The Day I Killed James (9 page)

She walked up to the pair of neighbors. Said, “I thought the kid involved with this was somebody named Cathy Weiss.”

“That’s right,” said one of them.

“But the girl who lives here is named Georgia.”

“No. The girl who lives here is named Cathy.”

“Really? What’s her brother’s name, do you know?”

“John, I think.”

“What happened exactly?”

“Brother was rattling around in the middle of the night and got shot. I guess she thought it was an intruder. Mother’s never home, anyway. Poor girl has to fend for herself. Got scared, I guess. Said she thought it couldn’t of been her brother because he was in the bathroom. Doesn’t make a boatload of sense, but that’s what she kept saying. The sheriff took her off for questioning. Got to be an accident, though. Don’t you think? Can’t see how they can blame a girl her age for a thing like that.”

“No, I guess not. I thought her name was Georgia.”

The other woman said, “She told me her name was Virginia. And that her brother’s name was Montgomery. But I think she just liked to make stuff up.”

The first woman said, “Wanted to be somebody better, I guess.”

“Did the brother die?”

“Oh yeah. Instantly.”

Annie shook her head and walked off.

She let herself into her trailer and sat down hard on the couch.

So Georgia had cut off all her hair, and her name wasn’t even Georgia. Just something she picked out to try to be somebody else for a change. That made two coincidences. Two things they had in common.

Annie lit a cigarette and lay down on the couch. Picked up the afghan Georgia had left on the floor so many nights earlier and pulled it over herself. Smoked and looked at the dim ceiling.

Now Georgia had gone and killed somebody.

That’s three, she thought.

Then she started to pack.

PART THREE

Journal Entry _________________________

Writing this: Five days after I ran away from my new life in San Simeon

Writing about: Right now

I have a number of questions. If I had half as many answers, I’d be in great shape.

Question number one: Why did I pick up a pen and start writing in this journal again? I hate this journal. It was never my idea. I only ever did it to make Dr. Grey happy. Okay, let’s be really honest here. To keep him off my back. I was never heavily invested in whether or not he was happy. I only picked it up again because I was gathering a few things from my old room. To take over here to Frieda’s. I found it under the bed, and I didn’t like the idea of leaving it lying around.

But here I am writing in it.

That one is more or less unanswerable. So I’ll keep going.

Why did I run like hell all the way back home? If you can loosely call the room over Frieda’s barn home.

That one has been running around in my head a lot lately. And I’ve come up with a number of answers.

I came home to face myself and my situation at long last.

I’m running like a scared rabbit from what happened with that kid.

A weird combination of both of the above.

To even consider the question for very long confuses me.

Then there’s the most depressing answer of all. And, unfortunately, the most likely to be true.

I don’t know myself well enough to judge.

Moving on. Which, by the way, is becoming a specialty of mine.

I’m going to make a confession to this journal. Since I’m damn well not making any to anybody else. And because somewhere, in some naggy little corner of my mind, I figure this is the reason Dr. Grey got me onto this journal thing in the first place. Like maybe, in some intensely miraculous moment, some weird mood that almost never strikes me, I might tell it something honest.

By the way, that may go to answer question number one. Though potentially true, this is also a stall tactic.

So, marking this day on my calendar.

It goes a little something like this.

The whole leaving-myself-behind thing was a total crock. Really stupid. Way up there among the stupidest things I’ve ever done. And God knows it’s up there facing a lot of stiff competition.

If I’d thought about it before I did it, I would probably have known this, and then I could have saved myself the trouble. So that’s probably why I didn’t think it out. Because it was kind of fragile. It would never have held up to the thinking. And I guess part of me knew that, so I left it alone. Let it be delicate and, against odds, weirdly whole.

In hindsight I know more about it than I might have known in advance. If I’d thought it out before doing it, I might have come to a simplistic judgment, like, It’ll never work. In hindsight it’s a bit more complex.

In hindsight I can see that I left behind my name, my father, my best friend, my home. My hair. All the identity I’d ever had. In other words, everything that was not to blame. And the only thing that
was
to blame I hauled to San Simeon with me.

Ah, logic.

Sudden insight: Is it possible that I’ve just answered all my own questions?

No. After reading back, I guess not all of them. That one about whether I came back to face things or evade them. That one I’ve left hanging.

Or, more realistically, I guess it’s hanging me.

Journal Entry _________________________

Writing this: Six days after I ran away from my new life in San Simeon

Writing about: My first day back

I realize I haven’t said all that much about my father. Anybody who knows my father will realize that it’s because there’s very little to say.

After the whole “incident,” he just sort of disappeared. He had that new girlfriend. I don’t even know if they’re still together. I didn’t ask. Thing about my father is, he doesn’t like problems. Not that anybody does. But he absolutely refuses to acknowledge that they exist. So he has to spend a lot of his life getting out of the way.

I guess that might answer some questions about where I got that from.

He paid for my therapy. That was his way of dealing with the crisis. If I had a paid professional to talk to, I was set. I didn’t have to, God forbid, discuss anything with him. Then he went to his girlfriend’s a lot, and that was pretty much that.

On the day I packed my things and moved out, he wasn’t even home.

Enough said about that, I guess.

So about four months later, there I was standing on his welcome mat. The front stoop of the house I grew up in. I knocked on the door. Amazingly, he answered. He was home. Or maybe it’s not so amazing. Maybe he was always home. Just as soon as I wasn’t.

He looked at me for a split second before it hit him. Who I was.

That surprised me. That caught me off guard, I had to admit.

I have no idea how much I have or have not changed. I didn’t spend those four months up the coast seeking out mirrors. I assume most of the change is on the inside, but I guess those things have a way of seeping through the cracks. I’m not trying to exaggerate here. I mean, it was less than a second. Just a beat in the huge continuum of time. But it showed me something. Whether it’s something I wanted to see or not is hard to say.

Then he said, “Oh.”

I waited. There had to be more than just “Oh.”

A painful silence, in which I realized that my very presence on his mat constituted a nasty trauma. And he had nowhere to run.

Finally I said, “I just wanted you to know I was okay.”

“Oh,” he said again. He looked tired. More than four months older. Or maybe those were just the eyes through which I was viewing him. “Well, Frieda told me you were okay.”

Another painful silence. During which I was still not exactly invited in.

Then he said, “Are you back, then?”

I could tell he was trying very hard to sound like that was not a bad thing. But it was. To him, it was.

I’m not stupid. I’m also not overly inclined to take a thing like that personally. My father loves me. This goes without saying. If I were happy and without problems, he’d be more than willing to coexist with me. But of course I was no such thing.

I said, “I thought I’d stay over at Frieda’s.” His brow furrowed slightly. Probably at the thought of Frieda’s parents and their famously reckless habits. “She has that empty room over the barn,” I said. Her parents never bother to venture into that great outback, I didn’t say. “I thought it might be a good place to…” The honest ending to that sentence would have been the word “hide.” “…get myself together. For a while.”

“Oh.” That was his favorite word on the day I returned from self-imposed exile. “Okay. Yeah. Good.”

Another painful silence. I guess neither one of us wanted to address my exact reason for knocking on his door. Something struck me suddenly, but it’s hard to put into words. Some understanding of the world. Why it’s in the shambles it’s so often in. If this is what we call family.

“I just came to get a few more of my things. From my room.”

“Right. Of course.” He said it quite brightly. His relief shone through the cracks between each word.

I gathered up some more clothes. My old teddy bear that I’ve had since childhood. This journal from under the bed, which I only just remembered at the last minute.

Frieda wasn’t home, but I went up to the room over the barn anyway. Set down my things but didn’t unpack. It seemed wrong to unpack without permission. Even though I knew Frieda would never refuse me the room.

Leevon escorted me up and stayed with me. He’s a host of a dog, Leevon. The sort of dog who will practically pour you a drink as you walk in the door.

I asked him if he had a cigarette, but he only looked at me curiously. It seemed to make him nervous when I asked him something he didn’t understand. So I dropped it altogether. Though I hadn’t had a cigarette for a couple of days and was just about to jump out of my skin.

I lay on the bed and cried for the first time in as long as I could remember. Leevon worried about me. He kept bumping my ear with his cold nose.

He’s better at many things than my father. Or, for that matter, me.

ONE

Still More Questions

I think I’d been in the room over the barn detoxing cold turkey off cigarettes for a couple of days when I heard a knock at the door.

Leevon barked. Which alarmed me. Because that meant it wasn’t Frieda. Then again, I knew it wasn’t Frieda, because she would have just opened the door and come in. But it was more the bark that alarmed me. If Leevon was scared, so was I. My heart rate jumped wildly.

I didn’t answer it straight off. Leevon growled low in his throat while I ran a quick mental list of who even knew I was up here. My father. It could be my father. But that would mean he was voluntarily walking in the direction of trouble, which seemed unlikely. Frieda would never have told her parents I was here. But maybe they found out somehow and had come to evict me. Seemed like something that involved too much gumption for either one of them. But people have their moods. You never know.

Another knock. Leevon let out one stiff howl. It struck me that he wouldn’t bark at Frieda’s parents, either. He has a sense of smell. All dogs do.

“Who is it?” I called. Sounding every bit as paranoid as I felt.

“Annie?” A kid’s voice. Almost like…
the
kid. Not just
a
kid. But of course that was impossible.

“There’s no one by that name here,” I said through the door. Feeling foolishly satisfied and righteous about the truthfulness of that statement. I had admitted to myself, one member of the family, and one good friend that my name was, in fact, Theresa.

“Her car is out front. Do you know where she is?”

It was the kid.

Or an auditory hallucination. Quitting smoking cold turkey was making me feel weirdly emotional and disconnected from reality. Maybe I was having a sort of waking nightmare.

Against my better judgment, I opened the door.

“It
is
you,” she said. “I thought it sounded like you.”

Her hair was still only about an inch long, and she was filthy. Her clothes were dirty, her face was dirty. Her hands looked grimy. She looked something like I felt.

I was beginning to gather that I was not imagining this. Though I hated to let go of such a welcome theory.

“What are you doing here?”

“Can I have a cigarette?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Just one. I haven’t had one for days.”

“How did you find me here?”

“It wasn’t hard.” She scratched her nose. Looked once at my face. But I guess she didn’t like what she saw there, because she looked down at the doormat immediately. “Your mail was forwarded from here.”

“So you looked in my mailbox.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I know your name is really Theresa. Your checks from the Castle came to Theresa, too. I guess you had to tell them your real name, huh?”

“And I know your name is really Cathy. What are you doing here?”

“Please can I have a cigarette?”

“I don’t have one. Wait. My mail was forwarded from home. Not from here.”

“Right. That man at your house told me you were here. Is that your father? What do you mean you don’t have one?”

“I quit, okay? What are you doing here?”

“Can I come in? Hey, cool dog. Is that your dog?” Leevon was poking his nose through the partly opened door, licking in the general direction of the kid. Leevon liked kids.

It struck me that the conversation was spinning like a dog chasing its own tail. I was getting nowhere. Maybe it was the nicotine deprivation, but the whole thing was making me feel irritated. Actually, it was probably irritating enough all on its own.

“I’ve asked you about six times what you’re doing here. I’m not letting you in unless you answer my question.” The minute it was out of my mouth I realized I’d bargained off too much too cheaply. Now if she answered, she could claim I’d said I would let her in.

She looked down at the mat again. “My mom threw me out. For good this time. I got nowhere else to go.”

More nicotine-withdrawal-related outrage. “She can’t do that.”

“Wanna bet?”

“You’re eleven. She can’t just put you out on the street.”

“You wanna go tell her?”

I sighed. And with the sigh, all the irritation and outrage drained away and was immediately replaced by surrender and depression. I didn’t have the strength to fight anything that was so inherently bad. “How did you get here?”

“Took a bus to San Luis Obispo. That was all the money I had. Stole that out of her change jar the day before she kicked me out. Had a feeling it was coming. Hitchhiked the rest of the way.”

I sighed again. “What kind of person picks up an eleven-year-old girl and doesn’t even ask what she’s doing away from home? You could have been killed.”

We both squirmed a bit at my admission that I cared, on some level, whether she lived or died.

“Do-gooders,” she said. “I told them your house was home. That I was lost and they were taking me home. People are stupid. They’ll believe anything.”

And you’ll tell any lie, I thought. And I’m not that stupid.

But I opened the door. So maybe I am.

Leevon poured her a drink.

Hard to say how long I sat there on the bed with her, watching her bite her nails. Could have been thirty minutes. Could have been three minutes that felt like ten each.

I wanted to tell her to cut it out. The nail thing. Because it was making me nervous. But I’d been plenty nervous before she showed up. So that didn’t seem fair.

Finally I said it. Because it needed saying. Even though it went without saying. I guess you had to be there. It made sense to me.

I said, “You know you can’t stay here. Right?”

She shot me this wounded look. Just for a split second. Then she armored over it, trying to look bored and cool and a little bit angry. My stomach dropped into my shoes. She hadn’t known that. I really would have thought she’d known.

“Why can’t I?”

“Oh my God,” I said. I honestly didn’t know where to start. “Look around you. What do you see?”

She looked around. A bit defensive. Or detached. Like I had asked her to do some bothersome homework. And she was more or less just phoning it in. “A nice place. It’s cool.”

“One room. With one tiny bathroom. No kitchen. No refrigerator. One twin bed.”

“I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“No kitchen,” I repeated.

“We’ll eat out.”

“And I assume you’ll be picking up the check?”

I regretted that. As soon as I said it. It was a valid truth. But the delivery felt harsh.

More valid truth. I was getting low on money myself. I needed to get a job. I’d been eating fast food and allowing Frieda to sneak me leftovers. I honestly couldn’t afford anyone else on the tab.

But oh my God. That was so only the beginning.

“Look,” I said. “This place is barely a home for one. I’m sorry.”

“That’s not why,” she said. “That’s not really the reason. You just don’t want me.”

“Kid,” I said. The name thing still had me slightly off balance. “I don’t even want
me.
”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” She had stopped biting her nails. Switched to hugging and kissing Leevon. Not realizing that her vulnerability was showing.

“What I mean is, just taking care of myself…just turning my own mess back into a life…I’m not even sure I’m up to doing my own stuff right now.”

“I won’t be any trouble. I promise. I’ll help. I’ll clean up. I’ll find some ways to make money or something.”

“You can’t stay here,” I said. With a finality that sounded really sad. Even to me. “I’m sorry.”

Silence hung for quite a long time. Then I reached out to put a hand on her shoulder. Not hard to do. That little room was so small that two people couldn’t really get far outside touching distance. She jerked away. Jumped to her feet. I had let the cork out of the bottle. She was pissed.

“I’m not going into foster care! I’m not! My friend Tara was in foster care. I’ll live on the street before I let them get me. I’ll run away.”

“Down, girl,” I said. “You already ran away.” She sat on the bed again, looking more than a little defeated. “Now let’s just calmly consider our options here. What do you have in the way of blood family?”

She was looking down as I asked the question. Down and partly away. She sniffled quietly. Wiped her nose on her sleeve. That’s when I got that she was crying. But not for effect. She was trying hard to hide it. “Not much. Just a grandmother in Bellingham. But she won’t take me.”

“Where’s Bellingham?”

“Washington State. Way up near Canada. It’s pretty there. We were up there once. But she won’t take me.”

“How do you know?”

“She’s Harold’s mother. My dad. He died. I called him Harold. She hates my mother.”

“You’re not your mother.”

“Close enough, though.”

“We could call her.”

“She doesn’t have a phone.”

“You’re joking.”

“Not so much, no.”

“Who doesn’t have a phone in this day and age?”

“My grandmother. For one.”

As I stopped to try to imagine such a thing, it struck me that I was taking the word of what you might call an unreliable narrator. In other words, a liar.

“Are you lying to me so I won’t call her?”

She raised her hand as if in a court of law. “May God strike me dead if I’m not telling the truth.”

She didn’t glance up at the sky or anything, as if expecting a lightning bolt. Not exactly ironclad proof. But I figured there was maybe a sixty or seventy percent chance that her grandmother honestly didn’t have a phone.

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do here,” I said. I didn’t realize how defeated I felt until I heard myself say it.

“Me neither,” she said.

I mean, I couldn’t just put her out on the street. Could I? I resented having somehow become responsible. I tried to track how and when that had happened. But somehow it had happened. If I put her out, she might end up dead. And someone could come to me and say, You
what
? You put a defenseless eleven-year-old girl out on the street by herself? Why didn’t you help her?

No one
would
come to me and say that, of course. I would do it to myself.

I said, “I guess you’ll have to stay here just until we figure out what to do with you.”

“I’m not going into foster care,” she said again.

“Yeah, I got that.”

“If I find out you called Child Protective Services, I’m gone forever.”

“Oh, now there’s a threat that has me shaking in my boots.”

That seemed to bump her out of her gangster mode and remind her she was a lost child with precious few options.

I chewed on our precious few options for a few moments. Until she said, “What are you thinking about?” Like whatever it was, I could hurt her just by thinking it.

“I was wondering if my piece-of-crap old car would make it almost as far as Canada.”

A long silence. I could hear her breathing. I could feel the world—at least her world—freeze solid into her fear.

“What if she won’t take me?”

“I think it might be harder to say no if she was looking you right in the face.”

“But what if she won’t?”

Good question, actually. But when only one possible option remains, I find it best not to question it too thoroughly. And I said so.

After that she didn’t have much to say. So I guess the doubts were more or less all she had.

Journal Entry _________________________

Writing: The day the kid showed up

About: Now

To fail to see the significance of this thing, a person would have to be blind, deaf, dead, and stupid. Maybe I flatter myself, but I like to think I’m none of the above.

It’s as plain as the nose on my face. The Universe has sentenced me to perform community service.

It’s about time someone sentenced me to something. Someone besides me, that is. Which is not to say I’m the least bit happy about it.

First of all, I’ve had to slip down into the barn just to get the privacy to write this. And the barn is the last place I saw James alive. So that’s not fun at all.

Second of all, how am I supposed to help somebody get through something when I’m completely lost in that same something myself?

Journal Entry _________________________

Writing: The night of the day the kid showed up

About: Now

Last-minute change of plans. The kid is sleeping up in my little room. With Leevon. I’m down in the barn.

It’s sort of hard to explain.

I couldn’t sleep in the same room with her. The room is just too small. And she kept looking at me. I was getting claustrophobic.

It’s not so bad down here. I know I just complained about it last time I wrote in this journal. I haven’t forgotten that. But I was just weirded out by the whole James thing. It’s not exactly like the whole “barn as it relates to James” thing has evaporated. It’s more like it’s stopped feeling so bad to me. It almost feels like a good thing.

I can remember his face tonight. Not struggle to put it together feature by feature. Remember it. Not just the hair color and the shape of his face but fully animated, actual James. I can picture him over in the corner of the barn, getting me a soda.

Just in my imagination. I’m not hallucinating.

I miss James.

But that’s not really fair, in a weird way. Because if he’d just walked out of my life that night, I’m not sure I ever would have. It’s genuine, my missing him. But why did it take a thing like that to wake it up?

Something about the whole thing doesn’t seem right.

The coolers are gone from the corner of the barn. Of course. The only leftover from the party is the hay and the straw. I guess there was no point dragging out all that hay and straw.

So I’m fairly comfortable in the stall where James and I…were.

It seemed wrong to kick the kid downstairs. Make her sleep in the barn. Like child abuse or something. She’s been evicted plenty enough for one lifetime.

And I’m really okay down here.

I wonder if I’ll feel better after I’ve done my community service. I wonder, also, if just giving her a lift to Bellingham will turn out to be enough. Maybe I’m also supposed to know how to help her deal with what happened. In which case I’m going to have to learn whatever it is I need to know as I go along.