The Uninnocent (22 page)

Problem was, when I confessed that Franklin wasn't here because I'd killed him, and that he was dead in the pond along with the revolver I assassinated him with, the minister scoffed. “I'm well aware that you have your issues with Franklin, Wyatt, but I think the alcohol is speaking here, and not you.”

“No, ith's true—” I slurred.

“I know things have been tough for you, my son. Losing your mother and father, your grandfather. All tragic indeed. But blaming bad things that happen to us on others is not the Christian way,” as he put a large, warm, consoling hand on my swaying shoulder.

Tongue foundering from the champagne, continuing to insist I was guilty of murder, I felt my legs wobble and fold beneath me. The minister, helped by a neighbor, carried me upstairs to my bedroom, where I promptly passed out.

By next morning, Franklin still having not returned, my grandmother reported him missing to the police. At first she neglected to repeat my drunken claim that I'd killed him, assuming as the minister and others within earshot had that I was expressing an immature desire rather than an absolute fact. But after a few more days, having sobered up, of my continuing to insist, adding that I was quite certain Franklin wasn't of this world, she finally broke down and reported me. In her shoes, I might well have done the same.

The officers, themselves doubtful, especially in light of the more unusual aspects of my theories about Franklin, allowed me to walk them down to the place where I had hidden my weapon and committed my crime. No one had heard gunshots the night he disappeared, fortunately or unfortunately. Nor had anyone reported seeing anything unusual on Grover's Mill Pond that evening. Joined by a detective, the cops walked through the grass and down to the gently lapping water, seeing and saying nothing until one of them knelt down and picked up a spent bullet shell.

“What kind of a gun was it you said you used on the victim?” he asked, standing.

“I'm not exactly sure,” realizing I might better have kept the revolver if I wanted to convince anyone of what I'd done.

That they found no traces of blood in the grass might have strengthened my case about Franklin's origins, I felt. Perhaps he didn't bleed because his kind didn't have actual blood running in their veins. And yet I could have sworn I saw his face erupt in a gushing geyser of red when my bullet hit its point-blank mark. On the other hand, I reasoned, maybe theirs is thinner and evaporates like so much mist under a hot sun.

What happened next confounds me to this day. They brought in divers, yet again, and this time even dragged the pond with a special boat they commissioned for the job, having taken me into custody for my own protection, as they put it. And what did they come up with? Nothing. No body, no revolver—just the usual jettisoned tires, an old boot, a porcelain dolly missing its head, fishing tackle, and part of a rusted nineteenth-century threshing machine. My court-assigned lawyer got me free in no time, but not before the tabloid papers had a field day with me. I still possess some of the newspaper clippings.
Murdered Martian Missing in Grover's Mill. Boy, 16, Claims Revenge for Dad's Death at Martian Hands. War of the Words in Jersey Missing Mars Man Case
.

Mollie and I were kept apart by my grandmother, who now had taken a much harder line toward me, especially after the discovery of the bullet casing, which, although it proved nothing to the authorities, she understood as very damning. Citing me as a troubled child, abnormally disturbed after my parents' deaths, a juvenile delinquent and high school dropout, an unruly young man given to thoughts of violence, potentially psychotic and a danger to her and society, she moved to have me committed to a state hospital for evaluation. I voluntarily agreed to this because, for one, it got me away from her and, second, made it possible for Mollie to visit me, as the facility was a relatively short bus ride away. Third, though I didn't talk with anyone about it, I felt safer sleeping in an institution designed to keep some people in and other people out than I ever did back home in my bedroom, knowing that Franklin had somehow managed to escape my attempt to rid the world of him.

When half a year after Franklin's vanishing a large amount of money was discovered missing from my grandmother's bank account, it was clear I couldn't have taken it since I was essentially under observation day and night. The authorities traced a money transfer to a temporary account in Greece. I heard that an international police dragnet pursued the thief, but the trail was as cold as the far side of the moon. Mollie, whom I married while still in the hospital once we were both of legal age, tried to use Franklin's larceny to prove to me that I was mostly right, that Franklin
was
evil, a con man, the opposite of honest, direct,
frank
—but also that he was not some alien.

“Martians don't need money,” she assured me with a wistful smile.

I nodded my head in agreement, hoping to mollify Mollie, knowing it was her fondest wish that I might come to my senses and sanity based on this information. Whatever I thought I had done the night of my sixteenth birthday, I had
not
done—this is what the few who cared about me wanted me to understand. The time had come for me to seek a discharge and take my place once more in society. So I renounced as delusional any lingering thoughts I had about Franklin—believe it or not, I never knew his last name; did he even have one?—though I held privately to the hypothesis that he was probably spirited out of the pond in a rescuing spacecraft rather than somehow disappearing that afternoon with the numbers to Iris's savings account, having had enough of us both.

When she died of cancer, not long after my release, Grandmother Iris willed the old house to me, there being no one else left to give it to. In her final years, I think she might have seen the light about who Franklin really was. Oh, I don't necessarily mean that she ever embraced my theory, which I cling to even now in judicious silence but sure as a spore clings to a moldy loaf of bread. Yet the fact that they never did find his body after so many days of dredging, so many man-hours of frogmen searching Grover's Mill Pond's muddy bed, surely must have left her uneasy. I would like to think that if he really didn't die of his gunshot wounds that night, and if he didn't drown when I swam his leaden body out into the pond as far as I could before I submerged him, filling his mouth and nostrils with the water meant to weigh him down like liquid concrete, if he did happen to best death a second time, then Iris might have been paid a visit by Franklin. An after-midnight visit to her bedroom, not unlike the one I experienced that time.

And if she had, and he came floating into the scene of her helpless, troubled slumber, inhaling, hovering, I'd like to think that maybe she felt a panic of second thoughts about this beast she allowed into our family house off Cranbury Road. I would like to think that if in naked terror in her bed, she reached to her bedside lamp and turned on the light, she might have seen him undisguised, monstrous and gloating, for what he was.

ELLIE'S IDEA

S
HE AWOKE AFTER
a
NIGHT
of delirious dreams into an idea so fully formed it was as if she had spent her whole life thinking about it. Sublime in its clarity, this idea was as sharp and scary as any of the nettles that threatened to take over her neglected garden that August. Her pillowcase was damp from the sweat of its inception. So were the sheets knotted around her arms and legs. How was it possible she had never thought of it before?

As with any idea that laid claim to the sublime, hers was marvelous in its simplicity.
The truth shall set you free
, wrote Saint John, and while she had never been much of a churchgoer—aside from her wedding day, Eleanor Mead hadn't darkened a holy door in years, raised as she was by an agnostic mother and atheist stepfather—she presumed that such a universal truism would work for a person of any faith, if not the faithless. The idea was this. For every wrong she had ever done against others, every betrayal ever made, every lie said, every evil committed, she would make immediate amends. She would apologize to each person she had ever hurt, and she would mean it from the bottom of her heart. This was a crossroads in her life and it wasn't one she had been expecting, but she was going to face it with all the courage she could muster. By confessing and seeking forgiveness, her slate would be wiped clean and her mind freed of the guilt scrawled all over it. She could start anew with a conscience not quite as pure as a child's, but certainly clearer than it had been ever since she found herself alone like this. Sure, the idea was daunting. Who wants to admit to doing wrong? And not only admit it, but confess directly to the people who have been most hurt by such behavior. But her fear was no match for the confidence she felt this morning, the knowledge that this was the right thing to do. No going back.

Waking by herself still felt strange. Sunlight was pouring into the naked bedroom. She looked at the clock on the bedside table, but of course it wasn't there anymore. He had taken it with him. Hadn't that been a wedding present from a mutual friend and thus not his to take? It didn't matter, she thought. She wasn't going to think about him, not yet. The idea was what mattered. The idea would take care of all other ideas. And no, she wasn't going to binge. She wasn't going to purge. No matter what, she wouldn't indulge herself in her worst, most secret pleasure. Make some tea, she told herself, and get down to work.

She felt good about this, very good. The smile on her face was a welcome relief from the frown that had defined it for the last week. Her task was set and the outcome was to be nothing less than full redemption. Acts of unabashed humility, her apologies would permit people, her
victims
, as she now realized they'd been, to heal from the abuses suffered at her hands. How self-indulgent to have believed she'd always been a good woman. What a delusion, she whispered to herself, barely audibly, so arrogant. How could she have been blind to the obvious fact that she had never finally been good, not really good, toward anyone who crossed her path over the course of her thirty years on this confounding Earth? Her moment of enlightenment, brought on by a downward spiral of miserable days and nights of deep silence, had to happen eventually. Now the consequences of her misdeeds must be addressed. And they would be. Thank heavens, she thought, for nightmares.

Slipping into her favorite pair of baggy white painter's overalls and the wrinkled, unwashed white dress shirt her estranged husband had left behind in the laundry hamper when, without warning, he vacated their small rented house last week, Ellie, as most everyone called her, even looked the role of the rumpled saint. As she rolled up her sleeves she noticed the broken button on the left cuff she'd meant for months to replace. Guilty as charged. One more thing to apologize for, assuming he would be willing to speak with her. Hadn't Matthew asked her a number of times to do this one simple task, and she, whether from forgetfulness or resistance to housewifely chores, had never risen to the occasion? She left the shirt unwashed because it still smelled of him, who had otherwise been very thorough in removing his effects when she was away last week on a long-delayed visit to her parents and sister. Well, not a visit, as such, but rather because of an emergency that required her to go. Still, whether her rare trips to Ithaca were to visit or help out with a crisis, Ellie's homecomings were always fraught, as she and her sister never much saw eye to eye about anything anymore. About politics, culture, religion, about everything under the sun they'd become polar opposites in their thinking. And like the terrestrial poles themselves, they were now as icy cold toward one another as they once, long ago, had been equatorially warm and embracing. But both parents had been injured in an automobile accident—her stepfather had a dislocated shoulder, her mother, broken ribs—and she was needed to assist for a few days, lend a hand getting them set up at home after their release from the hospital. It would have been nice if Matthew had offered to come along. Ellie wasn't a good driver, didn't like to drive, and felt wary of getting behind the wheel in light of what had just happened. But he simply couldn't get away from work. So she had left on a Tuesday morning, stayed in her old bedroom with its view of Lake Cayuga for three nights, and returned downstate late Friday to find her life modified beyond recognition. As if it were a toy box whose trove of games and puzzles some discontented child had decided he'd outgrown and on an impulse dumped into the trash.

Hudson River haze crocheted its way through the ghost-white limbs of the big sycamore out back. The viburnum was full of red berries, and birds flitted about in its long, heavy branches. It was going to be a scorcher, one of those steam-bath days. She sat down at the table in front of the row of French windows in the kitchen and took a sip of chamomile. The room, she noticed, badly needed plaster and paint. She could have made those repairs herself but somehow never got around to it. Had negligence always been her gravest shortcoming? If so, it was a shortcoming followed by many others, no doubt. She began listing names on a yellow legal pad and beside each of them wrote down misdeeds as far back as she could remember. The only sounds in the room were the scratching of a mouse family that lived inside the wall by the hutch and that of her pencil moving across paper. Before the morning was over and the sun had risen past the peak of her roof, Ellie Mead had reduced her life to a brave catalogue of apologies-in-waiting.