She tried again. “I’m not the judge of this one.”
You only say that because I’m not your kid, I remember thinking, rolling my forehead grease against the window, making it look like some wide, unidentifiable insect had flown against the glass. It’s hard now to know how much of what I did and wanted in those years came from some version of that thought.
What’s the difference between what you want to believe and what you do? That’s what I should have asked Patra, that’s the question I wanted answered, but it didn’t occur to me—or not in that way—until after we’d talked that day in the courthouse parking lot, until I was riding with my mother in the hot rumbling truck and she was parking between two vans behind Our Lady. While my mom wrote a thank-you note to tuck under the visor, I got down on my haunches in the gravel parking lot, my salad dress pouffing around me, and started sifting through the little stones. Then my mom came up, said okay, and we started back. As we walked along the highway shoulder, I uncurled my fingers and let the stones fall out. She didn’t try to talk to me anymore. She let me dawdle and lag behind, dropping rocks as I went. She glanced back at me once at the turnoff to the lake, but by the time I reached the sumac trail, by the time our cabin chimney was visible again over treetops, she was out of sight. She was a rustling of sumac branches, leaves moving in a pulse as she passed underneath.
And what’s the difference between what you think and what you end up doing? That’s what I should have asked Mr. Grierson in my letter—Mr. Grierson, who, even after Lily took back her accusation, was sentenced to seven years based on the pictures and his courtroom confession. I read through his statements in the months after his sentence, which he served first in Seagoville, Texas, then in Elkton, Ohio. The Gardners, who’d been charged with manslaughter, were acquitted after three weeks on the grounds they were protected by religious exemption. I didn’t follow them after the Whitewood trial ended. After I said my piece in court, I went home with my mom in the borrowed truck, ate three peanut butter sandwiches in a row, went fishing for pike. Went fishing, got drunk for the first time, forgot. Their cabin sat empty across the lake for months, and I never went back, and I didn’t stop to watch when the new owners set up their grill and badminton net the next summer. But I tracked Mr. Grierson around the country when he got out of jail, followed his little red flag from state to state, from Florida to Montana and back again. I watched him return to prison for violating the terms of his parole, get out again after another year, set up his shop in the marshes. By the time I wrote him my letter, by the time I was living in Minneapolis with Ann, I’d read his official statement about Lily several times. “I thought about it, I thought about it, I thought about it,” he’d said. He went on a few sentences farther down: “I wanted to, and when she said that I had, I was like, yes. When all that stuff was found in my apartment, I pretended I’d never seen it before. I did lie about that. But when that girl Lily said what she said, I thought, all right. Okay. Now my real life begins.”
20
THE VIEW FROM MY DESK AT THE BARGE COMPANY IN MINNEAPOLIS WAS A WEATHERED CONCRETE PARKING RAMP. All day long I could see people puppeting out of their car windows, punching their tickets, waiting for the yellow arm to kick up. If I scooted my chair back from my desk and swiveled 180 degrees, I could also see a wedge of Mississippi between the ramp and a bank of willows.
Egrets, brown foam, white buoys.