The Death Class: A True Story About Life (11 page)

Caitlin looked over at Jonathan as he mingled with the guests. Tonight he looked especially good, with his sandy brown hair gelled up at the sides in a short faux hawk and a dress shirt unbuttoned at the top.

Carefully tucked-in pink and blue cloth napkins blossomed like lily petals from the mouths of glass goblets throughout the banquet hall. Caitlin paused to smile for a photo with a friend. Black and white balloons with long ribbons tied to their ends floated around the room like guests at the party. Caitlin posed, hand on her hip, for another photo. Waiters in bow ties glided between tables, carrying trays of fizzy champagne. This party at Galloping Hills, where many people held their weddings, made her feel almost like a princess, right down to the tables with white embossed tablecloths and gold-painted chairs. Perfect.

Her sisters showed up, looking gorgeous as usual. One wore a leopard-print dress, the other a lacy white strapless minidress, outfits that did more than enough to show off their voluptuousness. For some reason Caitlin was the only one who had ended up model thin. She
resembled their mother in that way. The three sisters were so close that they each shared pieces of a necklace. Her oldest sister’s charm read, “Laugh,” while her middle sister’s read, “Love.” Caitlin’s read, “Live.”

Someone had hooked up an iPod to the stereo system in place of a live deejay, and R&B tunes bumped in the background. Yet Caitlin couldn’t help but notice that the waxy wooden dance floor was mostly empty. No one at her party was dancing.

Her mom, dad, and sisters gathered on the floor to pose with Caitlin for a banquet photo, grinning together, looking like one flawless family. It would be easy for people to look at the attractive clan with envy, oblivious to all the drama that went on at home. But if you saw the party through Caitlin’s eyes, you knew better.

She sensed that something else was off too. Caitlin glanced over at Jonathan’s younger brother, Josh. He didn’t really seem to be talking to anyone. He sat separated from the festivities, in the hallway alone, staring off into the distance with a look of silent detachment or depression. Caitlin thought Josh was a good-looking young man too, but he didn’t have his older brother’s charm and charisma. Every once in a while, she’d see Jonathan go out and try to coax his brother back inside to join the party, to no avail.

Caitlin knew that Josh didn’t care for her. She had always tried to be nice to him, but he’d made it known to Jonathan that he didn’t like being around when she was present. This party was probably the last place on earth that Josh wanted to be.

But there was something else about Josh, Caitlin thought, something suspicious, like an illness that she couldn’t quite diagnose. Whatever it was, it frightened her. Caitlin knew that Norma could tell something was wrong with Josh too. During the party, the professor had gone into the hall beyond the banquet ballroom and tried chatting with him. But Norma later told Caitlin how despondent he had been.

She smiled pretty for the camera again.

Once Caitlin had told Jonathan’s younger brother that he reminded her of Socrates, the way he philosophized in long, hard-to-decipher sentences.

Josh hadn’t responded at first.

“Does that bother you?” Caitlin had asked.

“No,” Josh had said. “That’s a compliment.”

But some of his behavior unnerved Caitlin. Josh didn’t look directly at people, and sometimes he asked weird, out-of-context questions. “Why do you always listen to Eminem when I’m in the car?” he’d accuse, as if she were listening to the music to intentionally piss him off.

Something about her boyfriend’s younger brother alarmed her. She had mentioned her concerns to Norma more than once but didn’t dare tell Jonathan. She didn’t want to upset him.

S
HE HAD BEEN
dating Jonathan for five years now, and she often stopped by to visit him in the apartment he shared with his brother. Josh was often up late playing the guitar or surfing the Internet, and he frequently slept in and missed his classes, until one day he had missed too many days and found out he was going to fail a grade.

Josh convinced his brothers that it would be best for him to become a homeschooled student. He had researched the process on the Internet and even found an adult mentor who worked in education to help him organize his transcripts, monitor his homework assignments, and apply for college. Caitlin saw Jonathan’s reasoning for going along with his brother’s idea at first; maybe Josh was too smart for school and simply got bored.

Josh signed up and began completing assignments. But he complained that the mentor was harassing and pushing him too hard. He asked too many questions and made him think too much. Josh stuck with him anyway, because he wanted to earn a diploma. He made it clear to everyone: he wanted to go to Harvard University. Not Princeton. Nowhere else. Just Harvard. He’d scored high enough on his SATs that he might have even had a shot at Harvard, but a Princeton recruiter requested an interview instead.

Caitlin could see how thrilled Jonathan was for his brother; the two spent hours practicing interview questions together, even though Josh told him again: he didn’t care about Princeton, only Harvard. Jonathan drove Josh to the interview anyway. It took place in a huge, fancy house,
and he eavesdropped from outside a door. The woman was a psychologist, and Jonathan got her card to give to Caitlin. He recounted to her later what he had overheard in the interview.

“What would you do with your degree?” she asked Josh.

“I don’t know,” Josh replied. That was all he said. No elaboration. He answered every question with a short answer, sometimes just one word.

Jonathan told Caitlin that his brother had blown it, and he appeared to be right. Princeton did not take him. But Josh received his diploma from his online studies anyway, and to his brothers’ surprise, he got accepted into Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut—on a scholarship.

Jonathan bragged about it to all of his friends. Caitlin remained supportive. How could she not? How would that look? Her boyfriend’s brother had outsmarted the public school system and made it into one of the best colleges in the nation. She knew Jonathan had never fancied himself an Ivy League scholar, but his brother, as he saw it, must have been a genius. Caitlin didn’t want to ruin that gratification for any of them.

She listened to Jonathan’s stories about Josh at Wesleyan. He seemed to have made a few friends. When his brothers visited, Josh took them to a campus party, and the three played Ping-Pong in the dorm.

But after a few weeks at Wesleyan, Josh reverted to his usual negative self, complaining about everyone around him, telling his brother, “People suck here. They’re so liberal and stupid. . . . They’re all rich. . . . They don’t know anything.” He earned Cs, Ds, and Fs his first semester. Within six months, he dropped out. He’d started reading books about surviving in the woods and decided he wanted to backpack through Europe. He told his brothers he wanted to live in Morocco, Portugal, and Spain, and the next thing Caitlin heard, he’d taken off.

A few weeks later, Josh returned and decided he was moving to Washington, D.C. Jonathan told Caitlin he couldn’t figure it out. Josh had no family there. No friends. No contacts at all.

Caitlin’s suspicions intensified. The White House was in D.C. The president of the United States. The Pentagon. Some people with mental illnesses, she knew, became obsessed with the government.

Jonathan went to visit Josh in D.C. one weekend, and he later described the trip to Caitlin. He’d found his brother living in a homeless shelter. Josh had acted as if it were normal. He’d even asked him to spend the night there too.

“I’m not sleeping in a homeless shelter!” Jonathan had replied. “Why don’t you come home with me? Just come
home.
”

Josh had refused. He’d told his brother just to give him a little while. He’d leave the shelter and move into an apartment. He’d work as a waiter—but he wasn’t leaving D.C.

Jonathan went home and showed up at Caitlin’s house a few weeks later with tears in his eyes. He described a phone call he’d received from Josh.

“Don’t do anything illegal,” Josh had said to him, sobbing.

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t do anything illegal,” Josh had said again, adding “They’re watching us.”

Jonathan told Caitlin he couldn’t figure it out. Had Josh killed someone? Was he running from the law? All he knew was that Josh was coming home this time. He’d arranged to catch a train back to New Jersey.

Caitlin couldn’t bring herself to say it to Jonathan, but she wondered if someone could really be watching or stalking Josh. She thought of her psychology lessons, all the warning signs she’d learned, and her conversations with Norma.

Or was he having a delusion?

D
ELUSIONS
,
C
AITLIN UNDERSTOOD
, come up in a mentally ill person’s mind very clearly, mostly manifesting in the idea that people are conspiring against you, devising a plan to do something bad to you. Maybe the conspirators are part of the FBI, the CIA, or the White House. Or maybe they’re aliens. Delusions are sometimes coupled with hallucinations, such as seeing things that are not there, but more often take the form of sounds, often of voices that seem very real. In extreme manic episodes, bipolar people sometimes experience delusions or hallucinations.

So do schizophrenics.

As Caitlin had learned, schizophrenia is a disease that also usually struck people around their teen and college years. Josh was twenty-one. One percent of the world’s population suffers from schizophrenia, and genetics also plays a powerful role in a person’s susceptibility to it. Like depression and bipolar disorder, it has been shown to have links to environmental triggers; a particularly rough childhood or high-stress social setting such as college can play a role in setting off schizophrenia in a person who is genetically predisposed to the disease. Paranoid schizophrenics often can’t stop believing that people are plotting against them, jealous of them, or spying on them.

Caitlin knew that many mental illnesses are passed on through genes. The more she learned about Josh’s behavior, the more she wanted answers about their father, even if her boyfriend didn’t feel the need to know.

She worried that Josh might be capable of the same kind of violence as their father. He might even hurt Jonathan.

“I
THINK
J
ON’S
brother has schizophrenia,” Caitlin told Norma. “I think his dad had it too.”

“You should tell Jon,” Norma advised her. He needed to know if his brother had a mental illness. They needed to get Josh into the right kind of treatment.

But Caitlin was too scared to broach the subject—until one night.

Jonathan and Caitlin went out for dinner together, and on the drive, Caitlin started explaining what she had learned about schizophrenia in school. “I think that’s what your dad had, and that’s why he killed your mom,” she said gently. “Maybe Josh has it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Jonathan shouted. He swerved the car, turning around, and headed back home. Dinner was off.

“You’re right,” Caitlin said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

“You have no idea what it’s like to be Josh,” Jonathan kept on, “what his life has been like, what he’s been through!”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have judged.”

She told herself never to bring it up again.

T
HE LOUD NOISE
that woke Jonathan and Caitlin that summer morning in 2008 sounded as if it had come from the kitchen. It wasn’t a scream, like the noises that had awakened Jonathan on the day his dad had stabbed his mom, but rather a bang that could have been anything—a door slamming or kitchenware falling. He looked over at Caitlin, now wide awake beside him, her hair tousled. Almost a month had passed since Jonathan had thrown Caitlin the graduation party. The look on Caitlin’s face told him she thought the sound was an indication of something worse, but Jonathan couldn’t help himself from partially dismissing her fear, again.

He told Caitlin he would go check it out, so she stayed behind in the bedroom. Once in the kitchen, Jonathan didn’t notice anything out of order. The apartment was quiet. Josh must have been in his room sleeping, or on the computer as usual.

Jonathan opened the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of water. He turned around and ended up eye to eye with his younger brother.

Of the three brothers, Jonathan knew he and Josh looked the most alike. They were the same height and shared the same thin-lipped smile, same bushy eyebrows. Josh was a few shadows bulkier that Jonathan but was still fit, and he wore his hair longer, shaggy, and parted loosely down the middle. He didn’t invest as much time in his appearance as Jonathan. Josh didn’t care about fashion at all, and his face always bore traces of red acne around his forehead and cheeks, a teenage trait he had not yet outgrown by twenty-one. But that morning, Jonathan thought, his brother looked particularly disheveled and out of it, with his chest puffed out and his eyes stretched wide open.

“Josh, what’s up?” Jonathan asked.

His brother erupted. “Don’t fucking look at me! Don’t stare at me. Don’t look into my eyes!”

“What?” Jonathan said. “I’m just getting water.”

“Look away!”

What
the hell was wrong with his brother? Josh had been acting weird for months now, but this was a whole different level.

Josh warned him again. “Don’t look at me!”

But Jonathan looked anyway.

Jonathan felt the first punch fly at his face. Another blow to his chest. Jonathan threw up his arms and tried to block his brother’s throws. Why was Josh hitting him? What had he done?

He felt Josh shove him into a column in the living room. The impact tore a bloody gash through his arm. Jonathan knew he had to fight back, even though he had no clue as to why they were fighting. He charged toward his brother, tackling him onto the ground.

“Why are you trying to hurt me, Josh? I love you!”