When Les woke, he examined the bumper and then drove back to where he’d heard the thud and saw the flash. He hoped it had been a deer or another type of animal.
As he returned to the scene, it was in that moment the RCMP came upon Les and explained that on the same spot the previous night someone had hit a person and taken off.
“My father had killed a man and confessed it to me,” Jesperson claimed. “In the morning, I tried to bring it up again, to get more facts. All he said was ‘Keith, you need to forget what I talked about last night. I shouldn’t have said it. It was a mistake.’ So it was his word against mine. Whenever we sat around and told ghost stories after that, Les never said a word.”
*
I NEEDED TO TAKE a trip to Washington and sit down with Les. Get his version of the life his son had scripted. The conversation would answer a growing list of questions. What would Les say about Keith all these years later?
“Go ahead,” Jesperson told me. “I’d be interested in hearing his response.”
By now, Les had stopped communicating with his son. He’d send a short note, or his second wife would write to say Les was not up to talking about the past or visiting anymore. He was too old, sick, tired. A man in his eighties, he didn’t want to deal with it. In 2012, Les wrote one of his final letters to his son, opening the missive with how “hard” it was for him to “start” writing because “feelings run so deep.” He mentioned how he chose to remember his son: A picture hanging over his bed, for which every time he looked at, Les explained, “My head says, ‘Why Keith, why?’” The one comforting feeling Les could die with, he added, was that “your mother did not know about you before her passing.”
Jesperson gave me his father’s address and phone number.
“I’ll make plans right away,” I promised.
28
TEN OF HEARTS
“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
—Franz Kafka
MARK WALKED INTO THE HOUSE. I STOOD IN THE KITCHEN, NOT far from where the side door opened (we never used the front door). He had groceries in both hands, cigarette hanging from his lips. It was April 12, 1996, two years after Diane and I had the recycling bin conversation at the end of my driveway. Mark and I had been living together in this empty house in Vernon, Connecticut, on Susan Road, which the bank was going to take any day. I was glad to walk away, honestly. So much misery had occurred within these walls. My wife had been gone about a year by then. I was devastated, depressed, sober, not eating much, about 150 pounds. It was time to move on, to accept my life had changed and that my wife was gone and never coming back, and start over.
“What happened to her?” Mark asked, staring at me, dropping both bags of groceries.
How the hell did he know? I had not said a word.
While he was out, I’d sat and questioned where he’d gone the night before. The guy never went out. His methadone maintenance program wouldn’t allow it. But the previous night—near the same time we believed that Diane had been murdered—Mark left the house. I’d convinced myself he’d played a role in her death. Yet, by the time he walked through the door, looking into his eyes and feeling the pain surround him like a force field, I knew my brother wasn’t a killer. Those thoughts were nothing more than the soul’s rapid reaction to tragedy, when every deleterious scenario possible takes over your senses, as if you have no control over your own thoughts. It’s like hearing a bump in the middle of the night. During the day, you wouldn’t think twice about it, but in the darkened silence of early morning, a branch squeaking up against a windowpane becomes a home invader sneaking in to commit deplorable acts of violence against your family.
I wouldn’t find out until many years later why Mark seemed to know before I opened my mouth. He’d taken a phone call from Diane two days before she was murdered. She said something about needing five hundred dollars before the weekend—or else. Going out that night before, Mark had been working on getting her the money.
“She’s dead, Mark, I’m sorry,” I explained, landing the blow as soft as I could, adding how our other brother Tommy had called. “Strangled. That’s about all we know.”
My brother’s body language personified his addictions. At times, Mark moved around as though he’d been paralyzed and was learning how to walk again. His gait reminded me of Ozzy on The Osbournes: stiff legs, like Pinocchio, except where they bent at the joints, a perpetual look of him falling over. He’d nod, in and out of it, like opiate addicts do, with the lethargy and consistency of a narcoleptic. I’d find him passed out all over the house: sitting on the toilet, at the kitchen table, outside on the deck, on the stairs going down into his section of the house, leaning against the handrail. I’d once pulled into the driveway to find him standing with his house key in the lock, his forehead leaning against the windowpane, a steam of nostril exhaust fogging up the glass in rhythm with his labored breathing, the screen door butted up against his back.
In those days before she was murdered, Diane was a woman all of us had wished would disappear. Now she was gone. Now her death was beginning to settle on my brother. Now Mark was broken.
After sitting, smoking several cigarettes, Mark tried to stand. I can still see his face, his body rubbery, melting as if all his bones had been removed. He and Diane had been estranged for close to five months on that night I told him, but he still loved her. He’d been living with me while Diane stayed in Hartford, inside the apartment of a “friend.” Yet, he was still seeing and sleeping with her. I’d asked him about this many times: “Why not just let her go, man. You two together, you self-destruct. The worst possible person for you to be around is Diane, and her, you.”
“I know,” he said. “But I can’t abandon her. She needs me—especially right now. I love her. I could not live without Diane in my life.”