What I did see, however, was Lindy, a few minutes later, walking her bike up the sidewalk. Her face was as blank as the day of the Challenger, the day I fell in love with her, and I noticed that her shoe was missing. The scraping sound of her uneven walk up the driveway is as clear to me now as it was then. It is as clear as the way I saw her bathroom light turn on, the way I stayed in the tree against my better judgment and listened to the shower go, and the way I watched through my binoculars as she walked into her bedroom still wrapped in a towel, still wearing the exact same blank expression, and curled into a ball on top of her bed. It is also as clear to me as our street was empty, by the time I finally went back home.
So, I am guilty in the most specific sense.
I had an opportunity to help someone and I chose not to. For a large part of my life, I’ve felt that this decision defined me and I’ve worn my guilt like a locket.
What am I trying to say?
After my mother’s stroke, a minor one that occurred in 2006, a year or so before my daughter was born, she told me that she kept a box in her closet. She was still in the hospital, doing fine but a little shaken and confused, and asked me to go retrieve it for her. When I brought it back to the hospital she unlocked it with a simple combination and opened it up. She pulled out a manila envelope.
“This is my will,” she said. “This is the boring part. The rest of this stuff, I figured we could take a look at.”
I imagine there is little need for me to describe the bittersweet exhaustion of that afternoon. My mother had a smattering of old photos, strange personal favorites she had collected that were pretty much evenly distributed between Hannah, Rachel, and me. She also had some mementos that didn’t mean much to me, but that I enjoyed hearing about. She had a dried corsage from her wedding to my father. She had a blue piece of silk that she told me was from her mother’s wedding to her father, both of whom had passed by then. She had letters that had been especially meaningful to her, one from my dad’s remorseful parents who had drifted away from us after my father’s adultery, another from Finally Douglas after Hannah had died. She had a photograph clipped from the newspaper that showed Rachel playing the wife in a kindergarten version of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas, and she had a poem that I had written to her for a Mother’s Day present when I was in the second grade that I had no recollection of. She also had a yellow Duncan yo-yo that my uncle Barry had asked her to give me.
“I’m sorry I never gave this to you,” she said. “Things were just so difficult back then. Barry was so confused and I could tell how much you looked up to him. I don’t know. I was afraid of everything.”
“I know, Mom,” I said. “I was, too.”
Other people came to visit throughout the afternoon, like Rachel and her family, and although the crying jags passed through the room like weather fronts, the majority of the day, interrupted by nurses’ visits, was cheerful with memory. When visiting hours were over and we were packing up to leave, my mother pulled out a small notebook from the bottom of the box and asked me if I would like to take it home.
It was Hannah’s journal.
“You were so young when that happened,” my mom said. “I figured you might not appreciate this until later. And then, you know, time went by and I didn’t know what to do.”
I looked over at Rachel. I knew she and Hannah were closer than we had ever been.
“You can take it,” Rachel said. “Trust me. I’ve read it a hundred times.”
I got home that night to a series of messages on our machine from Julie, who had been at an academic conference in Chicago when my mother had her stroke the day before. I’d told her to stay and deliver her paper, and she had called me to say that she managed a way to deliver it early and get a flight that would have her home the next morning. She asked me to call her in her hotel room and I did.
After this I sat at the kitchen counter of our rental home, on a bar stool I rarely sat on, and opened Hannah’s journal. I’d never been so nervous. I imagine now it is because I was old enough to realize that I never really knew my sister and perhaps, at this moment, I was about to.
To my surprise, the journal spanned the entirety of her writing life. The entries were sporadic and often undated and consisted of everything from poems to stories to songs to random observations about the happenings of our family from times both before and after I became a part of it. The tough parts that dealt with her disappointment with my father, her string of bad and even dangerous-sounding relationships with guys her age, these were difficult to read. Some of the pages were even glued together or blacked out in Sharpie so that no one could read them and I imagine that Hannah did this herself, for whatever private reasons she had, and that we all do this with our pasts. Still, the well-earned skepticism about men that I could see coming through, about their intentions, it reminded me of things Lindy might have said on the phone those years back. And yet the lighthearted stuff from when she was a kid, the tales of princesses and dragons she’d cooked up, it all seemed steeped with a certain unorthodox wisdom that reminded me of Julie. It was powerful stuff, all of it, and I couldn’t get enough.
But two specific entries were of particular note.
One was dated from the early summer 1989, the summer of Lindy’s rape, when Hannah must have been home visiting or stopping by for a swim. The setting seemed to be a window at our house, facing Piney Creek Road, where she was composing a love song about Finally Douglas, called “This Lucky Heart.” On the margins of the page, Hannah had scribbled details from our neighborhood as she saw them outside. Perhaps they were for future songs. Perhaps they were just practice. I am sure, however, that she had no idea of what they might mean to me all those years later.
Some of the lines read awkwardly, like:
A missing Mercedes / can’t hide the pain
Oak trees drop / what will be theirs again.
Maybe this is where I’d gotten my bad taste in poetry.
But then, near the bottom of this page, I saw this line:
A skinny boy slinks / tattoos blue as night.
His head as bald as the street / he throws rocks at the light.
And there it was.
Tyler Bannister. It had to have been him. He was the only kid with tattoos and a shaved head that Piney Creek Road had ever known. He must have returned to the neighborhood after leaving the Landrys’ and knocked out the light. He must have planned the whole thing. I felt sick to my stomach as I recalled the day that Tyler, Jason, and I stood in front of Lindy’s house talking about the water oak, the way we pretended to be fiddling with a remote-control car as Lindy’s father pulled up and smiled and asked his daughter, yet again, to remind him of what time she was to return from the track. It would be eight-thirty, Daddy, she told him, the same as every day, and in this way the whole awful thing became obvious to me.
The fact that Tyler Bannister had moved out months before—that he no longer lived with the Landrys at the time of the crime—meant nothing, because the simple truth is that there was a stretch of time in his life in which Woodland Hills was his home, and a home, no matter how wonderful or menacing, is a thing you don’t forget. Ask anybody.
So, my mystery was solved.
Yet I didn’t feel any better.
I had my reasons.
For starters, how had we not stumbled upon this connection before? Although Hannah lived across town at that point, although she was busy with her own life, hadn’t my mom or Rachel or perhaps even the police spoken to her about Lindy’s rape? Hadn’t everyone given their best effort, discussing simple clues like a busted streetlight or the reappearance of suspicious boys? I’d always thought so. This made me wonder if there was perhaps another, darker, reason that we’d missed this. It made me wonder if maybe my mother or Rachel, knowing what they did about Hannah’s history with men that was just now unfolding for me, felt it better not to mention to her what had happened to the Simpson girl in our very own neighborhood. It made me wonder if perhaps this was the reason my mother took that police officer’s card off the refrigerator and slipped it into the drawer that day, if maybe she didn’t want her daughters seeing a thing like this, being reminded of realities like this, every time they wanted a little something to eat.
This type of care, I understood, would not be dissimilar to the way people had been so wary to mention Hannah around my mother after she had died. I then began to wonder what Julie meant, exactly, when she said that rape is not a thing that women go around talking about, and this made me wonder what other dreadful knowledge is passed silently among the hearts of women and I suddenly had a hard time understanding men, in general, and the damage we can do, and how it is even possible that I am one of them.
So, from the time I read that journal until now, a period of a few years, I’ve buried what I’d learned about the rape of Lindy Simpson. I didn’t tell anyone about it. Yet I went so far as to look Tyler Bannister up and, unsurprisingly, found out that he was already in prison on various other charges, including sexual battery. This didn’t make things easier on my conscience and so I began to take strange and nostalgic trips back to the old neighborhood, wondering if I should track Lindy down and tell her what I’d uncovered. I suppose this is why I felt so awful after I ran into her that night at the football game.
It was the first time I had seen her since I knew, or at least believed I knew, who had changed her life so dramatically, and since I’d come to grips with my own cowardice on that night of her rape, and yet I didn’t even think to apologize. So, in an awful way, I felt again like I was in on the crime.
Maybe I was.
That’s why I am so lucky to have Julie around now, and to have had my mother and Rachel around for so long, to make me realize that life is not always about me and the unloading of my conscience. The story of Lindy’s rape, for instance.
It is about Lindy. And that is all.