***
There was only one television at the Sisters of the Perpetual Adoration convent. It was the very same color set the original Mother Superior received as a premium when she opened the order’s first checking account in the mid-1970s. It had a round dial for changing channels and a built-in antenna. The picture was fuzzy, but it picked up the few remaining broadcast channels.
The nuns and novitiates kept the television clean and dust-free, like they kept everything clean and dust-free; to them it was just another piece of furniture. As far as they knew, the set—which lived in a common room away from the dormitory—had never been turned on.
This was true. Except from eleven p.m. to midnight, Mondays through Fridays, and then only for Sister Benedict.
First it was the late news, which kept the Sister informed of all that was wrong with the world. (This was where she had watched Jared interviewed by the local Portland media.) After the news was the real allure of the television, The Duke Hamblin Show, the Sister’s one and only guilty pleasure.
The newest entrant in the flooded market of late-night television hosts, Hamblin had a conservative agenda that expressed itself through stale political jokes, a feigned disdain for the “Hollywood elite” (even though movie-star interviews were his bread and butter), and enough God references to embarrass a camera-hungry professional baseball player.
Hamblin had just finished his monologue and was going to a commercial break when he read a network promo: “Don’t forget to watch Life and Death, the most important reality series in the history of television. Beginning one week from tonight on ATN, you will follow the life of Jared Stone as an inoperable tumor slowly consumes his brain. Our cameras have complete access to his home, twenty-four hours a day. See how he and his family deal with terminal illness and death. This will be a truly unprecedented and transformative television event. We’ll be right back.”
The peanut-butter-slathered cracker that had been in Sister Benedict’s hand fell facedown onto her habit, sticking there for a moment before sliding to the floor. She didn’t even notice she had dropped it.
***
When Sherman Kingsborough saw the commercial for Life and Death, he was drunk. He had been sitting in one of the seventeen rooms of the eight-thousand-square-foot Palm Beach mansion bequeathed to him by his father, the young man’s only company a bottle of Maker’s Mark.
The week after Jared’s auction had been delisted, Sherman slid into a terrible funk. He was frightened at the ease with which he was not only prepared, but eager to slay a fellow human being. And yet he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind.
He had flown from his father’s house in Aspen to his father’s house in Provence to his father’s house in Palm Beach, trying to outrun his own wicked thoughts, but it didn’t work. Now he was trying to drink them out of his head.
He was drunk enough when he first saw the commercial that he wondered if it wasn’t some sort of alcohol-induced hallucination. He was just sober enough to know it was real.
Sherman had only one thought: This is a sign. I must kill Jared Stone.
***
Before Jared got sick, a typical weekday in the Stone house would begin like a typical weekday in any middle-class home.
The first to wake up was Megan. When life is good, when you’re popular, pretty, and filled with hope and ambition, you bound out of bed. She would spend an hour primping and prepping for school, leaving no detail untouched. Her assortment of makeup, accessories, and style magazines was more appropriate for a twenty-four-year-old fashionista than it was for an eighth grader.
Deirdre, almost a cliché of a suburban mom with a full-time job, would sprint through her morning routine: take a shower (she had it down to seven minutes), get dressed (each day’s ensemble laid out the night before), check e-mail (always amazed at the two a.m. time stamp on messages from her boss), and cajole Jackie awake (never succeeding on the first try, never failing by the third).
Jackie, once roused, would spend a few extra minutes with her head on the pillow, staring at her phone. When life is bad, when you don’t have close friends, when you shift between apathy and despair, you don’t bound out of bed, you sort of roll out. Her finger would work its way through each of her social media sites, her brain, fresh from a good night’s sleep, absorbing all the news and information it could. She would pick out the least flashy clothes she could find, take her backpack, and trudge down to the kitchen.