Ben grinned at that. “He’s living in a toxic waste dump. Ha.”
“He says Diondra Wertzner was your girlfriend, that you got her pregnant. That she was pregnant and you two were together, the night of the murders.”
Ben put a hand over his face, his fingers splayed. I could see his eyes blink through them. He talked with his face still covered, and I couldn’t hear what he said. He tried twice, me asking each time what he was saying, and on the third try he pulled his head up, chewing on the inside of his cheek, and leaned in.
“I said, what the fuck is your obsession with Diondra? You got a goddam bee in your bonnet about this, and you know what’s going to happen, you’re going to fuck all this up. You had a chance to believe in me, to do the right thing and finally believe in your brother. Who you know. Don’t say you don’t because that’s a lie. I mean, don’t you get it, Libby? It’s the last chance for us. The world can believe I’m guilty, believe I’m innocent, we both know I’m not going anywhere. There’s no DNA going to release me—there’s no goddam house anymore. So. I’m not getting out. So. The only person I care, to say they know I couldn’t have murdered my family, is you.”
“You can’t blame me for wondering whether—”
“Of course I can. Of course I can. I can blame you for not believing in me. Now, I can forgive you for your lie, for getting confused, as a kid. I can forgive that. But goddamit, Libby, what about now? You’re what, thirty-some years old, and still believe your own blood could do something like that?”
“Oh I totally believe my own blood could do that,” I said, my anger surging up, bumping against my ribs. “I totally believe our blood is bad. I feel it in me. I’ve beaten the shit out of people, Ben. Me. I’ve busted in doors and windows and … I’ve killed things. Half the time I look down, my hands are in fists.”
“You believe we’re that bad?”
“I do.”
“Even with Mom’s blood?”
“Even with.”
“Well, I’m sad for you, little girl.”
“Where is Diondra?”
“Let it go, Libby.”
“What’d you do with the baby?”
I felt queasy, fevered. If the baby had lived, it’d be (he’d be, she’d be), what, twenty-four years old. The baby wasn’t a baby anymore. I tried to picture an adult, but my brain kept bouncing back an image of a blanket-swaddled infant. But hell, I could barely picture me as an adult. My next birthday I’ll be thirty-two, my mom’s age when she was killed. She’d seemed so grown up. More grown up than I’d ever be.
So if it was alive, the baby was twenty-four. I had one of my awful visions. A might-have-been vision. Us, if everyone had lived, at home in Kinnakee. There’s Michelle in the living room, still fiddling with her oversized glasses, bossing around a bundle of kids who roll their eyes at her but do what they’re told. Debby, chubby and chattery with a big, blond farmer-husband and a special room in her own farmhouse for crafts, packed with sewing ribbons and quilting patches and glue guns. My mom, ripe-fifties and sunbaggy, her hair mostly white, still bickering pleasantly with Diane. And into the room comes Ben’s kid, a daughter, a redhead, a girl in her twenties, thin and assured, bangly bracelets on delicate wrists, a college graduate who doesn’t take any of us seriously. A Day girl.
I choked on my own spit, started coughing, my windpipe shut down. The visitor two booths down from me leaned out to look and then, deciding I wasn’t going to die, went back to her son.
“What happened that night, Ben? I need to know. I just need to know.”
“Libby, you can’t win this game. I tell you I’m innocent, that means you’re guilty, you ruined my life. I tell you I’m guilty … I don’t think that makes you feel much better, does it?”
He was right. It was one reason I’d stayed immobile for so many years. I threw something else out: “And what about Trey Teepano?”
“Trey Teepano.”
“I know he was a bookie, and that he was into Devil shit, and that he was a friend of yours, and he was with you that night. With Diondra. That all seems pretty fucked up.”
“Where’d you get all that?” Ben looked me in the eye, then raised his gaze up, gave a long stare at my red roots that were to my ears now.
“Dad told me. He said he owed Trey Teepano money and—”
“Dad? He’s Dad now?”
“Runner said—”
“Runner said fuck-all. You need to grow up, Libby. You need to pick a side. You can spend the rest of your life trying to figure out what happened, trying to reason. Or you can just trust yourself. Pick a side. Be on mine. It’s better.”