The Red Parts (10 page)

What I do know is this (and here I speak, of course, only for myself): there is no saving thought (
think how your _________ will feel; count your blessings; tomorrow is another day;
etc.) that is ultimately sustaining, no line of poetry, no holy book, no hotline, nothing but the thinnest of membranes,
a doctrine whispered in secret, that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away.

This is a great mystery which I do not quite understand
, Socrates says of this doctrine, shortly before he drinks the cup of hemlock that will cause his death—a death which, two thousand years after the fact, scholars are still debating whether can or should be termed a suicide.

FOR THE MONTH that I am in Ann Arbor, I will write letters to the man I loved on my yellow legal pad every morning before my mother wakes up, letters telling him how much I miss him, how much my body misses him. I will tell him all about the trial, to which he had said he would accompany me. I will describe each of the autopsy photos in detail, convinced that only he can understand their burden, their horror. I won’t send any of these letters. Even though I have told him that I never want to hear from him again as long as I live, I will check my e-mail on Jill’s computer every night, in case he has written.

He does write, once. He says that our separation has brought him no joy, but that he feels it’s an important part of the journey, the journey of “stepping into the light.” I have no idea what journey, what light, he’s talking about. I have never felt so lost, never felt such darkness. Perhaps he is talking about his journey, his light. I am coming to see that we no longer share either.

Every morning before court and every night after I will take a long shower, as the shower is the only place I will have any privacy. In the stall I will get down on my knees and weep, letting the water run over my body, praying to get better, praying not to hurt myself any more than I’m already hurting, praying that this loss, that this whole time, will move over me, through me, like a dark storm passing over a great plain. A great plain which is, essentially, my soul. A soul which is neither light nor dark, neither wholly alone nor wholly with any other, certainly not with God, just flat, open, deathless, and free. Curled up in a wet ball on the tile floor I will hear myself say,
Something in me is dying.
I no longer know to whom I’m talking.

M
Y MOTHER AND I had convinced each other before meeting up in Michigan that our time in Ann Arbor might be a kind of respite. She imagined a month off work, lots of time to think and read, early morning walks, cooking quiet dinners, maybe even trying her hand, at long last, at one of the writing projects she’d always dreamed of undertaking. I imagined a month of getting some distance, or at least distraction, from my heartache, finding a local pool to swim laps in, and quitting smoking, especially so as not to face my mother’s censure.

After the first day of jury selection, we realize our mutual folly. Every day after court we will stumble home down Main Street feeling as though we’ve been whacked with a slab of wood. Every night will be too hot to cook or sleep. We have to leave for court each morning by seven and we don’t get home until after six, so we are together almost constantly. “Taking space” from each other means walking to or from the courthouse staggered apart by a block, or going to sleep.

LET ME EXPLAIN
, says the very first potential juror questioned at the voir dire. He’s Italian, about sixty, tan, wearing Birkenstocks, bald except for a squirrelly ponytail.
I am an artist. I have the heart, the soul, of an artist. That means that in my world, there are no criminals. In my world, there are no crimes. In my world
—he closes his eyes beatifically, gesturing out to an imaginary plain—
everything is beautiful.

The judge looks exasperated.
If chosen for this jury, can you agree to live in
this
world, with the rest of us, right now?

The artist shakes his head.
I’m sorry, but I cannot. I cannot live in your world.

INSTEAD OF quitting smoking, I find that my mother wants to smoke with me. She complains that my cigarettes are too strong, however, so I start buying ultra-lights for her, and breaking off their filters for me. If I’m going to smoke, I’m not going to try to suck blood from a stone.

FOR A PORTION of this time there’s a summer street fair set up along Main Street, the Ann Arbor Arts Festival. My mother and I had heard about this fair before coming, and thought it might provide some relief, even some pleasure. Now getting spit out of the grim courthouse each evening into a bustling, cheerful mecca of corndog stands, bad landscape paintings, and glazed pottery makes us feel trapped in a Fellini movie.

AT THE VOIR dire the judge asks all the potential jurors to swear that even if they regularly watch
CSI, Law & Order, Cold Case Files
, or any other television show featuring forensic science and criminal justice, that they have a firm grasp on the difference between television—even reality television—and reality itself, in which we are presumably now mired. One potential juror with several small children says that won’t be a problem for her, because she mostly watches the Cartoon Network; the judge quips that an afternoon spent with the Cartoon Network provides as much or more information about the criminal justice system as a full season of
Law & Order.

One by one, each juror solemnly swears to his or her capacity to distinguish between dramatization and reality, between fact and fiction. This strikes me as completely disingenuous. But then again, who’s going to sit there in the jury box and say,
Actually, Your Honor, I admit it. I can’t tell the difference between representation and reality anymore. I’m very sorry.

FOR THE FIRST three days of trial my mother and I arrive at the courthouse to find ourselves adrift in a sea of heavy-set, elderly men. Retired cops, detectives, ambulance drivers, and medical examiners waiting to testify in our case jam the corridors, ambling about on their canes, greeting each other with slaps on the back as if it’s a high school reunion. All of their bodies emanate a faded, patrician majesty, and seem stuffed into their civilian suits. Several of their faces drag with strokes. Many have slurred speech, and are either going deaf or are already there.

I really can’t hear a word you’re saying
, sighs the now-ancient morgue wagon driver who transported Jane’s body on the afternoon of March 21, 1969.
All I know is that I came to the scene like I always did, and I loaded her up.

Three days solid, eight hours a day, dozens of witnesses, no women. Just two male attorneys, the male judge, the male defendant, a coterie of male detectives, and a parade of male retirees recalling their interaction with Jane’s dead body, pictures of which they draw upon from the witness box with little laser pens. Nancy Grow is resubpoenaed, but she never reappears. Her doctor has submitted a note saying that the stress of testifying again on this matter would be mortally dangerous to her health. In her place Hiller shows the jury a digital recording of her January testimony. The quality of the footage is bad—Grow flickers in and out, looking even more distressed than she had in person. More disconcerting still is the appearance of my family on this recording, as we all come into view whenever the camera pans over to our bench. We look awful—washed-out, shocked, teary—a mirror image of ourselves today, except that now the cast of characters has thinned out, and we are no longer dressed for winter.

And so Grow tells her story again. The same bloodstained bag, the same
Maybe it’s a dummy
, the same loafers and nightgown, the same screaming, the same shame, this time her grainy, sepia figure looking very much like the hologram of Princess Leia in
Star Wars
as she repeatedly appeals,
Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope. Obi-Won, you’re my only hope.

AS A RULE, my mother does not sleep well. After I go to bed at Jill’s I hear her fluttering around the house like a ghost. On good nights she talks excitedly to her new boyfriend on her cell phone; on bad nights she drinks wine until it’s gone, then rummages around for something else, anything else. Sits in the dark kitchen, drinking Kahlúa.

But compared to my state, and compared to where she’s been, she is doing quite well. A couple of years ago, after a little over twenty years of marriage, her husband, the housepainter, left abruptly and cruelly. His departure, along with the messy divorce proceedings that ensued, plunged her headlong into loneliness and despair. Her anxiety about being alone for the first time in her life was acute: she could barely go to the grocery store, for example, because she thought strangers were pitying her for buying single servings of food.

I tried to help at the beginning of this period, flying out to California to meet with her and her divorce lawyer, cleaning out my stepfather’s belongings from spaces that were too painful for her to enter. But one afternoon, while scrubbing down his walk-in closet with disinfectant at her request, I lost it. We had been here before. Twenty years earlier my mother and I had spent an afternoon together cleaning out my father’s closet a few weeks after his death, getting his house ready to sell. The same cardboard boxes, the same cylinder of Ajax. The same muted mania in the face of abandonment.
Just us chickens.

I had gone along then because I suspected there might be things of my father’s I wanted to keep, and there were. I also wanted to seem brave. More than that, I wanted to
be
brave, though I didn’t have a clue what that might entail. But my stepfather hadn’t died, he’d just split without saying good-bye, and I didn’t want to pay him the kindness of dealing with his stuff. Certainly I didn’t want any of it.

The more needy my mother became, the less I could help her. Her habitual expression of affection—
Don’t you know that I love you more than life itself?
—began to sound like suicidal threat. Every time I went back to California, I swore on the plane ride back to New York that I would never, ever set foot in the state again. I stopped visiting, stopped calling. I let my sister take up the burden. Since she had been mostly absent for the many years that I lived at home, I told myself it was her turn.

And she was good at it. Over the years Emily had seemingly discovered infinite stores of patience and compassion. After her two years of chopping wood in Idaho, she went on to college and graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, with a degree in women’s studies. She moved back to San Francisco, bought a beautiful little house with her girlfriend of many years, and started working for a series of nonprofits—Planned Parenthood, the Bay Area Labor Council. It was as though all of her anger and rebelliousness got shot through the machine of adulthood and came out the other side as political conviction, loyalty, and kindness. I envied her all the more for it. After years of feeling like the dutiful daughter, now I just felt like a complete shit. Clearly I’d missed the window of opportunity to make bad behavior seem glamorous or legendary. When you grow up and act badly, you just let people down.

But no amount of distance or silence could diminish the pull of my mother from the opposite coast, three thousand miles away. I felt it daily as though we were perched on two ends of a long balancing stick. Every night I knew we were each making dinner for ourselves, listening to the radio, starting in on a bottle of wine. I knew we were each thinking of the other, each negotiating our shared store of anxieties and sorrows, each sustained—or hoping to be sustained—by our careers of teaching, reading, and writing.

And now here we were, back in Michigan, walking to and from the courthouse day after day, each toting a legal pad. We take copious notes throughout the trial, as does Solly, Leiterman’s wife. My mother and I never speak to Solly, but we hold doors open for one another with a quiet civility, perhaps in tacit acknowledgment of the fact that we can each see that the other’s situation here is just a different version of hell. Each morning all three of us send our pads through the court’s X-ray machine, where the security guard, who has somehow gotten wind of the fact that I wrote a book about Jane, greets me daily as “the author.”