To this letter, Abed replied, as gently as he could, that even though he would have liked more than anything to give her what she asked for, professional ethics—and the law—prevented him from being able to do so.
Lisette’s response, which arrived a week later, was more a poem or hardcore lyric than it was a letter:
I was stupid to apologize.
I hope you die soon.
Five years later, on her eighteenth birthday, Lisette sent the third letter. She apologized to Abed for wishing him dead, apologized for having, prior to that, been presumptuous and manipulative, and then essayed, briefly, on the meaning of turning eighteen, saying, in sum, that, whereas before, whether she’d known so or not, it was reasonable for others to adjudge her choices the choices of a minor—a person for whose own best interests adults such as Abed understandably felt obliged to look out for—now that she was an adult herself, her choices were her own and, were she to suffer any negative consequences as a result of making those choices, no one would be to blame but herself. And the same, she argued, would apply to Belt when he turned eighteen, if he hadn’t already turned eighteen. And furthermore, she inquired rhetorically, her having—for nearly six years by then—ceaselessly continued to miss Belt should count for something, shouldn’t it? Didn’t she deserve a chance to know him? to tell him what she needed to tell him? And didn’t he deserve a chance to know her, to hear what she had to say to him? She went on for pages, then, somewhat incoherently, according to Abed, trying to make the case that trying to protect adults from themselves was in many ways worse than failing to protect children from themselves, and failing to make the case, or in any event, to sway him.
Abed wrote back, reiterating what he’d told her the last time.
He didn’t hear from her again for nearly two decades. The fourth letter came to him in the summer of 2011. In this letter, Lisette claimed to be in recovery from years of substance abuse that she had codependently undertaken with her second husband. Having split up with the husband some eight months earlier, she eventually began to attend AA meetings, had three months sober, and was working the steps. She was writing to Abed, she explained, in order, first and foremost, to ask for forgiveness and try to make amends for the cruel, manipulative, intellectually dishonest, and “outright dishonest” ways in which she had treated him previously (e.g. she’d never, she admitted, had a little brother; she’d been married only once; her husband had been a teetotaling deacon in the Church of Latter-day Saints who she, an adulteress, had put through hell). And she was writing to him, secondly—and here she noted the “sad irony of it all”—in order to ask him, once again, for my last name and/or telephone number and/or “even just Belt’s father’s number or address if his father’s still alive,” so that she, toward recovery and amends-making, might ask me for my forgiveness for offenses similar to those she’d committed against Abed.
This fourth letter alarmed Abed far more than the others. For Lisette to lie about the husband, and then apologize for lying about the husband within the same paragraph, indicated to him that she was more disturbed than he’d previously imagined. (Perhaps it’s worth noting that when Abed told me about the husband lie/apology, I not only laughed myself into a minor stomachache (receiver covered with hand), but was certain Lisette had intended the lie/apology to be funny.) And whereas the last two times he’d written back to her, it seemed to him to be of the utmost importance that he dissuade Lisette, however delicately, from continuing to hope she’d see me again, this time the opposite pertained; he feared what might happen if she were to lose the hope of seeing me again, and so after once again explaining that he couldn’t give her what she wanted just then, he assured her that if ever I were to approach him, looking for her, he would put us in contact.
To Abed’s surprise, Lisette’s final letter, which he received just a couple days after sending his response to her fourth, was polite, verging even on sweet. She thanked him, wished him well, and included two phone numbers and two addresses where I might reach her. The first of them belonged to her mother: I should, Lisette instructed Abed, contact her there only if she proved to be unreachable at the second phone number or address, which belonged to Costello House, where she had been living since 2008.
“The Costello House?” I asked Abed.
“Yes,” Abed said.
“That’s close to me,” I said. “And she’s there right now?”
“Right this moment? I do not know. But she does still live there. I called earlier this morning in order to be sure.”
“And what did she say?”
“I didn’t speak to her.”
“But you’re sure she still lives there?”
“The front desk said she was in, and redirected my call to her room.”
“She didn’t answer?”
“She did. I didn’t want to speak to her, Belt. I hung up.”
“You hung up on Lisette! Lisette Banks!” I said, laughing.
“By your tone, it would seem that, regardless of everything I just told you, you still adjudge it a good idea to contact Lisette.”
A good idea? I could barely swallow, my heart was so high in my throat. No, it was not a good idea. Perhaps it was the best idea. Perhaps it was even the worst idea. It was certainly an idea that demanded execution.
I took down Lisette’s info.
Abed, in an endearingly cautionary tone, wished me good luck.
We said our goodbyes, and, after grabbing two fresh packs of Quills from my carton trove, I got in my truck.
* * *
The murder at the Costello House Intermediate Care Facility, back in 2002, had made The Daily Herald’s front page for a week. My father had followed the story closely, in part because Costello House was just a few towns over, in posh Highland Grove, but in larger part, I think, because both of the murderers had schizophrenia, a fact that Clyde believed (or purported to believe) the Herald had been putting too much focus on. “They’re trying to turn this into ‘being psychotic makes you violent, makes you a murderer,’ ” I remember him saying, “and you’re actually less likely to be a murderer if you’ve got a psychotic illness than if you don’t. There’s cold, hard statistics on that exact fact. But you know what it is? Know what I think? These candy-ass Highland Grovers, they all want to get Costello House shut down. They’ve been trying to get it shut down since it opened—they think it hurts their precious North Shore property values. Only thing needs shutting is those richy-rich cakefaces’ country-clubbing pieholes.” And so forth.
At the time, I didn’t think what Clyde said made much sense. On later reflection, I doubted even Clyde thought it made much sense. The murder had occurred just a couple days before my twenty-seventh birthday, the birthday on which I’d lost my virginity, and I had, I suppose, since returning from the brothel, been holding myself more aloof from Clyde than usual, and I’m sure he noticed my extra aloofness, and I think he mistook it for a response to the murder, or the ways in which the murder was being reported. Either because I was known around town (to the extent that I was known at all) as someone with a “psychotic illness,” or because I, had I slightly different symptoms or slightly different parents, might very well have been a resident at Costello House myself, Clyde assumed, I think, that I was troubled by the notion that others might look at me more warily in light of the murder, and he just wanted to comfort me in his Clydely, longest-possible-way-around-the-barn manner; wanted to express to me, through Clydely subtext, and with Clydely subtlety, that he, Clyde Magnet, wasn’t like those others. I wasn’t, however, the least bit troubled by either notion (i.e. neither by how others might look at me in light of the murder, nor by how Clyde might), and the Herald writers, in at least a few of the articles that I had read, seemed to me to go out of their way not only to remark upon how unlikely it was for a schizophrenic to commit murder, but how it was all but unheard of for two schizophrenics, motivated by the same delusion, to commit murder together, which is exactly what had happened at Costello House, and was a lot of the reason why the murder had captured so much media attention to begin with.