Take One With You (8 page)

And that was how he came to search for his grandmother, an old woman with Alzheimer’s living in a tiny hospital-clinic in Spain, who would eventually lead the entire world to the Asshole of Arica.

1 MONTH AFTER TOWY WEBSITE

Fax Details
(from top): To: Det. Thane Parks, From: S. Harrison, (Fax # illegible), Re: Accident Rpt. 3765213 Williamson Melissa, *Do not redistribute, Comments: Attached as per request. Coroners pic from scene. Note – left portion of tattoo missing due to avulsion trauma. Higher res unavailable, but can send color if needed.

Melissa thought both of them were acting like children.

She had met Charlie first and then Sarah, although “met” was always a weird way to describe any online relationship, at least the way she conducted them.

It was always one way or no way.

If she had thought about it on a conscious level, she might have realized that she was looking for another Claire, someone to tell her exactly what to do at exactly the right time, but as it was, no one ever got enough information out of her to even begin to address what was bothering her. She would never again let anyone close to her.

Melissa was like a sponge that never dried up or allowed evaporation, sucking up the pain of others but never releasing her own. She just wanted it all to be over. In the river of life, she was treading water as she floated downstream, praying her limbs would give out and she would find blessed release.

But she found something, a bit of hope, maybe, in Charlie.

Both of them knew that she had lost a sister, but the details were never divulged outside of her being murdered. It was as if the tiny part of Claire that still lived inside her was too fragile to be exposed even for a moment, lest she be lost in the wind like a statue made of dust.

And because no details were offered, all advice and counsel was rendered meaningless platitudes, which were Melissa’s only comfort.

She had constructed for herself a fortress of pain, and ironically, she needed help maintaining her isolation. Charlie and Sarah provided that. Anything more was anathema to the memory of her sister. So she used them, used their obvious compassion, to assist in her self-imposed confinement.

Had she not had their contact, Melissa knew she would go mad from the depression, and madness would not allow her to feel the agony she needed to experience.

The pain she
deserved.

When she and her sister were young, waiting for a family who would accept both of them into their home, Claire and Melissa would play a little game. They would sit at whatever window was available at whatever time it was free of prying eyes, and they would wait for their Bandit.

Bandit had been a puppy owned by the cook at the group home they were sent to immediately following the death of their parents. He was such a happy little dog that the woman began to bring him to work with her, in the hopes it might cheer up the two new girls, who were frightened and inconsolable.

The cook would arrive at the home every day six o’clock on the dot, and little Bandit would tumble out of her old beater station wagon and onto the gravel driveway, following her into the kitchen. The other children there were singles, and the young ones went to families fast. The older ones were generally sullen and angry and uninterested in the cook and her little rat dog, and so Claire and Melissa had the pup mostly to themselves.

They would wake up early every morning to wait for the sight of that dog, play with it as much as they were allowed between chores and lessons, and then watch again in the evening when it would follow its owner out the door at six.

Once they left the home for their first foster family, and throughout their time between and with others, whenever Melissa got depressed, Claire would make her sit by the window to wait for her Bandit, which might end up being anything from a shooting star to the mailman to the backfire of a neighbor’s car.

Whatever it was, they would both know it, and then they would look at each other and giggle. Melissa caught on pretty quickly that it was just a game of concentration. If she was waiting for something to happen, eventually something would. And as she waited, whatever sadness she was feeling would dissipate, at least for a time.

Until the next Bandit.

Neither Sarah nor Charlie was her Bandit, but rather they served as her Claire, or at least a shadow of her sister. They were her reminder that a Bandit was coming, that a Bandit was always on its way, whether it was a shooting star or a mailman or the backfire of a car or a motorcycle, eventually her pain would be relieved.

Charlie and Sarah never knew until later that Melissa had been communicating with them both during their estrangement, though they might have assumed so. She had no inclination to be some kind of mediator; it was obvious they would end up together because they were so clearly in love.

Even online and in er stupor, she could discern that. But her interest was not in their personal lives. The truth was, she couldn’t have cared less about their problems or their lives. All human feeling had died in her. With her sister.

Melissa was mostly just killing time until she found the guts to kill herself. Her online friend Charlie told her that one day, she would snap out of it. He assured her that she would experience something or meet someone who would change everything, although wishing his mother took Brad intrigued her, mostly.

And then she “met” Jesus Two Bears.

***

After speaking with his doctor, a very compassionate man to whom he was referred after several others had failed to diagnose his disease, JT was convinced to seek out his grandmother. In reality, his physician thought the search might help take his patient’s mind off suicide, which he was clearly considering even though JT had not come right out and said so.

From what the doctor was told by JT, his grandmother had disappeared overseas years ago, and it might take him some time to find her. The doctor, an elderly man nearing his retirement, had a lot of experience over the course of his career with the terminally ill, and if there was one thing they all could use, it was time and something worthwhile to occupy it.

But JT had found her almost immediately. She was as crazy as a rabid bat and twice as irascible, but she remembered everything from thirty years ago as clear as if it happened yesterday.

JT was able to communicate with her via email, and spent hours writing long, involved missives to her, to which she would often respond with a single sentence which didn’t reveal whether or not she’d understood a word he’d written, or even read it.  He was sure that her caregiver was unenthusiastically responding on her behalf most times.

He wasn’t even convinced that she understood who he was until he mentioned the story of his name, and then she replied with a message that was written in such a way that it might have been a transcript of his mother’s version he had been so familiar with. It amazed him, and gave him some hope that she might understand who he actually was.

She became his quest, his reason to get up in the morning, his excuse to go on living even as he felt like he was slowly becoming as dotty as she was. She gradually warmed to him, although he still wasn’t entirely sure how much she understood, and sometimes her caregiver would write to tell him she was doing poorly or unable to sit up at the computer. He would send her a little note each day, sometimes for weeks on end, until she would finally respond and then they would continue their electronic correspondence. 

Sometimes it seemed to JT that as he declined, she became a little more lucid in their exchanges, but it may have been his mind playing tricks on him.

He called to speak to her only once but it went badly, and she didn’t return his emails for weeks. He worried that the tenuous connection had been irreparably damaged, but then one day she emailed him with a sweet story about his mother, and their relationship continued.

It wasn’t until he suddenly lost consciousness at the country club that he tried to call her again, goaded by El Culo de Arica.

***

JT had been feeling weaker lately, sleeping less and less, with his visions becoming more terrifying. The spirit brothers were arguing over him in these hallucinations, sometimes pulling him back and forth like a ghostly tug-of-war. Often he woke up the neighbors, none of whom knew his condition, and there was talk around the building he would be asked to leave his little studio apartment.

JT’s only real solace came from his sporadic contact with his grandmother half a world away. She was almost literally keeping him alive.

Soon he would no longer be able to work. His duties at the club had been reduced to opening the pool at five every morning, even though there was only the one old man who showed up to swim at that hour.

He supposed Mister Tee was keeping him alive, too.

Not long before his seizure, he had had a particularly rough night with the brothers. Iktomi, the elder, had taken the form of his mother, something he had never done before, and she had berated him for his unaccomplished existence, something she never would have done in life.

JT arrived at the club twenty minutes late, something he had never done before.

Mister Tee was waiting.

“What’s the matter, boy?” he said, not unkindly.

“I’m sorry, Mister Tee,” JT answered. “Rough night.”

“Has llegado algún gatito!” he said, his eyes lighting up.

JT had never once heard the old man speak Spanish, and laughed in spite of himself. The old man was congratulating him on getting some action, but in an oddly formal way.

“No, nothing like that, Mister Tee,” he answered. “Just tired, I guess.”

“Let me in,” the old man commanded, and JT unlocked the door, but once inside, Mister Tee was eager to ask him all about what he still assumed was his successful conquest.

“No, really,” JT said, and then he explained the actual reason for his fatigue, which seemed to interest the old man even more. He insisted JT tell him more about the evil spirits, which led to his disease, which led to his grandmother. The old man seemed to really respond to JT’s troubles.

“Why don’t you go see her?”

“No money,” JT said. “And I’m not sure how she would react, with the Alzheimer’s.”

From that point on, Mister Tee and the person whose final breath he would soon witness became fast friends. Eventually the older man even began to delay his morning swim just so he could hear updates from JT and his strange hallucinations.

JT assumed what he and many others had always believed, that he was talking to a sweet old man who was genuinely interested because he was lonely, but nothing could have been further from the truth. El Culo de Arica had relied on such assumptions for many years and become very good at cultivating them, but he was still the same monster he’d been since he was a child, only wilier and slightly more patient with his prey.

Like Iktomi, the shape-shifting spirit who tormented JT’s nights as different people but who always reverted to his original form, a spider, the old man remained, at his essence, a lover of suffering. He looked back on his younger days with fondness, his only regret that he wasn’t able to enjoy his sadistic hobbies more completely.

Still, JT’s stories about his mother and their lives reminded him of his own family, who he’d abandoned when he left Peru. He cared nothing for his wife, an ugly woman who’d been unable to bear him a son, but there was a single daughter, with child when he left, and though he’d always planned to send for them, he had never been able to do so. It was the single soft spot in the heart of a devil, and Jesus Two Bears had managed to find it with his simple goodness.

And so El Culo de Arica was careless.

People who commit crimes against humanity are never really safe; there is always someone, somewhere, looking for them. The Asshole was no different. But El Culo had been able to avoid detection for so many years not just because of his facile ways and language skills, but also by never letting down his guard. Not once in the twenty some-odd years since he left Peru had he ever allowed a single photograph.

Until a dying boy whose pain somehow reminded him of his daughter snapped a picture on his cell phone and sent it to his addled grandmother across the ocean.

***

clairebear
encountere
d
jtwobear
s
not in a suicide forum, ironically enough, but completely by chance on a message board thread linked beneath a story on CNN.com about the complex legal systems for allocating water rights in various states.

It was JT who messaged her, thinking she might be of Native origin because of her screen name and the fact that her post was the first intelligent and non-racist comment he’d come across.

He had begun the last stage of his disease, not sleeping at all and drifting in and out of strange delusions. On his good days he went to the club, opened the pool room, then went home to surf the Internet and smoke pot to try and keep up an appetite. On his bad days he never got out of bed, staring at his visions across the ceiling.

His bosses were understanding because Mister Tee was understanding; had he complained they would have had to hire someone to replace JT. But the old man just went back home if JT didn’t show by 5:30, and the club manager would open up when he arrived at seven.

Melissa, in her way of drawing out others without revealing much about herself, was soon Facebook friends with the dying boy, who would give her the strength to do that which would both end her life and provide it meaning.

JT told her his story from beginning to end over the course of one long, blessedly lucid night, describing in detail why he planned to kill himself and take Mister Tee with him.A concept inherited fro
m
clairebea
r
, by way of Charlie.