Girl at the Edge

by Karen Dietrich

  “The trick is to forget that the audience is even there,” Corey says, jumping down from the edge of the stage but landing like a gymnast, soft and graceful. “The audience matters, yes, but once you get into that flow, the world must fall away. All your focus, all your attention must be trained on the craft.”

  He takes his place in the aisle of the dimly lit theater. His footsteps echo, the sound following his body until he stops and turns around. “Volunteers to go first?” he asks, his voice reverberating in the silence as Dylan raises his hand. “Dylan, awesome. Show us what you got.”

  Dylan walks by me on his way to the stage. “This one’s for you, Evelyn,” he tells me. He hands me his note card and then climbs onto the stage as if he’s lifting himself out of a swimming pool and onto dry land. I can’t take my eyes off him as he moves, his body long and lean, built for motion, so effortless. I look down at Dylan’s note card, creased in my hand, and read the small blocky letters Corey has written. I will if you will.

  At the end of class, Corey passes out scripts of Our Town by Thornton Wilder, the first play we’ll be studying in class.

  “Our Town is a metadrama,” Corey says. “Make sure you read up on that term while doing your background research on the play for next week. I also want you to research the year Wilder wrote the play—1938. In drama, it’s very important to understand what was happening in a historical context when a play was written. It can help us get to know the characters and where they’re coming from.”

  I’m sitting in the front row, packing up my bag, when Dylan sits down next to me.

  “Tom Hanks.” He looks straight ahead, but I can tell that he’s watching me from the corner of his eye.

  “Excuse me?”

  “From the questionnaire. An actor that inspires me. My answer was Tom Hanks. Now we’re even.”

  “Are we now?” I ask.

  “Sure, until you feel like showing me something else.” He stands up and slings his backpack over one shoulder. He’s completely still for a moment, practically begging me to respond.

  “Unlock your phone,” I tell him. I extend my empty hand, and he does as I say, placing his phone into my palm. I add a new contact for myself, tap my phone number into the blank fields, and hit Save. “You can text me if you have questions about Our Town. Or anything else.” I hand the phone back to him, making sure that our fingers touch during the exchange. I consider winking but then wonder, would that be going too far?

  He looks down at the phone’s screen for a moment before sliding it back into his pocket. “I will definitely have questions,” he says.

  “Good,” I say. “I will definitely have answers.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  I have a few hours before Shea picks me up so I go down the street to the Starbucks to start my research for class. I sit in a corner on a comfy chair and balance my laptop on my lap.

  Online, I learn that metadrama is a term used to describe a play that has elements of awareness of an audience, like a character giving an aside to the audience or other instances of breaking the fourth wall. In theater, the fourth wall is that invisible barrier between performer and audience member which usually remains intact, but not in Our Town as I find out that there is a main character called the Stage Manager, who is fully aware of the audience.

  I research the plot summary and read a little about Thornton Wilder’s background. He was rather bored with theater when he wrote Our Town, which is why he wanted to do something so different, to shake things up. The play begins in 1901 and covers a period of ten years. I try a few different search terms and read about American life during that time period, which isn’t very interesting so my mind starts to wander back to Clarisse. If only I could know where she is right now, what she’s doing. Is she thinking of me? Will she ever think of me again?

  I go to Instagram to find Clarisse’s page. She’s deleted me as a friend, making her account private. I can see her profile photo but nothing else. It’s a picture of her sleeping at her desk at school, her head resting on her arms, which are folded in front of her on the beige Formica. I wasn’t going to contact her; I know better than that. I just wanted to see a real picture of her, something other than the phantom memories that run through my mind while I’m trying to fall asleep.

  I pull up Andy’s blog. There’s a new entry for this week.

  LETTERS FROM THE DEATH HOUSE

  Dear Sis,

  I don’t know how much longer I can hang on. Every day I stay in this place, the outside world gets further away. This prison might as well be floating around on a different planet right now, that’s how disconnected I feel from everyone and everything. It’s been such a long time since I held someone’s hand or gave someone a hug, I think I’m forgetting what touch feels like. Sometimes I wonder if my life before Raiford was just a dream. Sorry, I know I’m rambling. My thoughts are running around in circles in my head and it’s getting harder to catch them.

  You’ll probably say I should talk to someone about how I’m feeling and all this depressing stuff. We have shrinks and counselors here, but I don’t think they know what to say, really. What could anyone say to someone like me right now?

  I’m so alone, and I know that you’re out there, sis, so don’t let that get you down because you mean a lot to me. But really, I’m alone in here. This might be my last letter. I don’t know what else to say, so I’ll just say goodbye.

  Love you sis,

  Andy

  An idea enters my mind, and although I try to get rid of it, it just won’t leave. Some ideas are sticky like that. They attach to you and won’t let go, like suckerfish against the glass of the aquarium.

  Now I’m on a travel site, looking up hotels near Raiford. There actually aren’t any hotels in Raiford proper because there’s not much of anything in that town, really, except the prison, some bail bondsmen, a few check-cashing places, and a row of housing for the warden and correctional officers. There’s the Motel 6 in Starke. There’s the Budget Inn in Lawtey. The Motel 6 looks clean enough. The picture shows a double bed draped in a maroon-and-gold-striped bedspread, the cheap scratchy kind. I could stay there, just a place to sleep between visits with him. Sure, I’ll have to settle for seeing him behind glass, a telephone line stretched between us, but at least I will be able to lay my eyes on him. At least I’ll be able to see him in the flesh. But would he even want to see me? I decide it doesn’t matter. Once he sees how far I’ve come, he’ll understand.

  Even though I don’t really want to, I hover the mouse pointer over the icon for my saved bookmarks, the archive of my father. Even though I don’t really want to, I click the icon and a list of entries appears—web pages, videos, court documents, newspaper articles. I click one at random, and a video begins to load on my laptop screen. I fish my earbuds from my bag and plug them in so I can hear. I start the video. For the first time, I don’t do anything to stop it. I simply let it play.

  A reporter stands in front of the St. Johns County Courthouse, north of downtown St. Augustine, just off US Route 1, the longest north-south road in the United States. Her name is Melinda Sherrill. She wears a crisp white blouse and a navy blue skirt. I watch and listen as she reports on the day’s proceedings, talking directly to the camera, her perfect white teeth contrasted with deep red lipstick. Her voice is clear and steady, without an accent or dialect of any kind. She speaks in the bland Midwestern English that is standard for newscasters, that overenunciated style that extinguishes any traces of the person’s background, with no clues of origin to distract the audience from the message.

  Melinda is sharing details from the first day of jury selection for my father’s trial. It’s the local news at noon, the Florida sun straight up in the sky, high noon as the cowboys called it, although the correct term is solar noon. It’s easy to forget that we can understand our surroundings just by looking at the sun, which is also a star. It’s easy to forget the names of celestial bodies that guided our ancestors, easy to forget that we can t
rack the passage of time by looking up.

  Melinda says that jury selection is expected to take several weeks because the prosecution is seeking the death penalty. Melinda reminds us that the stakes are always higher with capital cases. In order to obtain a capital conviction, a conviction that will lead to a death sentence, the jury must be unanimous in their decision. If just one jury member disagrees, it will mean the difference between life and death for my father.

  At the time of jury selection, it’s already 2004, four years after the murders. Melinda Sherrill has to provide a brief recap of my father’s crime for the viewers. She has to put what he did into context, letting the audience find where it fits into history. Perhaps some nonlocal people have forgotten about the case, the entire incident blending into the background of the collective psyche along with all of the other heinous crimes we learn about and then eventually forget. The body can contain only so much sadness, after all, so much grief, so much fear and anxiety, until it inevitably spills out, some of the trauma getting lost, leaving the radar. That story of the factory worker who went on a shooting rampage can’t stay with you for eternity—there isn’t enough room to store all of that pain. You have to take it in small doses, liquid drops of pain on your television screen at night, on your radio in the morning, on the newsstand any day of the week.

  Melinda Sherrill doesn’t show teeth when she smiles but still manages to have a pleasant look on her face, a vital skill for a newscaster—to cover serious stories without looking too dire, without allowing the terror to show itself through your skin. She assures the audience she will cover the entirety of my father’s trial and sentencing for First Coast News, Channel 12, the local news affiliate based in Jacksonville, because they want to keep you informed. She repeats that they are your first choice in local news that affects you.

  The video fades out to black, and I click on another link from the bookmarks. This time, it’s an interview with a young man who was working at a kiosk selling personalized license plates at the time of the shooting. The young man is identified only as Rick, his name appearing in white letters at the bottom of the screen with the words mall employee next to his name. Rick appears eager to share his experience with the invisible reporter. He looks directly at the person asking questions, just off screen.

  Rick is good-looking with prominent cheekbones and a small nose. He wears a cowrie shell necklace and reminds me of the type of guy you might encounter hanging out on the pier at Clearwater Beach near dusk. He might be strumming “Blister in the Sun” on an acoustic guitar or playing a game of Frisbee with friends. Rick says he’ll never forget what he was doing when the shooting began. He was helping a customer flip through a binder of sample plates when he heard the first shot fired in the nearby jewelry store and heard a mix of voices screaming and glass breaking.

  “It took everyone a while to realize what was going on,” Rick says, his voice sounding concerned as he walks us through the trauma of realizing that people were being murdered at his place of employment.

  The voice off camera asks Rick about the aftermath of the murders, wanting to know how it felt to return to work knowing that mall employees and customers were brutally gunned down just yards away from his kiosk. Rick looks down for a moment, and then back into the red eye of the camera. “It was tough, for sure,” he says. “I knew the employees who were killed, a woman and a man. I would see them together in the food court sometimes.” The voice asks Rick if he’s afraid to come to work at the mall now. “No, I won’t let it scare me,” he assures the audience. “If anything, it makes me feel grateful for every day I have, you know? It makes me realize how precious life really is.”

  When senseless violence happens, the people left behind want to believe that they were saved for a reason, that they were spared to fulfill some divine purpose, as though some higher power believed that they should be saved without telling them why.

  I click on the next video, this time a reenactment of the shooting itself, where computerized figures stand in for people, including my father, his figure in red to denote that he has blood on his hands.

  I click again, and a St. Johns County sheriff’s deputy appears on the screen, dressed in dark green and gold, a pointed metallic star catching the sunlight as he walks toward a podium topped with multiple microphones and clears his voice to speak at a press conference to describe to the public in detail about law enforcement’s response to my father’s crime—the shooting rampage, the casualties at the mall, the southbound car chase, the failed attempts at hostage negotiation, and the discovery that the victim inside the car was shot to death in the head.

  If you let your imagination run, which is always dangerous, you can imagine the scene in that car, picture my father with one hand on the wheel and one hand on the gun pointed at his wife’s head. You can continue this scene in your mind, dreaming up a hundred different scenarios, so many possibilities for dialogue, so many various ways she could have been pleading for her life, begging her husband to spare her.

  Sometimes I imagine them talking about my mother and me, for how did we factor into my father’s decision? How did we make it better or worse? Perhaps she promised him that she didn’t mind, that he could have his child with this other woman and she’d still take him back, wouldn’t leave him again no matter what. But maybe that wasn’t enough for him, maybe he wanted more, needed more, his wants and needs devouring her and eleven other people when all was said and done. I pause the sheriff’s deputy, and he freezes midsentence, almost looks like he’s about to sneeze.

  In the Starbucks, an old man blows on his coffee and takes a slow sip. He sits alone, a newspaper unfolded on the table. He pulls a pair of glasses from his pocket, adjusts his gaze, and begins to read. He’s missing that look of loneliness I see on other old people, the one that makes me sad, makes me have to turn away. He looks up from the paper and clutches his arm, just above his shoulder. I can’t stop it. I just have to watch. Remind myself it isn’t real. He gasps for air, sweats, and flails. He falls to the ground, trembling in a seizure. His coffee shines in a puddle next to him on the floor.

  Three women sit on the comfortable sofas, having an animated conversation, talking with their hands and laughing. They’re dressed in exercise clothes with yoga mats at their feet, apparently fresh from class. They have identical ponytails, identical manicured nails. The tallest woman draws a small gun from her purse, a silver revolver with a black handle. She lifts it to her temple and pulls the trigger. She slumps down in her chair. Blood runs down her neck like rivulets and pools in the sharp edges of her collarbone. Her eyes turn empty and white.

  A little girl feeds a black-and-white cookie to a baby, maybe her little sister, as their mother takes a video with her phone. The baby reaches for the sweetness with chubby fingers. She licks her lips as her mother laughs, watching through the screen. The baby’s eyes get wide. She opens her mouth but doesn’t make a sound. She kicks her legs. Her lips turn blue. Her sister hides her face with her hands and begins to sob.

  A young man and woman appear to be on a date, barely touching knees under the table. He pulls a switchblade from his shoe and stabs her in the throat. Her dress seeps red, turning damp and dark, the color of a dozen roses.

  I open a new tab, type Florida death row inmates, and hit Enter. I scroll through a list, sorted by incarceration date. I find his name. The blue DC number next to it is a hyperlink. Click on it. Wait for the page to load. Tell yourself you’re about to see a man who looks nothing like you, a man who is not your father, who could never be your father in a million years.

  A picture of Michael Joshua Hayes appears on the screen. Look into his eyes. There. Right there. You have his eyes, silly girl. Of course you do.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Orcas are nicknamed killer whales, but most people don’t realize that they are actually more closely related to dolphins than whales. In kingdom Animalia, all creatures are classified. There is a hierarchy: life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class
, order, family, genus, species. Every creature fits in somewhere. An orca’s genus name is Orcinus, meaning “belonging to Orcus” or “of the kingdom of the dead.” In Roman mythology, Orcus was a god of the underworld, punisher of broken oaths.

  Dylan and I are on our first date at Ocean Wild, an aquatic zoo and amusement park in Lakeland, walking through an exhibit all about orcas. Once we started texting, it didn’t take him long to ask me out.

  I scroll through a touch screen display depicting orcas in the open seas, jumping and arching and splashing down. It’s called porpoising, that rising above then submerging, that delicate dance between water and air.

  It’s meant to be educational, a way for you to gain an appreciation for the animals before you enter the arena and watch them perform tricks for the promise of dead fish, the audience providing oohs and ahhs in unison as the orca jumps out of the giant swimming pool, diving back in with a splash. The exhibit itself is designed to make you feel as though you’re underwater, your path lined with footlights that glow deep blue, and sound effects pumped in overhead, the lull of rushing water.

  We walk toward a television screen, stopping for a moment to watch a brief explanation of the various parts of an orca. We learn that, while many perceive those white circles of skin on either side of an orca’s head as its eyes, the animal’s eyes are actually just below the white. The white circles are called eye patches. The eyes are nestled in the orca’s slick black skin, so small and beady compared to their giant bodies. But what fascinate me most are their tongues. An orca’s tongue looks like a separate animal. Thick and muscular, it looks powerful enough to strangle you.

  When we walk out of the dark blue of the exhibit and into the bright white of the open-air stadium, it takes a few seconds for our eyes to adjust. We find seats on the bleachers, up toward the top. Upbeat music begins to play. The orca trainers emerge from backstage and wave to the crowd, mostly parents with young children. Some of them hug plush killer whales, others eat neon pink cotton candy out of sticky plastic bags.