His disability check and food stamps allow him to feed himself, but he also trades some of the food (or sells the food stamps at a 50 percent loss) for booze and Newports. As a kid, l liked the Newport package with the upside-down Nike symbol. However, stealing and smoking his cigarettes came with a tic tac–like, cold burn in my lungs, so I wound up switching to Marlboro.
He’ll be broke in two days, eating my food, calling and begging our mother for money. She’ll give it to him. He’ll buy pills with that money because his methadone is regulated. A taxi—paid for by the State of Connecticut—picks him up every morning, brings him into Hartford, and returns him home. At the clinic, they give him his dose of “Kool-Aid.” Sometimes he stores up several doses so he can go on a bender. It is a cycle, one we’ve been on most of our lives. No one tries to stop Mark anymore because we can’t.
It is while he is shopping that I get the call—the fucking call that will not be a shock to most in my family, but will change Mark forever, send him on a new course, and initiate a suicide that will take him eight years to complete.
Several days before the call, Mark came upstairs. I asked him to sit down. “I need to tell you what I have told you a dozen times since you moved in.” As calm as I could, I explained: “I know that while I am at work, Diane is coming over.” Knowing Diane all my life, I was confident she was rummaging through my house, looking for things to pawn or information about me to hold over my head. “I don’t want her in the house. She cannot be in this house.”
He said something about being the older brother, more experienced in life, and how I should respect that. “And you never have. I love her. We’re getting back together.”
It’s hard, however, for me to look up to a man with burn marks all over his chest from nodding out while smoking, all his shirts with tiny burn holes on them, the bed he sleeps in and his sheets the same. Mark is a man who spends fifteen hours a day basically unconscious, takes opiates and methadone together, while drinking cans of Busch beer, and has not been a father to his three kids since they wore diapers. I love him, but I am perpetually furious with this man. He gave up on life long ago for reasons I do not understand.
For a response, I go to my emotional childhood bank and withdraw something our father would have said in this same situation: “But this is my house, Mark. My rules if you want to live here. And I don’t want Diane over here.”
He is nodding as we speak. In and out. His eyes languid, tired, Marty Feldman–bulged. His skin is slithery; the shiny texture of a salamander, with a subtle hue of yellow, like a healing bruise, same as the whites of his eyes, a strange, dull urine color. He is sickly-looking, gaunt, and emaciated. At times, he resembles a Holocaust victim staring back at me through an invisible fence between us. He has an anesthetic smell to him, same as a patient in a hospital. You walk down into the area of my split-level, ranch-style home where he lives on the bottom floor and it reeks of a rich, cigarette-butts-stuffed-inside-a-can-of-beer, stale tar odor that is part of the house forever. He sleeps on one of those pullout couch beds, with the springs that stick into your back. There are empty see-through-orange pill containers all over the place. Beer cans. Dishes. Drinking glasses. Old newspapers. Greyhound racing programs. Pencils. Pens. Two-liter Coke bottles, fruit flies hovering. Cigarette butts. Silver-gray ashes. So many ashes: the remnants of his smoking covers everything, like dust. The carpet around where he sleeps is dirty and worn. There are small burn holes all over the area surrounding his Archie Bunker chair and they look similar to tiny craters on the surface of the moon. I have installed four smoke detectors in an area the size of a one-car garage. In this moment of our lives, if there is one thing about my brother I can count on, it’s that his addiction runs his life and has him on a strict schedule. When I was growing up, and he lived with Diane and the kids, everything about their lives was unpredictable; you never knew what they were going to do next. At this point, my brother is, if nothing else, confined to some sort of controlled insanity only he comprehends and visible in his physical destruction: abnormally and enormously bloated hep C stomach; frail arms; old-man, saggy-skin legs, the wires of his tendons exposed; white fingernails; dry lips, cracking and sometimes bleeding; his greasy, black hair from not showering regularly.
“Did she kill that man?” I ask after we agree that Diane cannot come into the house ever again.
He stares at me. Looks down at the kitchen table. He knows what I’m talking about.
A few years before this conversation, a man was found stabbed to death inside Diane’s vehicle. She had driven him to Hartford on the night he was murdered. It is unclear what happened. He was a man she met at a bar while she was living with my brother at a nearby scuzzy motel. Diane was not in the car at the time the man was murdered, she claimed.
“Not talking about that with you,” he says. “She would never kill anyone.”
Mark leaves to go shopping. I put on some music and relax.
The phone rings.
That fucking call.
It’s our other brother, Thomas (whom we call Tommy). He and I are closest in age and get along same as good friends. Tommy lives a few miles away—two of Mark and Diane’s kids live with him. First it was me and my soon-to-be ex-wife; now Tommy is their official foster parent. Their other child, the oldest, lives with an aunt in a neighboring town.
“She’s dead,” Tommy says. “Strangled to death.”
It doesn’t register. “What do you mean—who’s dead?”
“Just heard. Ma called me. She heard, too. Someone murdered Diane. Where’s Mark?”
“Shopping . . . shit, dude. Are you sure?”
“Yeah, we’re sure.”
“What are you going to tell the kids?”
“I don’t know.”
*
I COULDN’T HAVE KNOWN at the time, but fifteen years after that phone call, my relationship with a man who had strangled eight women to death would set me on the road to resolving some of the issues I faced when my familial and personal worlds unraveled. That early evening my brother Tommy called and told me Diane had been murdered was the Phelps family’s introduction to the ripple effect murder would have on all of us forever. Like so many other families I’d become involved with through my work, as murder became part of our lives that night, we would never be the same people.
“You mentioned a little bit about your loss,” my serial killer tells me one day. “A death wakes up the family. Maybe some good can come of it. Maybe a Scared Straight course for the Phelps clan.”