Lillian
I heard a Fly buzz when I died.
Daniel called at three in the afternoon. He said that when Johnny left the Phelps Paper Company, a security guard followed his car. When Johnny went into Sheneel and Alex Greene’s house and stayed for nearly an hour, the security guard decided to check what was happening. When the security guard saw Johnny on the floor with Alex Greene’s body, he called the police and then called his boss, or maybe the other way around. Now, Daniel was calling from the highway halfway to Fernandina. I should come too, he said.
My own voice sounded faraway when I asked, ‘Did Johnny kill him?’
‘The man I talked to told me Alex Greene was cut up and Johnny was there. No one seems to know the details.’
I ran from my office to my car. Would Johnny kill Alex Greene? I saw no reason why, and I hated myself for thinking it. But I also had seen no reason why he would cut up his own hands.
When I got to Fernandina, eight police cars, two ambulances, and a fire truck were parked outside the yellow house. Crime-scene tape stretched across the front yard, and a uniformed cop guarded the front door. Neighborhood kids stood barefoot or straddled bicycles on the street.
I cut across the lawn and asked the officer to tell Detective Turner that I was outside. ‘This a family party?’ he said, but he radioed into the house.
Daniel came out, looking grim.
I asked, ‘Is he—’
‘He’s going to be all right.’
The little house was crowded and hot, though a window air conditioner blew full. A cop talked with two men in suits. Through the bedroom doorway, two women and a man worked under a bright light. Daniel nodded at one of the businessmen, a thick-chested man, and said, ‘His name is Bob Peterson. He found Johnny.’ He nodded at the other man – tall, in a pink Oxford-cloth shirt, holding a gray suit coat in his hand – and said, ‘Stephen Phelps. He showed up before EMS and the squads.’ When I glanced at the bedroom, he said, ‘Body’s already gone.’
In the kitchen, Johnny was sitting at the table with a detective. The bandage on his left hand was bloody, the arm above it swollen past the elbow. A trickle of blood had dried on his cheek.
The detective said to him, ‘He had bright white skin? “Blue-white”?’
‘That’s what it looked like. I saw him for only a second.’
‘Why didn’t Peterson see this man?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he went out the kitchen window.’
‘He was big, you say?’
‘Huge.’
The detective looked at the wall above the sink. ‘Small window.’
I went to the table and said, ‘My husband is hurt.’
The detective looked at me, annoyed. ‘Who let her in?’
‘He’s bleeding—’
His eyes icy, Johnny raised his good hand. ‘I’m fine.’
I asked, ‘What happened?’
Johnny turned back to the detective. ‘I don’t know how the guy left. I just know what I saw.’
I said, ‘What happened to your hand?’
He looked at me as if I had injured him. ‘A baseball bat hit it.’
‘I’m taking you to the hospital.’
Johnny said, ‘Cut it out.’
‘What?’
‘Cut it out. I’m talking with this man. I’ll go when I’m done.’
‘Your hand,’ I said.
‘It’s fine.’
‘It’s not fine. It’s—’
‘Stop it!’ he yelled. Then he lowered his voice. ‘Just stop it.’
I walked into the living room. Tears stung my eyes. The hot air smelled like copper and sweat, and I felt nauseous. I went to the couch and sat, and when the man Daniel had identified as Stephen Phelps saw me, he came and sat on the other end. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.
‘You’re Lillian Turner?’ he said.
I nodded.
‘Sheneel’s teacher.’
‘Small town,’ I said.
‘Very.’
‘My husband didn’t do this.’
‘Who says he did?’
The muscles relaxed in my chest. ‘Thank you.’
He wiped his forehead again. ‘I talked with him a little while ago in my office. I warned him he might hurt himself in this. In Sheneel’s part of the family, someone’s always getting hurt.’
‘Do you know what happened here?’
He hesitated, touched my shoulder, and said, ‘I tend to hear almost everything that interests me, but when your husband came to my office, he told me things about Sheneel’s death that I hadn’t heard before. To tell the truth, I didn’t know whether to believe him. Your husband didn’t look entirely … together. So I sent my security man after him when he left. Bob followed him here, and when your husband didn’t come back out, Bob went in after him. He found your husband on top of my cousin’s boy.’
‘On top?’
‘That’s what Bob says. Your husband was bleeding from the head, and he was lying on Alex. Bob pulled him off. Alex was dead. Bob called me, and I called the police.’
‘Christ.’
‘Your husband told Bob that someone else was in the house. He said a man attacked him.’
I nodded at the kitchen. ‘That detective doesn’t seem to believe him.’
He glanced through the door at Johnny. ‘How else could he have gotten knocked on the head? But Bob was outside and saw no one leave.’
Shouting erupted in the kitchen – Johnny and Daniel yelling at each other, Johnny saying something about Daniel covering up Sheneel’s murder, Daniel calling Johnny crazy.
Johnny burst into the living room and looked around wildly until he found me on the couch. He said, ‘Let’s go!’
Daniel followed him from the kitchen and said, ‘Here’s the secret, Johnny – there’s no secret!’
Johnny headed for the front door. ‘Let’s go!’
The cop at the door blocked him and Johnny looked ready to hit him, but Daniel said, ‘Let the man out,’ and the cop moved aside.
As Johnny disappeared from the front porch, I turned to Daniel. ‘Can you get my car back to my house?’
He nodded, and I tossed him my keys and ran after Johnny. He had parked at the curb in front of the house. He glared at me. ‘Get in.’
‘Give me the keys,’ I said.
‘Not on your life.’
‘If you don’t give them to me, I’m not going with you.’
His eyes burned with anger. ‘I’m sick of this,’ he said. He dropped the keys on the pavement and got in on the passenger side.
He leaned against the door as I drove to the hospital. When I stopped at the entrance to the ER, he got out without a word. By the time I parked the car and went inside, the nurses had him in an exam room, and an hour later – after the X-rays, the pupil dilation check, and the concentration and coordination test – the doctor, a small, round Asian woman, told us that Johnny had a fractured wrist and a mild concussion. ‘We can keep him here overnight, or we can put him in a cast and send him home,’ she said.
‘I’m going home,’ Johnny said.
‘That’s fine. We’ll get you into a cast.’ The doctor turned back to me. ‘Check on him every few hours and make sure he’s alert.’
‘Let’s go,’ Johnny said.
The doctor asked, ‘Is he always this way?’
That evening, a layer of clouds covered the sky, and, when we got in bed, a light rain fell against the windows. Johnny lay on his back, the lamp on, staring at the ceiling.
‘What are you thinking?’ I asked.
He said nothing.
‘I’m trying to help,’ I said.
He said, ‘You’re sucking me dry.’
As I fell asleep, the rain ticked against the window glass. I dreamed I was in class, teaching recitation from memory – a kind of teaching almost no one does anymore, not for fifty or sixty years – and two dozen twenty-year-olds chanted lines from Emily Dickinson’s ‘I heard a Fly buzz.’ The students knew the words, and they inflected them precisely, but I felt that a sound was missing, and I realized that the sound was Sheneel’s voice. Then I realized that the other students were reciting the poem for her.
I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –
With Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see.
I woke. The lamp on Johnny’s side of the bed was on. The clock said it was one thirty-five a.m. Light rain fell against the windows. Johnny was gone.
I got up and went to the kitchen and then to the sunroom. The glass doors from the sunroom to the backyard were open and a cool wet breeze blew into the house.
I stepped out on to the cold, slick grass. Johnny was lying on the lawn chair, wearing only his boxer shorts. ‘Hey,’ I said.
He said nothing. The cold rain stung my skin through my pajama shirt.
‘Come inside,’ I said.
He said nothing.
I went to him and stood by him. His eyes were open, staring into the rain. ‘The rain will ruin your cast.’
He said nothing.
I thought, This is the way it ends. Then I unbuttoned my pajama shirt and let it hang open. Johnny watched the thick dark sky. I slid my underwear down and left it on the wet grass. The rain fell into Johnny’s eyes. I stepped over the lawn chair, straddling him, and lowered myself on to him. His eyes focused on mine for several seconds, and he pushed me off of him, on to the grass. I lay on the ground, the cold rain stinging my skin, then got up and returned to him, stepped across him, lowered myself on to him, and when he tried to push me away, I grabbed the wrist of his undamaged hand and held it, and I reached down and pulled his shorts away. He cried out – with anger, pain, desire, I didn’t know what – and I took him in my hand until he was hard and I put him inside me. He struggled, but I held him and ground down on him again and again. ‘Never,’ I said, and rain spat from my mouth. ‘Never, never, never.’ I ground down on him deeper and deeper, and his struggling softened until, with a groan of anger or pain or desire, he bucked his hips against me.
‘Never,’ I said, and he collapsed on to the chair, breathing hard, his eyes closed now against the rain, and I lowered myself against him until our skins touched and the deep warmth of our bodies burned through the cold rain that coated us.
‘Never?’ he said.
‘Never go away from me,’ I said.
He lay quiet beneath me, then said, ‘I won’t.’
But in the morning, over breakfast, with the rain clouds gone from the sky and the grass dry, he said, ‘If you treat me like I’m already gone, I don’t know what to do.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You put me in the hospital. You—’
‘You put yourself in the hospital.’
‘Shhh.’ He stared at me hard and said, ‘You took my gun from my office. You keep treating me like I’m broken.’
‘I’m trying to—’
He held my hand to silence me. ‘Maybe I am broken. But if you treat me this way, I’m nothing. You understand? Nothing. I won’t be able to go away, because I’ll already be gone.’
‘I—’
‘You can’t save me from myself. Only I can do that.’
I stared at him, waiting for him to finish.
He smiled a little. ‘I give myself about fifty-fifty odds.’ He nodded, as if permitting me to speak.
I said nothing. Instead, I went into the bedroom and got his gun from my dresser drawer. I brought it to him and laid it on the table.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
I stared at it – a piece of squared black metal with a trigger. ‘Will you teach me to shoot it?’
‘I guess so. Why?’
‘Because if you come at me in the middle of the night, I want a fighting chance.’