Legend of a Suicide Read Online Free PDF Page B

She actually hit him, with a ceramic frog my aunt had brought from New Zealand. Then she called the police, filed the next day for a restraining order, and he left us alone.
    A few weekend afternoons that summer, when Merril was sunning on his lounger in his backyard, I sighted in on him with the .300 Magnum from my mother’s bathroom window. Through the crosshairs, I could trace the flabby outlines of his gut and even the thin blue veins in his arms. What would it have looked like if I had pulled the trigger? One day in John’s pickup, when I had run over a pigeon at ninety and glanced in the rearview, I had actually seen a puff of feathers.
    My mother was disheartened by the whole thing with Merril. He had been talking to her about family and commitment and how she made him feel like he was in high school again, and shehad started to believe. I didn’t mention Alise. My mother cried with me on the living room couch and told me she still missed Angel and John.
    “And your father, too,” she added. So then we were both crying. After a while, however, even that seemed funny.
    “What a stupid, stupid man,” my mother said, laughing.
    “You’re never going to marry anyone else,” I said.
    She stared out the sliding glass door. “I mean, come on,” she said. “After all that?”
     
    In early fall, post-Merril, when my mother wasn’t dating anyone, when it was just the two of us, I broke into our own house. I had left the key hanging in my locker at school. We didn’t have a spare hidden under the welcome mat anymore, and my mother rarely made it home before 6 or 7. So I checked all our windows and doors, and when I could find nothing that was open, I picked up a flat gray rock from our yard and smashed it through her bathroom window. I unscrewed the lock, slid the pane aside, and crawled in.
    I checked the master bedroom first. I found sixteen paper bags in the closet, filled with everything from school papers to clothing to spare batteries. The inevitable rings were hidden in shoes, wrapped up in nylons. The only safe was a toy one for a child, with the combination printed plainly on the bottom. Bras and panties were hanging from clothespins, but there were no ties, so clearly this room was without men.
    In the bathroom, a single purple toothbrush hung from the wall. The fact of a diaphragm in the cupboard by the sink had not been noticed before. This woman’s teeth were brittle or elseshe ground them together at night, because in that same cupboard she had both Sensodyne toothpaste and a plastic mouthpiece for sleeping.
    This woman kept no pictures of anyone on display, so it was hard to tell whether she had a family. In the only other bedroom, the wallpaper was a print of bamboo thatching that covered even the ceiling. In the corner was a fish tank with the light turned off and a poster listing 250 species of shark. The shark poster and the small pairs of white Fruit of the Loom underwear strewn about the floor suggested that a boy or several boys lived in this room. The single pair of hiking boots in the closet, as well as the single pair of soccer cleats, narrowed it to one boy. The guns in his closet—a Browning .22-caliber rifle, a .30-.30 Winchester carbine, a .300 Winchester Magnum with scope, a Winchester Model 25 .12-gauge pump shotgun, a Sheridan “Blue-Streak” pellet rifle, and a Ruger .44 Magnum handgun—were difficult to explain. Where had he gotten them all?
    The buildup of carbon in the chamber of the .300 Magnum indicated that the gun had been used frequently, perhaps even recently. The block of wood under his bed, shot full of holes that didn’t go all the way through, suggested that he not only had fired the .22 but may even have fired it inside the house. The box full of Playboy s , Penthouse s , Hustler s, and trash novels with “Adults Only” on the cover suggested that this boy was some kind of pervert, and why he kept so many pictures of his father in this same box but not on his