was the fact that she understood more about what I was experiencing than any of the social workers or therapists that everyone kept parading before me. She knew what it was like to suddenly be an orphan (and I am an orphan) and to feel all the time like you’re an imposition. And that is what I felt like: If you’re a kid without parents, even a teenager, you’re always forced to depend on the kindness of other people. You feel indebted to everyone. I had known the Cousinos forever, but it’s not like I was their kid. But there I was, living under their roof and eating their food and using their bathrooms. I could have lived with my grandparents in New Hampshire (for obvious reasons, my dad’s parents were never really an option in my mind), but I had lived in the same village since I was six and been friends with the same group of kids for almost a decade. Does any kid really want to move when she only has two years of high school left? No, of course not. So I chose to be a nuisance.
Heather also understood what it was like to see your mom bullied by your dad and be totally powerless to stop it. Sometimes we talked about all the fights we had witnessed. It seemed like her dad would say the same sorts of things as mine and her mom would sometimes hide out in the same ridiculous world of denial. Who knows? Maybe wife beaters really are one-trick ponies. They’re bullies, but about as creative as the bullies you hear about all the time these days who are my age.
And, of course, Heather was famous. Not famous to me, at least not at first. But soon I figured out that she was very well known to a lot of adults. Ginny, for instance, thought she was totally amazing. And there were at least fifteen videos of her that I found on YouTube. She had been on lots of talk shows and seemed right at home on those comfy couches with the beautiful hostesses. And I loved reading what people said about her books at the online bookstores. Some readers thought she was brilliant, and some thought she was in serious need of medication. Anyway, I would be lying if I said that her celebrity didn’t appeal to me. It did. I thought it was very, very cool.
But I kept reminding myself that there’s more to life than being on talk shows and having lots of clips of yourself on YouTube. There’s more to life than selling a boatload of books.
And even after reading both of her books-and I read them carefully-I still didn’t believe there were angels. I’d seen my mom’s bruises, and there was no way I could reconcile those marks with angel wings.
Sometimes I’d wonder if she and Stephen would ever get back together. I didn’t see it happening, but Tina did. When we talked about it, she said I was like that old Aerosmith song “Jaded.” She was wrong (and she was wrong about the song, too, because, I think it’s more about a girl who is spoiled than a girl who is totally cynical), but I understood what she was getting at. She thought Stephen and Heather would be a good pair because they would, like, balance each other out. Maybe. But it would mean that Heather would have to get over the idea that Stephen had killed my dad, and for a million reasons that’s never going to happen. And Stephen? I don’t know. But I think he’s built to live alone.
Anyway, in the end I remained most loyal to my mom when it came to that whole weird Stephen thing. Even if by any standard my mom wasn’t as hip as Heather Laurent, she was still the woman who had raised me and read to me and, until Dad killed her, was going to be there for me no matter what.
WHEN I WENT to the parsonage that Sunday night, Stephen told me to go back to Tina’s house right away and he would deal with the nightmare in my living room. He told me not to tell anyone anything, not even Tina. Later, of course, I did tell Tina. I told her a ton. Not everything. But almost everything. Stephen offered to drive me to Tina’s, but I told him that I had driven to my house and then to his in the Cousinos’ wagon. Aren’t you fifteen? he asked. I said yeah, but then he must have realized that underage driving was the least of my problems that night and sort of shrugged. I think he was in shock, too. In all fairness, when I went from my house to Stephen’s I’d figured that we would go to the police or call for help or do the sorts of things that I had seen on TV. He seemed like the right person, because even though I hadn’t been real good about Youth Group over the last year and a half, he was a minister and I knew he liked me. And I knew he had liked my mom. Now, I’m not sure I would have gone to him if I’d known he would actually go to my house and, as he put it, clean things up. I mean, I thought the two of us were just going to, like, call 911. It was horrible enough for me to see my mom dead that way. I really didn’t want Stephen, who may have loved her for a while, to have to see her that way, too.
The thing is, I had only gone home after the concert to get my laptop. Tina and I wanted to be online at the same time, and that meant that we needed two computers. We wanted to be on Facebook, and we wanted to buy new songs for our iPods, and there were concert videos on YouTube we wanted to find, and so I said I would go get my laptop. It would take ten minutes. And Tina didn’t even offer to drive. She didn’t need to, because I was just going like a mile to my house. She just tossed me her keys from the bottom of her purse.
Anyway, after I saw Stephen, I did what he said. I went back to Tina’s.
The plan, as much as there was one, was that he was going to make it look like my dad had killed himself. He reminded me that my dad had just killed my mom. And that my dad was a horrible man. Stephen didn’t expect that anyone would think he’d murdered my dad. I don’t think it had crossed either of our minds that that would happen. It was supposed to look just like a suicide. Whenever I saw him later that autumn, I told him I was worried he was going to go to jail. Each time he reminded me of something important: There was never going to be any evidence that he’d killed my dad. They might believe that he did it, but they could never prove it. He assured me that looking out for me now was the very least he could do for my mom. I think that was a big reason why he was still hanging around Bennington for a while. He wanted to be there for me till this whole mess blew over.
And doing something for my mom seemed to matter to him like crazy. Whenever we spoke that fall, he was like this uncle or godfather who felt this huge responsibility to my mom. I mean, he was already into Heather (and then broken up with Heather), so it wasn’t like he was pining for a lost love. But he did feel this burden that he was a part of the reason my mom was dead.
He was already living down in Bennington when I told him I thought the police were starting to think I was involved. He chuckled a little bit and said he didn’t think that was likely: He said he was the big suspect and to just keep reading the newspapers. But I told him I was worried because of some of the things they had been asking me, and that’s when he told me to go ahead and incriminate him. He said why not? They already thought he’d done it, but his attorney had assured him that they would never be able to prove it. So, he said, throw a little gas on the fire. He said he would, too. I was supposed to call Heather, but before I did, she showed up out of the blue one afternoon at my school, and I was like a windup toy. I just let it all out, just as Stephen had suggested, and I saw right away that he was absolutely correct. She gave me her cell-phone number, and a little later I did call her and made absolutely sure that she-that everyone-was positive that Stephen had killed my dad.
But he was also right that they were never able to charge him with murder.
Of course, from that point on I also had to steer clear of Stephen. As I said, he was the last person I should have been talking to. After all, the more I talked to him, the more someone might have figured out that we were- and here is one of those great TV terms from the cop shows I watch all the time now-co-conspirators. If I was seen with Stephen, suspect numero uno in my dad’s death, they might have begun to believe that I knew a lot more than I was letting on. Eventually they might even have begun to think that I was the one who had pulled the trigger.
I thought it was really ironic that we read
I never did go back for the laptop, and so it would be among the stuff that Ginny and Stephen brought me the next day. When I left, Lula was pacing nervously back and forth between the kitchen and the living room. It was Stephen who had let her out when he went back, and-to be totally honest-I’m pretty sure he kicked her out because she really was lapping up the blood that was all over the place. I don’t remember his exact words, and clearly he regretted like crazy what he’d started to tell me. He was trying to explain why Lula had wound up outside.
Someday, I know, he’ll regret that whole, horrible night. He should have just been a pastor and called the police, but I guess he was afraid I’d go to prison. (One time he said the fact that my dad had been such a psycho
