One of Us (3 page)

As a forensic psychologist, I do most of my work on the road, conducting clinical interviews and psychological testing in prisons, mental hospitals, and the offices of prosecutors and defense attorneys. I also spend a fair amount of time in court and in TV studios, sitting on small uncomfortable sofas in faux living rooms with thickly made-up talking heads clutching huge mugs of coffee asking me to provide commentary on cases that they never bothered to research.

I could easily dispense with having my own physical office, but I like being able to say I have one. Years ago when I first hired Max I believed I didn’t need a secretary either, but again, I wanted to be able to say I had one.

The first time I met him he was a woman named Stacy in her midthirties, doped up in a hospital bed, her face purple and swollen beyond recognition, arm fractured in two places, three broken ribs, having just been told by the detective who took her statement that there was a strong possibility charges would be filed against her for the death of her lesbian live-in girlfriend who she had just killed claiming self-defense by stabbing her in the neck with a pair of scissors.

When I told her I was a psychologist, she picked up a pen the cop had left behind and wrote “fuck you” on the back of her hand, which she held up to me in a fist.

After she regained the use of her jaw, I interviewed her once. If it was possible, she looked even worse than she did after being beaten. She was a frail, jittery mess of bony limbs, stringy striped blond and black hair, dull eyes sunk into deep pools of shadow, and cracked lips clamped on a succession of cigarettes she wasn’t allowed to light. Her case didn’t go to trial. She wasn’t charged. I had forgotten all about her by the time she contacted me almost eight years later.

I agreed to meet her for coffee and was stunned by her transformation. A well-spoken, smartly dressed, egg-shaped man with the stare and calm implacability of an owl greeted me. His entire appearance re
minded me of the bird: short spiky reddish-brown hair, large round-framed glasses, a fitted velveteen jacket swirled in shades of gray paisley. He wore a bracelet of glass beads and feathers.

He explained that back when he was a she after her near brush with death and even closer brush with love gone bad, she did what many women do in these situations who don’t turn to God: she turned to carbohydrates.

He then produced a picture of an extremely large woman. He explained that this had been him. She had lost sixty pounds. He still had forty to go.

He then went on to tell me that what had finally made him turn his life around, to not only quit all addictive behaviors, but go back to school and get a degree and also change his sex, was a quote he had read in one of my books.

I was more than a little surprised. I don’t write self-help books or anything remotely inspirational or motivational. I write about killers.

“‘
What lies in our power to do, lies in our power not to do,’” he recited to me over a skim milk latte. “That includes accepting our gender,” he added.

I told him the quote was from Aristotle, not me.

He said he didn’t care; I was the next best thing.

Today he looks like a different kind of bird. With his hair shellacked in the center of his head like a crest, his eyes outlined in black, and wearing a satiny azure pantsuit, he’s the personification of a blue jay.

We make small talk then settle down to business. He perches on the corner of my desk and opens a red suede day planner with
LIFE
written across it in tiny crystals.

“We could’ve had this conversation over the phone,” he tells me.

“I know.”

“You wanted to say good-bye to your office.”

I look around me. Unlike my home, my office reveals more of a personality, although it’s not truly mine and it’s not even entirely reflective of the personality I’ve adopted since leaving my hometown and making my way in the world.

The walls are pale blue, the color chosen because it made an ideal
background for my two Velázquez drawings and the Seurat, and the two charcoal studies of avenging angels mimicking the style of Michelangelo, as well as my diplomas and framed photographs of me posing with Larry King; Nancy Grace; Matt Lauer; Governor Corbett; the Wishbone Killer; Liza Minnelli; Johnnie Cochran; the Scranton Bomber, Senator Casey; Kelly Ripa; a half dozen feathery, bedazzled showgirls (conference in Las Vegas); Siegfried and Roy (same conference); Jane Fonda; Dr. Phil; Dr. Drew; Dr. Ruth; Dr. Oz; Dr. Sussmann (my internist); and Earth, Wind & Fire.

The sofa and my chair are upholstered in warm rust. My desk is a reproduction of an eighteenth-century, severely male monstrosity but scaled down enough to get through the office door. A china figurine of a collie is displayed prominently next to my banker’s lamp, a reminder of the dog I never had.

There’s a quiet flamboyance in the decoration of the room that gives the people who come here something to think about if they find it necessary to think about me at all.

“What a strange thing to say.”

He raises his eyebrows at me.

“You haven’t heard yourself talking these last few days. You sound like you’re going off to war.”

“It is hostile territory.”

He lets the subject go. We know just enough about each other’s personal lives to realize we don’t want to know anything else.

“Make sure you get in touch with your publicist,” he begins. “She wants to go over some details of your upcoming book tour and begin lining up interviews. Also give your editor a call to tell her how much you like the cover.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“It doesn’t matter. Say you do. It’s a good author photo of you at least.”

“I look aloof.”

“You are aloof. We finally have a shoot date for the episode of
Blood, Lies & Alibis
. You’ve also been asked to be a commentator on an episode of
Deadly Affairs
. A stripper who had her boyfriend kill her husband then
had another boyfriend kill the first boyfriend. They want an expert to explain that she wasn’t a sociopath, just someone who craved constant attention and wasn’t able to solve her own problems.”

“You’ve just described everyone on Facebook,” I say.

“And you’ve been asked to do an episode of
Women Who Kill
.” He pauses. “But I went ahead and passed on that one.”

I nod. Another subject we don’t need to get into.

“You have three active cases right now. The personal-history notes, test results, copies of the police statements, et cetera, are all here.”

He pats a stack of folders sitting next to him on the desk.

“I’ve emailed you dockets, dates . . .”

He waves his hand in the air signifying more “et cetera.”

“I’ve gone through your website email and there were a few requests from students I’ve forwarded on to you. As always I’ve taken care of the women and the crazies.

He snaps the planner shut and stands up, signifying it’s time for me to go. He’s right about me not needing to see him in person. We could’ve had this conversation over the phone.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asks me.

“Of course I’m going to be okay.”

“You need a girlfriend.”

“No one
needs
a girlfriend.”

“You need a friend.”

“I have friends.”

“Friends you actually see.”

“My friends aren’t imaginary.”

“That’s not what I mean. How about a pet?”

“I have Sal.”

“He’s your tailor.”

He helps me into my overcoat. The thought behind the gesture is feminine, but the forceful way he shoves the garment onto my shoulders is masculine. This is typical of Max’s androgyny. Meeting him for the first time people are never sure if he’s a woman with no waistline and the hands of a meat packer or a man with a girlish smile and too much love of texture.

“I’m fine,” I tell him.

He takes a moment to scribble on the back of his hand with a washable marker like he did during our first meeting. It’s a private joke between us and something he always does whenever I travel.

He holds up his fist.

For the first time since we’ve begun this tradition the words startle me. They’re no longer a jest but advice from someone who has stumbled upon the fact that my deepest fear and deepest desire are the same.

COME BACK
is written there.

I PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE
rented an SUV. The roads can be treacherous this time of year, but I couldn’t bear the thought of making the four-hour drive in anything less than the glove-leather comfort and sealed silence of my Jag.

I leave the wind and snow behind me. The interstate is clear of ice and for a little while, a heatless sun manages to shine through the clouds. As I approach the humped, shrugging shoulders of the rolling mountains from my boyhood, they prove to be strangely comforting, the lines of stripped trees sprouting from the pale earth reminding me of an old man’s stubble.

It’s not until I leave the main roads and take the unmarked turn off Route 56 between Hellersburg and Coulter that the uneasiness starts to get the better of me. I speed past the scattered roadside knots of run-down homes with porches draped in Steelers black and gold and enter country so suffocating in its silent grimness, I immediately long for any sign of mankind, even the shuttered King Kone.

The trees press too closely against the crumbling shoulders of old blacktop. The light seems to shrink. The hills crowd uncomfortably near. Even knowing the thought is nonsense, I wish they would take a few steps back.

A little farther along and the forest begins to thin, then drops away into hillside farms in varying degrees of decay. Some with all their buildings standing. Others with only a house and the skeleton of a red-blistered barn. Still others are nothing but a weed-filled cel
lar or a lone chimney with snarls of fallen barbed wire lying about.

After a sharp deadly bend marked with a cluster of small plastic crosses and artificial flowers, a collection of houses can be seen at the end of a coiled, shedding snake of a road. The usual words used to describe towns situated at the bottom of valleys—huddled, nestled, snuggled, cradled—don’t seem to apply. This one looks like it’s been spit there.

It used to be a well-tended place back when the mines were still operating. At one time it was home to two thousand people; now only a little over two hundred reside here, not even enough to fill a single cell block in the prison I just left.

The houses sag and need paint. Broken windows are stuffed with rags and driveways are blocked with disabled cars on cinder blocks. Yards are filled with every kind of junk imaginable, from discarded washing machines and bent bicycle frames to old mattresses and green Hefty garbage bags bursting with beer cans. Behind it all sit the watchful hills with a huge gaping wound of strip mining slashed across them. Some colossal earth-moving equipment is still parked there even though it’s been silent for years, a constant reminder that even the biggest machines can be bested.

The history of the entire region summed up in a glance: Man ruins Nature; Nature ruins Man.

I begin my descent down the hill toward a town whose infamy makes the cheerful greeting of a welcome sign unnecessary and somehow cruel. The relief a visitor feels once he leaves is how he knows he’s just been to Lost Creek.

two

T
OMMY’S NOT HOME WHEN
I arrive. I’m not surprised. When I told him I was coming he began ranting about how he was going to have his doctor’s medical license revoked for violating his patient confidentiality, how he was stronger and healthier than I could ever hope to be, and how the crime-ridden, godforsaken city of Philadelphia with its pedophiles, pickpockets, and pathetic excuse for a football team needed me much more than he did, but I expected his bluster.

Twelve years have passed since I last set foot in my hometown. Once my mom began her revolving-door lifestyle with various mental health care facilities in the region before ending up at White Hospital, I stopped making my yearly Christmas visits. It wasn’t a difficult sacrifice. Holidays had never been pleasant occasions for us. For most families they’re a time to celebrate what they have; for us they’ve always been reminders of what we’ve lost.

I still saw Tommy from time to time when I’d visit Mom. Wherever she happened to be, he’d meet me there and we’d have a meal afterward that he called dinner and I called a late lunch. The get-togethers never went well, though, and now standing on his front porch I realize I made a mistake trying to separate him from this place.

I push open his door, never expecting for one moment that it could be locked.

The curtains are drawn. I turn on all the lights in the small front
room bursting with books. The bits of wall not taken up with shelves are covered with travel posters of Ireland and amateurish paintings of rural Irish life where every man is pink-faced and clad in some shade of green and every woman smiles beatifically at one of the multitude of children clinging to her skirts.

In the midst of all this serene Celtic lushness, the only representation of Irish life in America that Tommy has seen fit to display is a framed photo of one of the memorial services held for the Nellies each year on the date of their execution. A group of men wearing white pillowcases over their heads with heavy nooses tied around their necks stand silently in front of the gallows. Their bound hands hold flickering candles.

I purposely keep my back to Fiona, choosing instead to greet Tommy’s prized flea-bitten mounted deer head first. His antlers are strewn with ball caps, random pieces of string and wire, the set of house keys Tommy never uses, a Terrible Towel, and a string of twinkle lights. I stroke his velvety nose the same way I used to as a child, only then I had to stand on the couch to reach him.

I can feel Fiona watching me, so I give up and turn around. If it’s possible, she’s grown even more fearsome.

She stares out at me from the heavy wood frame, where she sits stiffly and primly in a straight-backed chair with her hands folded in her lap. Her once long dark curls are pulled severely to the top of her head in a wiry gray knot and her lips are clamped together in a face that’s covered in hairline cracks, as if it’s made of a fine bone china and someone’s tapped it all over with a spoon.

In my fifth-grade geography class we learned about Aborigines in Australia who wouldn’t let outsiders take their photographs because they were convinced the camera would capture their souls. I was sure my great-great-grandmother Fi believed the opposite, that the camera was a way to preserve her soul and release it long after she was dead on members of an unsuspecting generation who were only trying to relax after school and watch reruns of
Gilligan’s Island
.

I never came right out and told Tommy I was afraid of her photograph, but one day I did get up the nerve to ask him if pictures could be haunted. I should have known better.

Of course they can, he said.

I set down my bags and head to the kitchen. It’s an extension of the front room; the only sign one has become the other is the difference in flooring and smell. The brownish-orangey carpet gives way to pinkish-gray linoleum and the scent of musty cushions and Bengay becomes the stench of cooking grease and burnt stuff.

The table is covered with one of the many cloths my mom used to embroider during her manic phases. This one she completed when she was hugely pregnant with Molly not long before she went to prison. I remember her sitting on the couch with the material draped over what used to be a lap I could sit on, but what had become a monstrous growth she insisted was a baby, while I was convinced it was the biggest kick ball from school that had recently gone mysteriously missing. Her fingers darted above and below the circle of fabric pulled taut in its frame, making small pings like sprinkles of birdseed bouncing off a drum.

Her skill was impressive, but to me it was also frightening. Like everything my mom did, I knew the calm of her competence was only a prelude to a crushing fall or an explosive launch, neither of which could be controlled by anyone, least of all her. Were the stitches going to eventually slow into a week she’d spend curled up in bed staring at a wall too depressed to even wipe the drool from her chin? Or were they going to quicken into a whirlwind of activity and jabbering explanations that I’d helplessly endure until the inevitable crash into full-blown hysteria and danger?

I run my fingers over the top of the faded blue fabric. It used to be a vivid turquoise edged with smiling suns, smirking stars, laughing clouds, winking moons, and dancing rainbows. I loved it but fought the love I felt. I had to find something wrong with it and I did. It wasn’t the human qualities she gave to the celestial bodies that bothered me, but the fact that she mixed day and night.

The guilt comes rushing at me, and I don’t try to get out of the way. I’ve become adept over the years at keeping it at bay for long stretches of time. It used to lap at me constantly like the tiny whitecaps that whispered around my ankles after a speedboat went by while I waded in the
reservoir swimming area holding my mommy’s hand. Now I save it up and let it knock me down all at once like a tsunami.

All the times I didn’t visit her in prison. All the times I haven’t visited her since. My inability to forgive her even though I know none of it was her fault. My inability to help her then and help her now.

As always my guilt can’t be separated from my bitterness and it comes pouring over me as well.

What about the times I did visit her in prison? How many little kids could handle that? And the times I have visited her since despite the inconvenience to my personal life and my career and the toll it takes on me emotionally? What about my ability to forgive her enough to have a relationship with her at all? My ability to keep her in first-rate homes and hospitals while others in her situation are left to rot in appalling institutions or abandoned to the streets?

The battering ceases. The waves subside. My black thoughts slip from shore back into the depths of my psyche where they will wait gathering their strength again.

Once again, bitterness trumped guilt. I wearied a long time ago asking why her? But it seems I will never be able to let go of why me?

I look at the tabletop again and notice a bag of Wise potato chips and a bottle of Jameson whiskey sitting in the middle of it, Tommy’s idea of lunch. He’s never been what I’d call a healthy eater, but his diet used to be a little better when he also had to occasionally feed me. At this juncture in his life he subsists entirely on alcohol, salty snack food, and charred animal flesh. I suppose I have no right to criticize. He’s lived to be ninety-six. I should probably urge him to start his own fitness empire. We could call it Swill and Grill Your Way to a Better You.

Nothing has changed since the last time I was here. Nothing has changed since I was a boy. This failure to evolve is one of the things that used to drive me crazy about Lost Creek and its inhabitants, a betrayed, conquered people enslaved by the notion the jobs may come back; a company town without a company.

I walk to the back door and look out at the identical rooftops spilling down the hill. I couldn’t understand why people didn’t move where the jobs were. What was the appeal of this crappy little town? Or if they
were determined to stay, why not try and make it better? And one of the ways to do this would be to encourage people to be smart instead of beating them up for it.

My eyes begin to search out the roof of my father’s house and I pull them away, dropping my gaze to the floor where I find a collection of Tommy’s footwear sitting on a mat: mud-caked work boots, ratty old-man slippers, and a pair of rubber wellies. The contrast between them and the toes of my own glossy mahogany Louis Vuitton loafers temporarily immobilizes me.

My earliest memories of my father are of his feet. Not flesh over bones, or cracked yellowed toenails, calluses, corns, blisters, bunions, random sproutings of dark wiry hair, or whatever else might have been hidden beneath his work boots, but the leather, steel, and hard rubber soles that he wore every day to do his job.

I knew every scuff on them, every bit of unraveling stitching. I marveled at how long a pebble could stay stuck in the same piece of tread. They’d walk toward me and come to a stop inches away from my face where it was stuck to the floor with blood or vomit or sometimes just the gummy spills of a kitchen now that Mom was no longer around to clean it. I smelled mud and motor oil and, amazingly, beer. How could even his boots smell like beer?

“What’d you say to me?” he’d always ask after I hit the ground.

I took him literally. I’d try with all my might but could never recall what I’d said to upset him. Can I have another piece of bread? I got a star on my math test?

He’d slowly dig his metal-tipped toe deep into my shrunken belly while I looked up and concentrated on the red, white, and blue enamel of his American-flag belt buckle that I secretly coveted, knowing if he were to read my thoughts he’d kill me.

He didn’t believe in sharing. I often thought this philosophy was behind his dislike of me. His son was one of his possessions, and I was the boy who lived inside him and was making him be someone my dad didn’t want him to be.

Thinking about both my parents at the same time would overwhelm me no matter where I was, but doing it here amplifies the pain.
The little house suddenly feels claustrophobic. Tommy could be anywhere driving around in his rust-freckled, mint-green Chevy truck, the two of them coughing and sputtering together, looking for someone to annoy or charm depending on how you feel about him. I have no way to find him. He doesn’t have a cell phone. He could be gone for hours.

I change and go for a run.

I start off with the lofty intention of at least ten miles, but the day is cold and my muscles aren’t willing after all those hours sitting in a car. A couple miles out of town, I decide to loop back, my purpose for running in the first place having already been served. I don’t do it to stay in shape or clear my head or puff up my ego with my latest PR. I do it because roughly once a day I’m overcome by a fear of being caught.

When I reach the stone wall surrounding the old jail the same human instinct that makes us all slow down and gape at car wrecks makes me slow to a jog and glance inside the entrance at the cracked walls covered in graffiti, the muddy ice patches, the disintegrating brick jailhouse, and the black specter of the gallows standing in the middle of it all.

The structure looms, sinister in its simplicity and inexplicable permanence. The platform sits on top of a twelve-foot-high scaffold now black with age. One of the trapdoors dangles open. Two are missing altogether. Most of the steps are rotted through. A perverse bird has built a nest on one of the crossbars and no one has dared to remove it.

With the advent of ghost town Internet sites and TV shows about the paranormal, the amount of tourists has increased sharply, but I think these particular visitors are often disappointed in what they find.

Searchers of terror are a type of thrill seeker who crave the excitement of the discovery, the scare, the escape, and Lost Creek offers none of this. The horror here is real but it’s out in the open, in the light, and can’t be left behind once confronted. The gallows are terrifying not because they’re haunted by the dead but because they were conceived by the living.

The prison and the courtyard are cared for by the long-suffering members of the Nellie O’Neill Society, aka the NONS, a rebel offshoot of the local historical society that has always vigorously asserted the exe
cuted miners’ innocence. They conduct guided tours on weekends, maintain a museum in Nora Daley’s attic, provide the hoods and nooses for the annual memorial service along with the baked goods, and have been trying to raise funds for a commemorative statue for as long as I can remember.

They also employ an unpaid groundskeeper named Parker Hopkins, who works for beer and the sheer joy of riding a tractor mower. This time of year he spends most of his time in Kelly’s Kwik Shop across the road drinking instant hot chocolate laced with peppermint schnapps, lamenting the lack of money in the budget for a snowblower.

But no one is here in the middle of a cold January weekday.

I’m about to turn and leave when I notice something lying on the ground near the gallows. I think I know what it is but it can’t be. I have to check it out.