Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  I examined photographs, unframed and curled up on top of the TV set: jumbles of skinny children on a wasted red couch; one photo was of a slight little boy alone, wedged back into the couch, round, black eyes, a plastered-down thatch of black hair. An old tired soul staring out of that face.

  When I looked at Troy I knew it right away, his sense of isolation: the only one of his kind, unfamiliar even to his own parents. I know what it means to be set loose in the world. Damaged children are all of the same tribe: I can look at any adult and recognize one instantly—Margo, Erin Cogan—we’re everywhere. Lost childhood lingers like tribal scars—in an off-kilter smile or a look in the eye—there’s always some sign.

  Visitors were constantly trying to get Troy to pick lottery numbers or names on racing forms, but Troy’s mother refused those requests. He was never to give out “lucky numbers.” Anita was tiring of people turning up at their house at all hours, tracking mud through her kitchen. She told herself—she explained later, through tears, hanging on my arm, crushing a Kleenex—just a little longer, until Jimmy gets a better job, then we’ll stop. She wanted her son to be a good, normal boy, the sort who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, because she understood the importance of being the one-among-many. If only I’d stopped it! she cried, over and over. She squeezed her forehead, her face reddened. She believed one of the clients killed Troy. Maybe Dolan Melford, whose wife had just left him, perhaps even Haynes Schaefer, who’d been arrested for stealing cars. Both had consulted Troy.

  What did he tell them? the chief investigator, Bruno Pollard, asked.

  I don’t remember! I don’t remember! she wailed.

  He tried another tack: What did Troy like to do?

  Oh, his cartoons, he loved his cartoons, Anita said.

  He liked the Smurfs show, and Highlander, said her eight-year-old daughter Lejean. She stood behind her mother and spoke in a tiny, frightened voice. Oh, and Aladdin.

  But we hadn’t spotted any satellite dish on the property—which limited them to Saturday morning cartoons. What did he do when he wasn’t watching TV?

  I don’t know, what do kids do besides TV? Troy, when we weren’t working him, he’d just disappear. You’d never find him. Drove Jimmy nuts. We’d have customers come for their fortunes and you couldn’t find him anywhere.

  He had Find, the tiny voice said.

  What was that?

  Anita looked despairingly at the top of her daughter’s pale head. He was always dragging these little wild animals out of the fields. Raccoons, a possum . . .

  He was taking care of it, Lejean said. On the porch. It was a little baby bird. He named it Find.

  That’s a nice name.

  Anita laughed ruefully.

  Where is Find now?

  Anita’s daughter lowered her gaze. Anita said, There were always all kinds of critters coming and going. Jimmy said it was like Troy was more like one of them than one of us.

  Her husband Jimmy wasn’t Troy’s biological father. But he regarded Troy as his own—closer than his own—he said so to the coroner, the investigators, the reporter. He’d married Troy’s mother when Troy was barely two years old. Jimmy had never actually had a child of his own—the children were born of several different fathers—but he considered these kids his kids. Yes, there were differences in the tone of their skin and hair, trace reminders that they weren’t actually blood of his blood, but Jimmy didn’t care about that, he’d said, he’d never cared about that at all.

  I didn’t want anything but to be a father to all these kids. Troy most of all, he said in the psychologist’s interview. Well, maybe I had just the one wish, that’s all. Yeah, the monkey’s paw wish, he said, his smile had a pink scar at one end like a fishhook. You know that monkey’s paw story, he’d said. (I knew it: the magical paw that granted wishes but in its own terrible, unpredictable ways.)

  Jimmy had always kept after Anita to let Troy pick the lottery numbers—just once. Just the one damn time, he’d said. They needed help. The bills were heaped up in a big yellow carton on the kitchen floor. You see how we live? Jimmy had said. The laundry frozen on a line outside because they couldn’t afford to fix the dryer. The utilities turned off in February, upstate New York, ten degrees outside, everyone sleeping shoulder to shoulder in a bundle under all the blankets and all the coats in the house. No way to live.

  What would it hurt to let him pick the numbers? Jimmy wanted to know. Maybe they’d win just a small lottery—even a small win—say seven, no, say ten thousand dollars—would really help them out. Pay the bills, restock the kitchen, fix the car up—let them get back on their feet. They wouldn’t have to tell anyone, not even the other children, no one would have to know.

  Anita said no. Maybe she was afraid of being disappointed—maybe Troy would pick the wrong ones and turn out to be not so magical after all. Or worse yet, maybe he’d pick the right ones and then their lives would change—there would be money and fame. And how could she ever keep Troy with her then? He would belong to everyone. Perhaps part of her felt that she’d never really deserved this little boy at all. A big woman, hair knotted up in an elastic band on her head, she must’ve wondered how she produced this quick intelligence; his café au lait skin and his sly laugh. A dream-boy.

  And isn’t it dangerous to have dreams in a town like Hesiod? All empty green hills, rusted-out cars, abandoned snowmobiles and orchard equipment. Just next door to the poisoned wells and chemical plants of Lucius. Every summer, crowds of migrant workers waft into Hesiod to work the onion fields, in eye-watering humidity. Until night comes, glassy with the residue of heat. Troy was fathered by one of these migrant workers, a man Anita let into her house for a tumbler of water and then let stay a little longer. She liked his sweet face and nice manners, she said. He was shorter than her, but had powerful legs and arms, hands with a strong grasp, built to the curve of the onion plant. And a smile like butter, and magical tattoos climbing up the curve of his neck. When Bruno asked what the tattoos were of—she shook her head . . . her memory was bad . . . she thought there might have been a lion . . . with wings. Her husband, Jimmy, beside her on the red couch, scowled at the coffee table, his long underwear showing through the V in his shirt, his work boots untied on the rag rug on the living room floor. He’d recently lost his job at a dairy farm (due, he believed, to “those migrants”) and had to start commuting to a job at the chemical processing plant closer to town.

  From this, a mild night polished by rain, came the boy Troy, a little different from his older brothers and sisters, who were all a little different from each other. She named him Troy, she said, because she didn’t know Spanish—she didn’t even know the man’s name, but she wanted to name this wheat-skinned boy something special and exotic and that’s what Troy sounded like to her.

  TROY SLEPT IN that listing porch off the kitchen, curled into that red couch, which was actually a narrow sleeper sofa that no longer unfolded. The children found him one morning, already stiff and gray, his body unmarked, just a stern look of concentration on his face, a new line between his eyebrows, as if he’d been trying to unpuzzle something.

  At the autopsy they found that he’d had a mitral valve prolapse—heart murmur, a tiny leak in the chamber. And that his body had been shocked by adrenaline: he’d been frightened to death. Or rather, half to death. Because the avioli in his lungs had burst—but he’d also been smothered. There were fibers in his lungs—some cotton strands, and minuscule pieces of something organic the examiner later determined were feathers. He was also found with blankets drawn over his face—a mark of remorse, Bruno said—hiding the victim from a guilty conscience.

  The family was questioned repeatedly. A psychological profiler was brought out to interview each one of them. Suspicion fell on Jimmy, but his polygraph was inconclusive.

  Before the Haverstraws, I’d only visited a couple crime scenes, and I thought the
Examiner’s Office had me confused with someone else when they’d requested me. (Though Bruno told me that the examiner had remembered once seeing “how you read the scene.”) I grudgingly left the Lab and went to the scene: a ramshackle house with cracked windows, a washing machine in the front yard, a dark, tree-shadowed backyard. There was a damp laundry smell in the front doorway, so distinct I’d almost swear I’d been there before. The house was circled with yellow police tape. The weather had been intensely cold for days but sunny during the brief window of daylight. And from Troy’s back porch door, I could see the fields for miles around, covered in an old impeccable snow—still preserved, clean as a page.

  I searched the room, examined every surface under a hand lens, lifted prints that I knew were useless. Then, after two days of looking, it came to me: I felt the first clue. It was a frisson that curved along my spine as I stood in the porch doorway. It made me lift my eyes above the snow-page and settle at a point in the distance, a dappled spot of shadows, beneath a couple of fir trees.

  Because there were no foot tracks beyond the immediate vicinity of the back of the house, most of the backyard hadn’t been taped off. So I just started walking. I went out the front door and strolled along the side of the house, walking outside the perimeter of the tape. I moved slowly, scanning. There were acres of retinal-burning whiteness all around—the kind that blends into the sky and brings on snow blindness.

  I turned and looked at the rear of the house from just beyond the backyard. The items on the porch were so carefully preserved, so closely scrutinized by forensics investigators, they looked like a still life: the pillow askew, two dolls on the floor, an Etch A Sketch at the foot of the sofa. I turned to the backyard: open lots, acres of wild trees. They were tall old hardwoods—oaks and hickories—good climbing trees. I put my hands on one and knew that this was where Troy had liked to disappear: into the trees. I fit my foot into the crotch of the lowest branch and stepped up, easily, just the way I had as a child, surveying the view, the branches bending under my adult weight. The wind sped around me, lifting the branches, sweeping me back into a lost country of trees and fields; for a moment I thought I saw the shadow of a child moving through dark limbs.

  JIMMY AND ANITA and their children were staying with friends, but Anita walked back up the hill every day and sat in the driveway in a folding chair with a thermos of broth, watching the investigators. Her eyes were flinty, her face like a blade.

  Each day, I felt her watching me as I went in and out of the house. At the end of my second day, she grabbed my elbow, her fingers like steel bands. I thought she wanted to ask about our progress, but she wanted to tell me about her dream.

  In her dream, there were no children or husbands: there was only a wolf, and this wolf traveled with a pack. It was so real, she said, rubbing her arm, I could feel the snow on her belly fur, I could feel how hungry she was. Anita grabbed my arm, her eyes sharp fragments. Anita might’ve been part Iroquois or Oneida, possibly French or Spanish.

  Why would I dream of such a thing as that? She released me then turned her hands and just barely lifted them, palms upright.

  I looked at her open hands, the soft, volar skin of her palms with the swirls and ridges—the prints horizontal on a human, diagonal on an ape—bisected by the line that some people believe forecasts the future. I told her about Jung’s theory of sublimation—that elements of our own personality are embodied in all the characters of our dreams.

  This seemed to make sense to her. She said, So that means that I’m that wolf, then, right? She laughed and I worried she might be a touch hysterical, but her laugh faded. Yeah, I’m sublime, she said.

  I kept thinking about sublimation that evening, even after I’d driven home and after I’d sat for the requisite one hour in front of Charlie’s TV—because we were still together then and that was the deal: I’d confront an hour a night of network programming; part of my human being lessons. We also had to ask each other about our days, though I found it difficult to listen to his answer: I was always preoccupied with cases. It was a frigid night, with a moon sharp as a paper cutout. Bright and sublime. I stared through the window beside our bed and let my thoughts float through me.

  The next day, I returned to the Haverstraw house. I stood on the back porch and looked out at the dappled spot of shadows directly across from the house—a grove of firs intermingled with bare deciduous trees. I began walking along the tape again, the fir trees getting closer, I could smell the pine, fragrant balsams and spruces, the big bodies huddled on a snow apron. I heard voices, a murmur of fir trees, I sensed the buried dreams of the onion fields all around me, the translucent onion snow, the trees so deeply green they were almost black. I walked until I was close enough to see crimson berries sprinkled over the branches. And I finally looked hard at the ground and what I thought was just shadow on snow turned out to be a set of tracks.

  Five footsteps. Almost six. Boot prints. A perfectly preserved, glittering trail. They seemed to have fallen into the field from the sky. As if someone had appeared in these trees, climbed down, took five steps, and vanished.

  The tracks were made by someone in a hurry—so clearly demarcated you could see the layers of snowfall they cut through, and even the logo of the boot sole: two tiny mountain peaks and a tree. I didn’t understand exactly how the prints had come to be there, but I could see this person had been running. He might’ve assumed he was safe when the new snow came that night and covered his tracks. But the backyard was protected by shadowy fir trees and this was a spot of snow open to the sun. And there was the third meaning of sublimation: a process of evaporation. It happens when it’s cold enough to keep fallen snow intact and the sun comes out, hot and sudden enough to reclaim the top layers in a steam, bypassing the liquid thawing, lifting it straight back into the sky.

  As I stared at the tracks, I flashed on a pair of unlaced boots, a rag rug, a floor of rough pine boards.

  It’s a cascade effect: find the central clue and then other pieces start to come together. Over the next few days, three red berries and several pine needles were discovered in the cuff of Jimmy’s jeans; I dusted and lifted a set of Jimmy’s prints from inside the back porch doorjamb—a door, they’d said, that was rarely used. Each piece of evidence, taken separately, wouldn’t carry much weight, but everyone began nursing suspicions.

  I walked back to the place of the footprints, thinking and fretting. As soon as the weather changed—turned warmer, windier, or snowier—we’d start to lose the evidence. Sarian wanted to confront Jimmy before they erected a tarp to protect the prints. He wanted the scene as close to the original crime moment as possible, thinking this might move Jimmy to confess. But Jimmy had the same blank, immutable expression as his stepdaughter Lejean—like many of the Appalachian-poor in this part of central New York. I thought it would be too easy for him to conceal guilt; I begged Sarian to give me more time to hunt for more evidence, but he only gave me a few hours. There was pressure to wrap the investigation: Rob Cummings wanted the Lab to move on, and certain investigators were starting to question whether Troy had been murdered: someone floated a theory that he’d actually died of a heart attack.

  I meditated on the bank of trees in the darkening afternoon. It came to me that the big wild oak in the center of the firs was just the sort of tree that Troy would’ve been attracted to. I circled the grove carefully, then I threaded between two of the tall spruces, flanking the oak. There was a small knot midway up the trunk that I could step on. I climbed up to a fork in the trunk, but the tree was too young for my weight and I couldn’t get much higher. I hopped down, circling the perimeter one more time. I knew Troy had climbed this tree, probably spent hours in its branches: there was something here for me.

  The wind was picking up and low, dark-bellied clouds were drifting in. The snow would start at any moment and then it would be too windy to protect the tracks. I surveyed the sky for a despairing mo
ment, and then, as my gaze lowered, I noticed a snowflake turning in the air.

  Except that it wasn’t a snowflake, it was a feather.

  I scanned the branches behind it, then I lit on a nest tucked onto one of the branches of the oak; startled, I followed a sensation—something like a scent—trickling along the lines of the bark, along the trunk, down to the knothole—and my breath stopped midway through my body. It took me five seconds to recover enough to start walking backwards then turning, running, flat out, toward the house.

  THERE WAS A NEWSPAPER reporter present when we finally confronted Jimmy with the snow-preserved footprints. She was from the local paper and she’d monitored our progress at a low-key distance, running small items about the case on the second page. There was a gang of investigators milling around that day and some deputies were interviewing Anita again at the front of the house. Sarian, Bruno Pollard, and I walked Jimmy past the backyard. Bruno pointed to the tracks, told Jimmy they matched his boots perfectly, that based on the weather patterns of the past few days, they were reasonably sure these prints were made on the night of the murder—when an ice storm would have created the glazed sheen of the tracks, followed by snow, then they would have been uncovered by the bright sun of the following days. Bruno asked if Jimmy had anything he’d like to tell us. Jimmy sniffed and swiped his nose on the cuff of his flannel shirt. What’s this, now? he asked, squinting at the boot tracks. What’re you showing me?