Joe Hill - Horns

She nodded furiously, her eyes bright and staring.

“Don’t suffocate yourself, Mom.”

His mother stared at him for a moment longer, then opened her mouth and drew a deep, whistling breath. She watched him put her papers into her bag.

When she spoke, her voice was small and shrill and rapid, words running together. “I want to write you a letter a very nice letter with very nice handwriting on my special stationery to tell you how much Dad and I love you and how sorry we are you aren’t happy and how much better it would be for everyone if you’d just go.”

He put the last of her papers into her briefcase and then squatted there, holding it across his knees. “Go where?”

“Didn’t you want to hike in Alaska?”

“With Merrin.”

“Or see Vienna?”

“With Merrin.”

“Or learn Chinese? In Beijing?”

“Merrin and I talked about going to Vietnam to teach English. But I don’t think we were ever really going to do it.”

“I don’t care where you go. As long as I don’t have to see you once a week. As long as I don’t have to hear you talk about yourself like everything’s okay, because it’s not okay, it’s never going to be okay again. It makes me too unhappy to see you. I just want to be happy again, Ig.”

He gave her the briefcase.

“I don’t want you to be my kid anymore,” she said. “It’s too hard. I wish I just had Terry.”

He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. And when he did, he saw how she had quietly resented him for years for giving her stretch marks. He had single-handedly spoiled her Playboy-centerfold figure. Terry had been a small baby, considerate, and left her shape and skin intact, but Ig had fucked it all up. She had been offered five grand for a single night by an oil sheik in Vegas once, back before she had children. Those were the days. Easiest and best money she ever made.

“I don’t know why I told you all that,” Lydia said. “I hate myself. I was never a good mother.” Then she seemed to realize she had been kissed, and she touched her cheek, smoothing one palm across it. She was blinking back tears, but when she felt the kiss on her skin, she smiled. “You kissed me. Are you…are you going to go away, then?” Her voice unsteady with hopefulness.

“I was never here,” he said.

WHEN HE WAS BACK in the front hallway, he looked at the screen door to the porch and the sunlit world beyond and thought he ought to go, go now, get out of here before he ran into someone else, his father or his brother. He had changed his mind about looking for Terry, had decided to avoid him after all. Considering the things his mother had said to him, Ig thought it was better not to test his love for anyone else.

Yet he did not walk back out through the front door but instead turned and began to climb the stairs. He was here, he thought, he should look in his room and see if there was anything he wanted to take with him when he left. Left for where? He didn’t know yet. He wasn’t sure, though, that he would ever be coming back.

The stairs were a century old and creaked and muttered as Ig climbed. No sooner had he reached the top of them than a door across the hall, to the right, popped open, and his father stuck out his head. Ig had seen this a hundred times before. His father was distractible by nature and couldn’t stand for anyone to go by on the stairs without looking out to see who it was.

“Oh,” he said. “Ig. I thought you might be…” but his voice trailed off. His gaze drifted from Iggy’s eyes and on to the horns. He stood there in a white wifebeater and striped suspenders, his feet bare.

“Just tell me,” Ig said. “Here’s the part where you tell me something awful you’ve been keeping to yourself. Probably something about me. Just say it, and we’ll get it out of the way.”

“I want to pretend I was doing something important in my studio so I don’t have to talk to you.”

“Well. That’s not so bad.”

“Seeing you is too hard.”

“Gotcha. Just covered all this with Mom.”

“I think about Merrin. About what a good girl she was. I loved her, you know, in a way. And envied you. I was never in love with anyone the way you two were in love with each other. Certainly not your mother-status-obsessed little whore. Worst mistake I ever made. Every bad thing in my life has come out of my marriage. But Merrin. Merrin was the sweetest little thing. You couldn’t hear her laugh without smiling. When I think about the way you fucked her and killed her, I want to throw up.”

“I didn’t kill her,” Ig said, dry-mouthed.

“And the worst part,” Derrick Perrish said, “she was my friend and looked up to me, and I helped you get away with it.”

Ig stared.

“It was the guy who runs the state forensics lab, Gene Lee. His son died of leukemia a few years back, but before he croaked, I helped him get tickets to Paul McCartney and arranged for Gene and his kid to meet him backstage and everything. After you were arrested, Gene got in touch. He asked me if you did it, and I said-I told him-that I couldn’t give him an honest answer. And two days later there was that fire in the state lab up in Concord. Gene wasn’t in charge there-he works out of Manchester-but I’ve always assumed…”

Ig felt his insides turn over. If the forensic evidence gathered from the scene had not been destroyed, it might’ve been possible to establish his innocence. But it had gone up in flames-like every other hope Ig held in his heart, like every good thing in Ig’s life. In paranoid moments he had imagined there was an elaborate and secret conspiracy to condemn and destroy him. Now he saw he was right, there had been a secret agency at work, only it had been a conspiracy of people who wanted to protect him.

“How could you have done that? How could you have been so stupid?” Ig asked, breathless with a shock that wavered on the edge of hate.

“That’s what I ask myself. Every day. I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it’s your job to stand in the way. Everyone understands that. But this. This. Merrin was like one of my kids, too. She was in our house every day for ten years. She trusted me. I bought her popcorn at movies and went to her lacrosse games and played cribbage with her, and she was beautiful and loved you, and you bashed her fuckin’ brains in. It wasn’t right to cover for you, not for that. You should’ve gone to jail. When I see you in the house, I want to slap that morose look right off your stupid face. Like you have anything to be sad about. You got away with murder. Literally. And dragged me into it. You make me feel unclean. You make me want to wash, scrub myself with steel wool. My skin crawls when you talk to me. How could you do that to her? She was one of the best people I ever knew. She was sure as shit my favorite thing about you.”

“Me, too,” Ig said.

“I want to go back into my office,” his father said, his mouth open, breathing heavily. “I see you and I just want to go away. Into my office. Off to Vegas. Or Paris. Anywhere. I’d like to go and never come back.”

“And you really think I killed her. You don’t sometimes wonder if maybe the evidence you had Gene burn up could’ve saved me? All the times I told you I didn’t do it, you didn’t sometimes think maybe-just maybe-I was innocent?”

His father stared, for a moment couldn’t reply. Then he said, “No. Not really. Tell the truth, I was surprised you didn’t do something to her sooner. I always thought you were a weird little shit.”

HE STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of his bedroom for a full minute but did not enter the room, didn’t lie down, as he had imagined doing. His head hurt again, in the temples, at the base of the horns. There was a feeling of pressure mounting behind them. Darkness twitched at the edges of his vision, in time to the beat of his pulse.