Save Yourself (2 page)

Instead, Mike had asked why the hell they would do that, since it wasn’t like the old man had killed the kid on purpose. And it wasn’t like they had any money to spare—only the old man had made fulltime union wages, and losing his paycheck had hurt them badly—and it also wasn’t like anybody was offering them free money, were they? “Fuck the kid, fuck his fucking family, and fuck you,” Mike
had said. “Dad’s going to be in jail for fifteen years. They don’t get anything else.”

Determined to send the money anyway, Patrick had used one of the computer terminals in the public library so Mike wouldn’t catch him, typing in the web address with his almost-maxed credit card ready to go. He’d scrolled down the page past the kid’s picture, trying not to feel cynical about the sappy graphics and badly rhymed poetry
(My broken heart can only cry, I pray to God and ask Him why)
and looking for the donation link. He’d found the other one first.

Click
here
for more information about John Cusimano and his sons
.

Gravity had done something weird just then. Patrick had felt like his limbs might float away from his body, but he clicked, anyway.

No flickering candles on this page. No sweet angels with electronic wings gently flapping. No poetry, no flowers, and most of all, no grinning first grader. The page he’d landed on was stark white, with red and black lettering: double underscore, bold, italic, and very, very angry. And it wasn’t about the old man. It was about him and Mike.

John Cusimano’s two ADULT sons, Michael and Patrick, were alone with him for NINETEEN HOURS after their father KILLED RYAN!! The car that took our Precious Baby away SAT IN THEIR GARAGE COVERED IN RYAN’S BLOOD and they DIDN’T BOTHER TO CALL THE POLICE!! THEY WASHED THEIR FATHER’S CLOTHES TO DESTROY THE EVIDENCE!! Call the Janesville County District Attorney’s office and demand that they be charged as ACCOMPLICES AFTER THE FACT!!! DO NOT LET THESE MONSTERS GET AWAY WITH MURDER!!!

There was a photo, which Patrick had already seen when it ran in the local paper, of the brothers leaving the courthouse after the
arraignment. There was also a message board. Patrick had known he shouldn’t read it.

Michael and Patrick Cusimano you will burn in hell forever
.

Those boys better hope they never meet me in a dark alley. Once upon a time somebody would have GOT A ROPE already
.

In twenty years monsters like this will be ruling the country. This is what happens when you take prayer out of the schools
.

Only one (anonymous) poster had said anything even remotely positive—
I knew Mike and Patrick in high school and I thought they were nice, I am so sorry to Ryan’s family but Mike and Patrick are suffering too
—and the responses had not been generous.

It is obvious you do not have children and I hope you never do!

If you think their nice your probably just as evil as they are. I notice your not using your real name
.

The messages made it sound like the old man had pulled up in the bloody car, said,
Hey, boys, look what I did
, and the three of them had traded a round of high fives, tapped a keg, and popped some popcorn. The dislocation was dizzying. Patrick had spent almost an hour reading those messages, all about what a monster he was. He never made the donation. He knew it was unfair, punishing the kid’s family for being angry that they’d lost their son in such an ugly way. Their kid was dead, and other people’s kids were alive. Patrick’s dad was a
drunk and a murderer, and other people’s dads were insurance salesmen and orthodontists and air conditioner repairmen.
Fair
didn’t seem to have anything to do with it.

He’d been thinking of the accident as a tragedy that had happened to all of them, Czerpak and Cusimano alike. He’d been hoping that the guys at the warehouse were just being awkward-weird, the way his teachers were when he was eleven and his mother was dying. But after seeing the website, his eyes were open. He felt every chill, noticed every look and nonlook and casually turned shoulder and half-heard whisper. At that point he’d still had a few friends, people he knew from high school and work, but within three months of the accident they’d all fallen away in a litter of voice mail messages saying
We totally gotta hang out, like, soon
, but not tonight and not this weekend and probably not next week but
soon
. By the time the old man had pled guilty to all counts and been transferred to a state facility in Wilkes-Barre, the messages had stopped. Patrick had been relieved. There was nobody he wanted to talk to.

Then it had just been Mike and Patrick alone in the house until Mike met Caro and the two of them took over the room where Patrick’s parents had slept: cleaned it out, redecorated it, filled it with the smells of laundry soap and sex and Caro’s perfume. Patrick quit his job at the warehouse and took the night shift at Zoney’s GoMart (except for that one day shift a month, which he hated). Mike worked every shift he could get at the warehouse, and Caro waited tables at a seafood place in downtown Ratchetsburg. To Patrick it felt like the three of them were planets that came into alignment once a week or so, shared a few beers and some hot wings, and then spun back out into their own separate orbits. The other world, the world he’d belonged to before that afternoon when the old man had stepped out of the Lucky Strike and decided he was sober enough to drive—that world, presumably, kept spinning, somewhere out there, but Patrick didn’t live there anymore. He’d fallen into a numb kind of stasis and after a while he couldn’t tell the difference between the long quiet
nights he spent alone in the store and the long quiet days he spent sleeping off the nights. They both felt the same. They both felt like nothing.

You’re Patrick Cusimano. Your dad was the one who killed Ryan Czerpak
.

That night, as he drove home from work, he hit a deer. He’d taken the back way home, down Foundry Road, which at that time of day was a green-black tunnel through the trees. It was hard to see anything clearly; headlights didn’t do any good, and the best you could do was squint and hope. Patrick had been awake for almost twenty hours. He’d left the goth girl behind him in a cloud of dust, but her voice was still in his ears. He was distracted. The world seemed like a movie scrolling by outside his windshield. Then he saw the tawny flash in his right headlight, and:
thud
.

His knees and elbows locked. He stomped on the brakes, steeling himself for the dreadful bounce of the wheels driving over the deer. It never came. When he pulled over to the side of the road, his chest felt tight and it was hard to breathe. For a moment he could only watch his hands clench and unclench on the steering wheel. Then he made himself get out.

He could hear the rush of traffic on the highway, but Foundry Road was deserted. In the faint glow of his own headlights, he stared at the four-inch fissure that had appeared in his bumper. There was no blood, for which he was thankful. He thought that if there’d been blood he probably would have flipped a circuit breaker and somebody would have found him by the side of the road in a few hours, twitching and drooling in a patch of poison ivy.

His legs felt weak but he walked toward the back of the car, stopped, and stared down the road, listening. He didn’t know what he expected to hear. The spastic scrabble of dying hooves against asphalt. Something. His nose searched among the smells of exhaust and scorched rubber for the heady tang of blood. But he heard nothing,
and he smelled nothing. He’d just clipped it, he thought, and it had run off. Or limped off, somewhere into the woods around him to die of shock or fear or internal bleeding. And what could he do about it either way? It wasn’t a cocker spaniel; he couldn’t wrap it in his coat and race it to the nearest vet. Even if it had been lying there on the asphalt in front of him, there would have been nothing he could have done except pull it off the road so it wouldn’t get hit again while it was dying. So its death would be long and painful instead of quick and violent. A questionable mercy, at best.

The tightness in his chest grew worse. It was only a deer, he told himself. Not a jogger, not a pedestrian. Not a little kid chasing a kickball.

The air was warm and dewy and smelled like growing things. The leaves on the trees around him rustled, a gentle susurration that he found almost mocking. A drop of sweat ran down his ribs from his armpit. All at once he was so tired he could barely feel his feet. He turned around and went back to his car, turned the key with numb, trembling fingers, and drove away. Leaving the deer, wherever it was, behind.

At home, Mike’s truck was in the driveway and Caro’s car on the street, so Patrick parked in front of the house next door. He grabbed his phone from the console and the emergency twenty from the glove box, saw a few CDs on the floor and grabbed those, too. He wasn’t consciously aware that he was emptying his car of everything he cared about until he turned at the front door and looked back.

The car crouched at the curb like a piece of roadside litter, the way you sometimes saw shoes or gloves or undergarments lying forlorn in puddles of mud, growing black with exhaust as the world passed them by. He’d owned the car for ten years, since he’d turned sixteen. Even in the yellow glare from the streetlight he could see how dirty it was. Although he couldn’t see them, he knew the gas tank was half-full and the washer fluid reservoir empty. He couldn’t see the cracked bumper, either, but he could feel it throbbing like a bruise.

Inside the house, he dropped his keys on the little table next to the door. Dead deer or no dead deer, he had no intention of ever driving the car again.

That night was one of those planets-in-alignment times. Four hours later he was steadier, drinking beer and watching television with Mike and Caro. She was sitting on his brother’s lap, still wearing the white blouse and black skirt she waited tables in; Mike hadn’t even taken off his work boots yet. His hand was tucked between Caro’s knees. Patrick knew without being close to them that Caro smelled like fish and hot butter and Mike smelled like the picnic table out behind the warehouse, sweat and dirt and cigarette smoke. Patrick was watching a horror movie; not a very good one. On the screen, a mutant bear tore off a hiker’s arm. The blood spatter hit the camera lens. It was that kind of movie.

“Come on, man,” Mike said. “Normal people don’t watch this shit. This is sick.”

“Change it if you want.” Without much interest, Patrick tossed over the remote.

Caro caught it and put on some sitcom with a laugh track. “You’re in a good mood. Tough day at the office, dear?”

Your dad was the one who killed Ryan Czerpak
. “Same shit, different day,” he said. “I hit a deer on the way home.”

“Grab me another beer, will you, babe?” Mike said to Caro.

She reached into the cooler behind them, pulled out a can of beer, and shook away the melting ice before handing it to Mike. “Did you kill it?”

“I don’t know. It ran off.”

“It’s a deer. What’s the big deal?” Mike cracked open the can.

“The big deal is that it sucks to kill something,” Caro said.

“I see a dead deer, I think jerky.”

She bit Mike’s ear. “That’s because you’re a jerk.”

“I’m your jerk, though,” Mike said, and kissed her. Patrick looked away. He liked Caro and she made his brother happy, but nothing said
you don’t exist
quite like being in a room with two people who couldn’t keep their tongues out of each other’s mouths. The fake family on the television screen was now embroiled in some sort of wacky misunderstanding involving a tray of lasagna and he missed the mutant bears.

“So, Patrick, did you mess up your car?” Mike said, finally.

“My sources say yes. It’s all over the road.”

Mike nodded knowingly. “The alignment. You want me to take a look?”

Caro slapped his arm. “You said you were going to get me a new battery.”

“I will, I will. Quit nagging.”

“You’re the one who has to drive my sorry ass around when my car won’t start.”

“I love your sorry ass,” Mike said, and kissed her again.

“I could not be here for this,” Patrick said. “That would be okay.”

“Patrick, you need a girlfriend,” Caro said sternly. “You’re the loneliest bastard I’ve ever met.”

“Right. Because all of my problems would be solved if I just had more sex.”

“I didn’t say sex. I said girlfriend.”

“You might not believe this,” Mike said to her, “but there was a time when my brother was a devil with the ladies. He used to take them to this graveyard, up in—where was it, Cranberry?”

Patrick’s jaw clenched, hard. He forced it to relax. “Evans City. And I only did that once or twice.”

“They shot some movie there,” Mike told Caro.

“Calling
Night of the Living Dead
‘some movie’ is like calling a ’sixty-eight Camaro ‘some car,’ ” Patrick said.

“You don’t know shit about cars.”

“You don’t know shit about zombie movies.”

“Now, boys.” Caro curled an arm around Mike’s shoulder. “I
didn’t know they made movies in Pittsburgh. Is it still there? Can we go see it?”

Mike shook his head. “I’m not driving all the way up there. You want to see a cemetery, I’ll take you out to St. Benedict.”

“Did they make a movie there, too?”

“No, but that’s where my mom is buried.”

“We can do that if you want. But I want to see the movie one.”

“It’s really not that exciting,” Patrick said. “It’s just a cemetery.”

“Exciting is not the point. The point is that we never go anywhere and we never do anything and all this will cost is gas.”

“Gas is expensive,” Mike said. Caro’s face went flat and he pulled her closer. “Cheer up, girl. We’ll go out tomorrow night. Do something fun.”