The Day I Killed James Read online

  Silence. Dead silence on my end. I knew it was my turn, but that didn’t help. He shouldn’t have thought highly of me. He was wrong to have done that.

  I wanted to say, I hope it’s okay that I called. But nothing came out.

  “It’s wonderful of you to call me,” she said.

  A jolt of terror. She reads minds. If she knows that, she knows everything.

  “It is?”

  “Yes, it’s wonderful. I don’t know many people who knew James. And even the ones who did, they knew him as a little boy. Or a teenager. I don’t know who his friends were after he left home. Except you.”

  I wondered if there was anybody except me.

  “I thought maybe it would be hard for you to talk about him.”

  “A little,” she said. “But not talking about him is even harder. How far away are you? You should come for a visit sometime.”

  Oh God. It’s not my imagination. She reads minds. “I’m at Grace Cathedral.”

  “Oh, you’re in town! I had no idea. I thought you were calling from home.”

  “No, I’m in San Francisco.”

  “Well, you should come for a visit.”

  “When?”

  “Well, anytime, really. I’m retired. So I’m mostly home. How long are you going to be in town?”

  “Not long. I need to take this friend of mine to her grandmother’s in Washington State. So we’ll need to get back on the road soon.”

  “Come today, then.”

  “Um.” Was there still any way out? No. There really never had been. I just hadn’t known it. Until now. “Okay. Yeah. That would be great. What’s your address?”

  I grabbed the kid’s left hand again, but it was pretty full with numbers, so I wrote the address down on her arm.

  “Okay, then. Thanks. Soon.”

  As soon as I was off the phone the kid said, “I’m glad I come in so handy. I didn’t know I had a future as a notepad.”

  “She sounded so happy I called.”

  “Good.”

  “Not really.”

  She waited. We both waited. I watched people bustle up and down the street. Climb the stairs to the cathedral. Watched cars and cabs try to squeeze around double-parked vehicles. All these people had lives. I just didn’t imagine any of them could be as complicated and hard as the one I was living just in that moment.

  But maybe that’s one of those things we think because we’re only on the inside of ourselves. Not anybody else.

  “Maybe I should just let her stay happy.”

  The kid said nothing. I said nothing.

  I put my head in my hands and tried to create a dark space. A cave. Something that would cover me. Allow me to hide. If only for just a few minutes.

  I’m not sure how long I sat like that. I thought it was maybe ten minutes. But when I opened my eyes, I could swear that the sun was on a noticeably different slant. And the right thing was still the right thing.

  My hiding days were over.

  FIVE

  The Best I Can Do

  I swear it must have been some kind of cosmic joke. When we found the address, it came complete with a parking space. Just sitting there. Open. Right in front of her house.

  “Spooky,” the kid said. She’d been a little spooked since I dragged her into a big church.

  “It’s unusual,” I said. Thinking it was spooky, but not wanting to commit.

  “It’s a sign. Admit it.”

  “Let’s not talk for a minute.”

  I had to take three shots at the parallel parking thing, because at home I never got to practice. When I had pretty well snugged the car in, I asked the kid to open the door and see if I was close enough to the curb.

  “Yeah,” she said. “We can probably hike to the curb from here.”

  “You’re such a smart-ass.”

  “Thank you.”

  It struck me that anyone who met us would assume we were sisters. And not just because of the hair thing, either.

  I turned off the engine. My hands were shaking again. I gripped the wheel tightly and we sat awhile.

  “What are we doing?” she asked.

  “We’re getting ourselves together,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  But the more I sat, the more impossible it seemed to move. My lower body felt like hardening cement. Heavier and more inflexible with every passing second. I knew if I was going to do this, I’d better do it fast.

  “Okay, I’m going in. I think you should wait here.”

  “Okay.”

  “I have no idea how long this will take.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s just something I need to do by myself, okay?”

  “It’s okay. Will you just go?”

  “Oh. Right. Okay.”

  Something in my head was causing the world to take on a dreamlike quality. I felt floaty and too acutely aware of every tiny movement. I opened the door. A car blared its horn and swerved to avoid hitting my door, and I jumped. It had never occurred to me to look before I threw my door open into traffic.

  James’s mother’s house was dark green and narrow. That classic San Francisco narrow. Three stories, but built straight up. And the street was steep. I was standing on the side of a hill, staring at the house, and the house was straight, but I wasn’t. It seemed too much like a metaphor. Or maybe I was still dreaming.

  The door was white, with a brass knocker.

  I’m not sure how long I stared at it before I walked back to the car. This time I checked traffic before opening my door and getting in.

  “Now what are we doing? You’re not chickening out, are you?”

  “No. I’m not. I just need another minute.”

  A pause, which I expect lasted about a minute.

  Then she said, “Want me to go in with you?”

  That snapped me out of my dream state. Somewhat. “No. I can do this.”

  I threw the door open, forgetting again to watch for traffic. This time I got lucky. No cars.

  I walked, rather boldly I thought, up to James’s mother’s front door. I raised my hand to knock. I’m not sure what happened with the follow-through on that, but next thing I remember I was turned around, facing the car. Watching the look on the kid’s face. She looked scared. I saw the fear on her face and knew she must be feeling it for me. On my behalf. It brought up some feelings of my own. It reminded me to panic.

  Something gave way inside my gut. I don’t know how to describe it any better than that. Something in that normally solid area of my gut started to cave and slide like a rain-soaked hillside in Southern California. Houses that had stood for years began to slip, their foundations crumbling. I took two steps toward the safety of the car and then sat down. Right there in the middle of the sidewalk. I was in a full-on state of crumple.

  A second or two later the kid was there, standing over me. “Now what are we doing?”

  “I’m not sure. Falling apart, I think.”

  “Want me to knock?”

  “Yeah. I guess you better. You better knock for me.”

  “Okay. You stay here. I’ll go knock.”

  A few seconds later, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  I looked up into James’s mother’s face.

  She looked a little different than I expected. She didn’t exactly look like Christmas. Or if she did, she looked like a pretty shopworn and threadbare version. She looked tired. She was a little overweight, and it showed a lot around her face and chin. She had crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes and jowls that sagged. But under that was the something I’d heard on the phone. The Christmas tooth fairy. She looked like a bright shiny angel that had been baked too long, left out in the rain to rust, faded in the sun, and then developed a maze of cracks. But the cracks were a good thing, because they let the bright angel shine through.

  I think I was still experiencing that dreamlike sense of everything.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. Her voice was already deeply familiar to me. I kne
w it would haunt me, even thirty years from now, even if I never heard it again.

  “Sort of. I think.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “No. Not exactly. I just got sort of dizzy. Well, not exactly dizzy, exactly. But something.”

  “You look like you’ve been sick.”

  It struck me that she might be referring to my near baldness, for which she was unprepared. “If you mean the hair, I didn’t have chemo. I shaved it myself. Hard to explain. It was stupid. Really stupid. I see that now.”

  And I really did. Sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, meeting James’s mother for the first time, I could easily see how stupid that had been. I had a flash that a number of previously unseen truths could be revealed to me at any moment. And probably would be.

  It was not a welcome feeling.

  She reached a hand down to help me to my feet.

  I sat on the couch in the front room, my hands wrapped around a cup of hot tea. I was blowing on it as if trying to warm myself. But it wasn’t cold in the room. I wasn’t cold. But I was shivering. Uncontrollably. My teeth were even chattering.

  But I wasn’t cold.

  James’s mother was perched on the end of the couch, watching me as though I might evaporate or explode at any moment, and I was in no position to assure her otherwise. The kid was watching silently, almost invisible in a chair in the corner. I mean, I could see her. Of course. But she was doing her best imitation of an invisible girl. I figured she’d had a lot of practice.

  When I looked at the kid, I got one of those moments of sudden access to a previously unseen truth. In a couple of days, she’d have to tell her own grandmother that she’d shot the woman’s other grandchild. And the phoneless grandmother might be hearing about it for the first time. I hadn’t even thought of that.

  She looked back at me. Met my eyes and whatever they contained. “Do you want me to wait outside?”

  “No. I changed my mind. I think you should be here.”

  I looked back to James’s mother. She seemed to have gathered that this was not a happy little visit.

  She said, “You don’t look the way I expected.”

  “What did you expect?” It was hard to talk with chattering teeth. And it was only getting worse.

  “James used to talk about you all the time. He said you were very confident. And strong and capable and funny.”

  “That was before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before James…did what he did.”

  Her eyes softened even more. As if such a thing were possible. “Oh, honey. Did he mean that much to you? I’m glad. I know he was in love with you. That was so obvious.”

  “I came here to tell you something really hard.” My teeth chattered humiliatingly as I tried to form the words.

  “Yes, I sensed that.”

  “It was my fault.”

  Silence. I squeezed my eyes shut. Trying to figure out which would be worse. Looking or not looking. I stole a quick glance at James’s mother. She didn’t look furious. She didn’t seem ready to scream at me. Instead she was smiling sadly.

  “I used to feel the same way,” she said. “In some ways I suppose I still do. But I’m learning to try to get over it.”

  “No, you don’t understand. It really was my fault. I hurt him. I broke his heart.”

  “Well, then shame on you,” she said. “Shame on you for breaking his heart. We should all be much more careful with each other’s hearts. I broke a boy’s heart once. In college. John.” I watched the kid wince at the sound of the name. “I ran into his best friend almost twenty years later, and it turned out that in some small place in himself, John never entirely got over that. We take the treatment of someone else’s heart altogether too lightly. When someone gives you his heart, it’s a huge responsibility. I hope you’ll do better next time.”

  “If there even is a next time. You don’t seem to understand.”

  “Honey. Let me tell you what you don’t understand. James had been fighting on and off with depression since he was fourteen years old. I had to hospitalize him twice for depression. He refused to take his medication after he left home. And this was his third suicide attempt. And the other two were deadly serious, believe me. Not the old ‘cry for help’ syndrome. He really tried. It was just by luck that he failed.”

  My eyes came up to hers and stayed there for the longest time. “I thought…”

  “I know what you thought. You’re a young girl, and young people think they’re more powerful than they really are. You think you can make people do things. But when you get older you figure out that people only do what they had it in them to do anyway. You could have broken another boy’s heart, and it would have been a terrible thing to do, but he wouldn’t have killed himself. That doesn’t let you off the hook for being careless with James’s heart, or anybody else’s for that matter. We have to take charge of what’s really ours. I’ve spent these months blaming myself, too. If only I’d left his father sooner. His father was just awful to him. Oh, he never hit him or anything. If he had, I’d have been out the door in a second. He just was so impatient with James. He never praised him. He was so short-tempered. Nothing James did was ever good enough.”

  My gut was still trembling, but now I could speak without my teeth knocking together. “He was careless with James’s heart.”

  “And I was, too, by not leaving sooner. There’s plenty of blame to go around, honey, but nobody drove that motorcycle off that cliff except James. It’s so sad, really. I always wanted James to find love, because I thought love was the one thing that might nail him down to this earth. But now I see that was impossible. Because he couldn’t handle even the slightest disappointment. And no one will ever find love that doesn’t contain the slightest disappointment. It doesn’t exist, as far as I know.”

  SIX

  My Pretending Days Are Over

  “I hope you don’t mind if it’s just marinara sauce,” she said. “I’m a vegetarian.”

  “I don’t mind at all.”

  “What about your sister. Will she mind?”

  “Sis?” I called into the dining room. Sis was in there setting the table. She could be polite and helpful when she got it in her head to be. I made a mental note to remind her of that when we got to Grandma’s house. “You’re okay with vegetarian spaghetti, right?”

  “I love spaghetti. Any kind of it.”

  “This is nice of you,” I said. I was leaning with my back against her refrigerator door. Eating from a little dish of mixed nuts and watching her peel cloves of garlic on an old-fashioned chopping block.

  “Well, you have to eat. No wonder you were so shaky. Not eating all day.”

  “I also quit smoking about a week ago.”

  We both pretended that was why. At least, I think she was doing it, too.

  While we pretended, I watched her press the garlic into a little dish of butter she’d softened in the microwave. She sliced a loaf of French bread into thick pieces without cutting all the way through the bottom crust. Then she slathered garlic butter in between the slabs. The leftover butter she spread on top of the loaf, which she then sprinkled with Parmesan cheese. I had personally watched her grate this cheese a few moments earlier.

  As she slid the bread into the oven to bake, I was almost overcome with my own sense of awe. Nobody ever did this at my house. I thought stuff like this only happened in movies and on television. I tried to remember the last time I ate a hot meal that somebody had actually cooked at home, from scratch. But my memory fields came up disturbingly blank. If this was normal, you couldn’t prove it by my background.

  I said, “You know, I’m not saying you’re wrong about what you said before. How young people think they’re more powerful than they really are. But it was weird when you called me a young girl. I don’t feel like one.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at me as the kid came back through for a small stack of plates. Be careful with those, I thought. They looked lovely and
fragile.

  “I don’t imagine you do,” she said. Sizing me up with her eyes. As if measuring the situation and talking about it at exactly the same time. “You sure don’t talk like one. In some ways you don’t act like one, and in other ways you do. How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “That’s a young girl. I expect somewhere down the road you were pressed into service as an adult. Am I right?”

  I had to think about that. I had never really looked at it that way.

  “When my mom left. I guess. My father was there, but not really. You know? You could look over and see him there. On the rare occasions he was home. But even when he was there, he was never really there. Know what I mean?”

  “Oh yes. I do.”

  “So, yeah. I guess I had to be grown-up.”

  “Too bad. You had a right to be a girl and have parents. Everybody needs a mother. Even grown-ups need a mother. I still need a mother, and mine’s been dead for seven years.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If you ever need a mother so badly you can’t stand it, come back and see me again. I have a big vacancy in that department.”

  Amazingly, that’s when I started to cry for real. The kind of crying where you think you’ll never stop but it’s too late and you don’t really care anymore anyway. Not when James washed up on the beach. Not when I told his mother it was my fault. When she offered to loan me some motherhood, I just fell apart.

  She brought me a whole box of tissues.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. And because she was there, I took a huge, shaky breath and tried to pull it all back in again.

  “Stop that,” she said. “Don’t do that.”

  So I tried even harder to stop.

  “Stop trying to hold it back,” she said.

  Oh. She didn’t mean stop crying. She meant stop stopping. “But I hate crying.”

  “Sure you do. Who doesn’t? I hate throwing up. It’s an ugly process. But if I have poison in my belly making me sick I’m not going to try to hold it in. Your body’s trying to tell you something. Probably to stop pretending you don’t need anything. And that you don’t hurt.”