What We Kill

by Howard Odentz

  Marcy slightly smiles as she crouches and slips on her shoes. It occurs to me that I just announced that a girl we once knew might have been killed, but I don’t think that matters to her. She’s far more concerned with the fact that Anders isn’t completely broken in the brain. He can talk. He can respond.

  Marcy stands, runs her fingers through her curls, and shakes her head. Sunlight streams down on her from behind and makes her hair look like it’s glowing. I’ve always known that Marcy was pretty, but she’s beyond that. She’s like one of those actresses in a schlocky horror film who’s been running and hiding through filth and grime for days but still looks hotter than ever.

  Genes. They’re a funny thing.

  Myers adjusts his patch and says, “What do you mean you think she’s dead? Why would you say something like that?” Myers and I went to Hebrew School with Sandra Berman up until we were thirteen. Then we both stopped going. We couldn’t take another minute of it. Myers got a whole ration of shit from his parents for quitting, but Beryl said it was my choice.

  Everything has always been my choice with her. She’s very Montessori that way.

  I notice Anders’ head slightly tilting in my direction. He’s alive in there, however dim that life may be. I know we have something awful happening to the four of us, but I decide that deflection is definitely the right way to go, sort of like biting hard on your lip if you’ve just stubbed your toe.

  One pain sometimes cancels out the other.

  “The sirens,” I begin. “The police cars.”

  “We never hear stuff like that here,” says Marcy as she bends and takes the wad of smelly laundry that I handed to Anders and slowly unfolds it. She dangles a pair of jeans in front of his face. Without looking, he reaches up and takes them from her.

  “So, when I was at your house,” I begin. “When I was upstairs getting your stuff, the phone rang.”

  “Yeah?” says Myers.

  I ignore him. “The answering machine picked up and it was someone for your mom.”

  Marcy nods and Myers says, “Yeah?” again. Sometimes it’s hard not to want to hit him. I know he’s one of my best friends, but still. Someone needs to hit him hard soon, over and over again, otherwise when he leaves the bubble of Meadowfield and goes out into the real world, he’s never going to make it.

  I continue ignoring Myers in favor of Marcy, “One of your mom’s clients was crying and saying she needed to talk to her right away because she’s having a nervous breakdown.”

  Marcy is listening, but she is far more interested in Anders, who is finally starting to stand. His underwear is still damp and it has a pinkish hue to it from of all the blood. Myers continues to stare at me, his lips slightly parted, looking every bit the part of the mouth breather he’s been perfecting his entire life. Anders only stands there holding his jeans, so Marcy gently takes them from his hands, pulls a dirty pair of underwear free from the wad of laundry, and holds them out to him.

  “They’re dry,” she whispers softly like she’s at the movies and doesn’t want to disturb the people who are sitting around her.

  In one swift motion, Anders pulls down his wet underwear and steps out of them, right in front of Marcy and right in front of me and Myers. My mouth hangs open a little, just like Myers’s. How can Anders do that in front of Marcy? Sure, we’re friends and all, and maybe he’s in shock or something, but, right in front of her?

  She doesn’t turn away. She waits for him to take the better, less wet pair of underwear from her. He holds them for a second as he stares out across the water. Then he reaches down, steps into them and pulls them up, adjusting himself when he’s through. He could be anywhere—in the locker rooms at school, at the swim club we all belong to down by the meadows near the Connecticut River. He could be anywhere with a bunch of guys changing their clothes.

  But he’s with us.

  He’s with Marcy.

  “So?” says Myers. He doesn’t get it. He never gets any of it.

  “This lady was saying that they were pulling bodies out of a house across the street from her, all wrapped in white body bags.”

  As Anders reaches over to take a tee-shirt that Marcy is holding out for him, I see a fire kindle in his eyes. It’s the fire I normally see behind them when he’s normal Anders, not broken Anders.

  “What?’ Myers says, as though he’s heard me but is unable to process any of it because I’ve strung together a bunch of words that he understands the meaning of, but not when they are put in the particular order that I’ve put them in.

  “She said she hoped her ‘Sandy’ wasn’t in one of those bags, because if she was, then she wouldn’t be able to handle it.” I feel as though I’m wielding a verbal hammer and with each word, I’m beating a verbal nail into a verbal coffin.

  “Poor Mrs. Berman,” Marcy whispers as she holds a pair of Anders’ smelly socks. She sniffs and her eyes turn glassy.

  “Sandy? Like Sandra Berman?” Myers asks, but this time he’s not being annoying at all. This time the words have to be said and they have to sink in. If they do, Anders might wake up and start thinking about someone other than himself.

  What’s more, I need my friend in the here and now and not in some dark place on the edge of an abyss.

  What finally comes out of Anders’ mouth isn’t exactly what I am hoping for, but it’s something, and something is better than nothing.

  “She blew me once,” he says. “Behind the middle school.” His face is mostly blank, but all I can think about is a dead girl’s blue lips and Anders’ little adolescent escapades.

  Tears immediately well up in Marcy’s eyes. She turns and walks off into the woods, leaving Anders’ socks crumpled at his feet. I’m not sure if she’s upset about Sandra, or upset that Anders would say such a shitty thing in front of her, especially now. It could be one or both.

  None of us say anything to her as she goes, but Myers mouths, ‘Marcy?’ as she slips away. He has such a pathetic look on his face he might as well be a whipped and beaten dog.

  Then Anders punctuates his revelation with something that’s even more inappropriate, considering that Sandra Berman might be dead, along with others who have been lying right beneath the surface of Meadowfield in someone’s murder house for God knows how long.

  “She was good,” Anders says, loud enough for Marcy to still hear, as he reaches down for his socks. “Really, really good.”

  17

  MYERS IS WITH MARCY in the woods. She doesn’t go too far, so I can see she’s trying not to cry but not doing a very good job of it. Myers has his hand on her shoulder. I don’t think he’s ever even touched a girl before. For that matter, neither have I. Marcy is the closest that either of us has ever come, and, well, she’s just Marcy.

  Anders is sitting again, but at least he’s dressed. He keeps shaking his head and rubbing his eyes.

  “What the fuck?” he whispers half to himself and half to me.

  “You mean about Sandra Berman?”

  He shakes his head again. “Yeah. No. Yeah. I mean everything.”

  My arm has been stinging right along, but I’ve been ignoring it, much the same way that Anders has been ignoring everything since we woke up this morning in The Maze.

  “Does your head hurt?” I ask him. “The rest of us feel sick.”

  “Like a son of a bitch,” he says, and I flinch. The voice coming out of his mouth isn’t Anders’ voice. It’s his father’s. Somewhere deep inside I wonder if we’ll even be friends after high school, or if he’s only biding his time like everyone else our age, until we’re set free of this place and scatter to the winds.

  “I know what you mean,” I tell him. “I’ve already puked.”

  “Gross,” he says, and then his stomach rumbles so loudly that I think that I may have just given him a suggestion that he’s going to f
ollow through with.

  “You’re a mess,” I say to him. “Do you remember anything?”

  Anders rubs his square jaw with one hand, his beard stubble making him look as rough as he probably feels. “No,” he says, then puts both his thumbs to his temples much the same way that Myers did when we were back on the path in the woods. Anders opens his mouth like he’s going to say something but closes it again. “No,” he says again, with such an utter lack of conviction that I’m almost positive he’s lying.

  I suppose I can ask him about big, black eyes and the cries of animals, but I don’t want to open that can of fake snakes right now so they can explode into the air.

  Instead, I lie and say, “Me neither.”

  I think lying is something we all do. Sometimes it’s easier to lie than to say things about our lives that might be a little too personal, even to each other. I’m sure Myers doesn’t need to let us know about the intricacies of the Myers household and how damaged his mother is. I’m positive Anders doesn’t want to talk about the scorecard he’s tallying way down deep of how many guys his mother has boned since his father left Meadowfield. Marcy certainly never brings up the big white elephant in her household—her nonexistent brother, who is hanging in photographs in their lower-level den.

  Me, well, I’m not much of a sharer. I can even keep things from myself. Sometimes living is easier that way.

  I sigh and say, “We have to get out of here. Where are your old clothes?”

  Anders doesn’t answer me.

  I close my eyes and call out to Marcy and Myers. They are only about twenty feet or so into the woods but a million issues away. “Hey, Marcy. Where did you put his old clothes?”

  Marcy pushes away from Myers and turns to me.

  “In The Grandfather Tree for now,” she says as she slowly walks back, wiping her face, with Myers following after her.

  The Grandfather Tree is an old stump, hollowed out by squirrels, termites, and rain that stubbornly refuses to come down. It’s been in Prince Richard’s Maze ever since I can remember, only a little ways from Turner Pond, off of Little Loop and surrounded by rocks that are almost big enough to climb on.

  It’s as good a place as any. We’ll have to get rid of Anders’ stuff at some point, but for right now, I don’t think anyone is coming in search of a pile of bloody clothing, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to put it all in my backpack.

  “We’re leaving,” I say. I’m definitely not the leader of our group, but right now I feel about the least damaged of all of us, and that’s saying a lot since I’m the one with a little triangle burned into his forearm.

  I’m planning on getting a tattoo there anyway, once I turn eighteen. I would love to say that it will be a colossal act of rebellion but it won’t. Beryl has two tattoos. There’s one of a rose on her calf that’s more like a rose bush than a rose, and there’s another one of a monkey between her shoulders. I don’t know what either of them means. I’ve never asked, and she’s never offered. The fact that my mother has two tattoos doesn’t help her reputation of not fitting into the fabric of Meadowfield. Her being inked isn’t much of a shocker. It’s expected.

  As for me, I’m still deciding what graphic will most represent freedom because when I leave Meadowfield for college, I’ll truly be free. Maybe it will be a broken chain, or something else equally symbolic. Now, all I know is that there’s going to have to be enough ink to cover up the little triangle that’s there—enough so I’ll forget that it was ever burned into my skin in the first place.

  Anders slowly blows a gust of air out of his mouth. He wobbles for a moment and Marcy immediately rushes up to him and grabs hold of his shoulders so he won’t keel. He grumbles something as he stares across the pond, then brushes her away.

  I’m no rocket scientist, but even I can see that Anders refuses to look at her. The expression on Marcy’s face is so pained that he might as well have slapped her hard. I don’t understand. Yesterday we were all best friends. Only hours ago Anders was clinging onto Marcy for dear life like she was the only thing in the world that could tether him to reality.

  Now he won’t even look at her.

  He won’t look at any of us.

  18

  AS SOON AS WE get into Marcy’s car, she slips into the passenger’s seat leaving Myers and Anders to share the back. I can tell she’s upset. Marcy has always had one of those faces that can’t hide emotions. She probably doesn’t even know she’s doing it, but every mood, every nuance, is written on her face.

  “Do you want to drive?” I ask her. “It’s your car.”

  “I want to go home and hide underneath the covers,” she says, which I guess means that she’s perfectly happy being driven.

  I want to ask how she plans on finding the covers. Her room is approaching hoarder status, but I don’t. I suppose levity isn’t always appropriate in the middle of tension. Sometime tension has to naturally play out or snap.

  “Put on the radio,” Myers says from the back seat. It’s about the worst idea I can imagine. We all feel like crap. The last thing we want is canned music thump, thump, thumping against our eardrums, while the insides of our heads are thump, thump, thumping back.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “There might be something on the news about the house across the street from where Sandra used to live,” he whines. Normally we would all be scrolling through our phones, looking for information, but our phones have all disappeared—just like our memories of last night.

  I reluctantly reach down and push the button on the radio.

  No music. Some guy is talking, but it’s not about anything important. Marcy has the radio set to the low numbers. Her parents are all about her listening to NPR and stuffing culture down her throat. They think that if Marcy is cultured, she’ll get into a good college and get a good job so she can end up in a good community, like Meadowfield.

  I have a sinking suspicion that Marcy wants to be far away from Meadowfield and no amount of culture is going to change that.

  Myers leans forward, tipping himself so he’s practically lying across the front seat between me and Marcy. “Change the channel,” he says, even though he’s the one who is changing it.

  I look in my rearview mirror and see Anders sitting there, staring out the window with that same far off gaze that he had when he was looking across Turner Pond.

  ‘Why is there blood?’ Marcy had blubbered this morning when we woke up in the middle of Prince Richard’s Maze.

  ‘Anders, there’s so much,’ Myers cried. ‘What . . . what did you do?’

  Way down deep, far away, the sheep start crying in my head again, and a flash of big black eyes appear and vanish.

  They’re all weird images that don’t even remotely fit together. They’re just disparate thoughts that won’t go away.

  And, yeah. What did Anders do?

  Why would he be covered in blood? None of the rest of us had any on us. We weren’t cut. We weren’t bleeding. Even Anders, standing naked and unashamed at the edge of Turner Pond, didn’t have a scratch on him. There should have been something. The amount of blood that Anders had been covered with this morning was epic. It was the kind of blood that you only see in horror movies when they use so much of it that you know it has to be fake, dyed Karo syrup. Nobody in real life bleeds that much.

  Buckets full.

  Myers keeps turning the dial on the radio. He stops as a voice says, “. . . Meadowfield, Massachusetts.”

  Marcy stares at the dashboard. Myers pulls his hand back. Anders doesn’t even flinch. It’s as though he’s turned around and seen Sodom and Gomorrah get destroyed and now he’s nothing but a pillar of salt.

  The voice on the radio goes on. “Once again, in our developing story, officials are continuing to remove bodies from inside a home in quiet suburban Meadowfield, Massach
usetts.”

  Marcy and Myers both make weird noises like frightened rabbits probably make when they know that the fox is actually going to win and eat them for real.

  In my rearview mirror, Anders closes his eyes.

  The voice continues. “Community residents are gathered outside this unassuming, two story colonial in a quiet corner of the Pioneer Valley. The owner of the home has been identified as thirty-three-year-old Dr. Viktor Pavlovich, a current medical intern at Johnstown Memorial Hospital in Tolland County, Connecticut.”

  “Stairway to Heaven,” whispers Myers. That’s what everyone around here calls Johnstown Memorial Hospital over the Connecticut border in Sumneytown. No one in their right mind goes there unless they want nothing more than a couple of stitches. Anything beyond that, and you’re taking your life in your hands.

  “Shhhh,” says Marcy to Myers and gives him a dirty look.

  “Just saying,” he mutters and turns quiet, but by then, all that’s left is a chilling last remark that leaves us all a little unsettled.

  “Officials here believe Dr. Pavlovich may be among the dead, however, no formal identification has been made. Please stay tuned for more information on this developing story.”

  I reach over and press the off button on the radio. I do it with a quick, jabbing motion as though I’m positive it’s hot, and if I keep my finger on it for too long, I’ll get burned.

  “I want to see,” whispers Anders from the back seat.

  “What? No,” cries Marcy, as she whips around and stares at Anders. Again, he won’t look at her.

  Myers gulps and slumps back into his seat.

  I swallow and take a deep breath. The truth is I want to see, too.

  19

  THE NAME, DR. Viktor Pavlovich, seems so classically cliché’ that it almost sounds made-up. I half expect that when they start flashing his image across the news and on the Internet, he’s going to look all villainous, with a gold tooth and a prominent scar. He may be one of the dead, but it won’t matter. He’ll be the new face of evil, and Meadowfield will become the epicenter of a horrific media earthquake.