Authors: Brandon Shire
He sighed and sat down beside Robert’s grave caressing it with as much tenderness as he’d showed for Lisa’s.
“I’ve been watching Charlotte for years, Charles. She’s my step sister. Jarrel is my brother.”
His face shadowed but he didn’t look up at me. He kept rubbing his hands along the cold contours of Robert’s stone.
“Charlotte was the person that called Lisa’s husband and told him about us. It exploded into a fiasco that led to Lisa’s racing home to her parent’s house to explain. She never made it,” he added quietly.
“But, why would Charlotte….”
He looked up at me but didn’t answer. Instead he explained how he had tried to stop my confinement, how he had talked to the doctors, Mrs. Massey, even his brother Jarrel. Robert’s suicide had halted all of it.
“I talked to Dr. Smith at the last place,” he told me.
“Caufield?”
He shrugged. “I guess. I gave him Henry’s name and the details of your past. I also found out that Charlotte had told him that I had molested you. That’s why I couldn’t get in to see you myself.”
“I thought Caufield convinced Henry to meet me.”
“He probably did,” Breece said. “I just put them together.”
“So you’re the one that found him, not Caufield?”
“Yes.”
“So you did all this, let me follow you around like a puppy for the last five years, and now you want me to go?”
“No. I want you to let go. I want you to grow the fuck up, move on with your life, and stop killing yourself over some adolescent puppy- love.”
“Is that what you’re doing with Lisa?”
He didn’t answer me. His eyes were weary and half lidded, and his face sagged with the weight of all he’d divulged. He would never leave Lisa. No matter what he said; no matter what he did. He’d never leave her. He couldn’t. The dead don’t break your heart but once.
I left him caressing Robert’s gravestone; its stark naked shape muted by the winter clouds. My determination was now an impenetrable fire of revenge. Before she died, they would pay, all of them.
(3 days prior)
So many things that had not made sense over the last five years on the street with Breece now became clear. Clear, but no less troubling.
At some obscure point between bread crusts to rats and Breece’s final revelations at Robert’s grave, I had decided that my need to find and punish Robert’s mother was just as necessary to me as punishing my own mother. Debra Massey’s complicity was just as genuine as Charlotte’s, and there seemed no reason that she should be allowed to escape my vendetta any more than Charlotte should.
She wasn’t hard to find. Three days after my conversation with Breece I returned to Potsham Park and retraced my steps back to Robert’s house, all the while wondering why I had not done this sooner. But I didn’t expect to be so rudely and quickly placed on the spinning edge of reality just by the mere glimpse of it.
It wasn’t the white picket fence, or the iced over columns; nor was it the smiling old lady who huddled on the front step flapping her arms against the cold.
It was the boy. A boy so much like Robert, though a few years younger, that I fell against the snow dusted fence and held on for life as I stared.
My stumble did not go unnoticed. Both their smiles faded and were replaced by masks of trepidation as the boy turned to me, a silent silhouette of youth and innocence shining bright against the snow that fell around him.
Mrs. Massey stood up immediately. “Robert, come away from there,” she called to the boy as she started toward the gate.
The boy’s fear hooked onto the edge of his grandmother’s warning and drew him away from me. He slipped behind her and then went to stand next to one of the columns, as if seeking refuge from my harsh and unbelieving stare.
“What do you want?” Mrs. Massey barked at me as she stopped and hovered beyond the fence line.
I tore my eyes from this younger version of Robert and glared at her, my breath frosting in the chill air.
“You’re Robert’s mother?” I demanded. “Debra?”
She looked surprised, cautious and concerned. “His grandmother. Now go away before I call the police.”
“Not him!” I screamed, leaning across the fence and pointing at the boy. “The son you murdered!”
She flinched as my words struck her and recoiled a step, her arms pin wheeling slightly for balance. Even from a distance I could see the haunted look of vacancy creep in her eyes. But I could not accept it.
“Grandma,” the boy whined uneasily.
“Go in the house, Robert. I’ll be there in a minute,” she said without turning to him.
Her posture did not relax when she heard the door close behind her, but I stood and folded my arms across my chest.
“Yes. It wouldn’t be good for your grandson to know how you murdered your own son, now would it?” I sneered at her.
“I…” Her mouth gaped open and silent tears began coursing down her cheeks.
“Was it so bad, Debra? So disgusting to know that someone loved your son more than anything on this planet? Maybe even more than his own mother? But you knew that, didn’t you, Debra?”
Her hand came across her mouth, shaking its liver spots across her lips. She wavered a bit then crumpled into the snow her grandson had packed down in his play. I put my hands back on the fence and leaned over it as I watched her tears make small holes in the snow.
“Of course you knew,” I taunted her. “You looked right into my eyes. You saw how much I loved him and you threw it away anyway. All because it didn’t fit with your pathetic values,” I spat at her. “Were they worth it, Debra? Worth the life of your one and only son?”
She only cried, a violent shudder of a response.
“Nobody told me how he did it, Debra, only that he was gone. Tell me, what method did you drive him to, huh? What method does someone who feels absolutely unloved use in their own house?”
The silence grew with each of Debra’s sobs.
“He hung himself,” a voice finally answered from the porch.
I looked up, recognizing one of Robert’s sisters, but not remembering her name. She was a younger version of her mother, with eyes just as pained.
“He hung himself,” she said again, “and we’ve lived with that every single day of our lives. Is that what you want to hear, Charles? How we suffered?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I want to hear.” I looked directly at Mrs. Massey. “He was the most beautiful human being I’ve ever met, and you killed him.”
Robert’s sister shifted her gaze behind me and I turned to see Breece approaching rapidly. He took one hard look at me and pushed through the gate to help Mrs. Massey to her feet.
“I’m sorry, Debra. Are you okay?” he asked her. “Patty, take her in and have her lie down a while,” he added as Robert’s sister, whose name I now recognized, came down the steps and took her mother’s arm.
We watched them walk up the steps together and disappear inside the house, Mrs. Massey’s grief seeming to grow with each step before a wail of despondency was finally choked off behind the oak door of her entryway.
“Do you feel better now?” Breece demanded as he whipped around and slammed his way out the gate. “Do you?” he screamed in my face, the muscles on his neck flaring with rage.
I said nothing; the smirk of contentment I wore said all I needed to say.
He turned away from me in disgust and stomped off.
“Who is she to you Breece? Who is she really?” I asked, my voice filled with its own contempt.
I thought he was about to come back and beat me with whatever he could lay his hands on when he turned around, but he took one long look at me and sighed; his anger suddenly deflating down to silent weariness.
He glanced toward the house before he answered. “She’s Lisa’s sister, Charles; her only sibling. Lisa was Robert’s aunt. Does it all make sense to you now?” he asked before he turned and walked off into the increasing snowfall.
And it did, finally.
Charlotte laughed with a cruel sharp edge. “He can’t let it go. Look at him; he’s still crying over a fag twenty years dead.”
She cackled merrily as Jarrel grabbed me from behind and kept me from her throat a second time.
Breece moved in front of me, blocking my view and calling my name until I was calm enough to register his presence. “Can you control yourself now?” he asked me.
I shrugged Jarrel off. “Fuck you.”
He looked at me, a challenge in his eyes. “You said you know the cause, what is it?”
“She’s a nigger, and she hates it!” I proclaimed as I stepped around him and looked her in the eye.
She rolled her eyes at me.
“It’s true and you know it.” I turned and told the rest of the family what I had learned in New Orleans.
“And you think you can hurt me with this, faggot?” she asked me. “You’re about twenty years too late,” she sneered. She looked around the room at the rest of the family. “You can’t defeat me, any of you. I shaped this family. I made it into what it is. And not one of you had the balls to lead it anywhere else. Pathetic,” she seethed at us. “You’re all so goddamned pathetic.”
“Not strong like you, are we Charlotte?” Breece said, moving closer to the bed.
“Not by half.”
“Your mother was a strong woman too, wasn’t she? You learned about strength from her,” Breece continued.
“My mother was the best. There was no one better than her. She had the backbone of twenty men.”
“And when Francois killed her, what happened then?” he asked her quietly.
There was a collective gasp in the room. “What?” I asked.
But he didn’t look at me. He went straight to Charlotte, like a cat intent on its prey. My eyes went from him to Charlotte, who was staring off into space, her eyes glazed with the past misdeeds of my grandfather. “He killed her,” she mumbled.
“Marie made him feel small, didn’t she?” Breece asked. “A small pathetic little man. He didn’t mean to kill her, but he wasn’t exactly sorry about it either, was he?”
Her hand came up as if to shield her eyes from his scaring words. She shook her head.
Breece stopped and looked at her pitifully before he turned to the rest of us. “He was drunk the night he killed her. He was always drunk. Marie drove him to his drinking, and then browbeat him because of it. But he was a drunk none the less.”
He looked back at Charlotte. “They argued that night because he found out the truth about her just like you did, Charles. She had plagued him about her aristocracy and now he found out just the opposite. So it became his turn to taunt her for a change. Drunk and reveling, he drove up and down the street chanting nigger at the top of his lungs. Somehow Marie ended up in the street and Francois ran her down.”
“How do you know all this?” Sylvia asked.
“Debra Massey, Robert’s mother,” he added as he inclined his head towards me. “They were the best of friends until that day. Debra was the one that found Charlotte in the street screaming at her father in the French that Marie had taught her.”
“She said Charlotte changed completely after that day, from an open, honest girl into a bitter resentful rival. She couldn’t be blamed, but Debra felt that somehow Charlotte became jealous; like it should have been her mother instead.”
Charlotte didn’t confirm or deny anything, she just lay there staring up at the ceiling.
“So she was a nigger and her mother couldn’t handle it either, so what!” I said.
Breece turned his gaze on me slowly. “It wasn’t that simple, Charles. Her whole life was built on the lies Marie filled her with, and she revered Marie like you revered Francois. It crushed her.