Moliere book and crept into the dining room, where he wouldn’t see her. She read her book, standing in the corner of the dining room and hiding from her family. She waited for the front door to open and close.
My neighbors and teachers, friends and family, circled an arbitrary spot not far from where I’d been killed. My father, sister, and brother heard the singing again once they were outside. Everything in my father leaned and pitched toward the warmth and light. He wanted so badly to have me remembered in the minds and hearts of everyone. I knew something as I watched: almost everyone was saying goodbye to me. I was becoming one of many little-girl- losts. They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never reopened or reread. And I could say goodbye to them, wish them well, bless them somehow for their good thoughts. A handshake in the street, a dropped item picked up and retrieved and handed back, or a friendly wave from a distant window, a nod, a smile, a moment when the eyes lock over the antics of a child.
Ruth saw my three family members first, and she tugged on Ray’s sleeve. “Go help him,” she whispered. And Ray, who had met my father on his first day of what would prove a long journey to try to find my killer, moved forward. Samuel came away too. Like youthful pastors, they brought my father and sister and brother into the group, which made a wide berth for them and grew silent.
My father had not been outside the house except to drive back and forth to work or sit out in the backyard, for months, nor had he seen his neighbors. Now he looked at them, from face to face, until he realized I had been loved by people he didn’t even recognize. His heart filled up, warm again as it had not been in what seemed so long to him – save small forgotten moments with Buckley, the accidents of love that happened with his son.
He looked at Mr. O’Dwyer. “Stan,” he said, “Susie used to stand at the front window during the summer and listen to you singing in your yard. She loved it. Will you sing for us?”
And in the kind of grace that is granted, but rarely, and not when you wish it most – to save a loved one from dying – Mr. O’Dwyer wobbled only a moment on his first note, then sang loud and clear and fine.
Everyone joined in.
I remembered those summer nights my father spoke of. How the darkness would take forever to come and with it I always hoped for it to cool down. Sometimes, standing at the open window in the front hall, I would feel a breeze, and on that breeze was the music coming from the O’Dwyers’ house. As I listened to Mr. O’Dwyer run through all the Irish ballads he had ever learned, the breeze would begin to smell of earth and air and a mossy scent that meant only one thing: a thunderstorm.
There was a wonderful temporary hush then, as Lindsey sat in her room on the old couch studying, my father sat in his den reading his books, my mother downstairs doing needlepoint or washing up.
I liked to change into a long cotton nightgown and go out onto the back porch, where, as the rain began falling in heavy drops against the roof, breezes came in the screens from all sides and swept my gown against me. It was warm and wonderful and the lightning would come and, a few moments later, the thunder.
My mother would stand at the open porch door, and, after she said her standard warning, “You’re going to catch your death of cold,” she grew quiet. We both listened together to the rain pour down and the thunder clap and smelled the earth rising to greet us.
“You look invincible,” my mother said one night.
I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said:
“I am.”
With the camera my parents gave me, I took dozens of candids of my family. So many that my father forced me to choose which rolls I thought should be developed. As the cost of my obsession mounted, I began keeping two boxes in my closet. “Rolls to be sent out” and “Rolls to hold back.” It was, my mother said, the only hint of any organizational skills I possessed.
I loved the way the burned-out flashcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever except for a picture. When they were spent, I took the cubed four- corner flashbulbs and passed them from hand to hand until they cooled. The broken filaments of the flash would turn a molten marble blue or sometimes smoke the thin glass black. I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found a way to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.
On a summer evening in 1975, my mother turned to my father and said:
“Have you ever made love in the ocean?”
And he said, “No.”
“Neither have I,” my mother said. “Let’s pretend it is the ocean and that I am going away and we might never see each other again.”
The next day she left for her father’s cabin in New Hampshire.
That same summer, Lindsey or Buckley or my father would open the front door and find a casserole or a bundt cake on the front stoop. Sometimes an apple pie – my father’s favorite. The food was unpredictable. The casseroles Mrs. Stead made were horrible. The bundt cakes Mrs. Gilbert made were overly moist but bearable. The apple pies from Ruana: heaven on Earth.
In his study during the long nights after my mother left, my father would try to lose himself by rereading passages from the Civil War letters of Mary Chestnut to her husband. He tried to let go of any blame, of any hope, but it was impossible. He did manage a small smile once.
“Ruana Singh bakes a mean apple pie,” he wrote in his notebook.
In the fall he picked up the phone one afternoon to hear Grandma Lynn.
“Jack,” my grandmother announced, “I am thinking of coming to stay.”
My father was silent, but the line was riddled with his hesitation.
“I would like to make myself available to you and the children. I’ve been knocking around in this mausoleum long enough.”
“Lynn, we’re just beginning to start over again,” he stammered. Still, he couldn’t depend on Nate’s mother to watch Buckley forever. Four months after my mother left, her temporary absence was beginning to take on the feel of permanence.
My grandmother insisted. I watched her resist the remaining slug of vodka in her glass. “I will contain my drinking until” – she thought hard here – “after five o’clock, and,” she said, “what the hell, I’ll stop altogether if you should find it necessary.”
“Do you know what you’re saying?”
My grandmother felt a clarity from her phone hand down to her pump-encased feet. “Yes, I do. I think.”
It was only after he got off the phone that he let himself wonder,
It was obvious to everyone.
By December 1975, a year had passed since Mr. Harvey had packed his bags, but there was still no sign of him. For a while, until the tape dirtied or the paper tore, store owners kept a scratchy sketch of him taped to their windows. Lindsey and Samuel walked in the neighborhood or hung out at Hal’s bike shop. She wouldn’t go to the diner where the other kids went. The owner of the diner was a law and order man. He had blown up the sketch of George Harvey to twice its size and taped it to the front door. He willingly gave the grisly details to any customer who asked – young girl, cornfield, found only an elbow.
Finally Lindsey asked Hal to give her a ride to the police station. She wanted to know what exactly they were doing.
They bid farewell to Samuel at the bike shop and Hal gave Lindsey a ride through a wet December snow.
From the start, Lindsey’s youth and purpose had caught the police off guard. As more and more of them realized who she was, they gave her a wider and wider berth. Here was this girl, focused, mad, fifteen. Her breasts were perfect small cups, her legs gangly but curved, her eyes like flint and flower petals.
While Lindsey and Hal waited outside the captain’s office on a wooden bench, she thought she saw something across the room that she recognized. It was on Detective Fenerman’s desk and it stood out in the room because of its color. What her mother had always distinguished as Chinese red, a harsher red than rose red, it was the red of classic lipsticks, rarely found in nature. Our mother was proud of her ability to wear Chinese red, noting each time she tied a particular scarf around her neck that it was a color even Grandma Lynn dared not wear.
“Hal,” she said, every muscle tense as she stared at the increasingly familiar object on Fenerman’s desk.
“Yes.”
“Do you see that red cloth?”
“Yes.”
“Can you go and get it for me?”
When Hal looked at her, she said: “I think it’s my mother’s.”
As Hal stood to retrieve it, Len entered the squad room from behind where Lindsey sat. He tapped her on the shoulder just as he realized what Hal was doing. Lindsey and Detective Fenerman stared at each other.
“Why do you have my mother’s scarf?”
He stumbled. “She might have left it in my car one day.”
Lindsey stood and faced him. She was clear-eyed and driving fast toward the worst news yet. “What was she doing in your car?”
“Hello, Hal,” Len said.
Hal held the scarf in his hand. Lindsey grabbed it away, her voice growing angry. “Why do you have my mother’s scarf?”
And though Len was the detective, Hal saw it first – it arched over her like a rainbow – Prisma Color understanding. The way it happened in algebra class or English when my sister was the first person to figure out the sum of
And later she cried out her disbelief to Samuel in the back room of the bike shop.
When my brother turned seven, he built a fort for me. It was something the two of us had said we would always do together and something my father could not bring himself to do. It reminded him too much of building the tent with the disappeared Mr. Harvey.
A family with five little girls had moved into Mr. Harvey’s house. Laughter traveled over into my father’s study from the built-in pool they had poured the spring after George Harvey ran. The sound of little girls – girls to spare.
The cruelty of it became like glass shattering in my father’s ears. In the spring of 1976, with my mother gone, he would shut the window of his den on even the hottest evenings to avoid the sound. He watched his
