I KNOW NOW that it’s never going to be possible to make you understand, you began again in your letter, your letter which I had spent several days reading and whose end, I knew, both from recognizing where we now stood in the story line and from the diminishing number of pages left to read, was near. I know this was all a waste and possibly even bad for me, you said, because I am usually OK these days, as OK as I can be, Michael’s gone now, Bobby lets me talk about him if I need to, in the end I finally found someone who cares about me and wants to protect me, isn’t that incredible, sometimes I can’t believe it, you wrote. But now, when I’m telling the whole story, it’s not making me feel better at all, it’s not taking weight off my shoulders, it’s putting more on, more and more the further I go, and I can’t stand it, I don’t think I can stand it. But I told myself when I started this that I had to finish, so I am going to finish, and if it’s bad for me, then I guess I will get better. But I am going to tell you what I have wanted to tell you. Are you even still reading this? Please say yes, you wrote.
I said “Yes” out loud in my house in Milpitas, a place where two people had been murdered in darkness by an assailant with a sword, which was the story I had moved into the house to tell. My new story, my new book.
This is the thing that you have to understand, you wrote.
* * *
THE FIRST CIRCLE OF HELL was the process: it was clear to you that procedures were the most important thing to the police, but they weren’t the most important thing to you. What was important to you was why they had asked you to come talk to them, why they were asking about Gene Cupp’s car, and what did they know about where Jesse had been all night, and where was he now. “We think we have a lead on where he went” was as direct an answer as you got from either of the detectives at first; they kept finding ways to not answer you directly. It made you feel like they thought you were stupid and couldn’t see what they were doing, which was something you were used to in your everyday life, but had the effect now of increasing your agitation a little with each passing moment, of deepening the reserve of dread whose membranous confines, you thought, surely would not be able to hold much longer, as, in wave after wave, the fear kept rushing in. They asked question after question about Jesse: had he been having problems in school; did he have close friends, and, if he did, what kind of people were they; and, if he didn’t really have friends, how did he like to spend his free time; what was his life like at home; had he met anybody new lately, maybe somebody he’d been spending a lot of time with; had he been acting strangely, or had anything unusual at all happened, some change in his routine, anything out of the ordinary.
It felt like they would never stop, like they would never run out of new ways to ask the same questions, one officer taking notes while the other nodded as you answered, offering a little assurance now and then as they walked you through the paces, each step of which felt like an endless, barren expanse, even if everybody was being nice enough: treating you with kid gloves, you realized, when clarity finally came.
Clarity came in the form of Jesse’s necklace, a silver chain with a tear-shaped turquoise chip dangling from the middle. He wore it every day; his father hated it and made cruel remarks about it, and made ugly insinuations about who might have bought it for him, and why. You liked Jesse’s necklace; it looked good on him, and, when he wore it, you felt like you were catching a glimpse of how he might carry himself when he was all grown up: when he became his own man at last, walking around in the world on his own. It was in a plastic bag now on a table in front of you, alongside a paper tag with some numbers written on it.
“Does this belong to your son?” Detective Haeny asked, and you put your hand over your mouth and screamed through your fingers, and felt, in that moment, like the best possibility available to you would be to just keep screaming and never stop, to produce a scream so great that it enveloped and consumed the evidence bag, and the officer holding it out to you, and the land, and the sea, and the sky, to scream and scream until the screaming somehow killed you; because, if you stopped, worse things than any of these would be waiting out there in the quiet, the rapidly gathering quiet that palpably stood ready to open up for you like a dark, endless cave from which you would never be free.
7.
A CAVE I will never, ever get out of, you said: your exact words. A cave that probably has other people in it, maybe a lot of them, and sometimes you think you can hear them around you or behind you or ahead of you, talking, crying, pounding on the walls, but you can’t be sure because the pain is making you crazy, and to be crazy is to have more noises in your head than usual. A cave that can disguise itself as a morgue, or a coroner’s office, or a courtroom, or a bedroom, or the bathroom, you said: a cave you carry around with you like a chair you have to sit in wherever you go, and, to everybody else, it just looks like a normal chair, but to you it’s the top of a slide, and every time you sit down on it you head down into the depths.