“Please … please stop.”
Jean’s terrified eyes meet mine and it’s working, I can see her seeing it again, being there, I’m doing it, I’m going to get the information I need, she’s back there now at the scene with the knife handle wrapped in her palm, Nico’s struggling weight beneath her. And where was I, I was on the way but I wasn’t here yet, it took me too long, I should have been here to save her but I wasn’t and it’s burning, my blood is burning. I need more, I need all of it.
“Did she beg you for her life?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did she, Jean?”
She can’t speak. She nods, nods weeping, thrashes in my grip.
“Was she screaming?”
Nodding and nodding, helpless.
“She begged you to stop? But you didn’t stop?”
“Please—”
“There are more things I need to know.”
“No,” she says, “no, you don’t—right? You don’t, right? You don’t really, right?”
Her voice is altered, high and pleading, like a little kid, like a toddler, pleading to be told that something unpleasant isn’t really so. I don’t really have to go to the doctor, right? I don’t really have to take a bath. Jean and I hold our pose for a minute, down in the mud, me clutching her shoulders tightly, and I feel it, suddenly, where we’ve gotten to, here, what’s happening. What the asteroid did to her is done, and what Astronaut did to her is done, and now here I am, her last and worst terror, forcing her to stare into this blackness, wade through it like every detail matters, like it can possibly matter.
I let her go and she rolls her head back away from me, emitting low terrified moans like an animal on the slaughterhouse floor.
“Jean,” I say. “Jean. Jean. Jean.”
I say her name until she stops moaning. I say it softly, softer and softer, until it becomes a whisper, “Jean, Jean, Jean,” a soothing small little whisper, just the word, “Jean.”
I am sunk now into the ground beside her.
“When did your parents give you that bracelet?”
“The—what?”
Her right hand moves to the left wrist and she brushes her fingers over the cheap piece of jewelry.
“You told me when we first talked that it was your parents who gave you the charm bracelet. Was it on your birthday?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “It was my first communion.”
“Is that right?” I smile. I lean backward, balance myself with my fingers laced across my knees. “So you’re how old for that?”
“Seven,” she says. “I was seven. They were so proud of me.”
“Oh, boy, I’ll bet they were.”
We sit there for a while in the mud of the lawn and she gives it all to me, painting the picture: the soaring nave of St. Mary’s in Lansing, Michigan, the dancing lights of the votive candles, the warm harmonies of the choir. She remembers quite a lot of it, considering how young she was, how much has happened to her since. After a while I tell her a couple of my own stories, from when I was a kid: my parents taking us up to the old Dairy Queen on Saturday evenings for shakes; going to the 7-Eleven after school to buy Batman comics; biking with Nico all around White Park, when she first learned to ride and never wanted to get off the darn thing, around and around and around and around.
There’s a memory I love. It’s me and Naomi Eddes, it’s six months ago, give or take. The last Tuesday in March.
“Well, I have to tell you,” she says, looking across the table at me with a tiny tree of broccoli poised at the end of her chopsticks. “I am quite taken with you.”
We’re eating at Mr. Chow’s. Our first and last date. She’s wearing a red dress with black buttons down the front.
“Taken, huh?” I say, playing at bemusement, teasing her for the outmoded turn of phrase, which I actually find poetic and charming, so much so, in fact, that I am falling in love with her, across the smudged table, under the blinking neon sign that says Chow! Chow! “And why do you think you’re taken with me?”
“Oh, you know. You’re very tall, so you see everything from weird angles. Also—and I’m serious—your life has a purpose. You know what I mean?”
“I guess,” I say. “I guess I do.”
She’s referring to a topic of conversation from earlier in the evening, about my parents, how my mother was murdered in a supermarket parking lot and my father hanged himself in his office six months later. And how my subsequent career, she suggested jokingly, has been like Batman’s, how I’ve turned my grief into a lifelong sense of mission.
But it makes me uneasy, I tell her, that version of events, that way of seeing.
“I don’t like to think that they died for a reason, because that makes it sound like it’s okay. As if it’s good that it happened, because it ordered my life. It wasn’t good. It was bad.”