“He may have been, Lucy. But it doesn’t justify someone’s doing something like that to him. And not everyone who is hurt or murdered is bad.”
“Mom says they are. She says good people don’t get murdered. Only hookers and drug dealers and burglars do.”
A thoughtful pause. “Sometimes police officers, too, because they try to catch the bad people.”
Dorothy would say such a thing and, what was worse, she would believe it. I felt a flare of the old anger.
“But the lady who got strangled,” Lucy wavered, her eyes so wide they seemed to swallow me. “She was a doctor, Auntie Kay. How could she be bad? You’re a doctor, too. She was just like you, then.”
I was suddenly aware of the time. It was getting late. I switched off the computer, took Lucy’s hand, and we walked out of the office and into the kitchen. When I turned to her to suggest a snack before bed, I was dismayed to see she was biting her bottom lip, her eyes welling.
“Lucy! Why are you crying?”
She wrapped around me, sobbing. Clinging to me with fierce desperation, she cried, “I don’t want you to die! I don’t want you to die!”
“Lucy . . .”
I was stunned, bewildered. Her tantrums, her arrogant and angry outbursts were one thing. But this! I could feel her tears soaking through my blouse. I could feel the hot intensity of her miserable little body as she held on to me.
“It’s all right, Lucy,” was all I could think to say, and I pressed her close.
“I don’t want you to die, Auntie Kay!”
“I’m not going to die, Lucy.”
“Daddy did.”
“Nothing is going to happen to me, Lucy.”
She was not to be consoled. The story in the paper affected her in a deep and pernicious way. She read it with an adult intellect yet to be weaned from a child’s fearful imagination. This in addition to her insecurities and losses.
Oh, Lord. I groped for the appropriate response and couldn’t come up with a thing. My mother’s accusations began throbbing in some deep part of my psyche. My inadequacies. I had no children. I would have made an awful mother. “You should have been a man,” my mother had said during one of our less productive encounters in recent history. “All work and ambition. It’s not natural for a woman. You’ll dry out like a chinch bug, Kay.”
And during my emptiest moments when I felt the worst about myself, damn if I wouldn’t see one of those chinch bug shells that used to litter the lawn of my childhood home. Translucent, brittle, dried out. Dead.
It wasn’t something I would ordinarily do, pour a ten-year-old a glass of wine.
I took her to her room and we drank in bed. She asked me questions impossible to answer.
“Why do people hurt other people?” and “Is it a game for him? I mean, does he do it for fun, sort of like MTV? They do things like that on MTV, but it’s make-believe. Nobody gets hurt. Maybe he doesn’t mean to hurt them, Auntie Kay.”
“There are some people who are evil,” I quietly replied. “Like dogs, Lucy. Some dogs bite people for no reason. There’s something wrong with them. They’re bad and will always be bad.”
“Because people were mean to them first. That’s what makes them bad.”
“In some instances, yes,” I told her. “But not always. Sometimes there isn’t a reason. In a way, it doesn’t matter. People make choices. Some people would rather be bad, would rather be cruel. It’s just an ugly, unfortunate part of life.”
“Like Hitler,” she muttered, taking a swallow of wine.
I began stroking her hair.
She rambled on, her voice thick with sleep, “Like Jimmy Groome, too. He lives on our street and shoots birds with his BB gun, and he likes to steal bird eggs out of nests and smash them on the road and watch the baby birds struggle. I hate him. I hate Jimmy Groome. I threw a rock at him once and hit him when he was riding by on his bike. But he doesn’t know it was me because I was hiding behind the bushes.”