An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [15]
"This was at Williston Country Day," Thomas said, "right after you killed my parents." He said this slowly, as if I were somewhat slow myself and so I would get it all down and understand, which I appreciated. "The other kids, students, friends even, they made fun of my parents."
"You're kidding me," I said. "That's awful, Thomas. Those were no friends."
"They were. They made fun of the way my parents died, you know, in bed." He stumbled over these last words and was obviously still in a lot of pain and haunted by it, the poor guy.
"For a long time," he went on, "I was ashamed of them, hated them because of what they were doing when you killed them."
"That's understandable."
"There was a girl in my class whose parents died in a car wreck," he said. "They were both decapitated. I was jealous of her. For a long time, I wished my parents had died like that."
"Totally understandable," I said.
"For a long time," he said, sucking in a big, wet breath, "I wanted to kill myself."
"Don't say that, Thomas, don't even think it," I said. Again, I would have done anything for the guy. If he'd brought out the razor blades to slit his wrists, I would have ripped my shirt into bandages; if he'd had pills and swallowed them, I would have pumped his stomach, even without the proper know-how or medical equipment. I wanted to save him just like I wanted to save myself, I suppose. In this way I was like the mirror who wanted to save the guy looking into it and thus save the mirror image, too. It was a complicated emotional response, all right, and I'm not sure I understood it myself, which was how I knew it was complicated.
"And when I didn't want to kill myself," Thomas said, looking at me from underneath his eyebrows, which were blond and thin, like his hair, "I wanted to kill you."
"Well," I said, because I didn't have a response to this except to say that I was glad he hadn't. Killed me, that is.
"Don't worry," he said, although he said this in a deep, dark tone of voice that belied his skinniness and suggested that maybe I should worry. "My shrink talked me out of killing you."
"You have a shrink?"
"I've had a bunch." Thomas said this as if he were weary of his sadness, as if grief were a Halloween costume he still had on after the holiday and wanted to take off but couldn't, and suddenly I had a very clear vision of his life, which I had helped make for him just as surely as I had helped make my own. I could see him going from shrink to shrink, and except for those shrinks and his grief and his awful past, he was all alone in the world. I doubted he had his own wife and kids waiting for him at home, and then I thought of Anne Marie and the kids, out there on their normal Saturday errands and then picking apples at a self-pick apple orchard, or petting domesticated wild animals at a petting zoo, or being read to at some library's reading hour, and it occurred to me that the world didn't need to be so big for just the four of us. I missed them badly and would have gotten in my minivan ― we had two of them ― and joined them at the petting zoo, for instance, except the minivan was low on gas and I didn't know where the petting zoo was.
"Anyway," Thomas said, shaking his head as if just waking up and trying to clear his head of a dream, "that's why I'm here. My shrink said I should find you and ask you to apologize. For killing my parents."
"Oh, I do, I do apologize," I said. "I'm so sorry." And I really was sorry and at the same time so happy that there was something I could do for Thomas after all these years. It is a rare thing, to be allowed to apologize for something so horrible and final. It was like Abel coming back from the dead and giving his brother Cain the chance to apologize for killing him. "Oh, I'm so sorry for killing your parents," I said, and I was so full of penitence that I got down on my knees in a begging