God Is Dead (15 page)

Without a word Selia set about gathering the plates and utensils and leftover food from their dinner, throwing them haphazardly into the basket. She picked up the blanket, wound it into a ball, and tossed it on top of the other things. Then she lifted the basket above her head and heaved it into the natural pool, where it landed with a splash, bobbed a moment on the ripples it had created, then slowly began to sink.

Selia watched the basket going down. “Here's something you don't know,” she said, her voice barely audible over the pulse of the surf. “Years ago, your father had another son. Your half brother. He died. So did your father's first wife. In one of those earlier worlds I was telling you about.”

Arnold had no idea how to respond. A peculiar sensation of minute trauma had started up between his eyes, as though he were being tapped there repeatedly with a ball-peen hammer. He realized in a distant way that this was his heartbeat.

Selia turned to face him. “I hate you for making me say this,” she said, and at the word
hate
Arnold felt suddenly much smaller than he was, impossibly small, like the infant he had no memory of being. Tears stung his eyes in an instant. “I hate you for making me sound like some hysterical idiot. But I have never been so sad or angry in my life, and all that's coming to mind right now are clichés. So here goes: If you join the Marines—if you go to that ridiculous war and break your father's heart again—you are not my son.”

Selia's eyes were dry. She turned away from Arnold and retraced their path along the rocks, not looking back. Arnold watched her recede and felt the first sob rising from his gut to the back of his throat like a surge of vomit, and though he resisted, knowing Amanda would be ashamed of him, in a moment he was overcome. He sat on the edge of the granite slab with his legs dangling above the pool and typed through his tears:

 

Coming home from work on a Wednesday evening, I see an ocean of emergency vehicles massed outside the High Hopes Mental Health Center—ambulances and police cruisers, their lights painting the autumn night with bright flashes of red and blue. There are twenty or thirty of them, parked haphazardly along the road and in the center's parking lot. Some of the police cruisers are staties, and this is the first indication that something very bad has happened. The town I live in is small but has a sizable police force; the state troopers are called on only rarely, when the local police are in over their heads.

As a traffic cop waves me past with his hooded flashlight, I notice that parked among the ambulances and cruisers are three CNN news vans with out-of-state license plates, along with the local media.

I hurry home. The streets are empty and I run a red light. I don't bother stopping at the store for cigarettes and orange juice, as I had intended.

When I step through the front door I can hear the news on the television in the living room. Melissa is waiting for me. She is sitting at the kitchen table with her hands wrapped around a mug of tea. Her hair is pulled back in a loose ponytail and she has been crying. She gives me a strange look—sadness mostly, but something else too—revulsion, maybe? Or dread? I can't tell, but it's not good.

What is it, Lissa? I ask, though somehow I already know, somehow I knew the moment I saw all those police cars. What the hell's going on?

And she tries to tell me, but it takes her a while, because she keeps breaking into fresh tears and stopping short to collect herself and wipe her eyes. Once she stops in midsentence and stares down into her mug for several minutes without speaking. Eventually, though, she gets it all out, and I have to look down at my legs to make sure they're still there and I sit down with her at the table because otherwise I might collapse on the kitchen floor. The two of us sit silently for a while. Melissa sips her tea. I feel something warm slide down my face and drop from my chin and I look down and see a small circle of moisture on the table and realize that I'm crying now, too.

The newscast drones on in the background.

Some time later I reach for Melissa's hand, but she pulls it away. I look up at her and now there's no mistaking the expression on her face—it's fear.

The next day I call in sick to work. Soon I wish I hadn't, because the phone is ringing off the hook. Reporters. Hundreds of them, from all over the country, some from as far away as England and Italy. They want to ask me questions about my brother. I thought I was numb beyond surprise or shock, but some of the questions they ask get my chest burning, make my forehead break out in stinging beads of sweat.

What did your brother have against the counselors at High Hopes? they ask me.

Nothing, I say.

We've learned your brother was being treated there on an outpatient basis, they say. Why would he suddenly turn on them?

I don't know, I say. He's got things wrong with him. He always has.

Was there some sort of significance, they ask, to the use of the Virgin Mary statuette as a murder weapon?

A sudden anger bubbles up, and I want to say, I doubt it. Probably the first thing he got his hands on, but I know this would not be true, and even though Melissa won't come near me and I've already gotten some sidelong glances and whispered comments from the neighbors and the people at Joseph's Deli this morning as I was buying the orange juice I meant to get last night, I say, very evenly, How in the world would I know?

And then, very, very gently, I hang up the phone. But the moment I put it down, it rings again.

Over the ringing, I hear Melissa turn on the water in the bathroom. This is the third time she's showered today.

My parents haven't left their house since the murders. It's been two weeks. My father hasn't emerged at all, but at first my mother was determined not to be judged guilty by association, and she went without a word right past the group of reporters and cameramen who'd camped out in their front yard. She went to the grocery store and the bank and her Thursday night cribbage group.

But people started saying things around town, and pretty soon those things made their way into the newspapers. By now the national media had packed up and gone home, but the murders were still big news locally, and the front page was littered with rumors and accusations—of theism, closed-door worship,
Christianity.
This my mother could not take. So she stopped going out, and now I am doing their shopping and running their errands for them.

Today I had their cable TV turned off and canceled their newspaper delivery, at my mother's request. The looks I get from people on the streets and in stores have changed now from naked curiosity to compassion. That poor boy, they say to each other. To have to grow up in that house. Imagine.

Mike, who has been a friend of mine since grade school, comes to my house one evening with a meat pie from his wife.

Mike, I say. Why are people telling these lies about my parents?

I don't know, he says, shaking his head. They're just trying to make sense of this, you know? Find some sort of reason for all of it. They can't believe your brother could be so…they don't see how he could do something that…well, you know. Unless something bad had happened to
him.

This is something else, now, that I've noticed—the few people I've talked to are very careful in choosing their words, as though they are afraid to say the wrong thing to me. What they don't seem to understand is there is no right thing to say.

I wish Mike wouldn't do this along with everyone else. We've been friends long enough, he can just say whatever comes to mind. But he won't.

Mike, I say. You know how my brother is. How he's always been.

Yeah, Mike says, and he's shaking his head again. But, I mean, why? Where did he get these ideas about a god? He must have learned them somewhere, right?

I take the pie and set it on the kitchen counter and thank Mike. I tell him to thank his wife. I almost add, Give her a hug for me. But then I think better of it.

I'm trying to be patient with Melissa. I've given her space. I sleep on the sofa. During the day I spend a lot of time outside in the yard, even though it's getting colder and autumn is passing into winter.

We haven't made love for a month. Once, a few days ago, the two of us were talking and drinking tea and something I said made her smile. It was a good moment, so I ventured a light kiss on her lips. But when I pulled back I saw goose bumps on her arms, and all the blood had drained from her face. I haven't touched her at all since then.

She has nightmares. I hardly sleep at all, so I lie awake on the sofa and listen to her moan and whimper. I want to go to the bedroom, wake her by smoothing her hair and speaking gentle, reassuring words. I want to bring her back to the real world and see the relief on her face when she opens her eyes and realizes it was just a bad dream. I cannot do any of this.

Even though I don't want to, I have to go back to work. My supervisor told me to take as much time as I needed (no one seems to know what the appropriate bereavement period is for this sort of thing), but the bills are piling up and Melissa's still not talking much, so I go to work.

My job is in quality control at the Chinet paper products factory. I punch in and go to my station and watch paper plates go by on the belt and remove the ones that have visible flaws. After four hours the whistle sounds and I go to lunch. Mike, who works in shipping and receiving, meets me in the cafeteria. The two of us sit at a table with Fred and Duke. I poke around in the bag lunch I packed for myself; Melissa didn't get out of bed to make my lunch as she used to. Mike and Fred and Duke talk about football. The Patriots are having another terrible season. Duke made the mistake of betting on them against the Packers last Sunday and lost fifty bucks. His wife is going to kill him, he says. If she finds out, he says. Then they mix in some talk about the war, the losses in the Pacific. It doesn't look good, they say. The three of them make an effort to include me in the conversation. They address questions directly to me. They want to know what I think about this and that, who looks to be the toughest team in the AFC, whether or not Trent Jackson will be able to hold the line in Mexico against the Evo-Psychs. But I haven't been keeping up with football this year, and the war seems as distant as Pluto, so I don't have much to say.

At one point, after I mumble something in reply to a question, the three of them are quiet for a moment, exchanging looks they think I don't notice.

After lunch my supervisor calls me into his office. He has me sit down and asks how things have been, if there's anything he can do. He is a good man. He came up from the factory floor himself, so he knows what it's like, and he cares about his workers.

My door's always open, he says, if you need to talk.

And suddenly my throat tightens up and my vision goes blurry and I want to tell him everything: about Melissa and my parents and how I just want things to be the way they were before, but I clamp my teeth down over the words and say nothing, because control is paramount—I must maintain at least the appearance of normalcy if I ever want things to go back to normal.

Thanks, I say to him, and leave the office quickly before the tears spill out onto my cheeks.

Melissa's sister Lacy comes by a lot. The two of them sit at the kitchen table and talk and smoke cigarettes. Melissa drinks her tea. Lacy makes herself coffee with the jar of instant stuff we keep around. They keep their voices low. Even when I'm in the next room, I can't make out what they say.

One day while Lacy is visiting, I go outside in the red-and-black-checked wool jacket my grandfather gave me years ago, before he died. I put on a pair of work gloves and set about pulling up the remains of the small garden I and Melissa planted and tended this year. The corn, which was a bug-infested disappointment despite the extra attention I gave it, comes up easily. I pull the stalks and shake the loose dirt from the roots and throw them aside. Then I move on to the two big sprawling zucchini plants. These were a boon. It seemed like every day when I came home this summer there were two or three new zucchinis washed and drying on the kitchen counter. Big ones, too. All summer long Melissa made stuffed zucchini and zucchini bread and zucchini parmesan. The two of us ate dinner and joked about never wanting to see another zucchini as long as we lived. Still, the plants kept producing more at an amazing, impossible rate.

And now, even with their stalks knocked flat by frost and their leaves dead and wilted, the plants cling stubbornly to the soil. I dig around the roots with a hand spade and work the plants back and forth, trying to loosen their grip on the earth. I'm not making much progress. Then I hear the screen door slam and I look up and see Lacy standing on the porch. She has her jacket on and her car keys in her hand. She is looking at me.

Damn things don't want to die, I say to her as she comes down the steps and approaches me.

Why don't you just leave them? she asks.

It'll be a real mess in the spring, I say, if I don't pull them now.

I go back to digging, scooping dirt away with the hand spade. I feel strange with her just standing there, watching me dig, and neither of us saying anything.

Lacy is quiet for a moment longer. Then she says, You've got to do something. My sister needs you.

I look up. What am I supposed to do, Lacy? I ask.

She crosses her arms over her chest and says, I don't know. Something. She's coming apart, and you're out here gardening in the middle of November.

I get to my feet. She treats me like I'm a leper, I say. She needs help, sure. She may even want help. But she sure as hell doesn't want it from me.

I've drawn myself up to my full height, a good six inches taller than Lacy. She eyes the spade in my left hand. Then she looks up, into my eyes. I know what she's thinking. And even though I shouldn't, I speak in anger.

Go ahead, I say. Think whatever you want. Be afraid of me, like your sister is. But I'm not my brother. I haven't done anything.

Lacy takes a slow step backward, then another. She says, Maybe that's the problem. You haven't done anything.

Then she turns and goes to her car in the driveway.

I watch her get in and turn the ignition and back out. I glance at the house and think for a moment that I see Melissa's face behind the kitchen window: ghostly, watchful. But it's just a reflection in the glass.

My father eats very little. Some days he doesn't bathe, doesn't even bother gettting dressed, just shuffles around all day in his pajamas and bathrobe. Unlike my mother, he accepted what he thought was his part of the responsibility for what my brother did. That was before people started accusing them of worship.

If something is repeated often enough, with enough conviction, it doesn't seem to matter whether it's true. It becomes the truth. So mostly my father sits around in his pajamas and bathrobe and doesn't do much of anything. He might flip through a book or a magazine. He glances out the windows occasionally.

Some days he doesn't get out of bed.