It causes you, you wrote, more pain than I will ever know, no matter how vividly I paint pictures of death scenes and coroners’ inquests, and no matter how many movies they make out of those scenes, bringing it all to life for everybody to gawk at, making everybody feel like they know what it’s like when they don’t and never will, to remember the sound of your own voice trying to sell Jesse on an outright lie about the meaning of what he’d seen with his own eyes, about what the situation on the ground really was for you both.
“He’s not even sorry,” he said, and you hugged him close again, hoping some more crying might help you both, and might also help you get through a moment from which you could see no easy exit; and realizing, probably too late to undo any of the damage already done, that children have greater powers of observation than many people suspect, and are often perfectly capable of drawing good conclusions from the information available to them, information not volunteered by anyone in particular but circulating openly, effortlessly, in the very air that they breathe.
* * *
I WASN’T SURE WHAT TO DO about the bottles on the walkway. I could just buy new bottles and use those, of course, fresh bottles of whatever soda happened to be available in glass, but I felt like keeping things as true to the pictures as possible meant avoiding substitutes. There are people who buy and sell antique bottles that vary from one another and from their modern incarnations in size, in shape, and in color, but that’s a collector’s market. I didn’t want to run up a huge tab on bottles I was just going to break anyway.
I thought the solution I landed on was pretty clever, almost elegant. There are still some local dairies here and there who sell their milk in glass bottles; I guess some people say it tastes better that way. I calculated—guessed—that one half-gallon milk bottle would be about two Coke bottles’ worth of glass; and I reasoned that Derrick and Seth and Angela and Alex had probably raided a steel trash can directly behind the store for empties. Twenty bottles? Thirty? Forty.
I drove to the dairy—not a short drive, but a pleasant enough use of my morning—and bought ten gallons of milk in half-gallon jugs, which cleaned them out; I’d have to settle for reduced bulk, but you learn to improvise. I then distributed them, still capped, among four pillowcases, and waited until it was dark and there wouldn’t be much foot traffic near my house. When the time seemed right, I put on a pair of rubber gloves, set the bulging pillowcases down in a jagged row along the front walkway, and went at them all with a baseball bat.
It disrupts the flow; I had to become destructive to get the dirty glass I needed, but Derrick and Angela and Seth and Alex had scavenged from available materials. It makes the process of re-creation feel tainted by some original energy. I try to avoid that, but here I was constrained by available materials. Everything’s in plastic now unless you go looking for glass.
When I woke up the next morning and came out to the porch, and saw the sun shining on the white, jagged mounds of sticky glass I’d hastily swept together last night, I felt pleased. They looked like I imagined their predecessors had looked, all the way back in 1986, after the crime scene photographs had all been taken and the yellow tape taken down, and the mess left by Derrick and Angela and Seth and Alex was finally getting cleaned up.
I looked right, and I looked left, and then I threw caution to the wind and knocked over both piles with the flat of the broom. The broken glass sprayed loudly into the air, and then all the tiny shards landed on the walkway, bouncing this way and that.
I did this until both piles were gone, and there was broken glass all over the front walkway, and the lawn, and until bits of it were glistening here and there in the light on the street just beyond the curb.
4.
THE FRESHLY BROKEN GLASS outside was soaking up the sun; on the table in the dining room was a small box of my most treasured eBay finds—the exterior crime scene photographs—and, alongside it, your letter. I resented the letter, a little, because I felt obligated to read it all the way through, even though I wasn’t sure what it might tell me that I didn’t already know. I had done my research before publishing The White Witch; I knew the break-in hadn’t been Jesse’s idea. He was a kid who had bad luck most of his life. There hadn’t been anyone to help him, and then it was too late. There was a case to be made that it wasn’t his fault that he ended up in Diana Crane’s apartment, but this didn’t feel like the case you were making.
I did believe you were building toward something; your letter was meticulous, even when your sentences ran on or your spelling flagged. You had been waiting for a very long time to get your message to me. Every time I turned over another page, I could feel the weight of all that time, the shape it had taken around the parameters of your life, its ever-gathering presence.
What would my work be like if I had to keep returning to the same story every time, I wondered. If, instead of hunting down sad places where people’s lives had been ruined, there was only the one place, a place where, every time I told the story again, there was some new thing to learn about it, some overlooked ripple or wrinkle or speck that fleshed out the details, that brought them more fully to life: but with the provision, present in the process, that nothing could help, nothing would change, no one would be unburdened, or healed, or made whole. My methods: How fine might their focus grow if they had but the one object, a moment and its consequences? And if I were somehow drawn inside that moment, me myself, not as an observer but as someone touched by it: What then? These moments are tidal in their force, I knew from long study: those unsteadied by their flow come to think of them as inevitabilities, as natural forces, energies whose actions can be resisted no more profitably than the rising of the sun. And still, sometimes, when they can’t sleep, those once visited by these moments ask themselves, bargaining for some vision of a second chance: What might I have done differently? Aren’t there infinite possibilities present in any given situation? What was I supposed to have done?
When he was nine years old, you wrote, that was when things seemed to get a lot worse.
* * *
JESSE WAS NINE when a teacher at his school asked him what he was sad about and he told her the truth. It was different then, you said in your letter: it was a different time, people had different standards, people had different ideas about how to do things. It wasn’t just that people drove different cars or wore different clothes, you said; there was a lot more to it than that. People talked different, and people acted different, and people expected different things from their wives and from their husbands and from their parents and from their children. From schools and from hospitals. From the police. To you, it felt, back then, like these expectations were, if not set in stone, then certainly beyond repair as far as a person like you might be concerned: there wasn’t anything, you said, that you could have done about any of it, so you did your best to take care of yourself and of your loved ones within the boundaries of the rules as you understood them. At some point, those boundaries shifted, and things got a little better, but all that was after, and too late for you, and for Jesse. You weren’t sure when things had changed; you thought maybe things were always changing, but there are some changes you barely notice until a lot of time passes, you wrote, and other things where when the change comes it feels like a whole big thing. Like when the divorce laws changed in California, you said. That was a big thing that changed.