ONE SATURDAY MORNING MY FATHER opens a check from Demont. I had carried it from the PO box and set it on the counter days earlier. The envelope is the same size and weight as all the ones that came before it. He pours himself a glass of water and cuts the seal with a butter knife.
His eyes swell. Then he reads again. He flips the note over as if to make sure it’s real. He bows his head. It starts slow, like an awful moan, and then he laughs as I’ve never heard, happy and triumphant and maniacal.
“Honey!” he calls. “Honey!”
It is unclear who he’s calling. We both come. He shoves the letter in our faces and tugs the corners, snaps the paper like a sail. His teeth salivate. He says, “See. Do you see?”
He tells us the site’s producing now. His land finally came through.
“How?” she stammers.
He tosses the letter at her and shows me the check. I have to read the words to accept the number: one hundred and nineteen thousand, three hundred and seventy-one dollars and 67/100 cents. Soon all I see is black. All I see is Paul. I need him. I need him, and he isn’t here.
“ ‘Due to recent production,’ ” Mom reads, “ ‘please find enclosed a check reflective of this quarter’s yield, per your contract with Demont.’ ”
He dances. His arms and legs flail. His shoes scuff the linoleum. “You both thought I was dumb. You thought I was the stupid one.” He kicks over a chair. “How’s that for a tuition check, Lady?”
“How much?” she says.
I hand her the check.
“Oh my God.” She clasps her mouth until she laughs like him. “Yes. Yes yes yes!” She twirls on her heels and wiggles her fat hips.
Stonewall wakes up and limps into the living room. He trails a blanket behind him. His crooked eyes peer up at us hatefully, all of us.
She shoves my shoulder. “What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you smiling?”
No more of this.
I park in the municipal lot and climb the staircase to town hall. For a moment I lean against the rail, watch the empty sidewalk and empty street. The sun warms my face. There are no shadows at noon. There is no reason to do this. But this is my choice.
I open the glass door and walk inside.
Behind the desk Cathy Eisenmann clicks and types with her pudgy cheek cradled in her palm. A little fan pivots back and forth, a small vase of roses at her elbow. A wooden swan pecks down and up from a bowl of green pebbles in perpetual motion. Her son made it in shop class, his initials on the counterweight tail feathers.
She’s startled to see me but hides it well. “Oh, hey, Amy. How can I help you?”
“Where’s Officer Durum?”
“He’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“Directing traffic at the park.” She straightens in her seat. “Whole town’s down there. You going?”
“When will he be back?”
“Oh, hon, I don’t know. It’s a whole thing now. After the ceremony they’re doing paddle boats on the lake, and you know Dr. Rogers is helping with that petting zoo. I don’t know when Memorial Day became such a carnival.”
The fan hums and wisps her brown hair.
“I could wait,” I say.
“Might be a long time. I can take a message.” She straightens her glasses, lowers her voice. “Are you okay? Is it something I can help you with?”
“I should talk to him. I really need to talk to him.”
“I’m here,” Officer Hastings says. “You can talk to me.”
He stands at the window overlooking the street, no telling how long he’s been there.
“We were chosen to hold down the fort,” Cathy says.
He takes a long sip of coffee. “Come on back, Amy.”
I almost run out the door. But it has to be now, while I’m still me. This is what I want. This is me doing this. I murmur thanks to Mrs. Eisenmann. Then I follow him.
He leads me farther. There is no one else, just open doors to vacant offices, shut blinds, empty chairs, walls medaled with Ohio Department of Justice emblems and framed diplomas from police academies.
I expect him to say something, small talk. But he only glances back with a smirk. My skin flushes, and I look to the floor.
We come to a large iron door leading to the holding cells. His office is nearby, small and without windows, a simple wooden desk and leather chair, a tall lamp with a burgundy shade. A diffuser steams essential pine oil. He points to a chair in front of the desk. I sit. He checks the hall and shuts the door with the knob already turned so the latch is silent. My body tightens. I clench my fists. He moves slow and sleek, a deliberate control. He sits behind the desk.
“You look different,” he says.
“Yeah. I lost over a hundred pounds.”
“You look healthy.”
“I haven’t lost enough.”
“Don’t take it too far. I have a little girl. I don’t allow her to read magazines, watch television. They push an emaciated ideal. This culture is sick.” He reaches over to a thermos with a pink heart sticker on the side. He pours himself a fresh cup of black coffee. “Your friend Sadie fits that bill.”
“I guess she does.”
“She is not healthy.”
Behind him, in simple identical frames, a diploma from the Ohio Valley Police Academy and a Bachelor of Science from Oberlin College. There are no photos of family or friends, of him, only a nondescript painting of a mountain at twilight.
“Why are you here?”
I swipe my hair back and look to the ceiling. My mouth shakes. Inside this body, I’ve buried and silenced the best of me.
“I did it,” I say.
“What did you do?”
“Everything. It was me.”
His eyes dim. After a moment, he raises his wrist and taps at a digital watch, electronic beeps, fingers long and strong. “I’m disappointed to hear this.” He opens a drawer and pulls out a blue bottle of scotch. With the same precision he sets out two glass tumblers. He pours liquid fire. Then he hands me a drink.
“What’re you doing?”
“This will help loosen your lips.”
He sets a digital recorder by his elbow.
I swirl the liquor, smell burning wood. It’s over. I opened my mouth, and now it’s finished. I am weightless, unburdened, and free in my destruction. I drink, swallow the heat.
“Alright. Tell me all of it then.”
“I wanted…”
“Go on.”
“I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to be good. A good friend, a good sister.”
I confess. My voice calm and direct, without tears, and I explain myself to this man. I tell him about Stonewall, about my father’s choice, how my family suffers, just like this whole community. Like Paul, I wanted vengeance. Nobody was supposed to get hurt. Steven was my mistake. I killed Paul to keep my secret. I killed my best friend because I was afraid to lose the future I thought I deserved. It wasn’t worth the cost, was never worth the cost. I was wrong for ever thinking any of it was right. I am an awful person.
There is no emotion from Officer Hastings. No indication that he is surprised or enraged, no acknowledgment that I had deceived them, beat them. He doesn’t seem to care at all. None of this moves him or impresses him.
“Everything I did, it meant nothing. All I did was hurt people. That’s all I do. It’s shit.” I shrug. “It’s all shit.”
“Have you told anyone else?”
“No. You’re the first.”
The faintest smile. “Why are you doing this, Amy? After all this time?”
“Because I need to be punished.”
He drinks. “Punished?”
“I made those choices. And they were wrong. Every decision I made was wrong.”
“You killed a husband and a father, and then you killed your best friend.”
He says it back to me so simply. And for the first time, I have to steady my voice. “Yes. I killed Paul. For nothing.”
He runs his finger along the rim. “In all this time, have you thought, even once, of killing yourself?”
I don’t move, not even a blink. This isn’t right.
“Have you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. What does that tell you?” He glances at his watch, rolls his tongue inside his cheek. “You say you made choices, conscious decisions, yet here you are, trying to take them back.”
I shake my head. “I’m not trying to take them back.”
“No? I don’t believe you. You’re too clever. You still think this is some problem to solve, that you being here will cancel out your wrongs, give you some kind of clean, blank slate.”
It surprises me. I can’t tell him no.
“This isn’t your fault, this belief. You’ve been conditioned your whole life. Sin, confess, repent, and in the end…” He parts his hands to the ceiling. “Forgiveness. Redemption.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t believe that.”
He tilts his head, an appraisal.
“I can’t keep lying. I thought I could. That it would go away. But it’s not. It’s killing whatever’s left of me.”
“You’re suffering.”
“Yes. I can’t feel anything good. I can’t feel anything anymore.”
He leans forward, creak of leather. “Want to know a terrible secret?”
I look at the recorder, its red light. After a moment, I nod.
“If you are looking for some place to rest your head, you are never going to find it.”
I wish he couldn’t see me, that there was a curtain between us.
“You have to become stronger than you are,” he says.
“Throw me in one of those cells, tell everyone. I don’t fucking care.”
He taps his fingers on the desk and seems to consider, reconsider.
“All I deserve is punishment, Officer Hastings. I’m disgusting, evil. And I just don’t care anymore.”
His voice turns playful. “Nothing disgusts me more than moral outrage. People who cry about good and evil have not critically examined life. Most people are severely out of touch with their true motivations.”
The edges of the room darken. My skin cools.
“I don’t know what this is,” I say. “I don’t know what’s happening.”
“You came here to confess, taste peace, get closure for murdering your friend. It’s a stupid and fortunate mistake. I’m no priest. No counselor.”
“You’re a police officer.”
“You tell me you killed two people. And you expect me to punish you. Would that be just? Make the world straight?”
I look at the door and already know he locked it.
“Look at me.”
“I can’t.”
“Look at me.”
I do as he says. I could drown in that gaze.
“If this goes as you want, if I throw you in that cell, what does that serve? Who does that serve? A capable, ambitious woman rotting in prison, wasting tax dollars, a slow, depressing death. What use is that to anyone? The dead are dead. They don’t care.”
“They were both loved,” I say. “I loved him.”
“Their grief is worthless. Your grief is worthless.”
“I can still make this right.”
“There isn’t anything to make right. Nothing went wrong.”
Slowly, I understand. And I almost laugh with sick relief, disappointment.
“Do you really want to be in prison for the rest of your life?”
“I don’t want this.”
“Prison is worse. I promise. And Ohio kills through lethal injection. Do you want to die? Even if you deserve it?”
“No.” I want to stop speaking but can’t. “I want to live.”
“Good. See. That is good.” He glances at his watch. “So. You’ve spilled your guts. Do you feel better, Amy?”
I don’t feel better. I don’t feel anything I should.
“What’s the matter? Was this not cathartic?”
“Fuck you.”
He taps the silver badge above his heart. “Careful.”
“You know my grandpa. That’s why you’re doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Protecting me.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” His grin is crooked, white. “I know your grandpa. But he doesn’t know me. I’m not protecting you. I’m encouraging you to become who you are.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“I don’t have to. I know what you did.”
My hand twitches. I hold my wrist.
“You know my uncle, then. Tom Schmidt.”
“I do, very well. But he’s not as strong as he imagines himself to be, as he needs to be.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I’m as strong as they come.”
I look at the diploma above his black shoulder. “You’ve never gone to war. Never even seen one.”
“I didn’t need war. Did you?”
That locked door is only three feet away. But I can’t move. I’d never make it out. His body is a raised ax. “This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”
“The only thing you’re suffering from is shame, and maybe sadness. Those don’t last. Whatever obligated you to come here, you have to kill it.”
“You’re so full of shit. It’s just talk. I know your kind.”
“I don’t think so.”
The lampshade glows, shadows along the wall. We share silence, a long, comfortable silence. It feels like cold air on a summit. It feels like dying. Outside that door and down that hall, a bored mother surfs the internet.
“What are you thinking?” I say.
“What am I thinking?”
“Yes.”
For the first time, he is surprised, unnerved. “Why do you want to know that?”
“Because I need to know who I’m talking to.”
He drinks, laughs at the glass. Soon he says, “I once made the mistake of giving money to the Sierra Club. Now, I get all these mailings begging for donations. Save the whales. Save the bees. Got a letter this morning with a sad polar bear on the front, trapped on a tiny chunk of ice, front of the letter said Please help me. I just laughed and threw it in the recycling bin. We’re in the midst of a global mass extinction, and they think money will save us.”
I stare at him. I wait. I do not smile or encourage.
“A cataclysm is coming. There are almost ten billion people on this dying earth. The carnage will be unimaginable. There is no salvation. When this party’s over, only people like us will survive.”
“I don’t care.”
“Your killings were encouraging. They were honest.”
“I was angry. I fooled myself into thinking it was something else. It wasn’t. And it didn’t change anything.”
“It changed you.” He smiles. “We only function as our biology demands. If we honestly embrace what we are, a superior relationship with the earth will naturally arise. An effective environmentalism must dehumanize humans.”
“I murdered two people. That’s wrong. You can’t twist—”
“Those aren’t your words.” He casually withdraws a revolver and sets it on the table. The barrel points at my stomach. The bullets shine in the cylinder. The metal is an oily black sheen without reflection. “Morality is a rigged language game. It’s clever, what they’ve done. They’ve created illusions to keep them safe from people like us.”
On the wall, where a window might be, is a poster with Ohio’s state seal. The title reads: Know Your Human Rights. There are many informative words, detailing state and federal laws, commandments written on Xeroxed pages in plastic lamination.
He catches me reading. There’s nothing kind in that face.
“God does not exist. Neither do human rights. You violated nothing. Every day an organism chooses life, another organism is condemned to death. Life is that simple. The strong know this, deep down. But we must return to a time long before Christian crosses and Jewish prophets, when the ideas of equality and good and evil were recognized as the idiocies they are.”
That voice echoes, caverns beneath the town, abhorrent and cold, familiar.
“I’ve heard this bullshit before,” I say.
“Not like this.”
My glass is almost empty. “Some of these things you say. I’ve thought them.”
“But you’ve never said them out loud.”
“I’ve never believed them. I never will.”
He uncorks the bottle and leans over with greater reach than I calculated, pours me more. For a quick moment, he glances at my chest.
“I don’t see many men wearing watches these days,” I say.
“Most men aren’t men. I like knowing how time works.”
“For a guy who thinks words are just empty noise, you sure do talk a lot.”
He laughs. “Words don’t have meaning. They have function. It’s only important what words do. You’ve discovered that. You listen to classical music?”
“No.”
“I do, all the time. Fascism is ordered violence, just as music is ordered noise. You should listen to classical music.”
I wipe at my shirt, smooth out the wrinkles on a sunken stomach.
“Your badge is missing a first name. What is it?”
“Brett.”
“Brett?”
“Yes.”
“That short for anything?”
“No.”
I drink. I could ask him who he is, or what he’s done, but it wouldn’t tell me anything. “That doesn’t fit you at all.”
“Then it is a useful name.”
My throat burns. “I watched Paul die. I wanted him to come back. I waited. But he didn’t come back.”
“You being here is a total failure.”
“I’m so afraid.”
“Of me?”
“Of myself. This pain…”
After a moment, he nods. For once, I see something solemn in him, something true, a hidden suffering that gives him great pride, a cruel and melancholic hunger.
“How do I live with this?”
He tilts his head, as if smelling something, angles the glass against the wood, stalls.
“You can tell me all this other shit,” I say, “but you can’t tell me that.”
“Life is horrific,” he says. “Most never accept this, confront it. You have. But you cannot overcome this horror without becoming its agent.”
In the distance, the sound of gunfire, steady volleys of thunder, a ritual down at the town park where children look on reverently with parents. I imagine a troop of veterans, all dressed in ceremonial uniforms, carrying clean rifles, aiming to the sky in a simultaneous praise to war.
Even though it’s far away, I flinch at the sounds.
And that amuses him.
“No.” I shake my head. “That isn’t me.”
“We’ll see.”
My veins quiet. I want to be far away from him. I could love him. He is the authentic monster my uncle only pretends to be. I invited this into my life.
“I could tell people,” I say. “About you.”
“I’m not speaking to them. I’m speaking to you.”
“I confessed, and you did nothing.”
He wiggles the bottle and returns it to the desk. “Your confession is inadmissible.”
“I’m underage, Officer.”
“Oops.”
A game, but I don’t know who’s won. “What now?”
“You open that door and never come back. You will not get a second chance.” He stops the recorder. “If you’re weak and stupid again, I will not help you. I may even kill you.”
I finish the drink. I stand and hack into my fist. Not as much fat to soak up the fire. I tell him, “I’m still getting used to my new body.”
“You don’t have a body. You are a body.”
He stands, much taller than me. That black uniform, his presence, consumes me.
“I’m not like you,” I say. “I’m going to college, and I’m never coming back.”
“Amy, wherever you go, they will have a real treasure.”
The doorknob turns easily in my palm. My hair moves, a brushed finger, a whispered breath.
“Let’s see what else you can do,” he says.
I graduate with honors.
Ninth in my class, I wear gold cords along with the standard green. On the square top of my graduation cap, I painted Wirkner in delicate white cursive. During the ceremony, Mr. Packard gives a long, tedious speech about civic responsibility and personal independence and the preparatory virtues of a well-rounded education that concludes with, “You are the future of America. You carry the hope of us all.”
I only sink in my seat a little, and my cheeks, for a moment, burn red. But that’s it.
Mom and Dad sit in the bleachers with Grandpa, Grandma, Uncle Tom, Aunt Emily, and Karl. Freshly bought clothes tailored to their skins. My family watches me with pride, the adoration of the blood.
Stonewall isn’t with them. Mom said she didn’t want him crying through the ceremony, ruining my special day. They left him asleep in his crib.
When Principal Bradfield calls my name, I step forward into a vacuum of silent stares. My classmates, those who hate me, those who fear me, those who like me, after all the bullying and struggle and isolation. I am newly born, thin and strong and hard. I move lithe and confident, take my time. When the diploma falls in my palm I grin, the sound of a shut cellar door behind me. From the crowd, my uncle Tom shouts, “Hell yeah, Amy!” and raises his fist.
Out on the green we take pictures, family and friends, me and classmates, Lawrence and Marybeth, little blond cousin Karl at my side. The day is sunny and warm and full of promise. My jaw hurts from smiling. Clouds sail through the bright blue sky. Mom fusses over my hair, straightens some dangling curls and tells me to tilt my new hips for the camera, straighten my shoulders. During a group portrait, Karl asks, “Why isn’t Stonewall here?” But Aunt Emily silences him and tells him that children were left alone all the time in their family.
“I really wanted him here,” I tell Mom. “You should’ve brought him.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one who has to take care of him.”
Sadie is gaunt and beautiful with hair shining past her waist. She watches me from a safe distance, sulks along the edges, a resentful awe. Nothing has cut me down.
Mr. Cooper emerges from the crowd to congratulate me and tells my parents how impressed they should be. Not every student can endure controversy and loss so successfully. He wraps his arm around me and rubs my stomach and says, “You’ve undergone quite the transformation this year, Lady Chevy.”
I pull away.
Uncle Tom almost draws his concealed .45 and puts five in his chest, but Dad intervenes and shakes Mr. Cooper’s hand and thanks him for all his guidance and counseling.
Mom isn’t so easily restrained. She tells him, “If you touch my daughter like that again, I will slice your dick off and feed it to your dog.”
“Believe it,” Tom says.
Mr. Cooper straightens his glasses. “We all know what she is.” And then he’s gone.
My family gets lunch at Wendy’s to celebrate, a bountiful table. Dad pays the bill with an easy laugh and shares with us his plans. He’s going to save up a few checks, then rebuild his childhood home, right on the old foundation. Mom claps. When I tell him I’ll never set foot in that house, he winces as if I’d stabbed him in the gut.
Soon Grandpa Shoemaker grips the back of my neck, massages, his eminent voice hovering in syllables of strung iron. “I’m very proud of you, Amy. Had a difficult year, but I knew you’d make it. We must all look forward instead of back. I’m not sorry for anything I’ve done. I actually regret I didn’t go far enough. But I got hope. More people are awake than ever before, those willing to do far more than I did. I can see it. You go online, you’ll see it, too. It’s all underground now.”
Tom glances at me with nothing but sadness. He holds his wife’s hand to keep her still.
My parents focus on their food.
Nobody says a thing.