The Same Blue

They laid it out the way police lay things out, in a room, with photographs, to families who had to be told, and to a county that wanted to understand, and the understanding they were given was this: that the man who had killed the fisherman in the first cottage, and then waited five days through the lockdown, and then come through the door of the second cottage, and killed the four of us, had been the fifth person on the trip. Had been in the car. Had been at the firepit. Had been sleeping by the motel door. Had been in the room when the plan was made. Had been in the room when the groceries were bought. Had been the one to suggest, gently, that it was a good idea.

Theo.

I'm going to say it again because it needs saying again, the way a bone needs setting twice before it takes. Theo, the quiet boyfriend. Theo, who rarely committed to ideas but committed to this one, out loud, which should have been the sign and was not, because we wanted the cottage and we took the yes for permission and not for warning. Theo, whose patience we called steady, whose calm we called kind, whose apartness we called shyness, whose watching we called fond. The whole week, the whole golden week, I had been misreading him the way you misread a sentence when you already know what you want it to say.

Here is what they believed happened, and I have to believe it too because there is no other story left. The fisherman first: Theo had met him, somehow, in the days before, or Theo had watched him, or Theo had decided him; the fisherman lived alone at the end of the lane and was easy to decide, and whatever Theo is, the thing that decided the fisherman, it had been hungry, and it had eaten, and then the lockdown had come down around him because of his own meal, and he'd been caught on the wrong side of it, away from us, in town, for five days, and the five days had not stopped him, they had organized him, he had used the lock of the county to lock himself in with the shape of the thing he meant to finish, which was us.

The boot prints at the tree line were his size of boot. The man who sold him the boots later said yes, he remembered, the tall quiet one, the polite one. The shape between the pines had been him, measuring, learning the lock, learning which window, learning the thickness of the wall, the sounds through it. The watching Eli felt on the dark nights had been him, and Eli had been right to feel watched and right to check the locks, and the locks had not been enough, because the lock is never enough when the person on the other side of it has been learning it from the trees for five nights and has the patience of a thing that has decided.

And his eyes. The same blue. The blue I had watched from across the quad, the pale patient blue I had called nice, the blue I had seen on the motel floor and called calm, the blue I had seen through the holes of the mask and called a stranger's, which had never been a stranger's, which had been his all along, the same blue as Eli's and not, the way two things can be the same color and one of them is the sky and one of them is the bottom of a deep cold lake, and you only find out which is which when you are already in the water.

Why us. You'll want to know why us, and I can't give you a why, because there wasn't one, the police said, in the careful way they say it, no motive that survived, no grievance, no debt, no drama, just a shape of want they couldn't name, a thing in a person that needs and needed this specific shape of ending, four people who trusted him on a lane in the dark, that's all, that is the whole of the why, and it is not a why at all, it is the absence of one, and that is the part of the story I can't finish, because there is no finish to a thing that had no start anyone can point to, only a day, a golden day, and a boy with dirty blonde hair and two cans of lemonade, and a friend with red ink, and her boyfriend with quiet eyes, and a road going north, and a door that stuck.