Patty Day
JANUARY 2, 1985
9:12 P.M.
The house had gone silent for a few beats after Runner sped away, finding someone else to bully for money. Peggy Bannion, she was his girlfriend now, Patty’d heard—why doesn’t he go harass her? Probably already had.
One beat, two beats, three beats. Then the girls had turned into a mess of questions and worries and small hands everywhere on her, as if they were trying to get warm by a really weak campfire. Runner was scary this time. He’d always had a bit of menace to him, he’d always been temperful when he didn’t get his own way, but this was the closest he’d come to attacking her. For the most part. When they’d been married, there’d been tussles, little slaps upside the head, designed more to infuriate, to remind you of your helplessness, than to really hurt. Why is there no food in the fridge? Smack. Why is this place such a shithole? Smack. Where does all the money go, Patty? Smack, smack, smack. You listening to me, girl? What the hell you do with all the money? The man was obsessed with cash. Even in a rare fatherly moment, grudgingly playing Monopoly with the kids, he’d spend most of his time sneaking money out from the Bank, clutching the bright orange and purple bills in his lap. You calling me a cheat? Smack. You saying your old man’s a cheat, Ben? Smack, smack, smack. You think you’re smarter’n me? Smack.
Now nearly an hour after Runner had left, the girls were still huddled on her, near her, behind her, all over the sofa asking her what was wrong, what was wrong with Ben, why was Dad so mad. Why’d she make Dad mad? Libby sat the farthest from her, tucked in a bundle, sucking a finger, her worried brain stuck on the visit to the Cates’s house, the cop. She looked feverish, and when Patty reached out to touch her cheek, she flinched.
“It’s OK, Libby.”
“No it’s not,” she said, unblinking eyes fixed on Patty. “I want Ben back.”
“He’ll come back,” Patty said.
“How do you knoooooww?” Libby whimpered.
Debby hopped on that. “Do you know where he is? Why can’t we find him? Is he in trouble because of his hair?”
“I know why he’s in trouble,” Michelle said in her most wheedling voice. “Because of sex.”
Patty turned on her, furious at that simpering, gossipy rhythm. A hair-in-curlers, whisper-in-the-supermarket tone. People were using that tone to discuss her family all over Kinnakee right now. She grabbed Michelle by the arm, harder than she meant to.
“What do you mean, Michelle, what do you think you know?”
“Nothing, Mom, nothing,” Michelle blurted. “I was just saying, I don’t know.” She started to blubber, as Michelle did when she got in trouble and knew she’d done wrong.
“Ben is your brother, you don’t talk hateful about your brother. Not inside this family and definitely not out of it. That means, church, school, whatever.”
“But Mom …” started Michelle, still crying. “I don’t like Ben.”
“Don’t say that.”
“He’s bad, he does bad things, everyone at school knows …”
“Knows what, Michelle?” She felt her forehead start burning, wished Diane were there. “I don’t understand what you’re saying. Has Ben, are you saying Ben has done anything … bad … to you?”
She had promised herself she would never ask this question, that it was a betrayal of Ben to even think it. When Ben had been younger, seven or eight, he’d taken to sliding into her bed at night, and she’d wake up with him running fingers through her hair, cupping a breast. Innocent but disturbing moments in which she woke up feeling sensual, excited, and then darted from the bed, pulling robes and nightgowns around her like a horrified maiden. No, no, no you don’t touch Mom like that. But she never suspected—until now— that Ben might have done anything to his sisters. So she let the question hang, while Michelle got more and more agitated, pushing her big glasses up and down her pointy nose, crying.
“Michelle, I’m sorry I yelled at you. Ben is in trouble. Now, has he done anything to you I need to know about?” Her nerves were jagged: she had moments of pure panic, followed by moods of complete remoteness. She could feel the fear rising now, that propulsion, like taking off in an airplane.
“Done what to me?”
“Has he touched you in a strange way. A not brotherly way?” A free-floating gap now, like the engines shutting off.
“The only time he touches me is when he’s pushing me or pulling my hair or shoving me,” Michelle droned, her usual litany.
Relief, oh, relief.
“So what do people say about him at school?”
“He’s a freak, it’s embarrassing. No one likes him. I mean, just look in his room, Mom. He’s got all sorts of weird stuff.”
She was about to lecture Michelle on not going into Ben’s room without his permission, and wanted to slap herself. She thought about what Det. Collins had said, the organs of animals, in Tupper-ware containers. She imagined them. Some dried in tight, wooden balls, others fresh and assaulting when you opened the lid, let the smell hit you.
Patty stood up. “What’s in his room?”
She started walking down the hall, Ben’s goddang phone cord tripping her up, as always. She marched past his padlocked door, down the hall, turned the corner left, past the girls’ room and into her own. Socks and shoes and jeans lay everywhere, each day’s flotsam abandoned in piles.
She opened her bedside table and found an envelope, In Case of Emergency scrawled on the front in Diane’s elongated cursive that looked just like their mother’s. Inside was $520, cash. She had no idea when Diane had sneaked that in her room, and she was glad she hadn’t known, because Runner would have sensed her holding out. She lifted the money to her nose and smelled it. Then she tucked the envelope back inside and pulled out a bolt-cutter she’d bought weeks ago, just to have on hand, just if she ever needed to get into Ben’s lair. She’d been ashamed. She started back down the hallway, the girls’ room looking like a flophouse, beds against each wall except the doorway. She could picture the police wrinkling their noses— they all sleep in here?—and then the aroma of urine hit her and she realized one of them must have wet the bed last night. Or the night before?
She debated switching out the sheets right then, but made herself walk straight back to Ben’s, stood eye-level with an old Fender Guitar sticker he’d partly scraped off. She had a quick moment of nausea when she almost decided she couldn’t look. What if she found incriminating photos, sickening Polaroids?
Snap. The lock fell to the carpet. She yelled at the girls, peeking out from the living room like startled deer, to go watch TV. She had to say it three times—gowatchTVgowatchTVgowatchTV-—before Michelle finally went away.
Ben’s bed was unmade, rumpled under a pile of jackets and jeans and sweaters, but the rest of the room wasn’t a pit. His desk was piled with notebooks and cassette tapes and an outdated globe that had been Diane’s. Patty spun it, her finger leaving a mark in the dust near Rhodesia, then began flipping through the notebooks. They were covered in band logos: AC/DC with the lightning slash, Venom, Iron Maiden. On the notebook paper, Ben had drawn pentagrams and poems about murder and Satan.
The child is mine
But really not
Cuz Satan has a darker plot
Kill the baby and its mother
Then look for more
And kill another