Gregory and Annette Roth, a Duluth couple, were charged last Monday with the attempted murder of their seven-year-old son. Authorities have placed their child (not named here to protect identity) into state custody. His fate will be decided after the Roths’ trial. The Roths allegedly held their son in a bathtub and cut his wrists with a razor. Shortly after the act, Annette Roth confessed to the next-door neighbor, saying that her son was taking too long to die. Both she and Gregory Roth told the police that their son was possessed by the devil.
I felt a thick, disgusted glob in the back of my throat that wouldn’t go away when I swallowed. I was having a hard time not thinking of Victor’s little brother, who was eight now. I flipped back to the photo of Sam holding Beck’s hand and looked once more at Sam, his half-closed eyes staring at some point past the camera, vacant. The position of his small hand in Beck’s turned his wrist toward the camera, clearly showing the recent red-brown slash across it.
A little voice in my head said And you feel sorry for yourself.
I shoved the newspaper clippings and the photograph back into the envelope so that I didn’t have to look at them, and looked at the sheaf of paperwork underneath instead. It was trust paperwork, naming Sam as the beneficiary of the trust—which included the house—and the contents of a checking account and a savings account, both bearing Beck’s and Sam’s names.
Pretty heavy stuff. I wondered if Sam knew that he basically owned the place. Underneath the paperwork was another black day planner. Flipping through it, I saw journal entries with the efficient, backward-slanting writing of a left-hander. I turned to the first page: “If you’re reading this, I’m either a wolf for good, or you’re Ulrik and you should get the hell out of my stuff.”
I jerked when the phone rang.
I watched it ring twice, and then I picked it up. I answered, “Da.”
“Is this Cole?”
My spirits inexplicably rose. “Depends. Is this my mother?”
Isabel’s voice was sharp over the phone. “I wasn’t aware you had one. Does Sam know that you’re picking up the phone now?”
“Were you calling for him?”
A pause.
“And is that your number on the caller ID?”
“Yeah,” said Isabel. “Don’t call it, though. What are you doing? You’re still you?”
“For the moment. I’m looking through Beck’s stuff,” I said, shoving the SAM envelope and its contents back in the drawer.
“Are you kidding me?” Isabel asked. She answered her own question. “No, you’re not.” Another pause. “What did you find?”
“Come and look.”
“I’m at school.”
“Talking on the phone?”
Isabel considered. “I’m in the bathroom trying to work up enthusiasm for my next class. Tell me what you found. Some ill-gotten knowledge will cheer me up.”
“Sam’s adoption papers. And some newspaper clippings about how his parents tried to kill him. Also, I found a really bad sketch of a woman wearing a schoolgirl outfit. It’s definitely worth seeing.”
“Why are you talking to me?”
I thought I knew what she meant, but I said, “Because you called me.”
“Is it because you just want to sleep with me? Because I’m not sleeping with you. Nothing personal. But I’m just not. I’m saving myself and all that. So if that’s why you want to talk to me, you can hang up now.”
I didn’t hang up. I wasn’t sure if that answered her question.
“Are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“Well, are you going to actually answer my question?”
I pushed my empty milk glass back and forth.
“I just want someone to talk to,” I said. “I like talking to you. I don’t have a better answer than that.”
“Talking isn’t really what we were doing either time we saw each other,” she said.
“We talked,” I insisted. “I told you about my Mustang. That was a very deep, personal conversation about something very close to my heart.”
“Your car.” Isabel sounded unconvinced. She paused, then finally said, “You want to talk? Fine. Talk. Tell me something you’ve never told anybody else.”
I thought for a moment. “Turtles have the second-largest brains of any animal on the planet.”
It took Isabel only a second to process this. “No, they don’t.”
“I know. That’s why I’ve never told anybody that before.”
There was a sound on the other side like she was either trying not to laugh or having an asthma attack. “Tell me something about you that you’ve never told anybody else.”
“If I do, will you do the same?”
She sounded skeptical. “Yeah.”
I traced the outline of the Sharpie schoolgirl on the mouse pad, thinking. Talking on a telephone was like talking with your eyes closed. It made you braver and more honest, because it was like talking to yourself. It was why I’d always sung my new songs with my eyes closed. I didn’t want to see what the audience thought of them until I was done. Finally, I said, “I’ve been trying not to be my father my entire life. Not because he’s so horrible, but because he’s so impressive. Anything—anything I do can’t possibly compare.”
Isabel was silent. Maybe waiting to see if I was going to say more. “What does your father do?”
“I want to hear what you’ve never told anyone.”
“No, you have to talk first. You wanted to talk. It means you say something, and I respond, and you talk back again. It’s one of the human race’s most shining achievements. It’s called a conversation.”
I was beginning to regret this particular one. “He’s a scientist.”
“A rocket scientist?”
“A mad scientist,” I said. “A very good one. But really, I don’t want to have any more of this conversation until a much later date. Like possibly after my death. Now can I hear yours?”
Isabel took a breath, loud enough for me to hear it over the phone. “My brother died.”
The words had a ring of familiarity to them. Like I’d heard them before, in her voice, though I couldn’t imagine when. After I finished thinking that, I said, “You’ve told someone that before.”
“I never told anyone before that it was my fault, because everybody already thought he was dead by the time he actually died,” Isabel said.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Nothing makes any sense anymore. Like, why am I talking to you? Why am I telling you this when you don’t care?”
This question, at least, I knew the answer to. “But that’s why you’re telling me.” I knew it was true. If we’d had the opportunity to deliver our confessions to anyone who actually cared about their contents, there was no way either of us would’ve opened our mouths. Sharing revelations is easier when it doesn’t matter.
She was quiet. I heard other girls’ voices in the background, high, wordless streams of conversation, followed by the hiss of running water, and then silence again. “Okay,” she said.