I am so staggered by the fact that Joy, my granddaughter, just stabbed my son-in-law in the heart that I can hardly think.
Tommy is screaming. Grace is crying. Angela keeps whispering, “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.” And I can’t see any of the rest, since my eyes are blurry.
“Joy-what-Joy-what-Joy-what–” Justin is saying.
I try to look at Joy with the long kitchen knife, the murder weapon, as she stands there in the door to our home, framed in that door.
Suddenly, as everything speeds up around me, I realize I have been experiencing things as if in slow motion.
Justin is at once near Joy, slamming her into the wall with one hand, grabbing both her hands at the wrists with the other and pinning them to the wall.
“Drop the knife! Drop the knife!”
She throws it a couple of centimeters aside.
“Killing people? Is that what you do?” he screams at her. “Killing people? Is that what you are? A psychopath?”
“Where’s Ethan? What happened to him?” Angela is at Justin’s side. “What’d she do to him?”
“Dad! Dad!” Tommy is screaming.
“Justin, let her go!” That’s Suzy running at Justin and trying to push him away from Joy.
“Are you a psychopath?” Justin is shouting. “Are you a psychopath?”
In all the screaming, Joy is screaming something back, but no one can hear.
“Are you a psychopath?” “Let her go!” “Dad! Dad!” “What just happened!” And on top of that Grace is crying and Joy is shouting something.
“He’s the angel!” Joy shouts at the top of her voice.
Justin stops shouting, and with him everyone else becomes quiet as well. “What did you say?” he says softly, though breathing hard.
“He’s the angel Chrysalis!”
Grace, Tommy, and Angela are all quiet now. Justin is holding Joy, but not as hard as he was. He just hasn’t moved.
“No, he’s not,” Justin says, his tone fearful rather than panicky.
“I know the person who killed me!” Joy insists forcefully. “I’ll know his eyes forever! That was him!”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“I made him permanent and I killed him so you can never bring him back!”
Justin lets her go. He looks at Angela as Joy massages her wrists. I notice that he is now standing between his daughter and his sister, as if defending Joy from Angela.
“What’s going on?” Angela looks at her brother.
Justin looks down, concentrating. “How can I check?”
He then looks up at his sister again. “Angela, you have a picture of Ethan in your wallet, don’t you? Show it to me!”
Angela puts Grace down. “Tommy, take Grace to my old room with Grandma Suzy. I’ll be right there.” She takes out her wallet and gives it to Justin as Suzy takes Grace and Tommy to Angela's old room.
Justin opens the wallet and looks at the picture. He looks at it closely, then suddenly exhales. “Nooooo!”
“Told you!”
He looks at Joy and raises a hand for a high five, “Good going!”
She high fives him.
“What the fuck is going on!” Angela says.
(To be continued…)
—Told by Grampa Walt