I had no idea how to answer.
“Are you trying to ruin my life?” she said. “Is that your goal?”
“No,” I said. “What are you talking about? I was trying to help you. I thought if maybe you knew.”
Lindy did not want to hear it. She turned in a circle. She was beside herself.
“If I knew what?” she said. “If I knew what his face looked like? How would that help me, you sick fuck?”
“You don’t understand,” I told her. “Mr. Landry has all these pictures of you. He has all these twisted pictures of everybody. He has all these drugs. I think he might have done it.”
She looked over at Jacques Landry, who was now surrounded by police, by Lindy’s father, by Old Man Casemore, by every male out there. “That fat ass?” she said. “He didn’t do it, you idiot. The guy was skinny. He was bony. He felt like a goddamned skeleton on my back.”
“He did?” I said.
The last couple years of my life appeared pretty na?ve to me then.
I thought, for instance, that explanations healed scars, when they didn’t, and that the way I wanted life to be was more important than the way life was, which it wasn’t. In fact, I think I honestly believed in those years that if I could get Lindy to again be who she was before her rape, rather than admitting to the fact that she had been raped and was now different because of it, then maybe I could get the entire world to go back to how it was when we were little, when my father was around, and when my sister was alive.
“I didn’t know that,” I told Lindy. “I didn’t know that he was skinny.”
Lindy cut her eyes so sharply in my direction that I understood, despite my years of trying, that I didn’t know a thing about her. Our talks about Dahmer. Our idle gossip. Our misguided phone sex. They had nothing to do with her real life. That had nothing to do with her heart.
She again leaned toward the open window.
“Does it make you feel better to know that he was skinny?” Lindy asked me. “Is that why you talk to me all the time? You want to know some more details? You act like you’re my friend, but that’s total bullshit. You just feel bad because you told everybody and now you want to make it better, but you can’t. That’s why you act so interested in me. So you can be a little detective and solve the case and feel better about fucking up my life.”
I noticed people looking over at us. I saw Lindy’s mom coming our way.
“Lindy,” I said, “that’s not true.”
Lindy slammed her fists on the roof of the police car. “Yes, it is,” she said. She stood on her toes as if wired with energy. She was so angry that she couldn’t even look at me. “Let’s get it over with, shall we?” she said. “What else do you want to know? Do you want to know that I get sick when I see a man’s sweat sock? Like in the gym or in the road or anywhere else. Some idiot loses a sock and I fucking puke because I taste it all over again. Do you like that? What else? Do you want to know that I remember hitting the ground and smelling ink and I have no idea why? That’s why I got a fucking C in Ms. Price’s class last semester, by the way, because she counts off for not using a goddamned pen but every time I smell one I am right back on that sidewalk and it is happening again right now and not in the past but right now and I want to fucking kill myself.”
Lindy beat her hand against the window.
“What else do you want to know?” she said. “Let’s get it all out so you can feel better. You want to know what he said to me before I blacked out? That’s a good one. Everybody acts like I don’t remember, but I do. I felt his body and heard his voice and I still don’t know whose it fucking was, no matter how many times you or a cop or my fucking dad might ask me, but I do know what he said. Do you want to know? I bet you do, you sick shit.”
At this point, Mrs. Peggy put her hand on Lindy’s shoulder.
“Lindy,” she said. “You’re upset, honey. Let’s go home.”
“Leave me alone,” Lindy told her. “I’m talking to my friend here. He wants to know all about me.”
“Sweetheart,” Mrs. Peggy said. “He was only trying to help.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I really was trying to help.”
Lindy broke away from her mother and turned toward me. We looked into each other’s eyes, both sober and clear, for the first time in years. And, as she stood there staring at me, I knew that I had hurt her. I truly felt it, for perhaps the first time.
“Do you want to know?” she said.
“I’m so sorry,” I told her.
Lindy put her mouth to the crack of the window.
“I’ll tell you what he said,” she whispered.
Lindy then lowered her voice to a grunt, to a growl, and it sounded like neither a boy nor a man but some feral animal given power to speak.
“You think you’re so pretty,” she said, and then Lindy walked away.
I let my head fall against the window and watched the scene before me dissolve through tears that had built up for a long time before this. It was Lindy, yes, and her shredded heart and my self-deception and my parents bearing witness to the person I’d become. And it was also, of course, my own bearing witness.
But I did not get much time to dwell.
Soon Louise Landry tapped on the glass. She was still wearing her thick and knitted nightgown. “Why did you break into our house?” she asked me. “Did Jason ask you to do this? Did he help you?”
I wiped my cheek on my shoulder. I nodded my head.
“I should have gotten us out of here a long time ago,” she said.
I looked up at her, and, in her remorse, Louise Landry appeared a thousand years old.
“Do you know where he is now?” she asked me. “Please. He needs help. He needs real help. I never planned for things to turn out this way. I hope you know that.”
I knew that she was telling the truth.
In my experience, nothing ever turned out as planned.
Except, perhaps, for Jason Landry on this one night, for whom everything had turned out perfectly. After all, what more could he have wanted? The Perkins School was on fire. His father was being investigated. His mother was pleading for forgiveness. And, meanwhile, Jason himself had walked unseen from the dark woods up the hill to face the back windows of his abusive suburban home. He still had a couple of bottles left in his backpack. He had his lighter. He had his aim. Nobody even knew he was there.
Yet we all heard the glass shatter.
We all heard the woof of his fire, the sound of his laughter.
It was only a matter of time.