Rag Page 5

  The day the trial began the jurors were introduced to the murderer. Not formally: he was just there. Middle-aged, tall and slim and strong-jawed, pale in his orange suit. His hands and legs were cuffed, a chain hanging between his wrists and waist. The jurors looked at him, at first in little snatches, then openly, at length. The murderer never glanced their way. Just stared at the stand, eyes hooded, his head tipped toward his lawyer. He was a completely unremarkable person, aside from the aura of evil Martin felt radiating from him, steady, unrelenting. If the murderer moved too quickly, if he coughed or reached for his coffee, the audience jerked in their seats. Martin watched the chain swing, then go still.

  When he returned home his daughter was sitting on the couch, cross-legged, reading a textbook. What he’d told the lawyers was true—Quinn was twenty-one and rarely visited—but it was spring break, and he’d bought her a plane ticket. She didn’t hear him come in and he didn’t say hello right away. He wanted to take a shower first, get rid of the lingering sour smell of the courtroom, and then greet her, clean, murderless, but there was no way to avoid passing her on his way down the hall. He watched her for a moment, then two, her hair pooled on the pages of her book.

  Hi, he said finally. She looked up. Her skin was very thin and smooth, dewy, and her eyes, sea-green, so serious beneath pale brows.

  Aren’t you hot? he asked.

  What?

  I mean you don’t have the fan on.

  She looked over her shoulder to the standing fan, then back at him. She shrugged. No, she said.

  I’m sorry about being so late.

  It’s fine.

  Did you get some food?

  There was pasta, she said, and he saw an open container on the kitchen bar, three-quarters full.

  Good, he said. I was just going to take a shower.

  Okay … she said after a moment, in a low, slow voice, as if he’d said something stupid.

  I’m happy to see you, he said.

  She nodded, her eyes glittering in the dim light, before dipping her head back to her book.

  The next morning they showed a picture of the victim’s crotch, a splotch of mangled flesh made comprehensible only by the context of the gleaming thighs on either side, spread, perfectly white. The legs had been wiped clean, someone was saying, by the murderer. In fact all of the body had been washed, except for this part, this catastrophe, through which one could see premeditation, deliberation, intent. Distress rippled through the courtroom, hands stifling a collective groan. The murderer smiled a tiny solemn smile. I’m sorry, the prosecutor said, but you need to know what kind of person we’re dealing with. Martin rubbed the back of his neck. The prosecutor clicked through more photos: close-ups, autopsy shots, a section of carpet soaked with blood. The girl’s blond hair slipping off the side of the coroner’s steel table. An elderly female juror vomited quietly into her lap. Another woman wept as she stared at the screen. The judge ordered a recess. The crying woman rose, knocking into Martin’s knees. Sorry, she said, reaching for the wooden rail to steady herself, and as she did he glimpsed the wormlike marks on her arm, white and pink and purple, plating her skin from elbow to wrist.

  There were sandwiches and warm sodas in the break room but only two jurors, the youngest men, were eating, silent, hunched beneath the fluorescent lights. The others watched the storm dump water into the street. The women were gone, presumably in the bathroom, getting themselves together. Man, someone said, running his hand over his head. That was completely crazy. Martin plucked at the cellophane on an oatmeal cookie and thought about the young woman’s arms. She’d pushed her sleeves to the elbows, maybe to relieve some of the heat, but surely she knew that everyone could see those scars. Did the lawyers notice? Would they want someone like her serving on such a jury? You didn’t get marks like that by accident, so organized, so regular, like the lines made on a doorjamb to measure a child’s height. He got the wrapper off the cookie but didn’t eat it. The clock over the door ticked and a clerk came in to say they would be excused early and for a moment no one moved.

  It was still storming. There was no avoiding the rain that had risen an inch above the sidewalk; in one step his shoes were soaked. Martin rushed to his car with his jacket over his head. Through the windshield he saw the cutter standing on the steps, her stockinged legs dark with water, her hair plastered to her cheek. She was squinting toward the road, her lips pressed together. Rain flying right into her eyes.

  He pulled up to the curb, shouting from the window. Can I give you a ride?

  She turned, frowning, as if trying to place him. She looked back to the road, then to Martin, then to the road. Oh, she said, finally, yes, thank you.

  She ducked into the car, using both hands to shut the door against the wind.

  It’s wild out there, she said, palming her wet bangs back from her forehead. She had narrow uneven teeth, very white, and a face like a slide, concave at the top, with a long slope of a nose tipping toward a prominent, squarish chin. Her eyes were almost black, like the sleek hair cut just below her ears, dripping water beneath her collar.

  It really is something, he said, pulling onto the road. I’m Martin, by the way.

  Jill Casey-Port, she said, offering a limp, moist hand. A hideous name. He glanced at her fingers: no wedding ring. She mopped her face with a tissue from her bag. The tissue disintegrated. He tried not to look at her arms.

  Where can I take you? he asked.

  She directed him to a neighborhood where identical stucco houses sat like squat blocks on cracked asphalt lots. He felt clammy in his damp suit, the air heavy and sour inside the small car. The cutter sat with her back not quite touching the seat, her hands clasped around her crossed knees. Only an hour ago she had been weeping; now she was almost smiling. He looked at her lap. Looked away.

  It’s just here, she said, indicating a bright blue house capping a dead end, tucked deep behind a crooked chain-link fence.

  You don’t have a car? he asked, checking the clock. It had taken him thirty minutes to drive her here.

  Someone was supposed to pick me up, she said, shrugging, her face turned to the streaming window. But we got out so early.

  She wasn’t pretty. That strange sloping profile. Eyes too close together. A business student, she’d said. At the city college. She thumbed the strap of the brown vinyl purse in her lap and thanked him. No problem at all, he said. He watched her walk into the house. He wondered how often she did it, if she was going to do it now; he didn’t know much about scars but some of the marks on her arm had looked fairly fresh, still pink. He wiped the corners of his mouth with his wrist. Rain drummed the roof. The fabric of the passenger seat was soaked. He touched it. Already cold.

  He watched a movie with Quinn in the den. She had her legs tucked up beside her on the couch; he sat at the other end, an empty cushion between them. Skin, he thought, we are sitting on skin. Its seams dark with dirt. He never used the sofa when he was alone; he never used the den. On-screen someone squirted ketchup on someone else’s chest. Quinn didn’t laugh.

  What do they call girls who cut themselves? he said.

  Quinn was silent.

  Cutters, right? he prodded. You call them cutters?

  She blinked at the television. What are you talking about?

  Cutters. Cutting. It’s a thing girls do now, right?

  Anyone can—

  I know, I know, but it’s mostly girls, isn’t it? Who do it?

  Quinn curled her back to show she was disgusted by this conversation. She did the same thing when they were eating steak and she cut into a piece of fat. If that happened she put her knife down, took a sip of water, and pushed her plate away, popping her lips. No matter how lean the cut of beef was she always seemed to find something, bent over her plate, spreading the meat with her knife and gazing into the dark gash.

  I guess, why?

  No reason, he said, shifting against the sticky cushions. I just wondered.

  The cutter didn’t say any
thing to him the next morning, just stood in the security line stirring her coffee with a red straw. She wore a gray long-sleeved blouse and yesterday’s black skirt, wrinkled around the hips. There was a run in the knee of her stockings. He waited at the end of the line so he could walk into the courtroom with her. She smiled. No teeth. He smiled back. She took her seat. The murderer had laid his cuffed wrists on the table, pulling taut the chain attached to his waist. Martin couldn’t believe the boredom that saturated him as soon as he sat down. The weapon the murderer used had never been found and it took an hour just to talk about that, what it might mean, what it proved or didn’t prove. Martin pulled at his collar to get some air down his shirt. A forensics expert described the kind of weapon he thought would best make the sort of wound the victim had endured. They would not show the photos again, they promised; instead they used a drawing, black-and-white, full of numbers and arrows. The expert moved his finger eagerly over the map he’d made, describing how such and such a weapon would produce such and such a wound. You could fit the claw of this hammer very easily inside the entrance to a woman and pull upward with one stroke and this is what would happen. You’d have to hold the pelvis down with one hand, or maybe you could use your knees, crouching on top of the body as you did your work. But don’t stop there. Keep ripping. You’re strong enough. She was awake. For most of it. The murderer hadn’t gagged her; he’d wanted to hear her dying. The walls of the basement were so thick. A lock on the door. Nobody home. The expert’s finger zigzagged all over the paper. See here, he kept saying, and here, and here is where—

  Martin squeezed his palms hard between his thighs. Shut up, he thought. Oh Christ just shut the hell up.

  He brought home fried chicken for dinner. Quinn picked the skin off her drumstick and left it on the side of her plate, exposing a network of tiny black veins beneath the brown flour.

  I’m sorry I can’t give you a better time, he said as the rain slithered down the kitchen windows. I couldn’t get out of this trial thing.

  Quinn shrugged, licking her fingers. Her mother, his wife, had been dead for six years. An accident. Only recently had his daughter started this silent routine with him. He pushed a cup of Diet Coke toward her and she sipped it, a straw tucked into the side of her mouth.

  School okay? he asked.

  Fine, she said.

  He nodded. Her gauzy gray sweater was rolled high around her neck but through it, at the chest, he could see the pale edges of a camisole. He used to know when she was on her period by the gamy way she smelled, the increase in intensity of her perfume. Now she smelled like nothing, not even shampoo. If he closed his eyes he wouldn’t be able to tell where she was in the room. He closed his eyes. Dad, she said. What are you doing? He opened his eyes. There she was. He smiled.

  He was drinking. Entertaining Quinn was impossible for him to do alone, now, with the trial and no wife and barely any money. It shouldn’t be legal to put someone through this, he thought. The cost and the waste of time and all those filthy pictures and the family weeping in the front rows behind the exhausted figure of the killer, you could tell he wasn’t taking any of it in or just didn’t give a damn. His incomprehensible plea of not guilty. When there was all the evidence against him. We’re stuck in the middle of this shit, another juror had said to Martin. It’s sick. I get nightmares, I know I’m going to get nightmares. Just hang the bastard. But Martin knew that some of the others enjoyed it, striking serious poses and taking copious notes on their yellow legal pads, staring at the killer as if trying to show they understood something about him. As if anyone could understand something like that.

  He finished the bottle of wine, opened another. It was 2:00 a.m. He would have to get up in five hours. His wife had been an early riser. He had rarely woken up with her in bed beside him. Quinn was the same way, up before the sun. She used to say she didn’t like to sleep, she didn’t have good dreams. When he woke up and saw them at the breakfast table, already dressed and drinking tea, toast crust on their plates, it made him feel like he was behind. He would spend the whole day catching up, walking into rooms where they’d been talking only to see them go quiet when he entered. There had been a car accident. In a storm. Quinn in the passenger seat with a broken arm, her mother’s chest wed to the steering wheel. Quinn in the hospital shaking so hard her teeth rattled, weeping against his shoulder. Cabernet jumped down his chin and he moaned, setting the glass down, too hard. As he stood the table seemed to rush away from him. He coughed, moving down the hall to Quinn’s room. Pushing her door open.

  She was lying on her back, one hand curled next to her cheek, her body barely a ripple beneath the comforter.

  Quinn? he said. He took three steps across the white carpet and bent down to look at her face. She was so still. If her chest was moving he couldn’t tell.

  He grimaced, holding his breath, as he peeled the comforter back from her body. She was wearing the camisole; her legs were bare. Clean. The mole three inches above her left knee the same as it was when she was a child. The round scar on her arm. Her thin underwear showed the outline of her hairless labia. He leaned and turned on the lamp beside her bed. Still nothing. He exhaled, pressing his palm deep into the socket of his eye, sickened, relieved. He pulled the comforter back up, smoothing it over her shoulders. A drop of red wine on the white blanket. He turned out the light.

  My daughter came to visit, he told Jill the next morning, both of them sipping coffee.

  Oh? she said.

  Yeah. But I hardly—there just isn’t enough time, because of this, you know?

  Jill nodded, frowning in sympathy. How old’s your daughter?

  Twenty-one, he said, proud to talk about her, still: his daughter. A woman.

  Ah, Jill said, smiling, opening a packet of sugar. Some spilled on the counter and she pushed it onto the floor with the side of her hand.

  How do you get here? In the mornings? he asked.

  She blinked. What?

  Without a ride, I mean.

  I have a ride, she said, her hand shaking on the Styrofoam cup.

  You look tired.

  She shook her head. It must be hard, doing this, when you have a daughter, she said.

  Do what?

  The trial, she said. She was so young.

  Jill’s hair was too deeply black to be natural, he thought. He wondered if there was a statistic somewhere, about who got murdered more often, blondes or brunettes. Time was moving in a weird way. Slower. Jill slid past him. There was a circle of coffee on the linoleum and he wondered if it was hers. He took some napkins and dropped them over the dark liquid, watching as the white fibers turned brown.

  On Sunday Quinn sat at the table while he made breakfast. Eggs, bacon, toast. He’d said good morning; she hadn’t said anything back. Just stared at him while he was at the stove, her feet pulled up on the lip of her chair, a black sweater stretched over her knees. He put a plate in front of her and she leaned away from it.

  What? he asked. She shook her head, eyes slit, mouth set. Accusing.

  Why are you looking at me like that?

  She wiped her hands over her face and breathed. Last night, she said. God. Dad.

  He blinked at his plate, his fork frozen over his eggs, a silt in the yolk oozing yellow.

  Hm?

  On the computer. Jesus, it was right there.

  The wonder in her voice. The way she looked a bit beyond him, as if at a miracle taking place over his shoulder, the medieval kind, some saint tearing out its own eyes.

  Is it some kind of weird fetish or what? she asked.

  Fetish…?

  It’s—really bizarre, Dad.

  I’m sorry, he said, clearing his throat. He didn’t exactly know what she was talking about. Whatever she had seen must have been from weeks ago, from before the trial. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at pornography. She had the wrong idea. But he couldn’t correct it. It was his computer, anyway. Where was her own? The one he’d bought her? This was
a girl with everything. And yet she never smiled.

  She made a small movement with her head, as if to shake something off, the memory of what she’d seen or him altogether. Abruptly she stood, gathering her plate and juice glass, and took them to the sink. She was thinner, he noticed, than the last time she’d visited, the bone at the top of her neck jutting obscenely from the collar of her blouse.

  Quinn, he said, eat something. She said she wasn’t hungry. She went to her room and he thought she was doing homework but when he passed her open door he saw she was just sleeping, an hour after she’d woken, on her side with her back to him. She had always been a secretive person. He didn’t know her. He touched the doorframe and a splinter of loose wood jabbed his finger. Jesus, he said, and her foot jerked against the blanket.

  When he opened his computer the video began. A young girl, much younger than Quinn, telling the camera that she had just gone shopping. She had blue hair and purple lips, a black bra. She smiled and held up a package of razor blades. She opened the plastic with her teeth, withdrew one of the blades with a flourish. Ta-da. Now, she said, grinning, putting the blade to the camera until it filled the screen: Watch. She did each forearm, vertically, slow. She didn’t flinch. Her skin just fell away from either side of the blade and blood surged into the trenches she’d made. When she was done she set the blade down, blood falling onto a sheet of plastic beneath her feet. There, she said, holding up her arms. See? Martin gagged. He had been drunk. He didn’t remember looking for this. There were other videos in his history, from sites like Little Cutterz and Bloodfuck and EmoXXX. He felt numb. Quinn left the next day, before he even woke up. A note on the kitchen table: Thanks.