KooKooLand (46 page)

About eight months after Hank's murder, Dr. Standow testified at Susan's court hearing before a judge.

The shrink contended Susan had had a “lifelong love-hate relationship” with her father—something I could certainly relate to. He said this tortured relationship had finally been “resolved by his death.” However, he felt Susan's guilt over what she had done was far from resolved. He said that Susan's exhuming of Hank's body had been a manifestation of this guilt.

The shrink pronounced Susan, just like her father, mentally ill. In fact, he thought it was likely she had inherited her condition from Hank.

He thought Susan was more of a danger to herself than others. He recommended housing her in an open ward at the state hospital, where she could receive occupational therapy and other treatment.

Like Hank, Susan was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Like Hank, she was committed to New Hampshire Hospital for life, or until she was deemed no longer insane.

The hearing took thirty-five minutes.

Jimmy mailed me a clipping about it.

The article said that at the end of the hearing Susan stood before the judge, smiling, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Were they tears of relief? Sadness? Victory?

I wasn't sure, but I wanted to find out.

F
our months later, I returned to New England to see Susan.

Jimmy and Shirley picked me up at the airport in Boston. I hadn't been home in a while and we all seemed nervous.

“I recognized you right away, Dracula,” Jimmy said when I walked up, like he'd been afraid he wouldn't.

“What a fancy haircut!” squealed Shirley, who had given herself a perm for the occasion.

“I bet you paid some fairy a double sawbuck for that hack job,” Jimmy needled me.

I had paid a lot more than twenty bucks, but I lied.

“It wasn't that expensive.”

“You shoulda paid
me
the dough. I woulda cut it for you.”

Remembering his drunken haircuts, I forced a smile.

“And you wouldn't have ended up looking like a sheepdog either.”

“
Jim
,” said Shirley.

“What? I can't even ride my own daughter anymore?”

Then he looked in the rearview mirror at me.

“You look pretty goddamn good, kiddo.”

I beamed. I couldn't help it. His opinion still mattered.

We drove into the projects. The buildings had finally been repainted. I can't say it cheered the place up much.

Downstairs in the apartment, there were a few more stuffed ducks on the wall and a new TV.

Upstairs, Shirley had hung fresh curtains and bought new bedspreads for the bunk beds. Jimmy had piled a bunch of eight-track tape players in the corner.

The bullet holes were still in the ceiling.

The next morning, I anxiously got dressed to go see Susan. I put on jeans and a turtleneck. I blow-dried my sheepdog hair. I tried to look nice but not too nice. I wanted to seem like I was doing well but not too well.

Jimmy, of course, had no intention of going along and I was glad about that.

“The only way I'd visit that murdering bitch is with a loaded .22,” he said.

Shirley insisted she had too much housework, maybe she'd go next time, but I knew she really just didn't want to go against Jimmy.

I didn't want to visit Susan alone. I was afraid that seeing my childhood idol locked up in the nuthouse might put me away. So I called up Virginia. Before I could even ask, she offered to go with me. She jumped in her jalopy and drove up from Massachusetts. She was living right over the New Hampshire border, but at least she'd made it out of the state. She'd also finally left the massage parlor and the married man. Dustin was getting older and she was trying to clean up her act. She was working at an appliance store and she'd become a vegetarian, which drove Jimmy crazy. She'd met a nice guy, a musician, and thought he might be Husband Number Two.

On the short drive up to Concord, I got more and more nervous. I hadn't let Susan know I was coming. I'd told myself it would be nice to surprise her, but I think I was just afraid she'd tell me not to come.

I had called the hospital the day before to make an appointment. But, unlike with Hank, none was necessary.

She doesn't get many visitors, the woman on the phone had said.

I'd hung up and felt depressed.

I still felt pretty depressed.

Virginia tried to distract me on the way with funny stories about working at the appliance store. She was the person you called if your new fridge was a lemon. She had to calm down angry people all day long. She said she felt right at home.

Before long, Virginia's jalopy made the familiar turn onto Pleasant Street.

The hospital looked like it hadn't changed much since we had visited Hank, although having now been to college, I no longer thought it resembled one.

Virginia and I waited in a drab, crowded recreation room, while an attendant went to fetch Susan. I was clutching a gift-wrapped box of my favorite local fudge. My hands were so sweaty they were ruining the wrapping.

Susan walked into the room, looking for a familiar face. I jumped up, hoping that she'd recognize me. I had no trouble spotting her. She looked amazingly well: trim, pretty, and neatly dressed.

She lit up with surprise when she saw us.

I hurried toward her and awkwardly gave her a hug. Virginia did too.

“Wow. I didn't expect to see you guys here,” she said, smiling and shaking her head.

“I'm sorry I didn't call,” I said. “I wanted to surprise you.”

“I'm surprised all right,” she said. “This is the best surprise I've had in ages.”

I handed her the damp box of candy.

“Oooh, that's my favorite!” she said.

At least I knew we still had one thing in common.

“Are you home from college?” she asked. It seemed like she'd been keeping tabs on me too.

“I graduated last year,” I told her.

“I always knew you'd make it. I knew you'd get there one way or the other. Jimmy must be proud of you.”

“Oh, I don't know,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess you can never really tell with him.”

We all kind of laughed.

“Let's go over there where it's less crazy,” she said, pointing to an empty table. “Although less crazy here is still pretty crazy,” she joked.

She seemed pretty normal. At least she still had her sense of humor. I guess I thought murdering her old man might've taken that away. But maybe it had brought it back.

We sat down at the table and ate some fudge. Susan talked a blue streak. She was totally up on world events—the Camp David Accords, the new pope, the Red Sox getting creamed by the Yankees. I wasn't sure if her talkativeness was due to the meds she was on or her being starved for scintillating conversation.

“Can you believe I'm in here?” she asked at one point, with a wry shake of her head.

All around us, catatonic and delusional people shuffled about. One woman stuck her face in mine, speaking gibberish. Susan spoke to the woman like a doctor. She told the lady she needed to adjust her dose of something and gently shooed her away.

Susan wanted to know all about my life and Virginia's life. Virginia told her about Dustin and the appliance store. I told her about the low-budget Brian De Palma movie I'd cowritten that had been shot on the Sarah Lawrence campus that summer.

“It's like a student film,” I said, trying to play it down so the gulf between us wouldn't seem so wide.

“Who's in it? Anyone famous?”

“Kirk Douglas,” I mumbled.

“I once danced with Paul Newman at a political rally,” she boasted, trying to one-up me a little.

I didn't mention I'd had a Paul Newman sighting of my own.

“You should write a movie about
me
,” she insisted. “But you better hurry up 'cause lots of other writers, real big shots, are interested in my story.”

“Your life would make quite a story,” I said.

Of course that was part of the reason I was there. But I hadn't quite figured that out yet.

“Did you see that
New Yorker
piece on me?” she asked.

I looked surprised.

“The
New Yorker
? Wow—”

“Yeah, I always wanted to be in that magazine. I just thought it might be for one of my poems, but I guess I'll take what I can get.”

She leaned a little closer to me.

“I didn't mean to kill him, you know.”

I tensed. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Virginia do the same.

“I—I figured you probably didn't,” I stammered.

“Me too,” said Virginia, in barely a whisper.

With no hesitation, no self-consciousness, Susan launched into talking about the night she killed her father.

“It was self-defense,” she said. “It was me or him. He was gonna kill me. You know he threatened to all the time.”

I nodded. Virginia nodded. We hung on her every word.

“I went to his house that night to get my stuff. I left a bunch of things behind when I had to get my butt out of there in a hurry. I mean, jeez Louise, I woke up one night and he was pointing a gun at me! I wasn't going to stick around after that! I said, ‘I'm
out of here
.' But, like I said, I still had some stuff there. Some paintings I'd made that I really liked. Some poems I wrote. Clothes I wanted to take to California. Did you know I was planning on moving there?'

“I think I read that.”

“You can't imagine how many times I've said to myself, ‘Susan, you idiot, you should've left that stupid stuff behind.' If I had, I wouldn't be in
this
stupid place.”

“But . . . why did you bring a gun with you when you went over there?” I asked haltingly.

“Are you kidding? I was scared outta my wits. I was afraid he was going to kill me. So I took my cousin Mark's gun. I just borrowed it, really, from his house. I was going to put it back. I thought he wouldn't even notice. Wrong again, Susan. Anyhoo, I went there really late that night. I thought I could get in and get out without waking him up. I was hoping, anyway. But, just my luck,
he woke up when I was climbing through the window. I looked up and there he was. Standing there in his undershorts, pointing his rifle right at me. You know what he said? ‘Now I've got you just where I want you, you little bitch.' Those were his last words. I don't even know how I got the gun out of my purse so fast. I don't even remember pulling the trigger. I only fired once. Just to stop him.”

“But what about the second shot?” Virginia blurted out.

“I'm getting to that part. He fell back on the floor and was just lying there, not moving or anything. I didn't see any blood. I thought maybe I didn't even hit him. I thought maybe he was playing dead. You know, playing possum. I thought he was going to jump up and get me, like in a scary movie or something, you know? But then when I got closer, I could see he wasn't breathing too good. I could tell he wasn't gonna make it.”

She was silent for a moment.

“So I put him out of his misery. I took the rifle and shot him again. Shot him in the head.”

It was chilling to hear her say it. Chilling to think about it.

I had thought about killing Jimmy many times, but Susan had actually pulled the trigger.

She had taken Hank's last breath. Obliterated whatever his last thought might have been. To kill her? Forgive her? Beg for his own forgiveness?

She had destroyed his personality. His sensibility. His awareness—or, more accurately, his lack of awareness.

“Why didn't you just shoot him again with the pistol?” I asked.

“I don't know. I don't know why.”

“But why did you make it look like a suicide?”

“I don't know. It all happened so fast, like in a dream.”

It was the same way Hank had described his murders. Maybe that's what murder felt like sometimes. Dreamy.

I suspected some of Susan's dreaminess could be attributed to her being hopped-up and asked her about that.

“Were you drinking that night? Or taking drugs or . . . ?”

“Oh, I don't want to talk about that,” she said, dismissing my questions with a wave of her hand. “Anyway, I never thought the cops would really buy the whole thing was a suicide. But they're a bunch of idiots, those Manchester cops.”

“Is that why you had Hank's body exhumed? To show up the police? That's what some people think—”

“No! Those people are stupid too! I did it for my
babcia
.”

Virginia and I looked confused.

“My grandmother,” she explained, translating the Polish word. “I did it for her, not for the police. I didn't want her to think her son was damned forever. Anyway, I thought I could get away before the cops even suspected me. I thought I'd be out in California playing golf and they'd be chasing their tails. Wrong again, Susan.”

She never admitted that guilt might have played a part in her getting caught.

She did admit feeling remorse.

“Every single day I regret what I did,” she said.

I wasn't sure if she meant killing Hank or digging him up.

When I asked her to clarify, she assured me she was talking about the murder.

But I wasn't totally convinced.

I decided to leave it at that.

When we finally said good-bye, we promised to write. We promised not to lose touch again.

In the car Virginia said, “I don't know what to think. Did she kill him in self-defense or in cold blood?”

I thought about it and shook my head.

“Both, I think.”

For the rest of the way home, Virginia and I were silent.

One thought kept running over and over in my head.

That could have been me.