The Scapegoat

Listen, I didn’t think I hit her that hard, I swear to god. I work in a very stressful field, and my wife and I used to fight sometimes, mostly about my job. No, no it had never gotten physical before, I’m not that kind of person. One minute we’re arguing in the kitchen and then, I don’t know, it’s like I wasn’t even there, like it all went white or something, and my wife hit her head on the island, on that nice white marble countertop she just had to have, and then she wasn’t moving. On the ground, with her legs all twisted up funny, laying on them all wrong.


My first instinct was to sort of nudge her, like maybe she’d blacked out for a minute. Nothing, obviously. I put my hand in front of her face to feel her breath and there was still nothing, and at that point I started cursing up a storm, “Oh fuck, oh Jesus Christ,” and wiping my sweaty hands dry on my shirt. Just thinking to myself, how the hell am I gonna fix this?


I’m a problem solver. That probably sounds pretty callous, given the context and all, but it’s true, that’s how I think. It’s what I’m trained to do. I put on a big pair of rubber gloves and a rain slicker and I hauled her up in my arms. At this point I noticed the puddle of blood that had formed under her head and the little splatter on the countertop, and instead of letting it get any worse or dragging it around the house, I set her back down and did my best to wrap her up in a tarp from the garage that normally covered her car. It was important to take her car out. I got her phone out from her purse and texted her sister to say she was driving over, that we’d had a fight and she was getting space, and then set it on silent. I picked her up again, dragging the ends of the tarp. Where I stood, I could see out the kitchen window into the back yard soaking with rain, with a full view of the tall, shadowed figure by the fire pit.


I dropped her and ran out to the back, almost stepping in her blood on my way. I slammed the back door open, ready to scream at the guy, chase him down, maul him like a fucking mountain lion, whatever I had to do. From the kitchen window to the door onto the deck, there’s only maybe about 10 feet, and this guy was standing right in the middle of my yard. In the couple seconds it took me to get to the door and stumble out onto the deck, there’s nowhere he could have gone that I shouldn’t have been able to see him, whether he was vaulting over the fence or trying to hide in the trees at the back of the property. He was just gone.


What else was I supposed to do? I shut the door, locked it, and dragged her out to the garage to throw my wife into the back of her SUV. I flipped the TV on, pulled down the blinds, stuck my phone on the coffee table. Then I left. I kept thinking that it was a lucky thing for me that it had been pouring for an hour now, just coming down in sheets, otherwise this would have been a lot harder. Jesus, I must sound like some kind of monster, huh?


Something in me had just taken over, like I was just going through the motions. I took the SUV out to a nasty sidewinder road a couple miles away, heading in the direction of her sister’s house. We get a lot of accidents on that road as it is, and they keep bumping down the speed limit. But my wife, theoretically, would have been upset, not taking those treacherous corners as carefully as she should have.


When I went around back to the hatch, I saw him again. The lamps on the road had been laid out so they were almost strategically deadly, and where I was, the nearest puddle of light had its far edge a distance four times the length of her car. That’s where he was standing, when I turned my head to make sure nobody was coming. Right at the edge. He was most certainly a human figure with hands and feet and a head and everything he ought to have and nothing he didn’t- but he could have been the elephant man for all I could see his face. He was frozen still in the pouring rain. Not rigid, just still; thinking about it, from his posture he looked almost relaxed.


He vanished when I blinked. I didn’t know better, I mean, you would have relaxed too at that point. My own mind playing tricks on me was obviously the least of my worries.


I unrolled the tarp and hoisted her into the driver’s seat, didn’t bother buckling the belt. I threw the tarp bloody-side up on the pavement so the rain would wash it clean while I worked. I didn’t see the blood, it was so damn dark. It all just looked like black water to me. And then I put the car in drive and gave it a shove and it rolled down the hill right into a big ass tree. Crunched the front of it right up. In the dark, I thought I could see one of her arms sticking through the shattered windshield.


Walking those three, four miles home with a big armful of wet tarp, I’ve never wanted to die so bad. It was pitch black and slick, and I walked most of the way off the road in the mud so nobody could see me, and even though I was in rain gear the water had still soaked into my shoes and down my shirt, and I just thought about going and throwing myself in the reservoir for a good hour and a half. Listen, I loved my wife. No matter what kind of disagreements we had, I loved her, and I never would have meant to hurt her.


So I got home, coming around the back way to keep out of sight. Had to hop the back fence myself and toss the tarp over before me. My arms were just about pure pudding by the time I got into the garage- you know how heavy a wet tarp is after a couple miles' walk? Through the frosted window from the garage into the mudroom, as I was taking my boots off, I saw a shadow pass by and almost had a heart attack. I stumbled in barefoot and soaking wet, knocking my tools off the shelves from how clumsy and numb I'd gotten from the cold water and the panic. I ran all the fuck around the house looking for some intruder who obviously wasn't there. I only stopped and realized what I was doing when I got to the kitchen and saw the drying blood right where we'd left it.


I got everything cleaned up with around an hour to spare before I got the emergency call. They'd moved faster than I expected, and I hadn't even gotten the bloodied towels into the fire pit yet. Too wet outside. I had to bag them up and throw them in the trunk of my car, and I dropped them off in a dumpster on my way home from the hospital because they needed me to identify the body and go through all the steps.


And I swear I saw him again in the parking lot, leaning on my driver's side door. At first I thought it was some suit about to grill me about my wife, because even though I'd parked under a lamp he was all in darkness, and the only thing my brain could supply was, you know, men in black. I must have looked away, given him some moment to slip off into the dark. One of the plastic bags, I'd grabbed extra in case of any leaks, it had ended up in the passenger seat. I don't think I put it there. Looking at it, I got one of those call to the void moments. It would have been so easy to put it over my head and tie it off. But I drove home.


The wake was fucking unbearable. An entire week I spent with her family in my house, poking around my things and talking to me, talking about my wife as if they had any business saying a god damn word to me about her. They never liked me. They never said anything to my face but I know her parents were hoping she would marry a doctor, or at least another Jew. Well la-di. She got me instead. At least they brought food.


I drank a lot of beer that week, and I was off work for bereavement so I didn't particularly care what time I cracked one open. Towards the end of the week and around noon, I'd managed the corner the kitchen to myself for a while with a beer and a dish of whitefish salad. My in-laws were audible in the next room, but I'd been short with them enough times since the funeral that they were mostly keeping out of my way. And sue me if I was a little extra jumpy, as if I didn't have a right to be.


So around this time my niece came up to me with a little yellow envelope in her hands. She's only about six years old, and she's not a bad kid despite her mother's efforts. She told me a man had told her to give me this. I asked what man; one of her relatives? There were a few older and more distant relatives I didn't really expect her to know by name. She shook her head and said she didn't know. The man with the funny face, she said. Funny how? She scrunched up her face. Like his nose was big and his eyes were funny.


I laughed it off a little bitterly, thinking it must be one of the uncles or some shit dropping by and not wanting to talk to me. Roping a little kid into it? That was cold. She was just too little to understand. I popped open the envelope with my thumbs, not even thinking about it. Any kind of smile dropped right off my face. No card inside- just a couple of photos, old Polaroids like the instant kind you shake out. One peek inside at them had me running out the front door.


Obviously nobody was out there, least of all any funny men. But it at least meant I had time to look at the photos without prying eyes. I didn't need anybody else to see these.


Just two. Two was enough. The first one was my wife, collapsed on the kitchen floor, with her slack jaw just in frame. The second was another shot of floor, her body now moved but the blood still shiny and black in the badly developed lighting.


I looked on the back, where someone had left a message. 'One for the Lord.' On the back of the second: 'The other for me.' In black fat-tipped marker, neat letters like they'd been practically stenciled on. It's like it was mocking me. Just tormenting me, over something that wasn't my fault.


I am telling you, there is no fucking way this guy got into my house. Even if he had, I know I would have seen him! Everything was locked- doors, windows, the god damn chimney is shut. And when I got back, everything was just as locked and closed as it had been when I left, no sign of intrusion; with the pictures in my hand, I checked the locks closely to see if maybe they’d been jimmied open, but they were all pristine. I went back to the empty kitchen sweating and shitting bricks, and you know what I saw? Ash. Ashes. Not a whole heap but a thin dusting standing out against the countertops and the white tile floor. I know it was ash because I could taste the char on the air. They’d fallen in the shape of where she had.


I torched the pictures and the envelope for good measure. Tossed them in the fire pit, swept up the ashes in the kitchen and tossed them in too.


At first I thought, it has to be her sister or something. It almost made sense, aside from the fact that it was fucking impossible for her to have been inside and seen what I saw in those Polaroids. Any one of her family could have spread the ashes, coming and going in and out of the house like they'd been, and the sister resented me uniformly. But the first problem was, of course, the evidence. The second problem was why whoever it was didn't just go down to the station and squeal.


That one answered itself pretty soon. Just turning me in wouldn't be enough.


The night shiva was over and I finally had my house all to myself for the foreseeable future, I'd told myself things would get peaceful. In case my little stalker had a key, I swapped out my doorknob for one of those security pin ones, and I planned on having a home security system put in to be extra safe. It didn't matter. None of it fucking mattered, because that night, I woke up in the dead darkness and he was in my room, in my doorway, featureless and easy in the unlit house. The only light was a dim blue glow from my alarm clock, but it didn't clarify anything about him. He even moved like a man. A very slow, very careful one.


I watched him sit on the end of my bed, on my wife's side, and slowly, deliberately pull the sheets down. I'm not proud to admit it but I was piss scared, I couldn't even move. He gathered the sheet up and then started playing with it, rolling it out flat and then. God. Tying one end off in a loop. My chest felt like it was about to cave in or I was about to puke or something. I took a deep breath, braced every muscle, and then lunged.


He was gone before my hand could reach him. The half-fashioned noose fell off the end of the bed.


I've cleared the knives out of the kitchen, other than the chintzy plastic ones. I untie nooses and tear holes in the garbage bags and lock up the drano before I get any ideas. I'm too scared to even buy a handgun in case this freak somehow gets a hold of it, turns it on me. Do you know how emasculating that is? Not to be able to defend myself in my own home, to beg a bunch of strangers for help because some person or some thing is out to frame my suicide? I would never kill myself. I don't want to die.


Please, god, please, I am in every material way innocent. I don’t know who this is or why this is happening to me. I did everything right.