Rachel had run to my mother when I explained to her what was going on, and they had a conversation I was not privy to. Although it may seem odd that I would have been all right with this seclusion—that I wouldn’t have demanded to know what was happening—it only seems that way because I am an adult now and then I was a kid. And as a kid in my house, even as a teenager, whenever I approached my mother’s bedroom and saw the door closed like it had been so many dozens of times since Hannah’s death, when she and Rachel wept themselves to exhaustion, I did what all children do and fell into the pattern of grieving that we had already established. None of this was my mother’s fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was merely the path of least resistance, and that is the nature of grief. I was being protected from something my mother felt that I was not ready for and the fact that I didn’t bust down her door and demand to know is evidence, I think, that she was probably right.
So, I sat on the couch and waited. And, in this time, I thought of Lindy.
I felt deeply upset about the violence inflicted upon her in her very own neighborhood those years back and now, when I was still fresh off the first legitimate feeling of panic I had ever experienced, it suddenly crushed me to think of her crushed. I thought, too, of the way it had hurt me to see my mother look so vulnerable when that shadow appeared, so scared when she heard those footsteps, and then of what Lindy must see every time she looks in her parents’ eyes. It made sense to me that this would destroy her, and that it would destroy her family.
Then I felt a sharp click inside of me, as if my heart and mind had come together.
It was simple, I figured. Lindy needed to know who did this to her.
And since I was the one who’d made it all worse, I needed to be the one to tell her.
That this was the first time the idea had dawned on me, nearly two years after her rape, is one of the greatest shames of my life.
After I’d gone through half an hour of soul searching, of planning, of nearly forgetting what planet I was on, our doorbell rang. My adrenaline cranked up again, and yet I sat still as a stone as my mother and sister walked into the living room. They held hands like a unified front and my mother motioned for me to join them.
We heard a soft knock.
“Kathryn?” she said. It was Louise Landry.
She sounded tired and worried, and spoke weakly through the door.
“Have y’all seen Jason?” she asked us. “He hasn’t been home in a week.”
My mom looked over at me and I shook my head no, that I hadn’t seen him.
“Please,” Louise said. “I’m worried about him. I’m worried about what he might have done. I’m worried about what he could do.”
I assumed that my mom would keep her distance from Louise the way she did with Mr. Landry. I imagined her lumping them both together, but she didn’t. Something sad was happening between a mother and son in our neighborhood, and my mother felt it. And so the real sound of parenting, for me, has always been that of my mother unlocking our deadbolt and clearing her throat, of opening the door to look at this woman and say, earnestly, “I’m so sorry, Louise. We’ll keep our eyes open, okay? I promise you. We’ll keep you both in our prayers.”
30.
It did not take long to find Jason Landry. As if a figure from some urban legend, aware that we had spoken his name, Jason appeared at my bedroom window that same night. He drummed the glass and whispered, “Hey, Fuckhead,” until I opened the blinds. It was near midnight by then and I’d already had a strange evening of sleep. After Louise left, my mother and Rachel and I sat on the couch of our living room and stared out of the back windows like catatonics. My mom told us that our dad would come by the house soon to check up on things, that in her panic she hadn’t known who else to call. Her voice was monotone and lifeless, and she apologized for frightening us. She encouraged us both not to worry too much, said that she may have overreacted, and the next thing I knew we were all knocked out. I awoke with my neck craned to the side and Rachel’s legs slung over my lap. My mother lay stiffly toward the armrest next to me, as if she had been frozen in the sitting position and tipped over by some prankster. It looked like we were staging an accident. Rachel and I woke up at the same time, around nine o’clock, and nudged our mother awake as well. We then shuffled off to our own private bedrooms without supper.
I couldn’t fall back to sleep. The fact that it had gotten dark while I was unconscious bothered me. I felt that I had lost an important stretch of time in my life and I tossed around in bed feeling restless and guilty. I worried that Mr. Landry could have returned while I was passed out, of course, but I was actually more disappointed in my inability to stay focused on Lindy. I was supposed to be thinking up ways to explain the crime against her now, piecing together some closure for her family, and I had already fallen asleep on the job. I was torturing myself about this when Jason arrived at my window and, as such, I first mistook the sound of his voice for my own conscience. What are you doing? it asked me. Why are you just lying there? These were good questions. Then Jason said, “Stop yanking it and come to the window, you perv. I want to show you something.” So I did.
When I lifted the blinds, Jason Landry turned up his palms like he had been waiting for hours. He may have been. I didn’t know. He was dressed in camouflage from head to toe, baggy pants and a T-shirt, and had a look of strange glee in his eye. “Christ, you hornball,” he said. “I thought I was going to have to come down the chimney.”
“What are you doing out there?” I said. “People are looking for you.”
Across the street, an automatic porch light clicked on. Jason ducked his head. “Open the fucking window, you stroker,” he said. “I’m trying to do you a favor.”
I unlocked and opened the window but kept my body in the frame so he couldn’t climb in. He looked around my room to be sure we were alone and I realized that, through all the years we’d known each other, he’d never been inside of my house. I wondered how he even knew which window was mine, and then thought of the horrible likelihood that he had looked through all of them to find it. His face was dirty and streaked with mud, and he was sweating. His hair, white and thin, was longer than I had ever seen it.
“Either come with me or let me in,” he said. “I’m like a sitting duck out here.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Don’t move.”
I backed away from the window to pull on a pair of jeans, and by the time I turned around Jason was standing in my room. He was leaning over my desk, looking at my old Little League trophies and riffling through random scraps of paper. I could smell him. He smelled older than me, and he was. Nearly eighteen by then; the damp odor of Jason’s clothing, the rank sweat of an unwashed man filled my room as quickly as smoke might. He studied the posters I had on my wall: a couple of the bands Lindy liked, an advertisement for Rumple Minze liquor with a scantily clad barbarian woman on it, and a few miscellaneous sketches I’d done in art class that my mom had tacked up. He seemed quietly amused by it all. I watched him lean close to a framed photo of my seventh-grade soccer team and look for me in the group of us huddled together on one knee. He put his finger on the glass when he found me, clean cut and smiling in my pre-Lindy days. He then scanned the rest of the place, looking up at my ceiling fan, at my closet, at all the structural things I knew he had in his own room as well, and I could smell the mud of our local swamps on his shoes.
“Do you have any food?” he asked me.
I pointed to a half-empty box of Oatmeal Creme Pies sitting on my amplifier.
“Of course you do,” he said, and put the box beneath his arm. “You live in paradise.”
“Jason,” I said, “it’s the middle of the night. What’s going on?”
“Just a little war, a little vengeance, a little mayhem,” he smiled. “You know, the usual stuff.” I didn’t understand. “Okay,” he said. “Let me put it this way. Do you still like that Simpson chick?”
I wasn’t sure what to tell him. The question seemed inappropriate. The answer was complicated. Jason then motioned at my bed, where my mom had left the black-and-white photo of Lindy earlier that afternoon, and I guess that told the tale.
“What I’m saying,” Jason whispered, “is that old picture is nothing. Nothing. That’s just scratching the surface.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“We’re friends, right?” Jason said. “I mean, we’re on the same side in this. It’s us against him.” He searched my face for some sort of agreement. “Shit, man,” he said. “You know how much trouble I could have gotten into for showing you those pictures? You know what that asshole would have done to me? Do you know what he’s already done?”
“Take it back if you want,” I said. “I never even look at it.”
“I don’t want that stupid picture,” he said. “What I’m looking for is justice, maybe a little revenge. I thought you might want some, too.” He nodded again at the picture on my bed. “You know,” he said. “For her.”
“Jason,” I said, “do you know something about what happened to Lindy?”
He looked at me and raised his eyebrows and, with that small gesture, I knew that my life was going to change.
“What do you know?” I asked him.
“I know that we’re wasting our time jacking off in this room,” he said. “Put on some shoes and come with me. You’ll see what I’m talking about.”
“Okay,” I said.