“Keep it short and simple,” I’d said as Julie and I kept pressing dish towels to Heather’s chest even though by that point we both knew it was futile. “We tell them we didn’t know about Ray Fortini before tonight. We came here to comfort Heather because of the miscarriage and he showed up.”
I remember Julie weeping, leaving traces of Heather’s blood on her face every time she swiped at her eyes. Sarah stuffed the phone she’d stolen from Ray—the one he’d used to blackmail us—into her purse to be disposed of later, before clearing all of the texting related to the blackmail off Heather’s phones.
“What do we do with her second phone?” Sarah picked it off the table.
“Put it back in the hospital bag for the police to find,” I said. “It shows her relationship with Fortini.”
The story we told was mostly the truth. We hadn’t known about Ray Fortini, she’d kept him a secret from us. He stabbed her in a fight because she was trying to leave him. We had Heather’s second phone as proof of their affair, which provided a motive for Viktor’s murder.
It was a neat and tidy explanation, although I’m certain that Tedesco and Kasper knew there was more to the story. Lying by omission—isn’t that what they call it? I’m sure they would love to have charged us with that at least, but ultimately there was no concrete evidence to support any charge at all.
In the end, we were just the friends, bystanders to what had happened to Viktor and Heather. As I said to Detective Tedesco that night, “You never really know what happens in someone else’s marriage.”
As for our own marriages, our husbands asked a lot of questions, too, but were more easily satisfied than the police by the explanation we offered. I remember the warmth of Michael’s arms as he pulled me to him that night despite the blood coating my clothing. “It’ll be okay,” he murmured, but I felt his fear in how tight he held me. It was only when he brushed a gentle hand against my face that I realized I was crying.
Apparently Brian and Eric reacted this way, too, each of our husbands, like the best of spouses, moving quickly from questions to providing comfort and support. And don’t we all want to believe that everything is going to be okay?
Almost four years have passed since I first noticed that bruise on Heather’s wrist, and everything that happened after has started to fade a bit in my memory, the events less sharp, their exact sequence less clear. My family moved five months after her funeral, the job transfer for Michael back to Philadelphia that I’d once dreaded. He waited to tell me, afraid of my reaction, only to be surprised when I didn’t protest leaving Sewickley.
The children are settled in a new school with new friends and we’ve lived in this new house long enough that I’ve stopped opening the wrong drawer in the kitchen or hesitating before making the turn onto our street. It’s been long enough that Lucy and Matthew don’t talk as often about their old neighborhood or their Pittsburgh friends. They’re so young that it’s something they’ll barely remember; that past won’t haunt them the way it does me.
I miss Sewickley’s charm and walkability, Pittsburgh’s rolling hills and its rivers and bridges. Most of all, I miss my closest friends and the bond we once shared, which I know we’ll never have again. For the first few months after the move, I kept in touch with Julie and Sarah, but then it stretched out longer and longer, and the other day I realized that it had been over six months since I’d spoken to either of them. It’s been said that a shared trauma can bring people together, but just as often it pulls them apart.
Sarah did end up joining AA, and soon after that she went back to practicing law full-time. She and her husband are selling their house in Sewickley and moving back to the city. Perhaps they already have. Ostensibly, it’s to be closer to her law practice, but I wonder if she needed to get away as much as I did. Apparently she spends all her free time doing pro bono work, so much so that the Tribune-Review wrote a nice article about her, highlighting her “selfless fight for the rights of the underprivileged and underrepresented.” I think I know what fuels this obsession with justice.
Julie is still selling houses. There was a slight dip in her home sales after the murder, but she rebounded from that and has gone on to enjoy an even greater level of success than before, a fact that she apparently credits to a religious experience in some way connected to Heather’s death. She told me about it once, how she’d been afraid that Ray would turn the knife on her after Heather and how she’d held on to her belief that this wasn’t the plan. It’s an interesting spin on that story, I told her, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice, but I don’t know why I was surprised. Wasn’t she always afraid to look at the dark side of anything? Maybe she holds on to her beliefs because she thinks they will save her. And perhaps they will. All I can say is that I don’t share that certainty.
Here is what I know: We helped to kill a man. We might not have pulled the trigger, but we set the events in motion and placed the weapon in Heather’s hand. Will we be judged for what we did and didn’t do? Certainly I have judged myself for it. Sometimes I still have nightmares about it, seeing his body slumped over the passenger seat or lying in his casket. Once I had a dream in which I was back in Braddock, wandering through the house where I’d lived as a child, the same thin walls and hollow doors, but it was Viktor bleeding on that old linoleum floor, and as I ran to help him I caught my reflection in a window, but the face staring back at me was my father’s.
The letters still make their way to my mailbox, my father’s handwriting shakier now and his observations less acute. “I saw a movie last week that reminded me of you,” he wrote a month ago. “There were two little kids in it and I thought of you and Sean. Do you remember running through that sprinkler I set up for you?”
He isn’t the monster I remember. There are no monsters, just deeply flawed people, all of us given that power to choose, some of us making choices so damaging that they ruin the lives of those we claim to love.
I believed once in those clear lines, the good and the evil, the perpetrator and the victim, and now I see that all of us end up playing both roles at some point in our lives. We hurt those that we love, we make choices that we can’t undo, we throw ourselves headlong into battles in the name of rescuing people who never asked to be saved. Not everyone is as guilty as my father, or Heather, or Ray. But none of us are wholly innocent. We are all the damned and we are all the saved.
Could we have saved Heather? In my grief over her death, I’ve asked myself this question many times. If she’d only left Viktor instead of having an affair. If she hadn’t been attracted to such a damaged man or put so much value on money. If we’d only realized how lonely she was and taken her away from that stone house on the hill, just as we’d thought of doing so many times. But you can’t save those who don’t want to be saved.
This was true of my mother, and for all those caught like her, who keep going back for the embrace that is a stranglehold, like the fragile and frantic moths that find their way to my back porch on summer evenings, doomed to turn their bodies again and again toward the light that will destroy them.
I walk my kids to the bus stop in our new neighborhood, bringing something to read just like I used to all those years ago when Lucy started preschool. This morning, after the bus pulled away, another mother called after me as I started for home. “We were thinking of going for coffee,” she said with a lovely smile. “Why don’t you join us?”
I hesitated, memories of those mornings at the coffee shop in Sewickley filling me with a longing so great that tears sprang to my eyes. But I could feel the weight of the latest letter in my pocket, and the email Sean sent was fresh in my mind. He’s offered to meet me at the prison hospital, but when it’s time, I’ll walk into that room alone to face my father.
“I can’t today.” I smiled at the welcoming faces of the woman and her friend. “Maybe another time,” I said, and kept walking.