Put Me Back Together (33 page)

I moved to his bed and sat down on the worn flannel cover, pulling my legs up underneath me. Lucas stood staring at me for a moment before following suit. He sat down gingerly, almost warily. In that moment, watching him, I really felt as though I’d already lost him completely. I wasn’t sure if it would make it easier or harder for me to tell him everything, but I knew it didn’t really matter. There was no going back now.

I cleared my throat and waited until he was really looking at me to begin. This was the kind of conversation that needed everyone’s full attention.

“Have you ever heard of the Kindergarten Killer?” I asked.

Lucas frowned slightly. “Sure, everyone has,” he said. “The kid who murdered Tommy Wesley. The most horrific homicide in recent history, if you believe the papers. It’s been all over the news, because he just got out. Why are you—” I held up my hand to stop the question I knew he would ask. We’d never get anywhere if we did it this way. I just had to tell the story and let him hear it.

“I was thirteen when that happened,” I said. “He lived in my neighbourhood. The media frenzy was unbelievable. Even when they don’t publish your name they find you anyway—nobody ever mentions that. His parents barricaded themselves inside their house. The parents of the dead boy, the Wesleys, were crying in the papers, on the news, on their lawn. They lived on my street.

“Emily didn’t understand why I reacted the way I did. Why I changed into this sullen, silent creature that roamed the house at night because I couldn’t sleep and stopped caring about anything, stopped living. I couldn’t face the Wesleys, even though they wanted to see me, to comfort me. They thought I was on their side, but I knew better. I knew more about Tommy Wesley’s death than anyone.”

“What do you mean?” Lucas said, his face clouded with confusion now instead of anger. “How could you know more than them about their own son’s death?”

I raised my chin. “Because it was my idea,” I said.

20

“I met Brandon at the park,” I went on, looking out the window now. I couldn’t look at Lucas anymore. “That’s important. We didn’t go to the same school. The park near my house was this huge, wild tangle of nature, with a forest and hiking trails. I used to go into the woods to sketch on these huge boulders. That’s where I met him. He liked to smoke there and I thought he was cool because he smoked for real. You know, not like a kid pretending to smoke. He smoked like he knew what he was doing, like a grown up. Remembering it now it seems absurd, but I was so impressed with him at first, even though he was a year younger than me. He never said much, which was so different from all the boys at my school. He had these intense dark eyes. And he was cute. He called me Katie Kat. We met up every day for a week and a half and I called him my boyfriend, in my head anyway. A week and a half. That’s all it took.

“I didn’t tell Emily about him, which I was really glad about later. It was the first thing I’d ever kept from her.” My mind reeled as I said this, because I’d lied to her so constantly every day since. “I didn’t know it until…after, but Brandon never told anyone, either. If what happened next hadn’t happened, Brandon Tomko would probably be erased from my memory by now. There wasn’t much to our relationship, really. We never even kissed. But what happened did happen, so Brandon and those days we spent together in the woods are now and forever a major event in my life that I can’t ever escape.”

My voice quavered and I felt Lucas’s hand cover mine. His thumb smoothed the skin on the back of my hand and I knew that I’d been wrong. Whatever might happen in the next little while, I hadn’t lost him yet. He was still here with me. It gave me the strength to go on.

“Tommy Wesley was five and Ricky Wesley was nine. I was their babysitter. It was my first babysitting job. I’d watch them two or three times a week after school while their mother was taking a class. Copywriting, I think. I wasn’t a very good babysitter. Mostly I’d just let them watch TV for three hours straight, which was completely against the rules. Tommy would sometimes talk me into playing trains with him. He adored trains. If he hooked up all the toy trains he had—which he did once—it made one gigantic train that stretched all the way from the kitchen to his bedroom door. He was a cute kid, very cuddly. He still had that baby sweetness. It was Ricky that was the problem.”

“I don’t remember ever reading about a brother,” Lucas said, frowning, pulling me out of my story for a moment.

“Yes, you do,” I replied, my eyes on the sycamore across the street. “At the funeral he tried to climb into the coffin to be with his brother and an uncle had to drag him away, screaming.”

The papers had printed that detail over and over the week of the funeral. I knew Lucas would remember it. Everyone did. The dead child, the inconsolable brother, the sobbing parents, the nation in mourning.

The tears that I had wrought.

“Oh, right,” Lucas said grimly, remembering. “Keep going.” He squeezed my hand.

“Ricky hated me,” I said. “He didn’t want a babysitter. He thought he was old enough to stay on his own. Remember, I was only four years older than him. He would spend the afternoons doing anything he could to get rid of me. He broke a vase and said I did it. He played too rough with his brother, and when I pulled him off he accused me of abusing him. He poured soup into my backpack. Basically he acted like a total brat. By the time I’d been their sitter for a month, I hated him, too.”

“On the day I regret the most, the day that started it all, I met Brandon in the park when I was done babysitting. It was already getting dark, but I knew he would be there. I was excited to see him, because usually I could never think of what to say to him. I didn’t know how to talk to boys. But on that day I had plenty to say. And I remember word for word how I started. I said, ‘I want to kill Ricky Wesley.’ Then Brandon put out his cigarette and said, ‘Tell me.’”

I felt the tears building behind my eyes, threatening to fall, but it was way too early to start crying. There was so much more to go. I sucked in a shuddering breath and felt Lucas’s hand on my back, his legs pressing against mine. When I’d started the story he’d been sitting all the way on the other side of the bed, but now he was right in front of me. I wanted to lean into him, but I didn’t. I needed to hold myself up as I told this story. I needed to be strong.

“I ranted for a long time. About how much I hated Ricky, what a brat he was, how mean he was for no reason. That day he’d slammed a door and my finger had gotten caught. I was sure he’d done it on purpose. I used all the most vicious words I could think of to describe him, mostly because I thought Brandon would be impressed if I cursed. I never even mentioned Tommy. I figured Brandon wouldn’t want to hear about the sweet five year old I liked to hang out with after school. The evil one was a lot more interesting. But this omission would turn out to be the biggest mistake of my life. It meant that in Brandon’s mind I only babysat one kid. One kid I wanted dead.

“After about an hour of cursing Ricky I started to lose steam, and that was when Brandon took over. He wanted to know how I would kill him. Would I set him on fire? Hang him in the closet? Chop off his head? In retrospect the excitement in his eyes should have set off warning bells, but…I was the one who’d brought it up. I thought he was excited by my hatred, my passion. I thought he was interested in me, when really…” I bit my lip.

When really it was the kill that turned him on.

“Brandon thought sawing off his fingers one by one would be fitting, followed by his arms and legs and head. But I disagreed. I said—” I choked on the words. My head fell into my hands as the first tears begin to fall and I knew I’d never be able to stop them now. I felt Lucas trying to pull me toward him, but I pushed his arms away and turned to face him. He deserved to look me in the face when I said this. “I said I’d use a knife if I had a choice. I’d cut him right down the middle, gut him like a fish, so I could see the evil lurking inside.”

I saw the look of recognition on Luca’s face as he recalled the phrase “gutted like a fish.” The papers hadn’t spared the details for the Wesleys’ sake. That exact phrase had been used in every article about the murder as though the gruesome nature of the crime would convince the world of something, as though describing every bloody detail had some purpose beyond torturing me. Though if it did, I could never figure out what it was.

Vaguely I heard Lucas saying something about how I’d been just a kid. Kids said all kinds of horrible things. I hadn’t really meant it. But I wasn’t listening. The rest of the story tumbled out of me in a monotone, as though I were reading from the script of a horror movie in which I was the star.

“The next afternoon I was getting Tommy ready to go to the playground when Brandon showed up at the back door with the knife in his hand. It was a switchblade, still folded closed. I remember wanting to hold it because I’d never seen one before and I wanted to see how it opened. I didn’t understand what was happening yet. He told Tommy he’d push him on the swings, which was enough to make the kid fall in love with him. Then he leaned in and said in my ear, ‘Today’s the day we take care of business,’ and I knew something wasn’t quite right.

“That’s when I should have grabbed Tommy and run. I should have screamed my head off. But I just couldn’t comprehend what he meant. Take care of what business? The murdering business? Ricky wasn’t even there that day—he was sleeping over at a friend’s house. I assumed Brandon was kidding and that we’d just take Tommy to the park and watch him play. I assumed it was a joke because he was my boyfriend and that meant he knew me. He knew I didn’t really want to kill Ricky, didn’t he?

“But then, when we reached the woods, Brandon started describing to me, step by step, how he was going to do it. He kept pointing at Tommy, who had run ahead of us. Because he thought Tommy was Ricky. He thought Tommy was the bratty one, the horrible one, the one I wanted dead. He whispered his plan into my ear, and it was exactly as I’d described it the night before. He was going to do it, just like I’d said. Just like I asked. He was going to do it for me.”

Lucas’s eyes were riveted to my face now, his shock evident, though he was trying to hide it. I was rewriting a story that had been told thousands of times, unraveling the mystery that had gripped a nation. The Kindergarten Killer never had a discernible motive. His entire defense had hinged upon that fact. And all the time I’d had the answer.

His motive was me.

Just as Brandon had led Tommy and I into the woods six years before, I followed him in now. I continued to recount the story to Lucas, while in my mind I lived it: the darkness of the trees descending around us; the clearing appearing ahead, divided by the long-unused train tracks; and the sky still bright with the dying day, the sky I could not escape, the sky he died under.

Is this really happening?

The question runs through my mind on a continual loop as we walk through the trees, looking for all the world like three kids with nothing to do on a Thursday afternoon. Three kids taking a shortcut to the park through the woods. Three innocent kids.

Except Brandon is whispering bloody things in my ear. And the voice in my head is rising to a scream. And one of us might soon be dead.

“Race you to the train tracks, Katie!” Tommy cries, because trains are his favourite things in the world, because he has no idea my boyfriend plans to butcher him.

I want to tell him to keep running, to run for his life, but I’m shaking with fear and the words stick in my throat.

“You heard him, Katie Kat,” Brandon says. “You’d better hurry now. If I get there first, who knows what might happen.” He’s only pretending to taunt me, posing his arms as though he’s about to start jogging ahead, but not actually going through with it. He thinks I’m on his side.

“I’m coming!” I call to Tommy, who shrieks as though he’s being chased even though I haven’t moved a muscle.

Then I turn to Brandon and my voice falls to a whisper. “This isn’t funny, okay? Pretending you’re going to kill a five year old isn’t funny.” Because this is a joke, it just has to be. Twelve-year-old boys don’t murder kindergarteners. Brandon isn’t a killer…is he?

“Who’s trying to be funny?” Brandon says, his voice flat, all the mirth from a moment ago completely gone.

“Just give me the knife and we can forget this ever happened,” I say reasonably. “I won’t even be mad.” I hold out a shaking hand.

“Mad about what?” Brandon replies. He seems genuinely confused. That’s when I know he isn’t joking or playing a trick. This isn’t a game to Brandon.