Summer 1940, Long Island, New York
CHARLIE
I was drunk. So drunk that I didn’t notice what things were. I try to retrace my thoughts through the fog of the drunken stupor but when I do … just see a haze. A purple haze that runs through my mind concurrent with the desire to forget. I don’t want to remember.
I was riding in the car with Jonny when I noticed him. It was just a silhouette at the time. A dark mass that was nothing more substantial than the fog that surrounded him. An apparition. It wasn’t real to me. I forgot that I had seen him immediately—he was like a singular pillar of smoke that blew away in the wind and then was no more.
Jonny had just dropped me off in front of my house in Long Island. It was an expensive house in a classic, wealthy Long Island neighborhood. It was made of an off-white wooden shingle exterior with three perfectly separated dormer windows, that during the day lit the attic well. It had two stories and a deck on one side of the house, on the second floor, where you could walk outside.
I soon found myself on that deck.
I noticed upon walking up the brick steps to the black door, even though it was during the night, that I could see the void of blackness behind the door, indicating that it was ajar. I grabbed the gold handle and peered in. Mother would never leave the door unlocked, or open, in the middle of the night.
I didn’t want to unsettle the quiet for fear of what I might find. But I had to. I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted so that anyone on the first floor, and maybe the second, could hear me.
“Mother, are you ok? Mother!”
The silence of the crickets chirping their summer pleasantries to each other was the only sound around me. It was louder than normal, more pronounced against what I perceived as ominous silence. I walked inside and flicked on the lights and noticed that the entire house was truly dark. I could only see the shadows of the balusters leading the way up the staircase. There was obviously no other light turned on in the entire house other than the singular bulb that I stood directly under. I now added fear to my feelings of discomfort and worry.
I walked up the stairs and turned on the light as I did so, to illuminate my path.
“Mom! It’s Charlie—where are you?”
I came to the balcony on the second floor and noticed that a door was open. A certain kind of dread filled me like never before. I started to get tingles and knew something was wrong now—I no longer suspected it, I was sure of it. I walked outside and almost slipped from a liquid that was viscous. The light switch was on the other side of the deck—I relied on the moonlight to show me. To tell me that my mother was dead. I saw her lying on the deck with blood surrounding her and matting her hair. Her eyes were vacant. I ran to her, almost slipping on her blood, and cried and sobbed. I heaved for ten minutes; there was no point to rush to the phone—she was dead. No one could bring her back to life. As it turned out, I didn’t need to phone the police because the neighbors heard my cries and called.
I remember a policeman tapped me on my shoulder and when I didn’t turn around, he said that I’d better or he would shoot me. I glanced back and saw him and another cop pointing guns at me.
I kissed my mother on the forehead and got up—putting my hands in the air. They patted me down and then led me downstairs—allowing me to wipe up with a towel before questioning me. Very soon after, another policeman arrived and said that they had caught the killer. He was a vagrant wandering about the neighborhood with blood on his hands. He had jewelry, which the police wanted me to identify. I did—I said it was hers.
“I saw him—he was just here—must have been as I pulled up to the house. He was shuffling outside as if in a daze.”
“Probably a drug maniac. We will teach him a lesson on the way to the station. We have a field we take people who hurt women to. He will go to the chair, son.”
The police officer who first talked to me said this as he laid a hand on my shoulder, as if this could comfort me, as I looked at the ground.
“Do you think you would recognize him, could you ID him?”
“I don’t want to see him,” I said, “he was just a dark figure. I don’t think so.”
“Well, son, we have all we need to proceed initially, anyway. Why don’t you go into your living room while we take out the body; we have collected all the evidence we need.”
I was too tired to be sad and too emotionally exhausted to be anything but numb. I went to the living room and sat on the couch, with blood still covering me. I fell asleep.