The Day I Killed James Read online

  How is that fair?

  THREE

  Bringing Your New Puppy Home

  A young man in love has no soul. Of his own, I mean. No substance. I’m not saying a young woman is any different, but how about if we take things one at a time?

  Suddenly I had all this motivation to fall in love with James. Even a tidy case of lust would have done nicely. Because Randy had someone he felt that way about. It didn’t seem fair.

  But I didn’t even remember James’s last name. And more to the point, I had no idea at all who he was. Every time he came near me he left whoever the hell he was behind in order to be whatever the hell I wanted. And all I wanted was to know who the hell he was.

  So far this was not working out at all.

  Even when he was in the Air Force and wrote me all those letters. I learned everything about the Air Force and nothing about him.

  When I got home from drinking tequila shooters with Frieda, I missed my own door and ended up at James’s. It was an accident. I wonder why I just bothered to say it was an accident. I wonder if that means I’m not sure. Maybe it was one of those Freudian things. Or maybe it was one tequila shooter too many, and I’m investing too much significance in a simple drunken mistake.

  I was fumbling around with my keys, and he came to the door.

  I said, “James. What are you doing in my house?” I feel bad about the fact that I never just say, Hello, James. Ever. It’s always a question, usually about why he’s doing what he’s doing. I would have to do better with that. Sometime. When I was sober.

  He said, “Theresa. Wow. We better get you home.”

  And I guess we got me home, because that’s where I woke up. But to back up again for a minute…

  When we got me to my door, I was trying too hard. I wanted it to be true, what I told Randy about him. I wanted James to be my special exciting somebody new. Otherwise Randy had one of those and I had nothing. So I guess I was pushing at it.

  I threw myself at him, literally. But I doubt he knew that’s what it was. Fell into his arms and held him and felt his warmth and said to myself, There. I feel it. It’s right there. Really. I’m not making it up.

  I was making it up. It was just like hugging my brother. I mean, if I’d had a brother.

  I kissed his cheek and said, “You’re sweet, James. Really. I appreciate you.”

  Meanwhile I was thinking, If I open the door and Randy’s not there, I’ll die. If he doesn’t come over tonight, if I know he’s with her, I’ll drop dead on the spot.

  James waited while I opened the door.

  Randy wasn’t there.

  James said several more things to me, and I might have even said a few things back, but I’m not sure. I don’t remember. I was busy dying.

  When I woke up the next morning, James was in the driveway, under my car. He had it up on jack stands, and all I could see was a mess of tools and his legs. But it had to be James. Who else would spontaneously perform an automotive repair for me?

  I pulled on jeans and a sweater and took my coffee out to the driveway. I could have avoided all this by pulling my car into the garage last night. But it was a rough night, and the idea of getting out and opening the garage door had been too much for me. Actually, just making it home had been a stroke of luck. Good thing Frieda lived close.

  James had offered to install an automatic garage door opener. Many times. I had yet to break down on that one.

  I kicked his Nike lightly.

  He said, “Good morning.” Without bothering to slide out.

  I said, “James, I know I ask this a lot. But what are you doing?”

  He said, “Putting a new pan gasket on your transmission. You said I could. Remember?”

  “I said that?”

  “Last night. You really don’t remember?”

  “I was having a bad night.”

  Amen to that.

  He knew. He seemed to remember.

  He said, “I had to help you find your front door. I asked again about fixing your car. You said no. I said what harm could it do? You said it pisses Randy off. Then you said, ‘Oh yeah. That’s right. I don’t have to worry about that anymore.’”

  I should have worn my sunglasses. Out there in the bright old world. The inside of my head was not an attractive landscape, and shedding light on the subject hardly helped.

  James grabbed the bumper and slid out from under my car, wiping his hands on a shop rag. Where did he get a shop rag? Not at my house. He must’ve brought one from home.

  He said, “Did you break up with him?”

  It’s possible that he was trying not to sound hopeful. But if so it wasn’t working. I didn’t really want to talk about it. But it seemed easier to talk about it than talk my way out of it.

  I said something fairly noncommittal.

  I said, “Hard to say. Call it the first draft of a breakup. Never know what’ll happen in the revisions.”

  I was still not a hundred percent convinced that all of it was real. Any of it, for that matter.

  I was ready to stop talking. I was ready to go inside. I was ready to die.

  Hadn’t I meant to do that last night? When will I ever get that right?

  James said, “Your car will be ready to go in an hour or two.”

  I said, “Then it’s hours ahead of me.”

  And I went back to bed.

  Sometime later I heard his motorcycle fire up and fade away down the block. Which I took to mean my car must be ready. Which made one of us. Damned if there was any place I wanted to be.

  Actually, I figured he’d gone to work. Actually, it was Saturday, but at the moment I was not in clear focus about that. Actually, if it had been a working day for James it would have been a school day for me. Clearly I was not in clear focus about a lot of things.

  A few hours later he came home. He’d had the gas tank on his motorcycle repainted. It was now stark white, with a red heart top center, with a blue banner across it, on which was painted my name.

  Journal Entry _________________________

  Day I’m writing this: Twenty-four days after “The Day”

  Day I’m writing about: Before “The Day”

  Turns out there were other things I’m not good at. Probably had been all along. Could I really have been that blind to myself all those years? Or did circumstances conspire to help me recognize my own well-hidden shortcomings?

  I hate it when that happens.

  Either way.

  I went to school as usual after the shark attack. Only not as usual. Because I wasn’t Randy’s girlfriend anymore. As best I could figure, I wasn’t.

  Now, I’d been other guys’ girlfriend. And before being, and in between being, I knew who I was. All by myself and not contingent on my status in their lives. And even while I was other guys’ girlfriend, I was pretty much Theresa and that was okay. If memory serves.

  But it was different somehow with Randy. Like I thought there would always be me and Randy, so now I had to start all my thinking over again. Like now I could be wrong about anything. Everything. But I’m getting off track. That wasn’t my big discovery.

  I discovered I’m very bad at letting people see me hurting.

  Everyone knew about Rachel Lindstrom. Everyone. Paris Hilton could do something stupid and get less press. My brutal and senseless murder might have made fewer waves.

  I guess we’d been sort of an “it” couple. Which I’m not entirely sure I knew. Or noticed. Maybe I’d have known it if I’d stopped to think about it, but I never had. I’d had no reason to look at us from the outside. Who does that, anyway?

  Reaction was mixed.

  A couple of the unpopular girls, who never seemed to notice that I smiled at them every chance I got, smirked.

  My friends were very supportive. Every single one of them. One by one, as the day painfully progressed, they ran to my aid and said one thing or another that was exactly what I did not want or need to hear.

  Shanni said, “He’s a jerk
.” I still didn’t really think he was. Or didn’t want to, anyway.

  The Guyfriends, Harry and Bobby, approached me in the cafeteria like a two-man comedy team. Intertwined in their condolences. Said, “We always thought you were too good for him.” They seemed to mean it sincerely. I wanted to ask, Too good how? Why? In what way was I so good? I needed to hear that. But I didn’t ask.

  Heather said, “Oh. I heard about Randy and Rachel.” In the voice one would use to say, Oh. I heard about your whole family being killed in that car crash. “You poor thing.” I wanted to tell her she was ruining my careful system of denial regarding R. and R. But saying so would have ruined it just as surely.

  Ann pulled me aside in gym class and asked gravely, “Are you okay?” I was tempted to say, I might be, if everyone could just stop asking me if I am. But no point lashing out at those who are trying to help you. However ineffectively.

  Johnna said, “You give ’em everything and they cut your heart out. Every time.” She was going through her own breakup, so at least I could console myself in knowing that she was really offering bad condolences to herself. Not me.

  Christie just looked over her shoulder and smiled at me sadly in history. That, oddly enough, was the one that cut through the fog. Made me realize how bad I am at hurting in public.

  Paulette was out sick that week, so I’ll never know how she would have tormented me if she’d been healthier and more present.

  To each one of them, I said almost exactly the same thing: “No worries. None at all. Just wait till you see the twenty-two-year-old buff hunk I’m planning to bring to Frieda’s party. You’ll die.”

  Seriously. It was pathetic.

  It was also my one-way ticket into something I knew better than to do.

  Journal Entry _________________________

  Day I’m writing this: Twenty-five days after “The Day”

  Day I’m writing about: Before “The Day”

  Letting go is not a specialty of mine. In fact, it seems to be something I was born with. Or born without, I should say. Just a run-of-the-mill birth defect.

  My mother used to like to tell a story. Before she ran off to Europe to rediscover herself without us. Or whatever the hell she did. It’s hard to judge by my father’s version of events. And, also, she may still like to tell this story. For all I know. Wherever she is. But I wouldn’t hear it anymore, even if she did. Because of that whole Atlantic Ocean thing.

  I think she doesn’t think or talk about us at all now. But maybe I’m just being bitter. People say I’m bitter about her. I try not to be. But it’s tricky.

  Anyway, she used to tell this story of taking me to see Alice in Wonderland. On the way home in the car I was all twisted because they never did say why a raven is like a writing desk. I was still twisted the next day. And the following week.

  When I was about thirteen it came up again, more or less out of nowhere. I still wanted to know why a raven is like a writing desk. I mean, how can you open a can of worms like that one and then just walk away?

  My mother said, “Let it go, Theresa. Let it go.”

  Most advice comes without instructions.

  Two days after I broke up with Randy, James took me for a ride on his motorcycle.

  On the way up the coast together, I remembered that I didn’t even remember James’s last name. I mean, I must have known it at one time, because I wrote to him while he was in the Air Force. Not often, but I did. But in that moment it was gone from my head.

  But we were riding up on his bike, the roar of the engine all around us and the wind whipping past our helmets, and it just didn’t seem like the time to ask.

  He stuck his arm straight out on the cliff side. Pointing at something. I realized too late it was a pointing thing. Never saw what he saw.

  We got off and took a break in Ragged Point. Got two cups of coffee and leaned on the bike and drank them.

  I said, “I know how terrible this is going to sound, and I’m really sorry. Really I am. But I have this total mental block on your last name. I know it. It’s not that I don’t know it. It’s just one of those mental blocks. You know them, right? You know how they are.”

  I may have gone on even longer than that.

  I got the sense he was just waiting patiently for me to shut up so he could talk.

  He was a patient guy, James. Another thing we didn’t have in common.

  He said, “Stewart.”

  I said, “James Stewart?” Because, really. James Stewart? How could I have forgotten that?

  He said, “Please don’t make any of the obvious jokes. I’ve heard them all.”

  I said, “Deal.” Then before I tossed my empty cup, I said, “What were you pointing at back there?”

  He said, “A whale. Breaching.”

  I said, “There was a whale out there?”

  He said, “There was.”

  I’d been so busy stressing about Randy and his new girlfriend, I’d forgotten to notice there was even an ocean out there. And, at least on this particular occasion, that is how I missed the whale.

  Journal Entry _________________________

  Day I’m writing this: Twenty-six days after “The Day”

  Day I’m writing about: The morning after “The Day”

  The morning after I killed him, all the way up the coast I tried to explain that I didn’t know enough about James. To the Highway Patrol guys, I mean.

  I said, “He was my neighbor. But I don’t even know if he had family or who they might be.”

  I said, “He lived next door to me for four years, but I didn’t pay enough attention. He was kind of older. I was just a little girl. I mean, not a little girl, but…too little for him. I mean, most of that time. I was. Too young for him. I’m not even eighteen for three more days. And he was twenty-two.”

  I said, “It was a first date sort of a thing.”

  But when he left the party and never ended up anywhere, I’d been the one to phone it in. So now I owned him. Somebody had to own a missing person. All of a sudden we belonged to each other.

  I said, “How much farther do we have to drive?”

  In a weird regression to childhood, I thought, Are we there yet?

  The guy said, “It’s near Ragged Point.”

  By the time we arrived at the scene, a crane had been brought down from Caltrans in Gorda. They were pulling James’s bike back up from the rocks below, onto the road. More or less in one piece, but not looking much like a motorcycle.

  They set it down in the dirt on the cliff side of the road. All the officers looked at me. Stared at me and waited.

  “Yes,” I said. “That is my friend James Stewart’s motorcycle.” As I was talking, I was marveling at the fact that I was talking. How was I doing that? Was I really doing that? I couldn’t feel it. It sounded like me, but I didn’t really feel that. Or anything else, really. Then I heard myself say, “Am I done here now? I mean, can I go?”

  I know that sounded callous. I didn’t mean it to. I swear.

  It was actually a terrified moment of self-defense. What I meant was, Am I in custody? Or am I free? And that’s a very important question. Even at a time like that.

  A sheriff’s deputy was studying the tire tracks. He said there had been no braking and no skid.

  “Meaning what, exactly?” I said, though he clearly had not been talking to me.

  “Meaning he didn’t spin out, and he never went for his brakes.”

  I said, “Maybe the bike went over without him.”

  This was my first alternative theory. He had looked down at the bike and hated it for bearing my name. So he pushed it off in anger and walked home without it.

  Yeah. That could happen.

  He said, “Not a chance.”

  I said, “But he’s not here anywhere. Right?”

  “It’s a big ocean, ma’am.”

  I’m not used to being a ma’am. I don’t think I make a very good ma’am. Don’t you have to be years older than me to be a
ma’am?

  I said, “How can you be so sure he didn’t push it off?”

  He said, “He couldn’t push it from the road. It’s too far. It’d just stop and fall over.”

  “Walked it to the edge and pushed it.”

  Alternative theories were important. He didn’t get that.

  “Then there would have been footprints.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Has he been depressed lately that you know of?”

  “You never know what someone else is feeling.”

  Which is true. In the most generic sense. I hardly knew James. Maybe he liked getting his heart torn out, thrown on the ground, and stomped on. You never know.

  The gas tank was such a mangled mess you couldn’t read my name anymore. Thank God. So they never had to know I killed somebody who loved me that much.

  FOUR

  Okay, So It’s Weird

  James was just getting in from work when I caught him. In fact, he was still sitting on his motorcycle in the driveway. Until he cut the motor, he didn’t seem to hear me calling him. Then, when he did, he looked surprised. More than surprised, actually. Stunned.

  I thought, Is that so weird? That I should go over and talk to him?

  But then I knew the answer. Yes. It’s very weird.

  Because I never had before. Never. Not once, in four years. Well, two. I couldn’t very well have gone over and talked to him while he was in the Air Force.

  I suppose I could have written to him more than twice.

  Anyway, my point is that he always sought me out. Always. I never called to him. I never said, Wait. James. Don’t go away. Until now, when I needed something.

  It’s always about you, isn’t it? That’s actually what went through my head at that moment. I pushed those words away again. After all, they were Randy’s. It was something Randy had said about me once, in an angry moment.

  Of course, I was sure it wasn’t true. Now I’m not sure of anything.