It was also a tragedy and a mystery.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered about Mrs. Monk. Who was she? What was her childhood like? What hopes and dreams did she have for her two children and did they achieve them?
I probably found her so fascinating because I was a mother and because, as much as I wanted time to myself, I missed my daughter and she was never far from my thoughts. By thinking about Mrs. Monk and her sons, I was also thinking about Julie without directly thinking about Julie.
I believe that our children are reflections of ourselves and we like that but we want them to emulate only our best qualities and values and none of our faults. We want a better life for them than we ourselves had. We also want them to develop their own unique personalities separate from ours and to explore their full potential.
I still remember the first time Julie expressed an opinion. She was four or five years old. She pointed to a woman on the street and said, “That’s an ugly dress.”
I was stunned, mainly because I thought it was a very nice dress. And I told her so.
She shook her head. “It’s ugly.”
Julie had looked at something, measured it against her own values and tastes, and found it unappealing.
Her own values and tastes. Not mine. Hers.
Wow. In that moment, she wasn’t just my baby anymore. She’d become a person. I gave her a great big hug and smothered her with kisses. So, of course, for the rest of the day she called everything and everyone ugly, just to get more attention from me.
There’s probably a lesson in that, but never mind. Let’s stick to the Monks.
I couldn’t understand how Mrs. Monk could be pleased by their social isolation, which I know began when they were children. I’ve seen some of their home movies. They are the saddest things ever captured on film.
I wanted Julie to be happy and free. And I certainly didn’t want her to be alone, to be an outcast. I wanted her to have a rich life, full of family and friends.
She was only twelve, but I could already see that I didn’t have to worry about that aspect of her life. She had lots of friends and could function in society, at least the dog-eat-dog society of the seventh grade.
But that didn’t seem to be what Mrs. Monk wanted for her sons. Or was she just so frightened for their safety that she became overprotective and encouraged them to live in an ordered world of their own making that was intentionally unwelcoming to outsiders? A world where they would be safe because they were alone?
Like I said, I don’t have the answers. But it was something to think about.
By the time I reached that profound conclusion, the bubbles had all popped and the water had turned cold. I dried off, put on some skin cream, and poured myself into bed. I was asleep the instant my face touched my pillow.
I don’t remember much of what I dreamt that night, except that at one point I was in a stainless-steel room folding socks into pairs while Scooter watched me through an observation window. I couldn’t hear him, but I could read his lips.
He kept saying, “You’re so needy,” again and again.
16
Mr. Monk and the Session
Captain Stottlemeyer was right. When I turned on the TV during breakfast, the first thing I saw was Mr. Snork aiming his gun at Conrad Stipe. The station at least had the good sense not to show the actual murder, but even without that the video was still disturbing.
The content hadn’t changed, but the context had, making the footage disturbing in an entirely different way. I was seeing it now in a newscast, heavily edited and pumped up with dramatic graphics. The station was showing the shooting repeatedly in a brazen, calculated attempt to titillate viewers. The worst part was that it was probably succeeding.
I couldn’t swallow my bagel. I’d lost my appetite.
The footage was followed by a live report from outside the county morgue, where hundreds of devoted fans had held a candlelight vigil. One of them, an overweight man in his forties in a too tight costume and a Snork trunk dangling sadly from his puffy-cheeked face, explained to the reporter, the bubbly Mindy Drake, what they were doing.
“We’re waiting for him to rise again,” the fan said.
Mindy was dumbfounded. Then again, I’d seen her dumbfounded by the meteorologist predicting rain.
“You mean like Jesus?” Mindy asked.
“No, of course not,” the fan said. “Like Starella when she was reborn on Tryptonia.”
“But we aren’t on Tryptonia,” she said. “We’re on Earth.”
“Tryptonia is Earth on a parallel plane of existence,” the fan said.
“Oh,” Mindy said solemnly. “I didn’t know that.” She didn’t know Sacramento was the capital of California either. She discovered that when she announced during the Begonia Festival in Capitola that she was reporting live from the state capital.
“Conrad Stipe chose to tell us about it in a fictional context because society wasn’t ready to embrace the truth,” the fan explained. “That’s because he lived spiritually and creatively on both the parallel Earth and on our own. So now his presence there will cross over and revive his corporeal presence here so he can continue his important work, the same way it happened for Starella in that seminal episode.”
“How do you know that’s what will happen?”
“The best evidence will be when Conrad Stipe walks out that door.”
The reporter turned to the camera. “And we’ll be here when it happens.”
She said it without a trace of sarcasm.
That live report was followed by a taped interview with producer Kingston Mills, who sat in front of a poster for
