Triptych

He knew he looked like hell. Ms. Lam had knocked on his door at five o’clock that morning. She’d handed him the specimen cup, then started searching his room for contraband. He’d come back from the toilet to find her holding the picture of his mother in her hands. John had stood there holding his own piss, feeling a slow shame burning inside him. This was just one more degradation he had forced on Emily. When would it end? When would his mother be able to rest in peace?

Joyce said, “We’re here about Michael.”

“He was my son,” Lydia told them, as if it was that simple.

Joyce stiffened beside him, but John shook his head, willed her to be patient. He loved his sister, but she lived in a world of black and white. She didn’t know how to deal with the grays.

John told Lydia, “The little girl he kidnapped is going to be okay.”

“Well,” she said, dismissing this with a shrug of her narrow shoulders. John waited, but she didn’t ask about Angie Polaski, didn’t seem interested in the health of her son’s last victim. As a matter of fact, she didn’t seem interested in anything.

John cleared his throat. “If you could just-”

“He hated you, you know.”

John had already figured that out, but he needed to know. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, smoothing her skirt with her hand. She had a large diamond ring on her finger, the gold band at least half an inch wide. “He seemed quite obsessed with you. He kept a scrapbook.” She stood suddenly. “I’ll get it.”

She left the room, her slippers gliding across the white carpet.

Joyce hissed out air between her teeth.

“Calm down,” John told her. “She doesn’t have to do this.”

“She’s holding your life in her hands.”

“I know,” John said, but he was used to having other people control his life, whether it was his father or Michael or the guards at the prison or Martha Lam. John had never known a moment in his adult life when he wasn’t trying to keep somebody happy just so he could live through another day.

Joyce started to tear up again. He had forgotten what a crier she was. “I hate her, John. I hate her so much. How can you stand to be in the same room with her?”

He used the back of his finger to wipe away her tears. “We need something from her. She doesn’t need anything from us.”

Lydia returned, holding a large photo album to her chest. She put it on the low leather ottoman between the couches as she sat down.

John saw a photograph of himself pasted to the outside of the book. At least, he thought it was his photograph. The face had been scratched out with an ink pen.

“My God,” Joyce murmured, sliding the album over. She opened the cover to the first page, then the second, as John looked over her shoulder. They were both speechless as they saw pictures of John from junior high-class pictures, team photos, John ru

“It was Barry who made it worse,” Lydia said. Uncle Barry, her husband, their mother’s brother. “Barry talked about you all the time, used you as an example.”

“An example of what?” Joyce demanded, obviously horrified by the scrapbook.

“Michael went down the wrong path after his father left. He had problems at school. The drugs… well, I don’t know. There was an older boy at school who got him interested in the wrong things. Michael would have never done anything like that on his own.”

Joyce’s mouth opened but John squeezed her hand, warning her not to speak. You didn’t get what you wanted from someone like Lydia Ormewood by telling her what to do. You came with your hat in your hand and you waited. John had done this all of his life. He knew that one false word could ruin everything.

Lydia continued, “Barry thought you would be a good role model for Michael. You always did so well in school.” She sighed. “Michael was a good boy. He merely gravitated toward the wrong crowd.”

John nodded, like he understood. Maybe, on some level, he did. John himself had gotten sucked into Michael’s crowd. So had Aleesha Monroe. She had hung around Michael’s house all the time, had even been there the night of the party. She’d had good parents, siblings who were always at the top of their classes. Would John have ended up like Aleesha if Mary Alice hadn’t died? Would his life have been wasted like hers no matter what had happened?

Lydia’s chest rose and fell as she sighed again. “I made him join the military,” she told them. “I didn’t let him sit around after you went away. He fought in the war. He tried to help keep those Arab people safe and got shot in the leg for his trouble.”

Joyce was so tense John could almost hear her humming like a piano wire.

Lydia picked at a speck of fuzz on her skirt. “And then he came back to Atlanta, settled down, had a family.” She looked up at Joyce. “That girl he married, she obviously had something wrong with her. Tim was not Michael’s fault.” She spoke vehemently, and John looked around the room again, trying to find photographs of Michael or his son. The mantel over the fireplace was bare but for a glass vase of silk flowers. The stark metal table on the back wall held nothing but a neat stack of magazines and one of those princess phones like Joyce had in her room when they were growing up. Even the thick cord dangling from the telephone hung in a straight line, as if it, too, was afraid to displease Lydia.

The whole place was like a tomb.

“He got a commendation for saving a woman’s life,” Lydia continued proudly. “Did you know that?”

John’s reply almost caught in his throat. “No. I didn’t.”

“She was in a car accident. He pulled her from the car before it exploded.”

John didn’t know what to say. Michael may have saved one woman, but he had ruined countless others, selling drugs to the working girls, raping and murdering for his own sick pleasure.

“Michael was good,” Lydia insisted. “That other part of him”-she waved her hand, dismissing the evil her son had wrought-“that wasn’t my Michael. My Michael was a good boy. He had so many friends.”

So many friends he got hooked on hard drugs, John thought. Like Aleesha.

“And such promise,” she continued.

“You can’t do this.” Joyce’s voice shook with anger. “You ca

“Joyce,” John tried. She didn’t know the rules, didn’t know how to give up her control. She had never had someone throw feces in her face just for looking the wrong way. She had never tried to go to sleep while the sixty-year-old man in the next cell whispered about what a beautiful body you had, told you in minute detail what he wanted to do to it.

Lydia raised a thin eyebrow. “You should mind your brother, young lady.”

“Don’t you dare talk about my brother.”

Amusement flashed in Lydia’s eyes. John knew they had lost. In that one moment, they had lost everything.

Lydia asked, “Are you threatening me?”

Joyce exploded off the couch, yelling, “You knew John didn’t kill Mary Alice!”

“I knew no such thing.”

“How can you defend him?” John tried to pull her back to the couch, but Joyce slapped his hand away. “How can you just sit there-”

“You don’t have children so you don’t know,” Lydia snapped. “You and your… lady friend.”

Joyce clenched her fists. “No,” she answered. “I don’t have children. You’re right. I didn’t raise a child. I didn’t raise a rapist and murderer, either.”

Lydia looked as if she had been slapped. “You’ve no right to speak to me in that tone.”

“Did you tell Mama?” Joyce demanded. “When you went to the hospital, is that when you told her what happened, that your child murdered Mary Alice, not hers?”

Lydia advised, “Let the dead rest in peace.”

John didn’t know if she meant Emily or Michael. For his part, John wasn’t sure if Michael’s death brought him any peace. Standing there in that cellar, he had wanted with every ounce of his being to fall to his knees, beat the life back into Michael’s chest, do whatever it took to bring him back to life so he could kill him again with his own hands.