“So . . . there’s a lot here,” she says. “I’m not sure what you’re lookin’ for, but you can have anything you want.”
We agree that I’ll sit down and sort through everything, and that as I identify things I’d like to take with me, I’ll hand them to her and she’ll make copies. I am embarrassed by her generosity; I had expected to do all the work myself, but she assures me she’s happy to help. She’s set aside three whole days. As I start sifting through handwritten police notes, transcripts of interviews, and forensic documents, it becomes clear that I want nearly everything. I don’t know yet what will be helpful; I need to get it all home with me so I can really look at it. Hold it close. Think. So many other people have seen this material, and now I want it for myself. The prosecution kept the story necessarily simple: here’s the man who killed her; this is how he did it. But a violent act is an epicenter; it shakes everyone within reach and creates other stories, cracks open the earth and reveals buried secrets. I want those stories, those secrets.
My mother’s killer had twelve years of freedom before he was identified. In all those years, the state police and the cops in my hometown kept searching, kept interviewing, adding to this huge file. When asked why he and his colleagues remained so actively involved in this particular case, Walt said there were two reasons. The most obvious was that they had a huge amount of evidence; the case was tantalizingly solvable. But there was a more personal reason, too. They were angered and saddened by the fallout: the only child of a single mother, left alone.
Susie warns me, right away, about photos. She thinks she pulled them all out, but the files are disorganized, having passed through so many hands over the years. I agree to give her any photos I find without looking at them, if possible. I saw them at the trial four years ago; I don’t need to see them again.
About an hour later, I pull a sheet of paper off a pile and beneath it is a photo, facedown, thick smooth paper with the brand name printed diagonally in ghostly blue. Susie’s down the hall, and because she’s not standing right here, my hand turns it over before I can stop. I watch this hand move of its own accord, and as the photo flips, I think, I can take it. It’ll be fine. But it’s the worst one, a horrifying picture of my mother’s body. A close-up. And I am instantly angry with myself. I am tired of this impulse to wound myself so that I can prove that I’ll heal.
When Susie comes back, I say only, “I found a photo,” and hand it to her. She sighs, makes a clucking noise with her tongue, apologizes. I hold my face perfectly still. If I worry her, she might put a stop to this. And if there are more file boxes somewhere, I don’t want her holding them back.
For four hours, I do my best to flip through documents quickly, taking stock of them, adding each item to the “yes” or “no” pile. But it’s hard not to get sucked in, and some of the interviews are magnetic. When Susie’s in the room, I try to keep a neutral face, but when I smile, I can feel my mouth twisting weirdly. My movements feel sharp and fast and unnatural. Each time I find a particularly bizarre detail, I share it out loud, and my laughter is edged with hysteria. Susie easily joins in, makes me feel more human. She’ll say, “Oh, yeah. I remember that guy. He’s a total friggin’ nutcase.” She is professional without being impartial, which feels like a gift.
I’m laughing with Susie when Chris Harriman comes into the room, having just returned from the field. I don’t know Chris very well. He began working on the case after I’d left Maine for college. He’s younger than Walt, and smaller, with a round, affable face. He tells me he went to high school with Mom, although they weren’t close friends. He was an athlete, so they ran in different crowds. But he remembers her bright red hair.
He surveys the conference table and then says, “Do you want evidence?”
Susie jumps in. “Evidence?” she says, suddenly serious. “Like what?”
“Y’know, like stuff from the house. We’ve got it all downstairs in the basement. By law, you have to keep everything for fifty years.”
I’m curious about this evidence. I’ve always felt like I was missing some childhood photo albums; maybe those will turn up. I tell Chris, “Yeah, sure, that’d be great,” like someone just asked if I want a cup of coffee. But then I picture a vast basement beneath us, cement walls lined with hundreds of these cardboard storage boxes. In my mind, the place is dark, moisture leaking in from cracks in the walls. A subterranean maze holding fifty years of family time capsules, with all the worst memories preserved.
Chris comes up with a box about twenty minutes later. He sets it on the table next to the others, then goes back to his office. Susie goes down the hall with another binder to copy. It’s a big one; I know she’ll be there awhile.
I walk over to the new box and lift the lid. Inside is a folded sheet of plastic, wrinkled, vacuum-sealed around something. I take it out and unfold it; it’s about the size of a newspaper. I look at it and my thoughts grind against one another, the gears slipping and slipping, until finally they catch and I understand what I’m seeing. Between the layers of plastic is a pair of underwear, white cotton with small flowers. A urine stain. The underwear seems too big, until I remember that Mom always bought bigger sizes than she needed to. A funny sort of modesty. And I remember the detail about the stain, from the autopsy report I skimmed through an hour ago.
I fold the plastic again and lay it down next to the box. My forehead feels prickly, and the air in the room is suddenly too thin. I put both hands flat on the table for a moment, and its surface is cool and solid beneath my palms.
The next item in the box is a framed photograph of Mom and her fiancé, Dennis, a man ten years her junior. The Sears photographer had posed them like mother and son, and we’d all been too embarrassed to correct him. Beneath that is the calendar that hung on our kitchen wall. The calendar feels tainted, having hung in the room where she died. But I’m so happy to see Mom’s neat, looped handwriting, the same half-cursive script I remember from lunchbox notes and birthday cards. On the fifteenth of January, she’s written the amount of her house payment: $271. I think about how much I could help her now, how easy it would be to come up with that money. I flip through the months, smiling sadly over fun things we did, dates of movies and hikes along nearby mountain trails. The notes are plentiful, four or five per week, and it’s thrilling to read them. I’m grateful to have these memories back, to remember again how full our life was. I get so drawn in that when I turn to June and find it suddenly blank, it takes me the longest time to remember why.
* * *