Mirror

Owen was the kid who never stepped on bugs.
This unusual affinity for the souls of the soulless didn’t emanate from some internal reservoir of misplaced empathy since Owen was, objectively, a dick, but rather a perceived moral high ground from atop which he could turn his nose up at my failings with a sense of earned condescension. It was an elegant evil for someone so young. The angelic veneer he wore won over everyone who met him, forcing me to the periphery of social consideration where I lurked, marveling at how no one else could see that Owen was a gift-wrapped pile of shit. It was in the way he walked, the things he said. Something unsavory simmering just below his skin that mocked me with every friend he made, every teacher he charmed.
He regarded me with a sort of wariness that lay beneath the assumed superiority that came with being 12 minutes older. It bred a natural distance between us that went beyond a mere lack of social compatibility. I was convinced of a darkness buried within him and, as the years passed, my young mind struggled to cope with the idea that he could be so different from me.

By high school, Owen and I had established a silent rapport of nods and shrugs, but continued to avoid verbal communication to what now seems a comical degree. At the time it seemed reasonable, though. Deserved. Neither of us was worth the time or effort it would take the other to form words. After a while we both started to realize the absurdity of what we were doing, but even mutual clarity wasn’t enough to end the stubborn silence.
College was sweet relief. More than anything, it served as a convenient way to physically and figuratively distance ourselves from the spiteful dysfunction of our relationship. We didn’t see each other until we both went home for Christmas four months into the fall semester, and for the first time in years we broke our childish silence. Rusted words mingled tentatively in the air between us, suspicious of their sudden release. It was just small talk that steered far away from acknowledging our shared library of unspoken thoughts, but it was something. The disdain we’d felt for each other had dulled with time and distance.

We started talking more, and then even more when our parents got divorced, and then even more when Dad died. It wasn’t the friendly sort of talking, but the necessary talking you do when the pressure from the flood of disjointed questions and excuses inside your head threatens to tear you apart.
Our Mom, through a veil of tears and splayed fingers, had told us that both her and Dad had reached points in their lives where it’d be better to move on without the other; a speech she followed by promptly tumbling headfirst into the depression that would drain the life out of her.
Our Dad had told us nothing.
Four months later the police had told us that he’d committed suicide.
Owen’s flood of disjointed questions and excuses focused primarily on that, which meant Dad stayed alive in conversation months after his mortal body had failed to do the same.

Years passed and we kept talking. I moved back home, he didn’t, and we kept talking. Never as friends, but no longer with blatant hostility, either. We talked like two men who wore genetic obligation like anchors around their necks.

Then Owen met a girl.

Her name was Sloan and she was too good for him. Not too good for the sickeningly perfect persona, but too good for the fraud hiding behind it. By that point he’d polished over all his former blemishes and I doubted that Sloan had even caught a glimpse of what I suspected he really was.
I met her in person a week before the wedding and she radiated the kind of sincerity that Owen had spent his life trying to duplicate; smiling broadly when I told her about my new job, furrowing her brow with concern when I told her about the jolt I’d gotten the day before while swapping the cover of an electrical socket. She listened, she laughed, she offered to buy another round of drinks, she served as a mediator between me and Owen, and, for one night, we seemed like a normal family.
Once they were married, Sloan and Owen moved back home and Sloan got a job as a yoga instructor at the local gym. Owen worked for a large engineering firm and volunteered to oversee the entire community outreach program. Within a handful of months they were local celebrities; the unstoppable husband and wife. People would approach them at stores, gawking like schoolchildren, enthralled by the presence of physical and professional perfection. Such encounters were handled with preternatural grace by the most powerful of power couples, only serving to expand their air of infallible kindness.
Owen and I replaced phone calls with adjacent bar stools, meeting at the same trashy dive every Thursday night to give each other impersonal status reports on how our lives had changed since the week before.

I got along better with Sloan, though. It was a new place for her, and though she was known by many, she knew very few. We got lunch or coffee a few times a week and talked about nothing in particular. She always perked up whenever I’d mention the future, jumping on me, pressing me to take the leap and forge myself a path to where I wanted to be in five years. She was optimistic like that. She was witty, she was gentle, she was supportive, she was self-assured, she was powerful, and then, years before anyone would be able to figure out everything she could actually be, she was dead.

The police initially ruled it a suicide, which is what the headlines read the morning after she was found lifeless in a bloodstained bathtub, but backpedaled rapidly that afternoon when the town rained a nearly tangible downpour of indignation upon the precinct. How dare they imply the existence of an inadequacy within the community that would drive its brightest star to extinction.
I didn’t see Owen until two days after Sloan’s death. We met at a small coffee shop near his house, hoping to evade the sympathetic mob of townsfolk that would inevitably form once the grieving widow was recognized. We didn’t speak for a while. An hour, maybe. I stared into him, trying to glean any sort of emotion from his sulking impassivity. He stared at the table, never meeting my eyes. He was still staring at it when he spoke.
“She hated this place.”
I said nothing.
“Not this cafe; the entire town. Hated it,” he continued, his gaze shifting toward the window. “She never actually said it, but she did.”
I sipped my coffee, my eyes continuing to probe him. His voice wasn’t exactly sad, but resigned. Weary.
“She hated that she hated it. It was just too small for her. She belonged in a big city.” He shook his head. “Have you talked to the cops yet?”
I hadn’t.
“They still think it’s a suicide,” he said. “They’re just going through the motions until the town calms down.” His thumb flicked absentmindedly at a flap of cardboard on his coffee cup. “But they’ll probably still want to talk to you. Sloan didn’t know many people.”

He was right.

Four hours later I was seated in Interrogation Room 3 across from a pair of navy suits. Despite my adolescent misadventures, it was the first time I’d been involved with the police in any capacity. I was unimpressed. The station itself was all white tile and grey everything else, bathed in the glow and hum of the cheap kind of fluorescent lights you don’t see anymore. The detectives were even cheaper, not bothering to hide their disinterest as they rattled questions off the script in front of them. I didn’t have much of an alibi but I wasn’t much of a suspect. We talked a little about who Sloan had been and I told them I could count the number of people she was close to on one hand. They seemed a bit surprised that, considering her universal popularity, the number wasn’t bigger, and scribbled simultaneously, adorably, in their cheap notepads for a few beats before I asked if there was a primary suspect yet. The suits glanced knowingly at each other. There was only one suspect and she shared a grave with the victim, but of course they couldn’t say that. The suit with glasses assured me they were making sure to look at all the angles.
I asked if they thought it was Owen.
The suit with glasses paused and said they were making sure to look at all the angles.
I closed my eyes and counted to ten.

I was with Owen when suicide became homicide. We were talking without talking in the lobby of the hotel he’d been staying at, sipping weak coffee and feigning interest in whatever the meticulous comb-over on TV was going on about. Owen’s phone buzzed loudly on the table between us. The call lasted for only a handful of terse words before Owen gently, deliberately, placed the phone back down. He stared at it as he gathered his thoughts. When he spoke, his voice was thick.
“That was the police,” he said. “They said Sloan was murdered.”
It was day four.
Results from the morning’s autopsy indicated that Sloan died from a massive contusion on the side of her head, hidden, but not well enough, beneath her loose curls, before the razor opened her wrists.
Owen finally met my gaze and I saw, for the first time, the dark hollows beneath his eyes; the hanging lakes threatening to spill down his cheeks. He was a lost man being pulled in too many directions.
I took a drink of my coffee.

It turned out the police had a suspect, too. Rudy Flitch; owner and sole employee of a one-man, one-van plumbing company who’d responded to Sloan’s call about a clogged disposal and was, ostensibly, the last person to have seen her alive. Rudy was a local lifer, living with his mother until he was 26, then striking out on his own and moving into an apartment two hundred yards down the road once he started getting consistent work. He somehow stayed in business for 30 years despite not being a particularly good plumber or particularly good guy. The police showed Owen a picture. Rudy’s mouth slashed grimly below a sparse, white mustache. His hair; the futilely brushed prayer of a man clinging to something already lost. His eyes a deceptive, piercing gold that hinted at an intellectual depth that everyone who knew him claimed he didn’t possess. Owen didn’t recognize him, but some of Sloan’s coworkers confirmed that he was a regular in her 6am weekday yoga class.
For a man approaching his sixties he proved rather elusive and, just two days after his leap to the top of the wanted list, the police exhausted all their leads and had nothing to show for it.
Through it all, Owen’s demeanor remained mostly unchanged. The crime of passion story fed to him by the police failed to ignite the sort of emotional reaction one would expect from a widow presented with potential closure.

Owen had been in Boston when Sloan died. His company had flown him there for a massive conference where he got to stay in a five-star hotel, eat at restaurants that didn’t bother putting prices on the menu and rub shoulders with the biggest brains and wallets in his industry. It was a five-day trip; his return flight scheduled to depart several hours after Sloan’s body was found lifeless by the curious housekeeper. The cops knew that. The cops had verified all his flight information on day one. The cops knocked on Owen’s door at 7:15pm, seven days after Sloan’s death, and arrested him for her murder.

They’d found Rudy’s body that afternoon, folded unceremoniously inside a small hovel at the base of an oak tree next to the river. It’d taken a miracle. A teenage couple, fumbling awkwardly around the river and each other, tripped over a leaf-covered foot in their search for seclusion. The authorities refused to comment on cause of death until after the autopsy, but the way Rudy’s face was caved in, and the way he’d been posthumously dragged and deposited in a desolate part of the woods gave the media enough evidence to report that the town had a double murder on its hands.
The cops called me first. They asked why Sloan had called me on the evening of her death, the only call she’d placed that day besides the one to poor Rudy, and I told them she asked me if I knew anything about disposals and that I told her to call a plumber, although much more politely. Then they looked again at those flight records and found that Owen had purchased a second plane ticket, this one arriving more than eight hours before the approximate time of Sloan’s death.

I visited him in jail.
The chairs they gave us were single pieces of molded plastic, engineered to eliminate the potential for weaponization at the expense of comfort.
Owen had deteriorated even more from when I last saw him. He wore the three-day stubble of a man who’d given himself to the sullen embrace of tragedy. His eyes sat deep in his head and when he looked at me it was a look of sorrow, of shame. Of guilt.
It shocked me.
There was no trace of the quiet confidence that defined him. Some combination of loss and captivity had unearthed a sincerity I’d never seen, and, for a moment, I wondered if the mask he wore concealed not the cruelty I’d always assumed, but a paralyzing vulnerability. For the first time in a long time, I questioned how alike we actually were.

His voice was cracked and hoarse when he spoke.
“I think I understand now why Mom died,” he said. “It’s not the depression, it’s the lack of everything. The void. It’s the way you try to convince everyone, as a way of convincing yourself, that you’re feeling the way they expect you to feel, that you’re following the guidelines society sets for tragedy, when, in truth, there’s nothing inside you. When the sorrow or the anger or the self-pity or any scripted emotion has deserted you and you start to see yourself as something broken. It kills you.”
The orange jumpsuit sucked the life from his skin. He was leaned as far back as the chair would allow, his hands clasped tightly in his lap, his thumbs dancing around each other.
“But once you get through the sadness, which seems infinite at first, and the anger, which doesn’t last nearly as long, there’s only a pain that comes when you see their face, or in those brief moments after you forget how screwed up everything is. Then, when it all ends, there’s nothing left to feel. There’s just the struggle to convince yourself otherwise. I was grieving long before she died.”
He went quiet again, staring into the water he was holding. Then there were tears crawling down his face. His mouth churned wordlessly as he grappled with the sudden impulse to tell me something, managing only a broken sound before deciding against it.

That’s when I realized he knew.
He knew Sloan was cheating on him.
I counted to ten.
He knew and he hadn’t told the police, hadn’t told anyone. Even worse, he knew and he’d stayed with her to the very last, never so much as hinting at a flaw in their flawless mirage of a marriage. Everything made sense and didn’t make sense. When I raised my head again I saw how broken he truly was.
“I didn’t want to face the idea of going home,” Owen continued. “I got an earlier flight, and I landed, and then I was in a hotel bar, and I figured I’d have a drink or two, and then I bought a room and then I went back to the bar and kept drinking. I haven’t drank like that in…”

I didn’t hear anything else. The past came rushing back.

Her name was Gwenn and she knew how she looked. She was too tall, her chest was too big, her stomach was too flat and she smiled in that exaggerated way that showed all of her teeth and too much of her gums. I’d only seen her once, but the image of her sliding too gracefully into the passenger seat of Dad’s sedan was seared into my brain. It happened a couple of months after the divorce, but the familiarity with which her hand brushed Dad’s shoulder as he walked past her and the way she rolled down the window and tossed her too blonde hair in the breeze as they drove away said she’d been around for longer than a couple of months.
Clarity hit in a numbing wave of disbelief as Owen and I watched them go through the gaps in the blinds that covered the large bay window of Mom’s house. He’d barely acknowledged her while he and what was left of Mom discussed something I couldn’t quite hear from the kitchen, but, watching them go, I saw Gwenn as a trophy; visual evidence of Dad’s success in circumventing the eternal vows he’d sworn to the vanquished. She was one last blow to Mom’s already cowed psyche. She was what made me realize the depth of the rage that existed within me.
In that moment, staring through the blinds, Owen and I stayed silent, a practice that came easily to us, but I felt more connected to him than I ever had before. I assumed the anger washing over me was shared with my brother despite his ever-stoic demeanor and that when I did what I did, it was with his unspoken approval.

But looking at him now, with his hands running unthinkingly through his flustered hair as his mind tore itself apart, I questioned that brief moment.
His chin perked up so he could look at me, and when he did I saw his tears had dried, leaving faint tracks on his cheeks. There was a rare flash of curiosity amid the foggy weariness in his face.
“Everyone in town thinks I killed her now,” he said. “I’ve heard the crowd outside yelling for my head. The cops handle me like luggage. It hurts more than you could imagine, when people accuse you of hating the woman you married, and you know that even if you could find a way to reach them, which you can’t, you wouldn’t be able to add nuance to their black and white world.” His gaze shifted to the table as he collected his thoughts. When he met my eyes again, I saw the brother I knew. He took a deep breath.
“And you haven’t even asked me if I did it.”

He didn’t do it.
Owen had paid cash at the hotel he crashed at that night and it took the cops a day and a half to track down the desk clerk, the bartender, and the waitress at the diner next door who’d left the entire pot of coffee at his table when she smelled the whiskey on his breath the next morning, who all verified his story. The bartender laughed when the cops asked him if he thought Owen would’ve been able to drive home that night.
I didn’t see him for two days
Then he knocked on my door.
Once.
I didn’t know how, but I could see that he knew.
We’d been seated, he on the recliner that wasn’t reclined and I in the middle of the couch, for five minutes before I broke the silence.
“You know who it was with, right?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He was tense.
“Darren,” I went on. “Darren who she worked with four days a week for two years. Darren who was wearing tights every time I saw him. That’s who Sloan picked over you. And you knew. And you knew for how long?”
He looked away, but the fire in his eyes was still burning.

When Sloan told me, through a veil of stuttered words and the pillow she clutched to her face, I don’t know what she expected. Sympathy? She knew how Mom died, wasting away despite the best efforts of her doctors and her sons. The rage came to me quickly, as it had before. How could she do what she did, while maintaining the illusion of fidelity, and expect sympathy? In her mind she was doing the honorable thing, when in reality she’d dug herself far too deep for redemption.
I looked at Owen, ten feet away, staring purposefully at the ground.
I counted to five before the anger consumed me. It wasn’t an anger at the passivity with which Owen had reacted to Sloan’s unfaithfulness, though that was there, but an anger at the realization that he’d never been stronger than me. That, my whole life, I’d seen him as the wrong kind of fraud.
“How could you say nothing?” I asked almost scornfully. “How could you let her go unpunished?”
How could you let her live her lie so long that she ended up confessing it to me? To me!

I wondered if Owen felt old Rudy weighing on his conscience, too. Poor Rudy, who’d stayed ten minutes too long and seen the only other man who saw Sloan that day pull into the driveway as he himself was leaving. Just enough contact to be a fatal liability to the killer.
Owen suddenly focused on me, a renewed determination in his eyes. He reached deep into his pocket and placed the pistol we both knew he had across his lap.
I couldn’t help but smirk.
“All these years,” I scoffed. “All these years I thought you were hiding beneath a goddamn shell.”
His hand gripped the gun tighter but didn’t raise it.
“All these years I hated you for lying, I longed for the day you’d crack.”
His teeth ground slowly against themselves.
“Turns out all it took was the death of a whore.”
His arm shot up, the gun leveled itself at my face.
This was how he repayed me for the nicest thing I’d ever done for him.
“When she told me, she didn’t apologize once, did you know that? She didn’t confess for you, she confessed for herself.”
His eyes were tragic. He hated that he still loved her.
“All because you were too weak to tell her that you knew.”
He wasn’t crying, the gun wasn’t shaking, it didn’t look like he was breathing.
He looked like me.