The Life We Bury

by Allen Eskens

  Jeremy looked into the corner of the room and didn't answer. Feeling the blood in my cheeks heating up, I took a deep breath to calm myself, knowing that Jeremy would shut down if I became angry. I smiled at him, letting him know that he wasn't in trouble. “How'd you get this bruise?” I asked. He continued to look at the corner of the room, saying nothing.

  I sat down with Jeremy on the edge of the bed, resting my elbows on my knees, pausing for a bit to make sure I was calm. “Jeremy,” I said. “It's very important that you and I don't keep secrets from each other. I'm your brother. I'm here for you. You're not in any trouble. But you can't keep secrets from me. You gotta tell me what happened.”

  “Maybe…” His eyes darted from one fixed point to another as he struggled to decide what to do. “Maybe Larry hit me.”

  I clenched my fists, but my face remained calm. “See?” I said, “You didn't do anything wrong. You're not in trouble. How did he hit you?”

  “Maybe he hit me with the remote control.”

  “He hit you with the remote? The TV remote? Why?”

  Again Jeremy averted his gaze. I had asked one question too many. I wanted to put my hands on Jeremy's shoulders and let him know that everything was okay, but you can't do that with Jeremy. I smiled at him and told him to get some sleep and have good dreams. I started his movie up, shut off the light, and closed the door. Whoever this Larry was—he and I were gonna have a talk.

  The next day was a Saturday. I woke before Jeremy and made pancakes. After we ate, we headed downtown to buy Jeremy a cell phone, one of those cheap ones that let you add minutes when you need them. When we got back to the apartment, I programmed my phone number into his contact list, making my number the only number on his list. I showed him how to call me, how to turn it on, how to find my number, and how to press the send button. He had never had his own phone before, so we practiced. I told him to hide the phone behind his dresser. After that, I let him beat me in two games of checkers to distract him from his new phone. Then I had him find the phone and call me, to make sure he remembered how to do it. He did.

  “If anyone tries to hurt you…” I said. “If this Larry hits you or does anything like that, you call me. You got a phone of your own now. You call me. Okay, Jeremy?”

  “Maybe I will call you with my new phone,” he said, smiling with pride.

  After lunch we played some more checkers and then turned on a movie: his movie. As Jeremy watched the movie, I watched the street, waiting for my mother to drive up. I also watched the clock; I had to work at Molly's at seven. The last time I'd bailed on Molly, she told me that I would not be getting any more breaks, and if I didn't show up, I would be fired. My mom left her cell phone in her dresser drawer; I know this because that's where it rang when I tried to call her.

  With the drive time to the Twin Cities, I would need to leave Austin by 4:30. As I watched the hands of the clock slide past 3 p.m., I asked Jeremy, “Did Mom say when she was going to be back from her meeting?”

  Jeremy pulled his attention from the movie and concentrated hard, his eyes moving back and forth slowly as if reading lines on a page. “Maybe she didn't say,” he said.

  I found a deck of cards and started playing solitaire on the coffee table. I lost three hands in quick succession, unable to focus my attention anywhere other than the driveway. As the clock inched close to four o'clock, I began going through options in my head. I could take Jeremy back to my apartment, but when I was working or in class, he was apt to find trouble there as easily as he would find it here. I could ask Lila to watch him, but he wasn't her responsibility—for that matter he wasn't supposed to be my responsibility. I could leave him here, alone, but one more problem and Bremer would follow through on his threat to kick them out. Or I could cancel on Molly again and lose my job. I reshuffled my cards and started laying out a new hand of solitaire.

  At five minutes before four o'clock, my mother pulled into the driveway. I turned up the volume on the television to drown out the yelling that would be coming from the front yard, and I headed out the door.

  “Where have you been?” I said through gritted teeth.

  I don't know if it was my tone, my presence at her apartment, or her double-vodka lunch that confused her, but she stared at me as though she had just woken up from a deep sleep. “Joey,” she said. “I didn't see your car.” A tall man with stringy gray hair and a body shaped like a bowling pin stood behind her curling his upper lip in a snarl. I recognized Larry. I had thrown him out of the Piedmont about a year earlier for getting drunk and slapping a woman.

  “You left him alone,” I said. “He nearly burned the place down. Where the hell you been?”

  “Now you just hold on,” Larry said, brushing past my mother. “Don't you talk to your mother like—” Larry raised his right hand, as if reaching to poke me in the chest. That was the exact wrong thing to do. Before his finger could touch me, I shot my right hand across my chest, grabbing the back of his hand and curling my fingers around the pinky side of his palm. In one swift motion I ripped his hand away from my chest, twisting it clockwise and dropping Larry to his knees. The move was called a wristlock takedown. One of the regulars at the Piedmont, a cop we called Smiley, showed me that move. It had always been one of my favorites.

  With very little torque, I curled Larry into a ball, his face a few inches from the ground, his arm cocked skyward behind his back, his wrist wrenched forward in my hand. It took everything I had not to kick Larry in the teeth. I leaned down over him and grabbed a tuft of his hair. His ears turned red and his features contorted as he winced with pain. Behind me my mother screeched some nonsense about how it was an accident, and how Larry was really a good guy deep down. Her pleading evaporated into the air around me, no more important to me than traffic noise in the distance.

  I pressed Larry's nose and forehead into the grit of the sidewalk. “I know what you did to my brother.” I said.

  Larry didn't respond, so I gave the pressure point in his wrist a tweak and he grunted.

  “Let me be very clear about this,” I said. “If you ever touch Jeremy again I will come down on you like nothing you've ever known. Nobody touches my brother. Do you understand?”

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  “Wrong answer,” I said, lifting his face off the concrete and tapping it back down just hard enough to make a mark and draw some blood. “I said: do you understand?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I jerked Larry to his feet and shoved him toward the street. He walked down to the curb holding his bleeding nose and forehead, saying something under his breath that I couldn't hear. I turned my attention back to my mother.

  “Mr. Bremer called me.”

  “We just went to the casino,” she said. “We were only gone a couple days.”

  “What were you thinking? You can't leave him alone for a couple days.”

  “He's eighteen years old now,” she said.

  “He's not eighteen,” I said. “He'll never be eighteen. That's the point. When he's forty he'll still be a seven-year-old. You know that.”

  “I'm entitled to have some fun too, ain't I?”

  “You're his mother, for God sakes.” My contempt seethed in my words. “You can't just run off whenever you want to.”

  “And you're his brother,” she shot back, trying to gain some footing in the argument, “but that don't stop you from running off? Does it? Big college boy.”

  I stopped talking until the boil in my chest dropped to a simmer, my stare falling on my mother as hard and as cold as winter metal. “Bremer said he's kicking you out if he gets another call.” I turned to walk to my car, my eye on Larry as I passed him, waiting for an excuse to light into him again.

  As I pulled away from the curb, I saw Jeremy standing at the front window. I waved to him, but he didn't wave back. He just stood there watching me. To the rest of the world he would have appeared expressionless, but I knew better. He was my brother and I was his; and only I could see th
e sadness behind his calm, blue eyes.

  The next morning I was pulled from a bad dream by a knock at my door.

  In my dream, I was back in high school, wrestling at a tournament, trying to execute a simple escape maneuver. As I ripped the guy's grip from around my stomach, another hand grabbed my chest and yet another hand pulled at my arm. I pried each new hand loose only to create two more hands, like a hydra growing new heads. Soon I could only twist and scream under the onslaught of hands pulling and tearing at me. That's when I heard the noise that woke me. It took a while to purge the cloud of sleep from my head. I sat up in bed, not sure of what I had heard, waiting, listening—then, another knock. I hadn't dreamt it. I threw on a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt and opened the door to find Lila on the other side, holding two cups of coffee and a file folder.

  “I read the diary,” she said, walking past me, handing me one of the cups of coffee. “You do drink coffee, don't you?”

  “Yeah, I drink coffee,” I said. I grabbed a baseball cap from a hook on the wall to cover up my bed head and followed Lila to my couch. I had left the box of files with Lila in my apartment two days earlier when I charged out to go to Austin. She took some of the files home, including the one marked diary to comb through in my absence.

  “I read her diary last night,” she said.

  “Crystal's?”

  Lila looked at me like I was an idiot. In my defense, I was still groggy with sleep. She turned back to her train of thought. “The diary starts out in May of 1980,” Lila said, laying her notes on the coffee table in front of me. “The first few months are full of normal teenage crap. She's excited about starting high school one day and scared about it the next. For the most part she's a happy kid. She has fifteen entries about Carl between June and September, usually referring to him as the pervo next door, or Creepy Carl.”

  “What'd she say about him?” I asked.

  Lila had marked some of the pages with yellow tabs. She turned to the first tab in the diary, which was dated June 15:

  June 15 – I was practicing in the back yard and saw Creepy Carl watching me from his window. I flipped him off and he just stood there. What a pervo.

  “Just like the prosecutor said,” Lila commented, turning to the next tab. “‘He's watching me again. He stared at me while I did my routines.’ There's one…” She turned the pages of the diary to another marked passage, “Here it is.”

  Sept. 8 – Creepy Carl was watching me again from the window. He wasn't wearing a shirt. I bet he wasn't wearing pants either.

  Lila looked at me for a response.

  I shrugged. “I can see why the prosecutor liked the diary.” I think Lila wanted more of a reaction from me, but I moved on. “What else you got?”

  “Most of August is tame,” Lila said. “When school starts, she meets that guy, Andrew Fisher, in her typing class. She writes all about her plan to get Andy to invite her to homecoming—which he did. Then around mid-September the entries started getting darker. Read this one.”

  September 19 – Parking in the alley with Andy. Just when things were getting interesting, Creepy Carl walks up and looks in the window like he's Lurch or something. I could have died.

  “Again, just like the prosecutor told the jury,” I said. “Carl caught ’em getting it on in the alley.”

  “Two days later she starts writing about something bad happening, but she writes some of it in code.”

  “Code?”

  “Yeah. There're a few passages where Crystal uses a substitution code—you know, writing numbers instead of letters.” Lila pulled a stack of diary pages out of the folder. She had marked the coded entries with green tabs. “Look here.”

  September 21 – Terrible day today. 7,22,13,1,14,6,13,25,17,24,18,11,1. I am freaking out. This is very very bad.

  “What's it mean?” I asked.

  “Did I mention it's a code?” Lila said. “Maybe this was Crystal's way of making sure that if her stepdad ever found the diary, she wouldn't get shipped off to private school.”

  “Yeah, but it's the code of a fourteen-year-old girl,” I said. “Did you try matching the numbers up with letters?”

  “You mean like: A equals one, and B equals two, that sort of thing?” Lila rolled her eyes and pulled out the notebook pages where she'd been matching up numbers with letters. “I tried the alphabet forward; I tried it backward; I tried shifting so that A started at the number 2, then three, and so on. I tried matching the most frequent number with the letter E or T because those are the most often used letters in the alphabet. I looked for clues in her diary. I came up with nothing but gibberish.”

  “Did you try online?” I asked. “I think there are websites that can break codes.”

  “I thought of that, too,” she said. “Crystal didn't leave spaces between her words, so it's just strings of numbers. Nothing I found on the internet could solve it. There are eight billion possible combinations of numbers and letters.”

  “Eight billion?” I said. “Holy crap.”

  “Exactly. She must have had a key hidden away, or maybe she memorized a pattern to match the letters to the numbers. Either way, I can't figure it out.”

  Lila spread the pages on the table. “There are only seven coded entries, the last one written on the day she was murdered. I put them together,” she said, laying her own list on top of the diary pages.

  September 21 – Terrible day today. 7,22,13,1,14,6,13,25,17,24,26,21, 22,19,19,3,19. I am freaking out. This is very very bad.

  September 28 – 25,16,14,11,5,13,25,17,24, 26,21,22,19,19,3,19,26, 21,22,19,19,3,19. If I don't do what he wants he'll tell everyone. He'll ruin my life.

  September 30 – 6,25,6,25,25,16,12,6,1,2,17,24,2,22,13,25. I hate him. I feel sick.

  October 8 – 25,16,12,11,13,1,26,6,20,3,17,3,17,24,26,21,22,19,19,3, 19,9,22,7,8. He keeps threatening me. 2,3,12,22,13,1,19,17,3,1,11,5, 19,3,17,24,17,11,5,1,2.

  October 9 – 6,26,22,20,3,25,16,12,2,22,1,2,3,12,22,13,1,3,25. He forced me. I want to kill myself. I want to kill him.

  October 17 –5,16,17,22,25,3,17,3,25,11,6,1,22,26,22,6,13,2,3,12,22, 19,10,11,5,26,2,6,1,2,5, 10,1.

  October 29 – 6,1,19,10,22,18,3,25,16,19,10,22,18,6,13,26,17,3. Mrs. Tate said so. She said that the age difference means he'll go to prison for sure. It stops today. I am so happy.

  “October 29 is the day she was killed,” Lila said.

  “How do we know she's talking about Carl?”

  “There are dozens of pages where she talks about Carl being the pervert that watched her from his window,” Lila said. “He snuck up on her when she was having sex with Andy. It's not a coincidence that the threats began right after that.”

  “The code could change everything.”

  “There are other entries that aren't coded,” she said. “Look at this one from September twenty-second, the day after the ‘terrible day’ when she got caught with Andy Fisher.”

  September 22 – If they find out, it'll destroy me. They will send me to Catholic school. Goodbye cheerleading, goodbye life.

  “Don't you think that seems a bit dramatic,” I said. “I mean, they have cheerleaders at Catholic schools, too, don't they?”

  Lila shot a skeptical glance at me. “You obviously don't understand the brain of an adolescent girl. Everything is the end of the world. They're emotional to the point of being suicidal.” She paused, as if distracted by a thought. Then she continued. “Some things can truly seem like the end of the world.”

  “Who is Mrs. Tate?” I asked, looking at the last entry.

  “You didn't read the transcripts, did you?” Lila said, sounding exasperated.

  “I sort of read ’em,” I said. “But I don't remember Mrs. Tate.”

  “She was a school guidance counselor.” Lila pulled one of the transcripts from the box and started flipping through it until she got to Mrs. Tate's testimony. “Here it is.” She handed the transcript to me and I read:

  Q: And when you met with Crystal Hagen that day, what
were her concerns, what did she talk about?

  A: She was real vague. She wanted to know if oral sex was sex. I mean, she wanted to know if someone forced you to have oral sex, could that be called rape.

  Q: Did she tell you why she wanted to know?

  A: No. She wouldn't say. She kept saying that she was asking for a friend. That happens a lot in my business. I tried to get her to tell me more. I asked her if someone was forcing her to have oral sex. She didn't answer. Then she asked me if it's force if the person was making you do it by threatening to tell a secret about you.

  Q: And what did you tell her?

  A: I said that it could be considered coercion. Then she asked me, “What if the guy is older?”

  Q: And you responded how?

  A: As a school counselor, we receive training on the law regarding stuff like this. I told her that given her age, if a man is more than two years older than her, it doesn't matter if there is coercion or not. Consent is not an issue. If an older man is having sex with a fourteen-year-old, it's rape. I told her that if something like that was happening she needed to tell me, or tell the police, or her parents. I told her if something like that was happening, the man will go to prison for it.

  Q: And what was her response to that?

  A: She just smiled a really big smile. Then she thanked me and left my office.

  Q: And you're sure that conversation took place on October 29 of last year?

  A: That conversation took place the day that Crystal was killed. I'm sure of that.

  I closed the transcript. “So, Crystal went home, wrote an entry in her diary, and then went to Carl's house to confront him?”

  “Either that or she took the diary with her to school,” Lila said. “It makes sense, doesn't it? Crystal knew that she had the upper hand. It would be his life that got ruined, not hers.”

  “So the same day she's planning to put an end to it, Carl's out buying a gun?”