Before She Knew Him(44)
“I actually do want you to leave,” Hen said. “Right now.”
“You don’t want to talk? That’s all I’m here for. I’m not here to hurt you or threaten you.”
“Or kill me,” Hen said.
He smiled, and Hen thought he looked like a child caught saying something dirty at the playground. “No, I would never kill you,” he said.
“But you killed Scott Doyle. And you killed Dustin Miller.”
Matthew turned back over his shoulder to see if anyone else was near, then said, “Yes. I did.”
Hen was scared again. It must have shown on her, because Matthew pulled his hands from his pockets and held them up. “I would never in a million years hurt you. I promise.”
“What do you want from me?” Hen asked.
Matthew smiled again, almost sheepishly. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “I suppose I want you to know the truth.”
Richard
I suspect my brother is not what he seems. Not that I blame him. Anyone who got through our childhood gets to do what he wants.
We are owed, him and I.
I’ve had some of the same urges, I will admit, but I’m proud to say that I don’t act on them. The world is safe with me in it, even though I do like to have fun sometimes. Not quite the same fun that I suspect my father used to have. He came home once from one of his business trips and I followed him into the bedroom while he unpacked his suitcase. Mom stayed downstairs. She was cooking a pot roast, his favorite, and she wanted to make sure it didn’t burn. He’d been away for at least a week (it felt like longer to me, but everything feels longer when you’re a little kid), and I watched him pull clothes from his suitcase, dress shirts mainly, plus underwear and socks. He dropped them on the floor for Mom to pick up later, but then he pulled out a pair of ladies’ underwear, beige and lacy, worn thin in places. He held it up for me to see, smiling with his mouth open enough that I could see all his fillings, then laid it carefully down on top of the nubby bedspread, about halfway down. Then he pulled out a bra and laid it about two feet above the underpants so that the thick, pointy cones of the bra stuck up. I was just old enough to imagine what had been underneath that bra, and I remember getting aroused standing there. One of the cups was darker than the other, and I peered inside. Dark blood, more brown than red, smeared the inside of the bra.
My father watched me, then raised and lowered his eyebrows and said, “She didn’t want to take it off, but I convinced her.”
“Are they Mommy’s?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure they weren’t.
My father laughed at that, his head thrown back. “Your mommy couldn’t fill out that bra, trust me,” he said. “But I brought them back as a gift for her, to let her know I’ve been thinking about her while I was gone. Oh, got something for you, too, little man.”
That was the real reason I’d followed my father to his bedroom. I’d been hoping for a gift—he almost always brought me something, even if it was just little bottles filled with shampoo and lotion—and he fumbled around in one of the pockets of his suitcase, then pulled out a pack of cards and threw them toward me. “From my good friend Bill,” he said. “Those are some special cards. Don’t let Mommy see that you have them.”
I pulled the dog-eared cards from the box they came in. On the backs were naked ladies, showing all their parts including their bushy triangles.
“Just keep those to yourself, okay? You show them to the other boys in school and one of them will decide to steal them from you. Just put them away in your room.”
I don’t remember the rest of that night, or what my mom did when she found the bloody underwear on her side of the bed. I remember thinking it was a trick, like when my dad pretended to pull his finger off his hand, or when we’d go out to the quarry and he’d pretend he was about to throw me over the edge. But I still have the cards, even more dog-eared now than they were before. The girl on the eight of spades is my favorite—she’s on all fours, looking back over her shoulder, and I think it’s just a shadow, but it looks like she has a dark, fist-sized bruise on her left buttock.
I have the same dream, again and again. I’m visiting a house somewhere deep in the woods. I’ve wandered upstairs to where I shouldn’t be. There is a long, dark hallway, lined with doors to many bedrooms, most of them rotting and unused. At the end of the hall is a dark figure watching me, waiting to see where I’ll go. The feeling when I see him is always the same. I need to know who he is. But when I move closer to him, he ducks into one of the rooms, and I can’t find him. I am scared of what is in these rooms, but I need to open the doors. I need to find him.
Three days ago I went to downtown Winslow on a pretty day, knowing they’d be out in force, herds of Winslow College students in their tiny dresses and their field hockey uniforms. I got a Thai steak salad from Winslow Market and snagged a table on the sidewalk. Just as I was finishing my salad—the steak overcooked and rubbery—I spotted her. She was all alone—maybe a little too old to be a student, but still in her twenties. She was in black yoga pants, neon-orange sneakers, and a T-shirt that actually said the future is female on it. She was coming from the café across the street—Latte Da, it was called—and walking purposefully toward the center of town. I dumped my salad, began to follow her up the incline, but turned back as soon as I saw her unlock her Prius, parked on a slant on Main Street. My own car was a couple hundred yards back, and I turned and walked as fast as I could without breaking into a run. When I pulled onto Main Street she was gone, but at the top of the hill I spotted the green Prius turning left on River Street. I followed her, two cars back. She’d gone only about a mile when she pulled into a new apartment complex on the Waltham River, four stories of brick, each apartment with its own deck. I parked in a visitor’s spot and watched her walk across the parking lot, head down, looking at her phone, a large leather purse bumping against her pistoning hip.