She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,11

“I know what you look like, kid. I never forget a face. You say a fucking word, and I’ll hunt your ass down. I’ll slice you open and hang you from a fucking streetlight.”

A moment later, he was gone and I was alone.

I looked down at my leg. I had wet my pants. I didn’t care.

I stood there. I don’t know how long. I couldn’t move.

Eventually, I found the strength to wander back to Krendal’s and summon help.

August 8, 1986

Ten Years Old

Log 08/08/1986—

Interview with Dr. Helen Durgin. Subject “D” appears agitated.

Audio/video recording.

“I’d like to talk about your parents.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You need to. It’s best we all understand what happened.”

“I don’t remember. I was little then.”

“You remember. I think you remember everything that happened that day.”

Silence.

“It wasn’t your fault, David. You were only two. You couldn’t have known what would happen.”

“I don’t want to.”

Dr. Durgin sighed. “What would you like to talk about?”

“How come nobody else ever comes to visit me?”

“You know why.”

“But you’re not afraid. You come.”

“I’m deaf, David. I can’t actually hear you. I read your lips.”

“And that’s why you’re not afraid?”

“That’s why I’m able to visit with you.”

“So if you could hear, you wouldn’t visit me anymore?”

“I would like to, but they probably wouldn’t let me.”

“You’d talk to me through the speakers, though? Like everyone else?”

“If they let me.”

“Dr. Peavy used to come in and visit with me. He wasn’t deaf.”

“But he doesn’t anymore, does he, David? Do you remember what happened to Dr. Peavy?”

“Yes. Dr. Peavy was mean to me. I made him stop.”

“That was two weeks after your parents. If you remember what happened to Dr. Peavy, then you certainly remember what happened to them.”

Silence.

“David?”

“I’m tired. Can we stop now?”

“Were your parents mean to you? Like Dr. Peavy?”

“My daddy was.”

“And you made him stop?”

Silence.

“David, you have to speak aloud, for the record. You made your father stop?”

“Yes.”

“How did you make your father stop?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I think you do.”

“He wasn’t supposed to hurt Mommy.”

“That wasn’t your fault.”

David said nothing.

—Charter Observation Team – 309

1

“Read.”

“Oh, come on.”

Auntie Jo’s gaze fixed on me, her lips pursed tight over the nub of a cigarette dangling from her mouth. “Read.”

I rolled my eyes. “Kaitlyn Gargery Thatch. February 16, 1958 to August 8, 1980. Loving wife, mother, and sister. Can I go now?”

Auntie Jo narrowed her eyes and lit another cigarette. “Where exactly do you run off to?”

I snatched my comic book off the blanket. “Just over the hill, there’s a bench up there where I can read.”

“You can read here. Why not read aloud to your mother and me. I’m sure she’d like that.”

“I don’t think she’d give two shits about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”

She smacked the side of my head. “Language! Don’t think you’re getting so big I won’t put you over my knee.”

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry.”

Auntie Jo grunted and puffed at the new cigarette. She dropped the butt of the old one in the vase attached to Daddy’s gravestone. I made a mental note to fish it out later.

Two shits was my favorite new word—well, two new words. A kid transferred to Lincoln about a month before the school year let out, Duncan Bellino. His dad was a plant manager, and they moved here from Chicago. We called him Dunk. He smoked and said things like two shits. Dunk had the largest comic collection I had ever seen outside of a store, boxes of them. I had spent most of the summer digging through those boxes.

When word got around school about what happened at the grocery store, my popularity factor went through the roof and held steady for about two weeks before kids realized I was still the same kid they ignored before. After that, things returned pretty much to normal. Dunk stuck around, though. When he heard what happened, he shrugged it off, said stores in Chicago got robbed two, sometimes three times a day. You’d be lucky to get in and out without tripping over a robber, no big deal.

His dad had a gun on account of him being a former Army ranger. He kept it hidden in a shoe box on the top shelf of their closet. We had to drag a chair in from the kitchen just to get to it. The ammo was there, too. Dunk let me keep one of the bullets. He said if the robber ever came back for me, he’d let me borrow the gun so I could blast him in the face. With the gun in a shoe box at