In the Blood (26 page)

Our son seemed to calm under my husband’s firm guidance. If our boy was fire, my husband was cold water. With my husband, tantrums and breakdowns didn’t escalate the way they did with me. I would lie on the bed in my room and listen to the high-pitched sound of my son’s voice, the low, easy rumble of my husband’s, and then silence or even—imagine—laughter.

The night before he left for school was the hardest. I lay beside my son on his bed while he begged me not to send him away.

“I’ll be good, Mom,” he said. “Don’t send me to that place.”

And everything inside me hurt, but I held my ground.

“It will be fine,” I said. Even though I wasn’t sure I believed this. “And it’s not forever. We’ll all learn how to do better together. And then you’ll come home. Anyway, it’s just four nights away.”

He sobbed. And after he finally fell asleep, so did I. In the morning, my husband took him. My son didn’t even look at me. He wouldn’t even say good-bye. I told myself that this was the first step toward normal.

And something happened while he was away that week. I expanded. I stretched out and became myself again. I didn’t spend my whole day dreading the call from his school, or bracing myself for breakdowns over homework or what was for dinner. I didn’t worry about his nightmares, or his visions, or his lies, or
who he might hurt. For the first time he was in a place where they were actually equipped to handle all of it. And toward the middle of the week, over pizza and a bottle of wine, I fell in love with my husband again.

We’re hiding it from our son, this love affair we’re having, this newfound happiness. The weekends are still hard, and Sunday the worst of all. He hates the new school, of course, but we’re already seeing changes. And we’re learning that it is okay for him to be unhappy and to deal with it. He’ll need to change his behavior to be happier, and that’s something we haven’t taught him. Because when he’s been unhappy, I’ve tried to change the world to make him happier. I never asked him to be accountable for his own happiness. And for someone like my son, who has emotional challenges, this failure on my part has had some terrible consequences. Another child might have just been whiny, or spoiled or entitled. Our boy is filled with rage when things don’t go his way.

We feel that it would set him back if he knew how really happy we were while he was away at school. I know; that’s another bad mother badge for me. But you don’t understand; you can’t. Normal children demand all of you, night and day. They want and deserve to have you all to themselves, some of the time at least. But troubled children want all of you and then more and more. They want things inside of you that you didn’t even know were there. They mine the depths of you, pillage every resource and then still it’s not enough. I have been filling myself up again—spending time with my husband, working out, reading, seeing films. I’ve applied for a job at the local bookstore café, just something to reconnect me to the world, to my love of
literature. When our boy comes home on the weekends, I’m a better mother, a better person. I am fresh to the fight on Friday afternoon.

Since the first time I’ve started visiting with you, diary, I feel strong. I am in love again. I am hopeful for my son and for our family. I am almost afraid to say it. But I really believe, in my deepest heart, that everything is going to be all right.

Once I pushed a little boy off the jungle gym at school. I won’t forget the look on his face as he fell. The wide surprise in his eyes, the O of his mouth as he felt himself tilt off the metal surface and gravity took him down hard. He landed on his arm funny and it broke, twisted at an unnatural angle beneath him. There was a snap, an ugly sound that caused me to cringe inside. And then a loud wail of pain and fear. A swarm of adults flew from their playground posts. I stood above him, looking down. Much was made of my “flat affect” in that moment, my total lack of remorse.

It was one of several times I was removed quickly from a school and installed in another. People looked at me strangely. The teacher, who had been so warm, was suddenly stiff and cool.

“He fell,” I remember lying.

“No,” said the teacher, who had been on the playground. “I saw you push him. Why did you do it?”

“He made fun of me,” I managed.

But I was young, unable to articulate my feelings. The fact was that this boy had been quietly and surreptitiously torturing me since the first day of school. I was small for my age. I had a very high
IQ, was separated out for gifted programs. And this overdeveloped mouth-breather, for whatever reason, had it in for me. He pulled my hair, stole my pencil box, hid my show-and-tell. I dreaded him, dreamed about him, lay awake at night worrying about what he’d do the next day. I didn’t tell anyone about him. Because I was such a chronic liar, no one ever really believed the things I said. As a child, I had what I can only describe as daydreams. I saw people who weren’t there, imagined conversations with them. I thought they were ghosts sometimes. I heard voices in my head that told me to do strange things, like wash my hands fifteen times, or avoid a certain food all day, otherwise my mother would die. It was part dream, part imagination, part lie. It’s impossible to explain. Anyway, that’s why no one ever believed me anymore.

My fear and rage toward this boy was a throbbing, swelling thing that lived inside me. That afternoon, he’d eaten my sandwich. So I was hungry, as well as miserable. When he came up behind me on the jungle gym and whispered in my ear that I was too small for third grade, that I should stay with the babies in preschool, the thing, the white-hot rage that was always simmering, expanded and exploded from me. I jumped up and spun around and used all my strength to knock him back.

The truth was, I didn’t think he’d fall. I was pushing him
away,
not too concerned with where he’d
go
. It was true that I did not feel remorse that day, though I do now. What I felt more than anything was relief. He’d stay away from me now. They always do, you know, when you really hurt them. The bullies always stay away then; they’re cowards at heart.

And curiosity was the other big thing I felt. I was deep in wondering about that snap, and the broken bone, and how would they fix it, and how bad would it hurt. And what would the body do
inside to knit that broken thing back together. And I couldn’t stop thinking about that; I was totally focused inside on those questions, coming up with theories and wondering who I could ask or what I could read that would give me all the information I wanted. So that’s why I seemed flat, though somewhere deep inside, I
was
upset. It was just buried deep under layers and layers of manic thoughts and strange voices.

Dr. Cooper and I have talked this through. I understand who I was then better now that I’m older. There was a little bit of OCD, a little bit of my being too intellectually smart while emotionally underdeveloped. There was my hormonal imbalance, which has corrected itself mostly since puberty. There are other theories, too, about what might be wrong with me. But that’s the thing about mental illness; there’s no such thing as a cookie-cutter diagnosis. We’re all crazy in our own special way. Some of us just have it worse than others.

Langdon and I were trekking through the cold, haunted woods. He was grumbling and complaining, tripping every few feet.

“I’m not really the outdoor type,” he said.

“No kidding.”

Prior to our activities over the last few days, I don’t recall ever seeing Langdon out of doors. He was a man who seemed designed to dwell only in a library or classroom, possibly in a bookstore café, sipping some type of warm, herbal beverage from a travel mug. Not that I was throwing any stones; my feet were growing numb and that heavy fatigue that had settled over me felt like a weight on my back.

We came to the clearing and I saw the decrepit old barn sagging in the moonlight. It looked like it was built from cards, might crumble onto itself with a good wind. A shiver of dread moved
through me. I froze at the edge of the trees and found I couldn’t go farther.

“He brought her out to a place like this and buried her body.”

Langdon stood beside me. He seemed to intuit that I was talking about my life, not about the life that had ended here.

“I watched him do it,” I went on.

I could see my father digging and digging while I sat shaking and crying. I kept watching the rug, willing it to move. Maybe she was still alive. But no, her skull was shattered. The shape of it; I’ll never forget that or all the blood. “I watched him bury her.”

He dropped an arm around me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through.”

“Luke knows about me,” I said. “He must. A body buried in the woods? But how did he find out?”

It was a half admission. I didn’t tell him about the call, or how Luke was taunting me, what he had said. If I told him that, I’d have to tell him everything, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell him what happened between Beck and me, and how Luke seemed to have some knowledge of that. There were so many layers to my lies, so many moving parts to my problems. I was becoming tangled in the fishing line of my deceptions.

“So that’s what this is about,” he said. “That’s why you’re so hooked into this game.”

I folded my arms around myself, gave a single nod of my head. It was obvious, wasn’t it? Only an instinct for self-preservation would have me this desperate to follow his clues.

“Who else knows about your past?”

“You,” I said. “Beck.” But of course neither of them knew everything. “Dr. Cooper.”

There was no connection between the three of them, no place
for them to intersect and exchange information about me. Not that either Beck or Dr. Cooper would share anything about me with some strange kid even if the opportunity arose. I said as much. Neither of us made a move toward the clearing or the barn. It was spooky, even for me, who prided myself on not fearing anything.

“And what about the first clue?” asked Langdon. “I thought you said it didn’t have any meaning to you.”

“My father tried to kill himself in prison,” I said. “But, unfortunately, he didn’t succeed.”

I felt Langdon’s eyes on me. It was kind of a callous thing to say, and I could feel him analyzing my words, my demeanor, like any good shrink would. But there you have it. I wished my father were dead. He deserved to be dead. Not her; my mother should have been alive and none of this shit should have been happening. I couldn’t wait until they pumped his body full of poison. He’d turned my life into a horror movie, and now he wanted closure. Fuck him.

“So you think Luke knows that?”

“Apparently.”

“There was nothing else about that clue that resonated with you?”

I could feel him pressing at me. He didn’t buy that it was just about the suicide. And that’s because it wasn’t.

“No,” I said. “Nothing.”

Again, the silence of his analysis. I turned to look at him and his face was paler than usual in the moonlight. I heard an owl calling, and something rustling in the leaves caused us both to start. A black cat hurried from the brush and crossed our path. Perfect. As if my luck wasn’t bad enough.

“You’ve forgotten the other possibility,” said Langdon. “That this is about Luke and not about you at all.”

But I didn’t think it was, not after the telephone conversation we’d just had. The moon moved from behind the clouds and the clearing was washed in a silvery-blue light. I moved toward the barn, and after a moment Langdon followed. He reached out for my arm.

“Maybe this is a bad idea,” he said. “We should just go.”

I shook him off and kept walking. Aunt Bridgette and Dr. Cooper were always going on about how hiding from who I was and what had happened to me was just a temporary fix.
At some point, you’re going to have to face it,
said my aunt.
You’re going to have to own it. Until then, it owns you.

My aunt, my mother, and my grandmother had all moved and changed their names after my grandfather was convicted of the crimes he had committed. My aunt said that she used to lie awake at night, imagining what would happen if anyone discovered that she was the daughter of a murderer. Now she has a blog where she bares it all. It’s embarrassing and painful to read, but she’s received some positive attention for it. And she’s established a foundation to help the families of convicted murders. I think that’s why she’s so hell-bent on “helping” me.
You should write about your experiences, put them on paper. There’s power in claiming and narrating your life.
But I don’t want to see those words on the page. My story is more complicated than Bridgette’s. And I can’t just cast my mother and myself as victims and my father as the villain. It’s so much more complicated than that. We are all complicit in our own disasters, aren’t we?

But there was something inexplicable about Luke, about his trail of bread crumbs leading me into the forest—the pull was inexorable. Maybe it was time. Everything was rising up, and it was time to face it or be swallowed by it.

There was a hole in the ground, cordoned off by wooden posts and a frayed piece of crime-scene tape: Marla Holt’s grave. A door-size
piece of wood had been laid over the opening, but it had clearly been moved aside a number of times. From where I stood at the edge, I could see beer cans and cigarette butts accumulating at the bottom. People had no respect for anything, it seemed. A woman had died here, been murdered and buried. And yet some people still apparently considered it a cool place to party.

I kept walking toward the barn.

“Seriously,” Langdon called. He was lingering at the edge of the grave. “That doesn’t look safe. Don’t go in there.”

But I kept moving and he didn’t come after me. He seemed frightened now. I always knew he was kind of a wimp; I didn’t hold it against him. I assumed he’d come in after me if he needed to, but there was no reason to act the hero until it was necessary. He was nothing if not completely rational.

I stood in the doorway and heard a whistling where the light wind outside was finding its way in through the cracks and gaps in the rotting wood. There was graffiti on the wall, the usual unimaginative scrawls:
and
(really?) and
Liquor bottles, cigar and cigarette butts carpeted the dirt floor, a filthy, careless confetti. There was a little pit where someone had stupidly built a fire. I saw used rubbers, and a composition notebook covered in something red and gooey, magazines faded and swollen with moisture. The whole place was a testament to how badly people sucked, how stupid and boring they were, how totally base. Places of neglect always made me hate the world, how no one takes care of anything, or worries about the consequences of their actions. Beck would have understood that. I could have told her that and she would have nodded her head, and said,
Fucking losers
. But she had abandoned me, just like everyone else.