Baptism by fire to accept that your punishment is to live with it. But I’m getting ahead of myself with Nancy Werlin’s 1998 book, The Killer’s Cousin.
David has been acquitted of killing his girlfriend, and aims to finish out his second attempt at his senior year of high school. His parents ship him to his aunt and uncle’s house, where his cousin, 11-year-old Lily also lives. It’s never explicitly stated why his parents did this, but the underlying inference is a.) to avoid the publicity of staying around where he was acquitted of someone’s death; and more darkly poignantly, b.) his parents feel like they don’t know this David.
But there’s more afoot here than David’s past. The aunt and uncle, Julia and Vic, are having marital problems, and in fact, in an inversion of what is typical with children of quarreling parents, the marital problems are a psychological boon to Lily. The parents use her as the go-between to communicate with each other. So, when David comes, and their marriage rebounds — and thus, Lily is no longer needed as a go-between — she blames him for her newfound loneliness and uselessness. She starts terrorizing him with little and big pranks, for which Julia and Vic blame David and his craziness. They don’t believe him that Lily needs help. Given what I’m about to tell you, it’s astounding how willfully obtuse and oblivious they are to Lily’s needs.
Hanging like a dark cloud over their living quarters, sort of like the retrofitted attic David is resigned to living in, is Kathy, Julia and Vic’s eldest daughter who seemingly committed suicide. Julia and Vic never talk about her or even have photos of her around (that doesn’t seem healthy!). Worse yet, she killed herself in that attic. And still worse, Lily, who would have been 7-years-old at the time, not only found Kathy dying in the bathtub, but Lily thinks she caused it by giving Kathy a drink of water laced with ammonium (I think that’s what it was).
However, there’s a question of whether Lily, as a child, is merely transferring her trauma at having found her older sister dying to guilt at having caused the death, but Lily believes — and David comes to believe her, too — she intentionally laced Kathy’s drink because she hated the lavish attention Kathy received, and for all intents and purposes, still receives in her absence with the pall she’s cast over the family. In any case, it amounts to the same thing: a life taken, and it’s what also happened to David with his girlfriend Emily. He meant to intervene in a fight between Emily and her brother by punching the brother and instead, he punched Emily, killing her.
Thus, David’s lesson to Lily is that her punishment — their punishment — is to live with the knowledge, pain, and even power at having taken a life. So, at the end of the book, when Lily tries to kill herself by setting fire to the attic, David won’t let her die. He literally bursts into the house and saves her from the flames, hence my use of “baptism by fire.” Later in the hospital room, it’s quite powerful how David explains what the aforementioned power is like. To paraphrase, as humans, we’re all standing at the precipice of the abyss with the potential power to do harm to others within us, and if you exercise it, you end up on the other side of the abyss alone except for now possessing the knowledge that you’re capable of exercising said power. It’s scary, and it changes you. It’s what David is afraid of from page one, and it’s what Lily is afraid of, too. It’s unfurling the reality of this bond that, and of course, David having saved her life, that forges David and Lily’s bond.
David’s fear also impacts David’s relationship with his parents. They want to continue moving through the world as if he’s the “Davey” of old, but he’s not that person anymore precisely because of what happened and they — and he — need to reckon with it before they can actually move on from the past. Shipping David off to somewhere else isn’t going to allow them to escape that reality. Your baggage stays (or comes) with you. At the end of the book, after a frank conversation with his dad, the family is able to move on after such a reckoning.
Werlin’s book moved at a fast pace, with authentically realized characters and dialogue, and even though it’s billed as young adult, I think anyone at any point in their life can latch onto the weighty themes of trauma, loneliness, and ultimately, perseverance, expressed in the book. I’d highly recommend it as one of my sneaky favorite reads of the year.
Milam's Musings 