Did I understand what that felt like, you asked? Of course I didn’t. I didn’t even try to understand. For me, you were only a figure to be moved around—I was just like Michael in this way—you were useful to me when you were at the stove taking a call from the detectives, you were useful to me on the witness stand speaking your truth to Diana Crane and demanding that she hear it, you were useful to me when you screamed. You, your whole life, all the parts that went into making you who you were, were only useful to me so that I could write my book, but the truth of your life barely grazed the surface of it, just the juicy parts, the blood and the guts and the action. The parts that you wanted to forget, you said, were the only parts that counted for me.
To Diana Crane I had given my best: I named the book after her, the book was her story, and the thing that went wrong in her story was Jesse and Gene; and that was true, you said, and if I said you didn’t know that, then I was a liar, but how could I ever see this through your eyes? How could I know what it was like for a teenage girl to have a baby boy and to do her best all her life for her child, but to never be good enough, never be strong enough, never be smart enough, and then to see her son grow into a teenager and begin to slip away, and to hope, you didn’t want to say “pray,” you knew better, that he could at least get out on his own and find a way for himself? You had gone to every parent-teacher conference, you had made his birthday special every year with wrapped presents and homemade cakes and a card you always signed from your mother, who loves you; you had tried to keep your connection alive. Where was this in my book? Where was Jesse at all? The same place he was in the movie I let them make: wandering around like a pig waiting to be yelled at and beaten and stabbed in the heart and roasted on a spit, living a worthless life whose only purpose was to be sacrificed for somebody else’s story.
But he could have had his own story, you said. You had tried to heal yourself by telling yourself that story sometimes, by sketching out a life for him in a world he would never see. Graduating from high school. Going to Cuesta, maybe becoming an engineer. He was always a smart kid, you said. Teachers loved him and he worked hard. One more year and he would have been there, and from there he could have gone anywhere, Los Angeles or Boston or New York, any place in this whole world. And then you would have said it was all worth it: all the worry, and all the yelling, and all the bad nights, and all the bruises, worth it to see this good kid who never hurt anybody finally getting what he deserved from this world; and you could have grown old knowing that you’d done this one thing right, standing by your son, believing in him, who might not have looked like much at seventeen but who had potential.
Potential that in fact no one would ever know about now, potential erased from the world. Potential I might have at least talked about for a minute in my stupid book before leading him from the parking lot of those awful apartments up to her door like a dumb lamb to slaughter. Just a kid. He didn’t know how dangerous Gene was and he needed someone in his life who liked him, somebody besides his own mother. You knew Jesse had anger for you: he was mad because you couldn’t protect yourself, and you understood. You understood why he had become so distant, and it hurt so bad. The way he walked right past you during that last year or two. But what was he supposed to do, when it was you, you who had made the mess and couldn’t pull yourself out of it, you who seemed to have given up on life, you who couldn’t find the strength to shield him from the rancid world Michael had made of your home. And so he drifted into Gene’s orbit and never came out, your final view of him that of a handsome young man who might have been headed down the wrong path, but didn’t everybody have the right to make mistakes sometimes, a handsome young man only a few steps away from a future in which he might finally have been free—free to be the sweet person you knew lived within him, he whose sweetness had been a comfort in a cold world, he who only ten years before he got cut into pieces and taken down to the ocean to be dumped into the tides had still been your baby, you said, so desperate for help that he told his teachers his father was a bully, so lonely that anyone who showed him kindness became his favorite person in the world, so hungry for friendship that he was a sitting duck for a boy like Gene Cupp. Did I really think ten years was a long time, you said. It’s not. It’s nothing when you are his mother. It is the blink of an eye during a commercial break, you said. That’s how short a time you got to know your son before she took him from you. But you knew, you said. You knew how short a time ten years is, and how easy it was for me to make that whole time, so precious to you, look ugly, worthless, pointless. But Jesse’s life had been good sometimes, it had value and he deserved to live and you deserved to still have a son and I didn’t care, I only cared about the bad parts, how could I, how could I, did I understand at last what I had done to you, twisting a knife that had been stuck in your stomach since the day your son was killed, how could I.
7
Chandler
1.
LIFE IS A PROCESS of forgetting: of moving old things out of the way to make room for new things, of holding faded blueprints up to light to see where vanished angles might be hiding, of recalculating wants and needs on the fly. It’s not that we become forgetful as we age, though that’s true, too. It’s that a million things will need to be forgotten along the way if our later forgetfulness is to have any meaning.
I know the house where I was a child in San Luis Obispo was initially much smaller than it became during our time there. My father built an addition after we’d become established in town; he needed room for a piano, a stereo, a desk, and maybe some cushions for people to sit on. It was a grand room, with high ceilings and redwood beams. I remember its newness; all that fine red wood overhead, and a high window against which branches of a plum tree pressed after leafing out in summer. But I can’t remember the house as it was before the big front room got added onto it, I find; there’s a gap.
The same is almost true of our street in San Luis Obispo, but not quite. It’s not a long street, though, to me, it once seemed nearly endless; but all streets must seem fairly long to children, whose short legs take longer to walk from one end of the block to the other. Just past our house, it dips sharply; then it loops right onto a parallel street, which itself has another street in parallel just past a second loop, three streets like tines of a fork. Anything beyond there registered as elsewhere for me, even places just a block or two farther on. They repaved it at some point in my early years; I remember the day they did it, but I can only recall how the street looked afterward. The before-time is lost.
I recognize all this now as mapmaking. Improvements and modifications come and go, and all terrain shifts; we reconfigure our coordinates. We make erasures to accommodate new data; these erasures are permanent. We left this neighborhood sometime after I turned five, though my father remained; the streets I see in memory are almost certainly the streets as they looked just before the divorce. Most of their features were once new—this is California—but to me they still smack of the eternal. The plum tree, its fruit rich and sweet. The willow on the corner, whose rubbery strands we skinned and used as whips. The slope of the hill in our backyard, wild honeysuckle climbing it to the pasture beyond. And the house of the Mean Man, with its dry lawn out front and a rusty horseshoe in a yellowed window facing the sidewalk, halfway down the street.
* * *
GAGE CHANDLER LIVED OVER ON RAMONA, on the middle tine of the three-street fork that made up our neighborhood. His family moved in when he and I were toddlers. The Chandlers were old California stock, and arrived to our street fresh from the other side of town, where they’d been living the simple life until, as their only child grew larger, their bungalow began to feel cramped.