* * *
I sent Jeannie home, then sat up in bed reading every word of every article, including one that described the scene at our house when the police arrived: “Mr. Davis was found on the blood-soaked living room floor, MacPherson kneeling over him, a .357 Magnum in her hand. Davis had been shot in the temple and the eye and was pronounced dead at the scene.”
That horrific description was going to give me nightmares.
Most of the other articles were repetitive, but I still read them all. It was nearly midnight when I reached the most personal, most painful-to-read item in the box. It was a handwritten note on a sheet of lined white paper, clearly a Xeroxed copy.
Dear Mom and Dad,
I’m so sorry for what I’ve put you through. I know what I’m about to do will make it even harder on you, at least for a while, but I’m sure a jury won’t believe me about it being an accident and I can’t go to prison. It terrifies me. I just can’t do it. This is better for everyone in the long run. I love you and Riley and Danny so much and I’m sorry for any shame I’ve brought on our family.
Love, Lisa
13.
The forest was absolutely silent, the only sound the hush-hush of our footsteps as Danny and I walked over a carpet of long brown pine needles and tufts of neon-green weeds. I was in my brother’s world, though not at his invitation. I’d shown up with the box of articles that morning, feeling anxious, wondering how much he remembered of the shooting and Lisa’s suicide. How much he knew. But he didn’t speak. He sat at the table in his trailer, his face growing nearly as red as his T-shirt as he scanned two of the articles, then shoved the box aside. Grabbing his shotgun, he pushed out of the trailer and into the woods. I quickly followed, terrified that I may have made the worst mistake of my life by bringing the box to him.
When I found him, though, he was walking slowly, as though he hoped I’d catch up to him. He didn’t look at me, but kept his eyes forward, his gun propped against his shoulder, and I fell into step next to him. We walked that way in complete silence for ten minutes or more, and although I’d been nervous at first, I began to relax. There was something about the quiet out here. About the thick carpet of needles beneath our feet. All around us, for as far as I could see, the arrow-straight trunks of the pines shot into the sky, where they exploded into puff balls of long green needles. I glanced over my shoulders to see the same view in every direction. We were not on a trail, and I knew that without Danny at my side, I would be lost.
“How do you know where we are?” I whispered. It seemed wrong to break the spell of the woods with my voice.
“I just do.” He pointed ahead of us. “That’s where I like to go.”
I looked ahead of us, but the landscape of tree trunks looked no different in that direction than in any other. Yet within a few steps, I understood. An oval of grass opened up in front of us, circled by pines so tall, they created a cathedral-like space below them. “Oh,” I said. “I see why. It’s beautiful.”
He walked over to one of the trees and sat down on the cushion of pine needles near its base, resting the shotgun on the ground at his side. I sat next to him, and when I looked at him, he was slowly shaking his head, his eyes closed. I waited, and two or three minutes passed before he finally opened his eyes.
“You know how you think you remember things, but you’re not sure if maybe you dreamt them?” he asked, looking out into the trees. “Or maybe even … made them up?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Mom used to say I had a good imagination. I should be a writer, she said, because I made up such amazing stories.” He sounded bitter. “She’d laugh them off, my stories. When I’d ask her if she remembered the day she and I came home from the grocery store and we heard two gunshots as we got out of the car, she’d say, ‘Oh, what a creative mind you have!’ Or when I said something about remembering blood on the living room carpet, she’d say, ‘If you have to make up stories, can’t you make up nicer ones?’”
“Oh, Danny.” I touched his arm, relieved when he didn’t try to brush my hand away.
“I remember sirens,” he said. “I thought they were coming for you.”
“For me?”
He nodded. “You were bleeding. You had a cut on your head.”
“I have a scar on my forehead,” I said, lifting my bangs to show him the small dent above my left eyebrow, but he didn’t turn to look at me. He seemed lost in his memory.
“You were screaming,” he said.
I let my bangs fall over my forehead again. “Mom always told me I hit my head on a coffee table when I was little, but I don’t remember it.”
“I thought that was why the ambulance was coming, but that wasn’t it, was it?” He shook his head as though talking to himself. “It was for her teacher. That guy she killed.”
“Accidentally,” I added. “You read the part about it being an accident, right?”
“‘Shot through the eye,’” he said. “I knew that. I knew…” He ran his fingers through his hair. “How did I know that? Did I see it? Hear it?” He rubbed his temples hard in frustration, then looked at me. “I knew about all this, Riles,” he said. “I knew it, but I’d forgotten it.”
“I think,” I said carefully, not wanting him to go off on his tirade about our parents again … and yet, maybe they deserved it? “I think Mom and Daddy did their best to make you forget it.”
“I didn’t have to go to school then,” he said. “Mom homeschooled me for a while like she did with Lisa, though Lisa was gone.” He frowned as if trying to remember. “She was always going away on trips and things, but … I guess she was in jail then? She must have been. I didn’t connect the homeschooling with the sirens or anything. I thought I was being punished for something. They wouldn’t let me go out and play.” He was rambling, piecing things together in his mind. “I hardly knew her,” he said. “Lisa. Eleven years older and always gone. Her schedule ruled our lives. The whole world revolved around her.” He wrapped his hand around a fistful of pine needles. His face was still expressionless, but his voice was taut. Suddenly it softened. “I always liked you, though,” he added, glancing at me. “You were a cool little kid.”
I couldn’t believe he was talking this way. Saying so much.
“You were my best friend,” I said.
He dropped the needles. Rubbed his hands over his denim-covered knees. “I have this nightmare that comes and goes,” he said. “It sucks. It’s the worst one.”
“Do you want to tell—”
“I thought it was about Iraq.” He interrupted me, lost in his own thoughts. “But now I don’t know, because Mom is in it. She’s always in it. Always screaming.”
I watched the muscles around his jaw tighten and release as I waited for him to say more, but he was done talking about his dream.
“Suicide is the coward’s way out.” He picked up a twig, playing with it between his fingers. “I mean, I feel for the vets who do it, and I get it. It becomes too much for them to carry around. Maybe they don’t have a place like this to escape to.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by “a place like this.” Then I realized he was talking about this small patch of pine forest. His haven. I was touched that he’d allowed me to be there with him.
“So you don’t have to worry about me and suicide, all right?” He glanced at me. “I know you do.”
I was afraid of breaking the spell of warmth that had fallen over us, yet maybe I could take advantage of his mood to delve deeper.
“I do worry,” I admitted. “I know you’re depressed. If you’d stay on your medications, I think you’d be—”
“I’m not depressed.”
Like hell, I thought. “How would you define your feelings, then? What do you—”
“I’m pissed off, is what I am!” He broke the twig in two between his fingers. The sound it made was barely audible, yet it made me jump.
“Who are you pissed off at?” I asked.