And Michael opened the back window and he and Alice called and called Fluffy in the alley, and the dog’s name came echoing back to them from the mirthless backs of buildings.
Now, in the living room, he watched his unsteady fingers bundle up Alice against the recent cold snap. He struggled a bit with her coat, but she helped one arm through a torn sleeve liner and out the end. He pulled on her wool hat, wrapped her scarf until only her eyes and the bridge of her nose showed. They were partners. She gave him a stoic look over the scarf and he felt the sudden urge to weep. Then he heard an odd clicking sound. He stood perfectly still in the middle of the living room, listening. Alice began to sing a song about the letter H and he shushed her with a finger to his lips. He thought the sound might be coming from the smoke alarm. He tested it and Alice made a cringing face and covered her ears, and he hugged her and told her he was sorry for scaring her. He remembered from somewhere that tapped phone lines made clicking sounds. Click, and they’d know all about you and how to separate you from your family. They’d add to some mistake you’d made until you couldn’t recognize it anymore. He and Alice stood there taking in the silence of the room. “I’m hot,” Alice said from inside her scarf. Then he realized the clicking sound was the grinding of his own teeth.
He pulled on his coat. They held hands down the stairs. Walked up Holly Street through the bright cold to Metz Park, where they liked to play invasion of the zombie dads and prepare a delicate squirrel and tree moss stew. It was late afternoon.
In the park, everything slowed. Stretched out. Light slanted, burnishing the bare branches of pecan trees. They walked past a warped baseball backstop, a paper-strewn dirt field. A trash barrel near the playscape bulged with charred garbage. The whole place smelled like regret.
A few bundled people came and went, their heads swiveling toward the swing sets where Michael was pushing Alice. Michael wondered if he was talking too loud. He was often paralyzed by the thought of some future humiliation gathering just outside his awareness. True, he’d brought much of this on himself, on them—but he was scared of what might happen. Scared of the two men. He tried to remember exactly what he’d told Lucinda about the murders, but it seemed lost among their many quarrels, outrages, and reconciliations. The beginnings of panic fluttered in his chest. But after a while there was only Alice’s back-and-forth arc in the swing. “High, higher, higherest!” Alice yelled. He told her that this was just about as high higher higherest as things could get. She might fall out. And then what?
“Fuck it,” Alice said sharply. Michael glanced quickly around to see if anyone had heard her. A woman on a bench was laughing, hand to mouth. She had on sunglasses and a puffy hat that looked like an animal. Her little boy, several years older than Alice, was off climbing the playscape. The woman’s good skin and confidence made Michael uneasy. Michael laughed in case that was expected of him, too. Then he said, “Alice,” with fatherly disapproval in his voice. He glanced over at the woman. Her sunglasses hid her eyes, but he could feel her scrutiny. He couldn’t see Alice’s face, only the back of her wool-hatted head as she fell away on the swing and then rose again until she almost touched the low, bare branches hung with fire.
At bedtime, Michael read “Rapunzel” to Alice. His hands were shaking but he hid this by bouncing the book lightly on his thighs. Alice chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. She asked him how he could be sure which things in the story were real and which were made up. He said all of the things in these stories are made up. They couldn’t really happen. But how did he know? she asked. Well, he said, for instance, even though they might want to, most people don’t really hide their children up in towers until they grow up. “That’s called child abuse,” he said. “People go to jail for that.” He smiled. Her face fell a little. She stared off at the darkened window beside them, her own reflection. Alice seemed to consider what it would be like to live at such a height all alone. “In the tower,” she said, “you can think about who you’re going to be when you grow up and let your hair grow super long before they cut it.”
12
MOST OF THE evidence that the fire didn’t destroy, the water did. Then the short-staffed detectives in Forensics (half of whom were out of town at a conference) botched what was left. The DNA samples were inconclusive. Firefighters and police and EMS paraded through the unsecured crime scene, dragging through sooty water their hoses, klieg lights, and gurneys. Defiling Kate’s girls’ bodies again and again.
At night, the billboard with the girls’ faces—paid for anonymously, Kate discovers—burns bright over the interstate. Elizabeth shaping her mouth into a smile that’s a bit sullen, a bit prideful, it’s true. Zadie with the pixie cut from her sophomore year Kate had fought against. (Your beautiful hair is gone was all Kate could think of to say.) Meredith with her large eyes, her skin darker than Kate remembered.
WHO KILLED THESE GIRLS? the sign says. A reward offered. A tip line number listed.
On the first anniversary, Kate’s scheduled to do an interview with a woman reporter from the Chronicle but cancels at the last minute, then allows local TV news reporters to trot her out to make her plea. She mentions the hotline number, platitudes about justice and closure. On TV, she’s the martyred mother, her face slack with something, though she’s not sure yet if it’s grief. Watching one of the reports on the ten o’clock news, she is amazed to find she had applied eyeliner and then is angry with herself for caring enough to.
Strangers mail her—in care of the news stations—their children’s drawings of her girls in heaven. Heaven has horses. Heaven has tennis and bike riding and seashells by the seashore. In these heavens, there are always the three girls, though it strikes Kate there are times she has almost forgotten about Meredith. Strangers who have lost their children send her recordings—email attachments, CDs—with their survivor stories she’ll never listen to. They send their children’s school photos, favorite stuffed animals (some tattered, discolored with age), and occasionally even locks of their dead children’s hair. These, of course, are meant to bring her closer to the strangers, but they don’t.
By the third anniversary, the tip line has conjured eighty-seven confessions. The publicity has brought out all the crazies, Detective Robeson says. He knows only a small number of them hold any promise, so he updates her from time to time so she doesn’t go insane. It was me all along, they all say. I was the one. She asks the detective why they confess. Because, he says, most have nothing else left of value to give.
Kate still suspects everyone. Ray, who, on his knees, begged Kate for forgiveness on the front lawn in front of the neighbors a month after the murders; Bill MacPherson, who delivered the twice-monthly supply of napkins, cups, and bowls to the shop that were ignited to start the fire; the girls’ previous high school band director, who kissed Zadie in the instrument closet when she was in tenth grade. Even two homeless men, Truck and Trailer, who shuffled in single-file tandem along Barton Spring Road, so that one seemed to tow the other. She knows this makes no sense. But she can’t help herself. The mind reels. She remembered her mother saying that. Kate pictured a broken projector spooling film to the floor. But her mind did reel. Flung at her all its confused, spent images, its nonsense. Spooled out hypotheses until there was nothing but conspiracy and blame. It’s in this way that she continues to avoid the brutally quiet, small words spoken at her door that night.
Kate has planned out the whole thing. How when it comes time, she will write a victim’s statement and read it at the trial. Slowly. To the jury. To her daughters’ murderers. Rather than bear witness to her loss, she will curse the murderers’ fathers and mothers, their wives and children. She will utter heinous prayers. May their children plunge out of upper-story windows. May their fathers be rent limb from limb. May their mothers’ eyes be gouged out. May their penises be severed and inserted into their own gaping mouths.
She will offer no mercy.
Were her daughters offered mercy?
No understanding.
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What was there to understand?
She will bring down their houses.
Then, a few days before the sentencing phase, she’ll get one of the security guards she’s been working on during the trial to let her into the courthouse after hours. She will tell him she left her cell phone behind. After she recovers the phone from beneath a courtroom seat cushion, she’ll ask to use the nearest ladies’ room, which is approximately twenty-seven steps and one left turn from the courtroom door. In the restroom’s second stall, there’s a plumbing access panel just behind the toilet. She knows all about these from the ice cream shop, its bad plumbing. She’ll need the Phillips-head screwdriver in her purse to take it off. She’ll remove from her purse and place among the pipes the light brown calfskin pouch she’s sewn together from the upper portions of the girls’ cowgirl boots. It’s a bit of a patchwork, it’s true. She’s hidden the seams as best she can. The raised patterned leather—small spiraling plant shapes, whorls—looks like the topography of a map. The rise and fall of the land. Inside the pouch, a .380 handgun borrowed from her former brother-in-law, the same caliber used to kill her daughters.
Her wrath will be cunning, swift, terrible.
13
NEXT TO HER bed, Rosa keeps a plastic blue crate full of photos, interviews, notes, and news clippings about the murders that tell her nothing. A string of false confessions, some interviews that she’d done early on with Detective Robeson, witnesses in the shop earlier that day. Most remembered nothing except a small fire breaking out near the waffle irons. Later, a few recalled a fight in the parking lot. A disgruntled boyfriend of one of the girls, one said. Skate punks, said another. Homeless guys. Dropouts. The guy with the art car. A young man in a long overcoat. Squaring the circle, she thinks, looking at the crate. Where had she heard that?
And now, six weeks before the fifth anniversary of the killings, she has a feature story, possibly even the cover. The city was going to raze the ice cream shop, which had been condemned since the murders. People were angry, unsure of what to do. Until now, except for their yearly plea on the news channels, the girls’ families had turned down interviews. Victims’ families, Rosa knew, always had their own agendas and timetables. Parents who’d lost children were the most difficult. They went along with interviews to put pressure on the police or potential suspects. Sometimes they wanted to warn others or band them together for a cause, or to simply express their anger at God. Often their grief was complicated by a perplexed sense of failure. What could we have done differently? If only I’d been there. Though it was never clear what they might have done to change it. Even years after, the future for many of them—beyond what it might reveal about the past—was a void.
She’d sit with these mothers and fathers on their sofas, framed photos of their children clustered on the coffee table, illustrating what was obvious to everyone but them: that their loved ones never aged. That their children gestated unchanged inside them.
14
IT’S A WEEK before the fifth anniversary of the murders, and a crowd has gathered in the ice cream shop parking lot, anxious to get on with things (with what exactly is unclear, even to Kate, who has helped organize the gathering). The ice cream shop itself is encircled by a temporary metal fence. Workers have gutted the building. The smell of diesel exhaust is in the air. A backhoe and a dump truck idle behind the gate, waiting for the word.
A number of people in the crowd wave photos of the girls, and signs that read JUSTICE DENIED and NEVER FORGET. Hollis Finger is among them, his clothes already lightly dusted with crumbled drywall and ash, the unseasonable heat rising through his shoes from the asphalt. Television news crews and newspaper reporters crouch under the pecan trees and sit at the picnic tables in back. They talk among themselves, unsure what to do. Is this a protest or a memorial? they wonder. Later, under the tree, Rosa Heller, the reporter, will approach Kate. They’ll talk about the tip line, the donations to the charity that Kate and Meredith’s father have started in the girls’ names. Kate will stumble over her words, her tongue thick in her mouth. A tribute to their memory, Kate hears herself saying. Rosa will remember being startled by pecans plunking off the picnic table beside them.
The firefighter, Jack Dewey, is there too, near the tree in back. Kate recognizes him from the TV interview of a few nights before: his crew cut, his hands in his jean pockets. First responder. Discovered the victims. A bare foot sticking out of the water. I have a daughter, he’d said. He paused and studied the ground. The TV reporter in her red scarf was nodding, encouraging him, wanting desperately to finish his sentences. I have a daughter, he said again, who was lost for a while, who disappeared. But then she came back. He tried to find the words on the ground. Not a day goes by, he said, looking up, when I don’t think of those girls. They are a great comfort.
Kate thinks she imagined Jack Dewey’s last sentence. But she hears it over and over again in her head. They are a great comfort.
From where Hollis stands, he can see the shop’s flung-open front doors, the yellow police tape still clinging to the glass. A gaping mouth. Every once in a while a helmeted worker emerges from the dark opening, blinking in the sunlight as if waking from a dream.
15
KATE’S HEART SHAPES itself around a lack. A never-will-be. It doesn’t grow fonder. It doesn’t grow colder. It doesn’t forgive. It doesn’t even seek to be filled. It only sends itself away and then returns to itself. She doesn’t know why. The girls won’t tell her yet. So she waits.
In her dream, it’s a surprise.
The doorbell rings and rings but it sounds like the buzzer on the dryer. First she thinks it’s the newspaper reporter, Rosa, from the anniversary vigil. But it’s the girls, home for Christmas, something Kate’s forgotten about. She’s a bit panicked because the house is a wreck. In fact, it’s been recently sold. Boxed up and hauled away by college boys to a new condo downtown, though she knows this happened years ago. How did she forget to tell the girls about the move? she wonders. Mom? Where are our beds? She sees their fallen faces in the entryway. They won’t even look her in the eye. But they’re wearing tank tops, shorts, and flip-flops, their toenails newly painted seashell pink, and they’re not at all ready for bed. The resiny sweetness of their sunscreen is in the air. And she knows it’s not Christmas at all but the end of summer, Labor Day, the weekend before school starts. They’re supposed to be with her in Galveston, at her mother’s place. Her memory lapse is unforgivable. In ancient times people used different rooms in their houses, nooks and crannies, even furniture, to store memories so they wouldn’t forget. Kate learned this in Latin class. That was how these people memorized speeches. She knew that every ancient woman’s bottom dresser drawer held a revolver in a leather pouch, a vibrator, and hair-trigger memories that sprang out when least expected. Jesus, Mom, the girls say. A little too much information.
They are sitting together, the three of them, on hard plastic chairs in a small room—a room off the kitchen with a tiny window in the door that Kate had somehow forgotten. Inside the room, it smells of men and confused intentions. For some reason Kate can’t touch her girls. Then she realizes it’s because they are still tender from their sunburns. She hadn’t watched out for them, reapplied sunscreen when they went back into the water. This too is unforgivable. She worries that later, without their beds to curl into, they will want to leave.
So when do we meet the new guy? her girls ask. And the waffle cone smell—freed from the small, soon-to-be-forgotten crevices of the house—is so thick that Kate can taste it at the back of her throat.
16
They were daughters.
They were loved.
They were innocent.
They were cursed.
They were unlucky.
They were careless.
They asked for it.
They had no choice.
They were afraid.
They were brave.
They trusted.
They were betrayed
.
They suffered.
They heard a voice.
They saw a light.
II
17
THE WEEK AFTER the ice cream shop demolition, Hollis sees the girls in the bare trees near the Zilker Hillside Theater, drinking peach wine coolers and watching a shabby production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At first, Hollis thinks it’s a trick of the moon tower’s glow and the shadowy twisting oaks. But then he notices the wind has changed directions and his cedar allergies are coming on and his left ear aches, all of which are signs.
Covered in ash from the demolition, the girls look somehow leaner, taller than they’d been in life. Gone is the baby fat, thick ankles. They hoot from the trees at the Puck, who forgets his lines and whose blocking is so bad that he seems to drift around the stage like an abandoned boat. Elizabeth, a stage manager in high school, takes blocking notes, mimics their stepfather’s East Texas drawl: That there’s a piss-poor performance. From a nearby branch, her sister, Zadie, shakes her head ruefully and speaks out of the side of her mouth: A sorry-ass sight. The girls seem to sense Hollis watching them, because they crumble and smoke in the moon-tower twilight. Meredith, her brown skin and dark hair washed out with ash, takes a long swallow from a wine cooler and looks up thoughtfully at the stage. I like that fella with the horse’s head, she says. They all laugh, because that’s Meredith. A horsey girl. Meredith, kicked by a horse when she was ten. Meredith with a curving scar like a bend in a river on her abdomen from the surgery. A kidney lost.
Zadie, in a know-it-all way that seemed to embarrass the others, says, His name’s Bottom and he’s got an ass’s head. Hello?
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