like Cody Roache was a kid. He had always been a bully, had always liked hurting people—maybe because his father had picked on him and hurt him, Miss Navarre had said—but why had he decided that fateful Saturday to bring a knife to the park and stab Cody and try to stab her?
Did he just go crazy? Did people just go crazy? Would she go crazy? Would her dad go crazy? Would a crazy person come in their house one night and kill them just because he felt like it?
Wendy wandered into her bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, and wondered whether other people wondered these things too or whether she was losing her mind. How did people know if they were going crazy? If they were crazy didn’t they probably think they were normal, and everyone else would think they were crazy?
Just to try to do something normal, she brushed her teeth and took the scrunchie out of her hair. She had done her hair that day mostly down but with some messy sections snatched up into an off-center ponytail that looked like a blond fountain coming out the top of her head. She liked to dress like her favorite singers: Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, the girls in the Bangles. Although she didn’t put as much effort into it lately as she once had.
Everyone told her she looked just like her mother, which she did. They had the same thick, wavy hair that was all different shades of blond but darker at the roots. They had the same unusual blue eyes. Wendy had grown nearly two inches since fifth grade. In another year or two she would be as tall as her mother.
As she crawled under the covers of her bed she made a vow to herself not to end up as unhappy as her mother.
She snuggled her favorite brown teddy bear and kissed his nose. She was going to grow up to be a famous journalist, and she was never going to get married—until the perfect man came along.
She pressed her cheek to her bear’s head and whispered his name as she closed her eyes: “Tommy.”
18
On the other side of town, in the county mental health facility, Dennis Farman wondered too, what made people crazy.
He sat on his bed in his room, all alone because there were no other kids in the place, and because people thought he was dangerous and would probably kill a roommate in his sleep. The lights in his room had been turned out for the night, but pale yellow light came in from the hall, and white-blue light came in through the window from the parking lot.
He had none of his own prized possessions here. The pocketknife he had stolen from his dad’s dresser—the one he had used to stab Cody—had been taken by the detectives. He had put all of his most treasured things in his backpack that day, including the dried-out head of a rattlesnake he had watched a gardener kill with a spade. He never got his backpack back after they arrested him.
The knife had been the most important thing. He had always pretended that his father had given it to him for his birthday when he was nine. He had made up all kinds of fantasies about his father showing him how to use it, the two of them camping out and using the knife to cut branches and gut fish. The truth was, his father had never given him a present, had never even remembered his birthday.
When Dennis had asked Miss Navarre when he could get his knife back, she had looked at him like he was crazy. Maybe crazy ran in his family. He was locked up in a mental hospital after all.
Dennis had never thought of his father as crazy, just mean. But in the end, everyone said he had to have lost his mind to do what he had done.
People didn’t think Dennis knew what all had happened, but he did. He had never told anyone, but he had been right there the night his father had beaten his mother to death. Hiding up in his room, he had heard every slap, every curse, every cry. It hadn’t been the first time (so he didn’t think his father had gone crazy, just that he was drunk and mean, as he often was) and he hadn’t thought his mother would die, but she had.
The rest of what had left him an orphan he had heard in bits and pieces, listening to people when they didn’t know it. That was one thing he was really good at.
He had been in a room at the sheriff’s office when it happened, on account of everyone making such a stink about him stabbing Cody—
Anyway, his dad had come into the sheriff’s office and took the sheriff hostage and threatened to kill him. But in the end he had killed himself.
His dad was a loser. Dennis was glad he was dead. And his mother was a stupid, useless drunk who never did anything for him. All she ever did was yell at him. He didn’t need her.
He didn’t need anybody.
Nobody liked him anyway. He had never had a real friend. Everybody said Cody had been his friend, but Cody had only been his friend because he was afraid of Dennis and it was smarter for him to be Dennis’s friend than not. Stupid little cockroach. Dennis had showed him.
Miss Navarre didn’t like him. But she came to see him anyway.
Dennis knew she had married the FBI agent, but he wouldn’t call her by her married name. She would always be Miss Navarre to him. She was trying to help him. Nobody else wanted to help him. Everybody else wanted him to go to prison and rot there for the rest of his life. He had heard people say over and over that there was no fixing what was wrong with him.
But Miss Navarre was trying to help him.
Sometimes he dreamed about Miss Navarre.
Sometimes he dreamed about doing things to her. Bad things, dirty things.
Dennis knew all about sex. He used to like to go around at night and look in people’s windows. He had seen all kinds of people do all kinds of things to each other: men with women, women with women, men with men. A lot of it was gross, but he got excited anyway.
He had watched Miss Navarre with the FBI guy do it on the back porch of her house. He had never thought of her doing anything like that. She was a teacher. He never thought of teachers having sex or having to go to the bathroom or farting or anything like that. It made him angry that she wasn’t as perfect as she pretended to be. She was just a slut, fucking a guy on her back porch.
But she came to see him.
She tried to help him.
She was pretty.
She was a whore.
He closed his eyes and remembered what he had seen, what he had heard, the sounds she had made.
She would come to see him again tomorrow.
He would dream about her tonight.
19
They made love slowly, sweetly, gently. He touched, she sighed. Lips clung, tongues tangled. Her breath caught, he groaned, she gasped. They whispered and murmured, “I love you ... I need you.”
Anne slid her hands over her husband’s muscled back. She ran her foot up and down the back of his thick calf. She loved everything about him. She loved making love with him. She loved his strength, the size of him, the warm smoothness of his skin. She loved the way he smelled, the way he tasted, the way he filled her, the way he moved against her, the way he held her.
He was a patient lover, always careful she was ready, always careful that she was satisfied. He made her feel beautiful and powerful and feminine and sexual. He always held her afterward and kissed her hair and whispered how much he loved her, how he would keep her safe and never let anything bad happen to her ever
