The Nice Ones

by Elizabeth Zelvin

My Aunt Marion told me about her next-door neighbors when she lived up north. The family was a father and mother, a boy, and three girls. The mother was a downtrodden woman, too scared of her own shadow, Aunt Marion said, to have a conversation with a neighbor. The boy was the apple of the father’s eye. You could hear his voice booming, “my son,” all around the neighborhood. The girls fended for themselves.

One night, the boy went into the oldest girl’s room and assaulted her. Aunt Marion heard screeching and then a lot of shouting from the boy and his dad. Aunt Marion hesitated to call the police, but other neighbors did. In the end, it was all brushed off as a misunderstanding. The father went around telling everyone what a good brother his boy was to his sisters for a week afterward. After that, the girls all locked their bedroom doors at night until one night, the oldest sister forgot. The brother went in with an axe and split her head open. She died instantly. Even then, the father insisted his boy was a good boy, and the girl, his dead daughter, must have started it somehow. Aunt Marion thought that made the father as insane as the son, who never stood trial and ended up in a mental institution. 

The State itself being unhinged, Aunt Marion said, the two remaining girls were considered safe in the family now, with a father who never ceased to bemoan the loss of his wonderful son and a mother who, having formerly been inattentive to all her children equally, now mourned her dead daughter while continuing to neglect the two who still lived. Her depression worsened until she stopped going out of the house at all. A year after the tragedy, she hanged herself.

Their mother’s suicide finally got the girls out of there. They clung to each other, cried, and begged so hard not to be separated that they were even placed together in an excellent foster family in a different neighborhood. They were two of the nice ones, Aunt Marion said. But the damage was done. They didn’t get the sympathy they deserved. By that time, the story had spread and warped, as stories do. Most people thought that the two girls themselves had killed “all those people,” although some believed they killed them only because they were so desperate to get away and into a home where they might experience some kindness.

I remembered that when I married my own abusive pervert of a husband. I thought of those two girls the night I leaned over in the bed where he slept beside me and cut him right across the jugular. I’m not one of the nice ones. Sorry, Aunt Marion.

Elizabeth Zelvin writes the Bruce Kohler Mysteries and the Mendoza Family Saga. Her stories appear in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and Black Cat Mystery Magazine, as well as Yellow Mama.