I’m not interested in anything that belongs to the little boy. I looked for a space that was Jennifer’s alone, which proved annoyingly difficult to find. Even her bedroom showed signs of the child’s habitation—a tiny knight on the pillow, a discarded superhero shirt on the floor. A pair of his pajamas beside the bed, inside out, led me to wonder if she lets him sleep with her—something my parents certainly would never have allowed. All this bonding they do these days. As if what’s between a parent and a child would vanish without snuggling and trips to the zoo. I can attest that one is sufficiently bonded without those things, one is sufficiently stuck.
Down the hall from the bedrooms is a small room, barely bigger than a closet, that seems to serve as Jennifer’s study. Desk, computer, bookcase, two-drawer filing cabinet, in which papers have been dumped rather than filed. Also in the filing cabinet: photos of Jennifer with a baby and a teenage girl on the beach; a stopped watch; a screwdriver; an assortment of paper clips; the wheel of a toy car; an empty glasses case; a smiling Lego head; a little card of the sort that comes with flowers. You are all that matters.
On the back of the photo it said: Me, Milo, and Zoe, and the date.
Zoe, who called the police on her own mother, who marked her mother as a murderer, who pinned a letter to her mother’s chest. Imagine if she is wrong. Imagine if she is right. When I looked up Jennifer Carrasco on the Internet and found those articles, I felt a hard-boiled unsurprise. It turns out I am a detective after all. These detectives—they always uncover the same transgressions. A murder, a theft. Another woman’s husband, another man’s wife. We cheat, we steal, we lie, we kill. The list of sins is short. We all do the same bad things.
You are all that matters. Was it from the dead man, her husband? No one has ever said such a thing to me. Perhaps you would keep a card like that even if you murdered the one who wrote it.
Listen, Jennifer, I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like to have a madwoman in the attic of your memory. The thing you can’t let out. The thing you must pretend isn’t there, even when you hear the knocking.
Did you know that pressure on the brain swells it until it pushes its way out the bottom of the skull? That’s called herniating. The pressure can come from a depressed skull fracture. Maybe a piece of shrapnel flew through the air and caught you in the head. Different kinds of ordnances cause different injuries. A shell, for instance, causes percussive injuries, because the body gets thrown, and if it gets thrown hard enough, that’s one way it stops being the person and becomes the body.
We all become the body eventually. I know that.
Sitting in Jennifer’s chair at Jennifer’s desk, I imagined she was dead and I’d come to clean out her house. I often imagine this scenario, except I am the dead one, my house the one being cleaned. A silent interrogation, the examination of my things. What will they think of me?
When my parents died, I was the one who cleaned out their house. My sister came from North Carolina to “help” for three days, but her help consisted mostly of letting me know which things she wanted, then sneaking off to have various items appraised. She cared only about a certain kind of value. She had her eyes on the prize. I got lost in the rest of it—the evidence of their strange and secret lives. An entire dresser drawer full of my mother’s ring boxes: black cardboard; clear, cut like crystal, imprinted with something in Korean; red velvet, worn bare in patches, with a snap-open lid. When I found this last one, I thought I remembered it, presented by my father at a formal dinner party on one of their anniversaries. In one of my mother’s jewelry boxes, I found the ring I remembered belonging in it—platinum with diamonds in a style that had survived to become vintage. “An apology ring,” I once heard my mother call it.
Why had she kept all those ring boxes? Had my father given her all of them? Were there that many apologies?
His drawers, his desk, contained no such mysteries. Everything was organized, spare, neatly arranged, as though in anticipation of my snooping. Unrevealing, I’d say, except in the sense that it’s revealing to want to go unknown.
I’m not saying my sister got everything of value. I’m no dummy. I got it appraised, too, all of it. We split things fifty-fifty. Hers she sold, mine I live with. As I write I’m wearing my mother’s apology ring. It used to fit, but now it slips around my finger, too heavy and too loose. As soon as I was back home in Nashville, I threw out all the ring boxes.
I imagine if Jennifer were dead, Zoe going through her things, she would want what I want—an answer, evidence, an end to uncertainty. When she went to the police about her mother, did she just believe her guilty? Or did she know? What I really wanted to find was a journal like this one. If Jennifer keeps one, it’s well hidden. It wasn’t in the desk. It wasn’t beside her bed. This is as close as I came: in the middle desk drawer, beneath a scatter of scrap paper, was a pad of sticky notes with Zoe and a phone number written on the top one. Below that, a lightly drawn question mark, over which Jennifer had put an X.
Here is a catalog of my precious objects:
The letters I wrote from the war, and my mother’s replies
My father’s medals from the First World War
A dried flower, pressed inside a photo album
My doctoral degree, in a black frame