“Listen, I’m not-”
“Take some time to settle yourself.”
“I don’t want to settle myself. I’m not coming back tomorrow, Collie.”
“Go home. Visit the family. I’ll tell you what I need when I see you again.”
I started breathing through my teeth. “What you need. I’m not running drugs for you. I’m not icing anybody on the outside for you. I’m not sending around a petition to the governor. I’m not coming back.”
It got him laughing again. “You’re home. You’re going to see the family because you’ve missed them. You’ve been gone a long time and proven whatever point you had to make, Terry. You can stick it out on your own. You’re your own man. You’re not Dad. You’re not me.” He cupped the phone even more tightly to his mouth. “Besides, you love them and they love you. It’s time to say hello again.”
Life lessons from death row. Christ. I felt nauseous.
I stared hard into my brother’s eyes, trying to read a face I’d always been able to read before. I saw in it just how plagued he was by his own culpability. He was shallow and vindictive but he rarely lied. He didn’t often deny responsibility and he never cared about consequences. There was absolutely nothing I could do for him.
“I’m not coming back,” I told him.
“I think I need you to save someone’s life,” he said.
“What?”
“Tomorrow afternoon. Or the day after, if you want. And don’t be late this time.”
I hung up on his smile and let out a hiss that steamed the glass.
Already he’d bent me out of shape. It had taken no more than fifteen minutes. We hadn’t said shit to each other. Maybe it was his fault, maybe it was mine. I could feel the old, singular pain rising once more.
I shoved my chair back, took a few steps, and stopped. I thought, If I can get out now, without asking the question, I might be able to free myself. I have the chance. It’s there. The door is three feet away. I can do this. I can do this.
It was a stupid mantra. I’d already missed my chance. I’d turned back once already, and I was about to do the same thing again. I knew Collie would still be seated, watching me, waiting. I turned back, grabbed the phone up again, stood facing the glass and said, “The girl in the mobile home.”
He almost looked ashamed for an instant. He shut his eyes and swung his chin back and forth like he was trying to jar one memory loose and replace it with another. He pursed his lips and muttered something to his invisible audience that I wasn’t meant to hear. Then he grinned, his hard and cool back in place. “Okay.”
“So tell me,” I said.
“What do you want to hear?”
“You already know. Just say it.”
“You want to hear that I did it? Okay, I aced her.”
“She was nine.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me why.”
“Would you feel better if she was nineteen? Or twenty-nine? You feel better about the old lady? She was seventy-one. I killed her with my fists. Or-”
“I want to know why, Collie.”
“You’re asking the wrong questions.”
“Tell me or you’ll never see me again.”
His icy eyes softened. Not out of shame but out of fear that I would leave him forever. He licked his lips and his brow tightened in concentration as he searched for a genuine response.
“I was making ghosts,” he said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I appreciate you showing up. Really. Come back tomorrow, Terry. Okay? Or the day after. Please.”
I thought of a nine-year-old girl standing in the face of my enraged brother. I knew what it was like to be caught in that storm. I imagined his laughter, the way his eyes whirled in their sockets as he made her lay down on the floor beside her parents and brothers, pointed a. 38 at the back of her head as she twisted her face away in terror, and squeezed the trigger.
I made it to my car and threw up twice in the parking lot. I drove through the prison gates and waited on the street until I spotted the guard who’d made me repeat my name three times.
He eased by in a flashy sports car so well waxed that the rain slewed off and barely touched it. For a half hour I followed him from a quarter-mile back until he turned into a new neighborhood development maybe ten minutes from the shore.
The rain had shifted to a light drizzle. I watched him pull into a yellow two-story house with a new clapboard roof and a well-mown yard. There was an SUV in the driveway and the garage door was open. Two six or seven year old boys rolled up and down the wet sidewalk wearing sneakers with little wheels built into them.
I drove to the beach and sat staring at the waves until it was dark. I’d been surrounded by mountains and desert for so long that I’d forgotten how lulling the ocean can be, alive and comforting, aware of your weaknesses and sometimes merciful.
Five minutes off the parkway I found a restaurant and ate an overpriced but succulent seafood dinner. I’d been living on steak and tex-mex spices for so long that it was like an exotic meal from some foreign and romantic land. The lobster and crab legs quieted my stomach and loosened the knot there I listened in to the families around me, the children laughing and whining, the parents humorous and warm and short-tempered.
The wind picked up and it started to rain harder again. Streams of saturated moonlight did wild endless shimmies against the glass. I drank a cup of coffee every twenty minutes until the place closed, then I sat out at the beach again until the bluster passed.
It took me three minutes to get into the screw’s house. I stood in the master bedroom and watched as he and his wife spooned in their sleep. She was lovely with a tussled mound of hair that glowed a burnished copper in the dark. One lace strap of her lingerie had slipped off her shoulder, and the swell of her breast arched toward me.
I found his trousers and snatched his wallet. He had a lot of photos of his children. I left the house, drove to the water, and threw his wallet into the whitecaps. I didn’t want his money. I didn’t want to know his name. I didn’t even especially want to hurt him. I was testing myself and finding that I’d both passed and failed.
I was still a good creeper. The skills remained. My heart rate never sped. I didn’t make a sound.
I hadn’t broken the law in five years, not so much as running a yellow light. My chest itched. My scars burned. The one where Collie had stabbed me. The one from my broken rib. And the largest one made up of Kimmy’s teeth marks from the last time we’d made love. She bit in so deep under my heart that she’d scraped bone.
I drove home through the storm thinking of the ghosts I had made.