I’m still thinking about it now.
But on that night, Julie rolled back over to her other side, where it was more comfortable for her to sleep in those days. It wasn’t personal that she turned her back to me. I understood that. I reached out and adjusted the crease in her shirt. I straightened the covers on her legs.
“Hey,” Julie said. “Can I tell you something?”
“Yes,” I said. “Anything.”
“It doesn’t bother me that you used to be in love with Lindy, or that you got arrested trying to save her like some comic-book hero.”
I smiled at this.
“Why not?” I said. “Shouldn’t you be insane with jealousy?”
“No,” she said, “because you are in love with me now and we are going to have a kid and you will be our real-life hero.”
“Ouch,” I said. “No pressure.”
Then, after a minute, I said, “You’re right about that, though. I am in love with you.”
“Plus,” Julie said, “I’ve got like forty pounds on her now. I’ve got a ninja in my belly. If Lindy tried anything, it could get ugly.”
I lay there and smiled for a good long time.
And then a couple of years went by and our child was healthy and bright and everything I believed I knew about love and humanity deepened in ways I could have never predicted. Still, I understand that we are just getting started, Julie and I. Our daughter is three years old now, and every leap she makes, even the simple sound of her singing in her room when she thinks that no one is listening, it fills me with an irreplaceable joy. It does this to Julie, as well, and so we are happily crushed, like so many others, by parenthood.
But just the other day, as my daughter and I were playing around outside, drawing chalk figures on the driveway, washing the car, and picking a few stray weeds from the flower beds, a small group of neighborhood kids came by. They range from around my daughter’s age up to maybe nine years old or so. They are polite and energetic and we see them in the neighborhood often. We wave at them when we pass by. I recognize each of their parents. I hope that Baton Rouge will always be this way. Still, this was the first time they had come to our house in a group to ask if my daughter could join them a few houses down, where they were doing things like riding their bikes in a circle, building an igloo out of milk jugs, and eating popsicles.
I looked down to ask my daughter what she thought of this idea and the look in her eyes was so hopeful that all I said was, “Okay.” She ran to the patio to grab her tricycle, a pink getup with a basket on the back, and she was gone. The older kids were kicking off on their skateboards and rip-sticks, the younger kids still with their training wheels, and in that scene I saw what felt to me like the entirety of my life. The plump kid on the Big Wheel, that was Randy Stiller. The older kid on the skateboard was Duke Kern. The girl on the bike, pedaling hard to get to the front of the pack, was Lindy. I did not know who my daughter was yet, or if she would ever be like any of us. I only knew that, whoever she might be, I would love her.
And then a number of things made sense to me—the research I’d found myself doing lately, the old photo albums I’d been looking through, the way I kept steering the conversations with my mother and sister toward Lindy and Hannah and the old days, and even the conversations with my father and Laura, who are now married. These past few years, ever since we had our first child, our daughter, I understood, I’ve only been trying to say this one thing.
35.
I was up in the tree that night.
It was June and it was hot and I was young and turned completely inside out by what I thought at that time was love. And on that night I had finished supper and helped my mom with the dishes and without even the slightest bit of hesitation I lied and told her that I wasn’t in the mood for television. I said that I was instead going to my room to play video games, maybe fall asleep a bit early. And these were the days when everyone I knew was alive, remember. My father was gone, yes, but Lindy and Hannah were untouched. We were all young. So, I knew that my mom would do what she always did in the young summer evenings of 1989 and sit at the dining room table to call Rachel in her dorm room in Lafayette, call Hannah at her apartment on the other side of Baton Rouge. If she got hold of them, they would chat pleasantly for a few minutes and tell each other they loved each other and my mom would then walk the phone back to the wall to hang it up. She might then have called her father or perhaps a friend to reconfirm a lunch date, but not much more, though I am sure she wanted, at times, to call my dad. I am sure she wanted, at other times, to knock on my door and say, Hey, you, come visit with me. It’s barely eight o’clock. But she did not. She instead walked through the house turning off the lights and picking up little odds and ends like socks and discarded food wrappers until she got to her room, where she began the long process of undressing and taking off her makeup before she would lie in bed and fall asleep reading a self-help book about how to parent through a divorce.
Meanwhile, in my room, I watched the clock.
The thing was, I knew the routine of the Simpson girl.
So when I heard my mother’s door shut at eight o’clock, I waited fifteen more minutes and then opened my window to sprint across our darkening street. Lindy would return from the track at eight-thirty, and this gave me enough time to run from one yard to the next while making sure all of the neighbors were inside. I had done this a few times since I learned how to spy on her from the water oak and the results had been tremendous. I saw her, once, talking on the phone and painting her toenails. On another occasion, I watched her fold some laundry and put it away and I honestly never imagined there would come a time when I regretted this.
But that night, as I made like a cat across the street, I couldn’t help but look a bit farther down the block to where that broken streetlight looked so peculiar to me. It was still new to us at that time, maybe a couple weeks old, and as I sprinted toward the tree, I saw someone beneath it. I did not think I saw someone. I did see someone. It was a man, I thought, or perhaps a boy, and the truth is that it was impossible for me to tell because I was running. In other words, I did not get a good look because I did not stop to get a good look.
What I did see was a shadow working hurriedly, moving back and forth from the pole to the azalea bushes, and I thought it was perhaps Old Man Casemore, or maybe some utility worker who’d come to fix the light. I did not care as long I was not seen.
I cannot go back and change this. I cannot go back and fix this.
All I can do is confess that a few minutes later, when I was up in that tree, I heard something happen on Piney Creek Road. The sound of it was quick and muted and has no other reference for me than that single event. So I have no way to describe it to you, no way to make you hear it. Yet I can tell you this. It was a sound that gave me a feeling. I immediately felt that something was not right and I knew that, whatever it was, it was happening around the corner. I also knew that Lindy, at that time of night, would likely be around the corner. I thought to climb down and go see. That’s what kills me. I thought to check on her. Yet I was so afraid of being caught that I decided not to.
So, I never really saw what happened. And I did not commit the act myself.
That’s the truth.