Alligator Candy

by David Kushner

  But despite Witt’s death sentence and the fact that Tillman had gotten life, this didn’t resolve the loss. For each of us, that time was a dark blur of individual suffering, each of us dealing with it in our way, just as everyone deals with death in a personal manner. My parents had to not only find some way to survive this themselves but also to support and nurture Andy and me through the chaos as well.

  “You had something severed from you,” my mother told me. “Jon and you, you just adored him, and he just adored you, and then it was just ripped from you. And there you were, four years old and all this tumult and craziness. How do you explain what happened to you? You were confused, you were scared. I remember siting in the living room when we found out what happened, and Andy was there, and you, and just protecting you and loving you.”

  We couldn’t talk about Jon, couldn’t even say the word murder—not even in the decades to follow. I had always wondered why we were so silent about Jon, but my mother explained the obvious answer: “It was too scary,” she said.

  “It was just too painful,” Andy told me as well.

  But there’s a price for living in silence: the isolation that comes with grief. I had experienced this myself for so long, the consequence of silence, the pain of it. My family was a family of storytellers, repeating tales of our lives over and over again, refining them along the way. But this story of Jon was never told. Death leaves trails of mutes. People don’t know what to say to others who are grieving. They fear upsetting them, they don’t know how to behave. But as my family learned, people who are grieving are desperate for support, for connection. It’s always better to reach out to someone and just say simply, “I’m sorry,” to let them know you’re thinking about them, to give them a hug, and feel assured that that alone is enough.

  As I heard my mother tell me of her struggles, of their efforts to transform their personal pain into social action, I began to appreciate even more how the three Cs—community, compassion, and connection—are, perhaps, the fundamental ways that people survive not only death but also any kind of struggle and horror in life. But with the death of a child, this gets even more challenging. And it was challenging for my parents despite their activities. “I remember guilt when I laughed; how do you laugh?” my mother recalled. “How do you get into life and enjoy it, and when you laugh you feel guilty about it?”

  One day my mother handed me some old yellowed papers to help me understand firsthand how she endured this question, how she struggled for answers, for meaning, for hope. It was the journal she had kept over the first few years following Jon’s death. I read them in one sitting, following her early months of suffering, her dreams of Jon, her desire to speak out, to hear his name. As I read, I realized that she had been on a journey similar to my own. She didn’t want to lose Jon to the annals of the past. She wanted to preserve his story, get it down before it disappeared. “How good that we’re doing this,” she wrote in July 1975, “making a record of our memories of Jon, our feelings, all of this helping to save Jon, to hang on to him, not forget.”

  Many times, she had despaired over the taboo surrounding death in our culture, the fear that prevented even the most compassionate people from discussing memories and feelings. “Why are people so afraid that talking about, thinking about, looking at a picture of a dead person is morbid?” she wrote. “It’s so wrong and painful to live that way. Let’s celebrate Jon. Let’s laugh about him. Let’s remember him. He is still part of our lives. Why can’t we learn a different way to deal with death?”

  There had been times she wanted to scream his name out loud, from the top of the Skyride at Busch Gardens, from the back of the synagogue, to remember him, to celebrate him, and to exorcise the pain inside her. “You’d think the body, the head, would split apart during the most intense grieving,” she wrote. “But then tears and tears, building up and bursting out over and over, spasms of grief, constant and exhausting.” And yet she could feel the pain becoming a part of her, finding its indelible groove but never vanishing. “Time goes by,” she wrote, “days spill on, routines, appointments, diversions, some fun, a trip, somebody sick, on and on, time goes and grief finds a niche, a place, and settles in and goes along, too, included in everything. ‘I’m here,’ says Grief. ‘Never mind me, just go about your business.’ ”

  Jon’s murder was real, it was permanent, part of our family, part of our community, and we had the responsibility to survive. “We must live,” she wrote on October 28, 1975, on the second anniversary of Jon’s death, “We must live with this pain of no Jon, for each of us all, Andy, David, especially, for Gil and me, for my parents, for friends who need to have us show them we can live with horror.” And more than anything, it was our shared survival of the murder that enabled us to live. “I think that is the only way to make it, really, when all is said and done,” my mother wrote the following October, “to have love and support from humans who breathe love and hug comfort.”

  Toward the end of her journal, her entries became less frequent. Life resumed its pace. There were joys and sorrows, births and deaths. There would never be closure, but there was something else that came with the passing time, as I read on the last page of her journal, from August 1977, nearly four years after Jon died: a way of living with death that brought new meaning to life.

  “I treasure what I treasure,” she wrote. “I am aware of the temporariness of relationships and life itself. I am aware of what matters and turns me on. Did Jon give me this gift? I believe so. My sweet, sweet, sweetness. I thank you for that. I carry you with me forever unseen now, just as I did when you were snuggling in my uterus through the streets of Jerusalem, unseen but filling my belly and my mind, part of our family even before you were born . . . part of our family now after your life. Thank you for this capacity to love and understand. Do you still know that you are loved?”

  43

  FOR SO LONG, I had felt a disconnect with Jon’s death, perhaps because I was so young at the time. It was my family, but it wasn’t my family. It felt so unreal, as though the story had happened to someone else. But reading my mother’s words, after all my research and interviews, made me feel more connected than ever before. This wasn’t just some mother who had lost a son, this was my mom. And it wasn’t just the thoughts and feelings of the mother of a murdered child, it was a document on the taboos that still exist around death and dying, the aloneness that people endure, and how, in the end, it is other people who can help us survive.

  Each of us had always pursued our dreams—my mother in childbirth education, my father in anthropology, my brother in music, me in writing—against whatever obstacles we faced. For Andy and me in particular, since we started our careers after Jon’s death, life felt urgent, and there was never time to wait or sacrifice what we wanted to achieve most. “We all came out of this more determined to not let it crush us,” Andy reflected. “It’s like what they said after 9/11: we can’t let this keep us down. There was more of a determined sense of urgency to keep moving.”

  “You appreciate when things are good,” my mother said. “Happiness makes you feel very happy, laughing feels so good, going somewhere and having a good time feels so good, so you become a happy person.” In recent years, psychologists have referred to this as post-traumatic growth. My mother paraphrased psychologist John Brantner, who’d once compared grief and suffering to a metal spring. Grief and suffering compress the spring down, she said, “but when you experience happiness, it springs up” even higher. Over her desk, she hung a big yellow button. “Enjoy life,” it reads. “This is not a dress rehearsal.”

  The more I learned of Jon’s story, the more the story began to come to life in new and surprising ways. I began to see connections in things I had never seen or thought about before, sometimes in ways that unsettled me. For years, I had walked past the banners in our synagogue in Tampa, the ones depicting the prophesy of the Child Shall Lead Them, and the story of Jonathan and David. In all this time, however, I had never read the sto
ry of Jonathan and David, and, one afternoon, I looked up the translation. I read of the two friends’ love for each other, and how Jonathan’s father, King Saul of Israel, had grown jealous of David after David had killed Goliath and married his daughter.

  But what really struck me was what happened next. Saul decides to have David killed, and Jonathan devises a plan to save his friend. He tells David to hide in the woods. Jonathan would then come to the woods with a bow and arrow, and shoot arrows into the woods in a certain direction if the coast was clear. Jonathan does this, and David returns from the woods to find that he’s safe. But the two must say good-bye, and, when they do, the story says, “They cried together, but David cried the most.”

  Woods. Bows. Arrows. Jonathan. David. David crying the most. It was strange. I was never religious, and I took the Bible stories as just stories from which one could glean whatever one liked. My brain blended the story with my own, twisting the two. Jonathan went into the woods. The killers came with their bows and arrows. Jonathan died, and I, David, cried for him.

  I didn’t know what, if anything, it meant, but the parallels felt striking. Such strange connections happened again, like when I listened to the only tape I had of Jon’s voice, and heard that it was him describing the murder of Underdog by Simon Bar Sinister. There was more too, like the fact that my daughter, who had been named for him, would later have a bat mitzvah that randomly fell on the same weekend as the anniversary of Jon’s death.

  But most powerful was when my mother called to tell me she’d been moving a file cabinet in my father’s home office when she found something amazing underneath: letters and poems of Jon’s. I couldn’t believe it. She had no recollection of these papers, and neither did Andy or I. The few treasured possessions we had of Jon’s had been in the same small wooden box for decades. If my father had found these papers, he would have shared them with us. The only explanation—the only rational one—was that we had all somehow forgotten these existed, and that seemed absurd. But no matter: the fact that my mother found them, after decades, just weeks before I finished writing this memoir, was incredible enough.

  Soon after, I received a manila envelope from my mom with Jon’s papers inside. I had never seen anything he’d written, never heard his voice other than that one audiotape, and felt almost as though I couldn’t even focus on the first page I pulled out. It was a one-paragraph story from December 1971, about two years before his death, when he was nine, written in blocky pencil on lined paper. “Trees and Birds,” it is titled. “One day there was a beautiful tree in the garden. What a garden. But did you know that some children use to play there but now there dead and then some children moved in the house. The End.”

  I felt light-headed as I lowered the papers in my hands. A beautiful tree in the garden. Children played there. Now they’re dead? I read the page again for clues. What was this? There was a red star in the upper right-hand corner. It must have been a school assignment of some sort. Maybe he was paraphrasing something he had read. Maybe he had just watched some filmstrip he had to describe. Or, who knows, maybe it was his own invention. My mind reeled. Was it a premonition of his own death in the woods? The “garden” across from our street? The woods, in fact, where homes had since been built and, as he wrote, “some children moved in.”

  It didn’t make sense. But nothing about his death ever did. I turned the page. “The Ugly Goblin,” this one was titled from an unmarked year. “There was a ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, spooky, spooky, ugly, yucky goblin. He was very, very ugly. But there was a friendly ghost named Gus and he lived with his best friend and he was a goblin but he was not that ugly. And did you know that there was a bat his name was fatso? And he was so fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat. Boy—he was so fat he popped! All he’s [bones] fell out. And he was very stupid because he had no brain and he did not know anything at all. The goblin was the stupid one. The End.”

  Again my mind clawed for clues, reading the words like a cipher. A ghost? More death. The bat, another sign. The bat was stupid, the goblin too. Perhaps this was Jon’s way of saying that he felt stupid, that he was struggling with his learning problems. I stopped myself in midthought. What was I doing now? What was I trying to divine? I flipped the page to find a short letter, written the summer before he died, when he was at overnight camp, the same camp where I had seen him posing shirtless and flipping a bird. “Dear Mom Dad Andy and also David,” he wrote. My name, David. So strange to see it in his own hand; this the only time I’d ever seen him use it at all. “I’m still having a great time,” he went on, “tell David thanks for he’s nice letters he’s ever had. How’s Andy Mom and Dad and David. I hope there OK. Love, Jon.”

  I read it again, savoring his mention of my name, not just once but three times. My name, David, his little brother, my big brother Jon. And I couldn’t help but find more meaning in his words. This was it, the only reference to me at all, and what was he doing? He was thanking me for writing. Was I overreaching by thinking this? Was I seeking his approval? Or was I simply tuning in to some otherworldly missive, some message he sent to me—astonishingly—in the final days of my writing my book about him? I didn’t know what to make of it and felt a bit foolish trying to make anything of it at all. I consulted my rabbi for insight, and he said the same thing that a religious friend of mine had told me: perhaps this is Jon here with you while you’re writing your book.

  But Jon would come to me in one more way. It happened on a clear, blue day in January 2013, and I was sitting at my desk at home, leafing through the eight-hundred-page case file while working on my book. I thought I had read everything, but there was apparently one thing I missed. In the middle of the case file, I came to an eight-page summary by the police of the first two days after Jon went missing. It started with the missing-person call from my dad. “Very briefly,” I read, “the child’s parents reported that their eleven-year-old son Jonathan Kushner, had just finished cutting the lawn and his five-year-old brother asked him to go to the 7-Eleven store to get him some candy.”

  As I read the words, I reached up to turn off the music on my computer. Then I read the end of the line again, focusing on the words “brother asked him to go to the 7-Eleven store to get him some candy.” They had my age wrong—I was four—but that was not what hit me. It was the rest of it, the part about how I had asked Jon to go get candy for me. He went because I asked him? He went for this reason alone?

  Throughout my life, I had gone through so many iterations of my final exchange with him, and, yes, I did recall standing on the sidewalk asking him for the alligator candy. But I never entertained the thought that the reason he went to the store at all was because I had asked him. I thought he was just going anyway, and I had asked him to get me something while he was there. That thought alone had given me sometimes unbearable guilt growing up, and now, forty years later, out of the blue, the guilt came walloping back.

  He had gone for me? Because I asked him? My mind and heart raced. Intellectually, I knew well enough that I should not assume guilt for his murder, that I alone was not responsible for his death. I knew that the living play self-destructive games of what-if when someone dies. Friends of Jon’s had been asking themselves, What if we had played with him that morning, and he hadn’t gone? Teachers at IDS had asked themselves, What if we had allowed other students to go down that path when the killers were there?

  But as much as I knew it was just my mind corroding me, I couldn’t fight it. I felt responsible. I felt awful. Even though this was on the page in black and white, I still didn’t know if it was completely true. But why would my father tell the police that Jon had gone to get candy for me? I thought back to the day when I was sixteen, and I sat with him on the back porch, listening to the news of Witt’s execution on the transistor radio, and how my dad told me, for the first time, the details of Jon’s murder. I remembered how, when I brought up my memory of my last conversation with Jon, my dad corrected me, telling me that, no, I wasn’
t the last to see him. The memory hadn’t happened. The last person to see Jon was him.

  I’d since wondered if perhaps my dad was protecting me—if he was purposefully revising the story so that I wouldn’t beat myself up for having dispatched Jon to his death. As much as I thought that would be out of character for my father, since he was always so direct with me when we discussed such matters, now, with him dead, I would have no way of knowing. I called my mother to ask her what she thought: Could Dad have been lying to me? She agreed that that wasn’t something he would do; he was not one to mask the truth. My mother’s memory of what happened to the candy was hazy, but when I told her about the police report, she thought it wasn’t accurate. As far as she recalled, Jon was going to the store anyway, and I had simply asked him to get me something while he was there.

  Still, the truth felt like it was eluding me, and my emotions of guilt were already unleashed. I wasn’t trying to be a martyr, I was just trying to cope. But I couldn’t write anymore. I couldn’t read. I had to get up and walk outside, breathe the crisp winter air. Guilt was corrosive, an acid, numbing me to the world around me, casting me back into the body of myself forty years before. I replayed the conversation with Jon again, calling it up like a hologram before my eyes. I heard myself talking with him about the alligator candy, saw him shifting his feet on the pedals, and I wanted to scream out, “No, don’t go! I don’t need the candy. Don’t get it. Don’t get it for me. Stay home. Stay here. I know what awaits you. I can see through the woods. I see the men there parked in their car with their Cracker Jack and Coke. I know what awaits you. I know everything!”

  But I couldn’t scream out. I couldn’t travel through time. It was written. The story was done. Jon went to the store and never came back. And I would have to live with that, live with the missing pieces of his story that remained despite everything I had learned. But at least I knew enough to understand that even if I were responsible for Jon’s decision to go to the store that day, I did not put Witt and Tillman there. I did not set the crime into motion. And perhaps Jon would have gone anyway. His death was beyond his or my control.