Dark Places (14 page)

I drove three hours into Kansas, rolling up and down the Flint Hills, then hitting the flatlands, signs inviting me to visit the Greyhound Hall of Fame, the Museum of Telephony, the Largest Ball of Twine. Again a burst of loyalty: I should go to them all, if only to smack ironic road-trippers. I finally turned off the highway, heading north and west and north and west on jigsaw back roads, the farm fields dots of green and yellow and brown, pastoral pointillism. I huddled over the wheel, flipping stations between weepy country tunes and Christian rock and fuzz. The struggling March sun managed to warm the car, blazed my grotesque red hairline. The warmth and the color made me think again of blood. In the passenger seat next to me was a single airplane bottle of vodka I planned to swallow
when I got to the prison, a self-prescribed dose of numbness. It took an uncharacteristic amount of willpower not to gulp it on the drive, one hand on the wheel, throat tilted back.

Like a magic trick, just as I was thinking
Getting close now,
a tiny sign popped up on the wide, flat horizon. I knew exactly what it would say:
Welcome to Kinnakee: Heart of America!
in 1950s cursive. It did, and I could just make out a spray of bullet holes in the bottom left-hand corner, where Runner blasted it from his pickup truck decades before. Then I got closer and realized I was imagining the bullet holes. This was a tidy new sign, but with the same old script:
Welcome to Kinnakee: Heart of America!
Sticking with the lie, I liked it. Just as I passed the sign, another one arrived: Kinnakee Kansas State Penitentiary, next left. I followed the direction, driving west over land that was once the Evelee farm.
Ha, serves you right, Evelees,
I thought, but I couldn’t remember why the Evelees were bad. I just remembered they were.

I slowed to a crawl as I drove down this new road, far on the outer edge of town. Kinnakee had never been a prosperous place—it was mostly struggling farms and optimistic plywood mansions from a preposterously brief oil boom. Now it was worse. The prison business hadn’t saved the town. The street was lined with pawn shops and flimsy houses, barely a decade old and already sagging. Stunned children stood in the middle of grubby yards. Trash collected everywhere: food wrappers, drinking straws, cigarette butts. An entire to-go meal—Styrofoam box, plastic fork, Styrofoam cup—sat on a curb, abandoned by the eater. A scatter of ketchupy fries lay in the gutter nearby. Even the trees were miserable: scrawny, stunted, and stubbornly refusing to bud. At the end of the block, a young, dumpy couple sat in the cold on a Dairy Queen bench, staring out at the traffic, like they were watching TV.

On a nearby telephone pole flapped a grainy photocopy of an unsmiling teen, missing since October 2007. Two more blocks, and what I thought was a copy of the same poster turned out to be a new missing girl, vanished in June 2008. Both girls were unkempt, surly, which explained why they weren’t getting the Lisette Stephens treatment. I made a mental note to take a smiling, pretty photo of myself in case I ever disappeared.

A few more minutes, and the prison appeared within a big sunburnt clearing.

It was less imposing than I’d pictured, the few times I’d pictured it. It had a sprawling, suburban look to it, could be mistaken for some regional offices of a refrigeration company, maybe a telecommunications headquarters, except for the razor wire that curlicued around the walls. The looping wire reminded me of the phone cord that Ben and my mom always fought over toward the end, the one we were always tripping on. Debby was cremated with a little starburst scar on her wrist because of that goddang phone cord. I made myself cough loudly, just to hear something.

I rolled into the lot, the poured-tar surface wonderfully smooth after an hour of potholes. I parked and sat staring, my car crinkling from the drive. From just inside the walls came the murmur and shouts of men, taking their rec time. The vodka went down with a medicinal sting. I chewed a piece of hardened spearmint gum once, twice, then spit it into a sandwich wrapper, feeling my ears get booze-warmed. Then I reached under my sweater and undid my bra, feeling my breasts woosh down, big and dog-eared, to the background noise of murderers playing hoops. That’s one thing Lyle had advised me on, stuttering and careful with his words:
You only get one chance to get through the metal detector. It’s not like at the airport—there’s no wand thing. So you should leave everything metal in your car. Um, including, um, with women, uh, the, I think is it underwire? In the bras. That would be, could be a problem
.

Fine, then. I stuck the bra in my glove compartment and let my breasts roam free.

In the interior of the prison, the guards were well mannered, as if they’d seen many instructional videos on courtesy: yes ma’am, right this way ma’am. Their eye contact was without depth, my image bounced right back at me, hot-potato. Searches, questions, yes ma’am, and lots of waiting. Doors opened and shut, opened and shut, as I walked through a series of them, each shifting in size, like a metal Wonderland. The floors stank of bleach and the air smelled beefy and humid. Somewhere nearby must be the lunchroom. I suffered a nauseous wave of nostalgia, picturing us Day kids and our subsidized school meals: the bosomy, steamed women, yelling
Free
Lunch!
toward the cash register as we came through with a dump of stroganoff and some room-temperature milk.

Ben had good timing, I thought: Kansas’s disappearing-reappearing death penalty was in moratorium when the murders happened (here I paused at my jarring new mental phrasing, “when the murders happened,” as opposed to “when Ben killed everyone”). He was sentenced to prison for life. But at least I didn’t get him killed. I now stood outside the smooth, submarine-metal door of the visitation room and then stood longer. “Nothing to it but to do it, nothing to it but to do it.” Diane’s mantra. I needed to stop thinking family thoughts. The guard with me, a stiff blond man who’d spared me small talk, made an
after-you
overture.

I swung the door open and shoved myself inside. Five booths sat in a row, one occupied by a heavyset Native Indian woman, talking to her inmate son. The woman’s black hair speared down her shoulders, violent-looking. She was muttering dully to the young guy, who nodded jerkily, the phone close to his ear, his eyes down.

I sat two booths away, and was just settling in, taking a breath, when Ben shot through the door, like a cat making a break for the outside. He was small, maybe 5’6”, and his hair had turned a dark rust. He wore it long, sweeping his shoulders, tucked girlishly behind his ears. With wire-rim glasses and an orange jumpsuit, he looked like a studious mechanic. The room was small, so he got to me in three steps, all the while smiling quietly. Beaming. He sat down, placed a hand on the glass, nodded at me to do the same. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t press my palm against his, moist against the window like ham. I smiled milkily at him instead and picked up the phone.

On the other side of the glass, he held the phone in his hand, cleared his throat, then looked down, started to say something, then stopped. I was left looking at the crown of his head for almost a minute. When he looked up, he was crying, two tears from both his eyes trickling down his face. He wiped them away with the back of a hand, then smiled, his lips wavering.

“God, you look just like Mom,” he said all at once, getting it out, and coughed, wiped more tears. “I didn’t know that.” His eyes flickered between my face and his hands. “Oh, God, Libby, how are you?”

I cleared my own throat and said, “I guess I’m OK. I just
thought it was time I came and saw you.”
I do sort of look like Mom,
I thought.
I do
. And then I thought,
my big brother,
and felt the same chesty pride I’d had as a kid. He looked so much the same, pale face, that Day knob of a nose. He hadn’t even grown much since the murders. Like we both got stunted that night. My big brother, and he was happy to see me.
He knows how to play you,
I warned myself. Then I set the thought aside.

“I’m glad, I’m glad,” Ben said, still looking at the side of his hand. “I’ve thought about you a lot over these years, been wondering about you. That’s what you do in here … think and wonder. Every once in a while someone’ll write me about you. But it’s not the same.”

“No,” I agreed. “Are they treating you OK?” I asked, stupidly, my eyes glazed, and suddenly I was crying and all I wanted to say was
sorryI’msorryI’msosorry
. Instead I said nothing, looking only at a constellation of acne scattered around one corner of Ben’s lips.

“I’m fine, Libby, Libby, look at me.” My eyes to his. “I’m fine. I really am. I got my high school degree in here, which is more than I ever prolly would have done outside, and I’m even partway to a college degree. English. I read fucking Shakespeare.” He made the guttural sound that he always tried to pass off for a laugh. “Forsooth, you dirty bugger.”

I didn’t know what the last part meant, but I smiled because he was waiting for me to smile.

“Man, Libby, I could just drink you in. You don’t know how good it is to see you. Shit, I’m sorry. You just look like Mom, do people tell you that all the time?”

“Who would tell me that? There’s no one. Runner’s gone, don’t know where, Diane and I don’t talk.” I wanted him to feel sorry for me, to float around in my big empty pool of pity. Here we were, the last of the Days. If he felt sorry for me, it would be harder to blame me. The tears kept coming and now I just let them. Two chairs down, the Indian woman was saying her good-byes, her weeping just as deep as her voice.

“Ya’all by yourself, huh? That’s no good. They should’ve took better care of you.”

“What are you, born again?” I blurted, my face wet. Ben
frowned, not understanding. “Is that it? You forgiving me? You’re not supposed to be nice to me.” But I craved it, could feel the need for the relief, like setting down a hot plate.

“Nah, I’m not that nice,” he said. “I got a lot of anger for a lot of people, you’re just not one.”

“But,” I said, and gulped down a sob like a kid. “But my testimony. I think, I may, I don’t know, I don’t know …”
It had to have been him,
I warned myself again.

“Oh that.” He said, like it was a minor inconvenience, some snag in a summer vacation best forgotten. “You don’t read my letters, huh?”

I tried to explain with an inadequate shrug.

“Well, your testimony … It only surprised me that people believed you. It didn’t surprise me what you said. You were in a totally insane situation. And you always were a little liar.” He laughed again and I did too, quick matching laughs like we’d caught the same cough. “No, seriously, the fact that they believed you? They wanted me in here, I was going to be in here, that just proved it. Fucking little seven-year-old. Man, you were so small …” His eyes turned up to the right, daydreaming. Then he pulled himself back. “You know what I thought of the other day, I don’t know why. I thought of that goddam porcelain bunny, the one Mom made us put on the toilet.”

I shook my head, no clue what he was talking about.

“You don’t remember that, the little bunny? Because the toilet didn’t work right, if we used it twice in an hour it stopped flushing. So if one of us crapped when it wasn’t working, we were supposed to close the lid and put the bunny on top, so no one else would open the lid and see a toilet full of crap. Because you guys would scream. I can’t believe you don’t remember this. It was so stupid, it made me so mad. I was mad I had to share a bathroom with all of you, I was mad I lived in a house with one toilet that didn’t even work, I was mad about the bunny. The bunny,” he broke into his confined laugh, “I found the bunny, like, it humiliated me or something. Unmanned me. I took it very personally. Like Mom was supposed to find a car figurine or a gun figurine for me to use. Man, I would get so worked up about it. I’d stand there by the toilet and think, ‘I will not put that bunny down,’ and then I’d get ready to leave and I’d think, ‘Goddamit,
I gotta put the bunny down or one of them’s gonna come in here and all the screaming—you guys were screamers, high,
Eeeeeeeaaaahh!
—and I don’t want to deal with that so fine here’s the goddam bunny on your goddam toilet!’” He laughed again, but the memory had cost him, his face was flushed and his nose was sweaty. “That’s the kind of stuff you think of in here. Weird stuff.”

I tried to find that bunny in my memory, tried to inventory the bathroom and the things in it, but I came out with nothing, a handful of water.

“Sorry, Libby, that’s a strange memory to throw at you.” I put one tip of my finger near the bottom of the glass window and said, “That’s fine.”

WE SAT IN
silence for a bit, pretending to listen to noise that wasn’t there. We had just started but the visit was almost over. “Ben, can I ask you something?”

“I think so.” His face went blank, preparing.

“Don’t you want to get out of here?”

“Sure.”

“Why don’t you give the police your alibi for that night? There is no way you were sleeping in a barn.”

“I just don’t have a good alibi, Libby. I just don’t. It happens.”

“Because it was, like, zero degrees out. I remember.” I rubbed my half finger beneath the counter, wiggled my two toes on my right foot.

“I know, I know. You can’t imagine.” He turned his face away. “You can’t imagine how many weeks,
years,
I’ve spent in here wishing I’d done it all differently. Mom and Michelle and Debby might not be dead if I’d just … been a man. Not some dumb kid. Hiding in a barn, angry at Mommy.” A tear splashed onto the phone receiver, I thought I could hear it,
bing!
“I’m OK being punished for that night … I feel … OK.”

“But. I don’t understand. Why were you so … unhelpful with the police?”

Ben shrugged his shoulders, and again the face went death-mask.

“Oh God. I just. I was such an unconfident kid. I mean, I was fifteen, Libby. Fifteen. I didn’t know what it was to be a man. I mean,
Runner sure wasn’t helpful. I was this kid no one paid much attention to one way or the other, and here all of a sudden, people were treating me like
I
scared
them
. I mean, presto chango, I was this big man.”