Nothing to Lose (25 page)

I was wrong. Big-time wrong.

“Plea bargain?” I say to Angela when I walk into her study.

She nods. “Fifteen years.”

Fifteen years. In jail. My stomach feels like that day Walker punched me. I can’t breathe.

Angela’s still talking. “It took me a while to get in touch with her lawyer.”

“Shit. She did it for me, because I was there … to keep me from saying anything, to keep me from—”

“You can’t know that, Michael.”

“I do know it. She was trying to protect me.” I think of the years she wouldn’t let me play ball. And I hear Kirstie’s voice on the phone, Kirstie’s voice saying,
You can’t run. Not really.

I look at Angela. She’s obviously thinking my mother didn’t protect me enough. But she doesn’t know it all.

She says, “I know it’s hard. But it’s not a bad deal, Michael. She won’t serve the whole fifteen years, probably.”

“But what about battered-spouse syndrome? What about her defense? Shit, she doesn’t belong in jail. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“She killed him, Michael. Fifteen years isn’t that bad. And this way, you don’t have to testify, don’t have to subject yourself to—”

You can’t run. . . .

“You don’t understand, Angela. She didn’t kill him. I did.”

That night, I dreamed I was dismantling rides at the fair. I was using a hydraulic drill. Beside me, someone was hammering. Every once in a while I heard the pounding, even over the shriek of my drill. But mostly it was the screaming, the screaming, filling my head until it was about to explode in a wall of flame.

I woke, sweating, shaking, not knowing where I was. Everything was blackness, and the hammering, the shrieking, just kept going on and on.

The screams came from below me, downstairs. It wasn’t like before. It was much more, filling the air, like death. Then I was jumping from bed, stumbling toward the stairs, slipping on cold marble. I don’t even remember running down, just landing.

Downstairs, lights blazed yellow. The runner on the hallway table was ripped. Objects that had been on top of it lay broken, on the floor.

I didn’t stop. The cold heat moved me.

Another scream. Then it all stopped.

I was in the doorway of Walker’s study. I heard my breath rasping in my ears. Walker was yelling, but I couldn’t make out the words. Only my own breath, louder now.

And I saw them. He had her up against the fireplace, punching her in the stomach like he did. With each blow, her head slammed the coral fireplace. He was going to kill her. He’d kill her. God, it was never going to end unless I ended it or Walker did.

Then my eyes went to her stomach.

What was he doing to the baby?

I don’t remember lurching forward. But I must have, grabbing the iron fireplace poker—so cold—aiming it at Walker’s skull, bringing it down, again. Again. I don’t remember her screams. I didn’t hear them.

But I remember the feeling, the shock to my arm as it hit hard bone, over and over. Then the relief as the bone crushed in. As Walker’s skull broke and let me inside. The warmth of the spattering blood hitting me. I was on the floor. This was the only way it would end, the only way was if I ended it.

He was on the floor. I kept hitting him. Then he was just there, motionless.

Dead?

I stopped and stared at the nightmare face that had been Walker. I held the fire poker up, ready to hit him again if he moved. But he didn’t.

I was glad he was dead. I was glad. Glad.

Glad.

I dropped the fire poker, and it clattered to the floor.

“I killed him,” I tell Angela. In my arm I can still feel the vibrations, the cramp in my hand where I held the poker, the airy exhilaration of seeing him fall. Then the horrible realization. I was a killer.

At her desk Angela is completely still, quiet.

Behind me I hear a voice.

“You were protecting her,” Karpe says. “Her and the baby.”

“The baby,” I say, dully. “Yeah. The baby.”

So much blood. A puddle below Walker’s head and small droplets all over, some as high as the ceiling. And other stuff. Images flipping past my eyes like the shadows on a movie screen. My mother crouched over Walker. The fire poker in my hand. Walker’s body, still now. My mother shook him. She wasn’t crying. He didn’t move, didn’t speak.

“Oh, my God, Michael. Oh, God, what have you done?”

I couldn’t speak. Her face was covered with blood. I didn’t feel it on my own face, but it must have been there. I couldn’t be clean.

“I had to,” I said, feeling strong. “He’d have killed you. Don’t you understand? He’d have killed you, or killed the baby.”

She’d sunk forward onto Walker’s bloody body, embracing, cradling him. She moaned.

She stayed there a long time. Finally she said, “There’s no baby, Michael.”

“What?”

“There was never a baby. There was never one. Never. I only told you that so…”

“So I wouldn’t go,” I finished for her.

“I didn’t think … oh, God.” It was a sob. She looked down at Walker’s bloody face and recoiled. Then she was frantic, removing her shirt so she was only in her skirt and bra. She started trying to wrap the shirt around Walker’s head. She couldn’t do it, and his head flopped onto the floor.

“What do we do?” I still hadn’t moved. My heart was ramming against my ribs, and I felt like it might stop beating entirely. I stared; the horror of what I’d done hit me like a sudden wave. “I killed him. Oh, God, I killed him.” His head was bloody, unrecognizable. A smell filled the air. Blood. I even tasted it in my mouth, and I wondered if I’d swallowed it somehow, and suddenly it was like I realized what it was, like it had come into focus. Walker’s head. Walker’s bloody face, and Mom trying to cover it. I felt the sickness well up in my throat. I crouched and puked on the tile. I tried not to look at him again. I was choking on the blood-filled air, and I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move. Then I did. I put my hands to my face, and they were clean.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. . . .” She tried to wrap the shirt again. She was crying, gritting her teeth. She was covered in his blood.

Then her face changed, somehow, and she said, “You have to go.”

“What?”

“I did this.” She let go of Walker and stood, trembling. She was all covered with his blood. “I did it, and that’s what I’ll tell them.”

“But…”

“You have to go. You have to let me do this for you. You’re my baby.”

And suddenly I felt tired. Tired enough to lie down on the floor beside Walker and never get up again. Too tired to resist.

“No, I can’t let you.” I started toward her.

“Don’t move!” Her voice was sharp. I looked at the Oriental rug, where my bloody footprints were about to be. “Wait there.”

I stood, staring at my clean hands, while she went, so carefully, and found a towel for me to walk across, another for over Walker’s face. I threw it onto him, feeling the puke welling up again but keeping it down.

“I need to do this, Michael. You need to let me. I’ll explain that he was killing me, that he beat me. It will be okay. I won’t go to jail. It happens all the time.”

And it was decided. I went upstairs, showered, and put the towel, bath towel, my underwear, which had only a few drops of blood on it, and my other laundry into the washing machine. I waited until the water ran hot over my hands, then added twice the normal amount of detergent. I found my still-packed duffel and brought it to the front door.

My mother had put her energy into cleaning. When I reached the study, the puke was gone, but there was still blood. So much blood. And the smell. I could see the outline of footprints, her footprints, all over. I started toward the body.

“Michael, no!”

I spun.

“Don’t touch anything.” Her hair, her face were still covered with blood.

“We could bury him,” I said. “Or throw him in the ocean. We could leave town and not tell anyone. He doesn’t work at the firm anymore. No one will be waiting for him.” I couldn’t believe it yet. Everything had changed so horribly. It seemed like there had to be some way to fix it, to go back in time.

“There’s no way to cover this. They’ll know he’s dead. They’ll know he’s dead, and they’ll know I killed him.”

“But…”

“I
killed him. You have your life ahead of you. I have nothing. Nothing. It’s all over anyway. I’ve ruined everything.”

I recognized the mother of my childhood, the woman who hadn’t wanted me to play ball, hadn’t wanted me to get hurt. Where had she been all this time?

I waited for the wash cycle to finish and about half the dry, then packed the steamy, damp clothes into my duffel and started toward the only place I could think of. Julian Karpe’s. I went on foot after I told Mom to wait half an hour to call the police.

I was halfway to Karpe’s before it hit me again: I’d killed a man.

“Where did you go that night?” Angela asks, and I can see from her face that she’s accepted it, maybe always knew.

“I came here, Angela.”

She fixes her eyes on Julian. “So you … knew all this?”

I say, “I lied and told him my mother did it, like she said. I had to tell him that much, to explain why he couldn’t tell anyone.”

“I knew,” he confirms. “At least, I thought you probably did it.”

I stare at him. “But you helped me anyway?”

“I know what it’s like to feel trapped, to feel like there’s no way out.”

“I walked here,” I say to Angela, “then he drove me two hours to West Palm Beach to catch a Greyhound.”

Angela looks at Karpe, assessing. “And you went back to school and told everyone you hadn’t seen him since that Thursday?”

“He was a good friend,” I say.

“Or an accessory after the fact, depending on how you look at it.”

“I won’t get him in trouble,” I say.

“No,” Angela says. “No, I know you won’t.”

“You knew I did it,” I say to her. “Didn’t you?”

“I suspected.”

“Why?”

“It didn’t seem likely to me that your mother would have beaten someone to death with a blunt object. Knowing my own mother, I just couldn’t picture it. And…”

“And . . . ?”

“You came back. I didn’t think you’d come back unless you had something to say.”

I nod. It’s true, I realize. I have known all along I’d tell. The whole time I’ve been talking, I’ve been standing, leaning against the chair across from Angela’s desk. But now, my legs feel tired, so tired, like they won’t support me. And then, everything begins to go black.

When I come to, I’m on the floor. Angela and Karpe kneel over me.

“Are you okay?” Angela says.

“No,” I say. “I mean yes. I mean… I have to tell them.”

Angela touches my shoulder. “Your mother clearly doesn’t want you to. That hasn’t changed.”

“No,” I say. “I have to tell.”

She nods. “Then let’s do it.”

Justifiable homicide.
That’s what the state attorney tells the judge after hearing my confession, talking to my mother in jail, my mother’s lawyers, Angela, and me.

“It explains the blood spatter,” one of the lawyers for the state, a guy named Miller, said to another, after I told them what happened. The other two attorneys glared at him, but he said, “Well, we’ve all been talking about it.”

“The what?” I asked Angela.