The Best American Noir of the Century

2006 CHRIS ADRIAN STAB

Someone was murdering the small animals of our neighborhood. We found them in the road outside our houses, and from far away they looked like the victims of careless drivers, but close up you saw that they were plump and round, not flat, and that their bodies were marred by clean-edged rectangular stab wounds. Sometimes they lay in drying pools of blood, and you knew the murder had occurred right there. Other times it was obvious they had been moved from the scene of the crime and arranged in postures, like the two squirrels posed in a hug on Mrs. Chenoweth’s doorstep.

Squirrels, then rabbits, then the cats, and dogs in late summer. By that time I had known for months who was doing all the stabbing. I got that information on the first day of June 1979, two years and one month and fourteen days after my brother’s death from cancer. I woke up early that morning, a sunny one that broke a chain of rainy days, because my father was taking me to see Spider-Man, who was scheduled to make an appearance at the fourth annual Leukemia Society of America Summer Fair in Washington, D.C. I was eight years old and I thought Spider-Man was very important.

In the kitchen I ate a bowl of cereal while my father spread the paper out before me. “Look at that,” he said. On the front page was an article detailing the separation of Siamese twin girls, Lisa and Elisa Johansen from Salt Lake City. They were joined at the thorax, like my brother and I had been, but they shared vital organs, whereas Colm and I never did. There was a word for the way we and they had been joined: thoracopagus. It was still the biggest word I knew.

“Isn’t that amazing?” my father said. He was a surgeon, so these sorts of things interested him above all others. “See that? They’re just six months old!” Colm and I were separated at eighteen months. I had no clear memories of either the attachment or the operation, though Colm claimed he remembered our heads knocking together all the time, and that he dreamed of monkeys just before we went under from the anesthesia. The Johansen twins were joined side by side; my brother and I were joined back to back. Our parents would hold up mirrors so we could look at each other — that was something I did remember: looking in my mother’s silver-handled mirror, over my shoulder at my own face.

Early as it was, on our way out to the car we saw our new neighbor, Molly Matthews, sitting on the front steps of her grandparents’ house, reading a book in the morning sun.

“Hello, Molly,” said my father.

“Good morning, Dr. Cole,” she said. She was unfailingly polite with adults. At school she was already very popular, though she had been there for only two months, and she had a tendency to oppress the other children in our class with her formidable vocabulary.

“Poor girl,” said my father, when we were in the car and on our way. He pitied her because both her parents had died in a car accident. She was in the car with them when they crashed, but she was thrown from the wreck through an open window — this was in Florida, where I supposed everyone always drove around with their windows down and never wore seatbelts.

I turned in my seat so I was upside down. This had long been my habit; I did it so I could look out the window at the trees and telephone wires as we passed them. My mother would never stand for it, but she was flying that day to San Francisco. She was a stewardess. Once my father and I flew with her while she was working and she brought me a cup of Coke with three cherries in it. She put down the drink and leaned over me to open up the window shade, which I had kept closed from the beginning of the flight out of fear. “Look,” she said to me. “Look at all that!” I looked and saw sandy mountains that resembled crumpled brown paper bags. I imagined falling from that great height into my brothers arms.

“Spider-Man!” said my father, after we had pulled onto Route 50 and passed a sign that read Washington, d.c. 29 miles. “Aren’t you excited?” He reached over and rubbed my head with his fist. Had my mother been with me, she would not have spoken at all, but my father talked the whole way, about Spider-Man, about the mall, about the Farrah Fawcett look-alike who was also scheduled to appear; he asked me repeatedly if the prospect of seeing such things didn’t make me excited, though he knew I would not answer him. I hadn’t spoken a word or uttered a sound since my brother’s funeral.

Spider-Man was a great disappointment. When my father brought me close for an autograph, I saw that his Spider-Suit was badly sewn, and glossy in a gross sort of way; his voice, when he said, “Hey there, Spider-Fan,” pitched high like a little mouse’s. He was an utter fake. I ran away from him, across the mall; my father did not catch me until I had made it all the way to the Smithsonian Castle. He didn’t yell at me. It only made him sad when I acted so peculiarly. My mother sometimes lost her temper and would scream out that I was a twisted little fruitcake, and why couldn’t I ever make anything easy? She would apologize later, but never with the same ferocity, and so it seemed to me not to count. I always hoped she would burst into my room later on in the night, to wake me by screaming how sorry she was, to slap herself, and maybe me too, because she was so regretful.

“So much for Spider-Man,” said my father. He took me to see the topiary buffalo, and for a while we sat in the grass, saying nothing, until he asked me if I wouldn’t go back with him. I did, and though we had missed the Farrah Fawcett look-alike’s rendition of “Feelings,” he got to meet her, because he had connections with the Leukemia Society. She said I was cute and gave me an autographed picture that I later gave to my father because I could tell he wanted it.

When we got home I went up to my room and tossed all my Spider-Man comic books and action figures into the deepest recesses of my closet. Then I took a book out onto the roof. I sat and read Stuart Little for the fifth time. Below me, in the yard next door, I could see Molly playing, just as silent as I was. Every once in a while she would look up and catch me looking at her, and she would smile down at her plastic dolls. We had interacted like this before, me reading and her playing, but on this day, for some reason, she spoke to me. She held my gaze for a few moments, then laughed coyly and said, “Would you like to see my bodkin?” I shrugged, then climbed down and followed her into the ravine behind our houses. I did not know what a bodkin was. I thought she was going to make me look inside her panties, like Judy Corcoran had done about three weeks before, trying to make me swear not to tell about the boring thing I had seen.

But what Molly showed me — after we had gone down about thirty feet into the bushes and she had knelt near the arrow-shaped gravestone of our English sheepdog, Gulliver, and after she dug briefly in the dry dirt — was a dagger. It was about a foot long, and ornate, encrusted with what looked like real emeralds and rubies, with a great blue stone set in the pommel, and a rose etched in relief on the upper part of the blade.

“Do you like it?” she asked me. “My father gave it to me. It used to belong to a medieval princess.” I did like it. I reached out for it, but she drew it back to her chest and said, “No! You may not touch it.” She ran off down the ravine, toward the river; I didn’t follow. I sat on Gulliver’s stone and thought about all the little dead animals, and I knew—even a little mind could make the connection — that Molly had been murdering them. But I didn’t give much thought to it, besides a brief reflection on how sharp the blade must be to make such clean wounds. I walked back to my house and went down to the basement to watch The Bionic Woman, my new favorite.

After Colm’s death I got into the habit of staring, sometimes for hours at a time, at my image in the mirror. My parents thought it was just another of my new autistic tendencies, and they both discouraged it, even going so far as to remove the mirror from my bedroom. What they didn’t know was that the image I was looking at was not really my own; it was Colm’s. When I looked in the mirror I saw the face we had shared. We were mirror twins, our faces perfectly symmetrical, the gold flecks in my left eye mirrored in Colm’s right, a small flaw at the right edge of his lips mirrored by one at the left edge of mine. So when I looked in the mirror, even the small things that made my face my own made my face into his, and if I waited long enough he would speak to me. He would tell me about heaven, about all sorts of little details, like that nobody ever had to go to the bathroom there. We had both considered that necessity to be a great inconvenience and a bore. He said he was watching me all the time.

There was a connection between us, he often said, even when he was alive, that the surgeons had not broken when we were separated. It was something unseen. We did not have quite two souls between us; it was more that we had one and a half. Sometimes he would hide from me, somewhere in our great big house, and insist that I find him. Usually I couldn’t, but he always found me; I couldn’t hide from him anywhere in the house, or, I suspected, anywhere on earth.

After he died I found him, not just in mirrors but in every reflective surface. Ponds and puddles or the backs of spoons, anything would do. And invariably the last thing he would say to me was “When are you going to come and be with me again?”

Molly appeared that night at my window. I was still awake when she came. At first I thought she was Colm, until a flash of heat lightning illuminated her and I saw who she was. Glimpsing the dagger flashing in her hand, I was certain she had come to kill me, but when she came over to my bed, she said only, “Do you want to come out with me?” Another flash of lightning lit up the room. The lightning was the reason I had been awake — on hot summer nights Colm and I would stay up for hours watching it flash over the river. Sometimes our parents would let us sleep on the porch, where the view was even better.

She sat down on my bed. “I like your room,” she said, looking around. There was light from the hall, enough to make out the general lay of the room. Our father had built it up to look like a ship for Colm and me, complete with sea-blue carpeting and a raised wooden deck with railings and a ship’s wheel. Above one bed was an authentic-looking sign that read captain’s bunk; the other bed belonged to the first mate. While he lived we had switched beds every night, in the interest of absolute equality, unless one of us was feeling afraid, in which case we shared the same bed. The last time he slept in the room he had been in the captain’s bed, and because the cycle could not go on any longer I had been in the first mates bed ever since.

Molly pulled my sheets back, and while I dressed she looked around the room for my shoes. When she found them she brought them to me and said, “Come on.”

I followed her — out the window, over the roof, and down the blue spruce that grew close to my house. She walked along our road, to the golf course around which part of our community was built. The site, once a Baptist girls’ camp, had in the century since its founding turned into a place where well-to-do white people lived in rustic pseudo-isolation. It was called Severna Forest. You couldn’t live there if you were Jewish or Italian, and in the summer they made you lock up your dog in a communal kennel. The golf course had only nine holes. It was a very hilly course, bordered by ravines in some places and in others by the Severn River. Molly took me to a wide piece of rough on the fourth hole, only about half a mile from our houses. Though the moon was down, I could see under the starlight that rabbits had gathered in the tall grass and the dandelions. I bent at my knees and picked a stalk. I was about to puff on it and scatter the seeds when Molly held my arm and said, “Don’t, you’ll frighten them.”

For a little while we stood there, she with one hand on my arm and the other on her knife, and we watched the rabbits sitting placidly in the grass, and we waited for them to get used to us. “Aren’t they lovely?” she said, letting go of my arm. She began to move, very slowly, toward the nearest one. She moved as slowly as the moon does across the sky. I couldn’t tell she was getting any closer to the rabbit unless I looked away for a few minutes; when I looked back she was closer, and the rabbit had not moved. When she was about five feet away she turned and looked at me. It was too dark for me to see her face. I couldn’t tell if she smiled. Then she leapt, knife first, at the little creature, and I saw her pierce its body. It thrashed once and was suddenly dead. I realized I was holding my breath, and still holding the dandelion in front of my lips. I blew into it and watched the seeds float toward her, to where she was stabbing the body again and again and again.

In school the next Monday, Molly studiously ignored me. The whole morning long I stared at her, thinking she must give some sign that a special thing had taken place between us, but she never did. I didn’t really care if she never spoke to me again; I was used to people experimenting with me as a friend. I let them come and go.

After lunch, when we were all settling down again into our desks, in the silence after Mrs. Wallaby, our teacher, had offered up a post-luncheon prayer for the pope, Molly passed me a note. I opened it up, thinking for some reason that it might say, “I love you,” because once a popular girl named Iris had passed me such a note, and when I blushed she and her friends had laughed cruelly. But Molly’s note said simply, “You’d better not tell.” I supposed she meant I had better not write a letter to the police. She did not really know me at all.

“What’s that you’ve got there, Calvin?” Mrs. Wallaby asked, striding over to me, squinting at me through her glasses. Before she arrived I slipped the piece of paper into my mouth and began to chew.

“What was that?”

I swallowed. She brought her face so close to mine I could read the signature on her designer frame glasses: oscar de la renta.

“What was that?” she asked again. Of course I said nothing. She heaved a great sigh and told me to go sit in “The Judas Chair,” which was actually just a desk set aside from the others, facing a corner. She was not a bad woman, but sometimes I brought out the worst in people. Once she saved me at recess from a crowd of girls who were pinching me, trying to make me cry out. She brought me inside and put cold cream from her purse on my welts; then, after she spoke for a while about how I couldn’t go on like this, I just couldn’t, she gave me a long grave look and pinched me herself. It was not so hard as what the girls were giving me, and it was under my shirt, where no one would see. She looked deep into my eyes as she did it, but I didn’t cry out. I didn’t even blink.

On the night of the first day of summer vacation, Molly came again and got me from my bed. She said nothing, aside from telling me to get dressed and to follow her. We passed the golf course and I started off to where the rabbits were; she grabbed my collar and pulled me back.

“No,” she said. “It’s time to move on.” We spent the night hunting cats. It wasn’t easy. We exhausted ourselves chasing them through the dark. Always they outran us or vanished up trees.

“We need a plan,” she said at last. Closer to our houses, we found a neighbor cat named Mr. Charlemagne; we had chased him earlier and he escaped through a cat door into a garage. Molly positioned me in a bush by that door, while Mr. Charlemagne eyed us peacefully. Then she came at him. He took off for his door, but I jumped in front of it. For some reason he leapt right into my arms, looked up in my face, then turned to look at my companion. She had her knife out. He snuggled deeper into my arms, expecting, I think, that I would bring him inside to safety. I threw him down hard on the ground. Molly fell on him and stabbed him through the throat.

The authorities of Severna Forest — the sheriff and the chairman of the community association and the president of the country club —had dismissed the squirrel and rabbit deaths as the gruesome pranks of bored teenagers. When Mr. Charlemagne was discovered, draped along a straight-growing bough of a birch tree, a mildly urgent sense of alarm spread over the community. “Sick!” people muttered to each other while buying vodka and Yoo-hoo at the general store. Not one bit of suspicion fell on Molly or me. Everyone considered me strange and tragic but utterly harmless. Molly was equally tragic yet widely admired, with her manners and her blond hair and her big brown eyes. Sometimes I thought it was only because she stabbed that she could play the part of her sweet, decent self so well.

A few days passed before she came for me again, in the early evening after lacrosse practice. The Severna Forest peewee team practiced every Saturday afternoon. I was one of its best players, because I had absolutely no fear of the ball. Others still ducked when the ball came flying toward them like a little cannon shot, or knocked it away with their sticks. I caught it. If it hit me, I didn’t care. I scooped it up and ran with it, often all the way down the field because it rarely occurred to me to pass. I liked to run, and to be exhausted, and I thought one day the ball might fly at me with such force it would burst my head like a rotten pumpkin.

That day I got hit in the eye with the ball. Our coach, a college boy named Sam Corkle, hurled it at me with all his adult strength, thinking I was paying attention. When it struck my eye I saw a great white flash and then a pale afterimage of Colm’s face that quickly faded. The blow knocked me down. I looked up at the sky and saw a passing plane and wondered, like I always did when I saw a plane in flight, if my mother was on board, though I knew she was at home that day. Sam came up with the other coach and they asked me all sorts of questions, trying to determine if I was disoriented and might have a concussion. Of course I didn’t answer. Someone said I would throw up if I had a concussion, so they sat me on a bench and watched me to see if that would happen. When it didn’t, they let me back onto the field. I went eagerly — though my eyeball was aching and starting to swell — hoping to get hit again, to catch another glimpse of my brother.

“What happened to you?” my mother asked when Sam brought me home. She was sitting at the dining room table, where my father held a package of frozen hamburger to his own swollen purple eye. He had gotten into a fight when someone tried to cut in front of him in a gas line. It was a bad week for gas. Stations were selling their daily allowances before noon. “You too, sport?” he said.

My father examined my eye and said I would be fine. As my mother pressed hamburger against the swelling, there was a knock at the door. Sam answered it, and I heard Molly’s voice ask very sweetly, “Can Calvin come out and play?” I jumped from my mother’s lap and ran toward the door. She caught me and said, “Take your hamburger with you.” I stood at the door while she walked back to the dining room with Sam, and I heard her ask my father, “When did your son get a little girlfriend?”

Molly had an empty mayonnaise jar in her hands. “We’re going to catch fireflies,” she said, not asking about my eye. I followed her through the dusk to the golf course, dropping my hamburger in a holly bush along the way. We ran around grabbing after bugs. I was delighted she had come for me while there was daylight, thinking that must mean something. I grabbed at her flying blond hair as much as I did the fireflies; she slapped my hands each time.

I thought we were filling the jar so she could crush them mercilessly, or stick them with pins, or distill their glowing parts into some powerful, fluorescent poison with which she could coat her knife. But when it was dark, when about thirty of them were thick in the jar, she took off the lid and went running down the hill to the river, spilling a trail of bright motes that circled around her, rose up, and flew away.

Soon there weren’t any cats left for us — not because we had killed them all, but because after the fourth one, a tabby named Vittles, was found stabbed twelve times on the front steps of the general store, people started keeping their cats inside at night. Our hunts were widely spaced, occurring only about once every two weeks, but in between those nights Molly would come to the door for me and take me out to play in the daylight. We did the normal things that children our age were supposed to do, during the day. We swam in the river and played with her dolls and watched television.

In late July Molly decided to change prey again. She took me through the woods, out to the kennel. I could hear the dogs barking in the darkness long before we reached them. They knew we were coming for them.

The kennel was lit by a single streetlamp, stuck in the middle of a clearing in the woods. There was a little service road that ran under the light, out to the main road that led to General’s Highway and Annapolis. I watched Molly stalk back and forth in front of the runs. The dogs were all howling and barking at her. It was two a.m. There was nobody around; nobody lived within a mile and a half of the place. The whole point of the kennel was to separate the dogs from the houses between June and September, so their barking wouldn’t disturb all the wealthy people in their summer cottages. It was a stupid rule.

Molly had stooped down in front of a poodle. I did not recognize it. It retreated to the back of its run and yipped at her.

“Nice puppy,” she said, though it was full grown. She waved me over to her, and then turned me around to take a piece of beef from the Holly Hobbie backpack she had strapped on me at the beginning of our excursion. She took out my lacrosse gloves and told me to put them on.

“Be ready to grab him,” she said. She crouched down in front of the bars of the cage and held the meat up in the meager light. “Come on,” she said. “Come and get your treat, baby. It’s OK.” She held on to one end while the poodle nibbled, and with her free hand she scratched its head. She motioned for me to come close beside her. It was the closest I had ever been to a poodle in my life. I tried to imagine the owner, probably a big fat rich lady with white hair, who wore diamonds around her throat while she slept in a giant canopy bed.

“Just about…now!” said Molly. I reached through the bars with my thick lacrosse hands and grabbed the dog by a foreleg. Immediately it started to pull away, just a gentle tug. “Don’t let it escape!” she said, scrambling in the bag for her knife. The poodle gave me a What are you doing? look, and I very nearly lost my hold.

It was an awkward kill, because the bars were in the way, and the poodle was a strong-willed little dog who wanted to live. It bit hard but ineffectively at my hands. It bit at the knife and cut its gums, and its teeth made a ringing sound against the metal. It snarled and yelped and squealed, and all around us the other dogs were all screaming. Molly was saying, “There! There! There!” in a low voice, almost a whisper. When she finally delivered the killing blow to the dog’s neck, a gob of hot blood flew out between the bars and hit me in the eye. It burned like the harsh shampoos my parents bought for me, but I didn’t cry out.

On the way back I let her walk ahead of me. I watched the glint of her head under the moon as she ducked between bushes and hopped over rotting logs. I felt bad, not about the poodle, which I had hated instantly and absolutely as soon as I had laid eyes upon it, but about the owner, the fat lady who I thought must be named Mrs. Vanderbilt because that was the richest name I knew. I thought about her riding down to the kennel in her limousine with a china bowl full of steak tartare for her Precious, and the way her face would look when she saw the bloody cotton ball on the floor of the cage and could not comprehend that this was the thing she had loved. Molly got farther and farther ahead of me, calling back that I should stop being so poky and hurry up. Eventually all I could see was the moonlight on her head, and on the white bag she had brought for my gloves, promising to clean them.

When we had gone about a mile from the kennel I heard a train whistle sounding. It was still far away, but I knew the tracks ran nearby. I went to them. In the far distance I could see the train light. I lay down in the middle of the tracks and waited. Molly came looking for me — I could hear her calling out, calling me a stupid boy and saying it was late. She was tired. She wanted to go to bed. As the train got nearer, I felt a deep, wonderful hum in the tracks that seemed to pass through my brain and stimulate whatever organ is responsible for generating happiness. I imagined my head flying from my body to land at her feet. Or maybe it would hit her and knock her down. She would, I imagined, give it a calm look, put it in the bag, and take it home, where she would keep it, along with my gloves, under her bed as a souvenir of our acquaintance. The train arrived and passed over me.

I suppose I was too small for it to take off my head. Or maybe it was a different sort of train that did that to Charlie Kelly, a fifteen-year-old who had died the previous summer after a reefer party in the woods when he lay down on the tracks to impress Sam Corkle’s sister. The conductor never saw me. The train never slowed. It rushed over me with such a noise — it got louder and louder until I couldn’t hear it anymore, until watching the flashes of moon between the boxcars I heard my brother’s voice say, “Soon.”

All Severna Forest was horrified by the death of the dog, whose name turned out to be Arthur. A guard was posted at the kennel. For the first few nights it was Sheriff Travis himself, but after a week he deputized a teenager he deemed trustworthy; that boy snuck off with his girlfriend to get stoned and listen to loud music in her car. While they were thus occupied we struck again, after two nights of watching and waiting for just such an opportunity. This time it was a Jack Russell terrier named Dreamboat.

After that the kennel was closed and the dogs sent home to owners who locked them indoors, especially at night. Sheriff Travis claimed to be within a hair’s breadth of catching the “pervert,” but in fact he never came near Molly or me. She never seemed nervous about getting caught. Neither did she gloat about her success. She was silent about it, as she was about why she went around stabbing things in the first place.

But she talked about her parents all summer. When I was not playing lacrosse, I was with her, sailing on the river in the Sunfish her grandparents had bought her in June, or soft-shell crabbing in the muddy flats off Beach Road, or riding around on our banana-seated bicycles. I envied her hers because it had long, multicolored tassels that dangled from the handlebars, and a miniature license plate on the back that read hot stuff. Floating in the middle of the river on a calm day, I dangled my hand in the water and listened to her talk about her parents; her father had been a college professor of history, and at night he would tell her stories about ancient princesses and tell her she herself had surely been one in a past life. Didn’t she remember? Didn’t she recognize this portrait of her antique prince? Didn’t she recognize the dagger with which she had slain the beastly suitor who had tried to take her away to live in a black kingdom under the earth? Her mother, a cautious pediatrician, had protested when he gave her the bodkin, though Molly was grave and responsible and not likely to hurt herself or others by accident. “A girl needs to defend herself,” her father had said, but he was joking. The knife hung on her wall, along with an ancient tapestry and a number of museum prints of ancient princesses, and she was not supposed to touch them until she was older.

I listened and watched pale sea nettles drift by. Occasionally one would catch my hand with its tentacle and sting me. I wanted to tell her about my brother, about stories we had told each other, about our lighthouse game or our bridge game or our thunder and lightning game, or the fond wish we both had for a flying bed of the sort featured in Bed-knobs and Broomsticks, except that ours would be equipped with a matter transporter, a la Star Trek, so we could hover over our favorite restaurant and beam up pizzas. But nothing could have made me talk, on that day or any of the days that stretched back to Colm’s funeral. At the time I didn’t know why I would not speak. I think now the reason my throat closed up was that I knew, that day in the funeral parlor, there was nothing I could ever say to equal the occasion of my brother’s death. I should have spoken a word that would bring him back, and yet I could not, and so I must say nothing forever.

Molly’s birthday came in the first week of August. My mother took me shopping for a present. She spent a lot of time in the Barbie section, agonizing over accessories, but I insisted silently on my own choice: a Bionic Woman combination beauty salon and diagnostic station. It was not the gift I really meant to give Molly, not the gift from my heart. I insisted on it because I knew she would disregard it, and I could then play with it myself. Her real gift from me was a wide, flat stone, taken from the Severn, with which she could sharpen her knife. I wrapped it in the Sunday funnies. When she opened it she smiled with genuine delight and said it was her favorite.

From her grandparents she got a Polaroid camera. Her grandfather, a man who had always believed in buying in bulk, gave her a whole carton of film and flashbulbs. In the evening after her birthday party we sat on my roof and she sent flashes arcing over the ravine, tossing aside the pictures that popped out. They were of nothing, and she was not interested in them. I picked them up and pressed them to my nose because I liked the developing-film smell.

Later that night she came to my window, her backpack on her shoulders. I’d had a feeling she would come and so went to sleep fully dressed, right down to my shoes. To my surprise she removed my shoes, and my socks. While I sat with my feet hanging over the edge of the bed, she took a jar from her pack and scooped out a plum-size dollop of Vaseline, lathering it over my foot and between my toes.

“We have a long walk tonight,” she said matter-of-factly. I closed my eyes while she did my other foot, enjoying the feeling. When I put on my socks and shoes and walked on my anointed feet, it was like walking on a pillow or on my father’s fat belly, when he would play with Colm and me, all the while yelling, “Oh, oh, the elephants are trampling me!”

We went far past the kennel, three miles from our homes. We walked right out of Severna Forest, past the squat, crumbling brick pillars that marked the entrance to the forest road. We walked past the small black community, right at the edge of the gates, where families lived whose mothers worked as maids in our houses. Molly led me into the fields of a farm whose acreage ran along General’s Highway.

“I want a horse,” she said, standing still and eyeing the vast expanse of grass before us. In the distance I could see a house and a barn. I had seen the house countless times from my parents’ car, when my mother was driving and I had to sit right-side up. I had always imagined it to be inhabited by bonneted women and bare-lipped, bearded men, like the ones in the coffee-table book on the Amish that sat in our living room and was never looked at by anyone but me. Molly started toward the barn. I followed her, looking at the dark house and wondering if some restless person was looking out the bedroom window, watching us coming.

No one challenged us, not even a dog or a cat. I wondered what she would do if a snarling dog came out of the darkness to get us. I did not think she would stab it. I had a theory, entirely unsubstantiated, that she was moving up the class chain, onward from birds to squirrels to cats to dogs and beyond, her destination the fat red heart of a human being, and I knew that once she had finished with an animal class she would not return to it. She was storing the life force of everything she stabbed in the great blue stone in her dagger’s hilt, and when she had accumulated enough of it, the stone would glow like the Earth glowed in the space pictures that hung on the wall in our third-grade homeroom, above the motto nothing is impossible. When the stone glowed like that, I knew, her parents would step from it and be with her again.

If the horse had a name, I never knew it. In the dim light of the stable I might have missed it, carved on the stall somewhere. The horse was a tall Appaloosa. Molly had brought sugar and apples. She fed it and whispered to it. It was the only horse there. The other stalls were empty but looked lived-in. Molly was saying to the horse, “It’s OK. It’s all right. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” She smiled at it a truly sweet smile, and it looked at her with its enormous brown eyes, and I could see that it trusted her absolutely, the way unicorns in stories instinctively trust princesses. In her right hand she held the knife, and her left was on the horse’s muzzle. “Touch it,” she said to me. “It’s like velvet.” I put my hand on the space just between its eyes. She was right. I closed my eyes and imagined I was touching my mother while she wore her velvet Christmas dress. When I opened them the horse was looking at me with its great eyes, and in them I could see my brother touching the horse, and behind him Molly striking with her dagger. The horse did not even try to pull away until the blade was buried deep in its throat. Then it rose up, jerking the blade out of her hand and trying to hammer us with its hooves, which clattered against the wood of the stall. When it shook its head the knife flew out and landed at my feet. The horse was trying to scream, but because of the wound it could make only spraying, huffing noises.

I watched it jump and then stagger around the stall. I was still and calm until Molly took the first picture — I jumped at the flash. At thirty-second intervals another flash would catch in the horse’s eyes. At last it knelt in a wide pool of its blood, and then fell on its side and was dead. All the time our surroundings seemed very quiet, despite the whirring of the Polaroid, and the whooshing and sucking noises of the wound, and the thumping. When those noises stopped I could suddenly hear crickets chirping, and Molly’s frantic breathing, and my brother saying, “So soon!”

Molly took me home and made me get in the tub with my pants rolled up. She washed the Vaseline from my feet, and the horse blood from my hair, and then she put me back in my bed, not an hour before the sun came up. I slept and dreamed of horses who bled eternally from their throats, whose eyes held perfect images of Colm, who spoke from their wounds in the voices of old women and said they could take me to him if I would only ride.

A real live police investigation inspired Molly to lie low for a while. While Anne Arundel County police cars cruised the night streets of Severna Forest, we lay most exceedingly low; and even after they were long gone, we still did not emerge. The summer ran out and school started again. Molly mostly ignored me while we were at school, but she still came by occasionally in the afternoons, or on weekends. We sailed in her boat and once went apple picking with her grandparents, in an orchard all the way down in Leonardtown. Outside my bedroom window the leaves dropped from the trees in the ravine, so I got my clear winter view of the river, all the way down to the bay. In the distance I could see the lights of the Naval Academy radio towers, blinking strong and red in the cold. I would watch them and wait for her, my window wide open, but she did not come again until the first snow.

That was in December, just before Christmas break. Earlier that evening, down by the general store, all the children of Severna Forest had gathered under an old spruce, where a false Santa sat on a gold-leafed wooden throne and handed out presents. I knew he was a false Santa, but most of the others there didn’t. It was actually Sheriff Travis, handing out presents bought and delivered to him by the parents of all these greedy little kids. He sat in his chair, surrounded by bags of wrapped toys, and made a big fuss over whether or not this or that child had been good throughout the year. When he called my name I went up and dutifully received my present from his rough hands. It was a Fembot doll, the arch nemesis of the Bionic Woman doll that Molly had rejected. I was in my bed playing with my new toy when she appeared at my window.

“Go down and get your coat,” she said. “It’s cold out there.” I did as she told me. My father had left for the hospital shortly after we got home from seeing Santa, and my mother was asleep in her room, exhausted by an all-night flight from Lima. But almost all the other Severna Forest adults were down at the clubhouse, having their Christmas party. Several of them were famous for getting drunk on the occasion, Sheriff Travis especially. He kept his Santa suit on all night, and people talked about his antics for weeks afterward. They were harmless antics, nothing crass or embarrassing. He sang songs and said sharp, witty things, things he seemed incapable of saying at any other time of the year, drunk or not.

When we left my house, there was already about an inch of snow on the ground. The storm picked up as we climbed a tree outside the clubhouse. We waited there while the party began to die down. I could see my parents’ friends dancing with each other, and Sheriff Travis standing on tables and gesticulating, or turning somersaults, or dancing with two ladies at once. Music and laughter drifted through the blowing snow every time someone opened the door. I got sleepy listening to the sounds of adult amusement, just like Colm and I always did when our parents had one of their dinner parties, something they did often back before he died.

I fell asleep in the tree, with my head on Molly’s shoulder. We were wedged close to one another, so I was warm. It was snowing heavily when she jabbed me with her elbow and said, “Wake up, it’s time to go.” She climbed down the tree and hurried off. I jumped down, knocking the accumulated snow from my back and shoulders, and chased after her. She was moving back toward our houses, toward the tee of the seventh hole. When I caught up with her I could see another vague shape stumbling through the snow, about thirty yards before us. We had to get closer before I could make out the distinctive silhouette of the Santa hat.

Sheriff Travis lived down by the river, in a modest cottage that I imagine must have been lonely for all its smallness, because his children were gone and his wife was dead. He was taking a shortcut over the golf course. I knew he would cross through the woods beyond the green to Beach Road. He was singing “Adeste Fideles” in a loud voice and did not hear us come up behind him.

Molly had taken out her dagger and handed me a short length of lead pipe. “Be ready,” she said. When we were less than ten yards away, she ran at him, looking slightly ridiculous trying to rush through the deepening snow with her short legs. But there was nothing ridiculous about the blow she struck, just above his wide black belt, about where his kidney would be. He fell to his knees and she struck again, this time at his back, almost right in the middle, and then again at his neck as he collapsed forward. He screamed at the first blow, just like I thought he would, a great, raw scream like the one my father let go in the hospital room when Colm finally stopped breathing. She stabbed him one more time, in the right side of his back. In the dark his blood was black on the snow. He lay on his face and was silent. I stood in the snow, clutching my pipe and wondering if I should hit him with it.

Molly grabbed my hand and dragged me after her. She ran as fast as she could, through the woods, then along Beach Road to a point just below our houses. “I got him,” she was saying breathlessly, in a high voice. “I got Santa.” Twice we had to crouch down behind tree trunks to escape the passing headlights of the party’s last few stragglers. We tore up through the ravine, past Gulliver’s headstone, and she gave me a push up the tree by my house, saying only, “Put your coat back downstairs!” before running off to her own house. I did as she said. I would have anyway, and it grated on me that she thought I would be careless. I still had the pipe. I put it deep in my closet, where the Spider-Man toys were piled.

Back in bed I looked out my window at the storm, which was still gaining strength. It would be almost a blizzard by morning. School would be canceled. I lay watching the snow that I knew was covering our child-sized footprints, covering Santa Travis’s body. I thought of him dying, the coldness of the snow penetrating in stages through his skin and his muscle and his bone, a dark veil falling over his sight like somebody was wrapping his head in layer after layer of sweet-smelling toilet paper, like Colm and I used to do when we played I Am the Mummy’s Bride, or The Plastic Surgeon Just Gave Me a New Face. I imagined Colm, waiting patiently by the door to where he was, waiting and waiting, peering at the slowly approaching figure.

But Sheriff Travis did not die. A concerned citizen, worried because of the storm, had called his house. When he didn’t answer, people went looking for him. They found him where we left him, alive. At the hospital my father operated to repair his lacerated kidney and fretted over his hemisected spinal cord.

When Sheriff Travis woke up he said he remembered everything. Despite the darkness of the night, and the falling snow, he gave fairly detailed descriptions of his attackers. Two large black men had done it, he said, one holding him while the other stabbed him and called him “Honky Santa.” Police called on the community just outside the Severna Forest gates, and two men were arrested after Sheriff Travis identified them in a lineup. I saw them in the paper.

Molly was furious that Sheriff Travis hadn’t died. She stood in my room, kicking my bed so hard that the wall shook and the first mate sign fell down with a clunk.

“Why?” she said in a loud voice. “Why couldn’t he have died?”

I thought about her hungry blue stone while she kicked my bed some more, until my father came to the door and said, “Everything OK in here?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied. “We were just kicking the bed.”

“Well, please don’t.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, blushing. I looked at the sunlight on the carpet and wanted my father to leave. Don’t make her angry, I was thinking.

When he was gone she said, “It’s just not fair.”

I thought it would be many more months before she returned for me at night. I thought we would lie low, but she came back after only two weeks had passed, at the beginning of the second week of January. She had been in Florida with her grandparents over break, while a bitter cold descended over the Atlantic coast from New York to Richmond. The river and even parts of the Chesapeake were frozen over. She came for me the first night she was back.

When we went down the ravine to Beach Road, I thought for sure we were going to Sheriff Travis’s house, to finish him off. But upon reaching the road she crossed it and stepped over the riverbank, onto the ice. She turned back to me. “Come on,” she said, sliding over the ice in her rubber boots. She went past the pier and the boat slips, out to the wide center of the river. Her voice came drifting back to me: “Don’t be such a slowpoke.” I hurried after the place where I thought her voice was coming from, but I never caught up with her — perhaps she was hiding from me. It was a clear yet moonless night, and she was wearing a dark coat and a dark hat. I stopped after a while and wrapped my arms around myself. I was cold because my parents were both home and I had not dared go down for my coat. Instead I had worn two sweaters, but they weren’t enough to keep me warm. I knelt on the ice and looked down at it, trying to catch Colm’s image. I heard Molly’s boots sliding over the ice out in the dark, and I thought about a story people told about the ghost of a girl who drowned skating across the river to Westport, to see her boyfriend. On nights like this, people said, you could see her, a gliding white figure. If you saw her face you would die by water one day. I looked downriver, searching for either the ghost or Molly but seeing only the lights of the bridges down past Annapolis. There was a flash, and for a moment I thought it was the winter equivalent of heat lightning, until I heard the Polaroid whirring.

She took my picture again, and again, from different sides. I suppose she was trying to upset me, or make me afraid. Maybe she thought I would run and slip on the ice. I just knelt there, and then I lay down on my back and looked up at the stars. My father had shown me the constellation of Gemini. It was the only one I ever looked for; and though I didn’t see it then, I made out my brothers shape in any number of places. Molly came sliding up to me. She stood behind my head; I could not see her, but I could see her panting breath.

I thought she would speak, then. In my mind I had heard her speak this speech; I had played it out many times: “I need you,” she would say. “For my parents. They’re stuck in here and I must let them out. You don’t mind, do you?” Of course I didn’t. I would have told her so, if I could have. I had been expecting her to say this ever since she had stabbed the horse, because I didn’t know what animal she could turn to after that, besides me. That night Colm had said to me, “So soon!” But it was not so soon, and I had waited.

She didn’t say anything, though. She only knelt near me and put a hand on my belly. She wasn’t smiling, just breathing hard. The camera hung around her neck and the dagger was in her hand. She raised my sweaters and my pajama top so that I felt the cold on my skin and the goose bumps it raised. She put the tip of the dagger against my belly, and when she looked at me I was so tempted to speak.

“Goodbye,” she said, and gently slipped it in. I heard my brother’s voice ring in my head: “Now!” For just a moment, as I felt the metal enter me, I wanted it, and I was full of joy; but a tall wave of pain crashed over me and washed all the joy away. A cresting scream rose in me and broke out of my mouth, the loudest sound I had ever heard, louder than Sheriff Travis’s scream, louder than my father’s scream, louder than any of the dogs or cats or rabbits. It flew over the ice in every direction and assaulted people in their homes. I saw windows lighting up in the hills above the river as I scrambled to my feet, still screaming. Molly had fallen back, her face caught in a perfect expression of astonishment. I turned and ran from her, not looking back to see if she was chasing me, because I knew she was. I ran for my life, sliding on the ice, expecting at any moment to feel her bodkin in my back. I cried out again when I climbed over the sea wall and ran across the road, because of the pain as I lifted myself. I clambered up the ravine, hearing her behind me. On the spruce that led to my bedroom she caught me, stabbing my dangling calf, and I fell. She came at me again, and I kicked at her; she didn’t make a sound. I held my hands out before me and she stabbed them. With a bloody fist I smashed her jaw and knocked her down. I got up the tree and into my room, too afraid to turn and close the window. I rushed down the stairs into my parents’ bedroom, where I slammed the door behind me and woke them with my hysterical screaming. My mother turned on the light. Despite my long silence the words came smoothly, up from my leaking belly, sliding like mercury through my throat and bursting in the bright air of their room.

“I want to live!” I told them, though my heart broke as I said it; Colm’s image appeared in the floor-length mirror on the opposite side of the bed. He was bloody like me, wounded. He looked at me as my parents jumped out of bed with their arms out, their faces white with horror at the sight of me. I cried great heaving, house-shaking sobs, not because of the pain of my wounds, or because my parents were crying, or because I knew Molly was on her way back to the river, where she would turn her knife on herself and at last take a human life for her soul-eating dagger. I didn’t cry like that over the animals and people, now that I knew just how much a knife hurt, though I did feel guilty. And I wasn’t crying at my pending betrayal of Molly, though I knew I would say I had no part in any of it and there would be no proof that I had. I cried because I saw Colm shake his head, then turn his back on me and walk away, receding into an image that became more and more my own until it was mine completely. I knew it would speak to me only with my own voice, and look at me with my own eyes, and I knew that I would never see my brother again.