angrily. When she tossed her head a lash of glossy black hair whipped through the air. She wore a dark business suit with killer heels and glasses with thin black frames that accentuated the sharp Asian angles of her face. No matter how she turned I couldn’t see her eyes, only the glowing reflection of the ceiling lights in her lenses. Collie looked cowed, his chin down like he was a berated child. I thought, What in the fuck. I’d never seen my brother shrink like that before. It simultaneously elated and unnerved me.
“Don’t shake his hand,” the screw told me. “Don’t pass him anything or take anything offered.”
“Right.”
Three minutes later the woman gathered up her belongings and packed them into a briefcase. She leaned in to say goodbye to him and their lips met briefly. She pushed her seat back and moved to the door. It opened and she walked past me. She stepped like a thief, her footsteps silent.
I was ushered in. Collie stood and sort of jumped forward just to spook the screw. It worked. The tension thickened. Then Collie let loose with a laugh. The sound of the door slamming and the lock turning bothered me worse than it had yesterday.
Collie gripped me in a bear hug.
“We’re not supposed to touch,” I said.
“I’m going to die in less than two weeks. If I want to hug my own brother I goddamn will.” He pushed me off, took me by the shoulders. “Thanks for coming back. I knew you would.”
“Yeah, how?”
“Because you’re a good man.”
I didn’t know what the hell to say to that. He gestured to the visitor’s chair like we were about to have a beer and watch a ball game together.
“Who was that woman?” I asked. “Your lawyer?”
“That’s Lin. My wife.” He tried to grin but all it did was bring out the deep furrows in his face. “I got married a year ago. I didn’t tell the family about it, figured they wouldn’t want to know. In the beginning I just thought she was another one of these jailbird pen pals. I get boxes of mail a week. Everybody on death row does. It’s a weird cultural phenomenon, the way some women get turned on by-” He knew enough not to go on. “Well, anyway. But something in Lin’s letters reached me. She started visiting and one thing led to another.”
I tried to process everything he’d just said. “One thing led to another?”
“Yeah.”
A demented lonely hearts reads about a mass murderer and decides this is her psycho soul mate, hersoul matethis is the man she’s been waiting for all her life? A guy who butchers children?
I thought, Jesus Christ. What if he goes out with a bang and gets her pregnant? I could see the woman showing up on my parents’ porch, holding a half-Asian baby, going,
My father wouldn’t even sigh. My mother would turn away, grit her teeth, steel herself, then smile and feed and welcome them. Later, perhaps years later, she would lock herself in the bathroom and fold herself up in the corner and cry silently until someone needed something from her.
Collie let out a chuckle. “Well, say something.”
My tongue felt covered in moss. I fought not to glare. I pushed off my disgust. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks.”
“What was she so angry about?”
“We’ll get to that.”
“All right.”
He showed those teeth and I loathed his smile. It said that he had me in his hand, that he could make me come to him whenever he called. I’d thrown a hundred fists into that smile and I’d never hit it even once. Collie was faster than me, stronger than me. I could feel the superiority in him bleeding through even under these circumstances. I listed the things he might say that would force me to leave.
If he mentions Kimmy, if he asks me to help pay for a new attorney, if he talks about my fucking tan again. I thought, The minute he opens his mouth I’m out of here. It took me another moment to realize that I didn’t have to be here. That I wanted to be here. That I needed to be here for some reason I didn’t understand but my brother did. Maybe I hated him. Maybe I wanted to see him die. Maybe I wanted to pull the switch.
“You saw the family,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“How’s it been?”
“Fine. It’s been good.”
“Everybody okay?”
“They’re fine. They’re good.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not lying.”
“You’re lying, Terry.”
“So fucking what?”
“Don’t break Ma’s heart again.”
“I don’t take advice from dead men walking.”
He was making me question myself again. I wondered how he managed to swing it so easily.
His smile dropped and he ran a hand through his gray hair and a lot of my rage receded. He looked like an elderly man to me now. His manicure had dimmed, his nails had dirt under them. Then I realized they were paint chips. In the long night he probably scratched at the walls or the bars. What else was there for him to do? His freshest scars shone pink in the light. I wondered if he’d fought with other cons or the guards or both. For an instant it seemed to matter. I wanted to ask him who his enemies were. If the victims’ families ever tried to see him, if he ever spoke with them. If the rest of his mail was from people wishing him slow agony or a quick pop of city-grid voltage. I wanted to ask him about his nightmares. I knew he had them. I wondered if they were worse than mine.
“Collie, '1e1C;Collieyou said you wanted me to save someone.”
“Yeah.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.” He muttered under his breath, like he was speaking to someone else in the room. “The next one.”
“The next one?” I said. “The next one what?”
“The next girl.”
“What are we talking about?”
“Rebecca Clarke.”
The girl he’d strangled in Autauk Park a mile from the Elbow Room, where he’d been drinking, a couple miles from the trailer park where the mobile home had been parked. “I don’t understand. She’s already dead.”
“Listen to me, Terry, this is important. I need you to do something for me-”
“I need something from you first, Collie. I want you to tell me about that night.”
The temperature in the room felt like it dipped twenty degrees. My flesh started to crawl. Our gazes caught and held. I had once loved him more than anyone else in the world. I had once feared him more than anyone else as well. Maybe I still did. We were too much alike. There are sibling rivalries that dissipate and others that become wars of wills and knives. I remembered all the faces of all the girls he’d stolen from me. I recalled their names, the taste of their lips, the feel of their bodies in my arms. I knew my brother wouldn’t recollect any of them. The nerves in my fingertips tingled. My tongue was too large for my mouth. My teeth were too sharp. I needed to know the answer.
“You’ve already read about it,” he said. “You already know most of it.”
“I want to hear about it from you.”
“What’s that going to give you except nightmares? You remember how you used to wake up screaming as a kid?”
I leaned forward. I thought, We could do it. We could cut loose and kill each other in less than a minute. The guards wouldn’t be able to get in here fast enough.
“How about if the child-killer doesn’t fucking analyze me, huh?”
