Chapter Twenty – Mourning
He banished me to Skylar’s room to sleep alone. I wandered into my old room, but someone had been camping out in there. Must be Spike, judging from the camouflage sleeping bag and the mustache grooming tools. I wondered why. If his mom or his girlfriend kicked him out, couldn’t he just tell us?
As I tossed and turned in Skylar’s old bed, I wondered if Spike moved in to protect me, the way Trevor used to sleep on the floor outside my room so many moons ago. I admit it comforted me to think so. Several times I snuck out and put my ear to Trevor’s door. I could hear him in there. Sometimes he played Haydn. There was light beneath his door.
Toward morning my body betrayed me and fell asleep. I awoke all of a sudden, propelled out of a bad dream as out of a cannon, sitting up fearful and guilt ridden. I’d killed Colleen. Someone killed Colleen.
Then I remembered. Trevor killed Colleen; the same way Oz murdered my mother. It came on the sound of an echo; a short, sharp sound like a shot. Had I dreamed it or was it real? I bolted out of bed. Jake’s door was open, his music playing, but he and Shelley were gone. Was it a door slam that I heard?
How Shelley, Spike and Jake be so clueless as to eat breakfast? Couldn’t they taste the air and just know it changed forever? How could they act like it was just another day?
I put my ear to Trevor’s door and listened. Violins. Haydn’s Creation. A very bad sign.
I worried what was he doing in there. He used to cut himself when he was younger, but I didn’t suspect he’d regressed that far. Working on a plan to turn himself in? I couldn’t let that happen. I hammered on the door.
“Trevor!” I shouted. “Don’t do it! Let me in!”
Nothing. I could feel him alive in there. I swear I could feel him, I could still feel his love for me. I would make him listen. I ran through Jake’s room and bathroom to the other door, but Trevor had thought to lock that one as well.
“If you don’t open this door,” I lied, “I’m going to do something terrible to myself!”
He opened it instantly and leaned out. I was so relieved. Did I think he had killed himself? He seemed at peace. I drank in his beautiful face and tired unfocused eyes fading to pewter-color. He wore just a t-shirt. Not yet dressed for court.
He kissed my forehead.
“Don’t you dare do anything terrible to yourself,” he said, smiling as if making a joke. “What a loss that would be to literature. Don’t you realize everything terrible has already been done? Now it’s time for the wonderful things.” He looked me up and down, leaning out of the death room into the light. Into life. Kissed me, right on the lips. His lips were so real, so warm. For the first time ever he broke away before I did.
“I was crazy to think I could pass you off to another man,” he said.
He sniffed the air, hungrily, like a patient recovering from illness. “I’m starving. I could eat anything.”
“Egg foo yung?”
“Sure. Whole-wheat toast. No jelly. Bacon, if you can find it.” He closed the door and I heard him lock it.
I walked toward the stairs, just in case he was listening. I didn’t believe him for a second. I knew he was lying to get rid of me. In Skylar’s bathroom door there’s an old-fashioned skeleton key. Fortunately Vermillion has such antique locks they are easy to pick. In a house where every key is a skeleton key, every day is Halloween.
I thought I heard the music stop. Then I heard the door unlocking. I peeked around the stairs.
The door opened, then closed again. Re-locked.
There was now a note on the door. I tiptoed up.
On a plain white sheet of paper, written in capital letters, this is what it said:
BRONTË, THIS IS YOUR BIG BROTHER SPEAKING.
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO COME INTO THIS ROOM.
CALL 911 IMMEDIATELY.
I was still reading it when I heard the shots. There were two of them. So the shot that woke me was a prophecy, not an echo.
Spike said afterward that people think you can’t shoot yourself twice in the head with a pistol, that it’s just a reflex, but he says he’s known of cases where it’s happened. You just have to be very determined and have plenty of follow-through. Trevor was always gifted in that department.
He was on the bed, the bed he would never let us share because it so enshrined his self-disgust.
His head was mush – the eyes were gone – and there was blowback – what had they called it in the courtroom? – high velocity spatter along the white wall. Whatever had been Trevor was gone, now, his brain and his future blasted into space. Trevor my father, my mother, my lover, my brother, the giver of all my life’s good gifts, was no more. In a world without Trevor, who would ever know who I really was?
That dead thing was still his body, his so-familiar body lying half along the bed and half along the floor, but I didn’t touch it. I should have been afraid of him before; but I was much more afraid of him now. Poor Trevor, this death was foretold from the moment he killed Colleen. He had grown up cutting away pieces of himself he thought he could live without; this time he guessed wrong. The Luger had spun away from him along the once-polished floor. I stepped over it on my way to the mantelpiece.
You couldn’t miss the envelopes, lined up neatly in a row. Four of them. One was marked, The Prosecutor, one was marked For My Father, one for Jake and one said, Brontë. I was thinking fast and clearly. Who was the poet that said death is the silver backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all? I knew what I had to do, and there was no time. I owed him. In spite of what he had said our guilty pleasures were my responsibility. I especially regretted using Jake’s come-on line. And I owed Oz. Maybe it was revenge, the way Craig said, but what did I have left? Oz took away my mother. That is the crime beyond forgiveness. I would have to make sure he would never get away.
I grabbed all four envelopes and the pad he had written them on. I found the note Oz wrote in Trevor’s wastebasket, a basket empty of false starts—because Trevor knew exactly what he wanted to say. I locked in Skylar’s room when I heard feet on the stairs, and voices.
“What was that?”
“Brontë? Trevor?”
I could hear them running and whispering. Pounding up and down the stairs. Someone screamed. Shelley’s voice.
They would be in here in a minute.
I turned on the Skylar’s shower for the noise and sat down on the tiled floor next to the toilet exactly as if I was about to vomit. But what I planned to regurgitate was Trevor’s last words.
I opened the letter to me first. It was written in Trevor’s backward sloping hand, the penmanship he hated because he thought it made him look “dumb.” He could never master Oz’s confident loops and swirls. It read,
Cherry Vanilla,
Forgive me for everything. I write this knowing that you will, because I know for certain that you love me. Knowing that makes it all worthwhile, even the things that I did that were wrong and I regret. I don’t so much regret what I did as who I am, but what I do next will wipe regret away. Last night you wouldn’t listen to me when I told you of your absolution. Let me once again emphasize that fact. Go, be free, and spread your wings. God loves you as much as I do. He made you the way you are to have the best of everything. And I know you will. Bless you. I demand you have a joy filled life. I die happy in that certainty. None of this was ever your fault (underscored many times). I kiss you and hug you. I wish I could be with you on your wedding day the way I always imagined, but from heaven or hell or wherever I’m going, know that I will be looking back on you with pride. I’m eternally grateful to you for being born and for making me so happy. Trevor
I put that letter in my shirt. I was so glad he didn’t mention the murder. If he had I would have destroyed this letter, too, because that has to be erased, but as it was I could save it forever, pack it away in my “trousseau” trunk with my poems and diaries.
The letter to Jake began with “Brace yourself, bud,” said Oz told him the prosecution would announce in court that Shelley and Brontë were his sisters, and abjured him to start conducting himself accordingly. There was no reference to the murders except for the oblique closing line: “Forgive me. Remember, nothing is bad or good but thinking makes it so.”
He hadn’t been able to believe that himself. Well, at least that letter was OK, too. I decided to give it to Jake later, and tell him Trevor told me to.
I destroyed the note from Oz. Tiny pieces, flush flush. The other two letters were longer. Both were full confessions. He told Oz he never intended to let him take the fall and he just couldn’t believe the jury would convict him, but now that it looked as if they might, he had to take action. He didn’t mention the death of my mother. He didn’t mention finding out that I was his real sister. Right at the end he was protective of Oz’s feelings, Oz, who used his son like a canary in a mineshaft.
Flush, flush. The letter to the prosecutor was the same confession he had given me, but in more stilted language. He added some details he hadn’t told me. For example he said he looked in the window and saw Oz sleeping on the sofa. I’m pretty sure that was a lie he thought up in his effort to get Oz off the hook, otherwise he would have mentioned it.
I found it much easier to picture Oz standing in the darkness, watching the inevitable unfold, feeling smug and safe. Somebody allowed Colleen to bleed out while Trevor rushed back to the party. In the unacknowledged war between father and son, Oz must have felt he was the lifelong victor. Was it his plan that Trevor would stand up in court at the eleventh hour and rescue him?
Ironic that the son who couldn’t trust his father was so trusted by that same father! But Oz’s solipsistic universe can’t envision suicide. Probably he pictured to himself a sensational last minute public confession to the delight of jury and press.
He fatally underestimated his son’s sense of shame because it was an emotion he couldn’t feel himself. Was the suggestion that I get pregnant an end run around this very possibility, subtly trying to undermine Trevor’s right to take his life if it became unbearable?
The letter didn’t even mention my mother, didn’t mention our newly exposed connection. He told them Oz was an innocent man and they should let him out right now.
Flush, flush to all of it, even the envelopes, even the first blank sheets of Trevor’s writing pad. Far from grudging Skylar her updated amenities I welcomed them. My toilet would have clogged, but Skylar’s Quadraflush swirled everything effortlessly away down into darkness.
The sirens grew stronger. Why were they in such a hurry? They couldn’t put Trevor back together. Not all the king’s horses or all the king’s men could ever do that. Did they think we were all the captives of a crazed gunman, were they sending the SWAT team, what Spike calls “the green boys”? Spike himself had worked his way through the first door and found out my hiding place. Now he was shouting, hammering on the bathroom door.
The door splintered under his weight and Spike fell into the room. His stricken face melted at the sight of me.
“Jesus! I thought he killed you!”
Poor Trevor! Barely dead and already subject to misinterpretation. This too, was Oz’s fault. It was a good thing I hadn’t left the fate of his memory in his own hands.
Spike picked me up and rocked me like a baby, murmuring, “Dangerous, dangerous man.”
Did he mean Trevor, or Oz? No sense in arguing. Like a rabbit in the mouth of a very big dog, I felt it best to go limp.
It’s pleasant to be rocked. I am the baby after all. Still, the Brontë in me challenged him. “Why would Trevor ever kill me?”
“Well, obviously he could never really have you,” said Spike.
Poor Spike! Imagine being that big and that strong and that old and still not realizing you can never really have anybody. He nuzzled my neck like a mother bear trying to recognize a cub feared gone for good.
Jake appeared wild eyed in the doorway. “Why did he do it? Why? Why?”
I roused myself for one last volley.
“Oz confessed to him,” I told them both. “He’s as guilty as hell of both those murders. Trevor was sure he’d be convicted and die.”
Jake and Shelley both began to cry. I closed my eyes and felt the vertigo of a future in which my mother’s and my father’s, murderer and murderee’s tendencies warred within me. But even if temperament and talents are inherited, isn’t what I do with them entirely my own choice? No more court for me, not ever. At last I was free to leave this place and become myself. I was finally all grown up.
Spike was kissing, kissing my face and neck. Who would have thought such a big man, a Hulk, a Python, capable of such butterfly kisses? Men are eternally surprising. If I closed my eyes I stretched out again on that hot dock years ago, when Trevor kissed me back to life. Trevor had won after all. Death locked me into his template harder than his life could have. And if I wasn’t finished with Trevor, I was free to seek him still. He laughed at reincarnation, but said that love is immortal. Aunt Shea says someone you love is inside you always. So I lay there smiling while Spike kissed me with Trevor’s lips.
THE END
Alysse Aallyn 
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