One of Us Read Free Page A

with a razor. Even here in a maximum-security prison he’s been able to get hold of matches and lighters and burn them off. The few times he’s been in solitary, he’s gnawed his fingers with his own teeth. His compulsion has nothing to do with a desire to conceal his identity, but originated from a wish to erase the one thing about him that made him unique from others. Carson has always desperately wanted to be like everyone else.
    “Are you coming?” he asks me in a casual, pleasant tone, as if he is inviting me to dine with him instead of watch him die.
    “Do you want me to?”
    He shrugs.
    “It would be nice to have a friend there.”
    My mind wanders back to my childhood again at the mention of the word “friend” and my complete lack of one. In all fairness to the boys who bullied me, they couldn’t help themselves. My very existence practically begged for it. I was tall, spider-limbed skinny, skittish, bookish, pale, with a shock of almost black hair and equally dark eyes smudged with purple exhaustion that gave my face an otherworldly appearance.
    Kids who called me anything called me the Ghost. I liked to think the nickname was meant as a compliment to my athletic prowess, referring to my ability to disappear on a cross-country course as much as my pallor, but I knew this wasn’t the case. I was spooky. I had murder in my present and my past and someday in my future I’d choose to make the study of it my profession.
    “I’ll do my best,” I tell him, “but I can’t promise. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”
    “This sick grandfather you’re going to take care of . . . Is he the one who watched his father hang?”
    “It was his father who watched his father hang.”
    “I guess a lethal injection is better than hanging. Anything is better than drowning,” he adds when I don’t comment.
    I know where this observation comes from. He found his mother passed out drunk in the bathtub when he was ten years old. This fact alone didn’t traumatize him nearly as much as his own decision not to try and help her. He walked down the stairs of their apartment building, out into the moist Miami sunshine, and took a bus to the nearest public beach, where he sat in the searing sand and watched the hypnotic ebb and flow of a much larger body of water bringing dead fish to shore.
    He pictured his mother as he had left her and was amazed by her resemblance to them: her mouth dangling open and her skimpy sequined cocktail dress clinging wetly to her skin, giving her the same opalescent sheen as their scales. He knew when he returned he might find her in the kitchen, raw and shaky, wrapped in a faded, tattered aqua bath towel making a Bloody Mary; or he might find her submerged in the bathwater glassy-eyed and bloated like the fish. Either way he had made the conscious decision to no longer interfere. Leaving her alone in the tub had been his participation in the act of natural selection. Since then he’s become almost obsessed with the concept and convinced that it doesn’t work.
    His thoughts continue down their expected path.
    “Have you had any luck contacting my mother?” he asks me.
    “I’m afraid not.”
    “There has to be an address where her publisher sends all those royalty checks.”
    “Apparently the money is electronically transferred to a bank account in her name, but she’s no longer at her last known physical address.”
    He presses his fingertips together and begins to flex the digits like a bellows.
    “Do you want her to be there?” I ask.
    “No. If she’s there she’ll embarrass me.”
    “Then why is it so important that I find her?”
    “I want her to know. That’s all. I want her to be reminded.”
    It’s a difficult question for me to ask but one I feel I must for both of us.
    “Do you blame her?”
    His lips twitch slightly while he considers my question, pursing and relaxing as though he’s contemplating blowing a smoke ring. He’s a calm, quiet man,