The Day I Killed James Read online

  If I hadn’t been crying already, that would have done the job, too.

  We sat at the table, in front of our vegetarian spaghetti and garlic bread. Observing a spontaneous moment of silence. I knew the kid was hungry. Because our eating habits lately had been atrocious. But she waited and didn’t touch her fork. Just watched to see when someone else would.

  I wondered who had taught her to be civilized.

  James’s mother said, “Do you say grace at your house?” Still thinking, I guess, that we came from the same house.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “I don’t believe in God,” the kid said. Every time she said it, it sounded more and more like whistling in the graveyard.

  “I usually like to say a little Buddhist prayer. You might like it, because it’s really not so much about a traditional God idea.”

  “I like Buddhism,” the kid said.

  “You know something about Buddhism?” I said.

  “Well. I think I’d like it.”

  “Well, then I’ll say it,” James’s mother said. “This food is the gift of the whole Universe. Each morsel is a sacrifice of life. May I be worthy to receive it. May the energy in this food give me the strength to transform my unwholesome qualities into wholesome ones. I am grateful for this food. May I realize the Path of Awakening, for the sake of all beings.” Silence. “Namaste.”

  “Amen,” the little atheist said.

  James’s mother picked up her fork and we both followed suit.

  It only took about ten bites before I felt the food changing everything inside me. The jangling feeling in my stomach and chest began to ease up. My brain began slowing down. I was weirdly exhausted from the crying, and the more I ate, the more I lost that adrenaline-rush energy and began to feel naplike. Sleepy. Grounded.

  Like I wasn’t dreaming.

  James’s mother said, “I hope you’re not going to try to push on tonight. You look like you need a good sleep.”

  “No, I think we’ll need to stop over another night.” I pictured the drab little motel—or one just like it—in the empty space behind my eyes.

  “Good. I’ve got an inflatable mattress. I’ll put that in James’s old room, and then you should both be pretty comfortable.”

  I swallowed hard and was momentarily overcome by this entirely new thought. “I know this sounds really stupid, but it only just now occurred to me that James used to live in this house. I’m not sure why. Like I was thinking of it as a place you moved to after he left home or something.”

  “No, we moved here when I left his father. James lived here for five years.”

  We ate in silence until the kid said, “This is really good.”

  “It really is,” I said. Trying to remember how long I’d been living on fast food, power bars, and trail mix. “Thank you. For everything.”

  “I’m glad you two came to visit,” she said. “I think it’s the things we don’t talk about that make us old before our time.”

  We followed her up one flight of stairs, and she stopped briefly, her hand on the knob of a closed door. She turned to see that we were both right behind her.

  Then she opened the door.

  The walls of James’s room were blue. A deep, rich blue. The bed was a small wood-framed single with a soccer-themed bedspread. One whole wall was lined with metal shelves covered with trophies. Some were cup-shaped, others shaped like a soccer player or ball, others like a hockey stick or puck. On the dresser was a photo of James, looking about my age or a little younger, in his soccer uniform. One foot on the ball.

  “I’ll go get the blow-up mattress,” she said.

  While she was gone, the kid and I both looked around. At what few books he’d abandoned, his soccer posters. The room was missing all the miscellaneous items that clutter a room someone currently lives in. It was like a skeleton of what he had chosen to leave behind. I picked up the photo and held it in my hands. James’s hair was long and shaggy in the picture. I had never seen him like that. His smile seemed wide and natural. And yet, looking at both the eyes and the smile, I could still see it. Or maybe I was reading something in. No. I wasn’t. I could see it. A little cloud of darkness that the smile couldn’t quite cover.

  A question was forming in my head, but I didn’t quite have it in words yet. I looked up to see James’s mother. Holding the folded, deflated mattress. Watching me hold the photo.

  “So James left home when he was eighteen, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So there’s something I don’t get.” She didn’t ask. Just waited. I still didn’t quite have it together in my head. I looked at the picture again. “So usually when a kid dies, people keep his room just exactly the way it was. Like a shrine, you know? But usually when he just leaves home, they turn it into a sewing room or something.”

  I could almost hear and feel the kid standing behind me, frozen in her respect for the moment.

  “I guess,” James’s mother said, “if I were to be perfectly honest…I guess part of me always knew how the story was going to end.”

  I was pulling off my shirt when I heard the kid pad back across the hall from the bathroom. The door opened. She popped in. I was standing there in just jeans and a bra.

  “Oh. Sorry,” she said. Her eyes firmly glued to the tattoo.

  “It’s okay. Whatever.” I pressed my eyes open and shut a few times. They were sore from crying. As if someone had sandpapered the edges of my eyelids.

  I pulled on my big oversize T-shirt pajamas and pulled my bra out from under it, one arm at a time. Slid my jeans out from underneath and then climbed into bed. I stared at the picture of James on the soccer field until the kid turned out the light.

  “I brushed my teeth,” she said.

  “Good deal.”

  “Some day, huh?”

  “Yeah. Some day.”

  “Are you gonna always keep the tattoo?”

  “Well, tattoos are like that. They’re pretty much designed for keeping.”

  “You can have a tattoo removed.”

  “I’m not going to have it removed.” She didn’t ask why. But I felt I needed to say why anyway. “I just figure somebody needs to remember him. I just think everybody should have at least one person—besides their mother—who always remembers them. So I guess I’ll be James’s one person.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Think so?”

  “Yeah.”

  Long silence. Long enough that I thought she might have gone to sleep. Except there was no snoring. “You want to talk about what happened with John?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I’m sure.” Another long silence. I was trying to make out the shape of the photo on the dresser in the dark. “I miss John,” she said. “Do you miss James?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “Okay. Good night, then.”

  “Good night.”

  If she snored that night, I never heard. I must’ve slept through it. I think I could’ve slept through just about anything.

  I hadn’t had much experience with emotion. I had no idea how draining it could be.

  SEVEN

  Sudden Turns

  “I think we’re lost again,” I said.

  “No, it’s this way. I know it is.”

  “Then why did we just pass a sign that said we’re leaving Bellingham?”

  “Because she’s not right inside the city. That’s all. She’s just a little closer to Canada.”

  “Wait. How much closer to Canada?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then how do you know we didn’t pass it?”

  “It’s this way. I know it is. I recognize this road.”

  “Which is exactly what you said the last three times just before we figured out we were lost.” We had driven straight through the night. Now it was light, but I was dead tired and needing to take a break.

  “This time I’m sure.”

  “Look, we mig
ht want to—”

  “There it is!”

  I looked but saw nothing unusual. Yet another length of tree-lined road, orange and gold leaves skittering across it in the wind. “Where?”

  “That’s her fish mailbox. I’d know it anywhere. Stop! You’re passing it.”

  I hit the brake. Put the car in reverse. Not a soul on this road with us. Not ahead, not behind. Not anywhere.

  We pulled level with the fish mailbox. It didn’t just have fish painted on it, as I had been imagining. It was actually shaped like a fish. It had one red wooden fin that could be raised as a mail flag. Under the fin it said, in clean white fluorescent stick-on letters, WEISS.

  “I guess we’re here,” I said.

  I turned into the hard-packed dirt driveway and was surprised to drive for nearly half a mile without seeing a house.

  “She likes to live far away from people,” the kid said.

  “I gathered that.” I was also gathering that it could work against us. But of course I didn’t say so.

  We eased around a final bend and there it all was. A house. And a grandmother. The house was wood, freshly painted. Light blue, with white trim and white shutters. The grandmother was sweeping off the front porch. She wore an old-fashioned housedress and sneakers. And an apron. A cigarette dangled from her lips as she swept.

  Her eyes came up to meet us, and my heart fell. She glared. Suspicious. Hostile. I was reminded of the old movies where the farmer runs to fetch his shotgun the minute some unwelcome visitor drives up.

  As we stepped out of the car, she came toward us, down the first two porch steps, shading her eyes from the sun. We stood at the bottom of the steps, looking up at her. No one said anything for a long time. Well, half a minute. But it felt long.

  The grandmother spoke first. “You’re Cathy.” She had a husky voice. Scratchy, like car tires crunching over gravel.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the kid said.

  “You come to tell me what happened with John. But I know already. I know all about that. Your mom, she wrote me a letter. Tried to make it sound like it was all your fault. Bull, I say. You don’t give a kid a gun and tell her, Watch the place. You do, you’re to blame whatever happens then on. That mother of yours never was any good.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Nice of you to come tell me, anyway. You come a long way?”

  “We came from California,” I said.

  “Had breakfast?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. It was contagious. Also, I found her a little intimidating.

  “Least I can do is feed you a good breakfast before you head back.”

  She turned and walked up the porch steps again, motioning us to follow.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but the kid kicked my foot. “What?” I whispered.

  “Don’t.”

  “We have to ask her. We came all this way.”

  “She’ll say no.”

  “We still have to try.”

  We followed her into the kitchen, through a living room choked with overstuffed furniture and hand-knit afghans and a spinning wheel and a sewing machine and an old-fashioned jukebox and an ancient upright piano and dozens of other things I had no time to inventory with my eyes.

  “I’ll put on coffee,” she said, seating us at her old Formica kitchen table. “You drink coffee?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the kid and I said in exact unison.

  “I was talking to her. You’re too young,” she said, pointing at the kid with the fingers that still held the cigarette. The ash was nearly an inch long and looked ready to fall off at any time.

  “Mrs. Weiss,” I said. At the corner of my eye I saw the kid tighten up all over. “We didn’t just come here to tell you about John. There’s more to the visit than that.”

  She rattled through the contents of a kitchen cupboard until she found coffee filters. “State it, then,” she said without turning to look at me.

  “Cathy’s mother threw her out.”

  “That woman never was any good.”

  “She’s got no place to go.”

  She turned around then. Really focused on me for the first time. I watched it dawn on her. What was happening. Why we were really here. She looked at me through narrow eyes, then looked at the kid. Then back at me.

  “You’re the only blood family she’s got,” I said.

  “Well, that’s true enough. But I don’t know. I’m not as young as I used to be. And coming from that mother of hers…”

  “She can be a good kid,” I said. The kid’s eyes came up to me, but I couldn’t really take the time to look back. “I know her pretty well now. She can be a nice kid. It’s almost like nobody ever gave her a reason to be.”

  “So what you’re saying is, she can be good…but mostly she’s not.”

  I realized we were talking about her as if she weren’t here, but I couldn’t think what to do about that. I glanced over at her. She was staring at the tabletop. Running the tip of her finger along the patterns.

  “What I’m saying is…she doesn’t need much. She’s not a baby. She’s been raising herself for a long time now. She needs a roof over her head and food and somebody to sign her up for school now that it’s fall. She can be a help to you, too. And I think she will. I really think she’ll be a good girl if you take her in.”

  “And what makes you so sure she’ll turn over a new leaf all of a sudden?”

  “That’s easy. You’re her last hope. No Plan B. The best motivator there is.”

  Grandma disappeared briefly into a little pantry area by the back door. Came back holding a small wire basket with a handle. She handed this to the kid. “Cathy, you run out back to the henhouse and gather up half a dozen eggs.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  When she was well down the back steps and gone, the grandmother turned to face me, hands on hips. But by then her cigarette was burned down to the filter, so she ran it under water at the kitchen sink and threw it into a lined plastic trash bin.

  I was waiting for her to say no.

  “Lord,” she said. “Life turns on a dime, don’t you think? Woke up this morning thinking I’d spend the day picking apples and putting apple butter up in Ball jars. You wake up and you think you know just how your life’s gonna go. Nice and simple. Turns out the world got a different idea for you. Like I always say, man plans, God laughs.”

  “Does this mean you’ll take her?”

  “Blood family, I guess I at least gotta try. But she has to be good.”

  “I will be,” the kid said.

  We both looked up to see Cathy standing in the back doorway. Panting. Holding a basket half full of eggs.

  “That was quick,” Grandma said.

  “I’ll be good. I can help out around here. I will. Gimme a chance.”

  “Okay, a chance. Everybody ought to get a chance. But I got rules here.”

  “That’s okay. Rules are okay.”

  Grandma lifted the basket of eggs out of her hands. “Where’s your stuff, girl? You got a suitcase in her car?”

  The kid didn’t answer, so I answered for her. “Her mother threw her out with just the clothes on her back.”

  “That woman never was any good.”

  “But if you want,” I said, “when I get back home…I’ll be getting a job, and I could send some money along. So she can get some clothes and stuff.”

  “No thanks. Nice offer, but we’ll make do. I can sew. And I’ll take her down to the church thrift store. Little goes a long way there.”

  The kid sat back down at the table with me. We watched her grandmother breaking eggs into a hot skillet. She hadn’t asked how we wanted them. I guess it was more a question of how she wanted to cook them.

  The kid spoke up suddenly, surprising both of us. And maybe even herself. “Do I have to go to church?”

  A long silence.

  “Nope. I don’t suppose. I been going by myself for a long time. Guess I can go by myself just as well now.”

  �
�Good. Because I’m a Buddhist.”

  “A Buddhist! Oh Lord. I forgot. You’re from California. Well, I guess as long as you believe in something I don’t guess I got the right to say what. Not that you could prove it by looking around at the world, but I guess people can get along in spite of their religious differences. You want apple butter on your toast?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” we both said, once again in perfect unison.

  “She blames herself for what happened,” I told Mrs. Weiss.

  We were out on the front porch. She was sitting on the porch swing, rocking and knitting. I was perched on the railing, the hot sun on my back.

  Cathy was out back proving her worth by picking the apples that her grandmother would put up in Ball jars later in the day.

  “We’re always hardest on ourselves,” she said.

  “Right now I can’t even get her to talk about it.”

  “I’ll try and make sure she doesn’t punish herself.”

  “You can’t stop her,” I said. “I’m not even sure you should try. I know it sounds weird. But I sort of have this theory.” But I’d never said it out loud before. In fact, I’d never even put it together in this order in my head. I would have to organize these thoughts as I went along. “I wasn’t there when the police questioned her. But she’s here. So they must’ve ruled it accidental.”

  “They did. As well they should have, don’t you think?”

  “Well, yeah. Of course. From their point of view, of course it was an accident. But from hers, it would almost have been better if they’d decided to punish her. Because then she wouldn’t have to punish herself. And like you said, we’re always hardest on ourselves. I mean, if they’d ruled that there was some kind of negligence or something. Manslaughter. They’d have locked her up for a few years. But then when she got out, she could say, Hey, I paid my debt to society. I’m off the hook. It’s over. But when we punish ourselves, there’s nobody to let us out and tell us we’re free now. It’s hard to know when to stop. So instead of telling her not to blame herself…maybe you could just help her see when it’s time to stop.”

  She looked up from her knitting for the first time. Leveled me with a hard look. “Sounds like you know a thing or two about it.”