Fresh Kills Read Online Free PDF Page A

I appeared like a spirit for dinner every night, then vanished to my room for the evening.

    Using a stolen switchblade, I carved through the covers of my textbooks, into the desk my mother bought me when I started high school. I sliced thin red lines in my shoulders, drawing stares at swim practice. I answered their stares and the coach’s questions with crazy rants about Celtic warriors and tribal markings. I got suspended for telling the guidance counselor to mind his fucking business. I never talked to my parents about anything. I just haunted the house, my high school, my small slices of the island, pissed off at the world.

    “This has to be your genes, Susan,” my father said one evening as I cleared the dinner table, eager to escape upstairs to write bad poetry, to read, or just to stew in my own inarticulate venom. “We got us one of them faggoty artist types. He sure as hell didn’t get it from me.”

    “Please don’t use that word in reference to our son,” my mother said. To his last day, I’m sure my father thought she was referring to the word “artist.”

    I WAS IN THE SHOWER when my sister arrived from the airport. Julia pounded on the door and yelled at me to hurry up. I yelled back that I was already hurrying. I’d slept through the first inning of the Mets game. Already, they were down by two to the hated Atlanta Braves. I hate the fuckin’ Braves almost as much as I hate my father.

    I glanced at the TV as I passed it, saw things hadn’t improved, and found my sister sitting at the kitchen table, photographs spread out in front of her. I bent into the fridge for a beer, tossing the cap into the sink, an odd habit I’d developed I don’t know when, and sat in the fake leather nook that wrapped around the kitchen table.

    “’Sup, sis.”

    Julia swept her hair out of her face and sighed. “I didn’t think you still had a key.”

    “I don’t,” I said. “Broke in through the dining room window.”

    “Glad to see you’re staying sharp,” she said. She covered her eyes with her hands and rested her elbows on the table. “Can you believe this shit? Someone murdered our father. It’s unbelievable. Who would do this? What for?”

    “Forget that for now.” I leaned across the table and touched her elbow. “How’re you doing?”

    Julia didn’t answer. Her face was blank, unreadable when she took her hands away. Her eyes fell back on the photos.

    “Whatcha got there?” I asked.

    Julia moved some of the snapshots around, apparently at random. She was looking at them but seeing something else entirely. What that was, I had no idea.

    “Just some stuff, some pictures I had at my place,” she said.

    “Of us?”

    “Of all of us,” she said, still staring.

    She shoved a few photos across the table to me. They were square, four-by-four or something, with fat white borders, curling at the edges. I picked one up, then another, then another. My sister and I standing in front of a vintage car in a museum somewhere. My sister and I running across a beach. My sister and my father on a carousel. My father seated behind her on a toy horse. He’s wearing a loud shirt and wraparound sunglasses. He looks seasick. Julia’s wearing a bright yellow dress and a brighter smile. I looked at my grown-up sister. Her eyes were wet.

    “What museum is that?” she asked. “What beach?”

    I tossed the photos on the table. “I don’t know.”

    “Where is that carousel?” she asked. “Coney Island? Jones Beach? I don’t remember any of these.” She swept her hands over the pictures. “These people, they could be anyone. I don’t remember this family.”

    “Jesus, Julia, how old are these pictures? We were little kids. Of course you don’t remember.” I picked up the one with the car. “When was this? ’Eighty-four? I was seven, you were, what? Three? Of course you don’t remember.”

    “Do you remember?” She shoved the carousel picture at me. I was ten in that picture.