She stared at him.
Lindsey held on to her tray. She kept her eyes locked on Artie.
“I wanted to tell you before you read the flier,” he said.
Samuel rushed into the tent.
“What’s going on?” Lindsey looked helplessly at Samuel.
“This year’s competition is how to commit the perfect murder,” Samuel said.
Samuel and I saw the tremor. The inside shakeoff of her heart. She was getting so good the cracks and fissures were smaller and smaller Soon, like a sleight-of-hand trick perfected, no one would see her do it. She could shut out the whole world, including herself.
“I’m fine,” she said.
But Samuel knew she wasn’t.
He and Artie watched her back as she departed.
“I was trying to warn her,” Artie said weakly.
Artie returned to his table. He drew hypodermics, one after another. His pen pressed harder and harder as he colored in the embalming fluid inside, as he perfected the trajectory of the three drops squirting out.
Lonely, I thought, on Earth as it is in heaven.
“You kill people by stabbing and cutting and shooting,” Ruth said. “It’s sick.”
“Agreed,” Artie said.
Samuel had taken my sister away to talk. Artie had seen Ruth at one of the outside picnic tables with her big blank book.
“But there are good reasons to kill,” Ruth said.
“Who do you think did it?” Artie asked. He sat on the bench and braced his feet up under the table on the crossbar.
Ruth sat almost motionless, right leg crossed over left, but her foot jiggled ceaselessly.
“How did you hear?” she asked.
“My father told us,” Artie said. “He called my sister and me into the family room and made us sit down.”
“Shit, what did he say?”
“First he said that horrible things happened in the world and my sister said, ‘Vietnam,’ and he was quiet because they always fight about that whenever it comes up. So he said, ‘No, honey, horrible things happen close to home, to people we know.’ She thought it was one of her friends.”
Ruth felt a raindrop.
“Then my dad broke down and said a little girl had been killed. I was the one who asked who. I mean, when he said ‘little girl,’ I pictured little, you know. Not us.”
It was a definite drop, and they began to land on the redwood tabletop.
“Do you want to go in?” Artie asked.
“Everyone else will be inside,” Ruth said.
“I know.”
“Let’s get wet.”
They sat still for a while and watched the drops fall around them, heard the sound against the leaves of the tree above.
“I knew she was dead. I sensed it,” Ruth said, “but then I saw a mention of it in my dad’s paper and I was sure. They didn’t use her name at first. Just ‘Girl, fourteen.’ I asked my dad for the page but he wouldn’t give it to me. I mean, who else and her sister hadn’t been in school all week?”
“I wonder who told Lindsey?” Artie said. The rain picked up. Artie slipped underneath the table. “We’re going to get soaked,” he yelled up.
And then as quickly as the rain had started, it ceased. Sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. “I think she listens,” she said, too softly to be heard.
It became common knowledge at the symposium who my sister was and how I had died.
“Imagine being stabbed,” someone said.
“No thanks.”
“I think it’s cool.”
“Think of it – she’s famous.”
“Some way to get famous. I’d rather win the Nobel Prize.”
“Does anyone know what she wanted to be?”
“I dare you to ask Lindsey.”
And they listed the dead they knew.
Grandmother, grandfather, uncle, aunt, some had a parent, rarer was a sister or brother lost young to an illness – a heart irregularity – leukemia – an unpronounceable disease. No one knew anyone who had been murdered. But now they knew me.
Under a rowboat that was too old and worn to float, Lindsey lay down on the earth with Samuel Heckler, and he held her.
“You know I’m okay,” she said, her eyes dry. “I think Artie was trying to help me,” she offered.
“You can stop now, Lindsey,” he said. “We’ll just lie here and wait until things quiet down.”
Samuel’s back was flush against the ground, and he brought my sister close into his body to protect her from the dampness of the quick summer rain. Their breath began to heat the small space beneath the boat, and he could not stop it – his penis stiffened inside his jeans.
