Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  I sign my name to a list at the desk. The woman doesn’t even ask me who I am. She gets on the radio and says, “Bring in Gillespie.” After a few minutes a man walks through the doors, alone, wearing handcuffs. I take a quick glance at him, then look at the lawyer, who motions for us to follow him into a side conference room. The room is so small that when I reach for a chair my arm brushes Jared Gillespie’s. There is no electric shock of revulsion. It feels like nothing. It feels like skin, warm to the touch.

  We sit around the little table, the three of us, and I stare at the man across from me. Jared Gillespie is about six feet tall. He is thin but muscular, his biceps hard little lumps inside his long, slender arms. He sports a scraggly mustache. His stringy brown hair is long in the back and hangs over his eyes in the front. His face is young and round and soft. His eyes are black. He has a small mouth, lips so thin and pale they’re nearly indistinguishable from his colorless skin. His overlapping teeth are stained a faint yellow from nicotine. He is nineteen years old.

  He does not seem evil. His face is as blank as a doll’s, even when he smiles.

  The lawyer calls a guard to remove Jared’s handcuffs. Jared rubs his wrists. He takes a cigarette from a pack and lights it, inhaling slowly. Then he pushes the pack in my direction across the table. “Want a smoke?” he says. It’s the first thing I’ve heard him say. His accent is thick, lower-class southern. I nod and take a cigarette. He leans forward and lights it for me, and I look right into those black eyes. It’s like peering through a window into a dark and empty room.

  According to his friends’ accounts, Jared Gillespie is the one who forced Allison Avery into the trunk of the car. He was the first to rape her, and he paced back and forth punching the air while the others took their turns. He was the one who began to hit her, and then he kicked her, said Cody Parker, until she stopped screaming. The other two say they started to run back to Cody’s car, but Jared wasn’t with them, and when they heard a car engine start up they turned back to see the blue Honda Civic backing away, then racing toward the curled-up girl, Jared at the wheel. “We just stood there,” Parker said. “We couldn’t do nothin’.” When Jared pulled up beside them and ordered them to follow him, they did it, they say, because they were afraid he would kill them too. “He kept sayin’ we couldn’t let her go,” Parker said. “He said she saw us and we couldn’t let her go.”

  I can chart it out, now, exactly how it happened, who grabbed her, what they said, what they did, when they did it. I still don’t know how it felt to be there, to be her, to be him, this boy who sits slouched in his chair smoking a cigarette, the picture of sullen youth. I’m watching him, trying to picture him doing the things I know he did, trying to picture his face contorted with rage, the desire to destroy. I would like him to be an evil genius out of the movies, leaning back in his chair and coolly regarding us while he explained his master plan. All I see is this blank-faced boy, and I can’t feel anything about him, not fear, not even hate.

  His lawyer begins to go over some of his strategy for defense, that the cops coerced the other boys into pinning the blame on Jared because he’s the only one who will automatically be tried as an adult. Jared’s claim is that he was there, but he didn’t rape her, he didn’t hit her, and in fact he got scared and took off running when the other boys climbed back in the car and gunned the engine. He says they came after him and demanded he get in the car. “I didn’t want to hurt nobody,” he says, his voice a monotone. “I thought we was just gonna steal the car.”

  “How are you feeling, Jared?” The lawyer leans forward, an expression of avuncular concern on his face. “Are you scared?”

  Jared looks down at the table and shrugs. “Yeah, I’m scared, man,” he says. He studies the cigarette in his hand, burned down almost to his fingers. “I’m really scared. There’s no doubt about that.”

  “You know, Jared,” his lawyer says, “that the district attorney will likely seek the death penalty.”

  “I know, man,” Jared says, shaking his head. “I’m scared, too. Them other guys is lyin’, and I’m the one who might fry for it.”

  The lawyer looks at me, as though to say, are you getting this? I raise my eyebrows. We stare at each other for a moment, and then he turns back to Jared. “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen,” he says. Then he pauses, leaning back in his chair. “Have you seen Teresa lately?”

  “Yeah, she came to see me the other day.”

  “And how’s your little girl? What’s her name? Annabelle?”

  “Annabelle, that’s right. She’s okay, I guess. I haven’t seen her.” He takes another cigarette from the pack.

  “You miss your family, don’t you?”

  “Sure I do. I miss my mama, and Teresa, and my baby. What’s she gonna think, her daddy locked up in a place like this?” He waves his hand to indicate the room. Then he lights his cigarette. “You want another one?” he says, looking at me. I look back at him, and he smiles, showing all his jagged yellow teeth. I shake my head, and he shrugs as if to say, your loss. He takes a drag and exhales slowly.

  “You know Allison Avery’s family misses her too,” the lawyer says, his voice grave. He shoots me another look to see how I’m taking this.

  “I do, and I feel real bad about that,” Jared says. “I wish I’d never gone along with that plan. I read about her mama in the paper, and I’m real sorry for her. But she said she wanted me dead, and that’s not right. I didn’t kill her baby. I wasn’t the one.”

  The righteous indignation in his voice when he says “that’s not right” makes it hard to hold my tongue. Underneath the table I rub my hands up and down my thighs. Anything I could say to him would be like Peter ramming his mailbox, a useless, hopeless gesture. I want to say “You hit her. You raped her. You killed her.” I want to ask him if there was any reason why.

  I sit here listening to his lawyer feed him questions designed to provoke responses that will make me see him as human, as pitiable. I’d like to stop him and tell him that I’ve seen Jared Gillespie as human from the moment I walked into this room, and that it makes no difference. He is the reason I have to be afraid. He is death visited upon you without reason or remorse. He didn’t kill her because she spurned him, because she cheated him in a drug deal, because he knew her and wanted her to die. He just killed her.

  Jared Gillespie stands up to go back to his cell. His lawyer stands up, saying something I’m not even hearing anymore, and then I’m on my feet, too, and I hear myself saying, “Why did you do it?”

  “Don’t answer that, Jared,” his lawyer says sharply. He frowns at me, his face a picture of righteous anger at my violation of the deal.

  I ignore him, staring at Jared Gillespie. “Tell me why,” I say. I can hear the note of pleading in my voice.

  Jared looks at me for a long time. I wonder what he sees. I am the same height as Allison Avery, the same age. I have dark hair, the same shape to my face. Does he see her when he looks at me? Does he want to rape me, beat me, crush my bones? “Jared,” I say, making my voice hard and sharp. “Tell me why.”

  “Lady,” he says, finally, “I don’t even know.”

  Epilogue

  In Memphis, the end of the summer begins with Death Week. Every year thousands of people come from everywhere to line up outside the iron gates of Graceland and weep for a man they think they knew. Tonight I’m covering the candlelight vigil, moving through a crowd of solemn men and women in Elvis T-shirts, candles in their hands. Some of them are waiting to file through the gates behind the house and past the grave, strewn with flowers and love poems. Some of them have already been, and now they are just waiting with the others for the night to pass into the day that Elvis Presley died. A loudspeaker broadcasts his ballads, and some of the people sing along, tears streaming from their eyes. It’s a hot, sluggish late August night.

  When I’m through here, David wants me to come to Mud Island so we can talk. Two weeks ago I finally told him
about the heroin, about my desire for Peter, about how completely I lost myself in the story. We were sitting on his front porch. Across the street a couple sat close on a porch swing, not talking, just watching the sun go down. Some mother’s voice rose in the air after a tardy child. “I can’t believe it,” David kept saying over and over. “I thought I knew you. I had no idea.”

  “Neither did I,” I said.

  I don’t know what else to say to him. I don’t know what will happen to us. Perhaps he deserves someone more like himself, someone who takes people at their word. I’m not sure what I deserve. In the end I will probably go to my car and drive past all the yellow-painted homes, the porches, and hanging plants. A young woman riding her bike will lift her hand in a wave and I’ll wave back. Then I’ll drive onto the bridge off Mud Island, heading back over the river into town.

  In the next week or so Peter will call to say that he’s leaving for college. He’ll say that he’s going to write and I’ll pretend to believe him. He’s spent the last month in a drug-counseling program, and he’ll swear to me again that he’s stopped using forever. Neither of us will mention the fact that we’ll both be at the trial, and most likely we won’t speak there, just lift a hand in greeting from opposite sides of the room. What we have left between us now is a faint tenderness, a faint embarrassment. He seems like a dream I had, and when I remember it now it’s not the words that passed between us I think of. It’s the small sounds he made when I kissed him, somewhere between pleasure and pain.

  As for Carl, sometimes I still catch a glimpse of him on the street or at another table in a restaurant where I’m eating lunch with Hannah. I pretend not to see him there.

  I’m not going to put in the paper that Jared Gillespie doesn’t know why he killed that girl. I’m going to keep reporting the things I’ve learned about him, that his father abused him, that he grew up poor and uneducated, that his father’s departure and his own early parenthood left him blaming women for the problems in his life. I’m going to report that he was hopped up on pills and alcohol. When you read it you still won’t understand how someone could do what he did, but the course of events will make a familiar, sad kind of sense, and you will know that everything happens for a reason.

  I’m not going to put in the paper that I went looking for Allison Avery, that I thought I would find her in the heroin rushing through my veins. Instead I found her in the terror I felt when I woke up in the shower with a boy I didn’t recognize screaming my name. I stopped my heart for her, and this is my secret, that I followed her as far as I could.

  “Love Me Tender” comes over the loudspeaker, and on the chorus thirty thousand voices join in. There is no way to describe the sound except to say that it’s beautiful, that it swells my heart. I look around me. A man beside me with dyed black hair and sideburns sways from side to side, his eyes closed. Two women hang on each other’s necks, weeping. I am not as different from these people as I would once have thought, all of us just looking for some kind of meaning, a story to shape our lives. When I leave here I will go back to the newsroom and make these people into a story. I will describe them, and report the things they’ve told me here tonight. They come because Elvis helped them through some of the worst moments of their lives. They come to see how he lived and where he died. They come because he was pretty. They come because once they met him, touched his hand. They come to be swept up in emotion, to let the sound of his voice remind them what they’re living for. When they see my story in the paper, when they see their names in print, they will feel a part of something so much larger than themselves.

  One thing I know. I am still here. In the hot, thick night, I stand shoulder to shoulder with thirty thousand people. The tiny flames of candles flicker in their hands.