The Halo Effect: A Novel

by Anne D. LeClaire

  “Oh my God. Who did this to you?”

  “No one did it to me, Mo-ther.”

  “Don’t lie to me. Was it that boy? What’s his name? The one who keeps calling the house?”

  By “that boy” her mother meant Chuck Meadows from biology class who had phoned exactly twice in the past three months, each time to check up on a homework assignment.

  “My God, what have you got yourself into?”

  “Nothing. Just get out. Get out and let me get dressed.”

  Her mother left, but Rain heard her outside the door, waiting.

  It had begun in October—in European history class. They were studying the chapter on the period leading up to World War I, and Mr. Marshall was droning on and on in his pale, limp voice about the shooting of some prince or duke or something. Rain had felt so jumpy she didn’t know if she would make it through even one more minute. After Lucy was murdered, she hadn’t wanted to go to school, but when a week had gone by, her parents had said, Enough. It will be better if you get back to the normal routine. Like they had a clue what she needed. Like it was even possible to return to normal. Sometimes her skin felt too tight on her body; other times she felt as if she had no body at all, as if she might rise up off the chair and float right out of the room and no one would even notice that she was gone. Just like, after the first few weeks of circling a wide swath around Lucy’s vacant desk and chair in homeroom, classmates walked right by it as if they were invisible. Now she felt as if the chair she occupied was as empty as Lucy’s, as if she had evaporated or nothing more dramatic had happened than Lucy had transferred to another school or something. She’d shut out the teacher’s voice and picked up the biology report due for her next class and pried the staple off that had been affixed at a forty-five-degree angle as Mr. Neuben demanded or you got five points deducted from your grade. Idly, she unbent it until it was straight as a wire, tested the point of one end with her thumb, and then, with no more thought than if she were doodling in the margin of her textbook, she drew the point across the smooth inner skin of her forearm. A scratch appeared, a white line against her faded summer tan. She traced the line with the end of the staple, and then again, harder now, breaking the skin. She was amazed to see blood bead on the surface in a row of tiny red pearls. For the first time in weeks, it seemed that she could breathe, as if she were no longer invisible. She drew a second line. And a third. “Hey, spaz. Whatcha doing?” Ferret-faced, syruphead Danny Weston was watching her. She pulled her sleeve down to cover the marks, shoved the staple between the pages of her text, lifted her face to Mr. Marshall. But she couldn’t forget what it had felt like, couldn’t forget how for a moment she had been able to breathe.

  She thought about it for several days, ran her finger over the scrapes as they healed. Then, one night, while getting ready for bed, she could no longer ignore the claustrophobic tightness of her own skin, the growing panic, and so, as if in some part of her brain she had been planning this all along, she unearthed the green leather manicure case her grandmother had given her for Christmas and slid the tiny scissors from the silk loop that held them in place. Slowly she drew the smaller of the two blades across her arm, shocked to see it made not a scratch but a cut. The pain—and the relief—was immediate. She pressed the blade against her skin, made another cut. And no one knew. Until last week when her father had noticed. So her mother had done the total freak-out scene, threatening to call the police, so sure she was that someone had done this to her daughter.

  “Who did this?” she kept asking. “And don’t hand me any nonsense about cat scratches.”

  And so Rain had told her the truth, which set off a different kind of hysteria. The manicure set was confiscated. Lectures began. Whispered conferences between her parents at night while Rain eavesdropped from outside their door. “Well, I’ve had it,” her mother said. “It was bad enough with all the locks and that ridiculous security system that’s costing us an arm and a leg, but I’m done humoring her. I mean it. Now she’s gone too far.”

  “Maybe it’s some kind of phase she’s going through.”

  “A phase? A phase?” Her mother’s voice rose. “She’s cutting herself, David.” Her father murmured something, too low for Rain to hear. “I mean it. Enough is enough,” her mother said. “You’ve got to do something.”

  “What do you expect me to do, Beth?”

  Then her mother started to cry. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I just know this is beyond me. I can’t handle this.”

  Rain had retreated to her room, sick with shame. In the morning, her parents announced they were sending her for therapy. A shrink, she thought—to shrink me. Though if she got any smaller she would disappear for real.

  She placed her pajamas on the foot of the bed and slipped on a clean pair of panties—totally nude she felt too exposed, even though the shade covered the window. Then she opened the bottom drawer and pulled it free from the dresser and carried it to the bed, emptied the contents and turned it over. She knew her mother snooped in her room when she was at school, going through it like a customs inspector, and she was relieved to see she hadn’t discovered the razor blade in its hiding place. She picked at a corner of the Scotch tape from the underside of the drawer, freed the blade. The tightness inside her body made it hard to breathe. She took the blade and drew it across the pale skin of her left hip, felt the relief as blood surfaced. After a minute she drew a second line. She was real. She existed. She shivered, her near-naked body now cold. She pulled a Kleenex from the box on her dresser, folded it into a precise oblong, and pressed it against the new cuts, holding it there until the blood clotted. The cramp in her belly eased, nearly disappeared. She retrieved a large Band-Aid from her stash hidden in the bottom of a tampon box, tore off the paper, and placed the bandage over the cuts. She was always careful that there were no traces of blood on her clothes or bedding. She always flushed the old Band-Aids and bloody tissues down the toilet in the morning. She had never been a devious child, but she had become adept at fooling grown-ups: her sad-eyed father; her mother, who went through her room every day, searching for clues; and her teachers.

  Duane was right. She was a freak. A loser. A total screwup.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Instantly, even hungover, I realized I had really screwed up.

  When I heard my name, I believed Sophie had come to me in a dream; then she spoke again, was in the room with me. Not a dream. Here. Not in Washington. I scrambled up from the sofa where I’d passed out the night before and stumbled, momentarily dizzy. My head throbbed, my bladder ached, and my mouth was parched, but even with the hangover, I was acutely aware of my wrinkled undershirt and shorts, the sour smell of my body.

  “Hey, Soph,” I said.

  “Oh, Will.” Her body was rigid with an anger as sharp as a blade, and with disappointment, too, the more penetrating weapon. “You promised.”

  What could I say to that?

  She glanced around the room. “Jesus, Will.”

  “I wasn’t expecting you,” I said, my brain racing, wondering what she was doing there. Shouldn’t she still be in Washington? I realized I didn’t even know what day it was. I looked around, saw the mess as Sophie must have seen it. Empty bottles. My shirt and pants draped over one of the Morris chairs. Shoes on the floor. A blanket and pillow on the couch. Food on the coffee table. She hated the room looking like this.

  “What’s going on, Will?”

  A thong? Why was she asking me why I was wearing a thong? What the hell could that mean? I looked down at my shorts, was instantly shamed to see they were stained. “What?”

  “What’s going on?” she repeated.

  Oh. I took in the plastic forks and boxes of half-eaten food on the coffee table—a pizza carton and half-empty boxes of cereal—and tried to calculate how long the binge had lasted, tried to remember how long she had told me she would be in Washington. She had left for Washington on Monday. Her testimony had been postponed until Tuesday. So this had to be at l
east Wednesday. I closed my eyes as if that simple act could possibly make the mess disappear. Instead of answering I said, “Let me get us some coffee.” I would have sacrificed a foot for a cup of coffee. Or a Coke. Water. Anything liquid. That and a piss. I retrieved my pants from the arm of the chair and pulled them on, relieved to see they were not stained too. With forced casualness, I made an effort to straighten out the room. I was aware of her eyes following me as I folded the blanket, gathered the cartons. I focused on each movement, willed my hands to stop shaking.

  She remained standing. “So you don’t remember.” Her voice was flat. This was a statement not a question.

  Remember what? Now I would have sacrificed both feet for a triple dose of caffeine. “Let me get rid of these,” I said, indicating the boxes. If I could get her to the kitchen, I could turn on the coffee. But the kitchen looked no better. An open peanut-butter jar. Cracker bits and bread crumbs and dirty knives in the sink. A carton of souring milk on the kitchen table. Empty ice trays on the counter. Moving as quickly as the hangover allowed, I dumped the milk down the drain, wiped the counters. I measured grounds, poured water into the coffee machine, careful not to spill. The need to piss was urgent. Sophie was talking to me from the living room.

  “What?” I yelled. “I can’t hear you. Can you come out to the kitchen?” There was silence, and I could feel her weighing my request. As I reached for two mugs, my gaze fell on a squat cobalt-green teapot, and it brought on a rush of memory. The sprawling flea market set up on the edge of a farmer’s meadow. The autumn day. A lifetime ago. The moment Sophie fell into my life. Literally.

  The teapot had been in the back of a narrow table crowded with used and chipped china. Together, at exactly the same moment, we had reached for it. As our fingers touched, two children raced by, jostling Sophie, and she fell into my arms. Instinctively, immediately, I had cradled her, felt, as I steadied her, a nearly primitive need to protect this soft woman with the round face and wild blonde-streaked hair, this creature dressed in a denim skirt, off-the-shoulder blouse in a green—malachite, I remember, a shade that most women can’t wear—and boots with heels so insanely high I didn’t know how she was able to walk in them. And even with those heels, she regained her balance with the grace of a Balinese dancer. Her head just brushed my shoulder. Moments later, I handed money to the woman behind the table—the asking price, no haggling—while Sophie cradled the pot in her hands, just as shortly before I had held her. She laughed up at me then and looked directly into my eyes. “Our first purchase,” she’d said with a confidence I would never have dared, even joking, as if our future had already been decided and we could cut through the dance. So easy. So inevitable. With an innocence nearly arrogant, with not an inkling of what lay ahead.

  Another lifetime ago.

  Sophie came to the threshold but didn’t enter the room, and I was pulled back to the present. “Don’t go anywhere,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” In the bathroom I peed a long stream, the smell acrid. The cabinet mirror above the sink confirmed the grim news. Unshaven jaw, red-shot eyes, bags underneath, face deeply lined. I opened the cabinet door, shook two tablets out of the bottle, swallowed them dry. The headache was killing me.

  When I returned, Sophie hadn’t moved from her spot in the doorway. “You don’t remember calling me, do you?”

  Shite. A dim recollection surfaced. Sometime—the previous night?—I’d phoned her at her hotel in DC. The Mayflower. Big mistake, I realized now. Big, big mistake. Huge. I debated whether admitting I remembered the call would escalate the magnitude of my error or if it would be better to plead amnesia. Didn’t matter. Either way was an admission I’d been smashed out of my skull when I’d phoned. Here was an idea: someone should invent a phone with an internal Breathalyzer that would prevent drunks from making calls. It was the kind of crazy concept that once would have made her smile. I could imagine her response and how we would have played with the idea. What would you call it? she’d say. Intoxi-not. Dry-dock. Designated no-call. Think of the friendships it would save, the relationships rescued from rupturing. The coffee was brewed, and I poured two mugs, offered one to Sophie, which she ignored.

  “So what was so pressingly important that you had to wake me at two in the morning? Or was it just for some middle-of-the-night drunk talk?”

  Yeah, I sure could have used the no-call gizmo. I stalled for time, set her mug on the counter, drank from mine. I was playing catch-up here, trying to nail down the day, what I’d said during the call. Had I been telling her I needed her? Asking her to come home? Begged her? I thought I remembered crying. God, I sincerely hoped not. She hated drunken conversation, the slurred sentimentality. I didn’t blame her. Every inch of my skull ached—behind my eyes, my temples, jaw—and I was nearly cross-eyed from the pain.

  “You need help, Will. You’re a mess.”

  A mess. “Christ,” I shot back. “That’s rich.” As simply as that I was drawn in to starting an argument.

  “What?”

  “That you’d tell me that. Have you forgotten?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Last fall. Remember when you had lunch with Jan and Alicia and you overheard them say you were a mess? What did you tell me when you came home? You weren’t a mess. You were grieving. So what is it? You’re allowed grief, and I’m not?”

  I was gratified to see she was contrite.

  “You’re right, Will. I’m sorry.” She entered the kitchen, picked up the mug, and pulled out a chair at the table. “I don’t want to fight.”

  “I’m sorry, too, Soph. I really am. I screwed up. I know it.”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “Okay, we agree on that.”

  “I don’t know what to do, Will. I can’t handle this.”

  “Handle what?” I said, afraid of her answer. Did she mean the drinking? Our marriage?

  When she spoke, her voice was heavy with sorrow. “I don’t know, Will. I’ve tried, I really have, but I just can’t do this anymore.”

  The void between us was growing wider, and I feared it couldn’t be crossed. How had it come to this? Once I would have bet our marriage was solid enough to withstand anything, but I was no longer confident. I wondered if in even the strongest of marriages there always existed a fault line and it just took one major, earth-shattering disaster to reveal it. “I’m sorry, Soph. What can I say? I feel like a total shit.”

  “So what happened?”

  I sat at the table and dropped my gaze to my mug, unable to meet her eyes. “I don’t know. It wasn’t anything I planned.” I considered telling her I’d been lonely with her off in DC, and although I was tempted—even scared and on the defensive—I couldn’t use such an unfair accusation as a weapon. “I was out walking and thinking about—you know—”

  “No. I don’t know, Will.”

  Lucy. I didn’t allow myself to say her name, afraid I would start weeping. “Everything,” I said. “And I was walking by the Nest, and, I don’t know, I thought I’d go in for a beer. Just one beer.”

  “Not one of your best ideas, Will.”

  “You think I don’t know that? It’s just so hard, Soph. Sometimes I just need to forget.”

  She reached over and laid her hand on my arm. “Drinking never erases memory, Will. It just makes you drunk.”

  She was still upset, but I saw the conversation was calming her down. “I know. I know that.” But that wasn’t completely true. Drinking did help me forget, at least for the moment. And for this brief respite I was able to block out the pain of losing a daughter and how utterly I had failed my family. My head throbbed so badly I wondered briefly if I had a tumor.

  “Will?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We really need to talk.”

  We need to talk. Nothing good could come of that.

  I struggled to come up with a response.

  “Oh God,” she cried out.

  “What?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  She
was staring out into the backyard. “Lucy’s swing,” she said. “What happened to Lucy’s swing?”

  I shifted my gaze to follow hers, saw two ropes hanging freely from the elm tree, saw on the ground beneath it the plank of the wooden seat.

  She crossed to the sink for a better view. “Look. It’s been cut,” she said. “Someone came into our yard and cut down Lucy’s swing? Who could have done this? Why would anyone do something like that?”

  “I don’t know.” A boozy recollection surfaced. The hacksaw in my hands, the dark, lit only by the glow of the back porch light and the echo of light cast from the Eatons’ house next door. No longer able to bear the sight of the empty swing, I’d sawed away at the ropes, as if they were responsible for our loss. I remembered, too, the wind overhead in the night air and the drunken moment when I thought it had called out to me in Lucy’s voice. “I don’t know,” I repeated.

  Something in my voice or my face alerted her.

  “Will. Tell me you didn’t . . . tell me it wasn’t you.”

  But of course she knew, could see the truth plain on my face. The silence filled the air between us, as wooden and flat as the useless seat that accused me from the lawn in our backyard. “Soph—” I began.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t.” She set her coffee down on the kitchen table and, her posture rigid, left without another word.

  I heard the front door slam her departure, the rumble of the VW’s exhaust as she backed out of the drive. I stood motionless as granite while minutes ticked off and the mug grew cold on the table, but she did not return. I must have stood there like that for half an hour. Staring into the emptiness. Then a fury of motion took me. As I tore through the rooms as if possessed, I remembered what Sophie had once said about an acquaintance, a woman who never seemed to stand still. Can’t hit a moving target, she’d said. That best described me as, in spite of the searing headache, I began a frenzy of cleaning, as if setting the house straight would be the start of getting everything in order. I started in the kitchen, working as if to eliminate the criminal evidence. In the living room, cleaning as an act of atonement. I dumped the accumulated trash into a plastic bag, dusting, hauling out the Hoover. As I pushed the wand of the vacuum cleaner beneath the skirt of the sofa, it struck something. A shoe, I thought. I knelt, the motion causing a momentary wave of nausea, and reached under the sofa, knew instantly a shock as I felt the cold contour even before I withdrew the pistol. Or revolver. I didn’t know the difference. I cast a swift glance toward the hall, afraid Sophie might have returned, but of course she hadn’t. I had absolutely no memory of retrieving the weapon from the studio where I’d hidden it, but obviously at some point in the past days that was exactly what had happened. A thought chilled me. What if instead of under the sofa I had left it out on the table or on the sofa cushion? What if Sophie had seen it? I stared at the gun in my hand, knew it was no longer safe to keep it in the house. But where? The car was a possibility, stashed in the trunk. Or the glove compartment. I remembered I didn’t have a—what was it called?—a license to carry. Hell, I didn’t even have a license for a weapon, never mind driving it all around town. I tried to think. I abandoned the vacuum there in the middle of the floor and went upstairs. I needed to get sober and devise a plan. I carried the gun into the bathroom with me, shoved it in a vanity drawer, and turned on the shower, adjusting the water until it was as hot as I could stand, and gradually, as it streamed over me, washing away my sour stench, a plan formed. I dressed, then retrieved the pistol and headed out, intending to drive to our bank and open a safety-deposit box where I could stash the gun, but before I had even turned on the engine, it hit me that the entire purpose for the gun was to have it on hand. I sat behind the wheel, and my gaze fell on the backyard shed. Sophie never went there. It was dark inside, and I paused to allow my eyes to focus, then settled on a row of paint cans, three of which were empty, waiting to be recycled. I pried open the lid on one that had held the stain I used for the front steps, wrapped the gun in one rag, the ammunition in another, and dropped both in the can, reassured that now the weapon would be safe from Sophie but available for when I needed it. Available when I finally learned who had killed our Lucy.