Innocent Monsters

by Doherty, Barbara

“What have you done William? You’re bleeding.” She tried to look at his face hidden behind his arms; his eyes were shut, the way she used to keep hers as a kid sometimes, when she thought she could disappear by blocking things out, when it seemed obvious that no one could see her if she couldn’t see anyone. “Let me get something to clean this up.”

  She tried to stand up but he held her down by her arm. She looked at his hand on her, looked at the blood on his leg, trying to understand.

  “Why do you do this to yourself?”

  And then he opened his eyes, parted his lips but nothing came out, suddenly unable to speak, his anger and his frustration greater than any word he might have chosen to describe it. He looked small, weak. Jessica leaned closer to him and held him to her chest.

  “It won’t happen again.” He muttered.

  “Shh. It’s all right. It’s ok.” But it wasn’t really. All she could think of was her father, all his it won’t happen again, every single one of his I’m sorry. Jessica closed her eyes and she was seven years old again, standing in her parents’ bedroom with Kaitlyn, wearing her favourite all-in-one yellow pyjamas. She could see her father slapping her mother, then punching her right across the left cheekbone, her head still on her shoulders only because the neck hadn’t snapped. She could see him picking her up, both hands clasping her shoulders; she could see her mother flying across the room, her skinny body smashed against the lamp by the king size bed, a wedding gift from happier days. Then no more light. Darkness. Pitch black. And she could hear herself yelling —Daddy! Daddy! No!— later then she had intended, too late, the voice of a girl too young to know the kind of fear and desperation she already knew. Jessica clearly remembered Kaitlyn switching the main light back on that night, her mother scrunched on the floor crying with her face against the wall and her father still standing feet away, with both hands buried in his thick brown hair. It was the first time she had seen him cry. She’d heard him saying I’m sorry and later, when they were all back in bed, she’d heard him saying it won’t happen again to the woman he had sent flying across the room, to the same woman he would hurt, punch, slap, the next day and the day after and the day after that.

  Jessica opened her eyes wanting to escape the memory, but he was still there, her father’s feebleness and weakness in William, all over again. But oh, how she wanted to be with him, how she wanted to share his pain, how normal this all felt. Insecurities, frailty, madness, all part of a normality she had accepted since a very young age. And just like always, she wanted to understand him, she wanted to help this man, rescue him from himself. She wanted to be the one person he would open up to, change for. She needed to become for William the person she wanted to be for her father but never was. Through him maybe, possibly, through this present, she could once again try to change her past.

  “I need you Jessy. You can help me,” he told her.

  “I know,” she whispered. “It’s all right. It’s ok.”

  But it wasn’t really.

  11 January 2001

  JESSICA WAS meeting Charles Brown at the Coffee Bean in Sutter Street; a good few miles from Sacrament Street, but she decided to walk anyway.

  On a good day, wandering through Nob Hill gave her considerable pleasure; she loved the intriguing mixture of characters that seemed to cohabit in this area. Chinese temples, upscale boutiques, offbeat shops, bars and nightclubs sat just around the corner from old coffee shops, vintage barbers and cocktail lounges from bygone decades, parts of the neighbourhood that felt completely frozen in time. She loved that. She loved the greyness of this pockets dotted around the district, she loved the contrast with the glamour of the more modern establishments.

  It was in one of these worn out, cozy little coffee shops that she had asked Brown to meet her.

  She had left her apartment ridiculously early, given herself enough time to walk a good few blocks and sit down at one of the old tables with a cup of coffee by herself. She wanted to stop worrying, try to relax, stop thinking about everything, Roger, William, Kaitlyn, anything at all. But the very person she was about to sit with was one of the people she would rather not think about anymore.

  She had met Roger Wither in his office a couple of days after the incident for a much more formal meeting —him behind the desk, Jessica sitting across his desk like a pupil facing a punishment from the headmaster. He had welcomed her with a heavy plaster across his nose and not a trace of the friendly tone of voice he had used to talk to her in the past. In less than thirty minutes Roger had talked her through his whole working history, reminded her how things were never presented to him on a silver plate, how he had to swim through shit and work his ass off to shift his position from writer without a future to editor for one of the biggest firms in the United States of America. She wasn’t sure what his monologue had to do with her own situation, what the moral of the story could possibly be, but one thing was sure, Roger had lost his patience. He wasn’t prepared to back up her pathetic excuses anymore.

  Nonetheless, leaving his office she had felt strangely relieved and she knew the only reason was that Roger had not mentioned detective Charles Brown and his questions again. She could only hope Brown had not bothered him again.

  The detective walked in just as she sucked the last of her coffee from the bottom of the cup. He looked different from the last time she had seen him, just as tired, if not more, but at the same time she noticed a strange glow about him, as if he had just come back from a great holiday. Had he been a woman, she might have suspected he was pregnant.

  He walked straight towards her, a big wrinkly smile on his creased face, and shook her hand with both his.

  “Jessica, it’s good to see you again.” She wished she felt the same way. “I have some good news.”

  “How have you been, Brown?”

  “Charles, please. Call me Charles. Good. I’m doing all right.” He pointed at the empty cup in front of her. “I’m not late, am I?”

  “No, no. It’s me, I was early. I like this place. Just wanted to enjoy it by myself for a while.”

  Brown walked away waving a hand in the air with a knowing expression on his face. She watched him order a coffee at the counter, holding onto the saucer with both hands as he carefully brought it to the table, and for a fraction of a moment he reminded her of Lieutenant Columbo, the clumsy homicide detective from the hit TV show.

  “Charles,” she offered quickly as he scooped spoonfuls of sugar in his cup. “I need to ask you a question.”

  “Yes?”

  “I had a meeting with Roger Wither, my editor, a few days ago. He told me you went to see him...”

  “Yes, I did. We are so close, so close. I will explain everything to you in a second, if you could just answer a couple of questions first?” Jessica shrugged. Did she have any choice? “I need you to think very carefully about this one. Can you remember if Kaitlyn ever came to meet you, or walked with you to the Jefferson’s building?”

  She couldn’t remember and she didn’t really want to try very hard. “Possibly. I can’t say for sure... Probably not. If this is about Roger, I don’t think him and my sister ever met. Why did you go to see him? What could he possibly have to do with my sister’s suicide?”

  Brown lifted his eyes from the coffee. “Suicide?”

  “Yes, suicide.”

  “What are you saying, Jessica?”

  Jessica sighed, she felt better already. “I’m saying that I think you’re wrong. I think that coroner or whoever told you she was killed made a mistake. I’m saying I think she killed herself.”

  “Can I ask what’s brought this on?”

  “Nothing’s brought this on.” She answered too abruptly, too loudly. “It’s what I believe. What I need to believe.”

  “Ok. Let’s think about this rationally. You told me yourself your sister was happy, that she didn’t have
any reasons to end her life.”

  He was right, but she didn’t want to be rational, she wanted to be better. “She was depressed at times, I know that. I’ve always known that.”

  “Depressed? You haven’t mentioned this before? I thought you said your sister had plenty to look forward to.”

  “She had, I’m not saying she didn’t.” Jessica wasn’t sure what she was trying to say. Truth was, she hadn’t really thought about how she was going to put this to him, she hadn’t even had this conversation with herself but she started talking anyway, unsure of what was about to come out of her mouth. “Me and Kaitlyn... We haven’t had the happiest upbringing and I know how badly it affected me. There’s no amount of therapy that’s going to change that. You learn to live with it but you don’t forget and sometimes... Old wounds open up. You think you’re all scarred up but every now and then one of the old scars starts bleeding again and you’re back where you started... For a while. When that happens to me... I guess, yes, I could kill myself. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I have to believe Kaitlyn could feel the same way. I know she did. She could have done it. No, she did. She did do it.”

  Jessica started crying and couldn’t stop. Quiet tears, no sobs, no dripping nose, just tears. And she didn’t want to cry anymore.

  Brown was looking at her with a delicate, paternal expression on his face, and that hurt her even more, it slapped her with the knowledge of how little she had seen that same expression on her own father’s face, how ludicrous it seemed that a stranger could look at her that way instead.

  “I want you to stop. I want this to stop. I need to move on.”

  Brown sighed shaking his head, kept stirring his coffee with regular, circular movements. “We all lose loved ones at some point in time, but ignoring the way they die does not change the fact that they are not with us anymore.”

  “I am not ignoring anything.”

  “But you are, Jessica, you are. Autopsies are performed by specialists, they are not guess work, they are scientific findings. Your sister did not kill herself. She was raped and then she was suffocated. Then she was moved to the bathtub.”

  Raped. Suffocated. Jessica looked away. If she ignored the words it might be as if they were never spoken.

  “Stop it, for Christ sake. Just fucking stop it.”

  The words hang in the air for a second, embarrassing.

  “There’s a couple of people at the far end of the room who didn’t quite catch what you’re shouting.” He whispered, placed a hand on hers. “Please calm down. I’m just trying to help.”

  Jessica pulled her hand away. “Help who, Brown? Help yourself? Cause I gotta tell you, this whole thing is not helping me one bit. How exactly do you think knowing my sister was raped is going to fucking help me? Isn’t it enough she’s dead? I want you to stop.”

  Brown groaned looking in the coffee he hadn’t yet touched. “This is a police investigation, it’s got nothing to do with you. It won’t stop just because you don’t like the sound of it. I’m sorry, I really am. But if you could just listen to what I have found out. I just need a few minutes of your time.”

  Jessica wiped the tears from her face with both hands, defiantly, tried to catch his eye stooping towards his side of the table. “I don’t want to listen. I just want you to leave me alone. I want you to stop telling me what you’re doing. I don’t want you or anyone from your department to call me anymore. I don’t want you to send me any stupid fucking postcard. I just want to move on with my life. Can’t you understand that?” Brown was still shaking his head, eyes closed. “Forget I exist.”

  She stood up and stormed out of the coffee shop. A few people looked at her, a few stared at him.

  She was right, of course. He could do this without her. And yes, she was right, she didn’t need to know about the rape, not like this. But she would be grateful once it was all out in the open, then she would see. Then she would thank him.

  He took a sip of his lukewarm coffee then topped it with most of the cold milk from the porcelain jar sitting on the table. It was how his wife always used to take it.

  20 January 2001

  JESSICA STARED at the computer screen, the cursor going on and off and on and off and on and off on the white empty page of the Word document.

  you’re in deep shit Jessica

  Delete.

  fucked

  Delete.

  raped

  Delete.

  suffocated

  Delete.

  why why why

  Delete.

  Her sister had been killed, but she had decided to think of it as a suicide. It was easier that way. It was easier to move on when the only issue to deal with was a death. A death, not a murder. Nobody to blame, just someone to mourn

  Delete.

  Could she write about her sister’s last moments? Could she write about details she didn’t know much about, didn’t understand, could not bear to imagine? Could she write about facts she was trying to hide away in some lost compartments of herself?

  can I write? can I write? can I write anything something nothing anything at all

  Delete. Return. Delete. Return. Delete.

  Only eleven days till the end of January, eleven days to write the first chapter of her new novel, twelve hours already wasted sleeping, reading the paper, looking at the cursor going on and off and on and off.

  eleven goddamn days

  Delete.

  days days days

  Delete.

  He grabbed the man by the hair and smashed his face against the table, when he pulled his head back up blood was running down his nose. Blood hurt blood it feels so good to hurt myself

  Delete.

  It had already been twelve days since she had seen William last. He had called a couple of days after she had met Brown to tell her it was going to be almost impossible for him to meet her for at least another week. Projects to finish here, deadlines there and new work coming in and somehow it had been a good thing staying away for a while, it had given her time to think, to sulk, to try writing.

  unsuccessfully

  Return. Delete. Return. Delete.

  Could she write? Could she write about the scars on his arms, the scars on his legs, scars of the past he didn’t want to talk about, much deeper than what she could see on his skin? No. She couldn’t possibly try. And she only had eleven days before the Jefferson Company demanded their advance back —money she didn’t have and couldn’t get anywhere.

  As Roger had reminded her many times over the past few days, the company was ready to drop her and sue her, and a lawsuit from the Jefferson Company would have disastrous consequences on her life, on her reputation. It would destroy her, and did she have the money to fight back in court? Did she have any grounds to fight them? What was her excuse for not respecting the contract going to be?

  Your honor, I believe the defendant suffers from a post-family-death illness which impairs her ability to write

  Delete.

  Your honor, I believe the defendant suffers from a rare form of Mad Coward disease which prevents her from writing.

  Mad Coward disease? Could you tell us a little more about it? What are the symptoms?

  Well, the patients usually start wallowing in their own pain, in their momentary block like pigs in shit and although they are perfectly able to fight the illness, they choose not to, because they’re cowards.

  And do the patients like to wallow in their suffering like pigs?

  Yes. I’d say they generally feel more comfortable in their suffering than they do in their happiness.

  So we could assert that Miss Lynch could actually write but she doesn’t really want to, is that correct?

  Yes, I’d say it is.

  Coward Coward Coward
r />   Delete.

  Her head was about to explode. No way she could get anything done in this conditions. She needed painkillers. Fast. And something to eat. Jessica moved off the desk and while she was on her way to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, someone knocked at the door. The young man standing behind it was tall and skinny, slightly tanned, holding a large bunch of white lilies in his arms. “Miss Lynch?”

  “Yes?”

  “These have been sent for you.” He grinned handing her the flowers. He had horrible teeth. “No message, but this comes with them.” He took a flat square packet the size of a CD out of the inside pocket of his denim jacket.

  “Thank you. Do I need to sign anything?”

  “Oh no. That’s all. It’s ok. You have a nice day now.”

  “You too.”

  The guy was already on his way to the elevator, his thin legs almost invisible inside the trousers as he walked. Jessica closed the door and sat on the floor against it, the lilies by her side.

  Wrapped in deep blue paper she did find a CD, its cover completely white except for an orange circle underneath thin orange letters reading Preisner’s Music. She also found a lighter blue piece of folded paper.

  Fill up the bathtub.

  Light a candle.

  This is the sound of my soul.

  Can you see me?

  The Garden Courts. 94 Sutter Street. 5.00pm.

  I’ll wait for you in the dining room.

  William

  WILLIAM WAS lying flat on the bed, hands cupped behind his head, the curtains drawn, a candle lit. He was listening to Preisner. Was she? Was she listening to the same track? Was she bored, was she crying?

  He shut his eyes looking at the black inside his eyelids, listened to every chord, every note, every string played, and looked around the small church, the candles on the altar and the sun rays slanting down in millions of colours through the vitreous mosaic of the window above the cross, everything clear, detailed, like a movie projected on a blank screen, inside his eyelids. He could see the rows of empty benches. He could see his mother, her tears, her trembling lip, the deep wrinkles around her mouth, the effect of years of unhappiness on her face. He could see his aunt, his aging grandmother, the blank in her eyes and behind her eyes; groups of relatives he had never met before, people who had never taken an interest in their lives, who were there out of duty, not anguish. And he could hear the music, the notes that reminded him of that church and that day because Preisner was the composer his mother had chosen for Helena’s funeral.