And then I laugh. I have to. Because in the right corner of the camera’s frame, at a spot I had passed at least twice before, is an entrance to an unmarked road. It is exactly where it was supposed to be, its placement exactly as it is on the aerial photograph. It is next to Ardoin Lane, which means I stood just yards from it on my last trip here and never once saw it. Something in my body kept me from realizing until now.
On the road’s right is a one-story brick house with a purple foil pinwheel pitched in its yard. On the left, a white prefabricated house raised up on bare wooden stilts, a pickup truck parked beside it. Lumber and construction materials weigh down the pickup’s bed, but the cab is empty and both houses are dark. Farther down on the left, just before the road truncates at a thatch of woods, there’s one more house.
But that’s it, nothing else. No more houses, only grass and then that mass of woods. The other lot is empty.
I park my car by the pickup. The high grass tickles my ankles. I trespass over the yards with impunity, to the empty lot, where a small shed stands. Did it once hold the washing machine outside the Lawson house, where Ricky washed sheets late on the night he killed Jeremy?
Behind it, the world falls off. The ravine. The one Jeremy liked to play in, propping up his gun as he lay on his belly in the soft earth, and the one the police dredged when he disappeared. It’s deeper than I imagined, a steep sheer drop maybe ten feet down into dense brush and dark mud. A place where you could expect a child might have died, and where you would send out the searchers with their flashlights and the dogs with their noses and the helicopters that whirled and the ATVs, while all along his body rested fifteen feet behind you in a white house, wrapped in Tweety Bird and Dick Tracy blankets.
Fifteen feet. I turn and I walk to the spot. It’s just a patch of green now. The air clear and still and scented sweet from the grass.
All this time, all this searching. I have finally found the scene of the crime.
And it’s gone.
Thirty-Eight
When I get home to Boston, I climb the stairs to my apartment, open the door, and crouch to pet my cat when he runs to greet me. I push aside the mail the cat sitter has left on the floor, hang my keys on the rack, and walk through the entryway.
Then I see them. Three white boxes, each four inches thick, stacked on my bed. The photographs.
I drag them off. Before I do anything else, I drag them off. Each one weighs as much as a child.
The next morning, armed with coffee, I sit at my desk and open them. Inside the boxes are the pages I marked. First, aerial photographs of the house. The woods I just stood beside, the thin lane I now recognize. Then Bessie, the one photograph that exists of her in the cast. She is a pale face in a sea of white: white hospital sheets, a white nightgown pulled over the white cast. She looks frightened, or maybe just tired. Around her, her girls have piled onto the bed, wearing their Sunday best. Only the youngest—only Judy—looks at ease. Her older sisters, Darlene and Francis, hold their shoulders stiffly, a little away from their mother, as though they are trying to keep this new reality at bay.
But Judy? She is on her mama’s bed, she can hardly remember her differently. Her mama has always lain this way. Her mama has always been so still. It is not so difficult to reach around the cast and hug her. The next photograph is the cast alone, against a flat black background, its empty white carcass the shape of a ghost or a haunting.
Then Jeremy.
He sleeps. That’s what the first photograph looks like. I can’t not write it that way, as sleeping, and I can’t leave it that way. The flash of the long-ago camera lights up his blond hair. His eyes are closed, his lashes thick. His nose is the stub one of dolls.
For the next photograph the camera has moved lower. From his mouth there comes a white tube sock with stripes, dirty at the bottom. Jeremy in this photo does not look dead, he still might only be sleeping. His skin is still plump, his mouth still the bow bud of a child.
It’s the sock that looks limp, lifeless. The sock that means Jeremy is dead.
The string around his neck has been removed for the next photograph. A ruler, a horrible basic wooden school ruler, presses to the gouge in Jeremy’s neck, measuring the bruising. Around the bruising bloom black splotches. That word, that word that now haunts me: petechiae.
I steady my breath. I keep my pen moving. I try to describe each photograph. Through my open window, I hear music from a car radio. A woman laughs on the street below. When I finish one photograph, I move on to the next. I try not to feel. I just record.
It is the gun that does me in. Jeremy’s BB gun. The photograph is of the open closet door. In the closet is a mound of blankets. I can’t look too directly at the blankets—I know this is really a photograph of Jeremy’s body, not of blankets—so I focus on a small dark shape in the blurry photocopy. The shape is a vertical bar. I can’t make out what it is.
Then. The barrel of a gun, poking up from where Ricky tucked it. My own cry startles me. My sobs.
*
What I fell in love with about the law so many years ago was the way that in making a story, in making a neat narrative of events, it finds a beginning, and therefore cause. But I didn’t understand then that the law doesn’t find the beginning any more than it finds the truth. It creates a story. That story has a beginning. That story simplifies, and we call it truth.
Helen Palsgraf was on a beach outing with her children when her life changed forever and became a parable for where stories start. But there’s something else about the case, something I didn’t find out until years after I left the law: No one knows whether she was actually injured. She claimed mental injury; there doesn’t appear to have been any evidence. The judges said they’d assume she’d been injured, so as to reach the more interesting legal question.
But that’s an asterisk on history. To look at the reenactments law schools stage of the case, in which the scale crushes Helen, or the animations online to illustrate it for their study sessions, you’d never know that. Whatever happened in the past, the story wrote right over it. The story became the truth. What you see in Ricky killing Jeremy, I have come to believe, depends as much on who you are and the life you’ve had as on what he did. But the legal narrative erases that step. It erases where it came from.