I unzipped it very slowly.
No cobra lashed out at me.
I unzipped it all the way and peeked inside. It looked okay.
Finally I worked up the courage and rifled through the contents. Everything was there. Apart from the gun, the backpack and its contents were no different than they had been when I walked into his house.
I took my backpack to my room. One less thing to worry about.
The phone rang about half an hour later. It was Mom, checking up on me. She called three more times, but Mr. Martin didn’t call again.
I skipped lunch. Had to force myself to eat dinner.
Slept horribly.
The next day I skipped lunch and breakfast. Dinner was chicken pot pies, which I loved, though I still had to struggle to get down the last few bites. Mom didn’t bring up the psychiatrist and Dad didn’t bring up the safe, but I knew that neither of those subjects would stay buried for long.
Slept horribly again.
Woke up angry.
I’d been mad at myself, but now all of my anger was directed at Mr. Martin. He’d murdered Todd. He’d murdered at least two other kids in Fairbanks, and possibly a couple more elsewhere. He’d turned my life into nothing but twenty-four hours a day of dread.
Well, fuck him.
I wasn’t going to keep playing his game.
10
To be clear, the details of how I was going to stop playing his game still eluded me. Unless it was bullshit, he still had the guy who’d mutilate everybody in my household if Mr. Martin got arrested. Honestly, Mr. Martin had been right: now that I wasn’t in immediate danger, his threat did feel more like a bluff.
Not enough of a bluff to make me run to the authorities, though.
I needed a really good plan. Something much better than “Go over there with a gun and try to make him incriminate himself.” I needed something ingenious. “Ingenious,” sadly, was not a word used to describe me, unless there was sarcasm involved.
As expected, the visit to the psychiatrist happened without notice—pretty much “Get in the car and let’s go.” Unlike my own anger, my mom’s had faded, and on the drive over she assured me that this was something that might help me figure some things out, and that if I didn’t like it she wouldn’t force me to go back, but that she wanted me to at least give it the full hour. I promised that I would.
The shrink, Dr. Wasser, looked exactly like I envisioned a psychiatrist, since I envisioned them as men with ponytails and goatees, dressed entirely in black, leaving at the end of the day to recite poetry at a coffee bar. He looked about sixty years old, but of course I was only fourteen, and he might have been ten or fifteen years younger than that.
I lay down on his couch, and he licked the end of his pencil before opening his notebook.
He spoke in a soothing tone that I’m pretty sure he practiced. I didn’t want to be here, but I was willing to accept the possibility that this might help, so I decided that I was going to tell the truth about everything except my time in Mr. Martin’s house. As far as I knew, he wasn’t allowed to blab about anything I told him, even to my mother, but to play it safe I decided that the parameters of truth were the same ones I was using with my parents.
It was actually fairly similar to the line of questioning I’d experienced with the state troopers, except that Mr. Wasser kept asking how I felt about it, whereas the state troopers were not particularly concerned with that part of the story. I was honest. I felt scared. Angry. Helpless. He nodded a lot and kept writing in his notebook.
I honestly didn’t realize how much talking I was doing until he informed me that it was the end of my session, and I hadn’t yet had to lie about anything. “Hopefully I’ll see you again next week,” he said.
“Yeah, okay.”
On the drive home, Mom asked me how it went. I thought it would be funny to tell her that he said I had an Oedipal complex, but my mom and I didn’t really have the kind of relationship where I told jokes like that. So I just told her it had been fine. She asked if I’d be willing to go back next week, and I said yeah. She seemed extremely happy to hear this and didn’t push me for further details about the session.
I was much hungrier at dinner time, even though meatloaf wasn’t one of my favorites (my mom used way too much ketchup). I’m not suggesting for one second that I felt good about life in general, but I’d managed to hold back the sense of despair.
As we were finishing up, there was a knock at the door.
Dad, whose hatred of being interrupted at dinner time was something he should probably speak to a psychiatrist about, scowled, pushed back his chair, and went to answer it.
“Hi, I hope we didn’t bother you,” I heard from the foyer. It sounded like Todd’s dad, who had never come over to my house before.
“No, no, not at all, come in,” said Dad, whose rage about being interrupted during his meal did not extend to grieving parents.
Mom and I got up from the table as Dad came into the living room with Todd’s parents. They both looked like they’d been crying, though Todd’s dad had done a better job of drying his eyes.
“We apologize for interrupting you,” said Todd’s dad. “We just came over to say goodbye.”
“Goodbye?” I asked.
“We’re moving.” He gestured to his wife. “We’re going to stay with her sister in Oregon for a while until we figure out what to do next.”
“It’s been really hard, as I’m sure you can imagine,” said Todd’s mom, her voice trembling. “We’ve tried to get through
