“That’s the father,” Rebecca went on. “People always think it’s Oedipal. Kill the father, marry the mother. That’s what I’d assumed.”
“Gross,” I said. I looked at the photo again. The man’s eyes were partly open, as though he were surreptitiously glancing downward, shifty. His arms were held over his head, fingers jammed and piled up against the bedside table. I’d seen pictures of dead people before in various books and magazines, mostly important figures lying in mausoleums or photos from wars — soldiers slumped on the battlefield, starved corpses. Then of course there was Jesus dead on the cross everywhere I looked. There had been a few such crime scene photos in the files of other inmates at Moorehead, but none of them had captured the essence of death quite like that photo of Mr. Polk. Not even my own mother’s dead body struck me as powerfully. She’d just faded away, really, a little bit every day until there was nothing left. Life had been ripped out of Mr. Polk, however. The death was there, alive in the photo. I twisted my hand away from Rebecca and got up and flung myself toward the sink, vomiting that terrible sandwich, all that wine.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Rebecca came up behind me and rubbed my back. “Don’t be sorry,” she replied. She handed me a cold, wet and mildewed dishrag. “The picture should make you sick.” I turned on the faucet, rinsed my vomit off the plates. “Don’t bother,” Rebecca said.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. I don’t know how sorry I really was. Getting sick like that had excited me. I can’t think of any other time just looking at something has made me vomit. I wanted to look at the photo again. There was something in it that I couldn’t fully make out. Between the crumpled bedsheets, the thinly striped sleeping shirt, the black stain puddled on the rug, Mr. Polk, face sagging and limp, had something to say. Another kind of life lay behind the blank expression captured in that photo. I wished I could get inside of it, examine the throat where it was gashed, touch the blood, investigate the wound as though a secret were embedded there, but the throat wasn’t visible in the photo. What did those eyes know? What was the last thing Mr. Polk saw? Lee, the knife, the darkness, his wife, his own spirit rising up out of his body? I liked the look of those still, sneaky eyes. Mr. Polk, I knew, held a secret I’d been wanting to understand. He knew death, I suppose. Maybe it was that simple.
“Where did you get that?” I asked Rebecca.
“Lee’s file,” she said. “Scary, huh?”
I sat back down in the chair, sobered, calm. “Not really,” I lied, purposelessly.
“Lee snuck into his parents’ bedroom with a kitchen knife and hacked through his father’s throat. His mother claims she went into shock. She didn’t phone the police right away. She said she woke up and found her husband dead, assumed there’d been a break-in. How do you sleep through something like that, I wonder? Can you imagine? They found the knife in the kitchen sink, and Lee in his bed, holding his teddy bear.”
Rebecca’s expression hardened as she spoke. I looked closely at her face, at the delicate lines around her eyes, her translucent skin, fresh and rosy. In one moment she looked like a mature woman, in the next, a little girl. My eyes seemed to be playing tricks on me, as though I were peering into a fun house mirror, as if it were all a dream. She tapped my hands to get my attention. “But Lee isn’t responsible for this,” Rebecca went on. “That’s what he explained to me yesterday. The whole ordeal. It’s too much for a child to keep to himself.” She turned away as though overcome with emotion, but when she faced me again she was calm, steady, even grinning. “It’s terrible, this photo, yes. It’s disturbing. When I saw it, and then met Lee, I just couldn’t put two and two together. A smart, shy boy like that doing something like this. It didn’t add up. I asked him if he’d really done it, killed his father.” She tapped her finger on the photo, over the dead man’s face. “He said that yes, he had done it. Or really he just nodded. I asked him why, but he just shrugged. He didn’t open up to me right away, you know. I had to ask the right question. At first I was just stabbing in the dark. Did his dad beat his mom? Did his mom have him kill his dad for the insurance payout? What was it? I just had a sense there was something rotten happening in the family. It’s written all over the mother’s face, anyhow. You saw her. I knew something was going on. That’s why I called her and told her to come in. I told her, ‘I think your son would like to speak with you.’ You saw them together. The poor boy could hardly look her in the eye. And so afterward I just asked him point-blank. ‘What did your father do to you? Did he touch you?’ And he spoke. He spilled it all in a matter of minutes. That man, Mr. Polk, was raping him, his own son. Nobody had ever bothered to ask Lee before. Nobody wanted to know.”
At this point Rebecca was wild-eyed with enthusiasm, you’d say, nearly salivating, her hands having moved up my wrists and forearms to hold me by the shoulders. I was riveted by the pink of her mouth and gums, the black grit of wine in the chapped corners of her lips. I’d heard of stories like the one she was telling. I had a vague idea of what it all meant. “It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to get down to the truth,” she went on boastfully. She let go of my shoulders. “And it doesn’t take a prison sentence to set things right. The wardens and shrinks of this world are crazier than most killers, I swear. People will tell you the truth, if you really want to hear it. Think about it, Eileen,” she said, squeezing my hands again. “What would drive someone to kill his own father?” She looked up at me imploringly, her eyes darting back and forth between mine. “What?” she demanded.
I had spent years debating a similar question. “Killing him,” I answered, “would have to be the only way out.”
“The only recourse, yes,” Rebecca nodded.
We stared again at the photo, her head next to mine, so close that our cheeks touched. She leaned over my shoulder, put her arm around me. The wind shook the house, a spray of snow vibrating the drafty kitchen windows. I closed my eyes. This was as close to another person as I’d been in years. I could feel Rebecca’s breath on my hand, hot and quick and steady.
“You have to wonder,” she continued, “why the mother didn’t do something.”
I looked up at her. Her strange, shifting expression, strained in the harsh light, eyebrows raised, eyes wide, mouth open in delight or expectation, I couldn’t tell. She seemed excited, agitated, ecstatic and full of wonder. I twitched. “My mother’s dead,” I said defensively. Rebecca wasn’t irked by the non sequitur. I held my breath.
“Mothers are very difficult,” Rebecca replied. She stood suddenly and gazed down at me as she spoke. “Most women hate one another. It’s only natural, all of us competing, mothers and daughters especially. Not that I hate you, of course. I don’t see you as competition. I see you as my ally, a partner in crime, as they say. You’re special,” she said, softening. I could have cried hearing those words. I blinked hard, though my eyes were dry. She reaffirmed her statement by squeezing my hand again, and squatted back down to meet me at eye level. “That mother,” she went on, “Mrs. Polk, you remember her, don’t you?”
“She was fat,” I said, nodding.
“Quiet,” Rebecca whispered all of a sudden. She got up, put a finger in the air to hush me. The wind rattled, but otherwise the house was silent. The music had stopped without my noticing it. I held my breath. “Lee’s mother,” she went on, punctuating the words by clattering her fingernails on the table, “is the real mystery. There’s no lovely way to say this, Eileen. It broke my heart to hear the boy tell his story. But as you and I know, it’s so important to let the truth out. Lee told me that each evening after dinner, his mother would take him upstairs to give him an enema before bedtime. Then she just sat around watching The Honeymooners or painting her nails or sleeping or whatnot until they were done. Why didn’t she stop him? The answer is quite plainly that she didn’t want to. She must have been benefiting from it all somehow. I just don’t understand how.”