anyone else, either. He can feel their eyes on him, burning into him, and he turns away, toward the television. He stares at the pictures of the mess the bad guys made when they flew the planes into the buildings. He takes a deep breath and his nose is full of the smell of burning rubber and smoke and death.
Jerry shakes his head. “I don’t know why they did that.”
“Why who did what?”
“Why the bad guys made that mess. Why they killed all those people. They even killed themselves. Why would they do that?”
“Because they knew the secret, Slow Boy,” Doobie says, leaning closer so that the only way Jerry won’t be able to look at him is to close his eyes. He doesn’t do that, though, because he thinks it might make Doobie mad.
“What secret?”
“The one I told you. Remember?”
“No.” Jerry doesn’t remember Doobie telling him any secrets.
Doobie’s face is close to Jerry’s, and his black eyes are blacker than black. “The bad guys knew that heaven is the best place to be. They wanted to go there. They chose to go there. It’s better than anywhere on earth. A hell of a lot better than here. Hell . . . Heaven . . . get it?”
He grins, and Jerry can see that his teeth are black in the back.
“So . . .” Doobie shrugs and pulls back. “You should go. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Go where?”
“Heaven.”
“Heaven?” Rollins echoes. “Ain’t none of us goin’ to heaven, brother. We all goin’ straight to—”
“Not Slow Boy,” Doobie cuts in, turning to look at Rollins.
Jerry can’t see his face, but it must be a dirty look because Rollins quickly shuts his mouth and turns away.
“You . . . you’re going straight to Heaven,” Doobie whispers, turning back to Jerry. “You can go now, if you want to.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“I told you. It’s better than being stuck here for another fifty years, or longer. You can have cake there.”
Jerry’s mouth waters at the thought of it.
He hasn’t had cake in years. Ten years.
“But I . . . I can’t fly a plane into a—”
“You don’t have to.” Doobie’s voice is low. So low only Jerry can hear it. “There are other ways to get there, you know? There are easy ways to get yourself out of here, Jerry.”
Jerry.
Not Slow Boy.
“I could help you,” Doobie says. “I’m your friend. You know that, don’t you?”
Jerry swallows hard, suddenly feeling like he wants to cry. A friend—he hasn’t had a friend in a long time.
He thinks of Jamie . . .
No. Jamie wasn’t your friend. Jamie was your sister, and she died when you were kids. She didn’t come back to you all those years later, like you thought. That wasn’t real.
“Jerry,” Doobie is saying, and Jerry blinks and looks up at him.
“What?”
“We’ll talk about this later, okay? After the lights go out. I’ll help you. Okay?”
Jerry doesn’t even remember what they were talking about, but he doesn’t want to tell Doobie that, so he says, “Okay.”
Chapter Two
Glenhaven Park, Westchester County, New York
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
“Mommy!”
“Shh!” Allison hurries to the foot of the stairs and looks up to see her older daughter leaning over the railing at the top. “Daddy’s still sleeping, honey, and I don’t want—”
“No, he’s not.” Mack appears behind their daughter, having just come out of the master bedroom, looking like he just rolled out of bed. Unshaven, barefoot, and wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, he tells Allison, “I sent her to come get you.”
“Why?”
“Daddy wants you to watch TV with him,” Hudson informs Allison matter-of-factly, and turns briskly away as if to announce, My work here is done.
A moment later, the door to her bedroom closes, and Allison knows that the world’s most efficient six-year-old has resumed getting ready for school, even though the bus won’t be here for over an hour.
Allison scoops up J.J. as he crawls rapidly past her.
“Al,” Mack says from the top of the stairs, above J.J.’s bellowed protest. “Come up here.”
“Gee, honey, as much as I’d love to lie around in bed and watch TV with you”—Allison lifts the wriggling baby’s pajama-clad butt to her nose, sniffs, makes a face—“he needs to be changed, and I’m heating the griddle for pancakes, and—”
“That stuff can wait. You have to see this.”
“See what?” Something about his tone makes her doubt that it’s just one of the commercial spots on his network, which is usually the case when he summons her to the television.
“Come up and I’ll show you.”
“Everything okay?”
“Just come here,” Mack tells her. “I have the TV paused.”
Ah, the beauty of the bedroom DVR. After Mack got the new job, he went out and bought three new plasma televisions and TiVos for all of them—one for the living room; one, still sitt
ing in a box, designated for the about-to-be-painted sunroom; and one for the master bedroom.
Allison initially protested. “Dr. Cuthbert”—he’s the sleep specialist Mack recently started seeing at her insistence—“said you’re supposed to use the room only for sleeping and sex, remember?”
“Well, lately, I haven’t been using it for either of those things, so . . .”
Point taken. She’s been too tired at night for anything more strenuous than falling asleep.
“Anyway, the bedroom TV is for you,” Mack told her at the time. “This way, you can tape all those reality shows you like to watch up here, and I won’t have to sit through them downstairs.”
That sounded good in theory. But Mack’s the one who spent the whole day yesterday in front of the bedroom TV, moping around and channel surfing when he was supposed to be painting.
She didn’t nag him about it, though. She knew he hadn’t slept a wink the night before. When she got up with the baby before six, she found her husband still on the couch, watching another old comedy—but not laughing.
“Why don’t you go up to bed?” she suggested.
“Because I won’t be able to fall asleep. What’s the point?”
“The girls will be down here soon, and if they see you, they’ll want to play. If you’re not in the mood, you’d better make yourself scarce.”
He did.
It was a little better this morning. When he climbed into bed, she stirred enough to see that the bedside clock read 4:30, and when she got up an hour later, he was snoring.
Now, Allison starts up the stairs with J.J. balanced on her hip. He squirms, not happy to have been interrupted on his journey across the hardwoods, undoubtedly toward some kind of mischief. But he quickly switches gears, deciding to indulge his favorite new habit: pulling his mother’s long hair.
She hasn’t had time yet this morning to pull it back into a ponytail, her daily hairstyle these days—not because it’s flattering, by any means, but to spare herself endless tugging by J.J.’s chubby fingers, perpetually wet from teething drool.
He delights in pulling his sisters’ hair, too, leaving them much less eager to “babysit” their little brother lately.
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