Dear Killer (7 page)

He stood and wiped the dust from the pavement off his uniform and walked on. I pushed my hair away from my face, and this time it stayed.

I kept following him toward Waterloo Bridge. I no longer felt sorry for following him. How could I? He didn’t deserve my pity. He didn’t need it. I stepped delicately over the back wheel of the bike, nudging by the girl in yellow with a few murmured words of apology.

I followed him all the way down to the river, and there I left him. I stood in the shade of bright green trees and looked at the boats bobbing along the water. I didn’t need to go any farther; I had seen enough. I would stop here. I stood at the edge of the bridge. The Thames was sparkling in the sun. It didn’t sparkle like that very often, because the sky was so often cloudy; I liked to see it like that. I sometimes forgot that London was beautiful. The glittering Thames always reminded me.

As Michael walked away down the bridge, I kept watching him. He was a retreating shape now, one pedestrian among many. It was funny how things like that worked. A human can carry worlds of emotion, but the farther away you get, the smaller they seem, no matter how big they are on the inside.

And then, unexpectedly, Michael turned around.

He was too far away to see my face, and I was standing behind enough people to obscure the fact that I was wearing his school’s uniform, but it still made me uneasy. It was a casual gesture. He wasn’t suspicious or anything. He was just turning around for the sake of it. But still it set me on edge, just like everything else about him. He was looking back, but he was still walking. I saw the outline of his face from far away. Shadows for eyes, a thin line for a mouth. It was almost demonic.

He turned back around quickly.

Once he crossed the bridge, I left to go home. My skin was still prickling. I was disturbed. It was incredible to me that someone could hold so much anger within themselves and manage not to go insane.

But, I thought reasonably, I had no reason to be afraid. I was a killer, and he was just a teenage boy with issues. I was stronger than him, faster, more adept, better.

So slowly I reasoned my fear away. I had no use for fear. Even anger was better than fear.

My father was home.

It was honestly a shock to see him there, sitting at the kitchen table, on a Thursday night, no less. He usually worked late into the night during the week doing something that involved stocks—like so many other things about him, the details of his work were sketchy to me. He was only ever home at a reasonable time on the weekends, and even that was seldom.

He was reading the newspaper as if his being home at six o’clock on a Thursday were the most common thing in the world. I walked into the kitchen to get something to drink—the afternoon’s activity had left me parched and tired. I’d walked for nearly an hour and a half to get home. I’d dawdled. It was such a nice day, I felt as if I should enjoy the sun.

And I walked into the kitchen and there he was.

He was reading the morning’s newspaper, and there was a cup of coffee on the table in front of him, steam still rising over the rim. His gray hair, brushed away from sharp blue eyes, was short and spiky at the back, where it had gotten messed up during the day. He was still wearing his suit, but he had taken off his yellow tie and draped it over the back of a nearby chair.

Where was my mother? I looked around. She must be here somewhere. He wouldn’t make coffee for himself—he never did. I wasn’t even sure he knew how to use the coffeemaker. My mother always made it. Despite his incompetence, he was always drinking coffee. It was something that defined him. It was one of very few defining characteristics, really. If he didn’t drink coffee, I didn’t know quite how I would remember him.

I didn’t see my mother. I walked toward the table. He didn’t notice me, or at least, if he did, he didn’t let on. He turned the page in his tall newspaper; I set my book bag down, leaning against the leg of the table. I made sure that it hit the ground loudly, but he still didn’t look at me.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked at full volume.

He jumped, the newspaper rustling as he jerked it away from his face.

“Kit, you scared me!” he exclaimed, his voice melting into a cordial laugh. I tilted my head and replied with a similarly formal smile.

“Sorry. Where’s Mom?”

“You’re not going to even ask how I am?” he asked. I dragged my hands through my hair. He didn’t care whether I asked him. He was just being difficult.

“I could ask you, if you like.”

He laughed again, tightly, and didn’t push the issue.

“So where’s Mom?”

“She went out.”

I nodded and went over to the kitchen cabinets, taking down a tall glass. I filled it with ice and tap water, and I listened to the ice crackle; I kept looking at my father, who had gone calmly back to his newspaper.

Newspaper. That was another thing that defined him, wasn’t it, now that I thought about it. Newspapers grabbed off the kitchen table in the mornings as he went off to work, newspapers read as he went up the stairs at night. Spread out so I couldn’t see his face.

Glass in one hand, I went back over to the kitchen table. I looked down at my bag and considered picking it up and going up to my room like I had been planning to in the first place. But instead I took a coaster off the kitchen counter and sat down at the end of the table opposite my father. I kicked off my shoes. I took a long sip of my water and set it down, watching as the bottom of my glass made a ring on the leather coaster. I stared at him. I waited for him to notice.

It had been such a long time since I had heard him talk, I realized as I stared at the newspaper—I couldn’t stare at his face, because it was hidden behind the front-page headline. Perhaps weeks. He was usually so silent when he was home. He was like a ghost in his own house, drifting through, barely speaking, nearly invisible. Which was strange, because he was in business, and I knew that basically meant that he talked for a living. He was good at making friends. But he had no friends in his own home.

I set my head in my hands and remembered the Christmas so long ago that my mother always talked about when she was tired. She never really opened up except for when she was deathly tired. It happened more often than one would think. She had nightmares, after all, and sometimes I would come down to the kitchen in the middle of the night for a glass of water, or an extra blanket from the hall cupboard, and she would hear my footsteps and come out and hang over the banister and talk to me. She didn’t drink, but when she really wanted to sleep, she slurred her speech and wobbled like she had just drunk a half bottle of rum. And she talked, and talked and talked. And usually she told the same story.

I was young then—too young to know my fate yet, too young to know much of anything. Older than one and less than three, the story went. I don’t remember it myself.

It was Christmas Day, and Dad was home. Christmas was one of the few times a year that he was obligated to spend time with us—or at least, I suppose, he was obligated once. Now he had faded away even from that, appearing only on Christmas Eve, for example, or only for a few hours on Christmas Day.

Every Christmas during that time in my life, he bought my mother and me unsuitable presents—clothes in the wrong size, for example, or toys of the sort I had grown too old for—and helped to set the table; he pretended he was one of us. Every Christmas, my mother made him coffee, and he stood by the kitchen table and said nothing. What did they have to talk about?

Once they had been young, vibrant. My mother told me sometimes about how he had been able to dance, when they first met, and how he had been so charming then, with a crooked smile, a wicked sense of humor, and a casual way of speaking—she had seduced him, as well, with her own charms; once, he had loved her.

She had been different then too. Sometimes, with almost sadness, she told me about her past self. She had loved jazz and the kind of instrumental music where the trumpets seemed to belong to a different time—she had known the steps to every dance worth knowing, the name of every book worth reading. She had run through London at midnight, remembering the blood she was responsible for; she had worn bright colors and too much jewelry. My father, somehow and strangely, had once shared her vibrancy. For a while, they had danced through life hand in hand.

Until they had both changed.

It was just the way life went, I supposed.

Of course, she had never had any illusions about his true character. She had seen his inevitable change from the very beginning. He had always put career first, and respectability just behind. Career and respectability before everything, before family, before connection. That was why he had been so perfect—she had needed someone who would lose interest in her and drift away, no matter her allure, but would remain married to her in order to provide an illusion of respectable normality. We needed people to gloss over us, to not think about us too hard, and he gave us that essential veneer of the ordinary.

My mother had always called marrying him “logical.” To me, it has only ever seemed lonely.

That particular Christmas, my mother had sent him out to buy something early in the morning. He had come back at around eleven. Two presents had been opened for me so I would have something to occupy myself with until he returned and we could open the rest together, as a family, as was tradition. When he came back in, my mother was in the kitchen making pumpkin pie, and the nanny was upstairs in the second-floor living room with me, watching me as I played with my new toys and discarded wrapping paper.

My mother smiled and went to him and hugged him around the neck, and he returned the smile very faintly. He said absolutely nothing.
Not a word
, my mother always said,
not a word, not a word
.

She led him upstairs to me, letting the half-made pie sit alone on the kitchen counter and letting the refrigerator stand open. I hadn’t seen him the night before—I had been asleep—and I hadn’t seen him for weeks before that either. He had been away on business.

She led him to the small Christmas tree and dismantled presents. She swept me out of the nanny’s arms and—this was her favorite part—she held me up to my father, and he held his arms out to me, and I began to cry.

I didn’t know him. I didn’t recognize his face. He wasn’t around enough for me to know him. To my approximately two-year-old mind, he was a strange man who wanted to hold me, perhaps take me away, perhaps worse. I was afraid.

He took his arms away and my mother held me close to her chest, soothing me, trying to calm my tears. But I kept crying, and crying.

So my father left. He just walked down the stairs, saying nothing, and went out and didn’t come back for about a week, and even when he did come back, he didn’t acknowledge the fact that his own daughter didn’t know him. He just went on. And he was still going on. And that’s just how he was, and there was nothing I could do, I didn’t think.

Nothing any of us could do.

He was so still—so immovable. I wondered what went on beneath his surface. Was there pain there, or regret? If there was, was he facing it or running from it?

That possibility made me think for a minute. Running was possible. Maybe his fault was never that he cared too little, but that he cared too much. Maybe his fault was that he had only accidentally drifted too far from his family, and when he realized that he had floated so far, he also realized that there was no turning back. And so maybe his distance was always a way to protect himself. He never came home because he didn’t want to confront a problem that made him hurt so much.

But that was probably just wishful thinking.

I stared at the man across the table from me, hiding behind his newspaper. He wouldn’t notice me. There was no use in waiting, I realized.

I stood irritably up from the table and stretched, and then I picked up the coaster, the water glass, and my book bag all at once. I slung the bag over my shoulder, doing my best not to spill any water. I left my shoes behind. I kept looking at where his face should be behind the paper. Through my annoyance, I almost had to be amused. He really was precisely what he needed to be. He didn’t pay attention to anything he didn’t need to pay attention to, and he let things slip. He was so perfect it was almost scary.

I walked barefoot across the thick Turkish rug toward the stairs, and then, to my surprise, I heard my mother’s footsteps coming down. I paused. She walked onto the landing above me and saw me watching her with curiosity, and she stopped as well.

“Why the puzzled expression?” she asked, drawing her hands over her white wool skirt as if to smooth out imaginary creases. Her blue eyes looked at me, softly, I supposed. It was hard for her to seem truly soft; it wasn’t her fault. She had a sharp face, and sharp eyes especially.

“I thought you were out.”

“Why?”

“Dad said . . . ,” I began, but my voice trailed off as I realized that yet again my father hadn’t seen anything. Had just been an island. He hadn’t really known where she was; he had just been saying something for the sake of saying something.

She laughed faintly.

“He sounded like he knew what he was saying,” I excused myself lamely. My mother came down the stairs, and I shrugged and went up, meeting her eyes briefly, and I found something quiet simmering there.

Too quiet. She wouldn’t do a thing. Not anymore.

I realized why, suddenly.

While stubbornly resisting her murderous impulses, she had forced herself so far into passiveness that it was beginning to become her true nature.

That night I dreamed of a memory.

A dark midnight street, residential, lined with black-windowed houses.

I was eleven years old. I exited a redbrick house on a corner, stepping carefully out into the street, trying to close the door behind me without noise.

I walked three blocks to a more central area, where I met up with my mother. She was standing tensely outside a convenience store, a bottle of water and a silvery bag of half-eaten chips in her hands. She was waiting for me, making sure I got out of the murder unscathed.