You couldn’t tell Michael. He wouldn’t know how to handle it, he only knew how to be angry, he would be angry at you, he would beat you until he broke something, he would punch a cop and get taken to jail, how were you supposed to figure this out when the pressure inside your head was like a shaken-up soda can; but then they told you that they had already sent a police cruiser to get Michael now that you’d identified the body, easier that way, and you didn’t know how to feel, because there wasn’t any room for any other feelings besides the pain, and the horror, and the rage, why had she done it, that bitch, Jesse never hurt anybody in his life, he was the one who always got hurt, and now he was dead, every time you came back to it you couldn’t make yourself believe it, because you didn’t want to believe it, but at the same time you kept trying to get there, you didn’t know why. Instinct. What good had your instincts ever done you, you wrote, they were worthless, you couldn’t trust them, but you were trusting them one more time, just this once, to tell me this, to see if I was a human being instead of a monster.
Instead of a monster, you wrote at the top of a page near the end of your letter. The rest of that page was blank. I closed my eyes and tried to picture you as you might look in the present day, older, greyer, a little closer to the end of a journey whose pleasures had been few and far between: and the face that came through in my efforts seemed real and alive to me, alive in a way I found somewhat frightening, since I spend most of my days imagining people who once lived and breathed squarely within the confines of the space where I sit and write. And I think I do a good job—I have a method—but this was different.
* * *
A PERSON’S SENSE OF TIME gets turned inside out when their whole world gets taken away from them, you said, so you had a hard time connecting the dots from moment to moment when it came time to tell the story of how everything happened after that. There were parts you still couldn’t write down words about, big parts, the main parts, really, and it was making you feel so small and weak that you couldn’t do it, especially since you still had to see everything so vividly in your head, all these years later; but of course how could a person forget seeing the sight of their own son with parts missing, carved off like limbs from a hunted animal. They had put the parts together on a table, and you only looked at them for one split second before the screaming started again. By that time they’d brought Michael in, he wasn’t so tough now, he was scared, scared of the police and the police station and the photographers outside and the reporters yelling questions at him, and he cried: you had only ever seen him so shaken once before, the first time he came back after you left, and the connection you’d once felt to him awakened just long enough for you to hold each other in a way you hadn’t since you both were young: but even in that moment, you’d known it was nothing, nowhere near enough, Scotch tape on a burst pipe, not even a cosmetic fix.
You both stayed at the police station, you said, for the rest of your lives, because, when you left, who knows how many hours later, your lives were over: your lives together, and your individual lives; Michael’s in a real way, because he never recovered and was dead now, cirrhosis, he had been unable to bear Jesse’s death and was never sober again a day in his life, and yours, too, because you had to see everything through to honor Jesse’s memory, you couldn’t just pick up a bottle and disappear into it, you felt bad enough about the sleeping pills but you needed them and that was all there was to it, unless people know what it’s like to lie in the dark remembering their dead child’s body they can hold their tongues about what people do to deal with their own pain, but the life left to you was even less of a life than you’d had before as the punching bag for a guy you’d had a crush on in high school, because now the person for whom you existed couldn’t feel or see or benefit from your efforts in any way, and yet you couldn’t let go.
Did I understand what that felt like, you asked? Of course I didn’t. I didn’t even try to understand. For me, you were only a figure to be moved around—I was just like Michael in this way—you were useful to me when you were at the stove taking a call from the detectives, you were useful to me on the witness stand speaking your truth to Diana Crane and demanding that she hear it, you were useful to me when you screamed. You, your whole life, all the parts that went into making you who you were, were only useful to me so that I could write my book, but the truth of your life barely grazed the surface of it, just the juicy parts, the blood and the guts and the action. The parts that you wanted to forget, you said, were the only parts that counted for me.