Dear Killer (11 page)

Chapter 13

T
hey canceled school for the rest of the week. I imagine it was a PR nightmare for Ivy High School. Well, it wasn’t my problem.

Of course, my mom was furious that I had broken our code of conduct and risked incriminating myself. Not just slightly angry, but all-out furious. Throwing-things-around-the-house furious. But in a strange way, her anger was pathetic—it was the anger of a small child throwing a tantrum. She was angry for a reason that neither she nor I could quite pin down. It was Michael’s murder, yes. But it also, I think, was created by something more.

It was not the dangerous anger she had felt when I had just punched Michael. It was more childish, more frightened than that.

It wasn’t, however, any less fear inducing.

She broke three vases and a small ceramic dog figurine from the living room fireplace’s mantelpiece that reminded me of the stone dog I had seen outside Alex’s police station. The mood lasted all week, and there was no dealing with her at all.

“You’ve ruined everything,” she told me on Tuesday night as she ate dry cereal alone at the dinner table, glaring selfishly, desperately, up at me over the folded-up lid of the box, the shards of a teacup scattered around her feet. “You’ve ruined
everything
.”

The house was filled with odd bursts of cacophony and silence.

I didn’t dare leave the house until Wednesday, just for the sake of appearances. I decided it was best if I appeared weak and emotionally scarred by the whole ordeal. I wanted to leave desperately. I felt like I was sitting on pins for every moment I was at home. After much thought, on Wednesday I decided that I had waited a tasteful amount of time—and besides, Michael’s funeral was late that morning, and I figured that it might look good for me to go to that.

For a while I had been undecided about going, but after my mother started throwing things in earnest, I realized I needed to get out, if only for a little while; and the funeral would give me an excuse to respectably leave the house. I didn’t mind funerals much, anyway. They made other people sad, but for obvious reasons, death didn’t bother me much. I didn’t know how to mourn.

The service was in an old, small church with a thin steeple piercing high into a cloudy sky that swirled like milk poured into tea. When I got there, people were entering the church one by one, looking down. Some were whispering to one another. But strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, considering Michael, the overwhelming mood wasn’t somber. It was muddled, confused, and almost curious, as if none of the attendees could believe he was actually dead. Couldn’t believe someone with such angry conviction could just vanish so easily. It was a very strange mood for a funeral. As I arrived, a few men in stiff suits walked in a line through the wide church doors, looking up at the stained-glass windows as they entered.

I gathered a few glances as I stepped out of my cab. I didn’t own many black items of clothing, and I hadn’t dared to borrow anything from my mom with the mood she was in, so I had ended up wearing the black taffeta dress I had worn at a Christmas party two years ago, which made a lot of noise when I moved and was too formal for the occasion. And black always made me look pale and stern. But it was the best I could manage on short notice. Looking down, imitating the rest of the funeral-going crowd, I walked through the doors, adjusting clumsily to the relative darkness of the sanctuary, and took a seat in a pew in the back of the church as quietly as I could.

The seat was hard and the back was too short.

The church was beautiful inside, in a way, I mused, that only churches could be beautiful. The ceiling was the shape of an arching triangle overhead—arching, I imagined, as if it were moving away from me, with Gothic stone carvings crisscrossing it and spreading down the walls. Stained-glass windows sent light cascading in bright rays over the floor. Images of the burning bush and Noah’s ark and a few other biblical events I didn’t recognize stared down at me from those beautiful windows. Somehow, they made me itch, and made me want to apologize for something, I didn’t know what exactly. By the laws of the Anglican church, I was a pariah. I had so many things I could apologize for, by their rules. I didn’t really feel like I should, or even could, apologize for any of them.

Absently, I listened to the muffled sounds of people talking, catching a few whispered words every now and then.

“Can’t imagine . . .”

“I don’t . . .”

“His poor mother . . .”

“Insanity . . .”

Strangely enough, Michael’s body seemed to be of almost secondary importance.

He was laid out in a coffin on a table in the front of the church, surrounded by white roses and stuffed into a prissy black suit. I didn’t think that bodies were viewed all that often at funerals anymore, but I guess I must have been wrong, or perhaps someone had made an unusual decision while planning his. That seemed the most likely explanation. This whole thing seemed so unusual that a little bit more absurdity seemed only natural.

He still looked like a prat, even in death. That creeping, obnoxious smirk of his still seemed to play at his lips, and I could still see his fluffy hair bouncing stupidly as he walked. I couldn’t see his body clearly from this far away, but as I’d entered the church, I had caught a faraway glimpse of him. They’d cleaned him up. They’d wiped the blood away from his mouth and closed his lips so you couldn’t see the way he’d bitten nearly all the way through his tongue when I killed him.

I’d
killed
him.

I kept looking at the windows until someone came to the pulpit and began to speak.

“Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Do not let your heart be troubled. . . .’”

His voice echoed like a bell.

It was the pastor of the church, an old man with a wispy comb-over, who, to be honest, looked almost uncomfortable speaking to the crowd. I wondered how much of that was because he wasn’t a good public speaker and how much of it was because he had never liked Michael and essentially had to lie when he said all the things he was required to say—that Michael had a place in heaven, that he was now at peace. I, personally, didn’t think Michael even knew how to be at peace. The pastor’s dislike for Michael was at least half the reason for his hesitance—you could see it in the way he kept glancing at the coffin with that same muddled expression that so many of the people in attendance were wearing.

“. . . I am the way, and the truth, and the life . . .”

He was speaking about God. I was only halfway listening.

In the front row someone was crying.

It was a woman, and I wondered who it was for a while before realizing that it had to be his mother. He was an only child, and who else would cry for him, anyway? Slowly everything else faded away until all I could see were the high windows and all I could hear was the sound of her weeping softly. When she breathed in each time, she made a hiccuping noise, so it almost sounded like she was laughing.

I couldn’t see her from where I sat. I wondered what she looked like, this woman who was the mother of such a monster. Did she regret it, bringing such hatred into the world? Was she blind to it? Part of me wanted to look her in the eyes and just
ask
. I was so curious. Michael was dead—

Michael was dead.

Every time the thought occurred to me, it stopped me short. I suddenly remembered my mother’s screams as she picked the ceramic dog up in one elegant hand and thrust it at the far wall, just above the piano. . . .

The pastor had stopped speaking and had moved away from the pulpit, gazing entreatingly into the front pew. His eyes, set beneath sagging eyelids and thin eyelashes, were slightly nervous, anxious, uncertain. He nodded. Michael’s parents stood. I watched them with morbid interest.

His father was tall and slim, and had obviously given Michael his thin frame and self-assured bearing; but he wasn’t obnoxiously self-assured like his son, he was just proud, and seemed very old even though he couldn’t have been any older than fifty-five. He was in a dark-gray suit and had tired brown hair like a horse’s mane, wiry and wide. He was solemn. His wife was small in comparison to his height, with long hair and a smooth jawline and soft lips. Michael had his father’s body, but his face was nearly identical to his mother’s, though of course built on more masculine lines. It was eerie, the similarity.

Should I be thinking about Michael in the past tense now? I didn’t quite know. It occurred to me that maybe I should.

His parents ascended the steps, moving toward the pulpit. They would say a few words for their son. Michael’s mother was still hiccup-crying, her hiccups increasing in frequency and her hand shooting up to cover her mouth as she passed by the lifeless body of her only son. She was wearing a blue sheath dress that was too big for her, and she wasn’t wearing any eye makeup. Her husband murmured a few inaudible words in her ear and pushed her gently past the open coffin.

They reached the pulpit and turned to face the crowd. And almost immediately, Michael’s mother’s eyes lit on me.

I was frozen. She stared over the crowd and met my eyes exactly. She knew who I was. She might have looked for my face in one of his yearbooks when she had been told who found him dead, perhaps. However she knew my face, though, it was obvious that she did. She was still crying, and I could still hear her hiccuping, but everything else was silent. She wasn’t angry. She was just confused. Her face was lit up red from the colored light coming through the window.

I didn’t belong here. I couldn’t stay. I shot to my feet and looked down at the Bible held in a wooden pocket on the back of the pew in front of me, focusing on the swirling patterns in the old leather of the cover, and then, after mumbling some words of apology under my breath, I darted out of the pew into the aisle. I went to the heavy door. With some effort, I pushed it open and let myself out into the midday London sun. My taffeta skirt rustled far too loudly.

Or let myself out into the London half sun, rather, because the sky was cloudy and only half the sunlight made it through the clouds onto the street. I felt tired. There was an unlit streetlamp near me. I walked to it and wearily leaned against it, pressing my forehead to the metal, closing my eyes as the church door swung shut again.

I stayed there for a few minutes, just breathing in and breathing out.

Or, I suppose, it must have been longer than that. Longer than a few minutes. Because before I moved away, the doors to the church opened and people came streaming out, quiet, one by one. The service was over. I moved my head to watch them go, wrapping my arms around the lamppost. Some of them looked at me, but most of them didn’t. I felt as if I should leave entirely, but I couldn’t make my body listen to me.

Michael’s parents came out last, and as they came out, something jolted through me like electricity. He had his arm wrapped around her and she was looking down; but then he said something to her, something I couldn’t hear, and she looked up toward his face, and in the motion her eyes found me, the teenager by the lamppost. She let go of her husband gently and walked over to me where I stood. He looked reluctant to let her go but he did, and he lingered behind. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t make my legs move.

“Hello,” she said quietly, with a voice like butter.

“Hello,” I replied.

I kept seeing Michael in her face, and it disturbed me. I felt as if I were looking at him again, and that feeling brought me back into the moment of his death, and somehow, looking at her, I kept reliving it—I was killing Michael, again and again and again, in her deep brown eyes.

“You were the girl who found him,” she murmured, offering no explanation as to how she knew that.

“Yes, I was.”

“Why did you run out?”

I shuddered and sighed and looked down at my feet. What to say, what could I say?

“I thought you didn’t want me there,” I replied lamely.

“Why?” She sounded honestly surprised.

“You were staring. I thought you were angry.”

She laughed, and then cried for a few seconds, and shook her head. “No, I wasn’t angry. I was just surprised that you came.”

“My friend heard about it from someone, she told me when and where,” I explained, still trying to make excuses even though she wasn’t mad. I still felt out of place, out of line.

“I’m glad you came. Thank you for coming. Thank you. It’s good that you came.” She was looking up at the swirling somnolent sky now, distracted, halfway broken.

For a moment, I was so, so sorry, not for murder, but for this woman, this survivor, but then, of course, the moment passed.

“Um, you’re welcome.”

There was a pause. Then—

“What did he look like?”

“Excuse me?”

“Him. Michael. When you found him. What did he look like? And don’t lie to me, please, they’ve all been lying to me—” She glanced back at her husband furtively, like a child keeping a secret. “They keep saying he died peacefully, that there was no blood, but it’s murder, and that’s obviously a lie. They’re trying to please me. I want to know, really. Please. Please tell me.”

She reached out and grasped my left shoulder in one surprisingly strong hand, her fingers clenching around my skin and refusing to let go. I felt sorry for this woman. This poor strong woman who others assumed was so weak.

I looked at her and spoke in a quiet, quiet voice.

“His eyes were open,” I said. “And he had a bruise on his temple.”

She shuddered but she kept clutching, and I went on. I wasn’t done.

“There was blood coming out of his mouth, a lot of it.”

“Did he look like he died in pain?”

What could I tell her?

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“What do you
think
?”

She wanted to know. She wanted to know like her life depended on it. I felt the strange, irrational, unnatural urge to cry.

“I think it was painless,” I murmured, and after a moment, she let go.

“Good,” she whispered, and cried, “Good . . .”

I stared at my feet. She kept talking.