May 12, 2010
When he thought of that evening, what his mind kept returning to was the blood. There had been so much of it—an impossible amount—more than the human body should contain. It had seeped from the hole between the ribs, pooled beneath the body, congealing into something that was no longer liquid but rather a cooling gelatinous mass on the hardwood. The sole of his shoe brushed it as Jason sank to the floor beside the body for the second time, causing the coagulated puddle to jiggle like a dark lake of Jell-O.
He’d been upstairs in the bedroom when it started, watching a repeat episode from the third season of Mad Men. If the doorbell had rung or if she’d knocked, he hadn’t heard it. What he did hear eventually was the sound of arguing from the floor below. At the outset, Amir’s voice had been calm, reasonable, placating. But as the discussion continued his tone took on a sharper edge, becoming defensive, even angry. Jason recognized the female voice as well, and he’d gotten up, deciding he should go downstairs to intervene.
Then a scuffle—noisy at first, but then quiet and focused. He’d never noticed that before, how a physical altercation becomes progressively quieter as the struggle intensifies. Words turned to muted grunts. Halfway down the stairs, Jason could hear the unmistakable sound of a body striking the wall, the clatter of a picture frame falling to the floor.
That got him running, moving quickly through the living room and into the short hallway leading to the front door.
He saw them go down together, arms clasped around each other in what could’ve been misconstrued, under different circumstances, as a lovers’ embrace. Amir landed on top of her, the air from their lungs making an umph sound as it was simultaneously forced from their bodies. She arched her back, dug for something attached to her belt, and a second later she was driving a clenched fist into the left side of his rib cage. A single strike and Amir lay still—odd, Jason thought, because she hadn’t hit him that hard—and he had time to wonder if maybe Amir had struck his head on the way down, had knocked himself out when they’d contacted the floor. Then she was pushing herself out from under him, was getting to her feet, and there was blood on her hands—too much of it already—bright red and dripping from one fingertip onto the blue jeans of the inert body at her feet.
His eyes fell to Amir, to the area where she’d struck him, only now he could see the blood pumping from a wound on the left side of his torso, the knife lying next to him on the floor. Jason dropped to his knees, stuck his fingers into the hole in the shirt left by the knife, and tore the fabric apart to get to the wound. “Help me hold pressure!” he pleaded, placing a hand over the site, the blood spilling through the small spaces between his fingers. It was everywhere now: on his hands, arms, and clothing. Days later, he’d notice faint crusted remnants clinging to the underside of his fingernails.
She knelt down beside him, taking hold of his forearms as she shook her head slowly from one side to the other.
“He’s gone, Jason.”
“No. He’s not gone. Help me move him to the couch. We’ve got to—”
“He’s dead,” she said, letting the words fill the hallway, the town house, the crater of irrevocable absence above which the two of them now perched.
Not dead, not dead, he thought, for the person lying here had been alive and well ten minutes before, had sat at the bistro table and eaten dinner two hours ago in the kitchen behind them. How can he be dead when the blood is still warm? he wanted to argue, but he realized that was no longer true. The blood—inert and useless now—had already started to cool.
“What have you done? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!” he cried out, his words filling the hallway, racing through every room of the town house and back again. But, of course, he knew what she had done. She had come here to protect him—just as he’d known she would. Just as she always had.
She stood, fished a cell phone from her pocket, dialed a number.
“Are you calling an ambulance?” he asked, as if this were a situation that might still be salvaged—might still be undone.
“No,” she said. “I’m calling my field office. We’ll need a cleaner.”
Let’s go back to your relationship with your sister. What was she like?” I asked as we passed Morgan Hall—the main administration building—on what had become our routine walking route across campus. The brick exterior of the building was chipped and scratched beneath the windows, as if something roaming the grounds at night had done its best to claw its way inside.
Jason offered me that half smile of his—ironic and sad, but not completely devoid of hope.
“She always looked out for me, protected me. It’s what I remember most about our relationship.”
“What sort of things did she protect you from?” I asked, and he was silent for a while, as if the conjuring of those memories required a force of will, a certain mental preparation.
“I tend to think of my early childhood as being fairly happy, although I wonder if I was just too young to know any different. It wasn’t until I was about fourteen, though, when things really started to change for me.”
We’d come to a stop near the east end of the perimeter. There was a small gate built into the fence here. From the looks of its rusted hinges and neglected condition, I guessed it had been padlocked shut for the past twenty years, maybe longer. I’d forgotten it was here, and it occurred to me now that so much of Menaker was like that. It lay quiet and unobtrusive, like a water moccasin sunning itself on the trunk of a fallen tree along the riverbank. There are parts of this place that you can almost forget exist until you stumble upon them and they strike out at you from the high grass. I glanced over at Jason, who was looking out past the fence at the tree line beyond, his expression lost in recollection. I said nothing, only waited for him to continue.
“Fourteen is a … turbulent age. I think we were all rediscovering girls back then. I still remember how strange and terrifying and wonderful that was. It was like we’d known them as one thing our whole lives but were encountering them for the first time as something other than what we’d established them to be. Part of it was their physical development. Their bodies were changing—maturing and becoming different from ours in obvious ways that could no longer be ignored. Part of it was our own hormones kicking in, awakening from over a decade of dormancy and demanding to be dealt with.
“I had this friend, Michael. I guess you could say he was my best friend. He lived a block over from me, used to stop by every day after school—you know: hang out, ride bikes, toss the football around, that sort of thing. We’d both been living in the same neighborhood since we were born, had grown up together. Our families sometimes even spent vacations with each other, renting out a beach house for a week or driving up to Pennsylvania for a few days of skiing. We were pretty close, and I valued that friendship—relied on it, I suppose—in a way that I didn’t fully understand or have the ability to articulate.”
The wind moved through his hair—tussled it almost—making him look much younger. I could imagine him as an adolescent.
“Our best friends are those
