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Murder-Two
1.
This, he swore.
He’d returned to the town house on East End Avenue after eleven P.M. and found the front door unlocked and, inside, his mother lying in a pool of squid ink on the hardwood floor at the foot of the stairs. She’d apparently fallen down die steep length of the stairs and broken her neck, judging from her twisted upper body. She’d also been bludgeoned to death, the back of her skull caved in, with one of her own golf clubs, a two-iron, but he hadn’t seemed to see that, immediately.
Squid ink?-well, die blood had looked black in the dim foyer light. It was a trick his eyes played on his brain sometimes when he’d been studying too hard, getting too little sleep. An optic tic. Meaning you see something clearly, but it registers surreally in the brain as something else. Like in your neurological programming there’s an occasional bleep.
In Derek Peck, Jr.’s case, confronted with the crumpled, lifeless body of his mother, this was an obvious symptom of trauma. Shock, the visceral numbness that blocks immediate grief-the unsayable, the unknowable. He’d last seen his mother, in that same buttercup-yellow quilted satin robe that had given her the look of an upright, bulky Easter toy, early that morning, before he’d left for school. He’d been away all day. And this abrupt, weird transition-from differential calculus to the body on the floor, from the anxiety-driven jokes of his Math Club friends (a hard core of them were meeting late, weekdays, preparing for upcoming SAT exams) to the profound and terrible silence of the town house that had seemed to him, even as he’d pushed open the mysteriously unlocked front door, a hostile silence, a silence that vibrated with dread.
He crouched over the body, staring in disbelief. “Mother? Mother’.”
As if it was he, Derek, who’d done something bad, he the one to be punished.
He couldn’t catch his breath. Hyperventilating! His heart beating so wildly he almost fainted. Too confused to think, Maybe they’re still here, upstairs? for in his dazed state he seemed to lack even an animal’s instinct for self-preservation.
Yes, and he felt to blame, somehow. Hadn’t she instilled in him a reflex of guilt? If something was wrong in the household, it could probably be traced back to him. From the age of thirteen (when his father, Derek senior, had divorced his mother, Lucille, same as divorcing him), he’d been expected by his mother to behave like a second adult in the household, growing tall, lank, and anxious as if to accommodate that expectation, and his sand-coloured body hair sprouting, and a fevered grimness about the eyes. Fifty-three percent of Derek’s classmates, girls and boys, at the Mayhew Academy, were from ‘families of divorce,’ and most agreed that the worst of it is you have to learn to behave like an adult yet at the same time a lesser adult, one deprived of his or her full civil rights. That wasn’t easy even for stoic streetwise Derek Peck with an IQ of, what was it?-158, at age fifteen. (He was seventeen now.) So his precarious adolescent sense of himself was seriously askew: not just his body image (his mother had allowed him to become overweight as a small child; they say that remains with you forever, irremediably imprinted in the earliest brain cells), but more crucially his social identity. For one minute she’d be treating him like an infant, calling him her baby, her baby-boy, and the next minute she was hurt, reproachful, accusing him of failing, like his father, to uphold his moral responsibility to her.
This moral responsibility was a backpack loaded with rocks. He could feel it, first fucking thing in the morning, exerting gravity even before he swung his legs out of bed.
Crouched over her now, badly trembling, shaking as in a cold wind, whispering, “Mommy?-can’t you wake up? Mom-my, don’t be-“ balking at the word dead for it would hurt and incense Lucille like the word old, not that she’d been a vain or frivolous or self-conscious woman for Lucille Peck was anything but, a woman of dignity it was said of her admiringly by women who would not have wished to be her and by men who would not have wished to be married to her. Mommy, don’t be old! Derek would never have murmured aloud, of course. Though possibly to himself frequently this past year or so seeing her wan, big-boned and brave face in harsh frontal sunshine when they happened to descend the front steps together in the morning, or at that eerie position in the kitchen where the overhead inset lights converged in such a way as to cruelly shadow her face downward, bruising the eye sockets and the soft fleshy tucks in her cheeks. Two summers ago when he’d been away for six weeks at Lake Placid and she’d driven to Ke
If he’d come home immediately after school. By four P.M. Instead of a quick call from his friend Andy across the park, guilty mumbled excuse left on the answering tape, Mother’? I’m sorry guess I won’t make di
Last time you saw your mother alive, Derek? they’d ask and he’d have to invent for he hadn’t seen her, exactly. No eye contact. And what had he said? A rushed schoolday morning, a Thursday. Nothing special about it. No premonition! Cold and windy and winter-glaring and he’d been restless to get out of the house, snatched a Diet Coke from the refrigerator so freezing his teeth ached. A blurred reproachful look of Mother in the kitchen billowing in her buttercup-yellow quilted robe as he’d backed off smiling ‘Bye, Mom!’
Sure she’d been hurt, her only son avoiding her. She’d been a lonely woman even in her pride. Even with her activities that meant so much to her: Women’s Art League, East Side Pla
How still she was lying. He didn’t dare touch her. His breathing was short, ragged. The squid-inky black beneath her twisted head had seeped and coagulated into the cracks of the floor. Her left arm was flung out in an attitude of exasperated appeal, the sleeve stained with red, her hand lying palm-up and the fingers curled like angry talons. He might have noted that her Movado watch was missing, her rings gone except Grandma’s antique opal with the fluted gold setting-the thief, or thieves, hadn’t been able to yank it off her swollen finger? He might have noted that her eyes were rolled up asymmetrically in her head, the right iris nearly vanished and the left leering like a drunken crescent-moon. He might have noted that the back of her skull was smashed soft and pulpy as a melon but there are some things about your mother out of tact and delicacy you don’t acknowledge seeing. Mother’s hair, though-it was her only remaining good feature, she’d said. A pale silvery-brown, slightly coarse, a natural colour like Wheaties. The mothers of his classmates all hoped to be youthful and glamorous with bleached or dyed hair but not Lucille Peck, she wasn’t the type. You expected her cheeks to be ruddy without makeup and on her good days they were.