Doomed (14 page)

My arms tugged the book free, and I backed away a step but could not bring myself to take flight. Strewn among the flowers and broken eyeglass lenses was a scarlet butterfly, dead and pressed flat. It was the blaze-colored butterfly of my greatest naturalist dreams. My own species:
Papilio madisonspencerii
. But on closer examination it was neither scarlet nor a butterfly. It was merely a white moth newly saturated in this stranger’s rapidly issuing blood.

The man, shrouded with flowers, resting upon flowers, he lifted a quivering hand toward me. His old lips twitched with a single word, but no voice emerged. His pale lips moved again, this time saying, “Madison?”

Involuntarily the hand holding my makeshift knife relaxed—that longish shard of glass with a handle of tightly wrapped currency notes—and the dagger fell. The room’s hardened walls, scarred with their layers of graffiti, resounded with the fragile ringing sound of something brittle breaking into infinite fragments. Shattered glass sparkled, and the paper money fluttered to land in
the escaping blood. My nose could smell air I didn’t want inside my mouth.

The familiar dented pickup truck parked outside. The World’s Best Dad.

Leonard wants me to pick some flowers for my dad
.

The old lips hissed the words, “Little Maddy?”

My heart overcame my brains, and I inched closer, close enough that I could see the red was soaking his pants and the front of his shirt. He reached a trembling hand, and my hand, now empty of its weapon, met his halfway. Our fingers laced together, his skin feeling icy cold despite the summer heat. The stranger was my mother’s father. He was Nana Minnie’s husband. He was Papadaddy Ben, my grandpa, and his failing lips worked softly, saying, “You have murdered me, you evil child.… Don’t think you won’t burn in hell for this!” He hissed, “Forever are you condemned to the unquenchable lake of fire!”

His bony grip crushed my fingers. And like the repeating song of a finch … like waves lapping at a Galápagos beach, he kept saying, “You are a wicked, despicable girl.…” He rasped, “Your mama and grandma will hate you for breaking their hearts!”

On and on, with his every dying breath my papadaddy cursed me.

Gentle Tweeter,

As an actor my mother hates sitting for still photographers. Fashion models, she says, are able to communicate themselves in a fixed expression, but an actor needs to use the pitch and volume of her voice, the motion of her gestures. Limiting an actor to a still, silent image is a reduction, as flavorless and aroma-free as a perfect snapshot of the most delicious mesquite-roasted, Cajun-rubbed tofu. That’s how absurd this feels: reducing Papadaddy Ben’s death to a blog entry. Mere words. To make you experience the scene fully I’d need to smear his warm dying blood on your hands. Instead of just reading this, you’d have to sit next to him on that concrete paved with dirt until his fingers felt nothing but cold. You’d need to take the biggest chunk surviving from my busted eyeglasses and hold it over his gaped-open lips while you prayed to see the glass fog even a little bit. Not that my parents ever taught me how to pray. Spurred by your gigantic panic, your feet would launch you out through the brown-painted bathroom door, sprinting down pathways across soft steps of dead grass, your soles slapping parking lot until you were waving for somebody’s attention from the edge of freeway traffic. Crying all the way. Hearing nothing except the loud sound of your lungs yelling air in and out. Without thinking twice you’d do jumping jacks
between lanes of air-horning, headlight-flashing trucks and cars, and you’d perform all these verbs without seeing anything clearly. You’d be fluttering your blood-painted hands like red flags for some grown-up to please stop.

You’d need to go back, defeated, and see a warped scratched reflection of yourself in that belt buckle given to him by my mom in an earlier life, from back before she was a movie star. To really appreciate that long afternoon you’d need to see the dried flowers wicking up his blood. No longer faded, now flushed. Those daisies and carnations, reviving decades after they’d been picked, you’d watch them come back to life, blooming again in various shades of red and pink. Tiny vampires.

Even if my nana only boiled water in a pan, she’d scrub the pan before putting it away in the cupboard. That’s my Nana Minnie in a word: fragile. I couldn’t tell her the truth about anything.

Imagine being an expert witness to something you could never, ever tell anyone about. Especially not anyone you loved. I was going to hell. It’s why I know I’m evil. That’s the secret I’ve kept hidden from God.

Gentle Tweeter,

Eventually, the state patrol officers called what happened a hate crime. I wanted to correct them and politely explain that my grandpa Ben’s death was actually more of a hate
accident
. Maybe a
hate misadventure
. But I didn’t dare. Before anybody called the death anything, nobody called at all. My Nana Minnie had to issue the opening volley of tentative telephone inquiries.

The first night my Papadaddy Ben was dead, my nana stayed awake, waiting for his rusted pickup truck to pull into the driveway. I pretended to go to bed but my heart stayed alert, listening to her make restless sounds in the parlor. My thinking stomach ached with the hunger of not knowing my next action. I knew I could fix all her worries but that would involve telling her a truth that would make her feel even worse. Lying in that weird upstate bed without even security cameras watching me, I pictured her pantry and root cellars, where wooden shelves were lined with bottles of pickles that had lived and died before I was ever born. Their labels, like tombstones for stillborn babies with one year telling the whole story. Cucumbers floated in brine, their skin rubbery and see-through, like a homemade circus sideshow. Like biology, these pickles were so translucent you could see the dead seeds of future generations
embedded within them. I imagined all the rows of preserved bottles so that I wouldn’t fall asleep and relive my awful day. I had only to close my eyes to see my papadaddy dragging his bloody pantsless self across the bedroom floor, ranting and shouting that I was evil and damned forever.

This same bed had been my mom’s about a hundred years earlier, only she’d been stuck in it for her whole childhood. Her threadbare, Chinese-slave-labor-made stuffed teddy bears sat around my pillow, smelling like her. Not merely like her Chanel No. 5, but like her real skin, how she smelled when she wasn’t slaving away as a big-time movie star. My fingers half expected to encounter loose strands of her farm-girl hair.

Tomorrow I’d have to pretend to be devastated. If my mother could be a famous actor, I could at least fake sleeping. Later on, I’d fake shocked bereavement. Every day I already had to pretend that I didn’t feel hurt and abandoned, but for tonight, pretending to be asleep seemed like good practice.

In bed, I wondered whether my papadaddy’s dead outline was marked in chalk or masking tape next to the drain where all his blood had trickled away. I pictured a scene like in a movie starring my mom as a plucky private detective hot on the trail of a ruthless serial killer. This imaginary version made me the serial killer, but even being some Jeffrey Dahmer tasted better than being some idiot kid who’d mistakenly bled her grandpa to death by carelessly slicing his amorous wiener against daggers of sharp metal. My mind wandering, too tired to sleep, I wondered whether I could kill again. I worried that I might develop a taste for murder. By killing a larger variety of victims, possibly
I could establish a pattern and look less like a hapless amateur at my eventual prosecution.

The alternative was to swear to tell the truth and look totally ridiculous at my trial for one klutzy half-baked manslaughter. Any little Miss Hottie Hot Pants could tell an erect penis from a regular dried-out dog poop. I imagined my Swiss classmates following my trial live by satellite. Even getting the electric chair would be better than going back to boarding school with everybody giggling behind my back. In Locarno, girls would chase me down hallways, forever menacing me with their fecal-looking candy bars.

Nobody would believe my side of the story. My explanation would be endlessly joked about as the “Dog Doo-doo Defense.”

Every direction I could see to go was just a different nightmare.

My nana’s voice came down the hall, around a couple corners, faint from where it started in the parlor. First came a tickling sound: a fast dash followed by a quiet rattling of tiny clicks. This I recognized as a finger dialing their old rotary telephone. Yes, my grandparents had a telephone, but just barely. It was a phone like the Pilgrims might use to check their voice mails from Plymouth Rock, connected to the wall by a cord you couldn’t unplug. The rattling dial sound went on for seven long times, and my nana’s voice said, “Admitting, please.” I imagined her toying with the curly cord that held the receiver to the ringer part, trapped on the parlor sofa by the short length of that cord. Her voice said, “I’m sorry to bother you …” and it was light, singsong, the tone you might use to ask a stranger on a street corner for the correct time. She said, “My husband
ain’t come home yet, and I wondered if there’d been any accidents reported?”

She waited. We both waited. If I shut my eyes I saw my fingerprints dotted on a dirty toilet behind stretched-tight Day-Glo crime-scene tape. In my fantasy, state patrol detectives in wide-brimmed Canadian Mountie–style hats held walkie-talkies alongside their lantern jaws and barked all-points bulletins. Stripes ran down the outside legs of their uniform pants, leading to polished shoes. I envisioned a forensics expert wearing a white lab coat as he lifted a thumbprint using a piece of clear tape; holding the print between his face and the upstate moon, he studied the whorls, saying, “Our suspect is an eleven-year-old girl, four-foot-six, pudgy, a little dumpy, a real fatty-fatty-two-by-four, with hair that never does what she wants it to.…” He’d nod sagely, reading the finer details. “She’s never even kissed a boy, and no one likes her.”

At that, a police artist standing nearby and sketching wildly on a large pad would say, “Based on the evidence I think I have your killer.” The artist would whip his pad around, and drawn on the white paper would be a portrait of me, my eyeglasses restored to my nose, my freckles, my giant, shiny forehead. Even my dreaded full name would be written across the bottom:
Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer
.

From down the hallway my nana’s voice said, “No, thank you.” She said, “I’ll hold the line.”

Covering my tracks hadn’t occurred to me. It wasn’t until lying there that I thought about the
Beagle
book and my stained shirt. My murder weapon. Moonlight stretched a white rectangle into my bedroom, the shape of it flaring
from my windowsill to almost fill the far wall. Under the moon’s scrutiny I scrambled from the quilts and covers and donned my second-best pair of eyeglasses. I knelt beside the bed and wedged an arm between the mattress and box spring, feeling until my fingers dug out the book wrapped by the incriminating chambray shirt. Even in just moonlight you could see the stains had set in the fabric. They made larger and smaller blob shapes across the front of the shirt, trailing but close to one another, like a cloth map of the Galápagos Islands. In the middle of the
Beagle
book, around Tierra del Fuego, the pages were stuck together. With my fingernails I picked at their edges. Like a forensic investigator lifting a fingerprint, I pinched each of the two center pages and slowly peeled them apart. The paper felt heavy, gummy, and the pages came apart with a sound like a Korean aesthetician waxing my mom’s legs, ripping out all her hairs by the roots. The sound of incredible pain.

From down the hallway my nana’s voice told the telephone, “I see.” She said, “Yes’m.”

My hands spread the book’s pages like you’d part curtains, and spattered there was a psychology test in dark splotches. Made more or less symmetrical by the book’s being shut, the dark parts looked like a butterfly … or a vampire bat. While my eyes were trying to decide, the rest of me saw the white shape down the middle of the book where the two pages met. There, still white and printed with Mr. Darwin’s thoughts, a longish narrow shape pointed straight at me. Under the moonlight the blotchy black parts you could tell would be red in other light. Tomorrow they’d be blood. The ghost shape in the middle, the void where nothing was, that was an outline.

Still kneeling there beside my bed, I heard a breeze that was really my nana gasping, loud. With the air of that same inhale she told the telephone, “Thank you.” She said, “Give me twenty minutes to get there.”

The shape at the heart of my book was my papadaddy’s dead wiener. As heavy footsteps approached down the hallway, I slammed the book shut. In less than two footsteps I buried my stained shirt deep in the dirty-clothes hamper. In another two approaching footsteps I stashed the book under my pillow and leaped back into bed among the Mom-smelling teddy bears. By the last footstep my eyes were closed and I was faking a deep, peaceful slumber when the truth came knocking at my door.

Gentle Tweeter,

That first night my Papadaddy Ben went missing, my nana had to drive us to the hospital to find out something the police refused to reveal over the phone. Something that I already knew. In her car she lit each new cigarette off the last. She dropped the butt of the smoked cigarette out her window, a tiny meteor flaring orange sparks into the dark. The way a falling star foretells a death. Mostly, back then, it felt weird for me to ride in a front seat next to where a chauffeur should go. Thusly, we followed our headlights into the grim future.