Page 23 of Kill Your Darlings

Back upstairs Thom wondered what else Jason might have looked at on his computer. He opened Chrome and checked the history. Not surprisingly he saw a recent search for Alex Deighton, but alarmingly he also saw a search for Alexandra Fritsch. How could Jasonpossibly know that name? He was dizzy all of a sudden, like he’d been lifted up really fast and set back down, and he did his breathing exercises, trying to calm his mind. Then he had a thought and typed “Alex” into the search bar on the browser. A menu of possibilities presented itself. Not just Alex Deighton and Alexandra Fritsch but also Alexander Hamilton and Alex Kingston and Alexis Bledel and a local pizza place called Alexander’s. Jason must have put the name Alex into his search bar to see what had come up and Alexandra Fritsch, a name that Thom frequently entered, had appeared. But it looked as though Jason had clicked on the name and read one of the accompanying news articles. Thom opened the article himself, a story archived from theLubbock Avalanche-Journal. He’d read it before but glanced through it again, trying to see it through his son’s eyes. It began by referencing the unsolved stabbing death of Alexandra Fritsch, over twenty years ago, then connecting that crime to the scandal that swept Caprock College when it was revealed that some of the Texas college’s female students were part of an amateur prostitution ring.

Thom leaned back in his chair and thought for a while. He decided that he didn’t really have much to worry about. What bothered him the most, in a way, was that his son had read both his stupid letter to Deighton and his embarrassing European travel story. It seemed like only a couple of years ago that Jason had seemed to idolize Thom, impressed by his job, by his sense of humor, even by his mediocre tennis game. There was a period when Jason wore shorts late into the fall with button-down shirts and sweaters just like Thom did. But those days were over. It was only a matter of time until Jason saw Thom the way that Thom saw himself: a failed, out-of-shape writer who drank too much and who was barely tolerated by his wife. A wave of self-pity swept through him, making him feel even worse about himself. His only hope was that Jason would never ever find out about his more cardinal sins. He remembered whatWendy had said about his password and decided he ought to change it, even though he’d had the same one for the whole time he’d had the computer.

iii

After Thom’s parents had left (they always came too early, but they always left early as well), Wendy finished the dishes and went to her office just to have a little bit of time for herself. Samsa was in there as well. Wendy had left a shoebox on the floor a week ago and he’d turned it into his new favorite afternoon sleeping spot; she hadn’t had the heart to throw the box out yet.

She logged onto her computer to check her emails. Her brother had sent her a photograph of his Thanksgiving dinner, their mom with a particular grin on her face that meant she wasn’t all that happy to be there. Wendy made a note to herself to book a trip to Wyoming soon, maybe over Jason’s February break. Thinking of Jason, she clicked the button that showed recent browsing history, but there was nothing suspicious. She opened up Word and checked to see if any files had been opened by someone other than her. Even though she was prepared it was still a shock to see that several documents had been looked at by Jason. Two were poems, both unfinished. One was called “A Murder of Sparrows” and the other “Too Much of Water,” both picked because Jason, the boy detective, seemed to be investigating the drowning death of Alex Deighton. She looked at the poems again just to see what he had read and imagined he was more bored by them than anything. “A Murder of Sparrows” was an attempt at a comic interrogation of bird taxonomy, and “Too Much of Water” was actually about her father’s death when she was fifteen, but written in a way that there was really no way Jason would ever have figured that out.

But the third document Jason had opened did concern her a little. It was called “Money Stuff” and it was a list of assets and accounts that she’d put together over a year ago. She’d only made it because Thom had no idea about how much money they had, where it was kept, or how to get to it. She’d sent him the document after she’d written it, but he hadn’t seemed particularly interested. She wondered sometimes if it was an innate failing of his, or if he felt guilt about the money. Either way, money was simply something he had no interest in thinking about, although he didn’t seem to feel too bad about the enormous DVD library he’d amassed or the yearly trips to Europe or the single malt he drank. Wendy opened up “Money Stuff” and looked at it. It was a pretty rudimentary list. She hadn’t included account numbers, just the names of banks and institutions, and roughly how much was in each. It was funny. They’d spent a lot of money since Wendy had inherited her first husband’s trust fund, but they seemed to have more now than they ever had before. Money made money.

She wondered if Jason understood the numbers he’d looked at. Probably better than his father did, she thought. It was a lot of money, mostly because she had been careful about spending it. She and Thom were basically academics and for that reason neither of them wanted to be driving around in Italian sports cars or wearing designer clothes. They had their house on the sea. They had traveled the world. They’d donated huge sums to multiple charities. Locally, they’d probably single-handedly kept both the New Essex Art Cinema and Mother Hen Cat Rescue in operation. Most important, Wendy was able to make sure that her mother would never have to worry about money for the remainder of her life. Her brother, also, although he was less inclined to take money from her unless it was for something related to his kids (she paid the fees for their sports clubs and contributed to their college funds). Even now, after so many years, just knowing that she had access to money was an enormous weight off her shoulders. When she’d been young her parents had mostly tried to hide just how precarious their situation had been, but both she and her brother knew from a young age that they were poor. She had a childhood habit, one she continued to this day, in which she lay in bed each morning and counted her worries, telling herself to worry about them quickly and get it over with for the day. Her primary worry back then, besides her father and what he might do when he drank too much, was when the money would run out and what would happen then. She’d never really shaken that feeling, and maybe that was the real reason she’d made a list of how much she and Thom had in the bank. People like Thom, who had never really worried about money (even though he loved to talk about his down-and-out days as a video-store employee), were the type of people who would say how money wasn’t all that important. But Wendy knew its importance, not in buying things but in making sure that you and your family were safe from the wolves.

After deleting the “Money Stuff” file and changing her password as well, Wendy shut down her computer and went to see what Thom and Jason were up to. They were on either side of the couch in the TV room, both glassy-eyed (Thom from booze, Jason from his grandmother’s pecan pie), staring blankly at the screen. Wendy sank down between them. Roger Moore was on screen, wearing a safari suit, in some kind of jungle hideout. “James Bond marathon,” Thom said, and Wendy, tired suddenly from a day of cooking and entertaining, stretched out to watch for a while, her head on Thom’s lap and her feet up against her son.

2013

July

i

“He’s dead,” Thom said.

“Who’s dead?”

“Alex.”

Wendy turned away from her computer to face Thom, who was standing in her office doorway. He’d been there five minutes earlier, talking about his rejected American-lit-survey syllabus, when the phone rang and he’d gone to answer it, saying that it was no doubt Alex, calling to explain his decision. Instead, he was back in the same spot, shirt untucked, telling Wendy that Alex was dead. He seemed shocked, dazed almost.

“Wait, what? Alex Deighton?”

“I know. We were just talking about him. He drowned on one of his swims. This morning. That was Linda on the phone.”

“Oh my God,” Wendy said, standing up and walking toward her husband. “Hedrowned?”

“Apparently. I’m... I don’t know what I am. I mean, as you know, I hate the motherfucker, but I also thought he’d be in my life forever, you know?”

“Of course. Of course.”

“I can’t...” Thom brought his fingers to his mouth, tapping at a lip, a habit he’d developed since finally quitting smoking just under a year ago.

“What else did Linda say? When did it happen? How was she told?”

“Um, she just said, ‘Thom, I have some terrible news,’ and you know what I instantly thought? I thought that I was being fired. Which is ridiculous, of course, because I can’t be fired, but my first thought was that Alex had found some way to do it. And then she said that Alex was dead, and I think I said the words ‘Our Alex?’ which is strange, right, since who else would it be?”

“He drowned?”

“Yes, you know how he swims every morning over at Blood Stone Quarry?”

“He never shuts up about it.”

“He never did, did he?” Thom smiled, and the act of smiling seemed to relax his whole body, his shoulders lowering, his hands returning to his sides.

“Who found him?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even think to ask. Linda just told me that he’d been found dead at the quarry, and that—”

“Who’s dead?” Jason had wandered into the room, holding a comic book in one hand.

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