Mad Honey: A Novel (24 page)

There is a soft cry across the room; I don’t have to look to know it’s coming from Ava Campanello. Instead, I steal a glance at Asher. His jaw is set tight, and his eyes are unblinking.

“There was also a subarachnoid hemorrhage over the right fronto-temporal lobes,” Dr. McBride says. “She was bleeding into her brain.”

Gina asks, “What about further down on Lily’s body?”

“She had extensive bruising on the face and neck, and ecchymoses on the arms and lower legs.”

“Which are…?”

“More bruises that are visible in areas of minor trauma.”

“Dr. McBride, could you determine which of Lily’s injuries were fatal?” the prosecutor presses.

“Yes. The cause of death was intracerebral hemorrhage. That means there was enough trauma to her head to cause a brain bleed and a transtentorial herniation. In plain English: there’s blood where there wasn’t blood before. Because the blood occupies space, lower
parts of the brain are pushed down through a layer of meninges—the tentorium—and press against the brain stem. The brain stem controls respiration and heart rate. If that’s not treated immediately, it can cause brain death, and/or a cessation of breathing and heartbeat.”

Asher’s eyes are closed now, and his chest rises and falls in shallow pulses. I watch Jordan elbow him, and he blinks.

“From what you found in the autopsy, Doctor, could you tell what caused the trauma to the victim’s head?”

“Blunt force,” he replies.

The prosecutor turns toward the jury. “Would that blunt force be consistent with being hit by someone’s fist, or being shoved against a wall?”

“Yes.”

“Would it be consistent with being pushed down a flight of wooden stairs?”

“Yes,” he says.

“In your expert opinion,” Gina asks, “did you determine a manner of death?”

“Homicide,” Dr. McBride says.

“Nothing further,” the prosecutor replies, and she sits down.

“DR. MCBRIDE,”
Jordan says, beginning his cross-examination, “you said the injury that led to Lily’s death was an intracerebral hemorrhage—a brain bleed. Do I have that right?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve said that you take into account what the police tell you about how the body is found, correct?”

“Yes,” the doctor says.

“Isn’t it true that the police report told you there were signs of a struggle in the house, and that Lily was alone in that house with her boyfriend?”

“It is.”

Jordan narrows his gaze. “So you were already predisposed to think of this as a homicide?”

“Maybe, but the facts of the autopsy also supported it. The underlying hematoma on the victim’s temple and the laceration on her scalp are consistent with the blunt force trauma caused by being hit, or thrown down the stairs.”

Asher tries to hide his flinch; it becomes a tiny earthquake down his spine.

“If Lily tripped and fell headfirst down an entire flight of wooden stairs, wouldn’t that also be consistent with blunt force trauma?”

“Yes.”

Jordan hesitates, plotting his course. “You’re not a full-time forensic pathologist, are you?”

“No, I’m a contract pathologist. Roughly twice a month, I work at the office of the chief medical examiner in Concord.”

“So your specialty
isn’t
forensic pathology?”

“I have had forensic training,” McBride says, “but my day job is in hospital pathology.”

“Your real job is distinctly different from your part-time work, right?”

“In some ways,” the pathologist says. “But I’ve had extensive practice at both.”

“So you do forensic autopsies in addition to your day job?”

“Yes.”

Jordan nods, impressed. “You’re a pretty busy guy.”

“I am.”

“Lily’s autopsy wasn’t the only one you did that day, was it?”

The medical examiner shakes his head. “I did four.”

“You must have been exhausted!”

He shrugs. “Part of the territory.”

Jordan looks at the report. “It says here you started Lily’s autopsy at four
p.m
.?”

“That’s right.”

“Isn’t it possible that you might have been in the unfortunate position of rushing through Lily Campanello’s autopsy?”

“No,” the doctor says, affronted. “I would
never.
”

“And yet, there does seem to be some missing information.”

McBride goes beet red. “What?” he says, leafing through the papers. “No there isn’t.”

“On page two, for example,” Jordan says smoothly. “You’ll see a blank. Next to
Female genital system
.”

“Oh, no.” The doctor looks up, recovering. “That’s not missing. I mean, it is, but not like you think.”

“Negligence is negligence, Doctor Mc—”

“I looked for the uterus and ovaries, naturally,” the medical examiner says, cutting Jordan off. “The possibility of pregnancy as a motive for homicide is always considered in the death of a woman in her reproductive years. There’s no record of the organs because the uterus and ovaries were absent.”

For the first time since we’ve come to court, Jordan seems completely lost. “You mean…like a hysterectomy?”

“Surgical removal would be one reason for that finding, yes…but not in this case.” The medical examiner looks from Jordan to the prosecutor. “I assumed you all knew,” he says. “The deceased was transgender.”

LILY
5

NOVEMBER 2, 2018

Five weeks before

J
ust be yourself,
they tell you. Worried about how you’ll come off if you’re interviewing for something?
Just be yourself.
Wondering what to say or how to act on a first date?
Just be yourself.
Looking for the words to describe the impossible?
Just be yourself,
they tell you, to put you at ease. As if
just being yourself
is so easy. As if, for so many people, it isn’t the very thing that most puts you at risk in this cruel and heartless world.

I remember getting ready for T-ball one Saturday morning, back in Seattle. Maybe I was eight years old? Wearing that little uniform they gave us. Going to the bathroom before Dad and I were supposed to leave the house, and seeing one of Mom’s lipsticks on the sink, and just twisting it open and doing my lips and then standing there amazed, looking at myself in a mirror I was almost too short to reach. From the hallway, Dad shouted, “Liam, are you coming?” I tried to get the lipstick off with toilet paper, but it wouldn’t come off. Dad, hearing the faucet running, said, “What’s going on in there?” I called out, “Nothing!”

When of course it was not
nothing,
but
everything
. Why couldn’t I just have come out wearing lipstick, looked my dad in the eye, and said,
I’m here, this is who I am
? I mean, I’ve heard of all these people who did that, who were brave enough to come out at age six, or younger. So why didn’t I have the courage to make myself known? It wasn’t as if I didn’t know the truth.

But I was years away from being able to find the right words for the thing I felt, years away from even seeing the face of another person like me. All I knew was that, looking in the mirror at this boy wearing a T-ball uniform, whoever I was, this was not it.

I finally came out of the bathroom, and my father looked at me angrily and said, “What’s wrong with you?”

I wish I’d known what to tell him, back then. I wish I’d had the courage to say
Not a goddamned thing.

Instead, as years went by, and I got a better understanding of how deep the trouble was that I was in, I came up with a strategy. If I couldn’t live honestly in the world, I figured the next best thing was to do the opposite: to live as if I was invisible.

There are people who think that invisibility is a superpower. That nothing would be cooler than being the Invisible Girl, like in the Fantastic Four. But they’re wrong. Invisibility isn’t a superpower. It’s a curse.

“What is going
on
in that head, Lily Campanello?” says Mom, from across the room. She’s drinking a glass of chardonnay, still wearing her uniform. I look up at her.

I’ve been playing the Schubert
Arpeggione
Sonata by the fireplace, the piece that I learned over a year ago after I’d tried and failed to kill myself (because, as it turned out, I couldn’t even do
that
right), the piece that everyone said was too hard for me. I guess I’d finished a moment ago and had just been staring into space, lost in thought.

“Can I ask you a question, Mom?” I say. “Would you rather be invisible—or be able to fly?”

Mom laughs. I love the sound of her laughter. It’s like bubbles coming up from a Sparkletts machine. A
watercooler,
they call it on the East Coast. I haven’t heard that sound much since we moved.

“Lily, I’m a middle-aged woman. I’m
already
invisible.”

In so many ways, Mom acts like her life is over, and it pisses me off. It makes me feel guilty, too—because she’s spent so much of her life trying to save me. She got us out of Seattle when my father tried to crush me, and resettled us in Point Reyes so I could do the social
transition, and then she homeschooled me when everything went to hell at Pointcrest. She kept me alive after the suicide attempt. She got me to Dr. Powers for surgery. She moved us out here and got the desk job after that. There are times when her whole life has just been bailing me out, time and time again.

I start playing the Schubert once more, and I do fine until I get to the crazy passage toward the end of the first movement. It’s like I’m doing cartwheels on a high wire.

I can feel Mom’s gaze. She raises the glass of wine to her lips.

When she was twenty-five she became a ranger so she could spend the rest of her life
in the wild
. It didn’t pay well, but she always said,
I take my paycheck in sunsets.

I’m playing so furiously, and so hard, as I think about her, and Asher, and Jonah, and Dad, that all at once the A string on my cello snaps. It’s a hard, sharp sound, and I jump about a foot in the air. The sound of the sudden snap resonates and echoes in the body of the cello. I’m glad I didn’t get hurt—once before when I snapped a string, it sliced right through my ring finger.

Boris, who’s asleep on the floor, raises his head, although it’s more likely that this is because I jumped than because he actually heard anything.

“Lily,” says Mom, putting her wineglass down.

I go over to the couch and sit next to her and let my head fall onto her shoulder. The ugly tears come in a rush.

“Mom,” I say. “Do you hate me?”

“What is this?” says Mom. “Honey. How could I ever hate you?”

“I wrecked your life,” I tell her.

Mom pets my hair some more. “Is this about Asher?”

“No,” I tell her. “Yes.”

Mom thinks about what she wants to say. “He hasn’t been around for the last week,” she says carefully, running her index finger around the lip of her glass. I was hoping she hadn’t noticed.

Boris sighs. It’s hard sometimes not to think that dogs can feel your emotions, the same way deaf people can hear music through the
solar plexus. There have been times when Boris seemed to know what was going on in my heart better than any human, although this happened more often back when my old dog was young.

Sometimes I miss those days.

Not often.

“I always thought I’d choose flying,” I say quietly. “But now I’m not sure.”

Mom keeps stroking my hair. She knows damn well I’m not talking about
flying
flying. But if we’re going to talk about sex, we’re going to have the conversation in code, or not at all. “I think there are a lot of misconceptions about flying,” she says, already speaking the language.

Boris puts his head back down.

Mom pulls back from our hug and looks me in the eye, wipes the tears off my cheeks with her thumb.

“Flying’s overrated,” she says.

It absolutely breaks my heart to hear her say this.

“Did I tell you? I had to rescue some hikers today,” she says.

I wonder why we are talking about this. Now.

“I thought you were doing the paperwork on the—bobcat habitat—thing—?”

“The Lynx Analysis Units,” she says. “Yeah. But these hikers got into trouble, and the chief sent me in. I mean, there were rangers closer to them than I was, but you know how he likes to give me the worst jobs. Just to make sure I know how much he resents my being forced on him.”

I do know about this. The chief thinks that Mom has an attitude because she used to be Park Service. This is a distinction that no one cares about except for the chief. Because he wanted to be Park Service, but he failed the test.

“You should have seen these two. Peak baggers up from Boston, hiking the AT in shorts and T-shirts. In November. No rain gear, no hiking boots, dead cellphone batteries. They got drenched in the downpour, started shaking with the cold—they’d have got hypothermia if a through-hiker hadn’t found them and called HQ. I wrapped
them up in thermal blankets, gave them some soup from a thermos, got them down okay, but jeez. You wouldn’t believe the situations people can get themselves in by not looking ahead. By not being prepared.”

She looks me in the eye, hard. “Or maybe you would.”

Suddenly I understand why we are talking about this, and what she is trying to tell me. That when I make a decision, I have to understand what the consequences are.

The thing is, there are consequences no matter what I decide now, but I’m not sure which ones pose the biggest risk. Let’s say I tell Asher,
Listen, I’m trans, I know I should have told you before we slept together, but I didn’t so I’m telling you now, because I just want to be honest.
The consequence of that might be that he gets angry, that he flies off the handle, that—well, who knows what he’ll say? He is a gentle, gentle spirit—but I have also seen him angry, and I have worn his bruises.

Transgender people get murdered all the time in this country. They don’t get murdered because they kept their identity private. They get murdered because someone else finds out the truth. Incredibly, some courts still allow the gay panic defense—or the trans panic defense—to justify the killings. As if killing another person because they’re trans is somehow understandable.
Well, we don’t approve of murder, but really, considering the circumstances…

On the other hand, let’s say I
don’t
tell him, that I decide there’s no reason for him to know because the past is past, period, full stop. I was never a boy anyway, not in my heart, not in the ways that matter most. Does not telling him
everything
mean I’m lying to him? Is it really lying if all you’re doing is keeping your mouth shut, about something that’s nobody’s business anyway?

I don’t like either of these scenarios.

There’s another one, of course, in which Asher says,
It doesn’t make any difference to me, and I love you.
That’s the one I want.

I’d like to say that the Asher I know will react this way. But do I really know him? What if he has a private self, too? Actually, if you think about it, how could he
not
have a private self?

Is there anyone worth knowing who doesn’t have something about themselves that is theirs, and theirs alone?

My mother is staring hard at me. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

There is so much I want to tell her. But I can’t stand the idea of her worrying about me anymore. Her sacrifices and help have brought me as far as she can. I’m the one who has to figure out what to do next. I’m the one who has to live with the consequences of my choices.

I’m picturing the conversation
. Asher. There’s something I have to tell you.

Are you okay, Lily?

I want to tell him,
Fuck yes,
I am fine. In fact, I am wonderful. I am not a mistake. I am a miracle. Can’t you see?

But people never see who you are, all they can see is who you
were
.

I stand up. “I’m going down to Edgar’s,” I tell my mother.

Mom looks surprised. “I have no idea who that is.”

“Edgar’s. The music shop. We’ve driven past it a hundred times. I need a new A string.”

She drains her glass, plays with her long braid with one hand. In that single moment I get a glimpse of the younger woman she used to be, the girl who got her forestry degree at Syracuse and headed off to the Olympic National Park in Washington, at age twenty-five, thinking her life was about to begin.

“When you get back,” Mom says, “I will be here.”

I PULL INTO
a parking spot on Pierce Street. As I step into the sunlight the bells from St. Clement’s are tolling. As I pass by I can see on its sign that today is All Souls’ Day.

All Souls’ Day is the day when a mystical portal is supposed to be open between the land of the living and the dead. It started because, in the eleventh century, a traveler was shipwrecked on an island that contained a chasm. He could hear sounds coming from it, and
believed they were the cries of lost souls in purgatory. Hearing them wail, he decided we need to pray for everyone who’s trapped. When he was rescued from the island, the idea spread from there.

I’ve always liked the name. Like it’s a day for
everybody
. Is it Just
Some
Souls’ Day? No, stupid, it’s
All
Souls’.

I’m not very religious, but I know there is something bigger than I am, bigger than all of this. What
is
this thing? I absolutely do not know.

1. The only part of the New Testament I can quote from memory is Luke 2:8–14, and that’s because it’s the part that Linus recites in
   A Charlie Brown Christmas.
   

2. Actually, I sometimes think there is something very Jesus-like about Charlie Brown—his heartbreaking patience, his endless suffering.
   

   You have to admit the show would have a very different ending if, after he and Linus bought the sad little Christmas tree, the other kids in the Peanuts gang came after them with a hammer and some nails.
   

3. The thing that contains the burning incense in a Catholic church is called a
   thurible
   . The rising smoke is supposed to symbolize the prayers of believers rising up to heaven. The word
   incense
   comes from a Greek word. Originally it meant
   sacrifice.
   It’s no wonder one of the Magi brought it as a gift. Gold and myrrh were powerful presents, I’m sure. But the king who brought frankincense to that child knew full well that the world would take its toll.
   

4. My least favorite Bible verse is the one about Balaam and his talking donkey. Because, honestly, who could possibly take that seriously? If your donkey started talking, I promise you that you wouldn’t say you’d hit him and tell him he was being a bad donkey, like Balaam does.
   

   Instead, you would probably exclaim,
   Hey, I have a talking donkey; I’m gonna be rich!
   

5. I keep trying to be an atheist, but it just won’t take. In spite of how much garbage there is in the Bible—like all the instructions on how to treat your slaves, and how women should pretty much accept that
   we’re destined to be the property of men—there is still something about faith that I cannot let go of. I do not know what this world is, but I know that it contains miracles that I cannot explain, and the love that people have for each other is the biggest mystery of all.