by Darcia Helle
No more football. No more NFL aspirations. No more glamour. No more Big Man on Campus.
Melanie’s parents blamed Johnny for taking her to that party, for letting her drive.
The cheerleaders stuck together, their grief sticking to Johnny, who had morphed into a virtual pariah.
He’d finished high school with a private tutor in between physical therapy appointments.
For a short time, he’d blamed Melanie, the cheerleader, the popular girl, for ruining his life. I thought he’d let that go. Realized they were both to blame. He’d been the lucky one, because he was alive.
I sat up most of the night, reliving every moment, every conversation Johnny and I ever had. He refused to watch football. Hadn’t so much as glanced at a game since the accident. I’d explained it away as grief. Maybe it was nothing more than bitterness.
I feigned sleep as Johnny got ready for work in the morning. He brought me coffee, kissed my cheek, told me he’d be late. Again. I waited for the front door to click shut. Pushed off the covers. Vomited in the toilet and washed his kiss from my skin.
For two hours, I sat with my cellphone in hand. I needed to call Melanie. But how do you tell your homicide detective friend that your husband is the serial killer she’s looking for?
Then I thought I should just kill him. Turn those damn chocolate mint sticks against him. Use them as a weapon. Ram them in his eyes, up his nose, down his throat. Tie a red bow around him afterward. Hand his body to the police as a gift.
And now, here I am, curled up in the fetal position beside an empty glass and a bunch of chocolate mint sticks.
The chocolate sticks are still on the floor with my empty glass when Johnny returns home from work. I’ve managed to get myself up, put myself back together. He stops abruptly in the doorway. I see him looking from me to the floor, trying to work out what he’s seeing. But there is no explanation for this.
I hand him a glass of vodka and a chocolate mint stick. “An appetizer before dinner,” I say.
“What’s going on?”
I raise my own glass, one I filled with Baileys, chocolate liqueur, and an extra boost of vodka. “Let’s toast.”
His eyes drop to the floor, to the pile of sticks I should have wrapped in a bow. “To what?”
“To life.” He stares at me. “Humor me,” I say, my voice a soft thread in the tense air. “Drink. And eat your chocolate. Then we’ll talk.”
He gulps the vodka, perhaps sensing he’ll need to dull his senses. An alcohol haze to help deal with his crazy wife.
We sit at the table. He drinks, eats his chocolate mint stick.
Minutes click by. I watch his lips as he eats, thinking of the times they kissed me gently. I study his fingers, chocolate at the tips, and remember how easily his touch could make me burn with desire.
“Did you ever really love me?” I ask.
Such a cliché. I don’t want to be that woman, asking that question. But of all the things I want to know, this is perhaps the most important.
“Of course I love you. What’s going on, Teresa?”
I watch his eyes for a hint of deceit. A futile act. How would I know? I clearly have no idea when this man is lying to me.
We sit in silence.
His left eye twitches. He rubs his hands over his face. “You’re freaking me out here.”
“It’s been that kind of day.”
“Care to tell me what this is about?”
“I know.”
“You know what?”
“I know you killed those girls.”
I see a brief flash of fear on his face before he catches himself. “What girls? What are you talking about?”
“I found the red ribbon in the back of your sock drawer.”
He stares at me. His eyes narrow, but he doesn’t speak.
“And the condoms. Because you rape them first. And you’re smart enough not to leave DNA.”
He flinches. His left eye continues to twitch. “You’re bat-shit crazy.”
“And you’re a psychopath. It appears neither of us is who the other thought.”
Johnny looks at me and I see the transformation. I am yet another female out to ruin his life. He wants to kill me.
He pushes out of his chair, the legs scratching loud against the tile. His movements are jerky. Confusion passes over his face, his lips form a thin line, his eye twitches.
Suddenly he collapses to the floor, his body jerking and twisting in convulsive spasms. Foam leaks from his mouth. He stares at me, his eyes begging. Then betrayal. Recognition. Defeat. Finally, vacant eyes stare back at me.
The Internet is a wealth of information. Killing someone with poison is easier than I expected. Death by chocolate isn’t all that hard to accomplish, after all.
I step into my office and lift the page from the printer. Johnny’s confession. His suicide note. I place it on the kitchen table, beside his empty vodka glass. Then I grab my purse and head out the door. I’m meeting friends for dinner and a movie. Johnny told me he had to work late and couldn’t come. I’ll find him when I get home. The shock I’ll need to express won’t be all that hard, either, because I still don’t quite believe this happened.
Chocolate mint sticks.
Red bows.
A serial killer husband.
I look at him there on the floor, and I can’t help but see the teenage boy I fell in love with. A stranger now. Or maybe he always was.
Shades of Gray
Purple dripped from his lower lip. The remainder of the grape Popsicle melted into a puddle beside his face, forming a rivulet straight to his left eye. I wondered what would happen to the blue of his iris. Would the liquid purple Popsicle be like adding food coloring to your Visine or wearing colored contacts?
“Did you see him fall?” the young cop asked me.
“No.” And I hadn't. Not really. I’d seen the tall redheaded woman, eyes crazy with rage, charge at him with the frying pan. Not the old-fashioned cast iron kind that would have cracked his skull like an eggshell. This was the lighter, Teflon type. She’d screamed about him messing with her sister as she’d swung the pan at his forehead. The blow hadn’t been enough to kill him, though it did nearly knock him unconscious. He’d stumbled backward, caught the back edge of his sandal in a rut in the pavement. I’d watched him lose his footing, but I’d stopped watching after that. She’d interested me more. Her expression in that instant he’d gone down—part horror and part pleasure. I could relate.
“Did you see her hit him with the pan?” the cop asked.
I glanced at the redhead. She sat on the dirty stoop, hugging herself. She’d been clutching the frying pan until a different cop took it away. Her eyes were glazed and swollen with tears. Too late to take it back.
The cop shifted his weight and impatience rolled off him. I could smell his arrogance, bottled and sprayed on each morning for effect.
“No,” I said.
He stared at me, wanting to test the lie. I looked straight into his rusty brown eyes. Tiny yellow spots circled his pupils.
Why had I lied? I didn’t know the woman, with her silky red hair and spattering of freckles on her nose. I didn’t know the man either, now sprawled on the ground with Popsicle juice leaking from his mouth.
He’d been too dazed to react in time. He’d gone down hard, nothing to break his fall but the unrelenting pavement. I’d heard the crack of his head splitting open. Blood seeped and spread, forming its own rivulet. The two colors—red and purple—didn’t mix. The sidewalk tilted toward the street, a slight downward slope. He rested on his left cheek, looking away from the quiet street, and the purple pooled in his left eye. Closer to the street, the blood became a red stream carrying what used to be a life into the gutter.
A neighbor came out to grab her mail and saw him land. She’d called the cops. I didn’t know why I stayed. Something about the red and purple and the redhead with pale skin crumbling on the dark pavement beside it all. My world had a gray overcast. D
ifferent levels of darkness. Shadows. Never light. Never color. The red and purple glistened in the sunlight. I remembered coloring books and a big box of Crayola crayons, back when I took color for granted.
The EMTs couldn’t help the man whose life rolled down the street toward the stop sign. A gutter stained red and no rain in sight.
“Did you see anything at all?” the cop asked.
I dragged my eyes back to his face. The tops of his ears stuck out from his head, but the earlobes didn’t. Like they’d been stuck there with safety pins or his ears had been partially stapled to his head.
I wanted to tell him all the things I’d seen. Not today, here, with this redheaded woman and the Popsicle man. All the things that led up to this moment when red and purple leaked into the shadows and brought color back to my world.
I shook my head and said, “No.”
What had I seen, really? Anger and sadness, boldness and fear. A slice of two lives colliding in honesty and lies. The truth of it was that maybe I’d seen none of that. Maybe I’d only seen the charade those two lives had become.
The cop told me to stay put and I caught his eyes rolling as he turned away. I shuffled my feet on the sidewalk. The scorched pavement bled through the worn soles of my battered sneakers. I’d done nothing wrong. Not in this space, at this time. Yet I allowed the sun to draw moisture from my skin as I stood waiting.
Four cops huddled together by one of their cars. Blue lights jabbed the air. No sirens. The urgency was gone. A female cop showed up, joined the huddle. Her eyes landed on me, then the chubby woman fanning herself with her mail. My throat was dry. I shifted my weight again, wished for a grape Popsicle of my own.
The female cop broke from the huddle. The redhead moaned as the cop pulled her to her feet. A quick search and handcuffs. Then a tug on the arm from the cop, leading the redhead to the waiting car. Back door open, redhead stuffed inside. The redhead didn’t exist anymore. She’d checked out when the blood began to flow.
The young cop returned, asked me again if I had seen anything. Even the slightest detail could be important. I told him no. He frowned. His lower lip had a split in the middle, chapped and dry. He held a small spiral notebook in his left hand, a Bic pen in his right. He asked my name.
“Stuart,” I replied. “Stuart Hammel.”
He wrote that down. “Can I see some ID?”
“I don't have my ID with me.”
“Why would you be out without identification?”
“Why would I expect to need it?” I countered. “It’s a beautiful day. I came out for a walk.” I gestured to the gym shorts I wore, the baggy cotton ones with an elastic waist. “No place for a wallet.”
He frowned at me. “Address?”
His voice held an edge of exasperation, as if I’d been the one to make his day difficult. All this, the red and purple of his day, became more complicated because of me. I didn’t hesitate at his question. “Thirteen-forty-one Lyndon Drive.”
The place was a rooming house two blocks north. Recovering alcoholics and the unlucky lived in the tiny rooms in the old building. The cop looked irritated by my address. “Phone,” he said. The pen perched in his right hand, waiting.
“I don’t have one,” I said.
He looked at me with that frown again. “Is there a number where we can reach you?”
“No,” I said. “Though I’m not sure why you’d need to.”
“We might have follow-up questions.”
“I didn’t see anything.”
“So you’ve said. Wait here.”
The cop left me to confer with his comrades. A few moments later, he returned and told me that I could go. I crossed the street, since there was no other way to pass the dead Popsicle man and the red and purple mess. At the corner, I turned left, heading north. I passed Lyndon Drive, passed the rooming house where I’d claimed to live. I walked another two blocks, found a quiet side street and worked my way backward.
Twenty minutes took me into a nicer part of the city. Bigger homes. Lawns. No redheads with frying pans chasing their cheating boyfriends.
I trudged up the driveway, past the gleaming silver Mercedes. Not mine. The car belonged to my father, my landlord. My psychiatrist.
A set of stairs raised off the back deck, giving me a private entrance to my space above the garage. I had a bedroom and my own bathroom. The kitchen I shared with my family. My parents and two younger sisters lived in that space full of light and love. When I tried to join them, the light faded from all their eyes.
I hadn’t wanted to come back. This life no longer belonged to me. I’d been stamped unfit, discharged, dismissed. They’d taken the color from my world, from my soul, and returned a tired, gray version of who I’d been. My father had found me, plucked me off the streets and insisted I come home.
The color leaked from the house each time I stepped inside.
Safe in my room, I sat in the dust-colored recliner. Beige walls. Gray carpet. My mother had wanted to liven up the room, but I’d insisted on this décor. I couldn’t stand to see the color in the room disappear.
I closed my eyes and let the tears come. They didn’t cleanse. Not these tears. Each one took a piece of my soul. Soon I’d be nothing but a shell. Maybe then I’d fade away with the color.
Today, the blood and Popsicle had briefly revived the color in my world. Red and purple in a gray world. Murder in an otherwise empty existence. The redheaded woman reminded me of the passion I’d felt, the innocence I’d lost.
My life was not supposed to be like this. Then again, whose life ever turned out as planned?
I’d been studying history and had plans to teach at a university while I did research for the book I’d intended to write. I’d long been fascinated by the Native American tribes that thrived in North America before we Europeans took over. My book would be about them, a tribute to them. Maybe an apology.
Then 9-11 happened and, like countless others, I’d ridden the wave of patriotism straight into the army. I was taught to shoot. To kill. And I did, though mostly from a distance and the faces became nothing more than a blur behind the splash of red. Our enemies were targets, not humans. Each kill was a celebration. We were protecting America. Heroes, all of us.
I’d been taught how to erase a life with the pull of a trigger.
What I had not been taught was how to stop being human.
The day I don’t talk about was the last day I picked up a gun. I’d followed orders, gone into the building. Shoot to kill, I’d been told. And I did. The boy’s face wasn't a blur. I saw him as clearly now as I did then. I saw him when I walked the streets, when I closed my eyes. He never left me. His eyes wide with horror. The screams of his mother. The hole I created in his chest. Eight years old and guilty only of being born in a country we’d decided to invade.
Crimson red splattered walls and floors that day. An explosion of color with screams that battered against the sound of gunfire.
Then nothing.
The color left my world that day, replaced by shades of gray.
Free Fall
I feel myself withering, drying up, crackling. I’m losing touch, in a free fall away from the world. If gravity can’t hold me, I know nothing can. Still, I cling to the hope that something will pull me back.
I can’t help but reflect on the time in my youth when bright, luminous color surrounded me. Colors so bright I could almost taste them. My life was spring in bloom, yellow daffodils and red carnations. I danced on grass so green and soft that my toes giggled with delight. Now the colors have all left me and my spirit cries out in their absence.
My life sped through summer and landed me in autumn. Here, where the dry air sucks away every drop of moisture, my skin threatens to split apart like desert sand. My life is now a carpet of sepia-stained grass in a sienna forest. I taste the brittleness of age and nothing of those colors of my youth.
The once faint lines on my face turned to deep grooves years ago. I no longer recognize my reflecti
on in the mirror. This thing called old age leaves me grasping for the last of my dignity.
Please do not mistake my words as a plea for sympathy. I deserve no such thing, nor do I expect such emotion from strangers. My life is what I made of it. I gambled with my days and was fully aware that I would not always win. But I never expected to lose my sanity along the way.
The barren tree branches above me sway to a beat only they can hear. I want to dance with them, sing the songs of youth and luster. Instead, I lie here on a bed of leaves, my head propped upon a rotting tree trunk, my ears straining to hear the tune blowing on the breeze.
A mistake brought me to this place. Defiance, if I’m being honest, which I should be at this point. Might be the first time in my life I’ve told the complete truth, and I should do so at least one time if only to know how it feels.
I’ve lived a selfish life. I suppose that’s where my story begins and ends. Selfishness, maybe outright narcissism, defines me. What’s in it for me? I would say. You see, you’re already feeling less sympathetic and you barely know anything about me. Selfishness is such an ugly word, carrying with it a stigma of the pig-faced man hoarding possessions. I am not pig-faced and my selfishness has never been about things. I am selfish with my time, my thoughts, my very being. I do not want to give you even the tiniest piece of myself, because then I will never be whole again.
Maybe that’s also why I don’t like to tell the truth. It feels like I’m giving away my essence.
Despite my me-centered attitude, I truly enjoy people. I’ve danced with a princess and hiked with a government assassin. A true psychopath, he was. But that’s not the story I’m telling today. I get off track so easily these days. Age does that to a person. The mind doesn’t hold onto thoughts the way it used to. Then again, I was doing all right until a few days ago, when this thing I’m getting around to telling happened. I used to think I’d die of old age. Now I’m convinced I will die of crazy.
