* * *

—

It was also the summer that Donna Morse and her son, Spencer, were murdered. Surely there must have been other murders during the time I lived in North Shore, but those were the first and only ones that I was aware of, and for weeks it was all we could talk about, not just Bunny and I, but the whole town. Waiting for your drink to be made at a Starbucks, whoever was standing next to you would suddenly say: “What a shame about Donna Morse, eh?” And then you would be talking about it with someone you didn’t even know.

Donna had gone to North Shore High, but several years ahead of me and Bunny, and we did not know her directly, though we knew of her, mostly in the sense of a negative example because she had gotten pregnant and then married and dropped out of community college. North Shore could have been a launching pad for her, but it was not, and like my aunt she was a vestige of a poorer past, clinging to the town like it could save her. She was overweight and her hair was dyed bright red, like a Raggedy Ann doll’s. Aunt Deedee told me that Donna Morse had been hooked on drugs, but got sober when she got pregnant with Spencer. Now she nannied around for families who didn’t mind if she brought Spencer along.

Our main source of info about the murders besides the local paper was, of course, Ray Lampert, who, being a fixture at the Blue Lagoon, was a sponge for gossip. And so it came to be that we heard every detail of what happened from his gross lips as he sat hungover at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, trying to choke down a microwave burrito to keep from throwing up. That was something that happened during those high school years: Ray’s stomach started to go. He was always throwing up, and Bunny was always telling him to go to the doctor, but he never would make an appointment.

According to Ray, Donna Morse had gotten a divorce from Spencer’s father, Luke, because of domestic violence. “He wasn’t so much a puncher as a grabber,” Ray said, wiping bean splatter from his chin with a paper towel. “He would just grab her and go. Smash her into things, like bash her head into the microwave, wham, wham, wham. Her cousin said the worst was when he threw her against the furnace and one of those metal screws, like, cut her face open. That’s why she had that scar.”

I did remember the scar. It ran down her cheek like a pink tear trail. I would see her and Spencer come into the Rite Aid all the time, and I remember I used to judge her because she would buy him full-size candy bars, even though he was only three.

“Why was he even over there?” Bunny asked. “What the fuck was Spencer doing at Luke’s house if he was this violent turd?”

“Court mandated,” Ray said. “Visitation.”

“It makes me so mad!” Bunny shouted. “I hope whatever judge granted him visitation has nightmares for the rest of his fucking life.”

“We’re all gonna be having nightmares for the rest of our lives,” I said. That was how young I was. I thought I would never forget. I didn’t know how things faded, became simple facts, until they were things you hardly thought of anymore.

On a Saturday night that August, on a weekend Spencer was court mandated to spend with Luke, Donna got a call from Luke’s cell phone. She heard Luke’s voice in the background, “Tell her.” And then her son’s shaky little voice, “I’m gonna die tonight, Mommy,” and then she heard the gunshot. But she didn’t believe Luke had killed their son. Many times in the past, Luke had baited her, pretending to kill himself on the phone in order to get her to come over. The idea, however, that he was firing a gun in the same room as her son made her blood run cold, and she called 911 as she set out on foot to his apartment complex, which was only a few blocks away. She did not own a car.

They played the 911 call on the local news. She argued with the dispatcher, who told her to go back to her home. “The police are coming, ma’am, they are on their way.” “I can’t wait. I can’t wait out here when my baby could be in there hurting, please, I can’t.” “You must return to your house.” But she didn’t return to her house, she went into Luke’s, and she screamed as she saw her three-year-old boy bloody on the carpet, his face and most of the right side of his head missing. They did not play the rest of the 911 call because it was too graphic. Luke didn’t shoot her with the gun, though he still had four rounds, but he beat her to death by slamming her head into the kitchen counter over and over again. When the police arrived, he had just finished shooting himself in the head. They heard the gunshot as they broke down the door.

It was so terrible that it seemed to be from another world. I remember, too, a quote from the medical examiner that wound up in the paper, describing Donna’s skull as not just fractured but turned into a “mosaic of bone chips.” The violence was otherworldly. We couldn’t understand how someone could have performed it in a place that was so familiar to us.

“Doesn’t it seem weird,” Bunny asked one Sunday afternoon, a rare one that I wasn’t working at Rite Aid, as we sunned ourselves on her back patio, our skin glistening from the pool. “Doesn’t it seem weird that it was Donna Morse?”

I knew instantly what she meant. Donna, who was neither beautiful nor smart, who had not said one interesting thing as far as either of us could ever tell, seemed an unlikely object for such all-consuming desire. That was what we thought somehow. That all of this violence was over Donna, was, in essence, her fault, as though Donna were the gunpowder and Luke a helpless cannon, a series of mechanical pieces inexorably igniting her. If she had been beautiful or capricious, mysterious or charming, we could have understood how someone could have fallen so in love with her that it drove them to murder.

“It’s like, just get another girlfriend,” Bunny said.

“They had a kid together,” I said, but I wasn’t even sure what such a bond entailed. My own father had seemed to find it easy enough to let us go. They had gotten divorced while my mom was in prison, and he had certainly never contacted me again. Whatever life he lived he must have found sufficiently distracting to forget us. And as a child I had felt his love as physically as the heat of the sun. So where had it gone?

“Phh,” Bunny snorted. “Like he loved the kid.”

Did fathers love their children? It seemed only some of them did. Others were immune somehow, or they could turn it on and off, and we assumed that because of Luke’s violence, or perhaps because of the tattoo of a giant angry moon on his calf, or perhaps because he wore a beanie even in summer, that he was the kind of father who felt nothing for his offspring, or who felt the wrong things. We saw him often enough at the dog park, which was right off our street. He had a sandy-colored pit bull named Pecan. But even Hitler had a dog.

“She should never have let Spencer go with him,” Bunny said. “She should have fought harder in court to keep Luke from getting visitation.”