Devil House(35)
You are not strong enough.
Today you have summoned strength from reservoirs you hadn’t known were present in you—strength whose nature you’d never had cause to contemplate; strength whose character had been, until these days came, a subject of idle contemplation, of outward wonder. People tell passed-down stories about mothers lifting up school buses with their bare hands to free their children pinned under the wheels. The foreman in a mine single-handedly holding up the beam that allows the men in his charge to escape before the walls collapse. From an early age, every kid on the block knows stories like these, and swears she got it firsthand from her mother, or an uncle, or a close friend of the family. You know these stories probably aren’t true: but you also know that you’ve sawn through more bone today than the hacksaw from the gardener’s shed might otherwise have been thought capable of splitting, hoisted more weight than anyone might have guessed your slight frame could bear.
It has not been enough.
They find you at the shore.
7.
THE FLASHING LIGHTS down in the Oakside Court parking lot draw several early risers to their windows; were you looking up, you’d see them looking down at you through gaps in their curtains, but you’re not. You’re looking into the eyes of the arresting officer, your hands cuffed behind your back; you are asking him for the third time if there will be food at the station. They will use this against you in court. But you’re light-headed, confused by hunger and exhaustion. Officer Quinn, mindful of how lost you seem, has told you several times that you don’t have to talk to him until you’ve called a lawyer. “She seemed like she was in another world,” he will say, later, under oath.
There’s seldom any action around this place. Who knows how the rumor begins floating through the building this early in the morning, but gradually people begin to emerge from their apartments. They keep their distance from the squad cars, and at first they seem also to be avoiding each other, like congregants observing a rite or trying not to break a spell. Through these mainly silent ranks, officers are leading you down the asphalt to their cluster of cars, whose blue and red lights dance across your face and body; having arrived, you stand, still as a statue, awaiting an answer from Officer Quinn. He has stopped responding to your questions. He’s waiting for radio dispatch to tell him whether to proceed without further backup. The circumstances of your arrest are unusual. He wants to be mindful of protocol.
“It’s that teacher from the high school,” someone says when the quiet has grown oppressive.
“What did she do?” someone asks.
Everybody gazes out into the wash of red and blue light, wondering, their imaginations seeking out and finding places they would normally never visit.
“They sent a lot of cars, whatever it was,” says the first voice. It’s Don from your hallway. He’s a little tipsy from the night before, and he can’t believe his eyes. He thinks briefly about how nothing like this ever used to happen in the neighborhood where he used to live when he was married.
He and the others all watch as you are helped into the back of the cruiser, hands behind your back. In the absence of any information to work with, the onlookers begin asking themselves what they know about you, and using what answers they find to tell themselves stories about what they’ve just seen.
People are awful, even when they’re not trying to be. None of the stories they tell themselves are good.
* * *
IF YOU’D LIVED IN AN EARLIER TIME, who would remember you? Your name would be known only to students of esoteric crimes, your face seen alongside Lizzy Borden’s on dust jackets designed to attract a very specific readership who know exactly what they want from the books they buy. Maybe some singer in the early nineties might have splashed your mug shot on a T-shirt and worn it to the MTV awards, but probably not. For every iconic pair of murderer’s eyes staring blankly into a police photographer’s lens, there are unremembered dead in small towns across the country going back centuries. Murder seldom inspires much lasting interest beyond the houses it strikes. You used to have to really work at it to make a name for yourself.
But this is a new era. Americans have been more or less glued to their televisions since the Tet Offensive; that was four years ago now, and nightly drama coming out of the nation’s capital has only intensified the bond between average people and their screens. Print reporters have always known it’s good to have somebody on the inside; their colleagues in broadcast news are learning as they go. KSBY’s office in San Luis Obispo started sending crews around to talk to people about the missing teenagers yesterday; the head of the news department heard about them from a station clerk he knows. Occasionally he’s sent her movie passes to the Fremont; these cost him nothing—they’re a perk. They have netted him a huge score this morning.
The news van captures your face in the back of the car as it leaves the parking lot. The anchor describes your “evidently expressionless face” to his viewers as he wraps the segment, but what expression suits a person whose keep has been fatally breached, whose safe harbor, until days ago a place of idle peace, now suffers its second invasion in the space of days— a parking lot teeming with strangers, a chatter of voices.
“We’ll have to wait and see if there’s more beneath the surface,” he says, handing the broadcast back to his colleagues at the station. “Back to you.”