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“Do you know why your son killed himself?”
A hard chuckle burst out of her. She took another cigarette out of this kind of purse which held the pack and had a loop on the outside for her butane lighter. I hadn’t seen one of those in years.
“You want one?”
Of course I wanted one, but Ronnie would kill me.
“No, thanks.”
“Why do people ask that question? Why did your son kill himself? Do you think there’s ever a good reason for suicide?”
I wanted to say sometimes. Guilt, shame, a life so ruined it was unlivable. Those seemed like good reasons. I went with, “I suppose there isn’t ever a good reason.”
“Andy had a problem with depression. He was always a weird kid. Everything we did to make him normal just made him weirder. The older he got, the sicker he got. My husband left right before Andy graduated high school. My daughter doesn’t speak to me, she resents the attention Andy got. I’ve had ten years with a therapist, and I can see that Andy’s problems are probably not my fault. It’s the probably that’s hard to live with.”
“I’m sorry this was so hard for you.”
“Is. Itishard,” she said, softly. Then she seemed to rally and shrugged like it didn’t really matter.
“Did you know Andy had a gun?”
“No, of course not. As a teenager he was fascinated by Nazis. Cartoon villains. Monsters. He liked to draw. But that was all. We couldn’t get him interested in anything else. Certainly not bathing. We’d never have allowed him to have a gun.”
That created an interesting picture of Andy as the kid on the outside, the one who’d have been bullied, or at best shunned. For a moment, I wondered if he might be the one who’d killed Pete Michaels and then covered it up by testifying that he’d gotten the gun for Larry Wilkes. But that sounded too organized for the teenager she was describing.
“What was he like during the trial?”
“He didn’t do well with stress. By then, we’d gotten him to a psychiatrist. He was taking medication, but it was hard to get him to take it regularly. It would start to work, and he’d stop. My therapist told me that for some people sick is normal. That we’re asking them to take medication and not be normal. I think he thought that was helpful. It’s not.”
“Andy testified to supplying Larry Wilkes with the gun he used to kill Pete Michaels. Do you think that’s true?”
“I was at the trial. I know what he said.”
“Did you believe it?”
“He said he went to Compton and bought the gun from a drug dealer in a park. The way he talked about it, the way he told the story, it sounded like something he’d made up. His drawings. They were stories. I’ve never been able to figure out if that makes it more likely or less likely that it was true.”
“Did you talk to him about it after the trial?”
“Yes, of course. I tried many times. He became increasingly paranoid, and, in his fantasies, he was always being pursued, threatened. We once had a long conversation about the drug dealers he believed were doing business in our living room while we slept. He was trying to reassure me that they’d promised him we were safe.”
“You think that his whole involvement in Larry Wilkes’ trial could have been part of a paranoid fantasy?”
“I think so, yes.”
“But there’s no way to prove it, is there?”
“None that’s occurred to me.”
“To be clear, you think it’s possible Andy made up the whole thing? Do you also think it’s possible that someone might have manipulated him?”
“It would have had to be someone who knew Andy well, well enough to understand his fantasies. I don’t know who that could be.”
“Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”
“You don’t think the Wilkes boy killed his friend, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
