What happens when somebody tells a story that has real people in it? What happens to the story; what happens to the teller; what happens to the people?
* * *
WHAT OTHER BOOKS MIGHT I HAVE WRITTEN about the murders of Jesse Jenkins and Gene Cupp? Would those books have been made into movies, or gone quietly into a single paperback printing after their initial run?
Who were my readers? What did I really know about them, about what the stories I sought out and brought into the light did for or to them?
Why did I always flinch when somebody asked me to write a sequel?
This was not the first time I had asked myself these questions, or questions like them. They were familiar friends, after a manner of speaking. Take that any way you want—as an indictment of my character, as a complicating factor. As nothing.
What had I missed in Morro Bay?
* * *
WHEN YOUR LETTER CAME through my mail slot, I was preparing to shift gears on the book. I’d moved to Milpitas, gotten a feel for the town: for what it was like now, and for what it had been like before the tech boom changed it the way it changed a lot of places. I’d spent a long time doing preliminary research, and then I’d gotten granular: I’d conducted interviews, scouted important locations, and dug around in the microfiche at the public library. I had primary texts and secondary texts, and now it was time to move into my next phase, where I try, for better or worse, to gather together the twin spirits of time and place and make them real. In my line of work, you have to have something that sets you apart from everybody else: a feel for time and place is the corner on which I set up shop, years ago, when I first started writing about a locally famous double murder whose legend still haunted the town where I grew up.
Like all legends, it felt eternal to me, as non-negotiable as the scenery: the hills, the missions, the coastline, the White Witch. In writing about it and bringing it to life, I’d touched a nerve—not everywhere, but somewhere. I felt confident about my methods in the wake of the White Witch’s success, and had taken those methods elsewhere, with similar results. People liked to read true crime books that brought them inside the house or hospital or garage or basement where it all went down, to feel as though they’d breathed in a little of the menacing air they imagine circulating or hanging stagnant around a crime scene. I got better at what I did. I sharpened my focus and broadened its reach. I didn’t hurt anybody; the proof of my goodwill was in the results.
You sure got San Luis Obispo right, you wrote. I guess we were both there at the same time so that shouldn’t be a surprise. You elaborated on this theme for a number of pages, mentioning places we both might have seen in those days—me as a child, you as a young mother trying to leverage enough control over your life to make the effort feel worthwhile. The Madonna Plaza: you remembered taking Jesse to a petting zoo there one Easter. You remembered that it was unseasonably cold that spring, but that Jesse had loved the animals so much it hadn’t bothered him at all; you recalled all the other mothers huddling together outside the wooden stiles set up in the great parking lot, many of their young children clinging to their coattails, and Jesse inside running wild, touching all the animals and yelling their names. “The llama! The goat! The sheep!”
You remembered discovering that it wasn’t too expensive to take Jesse to see a movie at the Fremont Theater, and doing that when you could: the westerns, the musicals, The Incredible Mr. Limpet. Sitting in the dark with your son, watching a movie and eating popcorn: these were precious memories for you, pearls of incalculable price. When the horror of his final hours on this earth came for you in the middle of the night, as it still did after all these years, you turned to these memories for comfort, and knew you had done what you could to make his life a good one.
But I had made his childhood sound like a nightmare, you wrote. I had saved the worst for Gene Cupp, and you couldn’t say I’d been wrong there, you said; but, by the same token, you couldn’t say I’d been right, because who really knows what a person is going through with their child? In their home? With their family? That was the problem with my book, you said. Everything about it was real except for the people, who could only be one way for me because I had a story to tell, but the story was bigger than that, and the people were real, not characters in a movie whose lives were only important when they were doing something awful.
But there’s a lot more to it than that, you wrote. I get it, though, you probably think I don’t but I do. A story has to be about something, it’s not just about the people in it and everything else that ever happened to them. See? I understand. And then you explained—patiently, in detail, a teacher trying to spell something out for an especially dense pupil—that, however insistent the demands of narrative and convention, there were things beyond and beneath those demands that were just as important, and perhaps more pressing, in the final analysis. You took pains to make it clear that you understood your position wasn’t impartial; you had real skin in the game. Your exact phrase: I know I have skin in the game.