"What do the other half think?"
Chris turned slowly. He knew perfectly well what the other half of kids believed--anything that could be escalated into a juicy story would be, in the rumor mill. "I don't know," he said as off-handedly as he could manage. "Probably that I killed her."
"Why would they think that?"
"Because I was there," he blurted out. "Because I'm still alive. Christ, I don't know. Ask the cops; they've thought that since day one."
Chris did not realize until he'd spoken how bitter he was about the accusation, veiled as it had been.
"Does that bother you?"
"Hell, yes," Chris said. "Wouldn't it bother you?"
Dr. Feinstein shrugged. "I can't say. I guess if I knew I was being true to myself, I'd want to believe that everyone would come around sooner or later to my way of thinking."
Chris snorted. "I bet all the witches in Salem were thinking that, too, when they smelled the smoke."
"What is it that bothers you the most?"
Chris fell silent. It wasn't that he was not being taken at his word; if the situation had been reversed, he too might have his doubts. It wasn't even that everyone in the whole goddamned school was treating him like he'd grown six heads overnight. It was that, having seen him with Emily, they could believe he would ever willingly hurt her.
"I loved her," he said, his voice breaking. "I can't forget that. So I don't see why everyone else can."
Dr. Feinstein motioned again toward the wing chair; Chris sank into it. He watched the tiny cogs inside the tape recorder chug in slow circles. "Would you tell me about Emily?" the psychiatrist asked.
Chris closed his eyes. How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turned the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, but as long as Em was with him, he was at home?
"She belonged to me," Chris said simply.
Dr. Feinstein's eyebrows lifted. "What do you mean by that?"
"She was, you know, all the things I wasn't. And I was all the things she wasn't. She could paint circles around anyone; I can't even draw a straight line. She was never into sports; I've always been." Chris lifted his outstretched palm and curled his fingers. "Her hand," he said. "It fit mine."
"Go on," Dr. Feinstein said encouraging.
"Well, I mean, we weren't always going out. That was pretty recent, a couple of years. But I've known her forever." He laughed suddenly. "She said my name before anything else. She used to call me Kiss. And then, when she learned the word kiss for real, she'd get it all confused and look at me and smack her lips." He looked up. "I don't remember that, exactly. My mom told me."
"How old were you when you met Emily?"
"Six months, I guess," Chris said. "The day she was born." He leaned forward, considering. "We used to play together every afternoon. I mean, she lived right next door and our moms would hang all the time, so it was a natural."
"When did you start going out?"
Chris frowned. "I don't know the day, exactly. Em would. It just sort of evolved. Everyone figured it was going to happen, so it wasn't much of a surprise. One day I kind of looked at her and I didn't just see Em, I saw this really beautiful girl. And, well ... you know."
"Were you intimate?"
Chris felt heat crawling up from the collar of his shirt. This was an area he did not want to discuss. "Do I have to tell you if I don't want to?" he asked.
"You don't have to tell me anything at all," Dr. Feinstein said.
"Well," Chris said. "I don't want to."
"But you loved her."
"Yes," Chris answered.
"And she was your first girlfriend."
"Well, pretty much, yeah."
"So how do you know?" Dr. Feinstein asked. "How do you know that it was love?"
The way he asked was not mean or confrontational. He was just sort of wondering. If Feinstein had been bitter, or direct, like that bitch detective, Chris would have clammed up immediately. But as it stood, it was a good and valid question. "There was an attraction," he said carefully, "but it was more than that." He chewed on his lower lip for a second. "Once, we broke up for a while. I started hanging around with this girl who I'd always thought was really hot, this cheerleader named Donna. I was, like, totally infatuated with Donna, maybe even when I was still together with Em. Anyway, we started going out places and fooling around a little and every time I was with Donna I realized I didn't know her too well. I'd hyped her up in my head to be so much more than what she really was." Chris took a deep breath. "When Em and I got back together, I could see that she had never been less than what I'd figured her to be. If anything, she was always better than I remembered. And that's what I think love is," Chris said quietly. "When your hindsight's twenty-twenty, and you still wouldn't change a thing."
As he fell silent, the psychiatrist looked up. "Chris," he asked, "what's your earliest memory?"
The question took Chris by surprise; he laughed aloud. "Memory? I don't know. Oh--wait--there was this toy I had, a little train that had a button on it which honked. I remember holding onto it and Emily trying to grab it away."
"Anything else?"
Chris steepled his hands and thought back. "Christmas," he said. "We came downstairs and there was an electric train running around the tree."
"We?"
"Yeah," Chris said. "Emily was Jewish, so she'd come over to our place to celebrate Christmas. When we were really little she'd sleep over Christmas Eve."
Dr. Feinstein nodded thoughtfully. "Tell me," he said, "do you have any early childhood memories that don't include Emily?"
Chris tried to run backward in his mind, replaying his life like a loop of film. He saw himself standing in a bathtub with Emily, peeing in the water while she giggled and his mother yelled bloody murder. He saw himself making a snow angel, swinging wide his arms and legs and hitting Emily, who was doing the same thing beside him. He caught glimpses and snippets of his parents' faces, but Emily was off to the side.
Chris shook his head. "Actually," he said, "I don't."
THAT NIGHT WHILE CHRIS was in the shower, Gus ventured into his bedroom to clean up. To her surprise, the mess was contained--basically a pile of dirty dishes covered with meals that remained uneaten. She smoothed Chris's covers and then fell to her knees, instinctively checking under the bed for mismatched socks to place in the wash, for food that had unobtrusively rolled beneath.
Her thumb pricked the hard edges of the shoebox before her mind could consciously register what she'd stumbled across. She reached inside; her fingers ruffled over pages of secret codes, filmy 3-D glasses, invisible lemon juice ink messages that had been decoded over a bare lightbulb. God, how old had they been? Nine? Ten?
Gus picked up the secret message on the top. In Emily's daisy-chain handwriting, it emphatically announced that "Mr. Polaski is a dork." She traced her finger over the word is, the "i" punctuated by a fat circle, as if it were a balloon that might light off the page at any moment. She scrabbled beneath the loose pages and found a flashlight, batteries dead, and a mirror. Smiling, heartsick, Gus sat down on the bed and wiggled the mirror in her hand. She watched the reflection bounce off, skittering over the woods.
In the window of Emily's bedroom, there was a mated flash of light.
With a gasp Gus came to her feet, walking toward the sill. She saw the silhouette of Michael Gold at Emily's bedroom window, holding in his hand a small silver square of mirror.
"Michael," she whispered, raising her hand in greeting, but even as she did she could see Emily's father drawing down the bedroom shade.
ON WEDNESDAY BAINBRIDGE HIGH SCHOOL staged a memorial for Emily Gold.
Her artwork--a legacy--dotted the auditori
um. Her school picture from the previous fall had been blown up to an almost obscene size and hung from the rear curtain on the auditorium stage, a trick of the light making her gaze spookily follow students in the audience when they shifted seats or got up to go to the bathroom. On bridge chairs in front of the picture were the principal and assistant principal, the senior guidance counselor and a Dr. Pinneo, an expert on teenage depression.
Chris sat in the front row with a bunch of teachers. It wasn't as if someone had saved him a seat there, but it was implicitly assumed he had the right to the space. In a way, it was kind of nice. He was able to stare at that photo of Em and not see other kids doing what everyone did during an assembly: whisper, or finish their homework, or feel each other up in the dark. Mrs. Kenly, who was sitting next to him, rose as the principal introduced her. As the art teacher she probably knew Em better than anyone else. She talked for a while about how much creativity Emily had in her soul and other bullshit, but it was nice bullshit, Chris thought. Emily would have liked it.
Then the doctor got up and did this weird little song and dance on teen suicide. Warning signs, as if everyone in the audience had as much chance of coming down with it as they did the flu. Chris picked at the leg of his jeans while the guy was speaking, aware of the man's heavy stare on his own forehead.
Before Chris realized what was happening, the whole first third of the auditorium--the 363 seniors--were on their feet and being herded toward the rear of the room. Teachers in the back thinned the milling bunch into a single file, which snaked up the stairs of the stage. By the time each senior reached Emily's photo, he or she had been handed a carnation to toss at the foot of the portrait.
It was a good idea, in theory. But Chris--who was last not by association to Em but simply because no one had realized there was a senior in the front row with all the teachers--found it ridiculous. The flowers were being tossed into a kid-die pool that was used for a fishing game at the spring carnival; little yellow ducks peeked through the pink flowers. Tacky, Emily would have said. When Chris reached the pool, he was standing alone on the stage. He threw the carnation on top of the heap that had accumulated already and glanced up at the monstrous face of Emily. It was her, but it was not her. Her teeth had been airbrushed supermodel-white. Her nostril was the size of his whole head.
He turned to walk off the stage and saw the principal motioning him nearer. "As one of her closest friends," Mr. Lawrence was saying, "Chris Harte may have something to share with us."
He felt the principal's hand clench on his shoulder, drawing him toward a podium and a microphone that looked like the head of a rattlesnake poised to strike. His hands started to shake.
Chris found himself staring at a rippling field of faces. He cleared his throat; the microphone screeched. "Oh," he said, leaning back. "I'm sorry. This ... um ... is a really special thing you've all done for Emily. I'm sure she's watching, somewhere." He turned a little, blinking into the floodlights. "And she'd want to say ... " Chris glanced at the pile of wilting flowers, at the shrine they'd made to Em. He could too easily see her in the back row next to him, snorting over the cheesy display, checking her watch to see how much time was left before the bell rang.
"And she'd want to say ... " Chris repeated.
Later, he would never know where it came from. But suddenly the surfeit of emotion he'd been concealing since he'd returned to school at his father's command began to leak out of the hollow in his heart where he'd bottled it up. Overwhelmed by the smell of the flowers rotting under the lights and the garish photo and the hundreds of faces waiting for him, of all people, to give them answers, Chris began to laugh.
He laughed softly at first, and then a guffaw burst out, impolite and rancid as a belch. He laughed and he laughed in counterpoint to the utter silence of the auditorium. He laughed so hard, he started to cry.
His nose running, his eyes so blurry that he could not see the podium in front of him, Chris pushed away and headed toward the stairs at the edge of the stage. He ran down the long aisle of the auditorium until he exploded through its double doors into the empty corridors of the high school, and he sped toward the locker rooms of the gym.
They were empty--everyone had been watching him--and he changed into his Speedo in record time. He left his clothes in a puddled heap on the cement floor, and exited through the door that led directly to the pool. Its soothing blue surface was glass, he thought, and he imagined it shattering and slicing through him as he dove into the deep end.
The healing wound on his scalp stung; the stitches had been removed only the day before. But the water was as familiar as a lover, and in its ample embrace Chris heard nothing but his own heartbeat and the intermittent pump of the heater. He let himself float motionless underwater, glancing up occasionally at the rippling bleachers and fluorescent lights. Then, carefully, deliberately, he blew bubbles from his mouth and nose, depleting his supply of oxygen and feeling himself sink inch by excruciating inch.
"LISTEN," THE VOICE SAID, more hostile now. "Does Emily live there or not?"
Melanie's fingers clenched the phone receiver so hard her knuckles went white. "No," she said. "She does not."
"And is this 656-4309?"
"Yes."
"You're sure, now."
Melanie rested her head against the cold door of the pantry. "Don't call back," she said. "Leave me alone."
"Look," the voice said. "I have something of Emily's. Can you just tell her that, when you see her?"
Melanie raised her face. "What do you have?" she asked.
"Just tell her," the voice said, and hung up.
DR. FEINSTEIN OPENED the adjoining door with a frown on his face. "Chris," he admonished, "you can't just run in here, you know. If you have a problem, call. But the only reason I'm free is because another patient is ill."
Chris didn't bother to listen. He shoved past the psychiatrist into the office. "I wasn't going to do it," he muttered.
"Excuse me?"
Chris lifted his face, contorted with pain. "I wasn't going to do it."
Dr. Feinstein closed the office door and sat down across from Chris. "You're upset," he said. "Take a minute to calm down." He waited patiently for Chris to take several deep breaths, then sit up in his chair. "Now," the psychiatrist said, satisfied. "Tell me what happened."
"They had a memorial for Emily at school today." Chris scrubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes, the combination of his sorrow and residual chlorine creating a powerful sting. "It was totally lame, with these flowers and ... whatever."
"Is that what upset you?"
"No," Chris said. "They had me go up to the stage and, you know, speak. And everyone was looking at me like I was supposed to know exactly how to make it better, what to say. 'Cause I was there, and I wanted to do what Emily did, so I should have been able to explain what happened to make us want to commit suicide." He snorted. "Like a frigging Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Hi, my name is Chris, and I wanted to kill myself."
"Maybe this was their way of telling you that you're important to them."
"Oh, right," Chris sneered. "Most of the kids spent the assembly throwing spitballs."
"What else happened?"
Chris bowed his head. "They wanted me to talk about Emily, a eulogy kind of thing. And I opened my mouth and ... " He glanced up and lifted his palms. "I cracked up."
"Cracked up?"
"I laughed. I fucking laughed."
"Chris, you've been under an extraordinary amount of stress," Dr. Feinstein said. "I'm sure that when people--"
"Don't you get it?" Chris exploded. "I laughed. It was this little mock funeral and I laughed."
Dr. Feinstein leaned forward. "Sometimes very strong emotions cross over with each other. You've been--"
"Depressed. Upset. Grieving." Chris stood, began to pace. "Take your pick. Am I upset that Emily died? Every damn minute, every damn breath I take. But everyone thinks I'm a basket case, one turn away from slicing open my own wrists. Every
one thinks I'm waiting for the right opportunity to try and kill myself again. The whole school thinks it--they expected me to have a breakdown, probably, right at the podium--and my mother thinks it and even you think it, don't you?" Chris glared heatedly at the doctor and took a step forward. "I'm not going to kill myself. I'm not suicidal. I was never suicidal."
"Not even that night?"
"No," Chris said softly. "Not even that night."
Dr. Feinstein nodded slowly. "Why did you say you were, at the hospital?"
Chris blanched. "Because I fainted, and then I woke up and the cops were standing over me, holding the gun." He closed his eyes. "I got scared, so I said the first thing that made sense."
"If you weren't going to kill yourself, why did you have a gun?"
Chris sank down onto the floor, his muscles giving out. "I got it for Emily. Because she did want to kill herself. And I thought--" He dropped his head, and spat the words out again. "I thought that I could stop her. I figured that I'd be able to talk her out of it long before we got to that point." He lifted shining eyes to Dr. Feinstein. "I'm tired of pretending," he whispered. "I wasn't going there to kill myself. I was going there to save her." Tears ran unchecked over his cheeks, soaking the front of his shirt. "Except," Chris sobbed, "I didn't."
THE GRAND JURY WHICH currently sat in the Grafton County Superior Court spent one day hearing assistant attorney general S. Barrett Delaney recount the mounting evidence against Christopher Harte in conjunction with the murder of Emily Gold. They listened to the medical examiner discuss the time and nature of the victim's death, the path of the bullet through her brain. They heard a duty officer from the Bainbridge Police Department describe the scene of the crime as he'd found it. They watched Detective-Sergeant Anne-Marie Marrone explain the ballistic evidence. They heard the A. A. G. ask the detective what percentage of murders were perpetrated by criminals who knew their victims; they heard the detective answer ninety percent.