Geoff said, “You got what you wanted. I mean—with Bloch, his name going on the record. You still wanted that, right?”
Yes. I did.
I said, “I don’t want them to kill him. I don’t—”
“No, I know.”
I said, “It’s out of my hands now. Which feels good. Or at least it’s supposed to feel good.”
Geoff pulled me onto him, stroked my hair.
For context, I suppose I do need to explain here that Geoff and I had found ourselves in my bed. I don’t feel like telling you more than that. It’s none of your business.
Geoff said, “What do you think the Serenhos are doing right now?”
I couldn’t imagine. All I knew was that Robbie had lawyers, and probably his lawyers had lawyers. He was well-connected, after all. A Granby alum.
35
When I arrived for freshman year in August of ’91, Severn Robeson walked me around the unchanged parts of campus. The dining hall, Old Chapel, New Chapel, the library. He walked me into Couchman, his old dorm, to my excruciating embarrassment. Surely I wasn’t allowed in here. But no one looked at us twice; maybe they assumed I was dropping off my brother.
The broad wooden window frames in the Couchman common were carved within an inch of their lives—initials, dates, names. With visible pleasure, Severn found, in the corner of one frame, the initials SDR. “There I am!” he said. “Ah, that’s gratifying. Like I never left.”
I’d seen plenty of graffiti back in Indiana, but that was the vandalism of the bored, the desperate, those trapped in a horrible town and ready to desecrate it. This, though—this was a thing of beauty, these lasting marks. Like someone had summitted a mountain and wanted to leave a mark, to say I was here.
I think about this a lot. When someone asks if I liked boarding school, I can no longer base my answer, my judgment, on the people I knew. Once, I might have thought of you. I might have thought of any number of people who weren’t what I once believed. But I can still love the place itself, as a place, as smells and echoes and angles of light, as surfaces etched deep with their own history.
If Mike Stiles first knew he belonged at Granby when he saw those memorial plaques, I felt something similar in the Couchman common. It wasn’t destiny I felt—just that this was a place where someone could claim a small corner, a place where, by the end of four years, I’d be able to say I was part of something. Somewhere on campus, I’d find a place to leave a piece of myself.
I was here.
I was here.
36
Alder and Britt and Geoff all individually related the bizarre scene that had rolled out Thursday morning, the same morning I’d spent lying in bed staring at CNN, at global calamities that made the entire state of New Hampshire feel microscopic.
Robbie, his face pale and swollen, had taken the stand with his lawyer right behind him—“hovering over him like a puppeteer,” Geoff said. Britt said, “I had no idea they could do that. This guy was just telling him what to say.”
Robbie had apparently looked to his attorney after every question, even the ones about what years he’d attended Granby, whether he knew Thalia at all. For those questions, the attorney nodded and Robbie answered. As soon as Amy asked if his relationship with Thalia was sexual in nature, the attorney shook his head, and Robbie said, “I exercise my Fifth Amendment right not to answer.” And then the same, again and again, for every remaining question.
On cross-examination, the state asked only “Were you responsible for the death of Thalia Keith?” to which Robbie responded, loudly and forcefully, “No.”
Geoff said, “The fucker’s gonna get away with it. Even if Omar got off, they’re never going after Serenho. I don’t see it.”
Yahav said so, too, on the phone. He said, “There’s no case against him.”
I said, “But there was no case against Omar, either.”
“Yes. Well.”
37
There was a man who got off the hook because he married the only witness very quickly; she couldn’t be forced to testify against her husband. She was the victim’s mother.
There was a man who got away with it because the defense made the girl’s best friend, now thirteen, testify that the dead girl had sneaked into R-rated movies. This apparently meant she was mature enough （“sexually active,” they said） at twelve that anyone could have killed her, not just the bus driver who had the nude photos.
There was a man they let out on a technicality （a paperwork error） who went free in just enough time to show up, to her family’s horror, at the graveside service of the girlfriend he’d strangled.
There was a boy who was not charged with involuntary manslaughter for pushing his father off a restaurant deck—because the system worked for him as it should work for everyone. When they brought him in for questioning, they gave him a blanket and hot chocolate. They understood that he was a child.
There was a man who got away with it because five Black, trans women found dead in the same park in one year must have been coincidence, a sign that it was a seedy park. They never even looked for him.
In the ’90s there was a case where the state declined to press charges against the family friend whose semen had been found in the mouth and vagina and anus of the murdered eleven-year-old. The state’s attorney didn’t feel there was enough evidence. The girl might have been sitting on a bed where he’d previously masturbated, and eaten some popcorn there, and gotten his semen in her mouth. “This is how we get colds,” the man said. “We touch something, we touch our face. And then a little girl goes to the bathroom, and what does she do? She wipes herself, front to back, like this.” And on live TV, in some marbled court hallway, he squatted low, swiped his hand between the legs of his suit pants.
38
The defense rested after they questioned Robbie, and the state introduced no witnesses of their own. They spent the following day making arguments, the state again saying I had influenced people, this time manipulating Beth. I would have been allowed back into the courtroom for the closing arguments, but Amy didn’t think that would be a good idea; she told me to fly home, and the whole thing ended when I was in the air somewhere over the Rockies. When I landed, I had a voicemail from Amy telling me she thought it had gone very well. Now the judge would take it all “under advisement,” and in one to six months, Amy thought, we’d hear if he’d decided to vacate the original verdict.
The day I got home, I checked my email and found a note from a young woman in Salem, Oregon. You knew her when she was a student in Providence. Paula Gutierrez; I’m sure the name rings a bell. She was hoping I could get a note to Beth Docherty, thanking her for what she’d said about you on the stand. It sounded so eerily familiar, she wrote to Beth. Like you were talking about my own life.
A week later, Dane Rubra forwarded me an email from Allison Mayfield, who’d attended the school you came to Granby from. Do you remember her? The one who dropped out junior year after she cut her wrists with fingernail scissors?
How about Zoe Ellis? She really thought the two of you were in love. She hadn’t reexamined it until a friend sent her news about the hearing. God bless Zoe, she was ready to go public, to write about it all.