THE KNICKKNACKS, the found art taped to the wall, the modest assortment of paperback books; the cutlery. You had so little to protect, so few things you chose to call your own and keep as tokens of your passage through this world. Mothers protecting their children are expected to act with ferocity: society demands this of them; it’s one of many requirements women are encouraged to absorb and internalize, selves they’re supposed to envision themselves growing into. You? You were a high school teacher in a one-bedroom apartment a block from the bay. Few could have looked on your life with envy, fewer still with scorn: your days were like leaves. Why, then, did you defend your domain, such small holdings, with lethal force? It was this line of questioning, unfair and unfeeling, that would eventually put you on death row, but when the moment was alive and present, none of them were there. Only you know. Only you remember. Only you, alone among your inquisitors, know how it feels to have a place of refuge defiled, to see the barrier breached, and to know for certain that only ruin will remain unless you act.
Today, you arise unaware of the little drama that played out in your parking lot while you slept—the boy behind the wheel tightly coiled and ready to strike, the one in the passenger seat gently planting seeds of doubt, clearing a little space for light and nourishing the tender sprouts until his companion, Gene, turned to him angrily in the near-dawn, and said: “Fuck it. Tomorrow.”
But tomorrow’s here now; school’s out for the day, and you’re at Jordano’s again. In the lounge this morning, skimming the newspaper, you ran across a recipe for fried oysters in sauce, and it sounded so decadent—what a thing to do, just on impulse, to whip up some oysters and eat them, by yourself, on a Thursday evening in May, in sight of the very waters from which the oysters had been harvested. Maybe pile them high on a French roll, head down to the shore alone for dinner. Spread a tablecloth on the sand and watch the sun set. And with a glass of wine from just up the coast? Why not? It’s the small favors we do for ourselves that we’ll remember when we’re older. A little pampering, insurance against the unknowable tides of the future, maybe. It seems that way from here, today, anyhow. You can’t be sure that it’s true, but it feels true.
The man behind the seafood counter is older; he wears a name tag that says BILL in white letters debossed in a red field pinned to his white smock, and he makes charming small talk with you while wrapping your oysters. “This one spit in my eye when we dropped him onto the ice!” he says, holding one up; you picture the scene and smile.
“Can you blame him?” you say.
Bill cocks his head and wrinkles his lips, which causes his already bushy greying mustache to bunch up; it looks like an animal with its back turned to you, nestled just beneath his nose. “Guess I’d do the same, in his shoes!” he says, breaking into a wide smile. He must have been at this job for years: without drawing any attention to his hands, he’s wrapped everything up in butcher paper, tied it with twine, and written a price on the outside.
“Fresh is best!” he says when you thank him. “If you don’t eat them all tonight, just put a damp cloth on ’em in the fridge, they’ll keep!”
“A damp cloth, right,” you say, smiling and nodding as you turn toward the dairy aisle: the recipe calls for buttermilk. Maybe you’ll make biscuits or pancakes tomorrow. Maybe you’ll just drink a glass of buttermilk with breakfast, like your grandmother used to do. Does anyone still do that: drink buttermilk? At the checkout counter, again your eyes catch those little booklets. Secrets of the Chinese Zodiac. Modern Needlepoint. Hollywood by Night. They call to you—bright colorful designs on their covers, whole worlds of unknown possibility for forty-nine cents apiece. They’d look lurid on your coffee table: red lines drawn between stars to trace the shape of a monkey against the night sky. Quaint bright patterns. A cloak-and-dagger motif. But you leave them where they are, because everything’s already in order. You have a date with a tablecloth on the beach.
* * *
WHO KNOWS HOW the children who will tell your story in the future retain the detail of the radio on the counter? It sounds like something made-up, an embellishment from one of the older kids on the playground whose sense of detail demands a still focal point. But it’s true. The radio spends most of its time in a drawer: it’s a simple handheld transistor, the kind your father might take to a baseball game to listen to the play-by-play. When you come home from the supermarket, you wash your hands at the sink, take the shucking knife down from the knife rack, and, riding the inspiration that’s been with you since your morning cup of coffee, take the radio out and set it on the counter.
It’s clearly visible in photographs from the scene, a palm-sized silver faceplate with a round bubble in the upper right corner like a porthole where the dial is. The housing is shot through with perfectly round circles, die-cut and looking for all the world like the work of a very attentive child with a hole-punch. The top four holes are decorative rather than functional, framing a colorful pattern: red, yellow, yellow, blue. Why two yellows instead of a four-color spread? Who can say?
When Jesse and Gene let themselves in through your unlocked front door, the radio is playing “Hold Your Head Up” by Argent, a hard rock band. You remember this because it’s not your sort of thing; it’s a type of music you sometimes hear coming through the open windows of cars in the school parking lot. That it feels somehow aggressive seems, to you, a sign that you’re getting old; pointless to resist, it seems. The chorus is beginning to grate on your nerves as you work away at the oysters, prying their shells open and pulling the soft flesh loose, but this work requires focus, so you’re waiting the song out, hoping they play something mellower next. But at trial, later, you can’t remember what came after. Whatever it was, it has not been able to rise above the memory of the panic, and the chaos.
Neither of them announce themselves when they enter: they aren’t seasoned thieves, but they know that a doorknob turned gently enough makes hardly any sound at all if there’s ambient noise to mask it: a stove fan, a countertop radio. Everyone was a child once; everyone’s moved stealthily sometimes, either at play or from sheer animal need. Your awareness of their movement in your peripheral vision is sharp and sudden, the momentary flash you get just before an especially large bug hits your windshield: thwap. Just like that, the huge abstract splatter of guts and carapace across your field of vision. The wind widening its spread, rippling in the splotch.
When Gene covers your mouth with his right hand and pulls your body tightly against his, your fist reflexively tightens around the handle of the shucking knife, and your eyes go wide. You can’t stop your mouth from trying to open, to scream, to call for help: it’s pure instinct. “Easy, easy,” he says in a hot whisper, just next to your ear; you feel his arm against your right breast as he moves his hand to your wrist, intending to squeeze hard enough to make you drop the knife. Jesse, per his instructions, is already heading for the bedroom, since Gene has told him several times that the valuables are always in the bedroom.
But Gene, although a very dangerous person in many ways, has not planned for resistance. His assumption that there won’t be any is based on his own experience: every time he resisted a blow as a child, it only made things worse. Other people know that, too, he imagines; how would they not? The teenagers he shakes down for small change at school all lend support to this theory; his menace, the immediacy of the threat, is enough to dissuade them from putting up a fight. But here, at Oakside Court, he is on new ground—just as you are, but in a different sense; and, although he’s spent several days convincing Jesse that he’s thought all the angles through, he hasn’t. When he hears Jesse pulling down shelves in your bedroom closet, he jerks your body in the direction of the hallway. You fall into him; you are being dragged. A clear view of how things will play out if you fail to act explodes across your inner vision like a sped-up movie reel.