clothes and stuff for you. It was all against any rules of police procedure. But
“Can anything get Ben out?” I asked, my stomach gone eely. The fact that the definitive voice on Ben’s guilt had changed her mind was sickening me. As was meeting yet another person who was positive I’d committed perjury.
“Well, you’re trying to, right? I think it’s almost impossible to undo these things after all these years—his time for an appeal, per se, is up. He’d need to try for habeas corpus and that’s … you all would need some big new evidence at this point to get the ball rolling. Like some really compelling DNA evidence. Unfortunately, your family was cremated so—”
“Right, well, thank you,” I interrupted, needing to get home, right then.
“Again, I wrote the book after the verdict, but if I can do anything to help you, let me know, Libby. I do bear some culpability. I take that responsibility.”
“Have you made any statements, told the police you don’t think Ben did it?”
“Well, no. It seems like most people concluded a long time ago that Ben didn’t do it,” Barb said, her voice going shrill. “I assume you’ve officially recanted your testimony? I’d think that’d be a huge help.”
She was waiting for me to say more, to explain why I’d come to her now. To tell her, yeah, sure, Ben was innocent and I was going to fix all this. She sat eyeing me, eating her lunch, chewing each bite with excessive care. I picked up my sandwich—cucumber and hummus—and set it back down, leaving a thumbprint in the damp bread. The room was lined with bookshelves, but they contained only self-help books.
To me, all that urgent hopefulness was more frightening than if I’d found a pile of skulls with hair still attached. I ran out in full panic, my underwear tucked up a sleeve.
I didn’t stay much longer with Barb. I left with promises to call her soon and a blue paperweight in the shape of a heart I stole from her sidetable.
Patty DayJANUARY 2, 1985
9:42 A.M.
The sink was stained a sludgy purple from where Ben had dyed his hair. Sometime in the night, then, he’d locked himself in the bathroom, sat down on the closed toilet seat, and read through the instructions on the carton of hair color she’d found in the trash. The carton had a photograph of a woman with light pink lips and jet-black hair, worn in a pageboy. She wondered if he’d stolen it. She couldn’t imagine Ben, chin-to-chest Ben, setting a dye kit on the checkout counter. So he’d shoplifted it. Then in the middle of the night, her son, all by himself, had measured and combined and lathered. He’d sat with that mudpile of chemicals on his red hair and waited.
The whole idea made her incredibly sad. That in this house of women, her boy had colored his hair in the night by himself. Obviously, it was silly to think he’d have asked her for help, but to do such a thing without an accomplice seemed so lonely. Patty’s older sister, Diane, had pierced Patty’s ears in this bathroom two decades ago. Patty heated a safety pin with a cheap lighter and Diane sliced a potato in half and stuck its cold, wet face against the back of Patty’s ear. They froze her lobe with an ice cube, and Diane—
“It’ll be over in a second, you can’t do just one, P.”
Diane, the doer. Jobs were not to be abandoned, not for weather, or laziness, or a throbbing ear, melted ice, and a scaredy kid sister.
Patty twirled her gold studs. The left one was off-center, her fault for squirming at the last minute. Still, there they were, twin markers of teenage brio, and she’d done it with her sister, just like she’d first applied lipstick or hooked elastic clips to sanitary napkins the size of a diaper, circa 1965. Some things were not meant to be done alone.
She poured Comet into the sink and started scrubbing, the water turning an inky green. Diane would be by soon. She always dropped in midweek if she was “in her car,” which was her way of making the thirty-mile drive out to the farm seem like just part of a day’s errands. Diane would make fun of this latest Ben saga. When Patty was worried about school, teachers, the farm, Ben, her marriage, the kids, the farm (after 1980, it was always, always, always the farm), it was Diane she craved, like a stiff drink. Diane, sitting in a lawn chair in their garage, smoking a series of cigarettes, would pronounce Patty a dope, would tell her to lighten up. Worries find you easily enough without inviting them. With Diane, worries were almost physical beings, leachy creatures with latchhooks for fingers, meant to be vanquished immediately. Diane didn’t worry, that was for less hearty women.
But Patty couldn’t lighten up. Ben had gone so remote this past year, turned himself into this strange, tense kid who walled himself into his room, kicking around to music that rattled the walls, the belchy, screaming words seeping out from under his door. Alarming words. She’d not bothered to listen at first, the music itself was so ugly, so frantic, but one day she’d come home early from town, Ben thinking no one was home, and she’d stood outside his door and heard the bellows:
The record skipped and again came the coarse chant: I am no more, I am undone, the Devil took my soul, now I’m Satan’s son.
And again. And then again. And Patty realized Ben was just standing over his record player, picking up the needle and playing the words over and over, like a prayer.
