Blind Spot (8 page)

Suki’s eyes followed theirs to the casket. It stood before the altar, raised above the mourners in the first row, open. Jonah’s shoulders rested against creamy satin and even from where she sat, she could see that his face was waxy and overly made-up. In direct antithesis to the cliché, he neither looked asleep nor at peace. He looked dead.

Suki closed her eyes against the sight, against the reality it proclaimed. She knew Jonah was dead. She would have thought no single fact could be clearer to her. But she was acutely aware that up to this moment, she had only understood his death on an abstract level. The horror of it, the truth of it, now lay in that copper box.

She searched the crowd for Ellery McKinna, knowing that he, too, would be compelled to come, wondering what he must be feeling as he tried to reconcile his lies with the reality of Jonah’s lifeless body, the false defense of his son with Darcy’s grief. Ellery was prominently seated on an aisle close to the front of the church. His wife Carol was beside him, Devin beside her. She didn’t see Brendan or Sam.

Ellery had composed his face in an appropriate expression of solemnity and sadness, and he held his head high, making eye contact and nodding with the agility of a seasoned politician. Devin stared straight ahead, but he too kept his chin forward. Suki thought for a moment she might be sick and turned her attention to the priest.

Father Francis was not a young man, and his gravelly voice cracked as he spoke of Jonah. About what a terrific athlete he had been. A fine boy. A promising future. When he told of a prank Jonah had pulled as an altar boy with his friends Nicholas and Maxwell, he reached his arms out to where Nick and Max sat with their families, as if offering his story to them as consolation. “Jonah possessed a happy soul,” he said. “Jubilant and rich with life. That we were allowed to share in his few short years on this earth was a gift from God.” Amidst the sniffles, a full sob broke out from a woman Suki didn’t recognize.

Suki bowed her head and did not look up again until Warren Blanchard, Jonah’s uncle, had replaced Father Francis at the pulpit. Although he was close to her age, Warren was a graduate student at MIT and lived with his sister and her family. He had been the high school gym teacher for years, but quit suddenly, deciding he needed a change. He still continued as the boys’ soccer coach, and, as Kyle had been playing since first grade, Suki knew him fairly well.

Warren ran his finger around the edge of his collar and played with the cuff of his jacket. She was more accustomed to seeing him in a sweat suit on the playing field, or in shorts and a T-shirt when their paths crossed on their early morning jogs, and was surprised at how different he looked: somehow younger, more handsome, and heartbreakingly vulnerable. As he continued to pull at his clothes, it was obvious that he, too, was unaccustomed to himself in a suit.

Warren Blanchard was a real iconoclast, a sixties throwback with his longish hair, liberal notions and acute sense of morality. He had angered many football parents at the high school when he reallocated football program money into the soccer budget, declaring it a far less violent, and therefore more worthy, sport. Then, to keep things fair, he angered the soccer parents by refusing to accept the Middlesex Tournament trophy, claiming the final game had been won on a bad call against the opposing team. But no one was angry with Warren Blanchard today.

He cleared his throat. “I, ah, I don’t think I’m going to be able to last up here for too long,” Warren began, his deep voice shaking with emotion. “I … I know I can’t talk about Jonah, or what this means to me, or to my sister, or to our …” His voice trailed off into a whisper as he struggled to regain his composure. He had lost his wife to breast cancer just a few years ago. And now this. Warren raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I just wanted to thank you all for caring,” he said, then stumbled back to his seat.

Suki closed her eyes against Warren’s pain, against Darcy’s, and against her own, but they flew open when she recognized the voice of Ellery McKinna. The man had no shame. He stood at the pulpit, his gold watch chain smiling tightly across his taut stomach, the flat planes of his face accentuated by the light from the side window. She could almost feel the crowd responding to him: their guy, Mr. Rec Center, Mr. Skating Rink. Speaking from the heart. For all of them.

McKinna did not twitch or pull at his clothes as Warren had. He placed his hand under his jacket, over his heart, in an Napoleonic gesture, and began to speak. After a short opening of appropriate platitudes, he turned to the issues of violence and divisiveness and the crumbling of family and community ties. Of how everyone had failed Jonah and God and each other. Of how Witton needed to take this opportunity to grow closer, to strengthen its bonds.

“Now is not the time for anger and vengeance and violence,” McKinna said. “We have had more than enough of that. Now is the time to turn to each other with love. To offer support and comfort to everyone who’s suffering. Now is the time to heal.” He looked out over the church, and his eyes met Suki’s. “For everyone—everyone—needs to be healed.”

The heat roared up Suki’s cheeks as an undulating rumble swept through the church. No one turned, and no one looked at her, but Suki felt the power of their effort. Father Francis stood and quickly thanked Ellery, who stepped down. The rest of the service passed by in a blur. There were more prayers and talk of children and lambs, followed by the sprinkling of water. A few other people spoke, but Suki couldn’t say who. As the pallbearers wheeled Jonah’s casket down the aisle, Suki sat motionless, staring down at her hands.

When she finally stood, she was caught in the press of mourners streaming from the church. She nodded politely to those she could not avoid, but kept her eyes downcast and followed the shoes ahead of her toward the door. Someone grasped her hand and she looked up in surprise. Warren Blanchard stood before her, apparently as startled at the sight of her as she was at him. Somehow she had gotten into a makeshift receiving line. Darcy was standing next to Warren, but fortunately her back was to Suki. Suki wondered what she could say to them: their pain was so great, her part in it so uncertain.

“Suki,” Warren said, his eyes shifting between her face and some place beyond her left shoulder. “Suki.”

“Sorry,” she whispered, pulling her hand from his. “I’m so sorry.” She turned quickly and pushed back into the crowd, trying to lose herself amidst the pressing bodies. The going wasn’t easy as the crowd strained toward Darcy and Warren while she, in opposition, strained toward the door.

Just as she broke from the throng and into the sunlight, Suki felt a sharp tap on her shoulder. She jumped, but relaxed when she recognized, from the air of professional detachment surrounding him, that the man who had intercepted her was associated with the funeral parlor.

“The family has requested that guests not go to the cemetery, ma’am,” he said in a solemn voice. “The interment is to be private. Family only.”

Suki nodded her understanding and headed down the stairs. As she made her way toward the block where she had parked, she was surprised by the number of cars queuing up in the church lot with their headlamps lit. She hadn’t known the Ward family was so large.

When Suki got home from the funeral she was wound tight, restless with a nervous energy she couldn’t shed. Alexa didn’t respond to her knock, so she opened the door a crack and peered in. Alexa was just as Suki had left her, seated on her bed, staring at a poster of the CD cover of Bush’s
Razor Blade Suitcase
on the wall across from her.

Alexa’s room was in its usual state of complete disarray—yet another example of what Jen called “hormonally induced obnoxiousness,” something Jen counseled Suki to ignore—overflowing with Alexa’s many collections: stuffed animals, incense, nail polish, candles, baseball hats, CDs. Alexa’s mismatched accumulations always struck Suki as an interesting comment on her many personas: child, teenager, adult, female, male. Piles of magazines rose from the floor and the mirror was plastered with so many photos and postcards that it was impossible to see a reflected image. The desk and bureau were no better. Maybe worse.

Without moving her head, Alexa slowly turned her eyes toward her mother. It took a moment for Suki’s presence to register. “Not now, Mom.” Her voice was thick, as if she had just awoken. “Not now,” she repeated and returned her gaze to
Razor Blade Suitcase
.

“
Not now, Suzanne
,” Suki’s mother used to say when Suki came upon her in the darkened living room. “
Not now
.” Suki knew from experience that there was no intruding on this lethargy. She closed the door and prowled the house, her restlessness increasing as her mind jumped from one worry to the next. Kyle and her father cooked in the kitchen. They didn’t ask how the funeral had gone, nor how she was doing, and for this she was tremendously grateful.

Suki stood over the desk in her study, a tiny space tucked off the side of the family room; it was half-buried, two casement windows at dirt level bringing in thin rectangles of light. The Kern file jutted from her open briefcase, and she longed to escape into it, into an all-absorbing quest for a solution to an academic puzzle—even if this case promised to be more than just academic.

A general text on posttraumatic stress disorder lay on her desk, and she turned to the section on sexual abuse. As she had thought, it was not uncommon for extremely severe childhood abuse to cause dissociation and hallucinations in adulthood—she had once had a patient whose violation had been so horrific a PET scan indicated that the abuse had actually altered her brain structure. It was possible Lindsey had been mistreated as a child. Although Suki had only met the woman twice, and hadn’t received the medical and psychiatric history from Mike yet, she was pretty confident Lindsey did not fit the profile: the dissociative amnesia, the numbing, the depersonalization, the recurrent images and flashback episodes.

Suki put the book down and looked at the collage of photos she’d tacked to a few squares of pegboard: Alexa and Kyle at ages six and three, riding a pony at her cousin Tracy’s wedding; her high school clique at their twenty-fifth reunion; Stan and two buddies dressed as the three amigos on a trip to Mexico they’d made decades ago; Alexa and Jonah at the tenth grade Star Ball. In the bottom corner of the board was a picture of her mother and Alexa; even though Alexa was only two, the same smile shone out of both faces. Suki turned and walked from the study.

After another hour of aimless wandering, her jittery energy was finally exhausted, and Suki found herself standing at the living room window, staring out at nothing. That’s when the cars began driving by. She moved behind the pulled bundle of drape, so that she could see but not be seen, and watched the procession make its way slowly down Lawler Road. Suki knew the funeral had to be over, that Jonah’s body must have been buried for at least an hour now, and yet a string of cars, their headlamps lit, was streaming past her house.

Her father came up behind her and touched her arm. “The lentil soup’s ready,” he said as if nothing out of the ordinary was occurring, as if she had been eating three hearty meals a day instead of choking down a fraction of what he placed before her. “Come. Have a bowl with us.”

She shook her head without turning around, her eyes glued to the grim parade in the road.

He gave her shoulders a squeeze. “I’ll keep the soup warm for when you change your mind.”

Suki listened to his steps return to the kitchen. Since Saturday, he had made noodle pudding, manicotti, vegetable stew and now lentil soup. Comfort foods.

As she watched the cars, Suki wondered if her father could possibly be right about troubles passing, about everything being enlarged under the electron microscope of the present; he had always been so wise about so many things. Just as she was allowing herself to warm to the notion, as she was thinking she might be able to swallow a bit of lentil soup, she caught her breath. Something was happening outside the window. Something more than a few cars cruising by.

A pattern was emerging. That green Camry had been by before, as had the white station wagon and the mud-covered van. Somewhere beyond her vision, the cars were turning around. Circling back.

How long she stood there Suki could not say, but it felt both like forever and like only the quickest flash of a second before she understood what was unfolding before her. More cars came. The circle slowed to a sluggish creep, but it kept moving. And growing. Although no one honked or threw tomatoes, and no one yelled obscenities, there was a tangible sense of the ominous in the relentless circling. Suki looked into the cars, saw the faces of their occupants. She recognized many. Jan and Carl Richardson. Becky Alley. Carol and Ellery McKinna.

Suki jumped when she felt her father’s arms around her, then turned into the familiar comfort of his chest. He didn’t say anything, just held her and brushed her hair off her forehead with the same gesture he’d been using since she was a little girl. Finally, she pulled away. “Alexa saw Jonah’s body laying in the woods,” she said.

He blinked and looked at her through his thick glasses. “Yes,” he said slowly. “I assumed that she had.”

“No,” Suki said. “You don’t understand. She saw him
before
it happened. Like Mom.”

He blinked again. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m just telling you what happened.”

“Do you think Alexa can see into the future? That your mother could?” He took her hand and led her to the couch. “Sit.”

Suki sat. “Remember the time Mom wouldn’t let us get on that plane in Chicago?” she asked.

There was no need for her father to answer what was so clearly a rhetorical question, and he didn’t. They both knew all too well that the plane had crashed, killing all 263 people aboard. It should have been 267. Instead, he asked questions of his own: “What about when she wouldn’t let us fly and nothing happened? When she refused to allow Julie to take the train to Philadelphia—or let you baby-sit for the Lubins, those perfectly nice people who lived down the street?”