Dear Comrades and Minions:
My son, Percy, was a CC fan and collector. As some of you are probably aware from the news, he also committed a terrible murder and then killed himself. I truly cannot find any hints or reasons in his history that would have made him kill an innocent stranger, and I am struggling to make any sense of this that I can. I know that I cannot blame his actions on a comic book—and I’ve now begun reading CC myself, working my way through Percy’s collection, and to my surprise am enjoying it—but so much of the series is about facing pain and chaos, and so many of you have also faced pain and chaos, that I thought it might be helpful to talk to some of you. The Emperor claimed Percy. I am trying to remain on the side of meaning. I know there’s nothing any of you, or anyone really, can say to comfort me, but if you are willing to respond to this, I would welcome your thoughts. Sincerely, Anna Clark. P.S. Does it bother anyone else that Archipelago’s getting away with murder?
Jeremy blinks. Holy shit. Percy’s mother is looking for CC pen pals?
And is she nuts? Posting in a public forum like this could pull the media down on her like fruit flies on a rotting banana.
Well, sure, she’s nuts. Her son certainly was, and these things run in families, don’t they?
Shaking his head, Jeremy hits A on his cell phone—he has Amy on speed-dial now, a small triumph that would have meant a lot more before Mom died—but it goes to voice mail. Amy’s probably studying for finals or working on a paper or otherwise being productive. She’s much better at being productive than Jeremy is, and he’s still a little in awe that she even speaks to him. “Hey, A, so here’s some crazy gossip. Check out the WISS boards on CCnet. Percy Clark’s mother just posted there. I swear I’m not making this up. Catch you later.”
He’s pretty sure she’ll call back the second she gets that. It really is juicy. Percy’s mom has given Amy a reason to call him: there’s a sweet irony.
Feeling much more energetic than he did a few minutes ago, he sits up straighter on the couch and eyes Anna’s post. It has three replies; there was only one the first time he read it. He scrolls through them.
So sorry. Wish there were some way to make sense of this, but not even Cosmos could do that. You have our sympathies. And I’m betting Archipelago gets hers.
Ms. Clark, if you’ve read CC, you know that it isn’t about murder. The Emperor doesn’t kill people, at least not directly. He isn’t a murderer. He’s a force for chaos and disorganization, but murder requires planning and intent—just really negative planning and intent. So I think you’re looking in the wrong place. Good luck finding peace. By the way, I agree with you about Archipelago.
Comics don’t kill people, people kill people, and you and your son must both be morons not to know that, and he deserves to be dead. So does Archipelago. I’m betting her own bug kills her. Anyway, nobody feels sorry for you, lady. We feel sorry for your garbage son’s victim and her family. Suck it up.
Oh, man, Jeremy thinks. That’s hella mean. But it’s also exactly what she should have expected from posting here; Jeremy’s amazed that the first two responses were as kind as they were. This woman’s really clueless.
Mom’s last postcard is upstairs in Jeremy’s room, stuck into a corner of his mirror. He looks at the turtles every day. He doesn’t have to look at the back anymore, because he has it memorized. Just met guy your age, Percy, who likes CC too.
Everyone has told him that if Percy hadn’t struck up a conversation about that, it would have been about something else. Everyone has told him that Percy must have already targeted her, or that maybe he didn’t, but the content of the conversation didn’t matter. Jeremy’s devotion to CC, he has been repeatedly assured, is not responsible for his mother’s murder.
Percy Clark was responsible for his mother’s murder.
Mom told him that Percy said his own mother wouldn’t go near CC. More irony.
Should he respond to the post? But what would he say, if he did? Does Anna Clark know that Mom and Percy talked about CC? How could she know? Should he tell her? No, that would only make things worse. Wouldn’t it? But there’s no way to make things better.
He remembers VB asking him what CC would do.
He remembers Amy telling him about VB’s nervous breakdown. Nobody talks about how you get through the rest of your life after the murder’s solved. Yeah, no kidding. Percy’s mom has to be going through that, too, right?
Jeremy’s never thanked her for the fucking Christmas tree. Sending it was clueless, but at least she tried. He ponders, composes sentences in his head, and decides that all of them sound completely lame. Amy’s a good writer. When she calls back, he’ll ask her to help him compose a reply.
His cell phone rings. He smiles. This will be Amy. He answers without even looking at the caller ID. “Hey, A!”
“Jeremy.” The voice is distorted; he can hear frantic breathing. “Jeremy, it’s Veronique Bellamy, and I’m really sorry to bother you, but you need to call your Aunt Rosie and tell her to leave me alone, because she won’t listen to me, and calling the cops on me was as completely inappropriate as anything I’ve done since your mother died, including this phone call, and I’m truly sorry for that, but Rosemary won’t listen to me because she thinks I’m insane but she may listen to you, and—”
“What?” The cops, again? VB’s accumulating quite a rap sheet, unless she’s still talking about what happened in March. “Prof Bellamy, what are you talking about? Where are you?”
“I’m in Gerlach. I’m staying at the Planet X Guest House as a little treat for myself, and I’m absolutely fine, but Rosemary called the police because she thought—I don’t know what she thought, but she’s demanding that I come home, and I won’t. I’m fine. The cops told her I’m fine! I’m not two years old. You just tell her that.”
The line goes dead. Jeremy blinks at his phone and then hits R. Aunt Rosie’s on speed dial, too.
VB isn’t. He didn’t even know she had his cell number.
Aunt Rosie’s furious. “She should not have dragged you into this. That’s completely inappropriate.”
“She knows that.” This would be funny, if they weren’t both so upset. “That’s what she said, too.”
“Well then, she shouldn’t have done it! I’m going out there. I’m going to bring her home. I know I shouldn’t drag you into this either, but she already has, so do you want to come with me?”
“Um,” says Jeremy. The couch is pretty comfortable, and he isn’t sure he feels like moving. On the other hand, VB and Rosie sound furious at each other, and if he’s there, maybe he can keep the peace a little. On the third hand, he should stay out of it. On the fourth hand, what would Mom want him to do? And what would CC do?
And if VB refuses to budge, which is what Jeremy would do in her position, because Rosie really is treating her like she’s a little kid who’s run away from home, well then, Rosie’s going to be really upset. And Jeremy loves Rosie, and if that happens, she’ll need company driving home. And the first clue that Uncle Walter had Alzheimer’s was when he drove off across Nevada without telling anybody, and that must be making Rosie even more upset, and doesn’t VB remember that?
“Okay,” Jeremy says, resigned. “Can you give me half an hour to take care of some stuff here?”
“Of course. I’ll pick you up in thirty minutes.”
He has to eat something, shower, get dressed. And Amy still hasn’t called back. Jeremy looks unhappily at Anna’s post. There are two more responses.
Your son needed serious psych help and maybe you do, too. We aren’t therapists. Why are you even posting here? Why are you wasting your time even thinking about Archipelago? She’s not real.
When my brother killed hisself we found drugs in his room and u should look for drugs too cause no 1 just does this.
Jeremy shakes his head. He doesn’t envy her having to read this crap. He clicks on “respond to post” and types,
No answers for any of us. Sorry some people
here are being assholes. Brave of you to post, but pretty stupid, too. You should just delete this whole thread. Never thanked you for the tree. Thanks.
He doesn’t sign the post, not even with his CC handle. She’ll know who it is, and he really doesn’t want her searching for every post from Kid Coherence. The last thing Jeremy needs is Percy Clark’s mother stalking him.
PART THREE
15
Anna sits on her living room floor, surrounded by photo albums: large ones, small ones, fancy ones with satin covers, homely handmade ones fashioned from cardboard and tinfoil. There are envelopes of Polaroids, printouts of Facebook albums, photographs liberated from drawers and closets and the corners of mirrors. She didn’t know there were so many pictures of Percy in the house. How can a life be so well documented and remain so completely opaque?
It’s July 1; in a month, Percy’s memorial service will be over, and she’ll be able to move on to whatever comes next, a future she can’t even imagine. Right now, though, she still needs to plan the service.
She’s determined to do this right, as if it’s a normal funeral. At normal funerals, there are display tables with photographs and memorabilia, so Percy’s service will have one, too. The framed picture on Percy’s desk, the one of him and Bart, will definitely be included, but she also wants to use some baby pictures. Percy was a beautiful baby, calm and sunny. She’s determined that anyone who comes—and she still isn’t sure who that will be—will see him as he was then: blond, laughing, chubby-cheeked, as curious and quick to learn as any child.
Once again her mind falls into the familiar litany. Percy slept through the night sooner than most babies, never had colic, and didn’t even come down with any of the major childhood illnesses. He didn’t bully other kids and wasn’t bullied by them. He sailed through school easily. Was Mexico some horrible price for all his blessing? What went wrong?
Always the same questions. They loop through her brain, Ouroboros-like. William and his parents dismiss them briskly: “No, of course not. You did nothing wrong. We did nothing wrong. It’s his responsibility.”
But the world blames the parents. Anna knows that. She doesn’t blame herself, not exactly—and it amazes her that she doesn’t—but she hungers fiercely for explanation, something she can hand to the people she knows must hold her responsible. Part of her knows this desire is cowardice, the yearning to deflect blame. But she truly doesn’t believe she deserves blame.
She can’t imagine the crime itself. Her gorge rises at the very thought of it, and she is heartsick and enraged for Melinda—for all women who have suffered this or who have even feared it, who cannot trust their moats to protect them, as indeed Anna’s has in some sense not protected her—but she can’t even begin to put Percy in this picture. She’s tried. Her brain stalls, freezes, careens off-road.
She supposes some mothers would have tried to dwell in denial, to insist that their child hadn’t done this, couldn’t have, no no, it must have been someone else. Anna hasn’t. She gives herself some small credit for facing the facts, the evidence. Is that a sign that somewhere deep down, she believed Percy capable of such a thing?
If the suspicion ever existed, she cannot drag it into the daylight.
As many times as she’s scrutinized the history, she always comes back to the same answer. Whatever sent Percy swerving off the edge of sanity and civilization, she truly doesn’t think it was anything within her or William’s control, anything they could have seen or prevented. They didn’t, heaven knows, beat Percy or insult him or commit any other kind of abuse. He rarely fought with them even as a teenager. He wasn’t a wild partier. He wasn’t the product of a problem pregnancy, and Anna hasn’t been able to find any family history of crime or psychosis.
Everything about Percy was completely normal, until suddenly it wasn’t.
She looks down at the album in her lap. Percy as a newborn, Percy sitting up for the first time, Percy’s first birthday party. All the sweet, trite, predictable pictures taken by first-time parents.
She thinks about Melinda Soto, about Melinda’s adopted son. She thinks Melinda was very brave, to bring home a baby from another country. Look how badly things can turn out even when the genes are known quantities. Look how kids can break your heart even when they’re homegrown.
Her own heart breaks for Jeremy.
Jeremy has lost a mother and Anna has lost a son; she’s smart enough to see the pattern, smart enough, too, to know not to go there, not to succumb to the temptation to try to fix this by forcing a relationship. It isn’t possible. It’s deeply wrong of her even to be tempted.
She was shocked to find Jeremy’s post on the CC boards, although she supposes she shouldn’t have been; given the popularity of the series, half the world must be on the CC boards at any given time. She sent him a cautious private note: “I grieve with and for you, and hope you are finding your way.” He didn’t answer. She can’t blame him. She can’t imagine his rage. She thinks that Jeremy Soto must be even angrier at Percy’s death than she is, because there is now no living outlet for his fury.
Sometimes—but only sometimes—she finds herself relieved that Percy didn’t go through the hell of arrest, extradition, trial, life in a Mexican prison. Other times, she berates him for walking into the water, for walking away from consequences and responsibility and the possibility of answers. She doesn’t understand, will never understand, why Percy killed Melinda, but she understands completely why he killed himself.
She looks down at the photo album. Here is Percy on his first day of kindergarten. She carefully removes the photo and turns the page. Percy on a summer vacation they took in Maine. Percy at high school graduation. Percy in his freshman dorm room at Stanford. Percy with his father, with his grandparents, with various friends who have not bothered to respond to her invitation to the service.
And here, at last, is Percy with her. She is not in many of these pictures, because she’s usually the one taking them. But last summer the three of them, with Bart, went on a day hike in the Cascades. They hit a rough patch of trail, and Percy helped her around a clump of protruding tree roots, and William, ahead of them on the trail, turned and snapped the photo.
Anna, knuckles against her teeth, lifts the photo with her free hand. Percy, hair shining like a halo, holding her hand, his other arm strong and reassuring around her back. She remembers how patiently he led her around obstacles. “Here, Mom, step here where it’s level.” She can hear his voice, kind and courtly, as clearly as if he’s in the room with her. She can’t see his face, or her own: they’re both looking down at the ground. What would she see in his eyes if she could?
* * *
“Dammit,” Melinda says, “I could have slapped him! He’s known all his life what’s right. I’ve taught him that. You help people; you leave whatever place you’re in better than it was when you got there. That’s the core of every genuine faith on the planet, and Jeremy’s always gotten it, but this time he didn’t.”
The three women sit on Rosemary’s deck, sipping iced tea and watching Walter mow the lawn. After a brutally hot summer’s day, the temperature has at last cooled enough, with the last glimmers of light, for them to sit out here comfortably. A breeze moves the trees in the neighbor’s yard, creating a gentle whooshing sound. “He’s thirteen,” says Veronique. “He’s an adolescent. His job right now is to rebel.”
“There were other thirteen-year-olds there, and they were doing fine! They were pitching right in and doing the work, not sulking and playing hooky! And they’re his friends! I thought he’d have fun!”
“Were their parents on the trip, too?” Rosemary asks. “He might have felt self-conscious having you around.”
“Some of their parents were there, yes, of course.”
Veronique makes a sympathetic clucking noise. “They were probably fighting with their folks, too, where you couldn’t see. Mel, kids get impossible at that age. Girls, too. It’s the damn hormones.”
And you would
know this how? Melinda thinks furiously. In your childless state?
She hates this. Being angry at Jeremy, being angry at her friends. Being angry at herself.
“Did he originally want to go?” That’s Rosemary. “Or did you tell him he had to?”
Melinda looks over Rosemary’s fence, out at the distant mountains, velvet blue against the darker blue of the sky. “I—well, I told him we were going.”
“Melinda!” That’s both of them: Vera and Rosie, who so rarely agree on anything.
“His friend Richard went last year and had a great time! Jeremy wanted to go, then!”
“Then,” Rosemary says gently, “Richard’s white.”
Melinda squints at her. Dammit! Does everything have to be political? She’s political herself, but can’t they all give it a rest for once? And since when does Rosie talk about race? She’d have expected that from Vera, but Vera doesn’t know the kids at church. “Yes? So?”
“So white Richard goes with his mostly white youth group—that was before Tony Nguyen went off to college—to help build a rec center for poor brown kids. White Richard comes home feeling ennobled; we don’t know what Tony made of it. This year, the mostly white youth group, in which Jeremy’s currently the only brown kid, goes to help build a school on a Native reservation, alongside Native kids their own age. Furthermore, the white kids in the youth group know that Jeremy was adopted from Guatemala, because he made a nice little speech about it in church. You see where I’m going with this?”
Melinda swallows. “No.” Rosemary’s being a self-righteous pain in the ass, something else that would be more in character from Veronique. “No, I don’t. Give me some help here, please?”
Veronique studies her cuticles, and then fiddles with a loose thread on her chair cushion. Rosie gets up to pour everyone more iced tea, but keeps talking, looking at the glass and pitcher instead of at Melinda. “The church kids look at Jeremy and maybe think, He came from a place like this. The Native kids look at Jeremy, who looks more like them than the white kids do, and maybe think, How’d he wind up with them? And Jeremy maybe feels torn down the middle.”
Mending the Moon Page 22
