those borrowed novels granted me. One night I killed seventeen flies, and Jason ripped the flyswatter from my hands, marched downstairs to the kitchen, and cut the swatting part right off it.
* * *
—
It was also the summer that Donna Morse and her son, Spencer, were murdered. Surely there must have been other murders during the time I lived in North Shore, but those were the first and only ones that I was aware of, and for weeks it was all we could talk about, not just Bunny and I, but the whole town. Waiting for your drink to be made at a Starbucks, whoever was standing next to you would suddenly say: “What a shame about Donna Morse, eh?” And then you would be talking about it with someone you didn’t even know.
Donna had gone to North Shore High, but several years ahead of me and Bunny, and we did not know her directly, though we knew of her, mostly in the sense of a negative example because she had gotten pregnant and then married and dropped out of community college. North Shore could have been a launching pad for her, but it was not, and like my aunt she was a vestige of a poorer past, clinging to the town like it could save her. She was overweight and her hair was dyed bright red, like a Raggedy Ann doll’s. Aunt Deedee told me that Donna Morse had been hooked on drugs, but got sober when she got pregnant with Spencer. Now she nannied around for families who didn’t mind if she brought Spencer along.
Our main source of info about the murders besides the local paper was, of course, Ray Lampert, who, being a fixture at the Blue Lagoon, was a sponge for gossip. And so it came to be that we heard every detail of what happened from his gross lips as he sat hungover at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, trying to choke down a microwave burrito to keep from throwing up. That was something that happened during those high school years: Ray’s stomach started to go. He was always throwing up, and Bunny was always telling him to go to the doctor, but he never would make an appointment.
According to Ray, Donna Morse had gotten a divorce from Spencer’s father, Luke, because of domestic violence. “He wasn’t so much a puncher as a grabber,” Ray said, wiping bean splatter from his chin with a paper towel. “He would just grab her and go. Smash her into things, like bash her head into the microwave, wham, wham, wham. Her cousin said the worst was when he threw her against the furnace and one of those metal screws, like, cut her face open. That’s why she had that scar.”
I did remember the scar. It ran down her cheek like a pink tear trail. I would see her and Spencer come into the Rite Aid all the time, and I remember I used to judge her because she would buy him full-size candy bars, even though he was only three.
“Why was he even over there?” Bunny asked. “What the fuck was Spencer doing at Luke’s house if he was this violent turd?”
“Court mandated,” Ray said. “Visitation.”
“It makes me so mad!” Bunny shouted. “I hope whatever judge granted him visitation has nightmares for the rest of his fucking life.”
“We’re all gonna be having nightmares for the rest of our lives,” I said. That was how young I was. I thought I would never forget. I didn’t know how things faded, became simple facts, until they were things you hardly thought of anymore.
On a Saturday night that August, on a weekend Spencer was court mandated to spend with Luke, Donna got a call from Luke’s cell phone. She heard Luke’s voice in the background, “Tell her.” And then her son’s shaky little voice, “I’m gonna die tonight, Mommy,” and then she heard the gunshot. But she didn’t believe Luke had killed their son. Many times in the past, Luke had baited her, pretending to kill himself on the phone in order to get her to come over. The idea, however, that he was firing a gun in the same room as her son made her blood run cold, and she called 911 as she set out on foot to his apartment complex, which was only a few blocks away. She did not own a car.
They played the 911 call on the local news. She argued with