To The Power Of Three

24

The lot in Loudon Cemetery was desirable, assuming such a term can ever be used for a burial site. Remote, but not too remote, near a line of willow trees. It looked especially nice on this June afternoon, banked by displays of yellow roses, pale and pastel as ordered, with rows of white folding chairs facing the freshly dug hole.

School secretary Anita Whitehead walked around these chairs, trying to pick out an appropriate spot. She preferred an aisle, of course, so she could slip out the second it ended and avoid the congestion along the cemetery’s narrow drives, but the aisle seat in the last row seemed antisocial somehow. Perhaps two up? No, the far seat on the front row would be best, providing the access she needed without seeming presumptuous.

But as she settled herself in the less-than-comfortable chair, she was confronted by some undertaker type.

“We’ve been asked to reserve the seats for family and their closest friends, so if you could wait until-”

“I got here early.” Anita could see how it might be a problem if she had arrived late, expecting special treatment, but this was just the typical unfairness that Anita faced everywhere she went.

“I understand, but if you could just wait, miss, until everyone has arrived, and then we’ll be able to accommodate you.”

“I have a condition,” Anita said. “I can’t be on my feet, especially on such a warm day.”

“It’s just that I have a list-” The undertaker, or funeral director, or whatever such people wanted to be called, was very creepy, in Anita’s opinion. He was a normal-enough-looking fellow, but that was exactly what made him suspect to Anita. A funeral director should be pale and thin, ghostly-looking. This one was tanned and vigorous, with a broad chest and a gap between his front teeth. How did someone who worked with dead people get to be so healthy, not to mention cheerful? He was all wrong.

“Look, I’m just going to sit for now, and if you don’t have enough places, you let me know, okay?” She settled herself with as much dignity as possible. She had no intention of moving, ever. She was on sick leave, after all, her nerves so frayed by the shooting that she might have to go on permanent disability. She had gone to a lot of trouble, driving all the way here from her house, and that was no small thing. Anita was surprised, disappointed even, that the Hartigans, so obviously wealthy, would bury one of theirs in this seedy neighborhood. She was pretty sure she had passed a drug corner or two on her way in, and some black boys had stared into her car at a stoplight. Nonchalantly, she had lifted her left elbow and propped her arm on the edge of her door, as if resting it there. That had given her a chance to lock the door, without hurting the boys’ feelings. Better safe than sorry.

Wherever you go, there you are.

The nonsense sentence jolted into Dale’s consciousness as if it were another pothole along Frederick Road, whose neglected surface made even the funeral home’s town car bounce and rock. It was a line from a film, although Dale wasn’t sure which film, or if he had the wording exact. But he recognized it as stoner humor, hilarious if you were high. And Dale had been high a lot in high school.

Then one day, when he and Glen were seniors, he had watched Glen make the most ungodly mix of melted chocolate, butter, raw eggs, and flour. “It’s brownie mix,” Glen had said, proffering the bowl. “You left out the sugar, Glen.” “Oh. Yeah. I thought it tasted kind of bitter.” Dale had sworn off pot from that day on, while Glen had pretty much majored in marijuana. He had probably smoked a bowl this very morning, judging by his eyes-and how Dale envied him for that. Maybe that would blunt the pain. Alcohol clearly didn’t work, although he had given it every chance. Alcohol and Ambien and Tylenol PM, all worthless. He had even tossed down a couple of Percocet, left over from Susannah’s dental surgery two years ago, but the painkillers were helpless in his body. They needed a literal inflammation, something they could dull and still.

“The old house,” Glen said. They were passing a section of row-houses with Tudor touches that had been intended to make them distinctive but only served to make them odd and cheap-looking. “We’re going by the old house, Dad.”

Susannah, always gratifyingly interested in Dale’s past, made a point of craning her neck and looking at the house before it was out of sight, but Thornton Hartigan didn’t even turn his head to the side.

“Those houses,” he said, “were pieces of shit.”

The Hartigans had lived here on Frederick Road in their leanest years, back when it was still unclear if Thornton ’s decision to start amassing property in north Baltimore County would accomplish anything more than his complete and total ruin. The place was tiny even by rowhouse standards, two bedrooms and a single bath. Dale and Glen had been literally on top of each other, in a rickety bunk bed, the kind that would now be banned by several federal and state regulatory agencies. The household air was thick with the smells of a family whose resources were stretched thin-onions, potatoes, bacon fat. “The wolf is at our door, Martha,” Thornton had said one night, unaware that the boys were listening from the top of the stairs. The brothers had spent weeks trying to catch a glimpse of that elusive animal. Yet the little house was cozy-one of the advantages of a middle rowhouse, less light but more warmth-and Dale remembered those lean years as a happy time. Did children ever really know if their households are happy, or only if they are happy? Is there a difference? He thought his pretty stone farmhouse was one of the unhappiest places on earth during those last few years with Chloe, but Kat would have given anything to maintain the status quo.

Naturally Dale had thought quite a bit about whether it was an advantage for a kid to know hard times before being catapulted into good ones. Conventional wisdom held that it was better for children not to be given everything. Yet his own brother, Glen, who had been fifteen when their father finally hit, was as wrecked as any lifetime trust-funder, while Kat had always been sweet and modest. He was not romanticizing his daughter, Dale insisted to himself, as the limousine turned into Loudon Park. Kat had a natural goodness from the day she was born, a capacity for sharing and a marked lack of interest in material things. He liked to believe it was because he and Chloe, whatever their faults as people, had imparted to their daughter the sure message that they would take care of her, that her needs would always be paramount to them.

Of course, most parents think they’re doing the same thing. Dale’s dad probably credited his ways with instilling Dale’s work ethic. It would never occur to him to ponder the fact that the son he had ignored at the best times, bullied at the worst, had turned out to be the successful one, while Glen, indulged and bailed out at every turn, was a mess. When Dale had tried to make this point to his father-and he had, in a roundabout way, a time or two in his twenties-he was treated to the Hartigan legend, as Dale thought of it. How Glen, as the second twin by three minutes, had briefly been deprived of oxygen, which meant his mere normalcy was an achievement to be celebrated. Dale wasn’t even sure if this story were true, and his mother had always been tactfully vague on the subject. At any rate, it seemed to Dale that Glen had been given unconditional love, whereas he’d had to earn the love portioned out to him.

The result was that people respected Dale but they loved Glen, a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum, in Dale’s opinion. Was Glen loved because he was charming, or was Glen charming because he had been heaped with so much selfless love from the day he was born? Dale would probably be a pretty collegial fellow, too, if he had been cosseted and cotton-wrapped the way Glen was.

Kat, in fact, was one of the few people who hadn’t been beguiled by Glen’s easygoing nature. Oh, she loved him-he was her uncle, after all, and he tried to be doting, although he seldom followed through on his best intentions. His big talk of trips or projects, such as keeping a horse for her on his acreage, tended to peter out pretty quickly. Kat had realized early on that Glen was not reliable, and it was the one thing Kat required in the people around her-constancy, dependability. This was the key difference between Chloe and Glen, kindred spirits in so many respects. Chloe, no matter how scattered and crazy she might be with Dale, was someone Kat could count on. Even in the wake of Kat’s death, Chloe was meeting every expectation as a mother.

And so she was here, suitably dressed and behaving herself, holding Glen’s hand. What was it like, holding hands with his brother? Did it feel like Dale’s hand? Even when a twin was fraternal, even when you had spent most of your life making sure the physical resemblance was the only resemblance, it was hard not to think such thoughts.

Peter had thought he could skip the funeral, but when his parents got home Monday night, his mother insisted they go as a family. His mom was a little too much in awe of the Hartigans, in Peter’s opinion, but she had also been genuinely fond of Kat. She was one of the few people who thought Kat looked better before she lost weight, who was always trying to load her up with frijoles, plantains, and arroz con pollo.

Still, the Laskos hung back once they arrived, determined not to be presumptuous. Mrs. Hartigan motioned to them and insisted they take seats in the second row. His eyes on the ground, Peter stuck out his hand to the dark-haired man at her side, muttering, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Hartigan,” only to have Kat’s mom correct him. “This is Kat’s uncle, Glen. Her father’s over there, with the young redhead.”

Mr. Hartigan, the real one, had given his ex-wife a sharp look-she hadn’t tried to mute her voice in any way-then taken Peter’s hand with a loose, quick shake that reminded Peter just how much contempt the man had for him. Because I dated your daughter? Or because I stopped? To this day he still wasn’t sure what Dale Hartigan had wanted from him.

Dale noticed Peter’s error with his brother-but also saw how quickly he recovered from it. The young man had developed some poise in the last three years, but he still radiated that desperate like-me vibe. That same quality probably explained his success as an actor. It could be a useful quality, Dale thought, watching Josie Patel swing along on her crutches.

She was prettier than Dale remembered, but perhaps he simply hadn’t seen her since she passed through her awkward stage. Josie had been, well, monkeyish as a child, small and tanned, her nose a little large for her face, her cheeks pinched. She was still tiny, but the cheeks had filled in and the nose had receded, and there was no denying that the light-colored eyes gave her face an almost mystical cast. She made her way carefully along the front row, only to find that every chair was filled.

Susannah, who had the usual forethought to include Josie among those who would be seated for this brief memorial service, looked puzzled. She craned her neck, searching for the impostor among them. “What’s that?” she whispered, pointing to an impossibly large woman with a strange red rash visible on her bare arms and legs. The woman was at the end of the front row, on the other side of Chloe, who had engineered the seating so Glen, Thornton, and Susannah were between her and Dale.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he began, and that was all Susannah needed to confront the woman. He couldn’t hear Susannah’s whispered exhortations, but everyone was treated to the woman’s vehement protests. Finally Susannah’s gentle voice rose in frustration: “The girl is on crutches. She was Kat’s best friend. You can’t possibly expect her to stand.”

The large woman moved, although not without quite a bit of muttering, and it seemed at first that she might leave the cemetery altogether, as if this would prove she was the wronged party. Instead she settled for forcing her way into the front row of those standing.

Josie swung toward her seat, murmuring “I’m sorry” over and over. But for what? For the little scene over the seat, which was not her fault? Or for Kat’s death, which also was not her fault? Or was it? What the fuck did that one-line letter mean anyway? What truth did Perri want Kat to tell; what secret hung between them? Dale had sources inside the police department. He knew that Josie had been evasive with the detectives, obstructionist even. But why would Josie lie? Chloe insisted Josie had adored Kat.

Once Josie was settled in her seat, Chloe turned and held the girl’s hands in hers. Even from the other end of the row, Dale could see she was gripping them much too tightly, and her voice was inappropriately loud for this somber setting.

“I always thought,” she said, “that Kat would be safe with you.”

If he had been next to Chloe, he would have whispered some reprimand out of the side of his mouth or put a restraining hand on his ex-wife’s arms.

But Josie, tears in her eyes, merely said, “I did, too.”

Sergeant Lenhardt and Detective Infante stood on the other side of the drive, apart from the crowd, but in a spot where they were clearly visible to Josie. It was a cheap trick, but cheap tricks can work. We’re watching you. We’re going to talk to you again and again and again. Mr. Patel, seated behind his daughter, glared at them but did not try to approach or chase them away. How could he?

“Are these high-school girls,” Infante asked, “or strippers on a break from Northpoint Boulevard?”

“Pervert,” Lenhardt said, but Infante had a point. The girls’ idea of funeral wear was strangely provocative-short, tight black skirts with tops that hugged their bodies, leaving a strip of stomach bare. Perhaps it was a trick of memory, but he did not remember girls looking like this when he was in high school during an allegedly permissive time. The girls at Northern High School had worn low-slung jeans and gone braless, yet they had still been fresh, wholesome-looking even, with long, shiny hair and very little makeup. He would die before he let Jessica out of the house looking like this. Even as he made that vow, he knew he would be helpless to do anything about it. If this was how girls dressed, this was how girls dressed, and trying to force a kid to behave differently would be disastrous. Maybe, he tried telling himself, these getups were proof of just how innocent these girls were. Only a child who hadn’t made the connection between her body and sex could parade herself this way.

Infante nudged him, directing his attention to a short, compact beauty with her breasts pushed up into an impressive swell in her scoop-neck black top, a big gold E nestled in her cleavage.

“I never wanted to be a necklace before,”’ Infante said. “But I’m beginning to see the possibilities.”

“Hey,” Lenhardt said, more sharply than he had intended. He usually didn’t mind Infante’s on-the-prowl shtick, but these girls weren’t even legal. “Keep your gaze fixed on the Patels. We’re here to eyefuck, emphasis on eye.”

Eve was proud of her necklace, and she had borrowed a scoop-neck T-shirt from Lila to show it off, not realizing how much smaller Lila was across the chest. It had been hard deciding between a genuine gold letter and a super big one that was just plated. Val was the one who said she should go big because the necklace wouldn’t stay in style long, so Eve should get the most bang for her buck, not waste her money on real gold.

“Just make sure you paint the back with clear fingernail polish,” Val had advised. “Otherwise it’ll turn your skin green.”

It was funny how Val knew such things, because she didn’t give a damn about style or fashion for her own self. But that was the great thing about Val: She didn’t insist that everyone be like her. She just wanted the people around her to be honest, without affectations. It was okay by Val if you got caught up with wanting trendy stuff. Val wasn’t completely immune to such desires herself; she was, like, in love with her iPod. But somehow she kept it in perspective. Lila could be a little bitchy and, if she liked a guy, crazy competitive. Val was always mellow, always accepting. The only thing she despised was hypocrites. Hypocrites and liars.

The problem was, not lying was harder than it sounded, especially for someone like Eve, who felt as if she had been set up to deceive people. When she had started liking boys-and Eve had started liking boys young, back in fifth grade-it had been inconceivable that she could speak of this fact to her parents. They were so old, for one thing, and so stiff. Not only could she not tell them how much she liked boys or how often she thought about them, she found herself taking it to the extreme, insisting she had no interest in them whatsoever. If she told her parents that she liked boys, she might then have to admit they didn’t like her back.

It seemed to Eve that she told big lies only when she was trying to keep some part of herself hidden. She would start out with nothing more than a desire to conceal, to protect, and it somehow ended up being a lie. That’s why she had to continue dodging Ms. Cunningham. She’d end up telling some enormous lie to protect her secret, and it would be just like last spring all over again. Of course, the weird part about last spring was that she had tried to tell the truth about the car accident, but everyone thought it was a lie, so it had the same effect. Even Val had cautioned her not to spread stories, told her she would not put up with a friend who was a gossip.

That was when Eve had first realized that the dead lived by different rules. Well, not lived-the dead being dead-but the reputations they left behind were definitely changed for the better. Eve wondered what kind of rep she would have if she should die.

Kat’s crowd-mostly preps, although there were cheerleaders and jocks sprinkled among them, and even some drama geeks-were grouped at the front of those standing. Sniffling, holding each other, the girls presented a pretty tableau of grief. But Alexa couldn’t help thinking they knew this, which undercut the effect in her mind. It was as if they were enacting a scene from a music video. Pose, pose, pose. This is what grief looks like. Hair flip, clutch, hair flip.

It worried Alexa, these unguarded waves of hostility toward the girls she was committed to helping. But ten years out of high school, she still had mixed feelings about the popular kids. Because Alexa was pretty and slender, the girls at Glendale had projected on her the mantle of a once popular girl, and after a few token protests, she had allowed that false impression to stand. She should have been popular in high school. She was pretty enough. She did well in her studies without being a competitive grind. But she simply did not have the money to keep up with the upper-middle-class kids who dominated her school. Part-time jobs at the Gap and Banana Republic had helped Alexa hold her own in terms of clothes, but some things-a car, for instance-could not be faked in a single-parent household where the child-support checks seldom arrived. While her brother was home, they had kept up appearances, just barely. Once he left, the house had rotted quietly around them. Today location alone meant that the ugly old Cape Cod was worth almost four hundred thousand dollars, and Alexa had encouraged her mother to sell it, buy a little condo, and sock away the equity. But her mother refused to budge. It was as if she still expected Alexa’s father to show up for the scolding she had never been able to give him. Alexa wasn’t even sure if her father was alive, although she sometimes studied those lists of unclaimed property. It would be so like him to die without a will, failing to care for his children in his death as he’d failed to care for them in life.

Do you realize Kat is dead? she wanted to scream at the girls. (The boys, sullen and uncommunicative, were less appalling to her.) Dead because of you, because of the inadequacies bred in girls like Perri, who are driven insane by the no-win games you play. You killed Kat.

But she was being ridiculous, venting her anger toward Barbara on these innocent girls. Just an hour before she was to leave for the funeral, Barbara had convened yet another meeting, one for Perri’s teachers. They had been told, in no uncertain terms, to sit on Perri’s grades. The logic, if one could call Barbara’s twisted thinking logic, was that Perri’s diploma couldn’t be awarded if her records were incomplete. And it turned out that the Kahns were keen for their daughter’s name to be called from the stage Thursday night, arguing that she was not under indictment, so how could her diploma be withheld? Meanwhile Dale Hartigan was just as intent for Perri’s name to go unspoken, and Barbara had tended to do things Dale Hartigan’s way even before he had the moral advantage of a dead child.

“You know how it is when parents take notions about graduation into their heads,” Barbara had told Perri’s teachers. “We’ve already had to forgo the traditional valedictorian address because-well, you know how insane it got. So the easiest thing to do is just say she had incompletes in a subject or two. Surely she must have owed some of you work.”

Only it turned out she hadn’t-except to Alexa and the trig teacher, Maureen Downey, who had given seniors a take-home. Maureen couldn’t remember if Perri had turned it in or not, but she was happy to obey Barbara’s orders even if she did find the test among her papers. Alexa, however, wanted no part of it.

“It’s a cover-up,” she began, only to be shushed by Barbara. Literally shushed, a finger held to her lips, as if Alexa were some troublesome child.

“Think of it this way,” the principal said. “Perri violated school policy by bringing a firearm onto school property. That’s automatic expulsion. So even if she did submit those final papers to you both, she would be barred from the ceremony.”

“But it still hasn’t been established that Perri brought the gun to school,” Alexa had said, feeling dangerously close to tears. The other teachers seemed embarrassed for her, except for Ted Gifford, who appeared just as upset.

“Did she turn in her work to you?”

“I’m not sure.” Alexa still had not gone through all her final papers, given that the teachers had until the end of the day Wednesday to submit seniors’ grades.

“Then it’s moot anyway. She’s shy two credits. Even under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have walked.”

She had seen Perri’s final paper, Alexa decided now. Hadn’t it been in her box that Friday morning? She tried to re-create the scene in her mind, but those moments of normalcy could not be brought back. She had been sorting papers, reading Barbara’s memo-and then Anita had started to scream.

Anita, who was here at the funeral, despite being out of work on a doctor’s note. The gall, as Alexa’s mother would say. The un-mitigated gall.

Peter pulled at his collar. He hadn’t worn a tie, off-stage, for a long, long time, and the day was vicious hot. He was such a bonehead, lurching at Kat’s uncle that way, but the resemblance was pretty strong and he hadn’t seen Mr. Hartigan for almost three years. Peter had spent far more time with Mrs. Hartigan, who honestly liked him, and the feeling was pretty mutual. A hot mom, a total MILF. Oh, shit, that was probably the kind of thought that got you struck by lightning, standing at your exgirlfriend’s grave and thinking about how sexy her mom was. I didn’t mean it, he assured God. It was just an observation. Besides, anyone could see that Kat’s mom was appealing. Mr. Hartigan’s girlfriend was nice, too, but Peter preferred Mrs. Hartigan. Her eyes had that little downward droop, so sad and sexy, and her hair was always slipping out of this semi-topknot she wore. There was something about Mrs. Hartigan that made it very easy to imagine her naked, as if her clothes would give way as easily as her hair, sliding to the floor, and there she would be. No, wait, this was really wrong. He had to stop thinking like this. Listen to the minister. Focus on the words. “We”… “Kat”… “special”… “extraordinary”… “before her time.”

Bit by bit the words assembled themselves into sentences, and Peter willed himself into an appropriate state of grieving.

Josie stole a quick glance over her shoulder, curious to see who had shown up. Peter Lasko was beet red-it looked almost like sunburn, but she had seen him just yesterday at the assembly and he hadn’t been red then. One nice thing about her darker skin-it was very hard to detect a blush. When Josie was nervous or embarrassed, her cheeks flared prettily, two spots of pink on the bone, perfect as a painted doll’s, but only her parents recognized her color as embarrassment or nervousness. The police officers, for example, hadn’t noticed she was blushing at all, especially when they kept asking her about that stupid Tampax.

Josie could tell by the heat in her face that she was blushing now, in her own way. Why had she said that thing to Mrs. Hartigan? Had anyone overheard? When her lawyer had told her that the cops wanted her cell phone to review her text messages from the day of the shooting, Josie had kept calm, handing over her phone as if she didn’t think it was any big deal-and it wasn’t. But that meant they were going to look for Kat’s and Perri’s phones, too. What if they found them? And why had that cop been asking about her Pumas? She had thought she could keep her sandals, wear them again, but maybe not. She shouldn’t have improvised. Definitely not her strong suit. She should have stuck to the plan.

She had never missed Kat or Perri more. Kat would have soothed her, told her it was all going to be all right, while Perri would have had a strategy to deal with those police officers, something far more inventive than just droning “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” over and over. She felt so lost without them.

“Ashes to ashes,” the minister said, sprinkling dirt on Kat’s casket. “Dust to dust.” On the second “ashes,” Anita Whitehead launched herself down the path, eager to get to her car before anyone else, not caring if her sandals sounded flat and loud on the asphalt path. She wasn’t going to get stuck in some traffic jam getting out of here. She had put herself out enough for these people. Just watch her get carjacked in this horrible neighborhood, and then wouldn’t they be sorry?

She hated to say, she really did, but last year’s funeral was so much better.