Innocent Monsters (4 page)

Jessica shook her head. “I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I’m losing track of time... The police are investigating her death.”

“Who’s death? Kaitlyn’s? Why?”

“They think she didn’t kill herself. Someone else slashed her wrists. They think she was murdered, Lisa. She didn’t want to die. Someone she knew, they think.”

Lisa was stunned, lost for words, her big green eyes huge on her pale round face. “No, there must be a mistake... Who would do anything like this? Everybody liked her... Right?”

“I know. I know. It’s crazy. And you know what else is crazy? It’s made me feel better. I feel better about my own sister being murdered because it means she didn’t kill herself. How insane does that sound?”

She felt sick just uttering the words out loud, but Kaitlyn was happy, just as she though she was; Kaitlyn had not chosen to end her life. It had to be a glimmer of light at the end of this long dark tunnel.

Lisa was shaking her head, looking down at the dirty plate by her arm with tears welling up in her eyes, trying to process the information she had just been given. It was like watching someone struggling to understand a foreign language, with the irritation and confusion that comes with it and it made Jessica feel momentarily selfish and cruel. But that same information had been too much to bear on her own and around seven o’ clock that morning telling someone else seemed like the only sane thing to do.

“I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you,” she whispered. “But I keep thinking about her being lonely and scared. I need someone else to go through this with me. I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be. I think... I know I should feel relieved, just like you said. It’s just...”

Lisa stood up sniffling without saying another word and walked to the small window above the sink. She poured some water in the coffee maker and stood there for a few minutes staring outside in silence, gripping the edge of the sink firmly with both hands. When the water started boiling she let go and sat back down, arms crossed resting on the table, a slice of bread under her elbow.

“Y’know what? What difference does it really make? Nothing is gonna make any difference anymore. She’s gone. She ain’t comin’ back. However it happened, she’s gone, Jessy. I don’t know what you’re gonna do, but I just want to forget about this whole nightmare and move on.”

Irritation squeezed Jessica like a fist. Lisa had managed to chew up a distressing piece of information and spit it out in one single word: DEAD. What difference did it make how if the end result was the same? Simple. And of course she was right, Kaitlyn was gone, but Jessica couldn’t let her go as easily as that and Lisa’s simplistic approach to the whole situation, to life in general, annoyed her, forced her again to wonder about their friendship and its foundations, made her wish again there could have been someone else to turn to, another door to knock on. But there wasn’t anyone.

“How about some coffee?” Lisa proposed.

Simple. Coffee, the solution to every problem. So easy. “If you like.”

Lisa cleared the table piling everything in the sink; she poured two cups of coffee than sat back at the table with a packet of cigarettes ready next to the mug, and once the cup was emptied she had one. Always a cigarette after a cup of coffee.

It was almost ten when Bobby emerged from the bedroom. Jessica saw him heading for the bathroom, coming out then heading for the kitchen, his skin pale, a smudge of toothpaste by the side of his thin lips, his clear blue watery eyes still puffy under the bushy eyebrows, his long mullet already tied in a ponytail, like every respectable low- class loser. She could have punched him.

“Mornin’. Look who’s here! Any coffee ready?”

Lisa shot out of her chair. “I’ll get you a cup.”

Bobby sat himself in front of Jessica as soon as Lisa stood up, one elbow on the back of the chair, one arm stretched out on the table, the fingertips of his right hand drumming on a stain of Coke, his nails badly bitten.

“When’d ya get here then?”

“Around eight, I think.”

“
Eight?
Glad I didn’t hear you knockin’. What did ya’ have? Four hours sleep, Liz?”

Lisa nodded by the sink pouring hot coffee in his cup. Behind her the sky was now a pale blue, weak sun rays came through the window tracing her nose, her pouting lips as she concentrated in dissolving the sugar granules in the mug. She looked like a little girl, pure, malleable. It reminded Jessica of her own mother, of all the times she had seen her prepare the man she had married something to eat or drink. It reminded her of all the breakfasts she had eaten at the kitchen table looking at the bruises on Margaret Lynch’s face, all the times her mother had been standing listlessly by the window, where the purple of the blood under her skin disappeared because the light of the morning sun shining behind her made her whole face look darker.

“Jessica needed to get some things off her chest,” Lisa said bringing the coffee to the table.

“I’m sure Bobby doesn’t want to hear about it.” She didn’t want him to be involved; he had made his indifference very evident during the days before the funeral.

“That’s right. And I’ve had enough lookin’ at my princess here crying. She’s been in a state, y’know that?”

Bobby grabbed the mug without a thank you, lifted his ass from the chair and shuffled into the next room to reposition himself on the sofa in front of the impossibly large television. As he switched it on, George W. Bush’s face was on the screen, a big grin on his lips.

“Jessy, you wanna stay for lunch? ...Bobby?” Lisa shouted at him, “what do you think? Meatballs for lunch?”

His voice came loud from the room next door. “This guy is gotta win the election. Al Gore my ass, that’s what I say. Ya think some environmentalist faggot is gonna win our wars? I say, send him back where he came from! We need someone with balls running the country!”

The two women looked at each other, for a second able to share the same embarrassment then Lisa moved her eyes away, breaking off the fleeting conspiracy out of respect for her husband.

“Meatballs, then?” She asked.

Meatballs?
Kaitlyn was dead and there was an idiot sitting on the sofa next door, a clown Lisa had decided to marry and the question coming out of her mouth was
Meatballs?
Would shout help her friend see how ridiculous this was? How long would they have to go on pretending anyone might be in the mood for lunch when they both knew Jessica couldn’t bear to spend anytime at all with the man sitting on the sofa next door?

Jessica still clearly remembered Lisa’s wedding day, a small affair at the City Hall. She remembered Lisa’s parents, proud and well dressed, whispering at each other politely, her relatives and friends looking around the place, commenting and complimenting the architecture endlessly while waiting for the ceremony to start. She remembered Bobby’s father, an older version of his son, the two of them practically a carbon copy of each other twenty-odd years apart; both sporting a cheap suit, a mullet and a greasy ponytail. She could still hear the old man bellowing at everyone that San Francisco’s City Hall was featured at the end of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, had anyone seen the movie? It was after the fourth of fifth time Jessica had heard the words
pod people
and
snatchers
that Kaitlyn had grabbed her by the arm, pulled her behind one of the large marble pillars surrounding the main room and asked through gritted teeth, “Why are we letting her do this? Lisa is our friend, not some stranger throwing her life away”. Yes, it was ridiculously bad timing, but something had to be done, they had to try and make her understand that Bobby wasn’t exactly the best she could have done for herself. For Chirst’s sake,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers?
At a wedding? Was this the kind of DNA her future husband carried? As her closest friends, surely they had an obligation to inform her of what everyone else was thinking. It was only then that Lisa had confessed being pregnant. They loved each other and they were going to have a family whether everybody else approved of it or not.

At the time Bobby was just an ignorant truck driver; there was something not quite right about him but it was hard to know what it was exactly Jessica despised so much. But then Lisa miscarried and Bobby went from being arrogant and commanding to selfish and almost abusive and suddenly the two of them were such a good caricature of her own parents, Jessica found it harder and harder to spend any time with her while Bobby was around.

“No, thanks Liz.” Jessica looked at the floor feeling guilty, searching her mind for an excuse, anything that could save her from saying out loud that she couldn’t stay for lunch because the man Lisa had chosen to spend the rest of her life with was an asshole, because she couldn’t seat and eat meatballs pretending she had not come to tell her Kaitlyn had been murdered. “I’m tired, I think I’ll go home, try to catch up on some sleep.”

They had another cup of coffee, Lisa had another cigarette, Bobby remained on the sofa watching the Simpsons, then Jessica stood up to leave.

“Thanks for listening. Again, sorry”

“Don’t mention it. And it’s ok. Come anytime you like.” They left the room together while Bobby sucked some more coffee out of his cup. “I’ll call you.”

“I’ll try to answer the phone. Promise.”

They smiled at each other. Lisa caressed her back as she went for the door.

“Take care, ok? Whatever happened... I’m sure Kaitlyn wants us to go on as if she’s still here, y’know? I’d want that. I’d want my friends to keep doing all the things I can’t do anymore.” Her hand was still stroking Jessica’s back, melted mascara under her eyes, her hair all over the place. She smelled of lavender. “Now go home and sleep, you look like shit.”

“So do you. Thanks for everything.”

JESSICA THREW her jacket down in the hall, went upstairs and ran past the bathroom door heading for her bedroom. The yellow police-line strip still hung along each side of the doorframe. She had cut it open but hadn’t been able to force herself in. It had been almost three weeks.

She had not washed properly; she had bought a new toothbrush, which was now kept in the kitchen with the washing up sponge, toothpaste and washing up liquid sitting side by side by the tap. She had started peeing in the tiny sink in the closet- sized laundry room downstairs and every time she needed to take a shit, she went to get a coffee at Rico’s, down the road, just so she could use his toilet. So far it had proved an acceptable arrangement.

This was how compromised her world had become.

Her bedroom was cold. She had left the window open all night to change the air. The wind blew the white curtains in, then sucked them out, then blew them back in again.

She sat on the bed facing one of Kaitlyn’s paintings, a picture of a butterfly entirely painted in whites, creams, beige and light browns. White against white, yet so many details and so poignant —an insect with such a short life cycle painted by someone who had died so young. Jessica had found it in Kaitlyn’s room while looking through her things the day after meeting Brown at the police station; she had sieved through her pictures, her filofax, every single scrap of paper, but nothing stood out, nothing seemed suspicious. Brown had thanked her anyway, asked her to bring the filofax to the station.

Jessica lifted her chin to the ceiling, looking at the cracks branching from a corner to the middle of the wall, around the wire of the light bulb, thin and thick and curvy like roads sneaking through large green mould patches; dark green, almost brown in places. She had mentioned the ridiculous conditions of her ceiling almost every month since the mould had first appeared but her landlord had never done anything about it and she had never really cared enough to make a big fuss over it. It had become a monthly complaint to accompany her rent, nothing more than a habit, a ritual. It had looked the same for the past three years, only maybe slightly darker. So looking up Jessica had to ask herself why it seemed to annoy her today, of all days. What was different? Was it her own sense of helplessness and the resentment that came with it that really bothered her? Was it the knowledge that she couldn’t change anything?

Truth was, there were some things she could change if she really wanted to. The mouldering ceiling, the stupid landlord who ignored it, the bathroom she couldn’t enter anymore, the forgotten district where she still lived, where houses all looked the same; rows after rows of squared boxes, far enough from the real San Francisco to feel she lived somewhere else... She could change all of it if she really wanted to... Move somewhere else, another apartment, another place... A change.

Something Kaitlyn couldn’t do anymore.

And suddenly what Lisa had told her so ingenuously made perfect sense: she could do all the things Kaitlyn couldn’t do anymore, like moving downtown, not because she liked it, not because there was so much more there to discover than Crocker Amazon could ever offer her, but because Kaitlyn wanted to, because she owned a share of the art gallery in Port Street, because she was going to start looking for a place in that area next month. Because maybe if she left, the memory of Kaitlyn’s shocked expression and the vivid image of her blood would stay in this damn house.

She laid down on the bed still looking up at the ceiling for a few minutes, following the cracks, following the light bulb and its delicate swinging, back, forth... back... forth... and slowly her eyelids became so heavy she couldn’t keep them open anymore; the green mould turned into a green field and the cracks turned into blue rivers and Jessica could almost smell flowers in her room while slowly falling asleep.

Then she could see Kaitlyn again, sitting in the bath in that strange position, pleading for her not to tell mother, “You believe me, don’t you? It wasn’t me.”

When Jessica woke up gasping, lifting her back off the mattress, the room was already dark, only half lit by the red light of the sunset. She held her head in her hand, still tired, listening to the traffic outside her window.