In the Blood (32 page)

They’ll think I killed her,
my father said to me.
I’ll go to prison. And you’ll go to a group home. You have to help me.

There was so much blood. When I had knelt down to her, I got it on my palm and I thought about preschool and how they used to brush our hands with finger paint and press our palms into paper, write our name and the year.
Mom? Mom? What’s wrong?
She was so still and white. Her head was misshapen, flattened on one side. Her arm was twisted so horribly, it looked as if it were rubber tubing. I
stood staring, the world around me reeling, and me falling through space and time.

You have to help me,
he said again. He stood in the kitchen weeping.

I ran, keening, up the stairs to my room. There had been so many day-mares, so many ugly visions and imaginings, surely this was just another of them.
My mom, my mom, mom, mom.
I dove under my bed and stayed there. I listened to all the strange noises downstairs, the afternoon light fading, the room growing dark.

Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelve.

Later, after her body was discovered, after he finally admitted to burying her, he said she fell from the landing, down to the marble floor below. She must have—or someone else pushed her. But not him.

He hid her body because he’d been having an affair, he said. She’d discovered it, and knew he wanted to leave her. He knew how it would look. He was a journalist, had reported the story a million times. It’s always the husband. He panicked, he claimed. He hid her body and made me help, but he didn’t kill her. Of course, no one believed him.

I helped him carry her body, wrapped in the Oriental carpet she had so loved, out to the car, heft it into the trunk. And we drove and drove, endless miles into endless night. Why? That’s what the police would want to know when I finally, with the help of my aunt and grandmother, screwed up the courage to tell the truth. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this. Why would I help the man I believed had killed my mother? And the truth is as simple as the fact that I loved my father, too. It was my mother who put the stars in the sky, but I loved him, too. Absent, short-tempered, sometimes distant—he was
still
my father. I couldn’t lose them both. I knew neither my aunt nor my grandmother would want me. I didn’t
think they’d take me in after all the things I’d done. I didn’t want to go back to crazy school or a group home like the place where my mother worked. I would rather have slept in my own bed down the hall from my mother’s killer. But of course, I was in shock, too. And I wasn’t the most stable kid on the block to begin with.

Our parents hold an awesome power over us,
Dr. Cooper said.
The child of abuse will do almost anything to protect the injuring parent.

I jumped to his defense (sad, pathetic):
He didn’t abuse me
.

He was absent and often angry with you, by your own account, all your life. He was violent with your mother. You and a jury of twelve believe that he killed her. That’s abuse, my dear, even if he never laid a hand on you.

They came to get me on the third afternoon, Aunt Bridgette and my grandmother. My father had been taken in for questioning, and I was under my bed again. Because that was the only place in the house that I could stand to be.

They helped me pack a bag and took me back to my grandmother’s house. And there, in her old-lady living room complete with floral-patterned furniture, varnished dark wood, and doilies and a baby grand piano, I told them everything I had seen. I told them how we drove and drove, and finally I helped him carry the dining room carpet through a swampy, treed area until we came to a small clearing. And I wept and moaned as he started digging in the moonlight.

She wouldn’t want me to go to prison.
Thud.
You know that. She’d want me to take care of you.
Thud.
Whatever happened,
he said. He paused, breathless and sweating in the blanket of humidity that hung in the air.
It was an accident. You have to believe me.

And, oh, I so very badly wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe him so bad that I saw my mother’s ghost hovering in the air, blue and
saintly. She was nodding her agreement, and I knew that she wanted me to protect myself since she couldn’t protect me anymore. She’d want me to go along with him until I figured out what the hell to do now that my whole universe had broken into a million little pieces.

Mom, don’t leave me,
I called to her.
Don’t go.
And my voice rang out, as young and desperate and terrified as I was.

Shut up,
he said.
Stop saying that
.

And I did stop. Because, from the look on his face, I had to wonder: if I didn’t do what he asked, would he be digging a grave for me, too?

For three days I kept his secret, told the police that I had come home to an empty house that day. And no, I had no idea where my mother was. But I was a shaking, miserable wreck, and that detective never let up. She saw my fear, my pain. She knew that I was playing a game I didn’t want to play. It was her idea to bring my father in for questioning again, to let my grandmother and aunt take me away with them. With my mother’s people, in their safe and normal camp, I could tell the truth.

When I finally told my grandmother and aunt, we went straight to the police. And the second phase of our nightmare kicked in.
But at least we’ll have her body,
my grandmother kept saying. She clearly derived some comfort from this.
At least we’ll be able to lay her to rest.
I don’t have to tell you that it killed her. My grandmother never recovered from her grief. I’m not a parent, but I don’t think you can lose a child like that and go on with your day-to-day. It’s hard enough already, as it is.

No one blames me for what happened to my mother. No one blamed me for being afraid, for keeping my father’s secret, for lying. No, no one could blame the disturbed child, the mentally ill, gender-confused young person that I was.

Back in the woods, I needed to think, but I couldn’t think. Panic was running the show. So I found the hollow of a tree and sank into its moist embrace. I let the silence wash over me, the wind in the leaves. Who was that man in the door? I kept seeing him there, just a shadow. Not my father, of course. He was on death row in Florida. News of his release would have reached me by now. Or had there been anyone there at all? I fished around in my bag for my medication and the bottle of water I always carried. I took my pills right there. Better late than never.

I felt better after a minute of just sitting and catching my breath. I had the book I’d found in Luke’s attic, and I had the GPS on my cell phone which I knew might not get a signal. But really, who has a compass? I fished the envelope out of the bag, removed Beck’s necklace. I was going to find her. That had to be where she was, right? The location I had found in the book? That was the next clue that he hadn’t had a chance to leave me. It had to be.

How Luke could have gotten her out there, I didn’t even consider. But I was sure that she was there, and I was going to rescue her. That’s where I was in my mind. I’d hurt her. I was responsible for this. I would save her. Obviously, I wasn’t operating at top capacity.

Then I heard a sound. At first I thought it was the calling of a bird, distant and strange. Then I realized, it was the sound of someone calling my name. It was far off in the distance. I strapped my bag around my body and looked up the location of the site on my phone. I studied the aerial map, the bird’s-eye view of The Hollows Wood. It wasn’t that far, maybe three miles. If I could find the state-maintained trail, I could get there faster.

I was used to this kind of terrain, comfortable in the silence of the trees. I heard the voice again, faint and distant, so I started to
hoof it. Man, woman, or child, I couldn’t tell. Was it the police? My aunt? Luke? I had no idea. I just started to run.

There’s murder in my blood. A twisting rope of psychosis from my father and maternal grandfather, and probably others before them. From father to son, from father to son, it travels down the chain, a poison in the blood. Only it doesn’t kill you. I have often wished it did. I hate the thought of who I am. I despise my origins. I have done everything in my power to shed that person. And yet that person is with me always.

It was after my grandmother died and my father was convicted that I informed my aunt of my desire to be called Lana. I took my grandmother’s maiden name, Granger, as my own. I had a thought that I could bury myself this way, by taking my grandmother’s name before she was touched by my grandfather’s evil. The gene for violence, for murder, is one that travels through only the male DNA, as far as they know at this time. If I could hide from that, too, maybe I could escape my father and my grandfather’s legacy.

Beck was the first person to make me feel like a man. I had been hiding among women, dwelling in the persona of my female self. Living as Lana Granger allowed me to hide from my past, cloister myself from any sexual contact. But since my night with Beck, I was coming alive in ways I’d never experienced.

Still, I’m not sure I feel what others feel. I see people laugh and cry. I see Beck with all her rampaging emotions—her passion, her anger, her joy. I am aware of distant stirrings that might approximate what I see in other people. But have I been swept away in love, overcome by joy? No. I have felt sorrow, remorse, and fear. That’s how I know I am not a monster.

Does the psychopath know himself ? I have often wondered this. Do you know if you are evil, devoid of normal human emotion? There are people, doctors at Fieldcrest and at the crazy school I attended in Florida, who believe that a child psychopath (for lack of a better term—no one wants to diagnose a child that way) can be taught to display empathy, or to understand feeling.

Because above all else, the psychopath is a mimic. He learns to display emotions he doesn’t feel. He seeks to blend into his group, whatever that is. He will shape-shift and mold himself into whatever he needs to be to survive and thrive. The United States is excellent at breeding psychopaths—a country where we reward the individual with a hyperfocus on success at any cost. We reward narcissism—with our social networks and hideous reality television programs. We laud business leaders, even as they abuse workers, rape the environment. In other cultures, where the individual subordinates himself more freely to the needs of family and society, we see fewer psychopaths. So some forward-thinking doctors believe that if you interfere early in the budding psyche of a disturbed individual, he can be taught to think of others. He can be taught to see others not only as instruments of his desires.

What am I? The truth is that I don’t know. I know that I have truly loved and cared for people—my mother, my father, my aunt, Beck. I have regretted things that I have done, hurting people that I hurt when I was a child. So I do have feelings. It’s just that they’re muted and strange. Dr. Cooper thinks it’s a kind of arrested development, partly hormonal, partly psychological, partly related to the traumas of my life. Some of it has to do with the cocktail of medications I take, a antipsychotic, antidepressant cocktail. She thinks I will grow into myself someday. She doesn’t think I’m evil, or a monster, or a bad seed. She doesn’t believe in those things. And
neither do I. I am buried beneath layers and layers of genetic and pharmaceutical debris. But I can feel myself, ever since my night with Beck. I can feel myself breaking through.

The miles were hard and the cold winter sun was high in the sky by the time I finally found the trail. It must have been going on noon. But the light was dimming. A thick gray cloud cover was blanketing the sky and I could smell snow. I glanced at my phone; the compass app showed that I was headed in the right direction, due north. Another mile and I’d be at the site marked in Luke’s book. But I started to slow my pace, wondering if I was making a mistake. Maybe it would be better for Beck if I went to the police and told them what I knew. Maybe this was just wasting time. What if I got to the site and there was nothing there?