by Meg Haston
“It’s on the news.” I sit next to him without touching him. When Wil is sad, he has to be the one to touch first. You have to be patient. In fifth grade, when he lost the election for president of our chapter of the St. Johns Riverkeepers club, it was days before I could play-punch him in the arm without having to duck.
He shows me his face finally. It is streaked with red and not-so-red and so much pain that I swear it is rolling off him like choppy September waves. He’s been crying. “There’s gonna be a trial. We’ll have to testify.”
I nod.
“I don’t know how to feel,” he says, and he pulls my arm around his shoulder. This is real pain, meaty grief for the father Wilson was and maybe for the father he wasn’t.
“That’s okay,” I say. “You don’t need to know.”
“I mean, he’s still dead, and I—” He straightens out and scoops me up, the way men carry their wives into new homes. He cradles me against him like I’m nothing, a feather. His heart is getting louder. Searching for a way out of his body.
I think about staying here, with him, forever. I think about wearing a fine layer of Atlantic Beach sand from all my Mays to the rest of my Septembers.
“I can’t stay trapped in here all day.” Wil’s head jerks toward the door, and he lets go of me. “I can’t breathe in here, Bridge.”
“We’ll go.” I scramble to my feet and pull him up. “I’ll go with you. Wherever you want.”
He closes his eyes. “Goddamned reporters.” His breath reminds me of splintered wood.
“Screw the reporters. Hey.” I grip his head in my hands. “Screw them. They can’t keep you here. You’re not a prisoner.”
He mumbles something.
“Give me your keys.”
He digs his keys out of his back pocket and dumps them into my palm. I hold them so tightly it hurts.
“Stay here,” I tell him. “I’ll pull the truck close.” I drag open the workshop door, leaving Wil in the corner. I walk slowly, casually, across the lawn. It isn’t until I’m diving into the truck and gunning across the lawn that I catch a reporter’s curious face in the rearview.
Wil launches out of the workshop the second I pull up to the doors. He jumps into the car before I’ve come to a stop.
“Go!” he yells as he slams the door.
I press my foot on the gas and the truck leaps across the yard. We whip around the caravan of journalists and the wheels screech as they hit the pavement. We leave everyone else behind.
Wil tells me to drive to the marina. His breathing is even rougher now. By the time I pull into the parking lot, I don’t think I’ve heard him take a breath in minutes.
“Do you want to sit here or . . .” I let the words hang as I throw the truck into park.
“My dad refinished the deck on this beautiful—” His face is pinched. I look away out the window. The boats are bobbing, eager for him. “I thought we could take her out. Annemarie.”
“Sure. Anything you want.”
But we don’t move. I roll down the windows and kill the engine. The sounds of the marina should soothe me, but the slap of the water against the hulls startles me, again and again.
“Timothy Pelle. Guy sounds fake, doesn’t he?” Wil’s voice is thick with tears. I don’t look at him, because he needs me not to. “You know what I’ve been thinking all day, since the detectives came by to tell us?”
“What?” I ask quietly.
“I’ve been thinking about how the guy was a baby once. About how his parents probably loved him and maybe they thought he’d be president someday. I’ll bet he has a family, too, you know? And now that’s two families. Ruined.” His breath is like wind through a straw.
“He should’ve thought about that.” I tilt my face toward the window. There’s no breeze. “Before.”
“His life is over, Bridge. Starting today. I feel—it doesn’t feel right.” His body is tense; his lines bolded. His tears leave silvery lines on his cheeks. He is breaking, slowly.
“He took your dad’s life. It’s only fair.” I cup his face in my hands, turn him toward me. “It’s not your fault. It was his choice.”
“There’s no fair in this, Bridge. Nothing about this is fucking fair.” He twists away from me, and the heel of his hand collides with the dashboard, turning on the radio. Static-laced jazz fills the truck until I twist the volume dial down.
“Okay. I know.” I don’t understand the storm that’s happening in him. He should be glad that his father’s killer was caught. That this part of the nightmare is over. If Minna was speaking to me, she’d tell me that Wil doesn’t have to be logical. That he gets to thrash around with the meaning of his dad’s death. That he should be breathless and angry and dizzy with the unfairness of it all.
I wait for Wil to speak. I watch the sailboats bob on the surface of the water. Their movement makes me feel sick, like I’ve just stepped off a roller coaster.
“He wasn’t all bad,” Wil says while I’m studying a neglected, listing sailboat. He rubs the heel of his hand. “My dad. He had bad in him for sure, but he had good in him, too.”
“I know there was,” I say, and it’s the truth. “That good isn’t gone. It’s in you, still. You’re the best guy I know, Wil.” Finally, I turn to look at him. His face is a kind of pale I’ve never seen, except in my terrible dream.
“Don’t say that,” he mumbles.
“It’s true. You are.” Anger rises up in me. “Why can’t I say that? Why can’t you accept that?”
“Because it’s not fucking true!” he wails. “Because you wouldn’t say that if you knew!” He rests his forehead against the glove box, takes labored breaths.
“Knew what? Knew what?” I beg. “Please, Wil. Tell me. Whatever it is, whatever you don’t want to say out loud—” I stroke the damp curls glued to his neck. “I want you to tell me.”
“I can’t,” he whispers. “It was because . . .” He wraps his arms around his middle like he’s going to be sick. “It was because of me. I could have stopped it somehow, and I didn’t. He’s dead because of me.” He releases a slow, painful noise that dies slowly.
“Listen.” I scoot close to him. I wrap my arms around his solid, safe body, and rest my chin on his shoulder. He heaves bottomless breaths between sobs. “Whatever you think you could have done, whatever you think you didn’t do, nothing that happened that night was your fault. It was out of your control, Wil. It was a freak accident that guy picked your house.”
“You don’t know. You don’t,” he says.
“So tell me.” I hold him tighter. “It’s me, Wil. It’s just me.”
He tilts his head to one side. His tears have made well-traveled roads across his cheeks, down his neck. I stroke his hair and his lips, and I rest my palm against his neck.
Wil rolls up the windows so we are alone. “It was so dark when he got home,” he begins.
I hold my breath. Steady myself. I’ll hold the weight, no matter how heavy. I’ll do anything for him.
WIL
Spring, Senior Year
I can’t feel my body.
One minute, I’m on the floor listening for him and the next I’m shedding my Generic Teenager skin, leaving it slumped on the floor next to the bed. I fly out the door and over the box maze and into the kitchen, waiting to feel my feet on the ground or hear the heart engine inside me (tickticktick). I feel nothing. I wonder if I am here at all.
The sick crack of a skull against the plaster wall makes everything sharp again. Real. I’m standing on the other side of the island, squinting through the dark. My dad palms my mother’s head like she’s a basketball. There are tulips and glass and water in the sink.
He throws her against the wall next to the stove again. Again. She isn’t screaming. Why isn’t she screaming? There is a thin river of blood creeping from her mouth. Her eyes are dead.
He says, “I love you, I love you. Why would you—I love you.”
It sounds like: Die, bitch.
I say, “Dad! Don’
t! Stop!”
It sounds like: silence.
His back is shaking, heaving. He is crying.
“Dad!” I scream again. (Or maybe for the first time.)
I lunge for him, hurl the weight of my body over the island and collide with a cement man. I drag myself up with his shirt and wrap my arms around his neck and I squeeze, and for a second, he releases her. I see her and she sees me and then I watch her slide down the wall into a heap on the floor. She is shedding her skin, too. She is becoming unreal like me.
I squeeze harder. He throws me back, sends me flying—we’re in the public pool he took me to a few times as a kid. It’s bright and the water is blue and cold. He’s standing in the shallow end and he launches me up, like he is giving me to the universe. I slam into the refrigerator.
It takes too long to find my breath. By the time I’m up again, he has her by the neck. I am screaming for all three of us.
He holds her against the wall again, holds her by the neck, so high that her feet don’t touch the ground. So high that I can see the life leaking from her eyes, rolling down her cheeks in jeweled beads. Her mouth lolls open, searching for air. In the silent dark, she is the only sound. Gasping, gulping, straining for air. Until the moment her face relaxes. She goes slack. He is turning her from a human into a doll.
I search the kitchen for something to stop him, something that will press PAUSE, and there is nothing. It’s because of him that there is nothing—because clutter makes him insane, because the countertops must be clear at all times or else. Maybe this is ironic. I don’t know.
Now I am flying again, but it is harder this time. I am heavier this time. In the entrance hall, my hands find the golf clubs—find a single golf club with a bulb at the end—and I run back into the kitchen. They are on the floor now and he is on top of her, slowly turning off her life switch. Dimming her.
I want to stop him.
I only want to stop him.
I raise the golf club up and I bring it down between his shoulder blades. He crumples like paper and he curses. I bring it down again. He collapses on top of her. I was wrong about him when I was a kid. All this time, he’s never been anything more than a man.
My mother’s eyes are wide.
“It’s o—it’s o—” I wheeze. That’s it, I think. For now. And I let myself suck deep breaths like I will never see the surface again.
“You . . . sonofa . . . bitch.” My dad is up again, off her, swaying toward me. I can’t find his eyes. “I’ll kill you, too.”
I smell booze: sugar and sick.
“Back! Back!” The only words I can manage. I raise the club over my head.
I think, He never taught me how to play golf.
He comes for me and comes for me again, and I swing the club like a baseball bat. It slices through the air and collides with his temple.
He stumbles back, surprised. The corners of his mouth curl up like a smile. And he falls back into the island. His skull on the corner is the loudest noise I have ever heard.
We are all silent, all of us now.
My mother’s eyes are still frozen open, and I try to remember, try to remember whether people die with their eyes open or closed. I should have paid attention in class.
“Mom? Mom?” I drop the club and I sink next to her and I should scoop her up, kiss her, breathe into her, but her wax skin and open mouth terrify me. I slip my hand into her hand, and it is damp. She squeezes slowly three times, and I know.
BRIDGE
Summer, Senior Year
“NO,” I say. I say it again and again, until the word itself starts to sound wrong. It is an incantation. A desperate attempt to undo what has already been done. But Minna told me: I am not that kind of magic. “Wil. No.” Every part of me rejects the story he’s just told: my sour stomach and ocean-filled eyes, my tight fists and wet, panicked skin. I knew there was something. I never knew it was this.
Wil Hines killed his father. My mouth fills with bile, and I gulp it down. Wil’s face thrashes in choppy waters in front of me.
“I did it. I killed him.” He turns toward me so abruptly it scares me. And then I remember: It’s him. It’s still him, right? “I had to, Bridge. He was gonna kill me.” The word kill is pinched.
“You killed him,” I echo. I look up and see everything in the bleeding sky: the color of Mom’s cheeks when she’s been laughing too hard. Micah’s hair, unruly fire. But mostly I see Wil and me as cloudkids, racing out past the breakers, arcing back to catch a wave to shore. I see Wilson in the surf, holding me, holding me, holding me until just the right time. Rocketing me into the crest of the wave, whooping and clapping as I ride until the sand scrapes my belly. I see the three of us on the hot sand, water-beaded and spent. Wilson covering us up with beach towels like blankets, and saying, G’night, kids, until one of us cracked up and blew the whole game.
I propel myself back, away from Wil, pressing myself against the driver’s side door. I don’t mean to. It just happens.
“And then what?” I moan. “Why didn’t you call the cops, Wil? Why didn’t you—”
“Fuck! I wanted to!” he sobs. “But my mom—my mom said—” He’s crying too hard to speak, and almost all of me wants to hold him. And I’m watching his fists clench tighter and tighter and I think about it. I think about the fact that those hands have ended a life.
“Okay. Okay,” I say, and I don’t know who I’m talking to, exactly. I can feel it worming its way up from my gut: a deep, low moan that turns into a sob. Into a scream.
“I wish you didn’t know!” Wils shouts at the windshield. “I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to tell you any of it!”
“Okay.” I wipe my face, making space for more tears. “It’s not too late. You can go to the cops, still. Turn yourself in. Explain what happened! It wasn’t your fault!”
“I can’t. If it had just happened—but we’ve done too many things to make it go away.” He curls into a ball, his voice muffled. “We wiped my prints from the golf club. We put the club in Dad’s hands. We broke the glass door from the outside to make it look like a break-in. We lied to the cops!”
“So tell them now!”
“Tell them what?” he wails. “Tell them that I let my mother convince me to lie to save my own ass? Tell them that the story about my dad coming home from the bar to find an intruder is total bullshit? Thank them for all the news stories about the break-ins?”
“I don’t know!” I scream. “I don’t know what you’re supposed to tell them!” I don’t know how to fix this for them, for us. I hate Henney for convincing her son to lie. I hate Wilson for what he did to his family. The only person I can’t bring myself to hate is Wil.
“She said our lives would be over.” He closes his eyes, and his voice gets soft. “She said with my dad gone, we could start over and have the lives we were supposed to have. And I’m sorry, but I wanted to give her that. After all the bullshit he put her through—” Fresh tears slide down his cheeks. “She deserved that.”
I reach for his hand and I take it. He lets me.
“I believe,” I say fiercely, “that you did what you had to do to save your life. And your mom’s life. And I know that anyone else, anyone who knows you, would see it the same way.”
He shakes his head. “It’s too late.”
“Timothy Pelle,” I say. I squeeze his hand.
“He killed that other lady. He broke into those houses, right?” Wil’s eyes are big and wild. He is grasping for something to make this okay. There is nothing there but dead air.
“But he didn’t kill your dad.”
“He should be off the street,” Wil argues. “He’s a murderer.”
“He didn’t murder your dad.”
“No,” he says finally. His body crumples in the seat. “He didn’t murder my dad.”
I am suddenly and completely empty. I want to curl up in his lap and sleep for years. I sink back against the window. The warm glass tugs at my skin.
“Wha
t about Porter and Yancey? They have no idea?”
He covers his face with his hands. “That guy’s been on the news for a long time now. I remembered some of the details. I told Porter and Yancey that my dad saved my mom’s life.”
“And they just . . .”
He nods. “They believed us,” he murmurs into his palms. “We said Dad had been out drinking at Big Mike’s, and hadn’t been home too long when a guy broke the front door. We said Mom had surprised him, and when he’d attacked her, my dad had tried to hit the guy with a golf club. We said the guy was wearing gloves, and after he attacked my dad, he just . . . He ran.”
This is too much. I can’t hold this. I thought I could. I pull my knees into my chest and squeeze until I can’t feel my arms anymore.
“Anyway, next couple of days when the cops were asking us to go over the details, we’d seen the sketch of the guy they were looking for. So we knew what to say.” Finally, Wil lifts his head for a fraction of a second before his chin drops to his chest again. “We’re such fucking liars.”
“Don’t say that. Did they check with the bar?”
Wil nods. “Yup. He was there that night, just like Mom thought.” His mouth withers. “He’d been hanging out there a lot lately. Drunk piece of shit.”
When I blink I see Wilson, leaning outside the bar as I’m on my way into Nina’s. Fuck. Maybe if I’d said something. Maybe.
On Atlantic, a siren screams past. An electric charge runs through me, and Wil stiffens, too.
“They’ll figure it out,” I tell Wil gently. “When they don’t find the guy’s DNA, when you slip up and say something different—they’ll figure it out. You should have—”
“Don’t do that. Don’t you sit there and judge me.” There is venom in his voice. “I had to. For her.”
A new wave rises in me. I let the tears leak. I’m too tired to cry.
“I didn’t—” He looks out the window. “You can’t tell the cops. It’ll end me, Bridge. You can’t. I love you. You can’t.”
“I have to go home.” My head is throbbing. I’ll go home and I’ll sleep, and when I wake up, this won’t be true. Wil Hines will be Wil Hines again. Our biggest worry will be a long-distance relationship. I’ll bitch about an eight A.M. class, and he’ll tell me about this customer he had who was kind of a jerk. But we won’t talk about this. Nothing like this.
