“Where are you?” I said. “Do your parents let you cuss like that?”
“No one lets me do anything,” she said. “But, yeah, I’m in my room.”
I walked to my window. Her light was off and her shades were drawn. I looked over at my clock and realized that it was one a.m. and we’d been talking for hours. It is possible that I had never been happier.
Still, I should have understood even then that when Lindy and I spoke in those days, we were often talking about different things. My version of the Jeffrey Dahmer story, for example, was something out of a nightmare while hers seemed like an interesting dream. There was awe in her voice, a peculiar respect for the murderer. And as confusing as that sounds, I’ve since come to learn that this is not uncommon with victims of sexual violence. It is called rape trauma syndrome, in the clinical journals, and often manifests itself as vivid fantasies in which the victim of the violence becomes the aggressor. Female victims especially, it is said, still many years later, may often fantasize about killing their husbands, their sons, their brothers. They say they can’t help it. They say they feel terrible about it. They say they feel guilty. They say the most frequent method of murder, in a landslide, is by stabbing.
“Why is your light off?” I asked her. “I mean, if you’re in your room.”
“Here’s another question,” she said. “Why are you always watching me?”
My stomach sank.
I remembered what Lindy had accused me of at the party, the way she’d told everyone how I watched her. I’d gone over it in my mind every day those past months. Was it possible, I wondered, that she had seen me in the water oak those nights, squatting like a thief outside her window? If she had, why didn’t she say something? If she hadn’t, why make it up? Why try to hurt me? How much about me did she know?
“I don’t watch you,” I said. “Why do you keep saying that?”
“What are you talking about?”
“At Melinda’s,” I said. “Don’t you remember?”
“Look,” Lindy said. “I have zero interest in talking about that night. And my light’s off because I’m lying in bed. That’s what people do when they go to sleep. It’s not a big mystery.”
“You’re in bed?” I asked.
Lindy laughed. “Jesus,” she said. “Do you want to know what I’m wearing, too?”
“No,” I said.
“Good. Because maybe I don’t want to tell you.”
But here’s the thing. I thought I’d heard something sly in Lindy’s voice when she said that. I swore I heard something crafty. Despite her new cynicism, her hard outer shell, Lindy still had the ability to place herself directly between what I imagined I both could and could not have, both could and could not understand. Therefore, part of me thought she was being flirtatious while the other part became a paranoid wreck. I thought she was teasing me. I thought the few friends she still had might be listening in the background, hoping I’d say something they could bury me with. The telephone connection seemed suddenly sharp and crystal clear and I had no idea how to react.
I tried to be funny.
“Why don’t you want to tell me?” I asked. “Are you wearing fuzzy bunny slippers?”
“Ooh,” she said. “So close.”
“An evening gown?”
“Nope.”
“A gorilla suit? A garbage bag?”
“Silly boy,” she said. “Who said I was wearing anything at all?”
I had no retort.
In our silence, ocean liners moved across the sea.
In the world, mountains grew.
“Wow,” Lindy said. “You need to get laid.”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Right,” she said, and I thought I heard her sit up in her bed after this, maybe move around and adjust some pillows. She also made a noise to sound as if she was leaning over, reaching for something, and I imagined her bare breasts against her sheets. I imagined her clicking off her night-light to get comfortable. Her white bed. Her pink comforter. Her soft skin. Her legs. The way she used to wear her hair when we were only slightly younger than we were then. The way she used to run. A small brown freckle that I saw, once, on her neck. Her tan fingers.
Maybe she was right about me.
“Anyway,” Lindy said. “I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
And that was it. She hung up.
Across the street and two doors down from me I watched a faint blue light click on in her room. I imagined her turning on a television before bed, falling asleep to the drone of an anchorman’s voice, and I wanted to watch whatever she was watching. I wanted to be with her even if I couldn’t. It was like I already missed her.
So I left my room and walked toward the den, where our TV was also on. In those days, it was not a strange sight to see my mother up late. Whenever I would venture through our dark home to raid the pantry, thinking everyone asleep, I’d often find her standing alone in her nightgown, milling around in different rooms, quiet as a ghost. And if the glow from the open refrigerator lit her up, or if I’d ask her what she was doing, she would just tell me that she had forgotten to lock some door or turn something off and would kiss me on the forehead and go back to her bedroom. “Good night, Mom,” I would say. “Good night, son,” she would say. And we wouldn’t mention it again.
That night, she sat on the couch with a blanket on her lap. The room smelled sour. In the soft light of our television her eyes appeared dark and expressionless, and I couldn’t tell if she was looking at me. The TV was tuned to CNN and, as had become common, a mug shot of Jeffrey Dahmer took up most of the screen. It surprised me that she would be watching this.
“Mom?” I said, and sat next to her on the couch.
I saw a wastebasket on the floor, a wet towel on her wrist.
“What are you doing up?” I asked her, although I knew.
In the months since Hannah’s death, Rachel told me that she had often heard our mother, late at night, throwing up by herself in the bathroom. This image of grief was so devastating to me that I didn’t believe her. I made up excuses to explain it. I told her that Mom had mentioned to me she was feeling sick, maybe coming down with something. I said that Mom was fine, and she was probably just hearing things. Rachel told me that I wasn’t hearing anything at all.
Sitting beside me on the couch, my mother closed her eyes.
“Do you think it’s better?” she asked me. “Do you really think it’s better that they caught this guy?”
I looked at Dahmer’s picture on the TV.
People often remark, after their initial arrest and scandal, about how much serial killers look to them like “regular people,” like any random guy you could meet at a bar one night, anyone working a cash register. This was never the case with Jeffrey Dahmer. The more we stared at his mug shot that late summer—on our television screens, in our newspapers and magazines—the more obvious his guilt became. His eyes were, to everyone who saw them, a stranger’s eyes. His mouth was, to everyone who heard it, a dirty one. Even his mustache looked crooked and pasted on, like part of some devilish disguise, and simply by staring at him for a while we knew it was true, what he had done to those men. We could see it. This person was not like the rest of us. His lips were made to kiss people, yes. But his tongue was made to lick their dead skin.
So, I didn’t understand my mom’s question.
“What do you mean?” I asked her. “Of course it’s better that they caught him.”
“I meant for the families,” she said. “Do you think it’s better that they know what happened to their kids? All these details on the news? Is it better they found out?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think it’s probably hard either way.”
My mother looked over at me and seemed to suddenly surface from whatever hole she’d been in. She held up the remote control and turned off the television and touched my face and neck with her hands as if she had just found me, as if I had been missing.
We then sat quietly in the moonlit room and looked at each other a long time, and I began to feel as if we hadn’t spoken in months, although we saw each other every day. I also recognized, perhaps for the first time in my life, that there were many fundamental ways in which I looked like her, in which I was a part of her, ways in which people could have deduced that we were related. It was something about our noses, the set of our eyes. We looked so obviously kindred in that moment.
After a while, she palmed my forehead as if checking my temperature. She moved my hair away from my eyes. “Are you doing okay?” she asked me. “Are you doing okay about Hannah?”
I felt my throat tighten up.
I didn’t know what to say about Hannah. I never did.
So instead I leaned over and put my head in my mother’s lap. She placed her hand on my shoulder and then, for a long time, she rubbed it.
“You know I’m here, don’t you?” she asked me.
“I know, Mom,” I said. “Me, too.”
I meant this when I said it. But I wonder now if she believed me. If so, why? What had I done for her in those years? And, if not, how? What more could I have said to let her know?
Is there ever a love, any love, made of answers?