“Please,” you said to the operator, trying to tune Michael out.
“I’m going to hand you over to Detective Haeny,” the operator said to you, and you felt the muscles in your jaw tighten as they sometimes did when you knew Michael was about to hit you, which was something, you said, that you had sometimes tried to get control of, because you had heard someone say on a TV show that things hurt more when you are tense, but people who say things like that probably don’t know what it’s like to be under any actual pressure. They are talking about something else.
You listened. Michael watched your face for signs. You put the receiver back in its cradle, conscious of your feet underneath you, holding you upright.
“They say we should go to the station. I can do it,” you told Michael, mechanically, directly, like an engineer who, her instruments all indicating disaster, finds the known center where all the knowledge of her training waits. Perhaps sensing a shift in the energy of the moment, hearing you speak with uncharacteristic confidence, Michael looked at you with an alien gaze: It was respect, maybe, you thought. Or fear of the unknown. Or of the police. Who knows where it came from. It was enough to allow you to get into the car and drive.
You had learned in the years since, you said, that sometimes you get just enough of whatever it is that you need in order to go on to the next thing, no matter how bad it is.
* * *
I KNOW NOW that it’s never going to be possible to make you understand, you began again in your letter, your letter which I had spent several days reading and whose end, I knew, both from recognizing where we now stood in the story line and from the diminishing number of pages left to read, was near. I know this was all a waste and possibly even bad for me, you said, because I am usually OK these days, as OK as I can be, Michael’s gone now, Bobby lets me talk about him if I need to, in the end I finally found someone who cares about me and wants to protect me, isn’t that incredible, sometimes I can’t believe it, you wrote. But now, when I’m telling the whole story, it’s not making me feel better at all, it’s not taking weight off my shoulders, it’s putting more on, more and more the further I go, and I can’t stand it, I don’t think I can stand it. But I told myself when I started this that I had to finish, so I am going to finish, and if it’s bad for me, then I guess I will get better. But I am going to tell you what I have wanted to tell you. Are you even still reading this? Please say yes, you wrote.
I said “Yes” out loud in my house in Milpitas, a place where two people had been murdered in darkness by an assailant with a sword, which was the story I had moved into the house to tell. My new story, my new book.
This is the thing that you have to understand, you wrote.
* * *
THE FIRST CIRCLE OF HELL was the process: it was clear to you that procedures were the most important thing to the police, but they weren’t the most important thing to you. What was important to you was why they had asked you to come talk to them, why they were asking about Gene Cupp’s car, and what did they know about where Jesse had been all night, and where was he now. “We think we have a lead on where he went” was as direct an answer as you got from either of the detectives at first; they kept finding ways to not answer you directly. It made you feel like they thought you were stupid and couldn’t see what they were doing, which was something you were used to in your everyday life, but had the effect now of increasing your agitation a little with each passing moment, of deepening the reserve of dread whose membranous confines, you thought, surely would not be able to hold much longer, as, in wave after wave, the fear kept rushing in. They asked question after question about Jesse: had he been having problems in school; did he have close friends, and, if he did, what kind of people were they; and, if he didn’t really have friends, how did he like to spend his free time; what was his life like at home; had he met anybody new lately, maybe somebody he’d been spending a lot of time with; had he been acting strangely, or had anything unusual at all happened, some change in his routine, anything out of the ordinary.
It felt like they would never stop, like they would never run out of new ways to ask the same questions, one officer taking notes while the other nodded as you answered, offering a little assurance now and then as they walked you through the paces, each step of which felt like an endless, barren expanse, even if everybody was being nice enough: treating you with kid gloves, you realized, when clarity finally came.
Clarity came in the form of Jesse’s necklace, a silver chain with a tear-shaped turquoise chip dangling from the middle. He wore it every day; his father hated it and made cruel remarks about it, and made ugly insinuations about who might have bought it for him, and why. You liked Jesse’s necklace; it looked good on him, and, when he wore it, you felt like you were catching a glimpse of how he might carry himself when he was all grown up: when he became his own man at last, walking around in the world on his own. It was in a plastic bag now on a table in front of you, alongside a paper tag with some numbers written on it.