December Park(17)
Our school published a monthly newsletter of poetry and short fiction, spearheaded by Miss McGruder’s creative writing class. That year, the Halloween issue detoured from its usual assemblage of ghost stories and poems concerning decapitated heads and button-eyed zombies returning from the grave. Instead, its pages were filled with overindulgent sentimentality about flowers wilting in the winter air and butterflies bursting forth from cocoons in a dazzling exhibition of colored wings.
Of course, a bout of gallows humor followed the tragedy. The most tasteless yet inventive one came in the form of a limerick on the wall of one of the bathroom stalls:
There once was a man called the Piper
Who’d see a nice girl and he’d swipe her
The girl was found dead
With a hole in her head
As though she’d been shot by a sniper
Perhaps the most disturbing thing was the circulation of an alleged love letter Courtney had given to a boy who attended Stanton School. According to the date scrawled in the upper margin of the first page, it was written roughly one week before her death. Whether or not the letter was authentic did not lessen the impact of seeing it, holding it.
In science class, I was tapped on the shoulder and handed the folded sheaves of ruled notebook paper like someone being presented with the Dead Sea Scrolls. I read the first few lines and realized, with a rising sense of unease, that it must have been real, because it was too unimpressive, too mundane, to be a forgery. Had it been a fake, the author would have included some less-than-subtle foreshadowing of Courtney’s death or the irony of a profession of true love mere days before her life was snuffed out. The handwriting was bubbly and looping, the tone simple and without pretense. I couldn’t finish reading it and passed it along to pimple-faced Mark Browmer who sat beside me, hoping someone more virtuous than me might dump it in the trash before the day was through.
The Harting Farms Police Department felt the impact, too. Chief Barber went on TV and said there was no evidence to show that Courtney’s murder had anything to do with the disappearances of the three other kids. Unhappy with Barber’s statement, the other kids’ parents were often seen on the television news, giving their own opinions.
I registered this tension mostly from afar, just like any bystander, but it soon came home to me. On the nights my father made it home in time for dinner, he sat mostly in silence and would only speak when spoken to. And even then, it was in some foreign and guttural tongue, hardly intelligible. In the evenings, he sat on the back porch, sometimes with a glass of wine or a cup of coffee, and smoked countless cigarettes.
My father stayed up late and wore out the floorboards of the upstairs hallway like a ghost sentenced to haunt for eternity. I never slept on these nights, and I frequently heard his creaking footfalls pause outside my bedroom door. I remained silent in bed, staring at the ceiling, holding my breath as I waited for him to start walking again.
Once, I heard the shower come on, and I was reminded of how he had frequently gotten up in the middle of the night to shower in the months after we had learned that my brother, Charles, had been killed in combat in Iraq. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the running water was really just noise to cover up the sounds of my father’s grief in a house with thin walls.
That night, I realized this wasn’t just about the dead girl. This wasn’t about the Piper, or whoever was out there, and all the stress of my father’s job. Not to him. Not to me, either.
My father had become a different person after my brother’s death. Everything about him seemed to fade into a variant of semiexistence. His bedroom resembled a room you might get at a roadside motel. The items in it were purely functional: a bed, a dresser, a bedside lamp on a nightstand, an alarm clock, a closet full of dark suits, a mirror, and some toiletries on a bureau. He kept his shoes lined up at the foot of the bed, often with his socks still balled up inside them. Sometimes he left a tattered paperback mystery with a sensationalist cover and a gaudy foil-stamped title on the nightstand. There was always a stale quality to the air, as if the windows and door had been hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world.
The only sentimental items were the two framed photographs on the nightstand beside his bed, one of my mother, who had died when I was three. The few memories I had of her were muzzy and undependable, like looking at someone’s shape behind a plastic shower curtain. The other photograph was of Charles in his military uniform. He appeared frighteningly young, and if you looked close enough, you could see the places on his chin where he’d cut himself shaving.
I kept my own photographs of Charles in a scrapbook on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, tucked beneath a stack of comic books and issues of Mad magazine. I used to look at the scrapbook a lot in the months following Charles’s death, but I never took it out anymore. I’d stopped going in his room, too. It stood untouched at the end of the hall, the door shut but unlocked. Charles’s football and track trophies were on his shelves, his record albums and tapes meticulously filed away in an old steamer trunk at the foot of his bed. His varsity jackets and Windbreakers with his name embroidered over the breast, his jeans and slacks and shirts and jerseys, his football gear and track shoes were still there, too.
Most days, I managed to get by without thinking of Charles. Maybe that sounds cold. I don’t know if it is or not, but that’s the truth of it. Yet ever since I saw Courtney Cole being hoisted out of the woods, it was Charles’s face that haunted me at night, Charles’s caved-in head beneath the white sheet on the gurney.