“Do you miss her?”
“Every second of every day.” That, at least, sounded sincere.
“Is that why they made you come here? Because you killed someone?”
“No. No one made me come here. It was my idea. I’ve been depressed, very horribly depressed, for a long time. I thought they might be able to help me here.”
So Jimmy had been partly correct.
“Why didn’t you go to prison?”
“I was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.” He gave a short, hollow laugh. “Not to brag or anything, but it’s pretty rare, that verdict. It’s just, like, me and that lady who cut off her husband’s dick.”
Katherine winced. “How did you get it, then?”
“Well, I had a pretty good lawyer, and no criminal history. I think the judge could tell, you know, that I really loved her. That I never would have done something like that to her if I was in my right mind. And well, you know, it probably helped a lot that I’m white.”
Oh great, thought Katherine. A racially sensitive murderer.
“I was in a mental hospital for two months. Jesus, if you think you meet some weirdos here …”
He grinned, the kind of grin Katherine had always been a sucker for, both broad and apologetic, revealing a single dimple on the left side of his face.
“Wow,” she said. She moved her feet in circles around the dirty water, not looking at him.
“Why did you have a knife with you?” she asked, finally. “Where did you get it?”
“The knife?” He seemed confused for a moment. “Oh. It belonged to my friend Sam. He was into outdoorsy stuff, hiking, all that. It was a survival knife.”
“That’s kind of ironic,” Katherine said.
His face darkened. He looked more sad than angry, and Katherine was so embarrassed that in her haste to change the subject, she didn’t realize that he hadn’t really answered her question.
He continued. “When I got out of the hospital, I moved back home. None of my old friends wanted anything to do with me. Which I understand. Even my family was nervous around me. I had dreams about Sara all the time. Nightmares, really. It got to a point where I could barely tell when I was sleeping and when I was awake, because I was so fucking tired. And I couldn’t talk to anyone about it.”
Katherine nodded. However weird and incomprehensible the rest of his story was to her, she knew what it was like to be that lonely.
“I’m an alcoholic,” she said, even though he probably already knew that. “I was a party girl in college. I had lots of friends. We had so much fun. But then everyone else grew up and moved on, and I didn’t.”
She felt stupid after she said it—why was she trying to convince him they had something in common? But he nodded, and said, kindly: “It’s hard, feeling alone.”
“Is being here good for you? Does it help?”
“Yes. I like the routine. I like talking to people. I like talking to you.”
“Before I came here, I got so drunk, I almost died. In the hospital, I stopped breathing twice.” She paused. “I was legally dead.” Actually, she was uncertain of the precise legal parameters of death, but she was pretty sure that she was telling the truth. “But that’s not why I came here. I came here because my parents said they would stop sending me money if I didn’t. I was more scared of not having money than I was of being dead.”
He nodded, slowly. “That makes sense, actually. Often death is too abstract for people to process fully. Especially young people. Money is just more real.”
He was right, of course. She felt a small lift inside her chest, like a window opening, cool air rushing in.
Years ago, while she was taking time off from college, Katherine worked at a bookstore in her hometown. One day, a woman came in to purchase books for someone in prison. The whole process was complicated, but being the nice liberals that they were, Katherine and her co-worker helped the woman sort it out. The books she chose were The Stone Diaries and Amsterdam. Later Katherine’s co-worker looked up the name of the recipient and discovered that he was serving ten years for the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. “Well, at least she didn’t send him Lolita,” said Katherine, a little too blithely. Doing a bad thing doesn’t make you a bad person, Lucy had said, more than once. It was comforting, but at some point, it must cease to be true. There must be a certain threshold of bad things that did in fact reflect on your character. It’s just that no one was really qualified to make that call.
And what about forgiveness? Certain things had to be unforgivable, otherwise the whole concept was meaningless.
So Katherine had never cut anyone’s throat or run them over with a car. She was still selfish, impulsive, destructive, an embarrassment to her family, a toddler inside the body of a grown woman. There’s more than enough time for redemption, Arthur told her, more than once. That’s why you’re so lucky you got here while you’re still young.
So, what, should she spend the rest of her life volunteering in fucking soup kitchens?
“Well,” Arthur replied, “I was thinking more along the lines of, getting a fucking job.”
A job. Something benign, maybe at a library. Or a vet’s office. She’d always loved animals, and maybe she could get used to the smell. A job, AA meetings, a shitty little apartment with plants on the windowsill, new friends, a cat, perhaps, dinner with her parents every week, grocery shopping, laundry, falling asleep in front of the television.
One day at a time, that’s what addicts were supposed to live by, and Katherine had to admit there was a certain appeal to that. Who couldn’t make it through one day at a time? But days turn into weeks, into years, into lifetimes, and then one day you were dead, with nothing to show for yourself except maybe you hadn’t fucking killed anybody.
She forgave Blake, but it was irrelevant. She didn’t forgive him because he deserved it, but because she loved him, and she probably only loved him because he was handsome and kind to her and also because they were stuck in this muggy self-righteous hellhole together. However much joy he brought her, it could not possibly equal the sorrow he brought to others. It’s not that precise of an equation, Arthur might say. But it was still one worth considering.
Katherine left Paradise Lake and moved back to Oregon, to her parents’ house. She and her dad put a cot and a small desk in the attic so that she could have a little privacy while living with them. They also painted the walls white, with a blue trim. It reminded her, not unpleasantly, of a baby’s bedroom.
She got a job at a shoe store. To her surprise, she liked working there. She liked making small talk with customers, smiling at them, giving them compliments. The constant facade of happiness actually made her a little happier. Arthur would probably have something to say about that. Twice a week, she went to an AA meeting. Sometimes she took the bus, and sometimes one of her parents drove her.
The very first day her parents left her in the house alone, she went online to look for information about the girl Blake killed. There was almost nothing. Did college boys just murder their girlfriends so often that it was no longer newsworthy? It took her twenty minutes to find an article from the Dutchess County Weekly. It was headlined COLLEGE SLASHER FOUND INSANE. The article itself was behind a paywall. Katherine tried to sign up for a free trial period, but the website required a credit card. She didn’t have a credit card. Her parents had confiscated her debit card two years ago, and they kept their credit cards in a safe or on their persons at all times.