We sat agape for a few moments. No one had the heart to say what we were all thinking: we’ve just been cleaning out our dead mother’s belongings. We dissolved into more shrieking laughter.
My mother was, and will always be, the most complicated relationship of my life.
Writing this now, I’m struck by two incompatible truths that pain me. No one would have taken more joy from this book than my mother. And I probably wouldn’t have felt the freedom to write it until she was gone.
*
I WALKED THE SAME HALF MILE TO ST. EDMUND’S EVERY DAY, A LEFT on Randolph, a right on Euclid, a left on Pleasant. The girls wore gray plaid jumpers and white shirts; the boys, a mustard-colored collared shirt and slacks. Ms. Ray, my first-grade teacher, had an hourglass figure and a thick mane of caramel-colored hair, and she was always upbeat. It was Suzanne Somers herding a bunch of six-year-olds. Even so, she’s not my most vivid memory of St. Edmund’s. Nor, curiously enough, is any Catholic teaching or time spent in church, though I know there were a lot of both. No, St. Edmund’s will always be welded in my mind with one image, that of a quiet, well-behaved boy with sandy brown hair and ears that stuck out a little: Danny Olis.
My schooltime crushes ranged wildly in physical and personality type, but I can say with confidence that they all shared one thing—they sat in front of me in class. Other people are able to develop feelings for people sitting next to them or behind them, but not me. That requires connecting with someone too directly, sometimes even craning your neck to make full eye contact. Too real. I loved nothing more than the back of a boy’s head. I could project endlessly on the blank slate of a kid’s slouched back. He could be sitting there with his mouth half-open or picking his nose, and I’d never know.
For a dreamy projectionist like me, Danny Olis was perfect. I don’t recall thinking he was unhappy, but I also can’t picture his smile. He was self-possessed for a little kid, and slightly solemn, as if he knew something the rest of us gap-toothed fairy-tale believers would eventually find out. He was the Sam Shepard of our first-grade class. I’d been gifted with a stuffed Curious George when I was born, and something about Danny’s round, elfin face and big ears reminded me of my George doll. I fell asleep clutching him to my cheek every night. My love for Danny was big news in our house. Sifting through my old stuff during a move once, I came across a card Beanie had written me during her freshmen year at the University of Iowa. “Dear Mish, I miss you. How’s Danny Olis?”
I switched to the local public school, William Beye Elementary, for fourth grade. My best friends, the Van sisters, who’d saved me from loneliness by moving in across the street, went there. I wanted to be with them. I wanted to wear whatever I liked. After a while, I mostly forgot about Danny Olis. My Curious George disappeared, along with my other childhood things.
One night in my junior year of high school, a friend was helping me prepare for a big party I was throwing while my parents were out of town. She’d been hanging out the last few months with some boys from Fenwick, the local all-boys Catholic high school, and asked if a few of them could come to the party. Sure, I said. Actually, she told me tentatively, she was sort of dating one of them.
“Just kind of,” she said.
“That’s great,” I said. “What’s his name?”
“Danny Olis.”
My eyes widened and I half guffawed, half shrieked. I steadied myself and took a breath, the way you do when you’re about to share a big secret.
“You’re not going to believe this,” I said, “but I had the biggest crush on Danny Olis in grade school.”
My friend nodded.
“It started in music class because the teacher made you hold hands,” she said. My confused expression prompted her to continue.
“He told me,” she said.
I recalled nothing about holding hands and music class. And he knew? In my memory I was the quiet girl who sat in the back, faithfully but discreetly observing every swivel and dip of his head. Now it seemed my fixation had been about as subtle as a telenovela. I was mortified.
“Well, he’s very mysterious,” I told her, a little irritated.
She shrugged. “Not to me,” she said.
That night teenagers with Solo cups spilled onto my lawn and into the street. I drank too much gin and ducked and weaved through the throngs of unfamiliar people in my house. Boys I’d dated were there, and boys I would date. Someone played “Suspicious Minds” by the Fine Young Cannibals on repeat.
All night I was acutely aware of a quiet, sandy-haired boy standing in the corner of the kitchen near the refrigerator. His hair now covered his ears. His face had lost its roundness and was more drawn, but through quick glimpses I could see the steady, cryptic expression remained. All night I avoided him. I never looked him in the eye. Despite the gin, I was still the girl in the back of the classroom, watchful, never watched.
*
TWENTY-SIX YEARS LATER, ONE AFTERNOON IN MAY, I WAS PREPARING to close my laptop when the familiar ring announced a new e-mail. I glanced at my inbox. I’m an inconsistent e-mail correspondent, and sometimes, I’m a little ashamed to admit, it takes me several days or longer to respond. The name in my inbox took a moment to register: Dan Olis. I clicked on the message hesitantly.
Dan, who was now an engineer living in Denver, explained that he had been forwarded a profile of me that ran in the Notre Dame alumni magazine. The article, “Sleuth,” reported that I was the author of a website, True Crime Diary, that attempts to solve cold-case homicides. The writer asked the origin of my obsession with unsolved murders and quoted my reply: “This all started when I was 14. A neighbor of mine was brutally murdered. Very strange case. She was jogging, close to her house. [The police] never solved it. Everyone in the neighborhood was gripped with fear and then moved on. But I never could. I had to figure out how it happened.”
That was the sound-bite version. Another version is as follows. On the evening of August 1, 1984, I’m basking in the hermetically sealed freedom of our house’s renovated third-floor attic bedroom. Every kid in my family spent part of their teenage years up there. It’s my turn. My father hated the attic because it was a firetrap, but for me, a fourteen-year-old tsunami of emotions who signed her journal entries “Michelle, the Writer,” it’s a glorious escape. The carpet is deep orange shag, the ceilings slanted. There’s a bookcase built into the wall that swings open to a secret storage nook. Best of all is the enormous wooden desk that takes up half the room. I have a turntable, a typewriter, and a small window that overlooks my neighbor’s tiled roof. I have a place to dream. In a few weeks I’ll start high school.
At the same time, three-tenths of a mile away, Kathleen Lombardo, twenty-four, is jogging with her Walkman along Pleasant Street. It’s a hot night. Neighbors out on their porch watch Kathleen go by about nine forty-five p.m. She has minutes to live.
I remember hearing someone walk upstairs to the second floor—my sister Maureen, I think—and a murmured conversation , an intake of breath, and then my mother’s footsteps going quickly to the window. We knew the Lombardo family from St. Edmund’s. Word trickled out quickly. Her killer had dragged her into the mouth of the alley between Euclid and Wesley. He cut her throat.