Saint Homicide (Single Shot) (2 page)

Chapter 2

Maybe quitting your job was a mistake.

The thought came to me as I watched my wife sleep, a quivering strip of orange light falling across her face from the streetlamp swaying in the wind outside our bedroom window. I crept through the shadows to the side of the bed. While she slept she didn’t need the facial prosthetic, and it lay rolled up in a yellow towel beside a bottle of pills on her nightstand.  Contracting with each breath she took, where her nose and hard palette had once been, was a dark, moist hole.

Her eyes opened and turned toward me. Titanium snaps, fastened to bone, glinted from inside the hole. I did not move and did not turn on the lights.

Her jaw bobbed as she said, “Hello.” Without her prosthetic snapped in, her voice was a thick expulsion of air.

“Hey,” I said.

She sighed, and her thin blonde hair fell at her shoulders. After two years it still made me nauseous to look at the hole in the center of her face. I could see her tongue trailing down her throat like a snake. Letting my eyes drift, I focused on the yellow stripes on her pillow.

“Tired,” she told me.

I nodded. “You sleep. I’m going to bed.”

She stared at me. The moisture in her mouth cavity glistened in the synthetic orange light, and even trying not to see it, I saw it. I always saw it. She said, “Can you put…the thing…in for me?”

I walked over to the bed and unwrapped the prosthetic. It was light and hollow. Leaning over her, I positioned it in the hole until the magnetic snaps clicked into place.

I sat down beside her and took her hand. “Did your sister come over today?”

“Yes.”

“Did she get you up and around?”

“Some.”

“That’s good,” I said. “That’s really good.”

She pulled her hand away and laced her fingers together.

“That’s really good,” I said again.

Around the tan prosthetic her pale skin tightened. “You go by that clinic today?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s disgusting. They told me to leave. But I scared them, especially the abortionist himself. You should have seen how fearful that baby killer was when he saw me. A man like that…I hesitate to even call him a man.”

Above the immobile plastic, her wide, wet eyes did not blink as she asked, “Did you miss me today?” The words sounded as if they were coming out of a plastic tube.

“What? Of course.”

Tears slipped out of her eyes. “No, you didn’t.”

“Yes. I did.”

She shook her head, the prosthetic slick with tears, and coughed. “You don’t care.”

I took a deep breath and looked down at her orange tinted face. “I’m too tired for this, Jennifer.”

“You’re a son of a bitch. You don’t care about me at all.”

“I’m tired, Jennifer. I’m certainly too tired to have this absurd conversation again.”

“Then go. I don’t care. Take this goddamn thing out and go hide in your room and pray.”

“Please don’t talk like that. You know I hate that. It’s bad enough I have to listen to those atheists at work talk that way.”

“Then take this thing out and leave me alone.”

As I pulled the prosthetic out, my fingertips brushed her face. Where her tears had not fallen, her skin was as dry as paper. Laying the prosthetic on her nightstand, I glanced down at her. The hole in her face gaped, the eyes above it still filling with tears.

*

Why can’t you be a better husband?

The question nagged me as I lay in bed that night. I slept in the guest room that Jennifer had once painted a soft yellow in the anticipation of someday having a child. Clothes and picket signs and fliers lay strewn all about the place. The sheets were so dirty I got up and ripped them off and threw them into a little, over-stuffed wicker basket between the dresser and the door. When I was home, I rarely ventured out of my room.

Why can’t you?

It wasn’t Jennifer’s fault. The doctors said it was a miracle that she had lived at all. The night her father’s car had skidded off of a wet service exit and slammed into a tree, he had been killed instantly. Jennifer had been alone for forty minutes. When they finally pulled her from the wreckage of the passenger seat, they thought she would die any moment. When the news came to us in the waiting room that she would not die, I had gripped the arm of Jennifer’s weeping mother and said, “Praise the Lord. The Lord is good.”

Now I wished I could jab a hot poker into the part of my brain that said
, She should have died
. Where did such thoughts come from? The Devil? Her surgeon had calmly told me that her brain damage was minimal, but I wanted to ask,
What exactly is minimal brain damage?
She was not the same person I had married. I had married a preacher’s daughter—an intelligent, compassionate woman, a woman who was positive where I was pessimistic, strong where I was weak. Now I had to be the positive one, the encourager who applauded every few steps without the aluminum walker as if she were a toddler. My wife
was
dead. The woman left in my wife’s shattered body didn’t seem to believe in God at all. That was the hardest thing. At first, I thought of the accident and its horrible, life-altering implications as a test. I studied Job. I prayed. But Jennifer was
gone
. The bitter woman who slept downstairs cried and sulked and cursed me every day in God’s name. It was no test, no pass or fail. My life had simply altered, terribly and forever.

Of course, everyone thought I was a saint. At first, everyone cared, which was an improvement over Job’s lot in life, at least. The church had taken up a love offering. Cards and flowers arrived every day. Some people even seemed to love the spectacle of our misery, loved the way the new preacher hauled out my grief every Sunday and twisted it into an example of perseverance.

Everyone was kind. For a while. Everyone mourned the loss of Brother Peter, and they mourned the damage done to his daughter and the suffering inflicted on her young husband. Eventually, though, the flowers and cards stopped. Days turned into weeks, and then into months, until now years had passed and everyone had long since gone back to their families and their careers and their favorite television shows.

My new life consisted of pain and repetition. I tried to adapt. I had been strong after the accident, had kept taking Jennifer to church, had tried hard to accept the instantaneous change from lover to caretaker. For years, I had not been ashamed of myself.

Then, late one night I was in the den flipping channels on the television and caught a teenage sex-comedy on cable in which the female cast members kept taking off their clothes. In the darkened house, I sat in the television’s dim light and watched the female bodies as if I were watching a big game cat chase down and tear apart a zebra. The next day I cancelled the cable. A few days after that, however, I went to the video store and rented a soft-core sex movie off of the top shelf along the wall, handing over the cassette sandwiched between
The Searchers
and
Vertigo
to the smirking boy behind the counter. Late that night, and for several nights after, when I knew Jennifer was asleep, I sat in the weak light of the movie and masturbated.

Then one night while I was in front of the television I heard a heavy thud in the hallway. I shut off the television and found Jennifer collapsed on the carpet. She cried as I carried her to her room, and she told me she knew what I had been doing. “I know you lost a lot,” she said. “It’s my fault.”

I shook my head, my face seared with blood and shame, and told her, “Don’t. Don’t ever feel that way.” I tucked her into her bed.

“Could…” She squeezed her eyes shut, and her pale face, except for the plastic piece in the center, turned slightly pink. “Could you do that now? With me?”

I had tried. I took off my pants, laid them over the back of a chair, and sat on the bed with her hand in mine. But I could not achieve an erection. Not when I filled my mind with thoughts of Jennifer when she was healthy and strong, not even when I tried to recall the trashy simulated sex from the film. The figures of the naked women from the film only made me think of meat and bone and dismembered animals. Jennifer’s cold hand trembled in mine, her eyes full of something like worry, the plastic magnetized to her skull clicking with every breath.

We had both cried and to think of it now made me sick.

I threw out the television set. I devoted myself fully to the Bible. Out of the death and damage done to our family, I felt the Lord pulling me more and more toward the movement to defend life. I studied. I protested. I prayed. And now I had quit my job for the cause.

Still the thought tugged at me as I lay in bed that night:
Why can’t you be a better husband?

If I’m honest, I suppose I was scared of Jennifer. I was scared of what had happened to her, and I was scared of what she now knew about me. Had she ever told Lynn about the movie? Her teenaged sister was the only person Jennifer confided in. But the girl had never made any mention of it. She never acted as if her impression of me had undergone any change. I couldn’t really tell about her, though. Lynn was so much like Jennifer had once been: strong almost to a fault, keeping her terrors and insecurities so close to her they barely seemed to exist. It was hard to know if anything ever bothered her.

As if in reply to that thought, the phone rang. Sitting up in the bed, I read my alarm clock. 10:39. The phone rang again, and I slid out of bed and walked over to the dresser. It rang again as I picked it up.

A woman was crying on the other end.

“Hello?” I said.

“Daniel,” my mother-in-law whispered.

“Karen?”

“Daniel, she’s gone.”

“What?”

“Lynn’s gone. I woke up a few minutes ago because I thought I heard a car outside. I thought it might be that boy come to get her again. I went to her room and I found a note.”

I steadied myself as if someone had shoved me. “What does it say?”

I could hear the paper in her hand.

“It just says: ‘Dear Mom. I have to leave. I hope you’ll forgive me but I know you’ll see I’m right one day. You won’t believe this, but I do love you. I love you all. Tell Jennifer I love her most.’” A sob caught in her throat and she coughed. “That’s all. She didn’t even sign it.”

“Did you have a fight?”

“No. No, that’s the thing. Today had been one of our good days. This whole week had been good. And now this.” She broke down and the sound was so close to my ear I was embarrassed. I held the phone away from my head and rubbed my face with my other hand.

When I put the phone back to my ear she was saying, “Can you find her?”

“I don’t know.” I felt dizzy and put my hand on the dresser. “Maybe I should call the police.”

“What would they do? She just turned eighteen. And she hasn’t been gone very long. She’s just gone. Both my girls are gone.” Her voice cracked. “First Pete, now my girls.”

“I can’t believe she’d leave us like this.”

“Please, Daniel. You have to go find her. She ran away with that boy. I know she did. They couldn’t have gotten far.”

I walked with the phone over to the bed and sat down. One of my pillows fell to the floor. “What’s this boy’s name again?”

“Randall,” she said with disgust. “Randall Terpweiler.”

“How’d she meet this kid? She never told me much about him.”

“Well, he’s not really a kid. He’s twenty-four years old.”

I sat down on the carpet and leaned against the wall. “She never told me that.”

“She didn’t volunteer it to me. I had to drag it out of her.”

“But you never told me, either.”

“Lord, Daniel, I didn’t want to bother you with it. I know you got your hands full with Jennifer.”

“This guy. What do you know about him?”

“I think he works at a video store downtown. On Curtis Street. I know it’s Curtis Street because when Lynn told me that, I was pretty worried. I’ve heard Curtis is rough. I hate to ask you to go down there, but his number’s not listed and they’d know where he lives most likely.”

“I’m not sure they’ll tell me, Karen. They’re probably closed anyway. I could try it in the morning.” Even as I said it, though, I glanced around for my shoes.

“No. It’s an all-night store. I remember that much. I’m just scared that if we wait, she’ll be gone. Please tell me you’ll go. He’s not listed and I’ve looked in the phone book, but I can’t find a number for him or the store. And that just makes it worse. The more I think about it, the worse it gets. Please tell me you’ll go.”

“Of course I will.”

“Thank you,” she said catching her breath. “Thank you, Daniel. If they give you his address, you’ll try to find her?”

“Yes.”

“Should I come over and sit with Jennifer?”

“Yes, please. I doubt she’ll need anything, but I’d feel better about it if someone was here.”

“I’ll be over in ten minutes,” she said.

*

Even more than usual, I dressed without much regard to what I was putting on. After she’d come home from the hospital, Jennifer had demanded that we remove all of the mirrors in the house. It was an odd request, but she was adamant on the point. For my part, I didn’t miss them. To tame my hair, I just pulled on a gray sock cap.