Devil House(88)

You think of these things, when it keeps happening, you wrote. You think harder than most people: harder, you’d guess, than the people who write books about it, even, or the people who write laws. Your perspective is unique. It’s not a fun perspective to have, but it’s yours, and, if you want to keep it, you can. You don’t think I understood this, because I had turned Michael into a cartoon villain, beating his young wife, and, later, their child, yelling at them for nothing, terrorizing his own family for no reason. For me, you said, it was simple, because I was never there. For you and for Jesse it was not simple.

Jesse did ask you, now, about Michael’s temper. These were the hardest conversations you’d ever had as an adult, and you were totally unequipped for them. Just the beginnings of them were enough to make you feel like you’d never find the strength to go through with them.

“Why does Daddy yell so much?” he asked after Barbara left.

“Oh, honey,” you said, hugging him, trying not to cry.

Jesse felt safe enough in your arms to let his own tears flow freely, which made it harder. “I hate him,” he said. You looked at the scowl on his small face.

“Now, honey, you don’t hate him,” you said, licking your thumb and cleaning around his eyes. “I don’t hate him, either. He can’t help himself sometimes, but he is trying.”

“Even if he’s trying, it comes out the same way,” said Jesse, his stab at defiance replaced by a resignation so crushing that you scrambled to correct it.

You lowered yourself to a crouch so that the two of you could be eye-to-eye, like equals.

“He is trying to change,” you said. “He has done a lot for us and if we can help him change, that would be nice, right?”

It causes you, you wrote, more pain than I will ever know, no matter how vividly I paint pictures of death scenes and coroners’ inquests, and no matter how many movies they make out of those scenes, bringing it all to life for everybody to gawk at, making everybody feel like they know what it’s like when they don’t and never will, to remember the sound of your own voice trying to sell Jesse on an outright lie about the meaning of what he’d seen with his own eyes, about what the situation on the ground really was for you both.

“He’s not even sorry,” he said, and you hugged him close again, hoping some more crying might help you both, and might also help you get through a moment from which you could see no easy exit; and realizing, probably too late to undo any of the damage already done, that children have greater powers of observation than many people suspect, and are often perfectly capable of drawing good conclusions from the information available to them, information not volunteered by anyone in particular but circulating openly, effortlessly, in the very air that they breathe.



* * *



I WASN’T SURE WHAT TO DO about the bottles on the walkway. I could just buy new bottles and use those, of course, fresh bottles of whatever soda happened to be available in glass, but I felt like keeping things as true to the pictures as possible meant avoiding substitutes. There are people who buy and sell antique bottles that vary from one another and from their modern incarnations in size, in shape, and in color, but that’s a collector’s market. I didn’t want to run up a huge tab on bottles I was just going to break anyway.

I thought the solution I landed on was pretty clever, almost elegant. There are still some local dairies here and there who sell their milk in glass bottles; I guess some people say it tastes better that way. I calculated—guessed—that one half-gallon milk bottle would be about two Coke bottles’ worth of glass; and I reasoned that Derrick and Seth and Angela and Alex had probably raided a steel trash can directly behind the store for empties. Twenty bottles? Thirty? Forty.

I drove to the dairy—not a short drive, but a pleasant enough use of my morning—and bought ten gallons of milk in half-gallon jugs, which cleaned them out; I’d have to settle for reduced bulk, but you learn to improvise. I then distributed them, still capped, among four pillowcases, and waited until it was dark and there wouldn’t be much foot traffic near my house. When the time seemed right, I put on a pair of rubber gloves, set the bulging pillowcases down in a jagged row along the front walkway, and went at them all with a baseball bat.

It disrupts the flow; I had to become destructive to get the dirty glass I needed, but Derrick and Angela and Seth and Alex had scavenged from available materials. It makes the process of re-creation feel tainted by some original energy. I try to avoid that, but here I was constrained by available materials. Everything’s in plastic now unless you go looking for glass.

When I woke up the next morning and came out to the porch, and saw the sun shining on the white, jagged mounds of sticky glass I’d hastily swept together last night, I felt pleased. They looked like I imagined their predecessors had looked, all the way back in 1986, after the crime scene photographs had all been taken and the yellow tape taken down, and the mess left by Derrick and Angela and Seth and Alex was finally getting cleaned up.

I looked right, and I looked left, and then I threw caution to the wind and knocked over both piles with the flat of the broom. The broken glass sprayed loudly into the air, and then all the tiny shards landed on the walkway, bouncing this way and that.

I did this until both piles were gone, and there was broken glass all over the front walkway, and the lawn, and until bits of it were glistening here and there in the light on the street just beyond the curb.