“Are you a good psychotherapist?”
“I think so,” he said. “Whom did you kill?”
The question caught me absolutely off guard. “Ms Kew,” I said. Then I started to cuss and swear. “I didn’t mean to tell you that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “What did you do it for?”
“That’s what I came here to find out.”
“You must have really hated her.”
I started to cry. Fifteen years old and crying like that!
He gave me time to get it all out. The first part of it came out in noises, grunts and squeaks that hurt my throat. Much more than you’d think came out when my nose started to run. And finally—words.
“Do you know where I came from? The earliest thing I can remember is a punch in the mouth. I can still see it coming, a fist as big as my head. Because I was crying. I been afraid to cry ever since. I was crying because I was hungry. Cold, maybe. Both. After that big dormitories, and whoever could steal the most got the most. Get the hell kicked out of you if you’re bad, get a big reward if you’re good. Big reward: they let you alone. Try to live like that. Try to live so the biggest most wonderful thing in the whole damn world is just to have ’em let you alone!
“So a spell with Lone and the kids. Something wonderful: you belong. It never happened before. Two yellow bulbs and a fireplace and they light up the world. It’s all there is and all there ever has to be. Then the big change: clean dothes, cooked food, five hours a day school; Columbus and King Arthur and a 1925 book on Civics that explains about septic tanks. Over it all a great big square-cut lump of ice, and you watch it melting and the corners curve, and you know it’s because of you, Miss Kew…hell, she had too much control over herself ever to slobber over us, but it was there, that feeling. Lone took care of us because it was part of the way he lived. Miss Kew took care of us, and none of it was the way she lived. It was something she wanted to do.
“She had a weird idea of ‘right’ and a wrong idea of ‘wrong,’ but she stuck to them, tried to make her ideas do us good. When she couldn’t understand, she figured it was her own failure…and there was an almighty lot she didn’t understand and never could. What went right was our success. What went wrong was her mistake. That last year, that was…oh, good.”
“So?”
“So I killed her. Listen,” I said. I felt I had to talk fast. I wasn’t short of time, but I had to get rid of it. “I’ll tell you all I know about it. The one day before I killed her. I woke up in the morning and the sheets crackly clean under me, the sunlight coming in through white curtains and bright red-and-blue drapes. There’s a closet full of my clothes—mine, you see; I never had anything that was really mine before—and downstairs Miriam clinking around with breakfast and the twins laughing. Laughing with her, mind you, not just with each other like they always did before.
“In the next room, Janie moving around, singing, and when I see her, I know her face will shine inside and out. I get up. There’s hot water and the toothpaste bites my tongue. The clothes fit me and I go downstairs and they’re all there and I’m glad to see them and they’re glad to see me, and we no sooner get around the table when Miss Kew comes down and everyone calls out to her at once.
“And the morning goes by like that, school with a recess, there in the big long living room. The twins with the ends of their tongues stuck out, drawing the alphabet instead of writing it, and then Janie, when it’s time, painting a picture, a real picture of a cow with trees and a yellow fence that goes off into the distance. Here I am lost between the two parts of a quadratic equation, and Miss Kew bending close to help me, and I smell the sachet she has on her clothes. I hold up my head to smell it better, and far away I hear the shuffle and klunk of filled pots going on the stove back in the kitchen.
“And the afternoon goes by like that, more school and some study and boiling out into the yard, laughing. The twins chasing each other, running on their two feet to get where they want to go; Jane dappling the leaves in her picture, trying to get it just the way Miss Kew says it ought to be. And Baby, he’s got a trig play-pen. He don’t move around much any more, he just watches and dribbles some, and gets packed full of food and kept as clean as a new sheet of tinfoil.
“And supper, and the evening, and Miss Kew reading to us, changing her voice every time someone else talks in the story, reading fast and whispery when it embarrasses her, but reading every word all the same.
“And I had to go and kill her. And that’s all.”
“You haven’t said why,” Stern said.
“What are you—stupid?” I yelled.
Stern didn’t say anything. I turned on my belly on the couch and propped up my chin in my hands and looked at him. You never could tell what was going on with him, but I got the idea that he was puz-. zled.
“I said why,” I told him.
“Not to me.”
I suddenly understood that I was asking too much of him. I said slowly, “We all woke up at the same time. We all did what somebody else wanted. We lived through a day someone else’s way, thinking someone else’s thoughts, saying other people’s words. Janie painted someone else’s pictures. Baby didn’t talk to anyone, and we were all happy with it. Now do you see?”
“Not yet.”
“God!” I said. I thought for a while. “We didn’t blesh.”
“Blesh? Oh. But you didn’t after Lone died, either.”
“That was different. That was like a car running out of gas, but the car’s there—there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just waiting. But after Miss Kew got done with us, the car was taken all to pieces, see?”
It was his turn to think a while. Finally he said, “The mind makes us do funny things. Some of them seem completely reasonless, wrong, insane. But the cornerstone of the work we’re doing is this: there’s a chain of solid, unassailable logic in the things we do. Dig deep enough and you find cause and effect as clearly in this field as you do in any other. I said logic, mind; I didn’t say ‘correctness’ or ‘rightness’ or ‘justice’ or anything of the sort. Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that’s performing the logic.
“When that mind is submerged, working at cross-purposes with the surface mind, then you’re all confused. Now in your case, I can see the thing you’re pointing at—that in order to preserve or to rebuild that peculiar bond between you kids, you had to get rid of Miss Kew. But I don’t see the logic. I don’t see that regaining that ‘bleshing’ was worth destroying this new-found security which you admit was enjoyable.”
I said, desperately, “Maybe it wasn’t worth destroying it.”
Stern leaned forward and pointed his pipe at me. “It was because it made you do what you did. After the fact, maybe things look different. But when you were moved to do it, the important thing was to destroy Miss Kew and regain this thing you’d had before. I don’t see why and neither do you.”
“How am we going to find out?”
“Well, let’s get right to the most unpleasant part, if you’re up to it.”
I lay down. “I’m ready.”
“All right. Tell me everything that happened just before you killed her.”
I fumbled through that last day, trying to taste the food, hear the voices. A thing came and went and came again: it was the crisp feeling of the sheets. I thrust it away because it was at the beginning of that day, but it came back again, and I realized it was at the end, instead.
I said, “What I just told you, all that about the children doing things other people’s way instead of their own, and Baby not talking, and everyone happy about it, and finally that I had to kill Miss Kew. It took a long time to get to that, and a long time to start doing it. I guess I lay in bed and thought for four hours before I got up again. It was dark and quiet, I went out of the room and down the hall and into Miss Kew’s bedroom and killed her.”
“How?”
“That’s all there is!” I shouted, as loud as I could. Then I quieted down. “It was awful dark…it still is. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. She did love us. I know she did. But I had to kill her.”
