THE FRIDAY BEFORE I leave Detroit, I have coffee with Paula to say good-bye. We’re at a chain coffee shop off Orchard Lake Road. I’m wearing my black combat boots, black jeans, and a black T-shirt.
“Wow,” she laughs. “Who’s the serial killer now?”
I try to laugh it off. There’s another light bruise on my cheekbone that I tried to cover with a thirty-minute suntan before meeting her.
I know that something inside me has changed over the past six weeks. I’m unshaven and lonely, but that’s the constant; Paula is sensing something in my eyes that maybe the apparel simply frames.
I tell her how good it’s been to see her while I’ve been in town, to reconnect. When we talk about my dad, I tell Paula I got a bad feeling when he rubbed my daughter’s shoulder at the Tigers game.
I tell her, “I’m territorial, I guess. I don’t want him touching her.”
HE COMES HERE, TOO
I take a detour on my drive home past the Evergreen Plaza Shopping Center and stop at the house I grew up in. Parking next to the curb that I used to spend summers sharpening wooden Popsicle sticks on, I get out and knock on the front door but nobody answers.
I walk around to the back where the brick-lined patio my father used to lift weights on has been torn out of the dirt and replaced with a concrete pad. The grass I burned down has gone to weed. In a far corner there’s a swing set that wasn’t there years ago, but it’s as beat-to-hell as the one my father gave us.
I step onto the concrete patio and remember the girl named Jenny down the street from us, how we made wreaths from dandelions one summer, placed them on our heads in the grass beside this very spot, and married one another with the burn of sunlight in our hair. I remember not knowing how to tell Jenny anything about my family life but how the enmity inside my home was calmed by my ability to curl up inside Jenny’s eyes and rest there faithfully in the harder moments. I couldn’t have known I’d spend most of my adult life looking for that in somebody again. I drove by Jenny’s house on my way into the neighborhood and there was a foreclosure sticker on the window and the inside of the house was like a box of darkness behind broken curtain rods.
I walk around to the front of my old house and knock on the door again and stand there, and when I’m about to leave, a black man in a tight shirt answers.
He locks the screen door with thinning fingers and says through the meshing, “You want something in my backyard?”
“I used to live here,” I say.
“I know it,” he says. “You look just like your old man.”
Then we stare at each other, and I can feel the heat on the back of my neck and I look at the screen door and can tell that it hasn’t been changed since all those years ago, since I was a kid, just like the entryway to Tim’s home hasn’t been altered, either.
I have returned, after all, and I recognize my place.
I look back at the man and his eyes are wide open and brown when he adds, “Pretty sure he comes here, too, you know.”
I SPEND THE entire weekend in my hotel room, the curtains drawn, the privacy sign hung outside my door. I’ve turned off the ringer on both my cell and the room phone. At night a cube of red light blinks periodically, telling me a call is coming through, but I don’t answer.
A few days later I drive to the Oak Park police station in the suburb south of Berkley. I haven’t eaten. Inside the waiting area, I can smell the buildup of must and rankness from decades of crime shuffling through this space.
Behind a window, two black women are laughing at a joke. I’m wearing my suit because I’m doing last-minute research in a few office buildings where I think dressing sharply will work to my favor, but I’m white as the day is long in here.
They stop laughing when they see me.
“What you need, honey?” one of the women says. She has big hair curled into a huge puff around her head, the way my grandmother used to. She’s pretty, and I can smell her perfume.
“I need to FOIA a case,” I said. “I’m looking for a file going back to the seventies.”
She hands me a form. I stare at it.
“Relationship to the case?” she says.
I look up at her. Her eyes are like toffee, waiting for me to answer. I look back down at the paper and start filling out the dates.
“It’s my father,” I say.
I believe that he has a file, one that I’ve never seen, but I want to know what’s in it.
MY LAST MORNING in town, I have breakfast with Teresa in a diner. She’d been leaving me messages when I hadn’t answered my cell. Now we order eggs and toast and bacon and coffee. I don’t eat much of mine. We’re mostly silent. Teresa reaches across the table and holds on to my hand. Her skin is soft and reminds me of my mother’s.
She says after a while, “I don’t think you’re capable of falling in love with me.”
I don’t say anything.
She doesn’t change the pressure on my hand when she says, “You might have become cold inside.”
What I want to tell her is that even as a boy I knew how small my mother was in the hands of men like my father.
I want to say: The way a bag fills up with air, is carried away—that was the distance between myself and what I could do to save her.
ELLIE
I stop at a diner near Ellie’s on my way to the airport that evening. She’s in a booth in the back, pouring sugar into her coffee, when I see her for the first time in a year.
She looks up at me and sets the sugar down. Her skin is pale, her hair is unwashed, and her eyes have dark rings around them. Her lips looked dehydrated and cracked from twenty feet away when I come up to her.
“Thanks for calling,” she says. Her voice has a tremor to it; her eyes are like black pools I could step inside.
I sit down on Ellie’s side of the booth and push up beside her. We’re silent at first, and then my shoulders are touching hers when I say, “I FOIA’d my own dad today.”
We just sit there for a while, and she puts her hand beneath my hairline and touches me and holds her fingers to my skin and sweeps her hand behind my hair and allows for the waitress to walk by before she says, “Why?”
I don’t say anything at first and then I know that I can’t tell Ellie the whole story because my father’s story, remarkably, is still his own, but after a while I tell her simply, “Because he deserved it, I guess.”
I glide Ellie’s spoon from the table and I’m squeezing it, and then an airplane cuts through the approaching dusk outside the diner window when I add, “Because he wasn’t just pulled over randomly back then.”
I can feel the edges of the spoon digging into the bones of my palm where I’m squeezing it when Ellie says to me, “Your father isn’t the Oakland County Child Killer, Jason,” and I know that, of course, but goddamn if I don’t want to bury him for the fear in me that still trembles from the inside out all these years later.
She takes the spoon from my hand and puts her own hand where the spoon had been, and I bend into her lap. I curl into Ellie, pushing her to the back of that booth until I can’t push anymore.
Ellie places her hands across my shoulders, and I am a small thing held by her for however long it will last, and if the people in the diner are looking I don’t know, and I can hear another plane cutting through the coming darkness outside and I can smell the leather in Ellie’s coat and feel the warmth of her hands soothing across my back and I hope it lasts a long time and I know that it can’t, and I never see her again after that.
4:00 A.M.
We live out the consequences of our betrayals, usually not with precision, but with a great amount of estimation from the gods as to what our punishment should be. It’s never going to be exactly an eye for an eye, but you can bet your ass it will hit you in the same genre of hurt.
When I got back to Idaho from Detroit, I was still tweaking from everything I’d learned about the case, but something was wrong in my home now, too. I spent a week showering my kids with affecti
on, overwhelming them, rejoicing in them ad nauseam, but the emotional knickknacks were out of place on the shelves of my relationship with my wife. She spent a lot of time in silence. I spent my own amount of time analyzing that silence.
I’d been emotionally unfaithful with Teresa, maybe even fallen for Ellie in those last moments again, but I’d walked away from Detroit and come home to my kids and maybe even to my wife in many ways, if not physically. I was ready to do anything to keep my family together. The more impossible that seemed, the harder I fought, and the more hopeless I became. What I knew of my wife’s affair—the knowledge blossoming in me at the time but without proof yet—and of my own transgressions, too, was enough to know that we couldn’t turn back, but the uncertainty of what that meant for our kids was terrifying to me, and I raged within that terror.
One night I stood in the street out front of my neighbor’s house at four in the morning, my own front door left open behind me and allowing the cold air in. I was barefoot, in only my pajama bottoms, twenty yards from the man’s doorway. I wanted to cut him in the fucking neck, but underneath that, I knew, was my father punching my brother so hard it frightened me my whole life. Underneath all of my anger at the man in front of me in the darkness of that street was my anger at the man behind me in the darkness of four decades of fear, of rage against manipulation by my father, who had prevented me, I thought, from knowing love, from being able to give or receive honesty, from allowing myself to be whole or to live healthily.
I had a steak knife from our kitchen in my hand on the street that night. I saw it plunging into my neighbor’s heart and I saw it plunging into my own afterward. I imagined my face dropping into the leaves of his yard, the last remnants of autumn dithering even in darkness from the big maple that cornered his property.
What held me from violence, what kept me from murder or my own suicide, was that each of us had children of our own, whom I would never leave or betray, not even his. There were young ones yet, lucky enough to be remembered by more than news clippings and aerial photos or footprints in the blood or snow, or in the leaves like an ellipsis leading to an early end.
ONE DAY IN November, after dropping off my kids at school, I sat a red light until it turned green and the cars were honking behind me. Out of nowhere, I became so insanely angry again. By the time I got home, the rage had taken over my body in a way I’d only seen happen to my father.
I parked my car crookedly in the driveway and kicked through the back door, storming around. My wife was still asleep and I shouted at her to get out of bed. I broke things against the walls, a vase that splattered into pieces like spring ice, a few picture frames that splintered at their corners, sending shards of glass careening across the room. I screamed at the top of my lungs like exorcising a demon. I broke what we had and more, it seemed.
My wife removed herself to a corner of the living room, curling away from me on a couch with her eyes alert, her body frozen into position while the various objects we’d collected over the years soared by and exploded into fragments against the walls we’d painted together after weeks of picking out colors.
Looking back, she was as my mother in that moment, and I was as my father. Hadn’t I been fated to repeat that dynamic of violence after all?
When my wife finally confessed to her affair, I did not feel any relief whatsoever. There was no metaphorical releasing of the pressure cooker, no steam pouring out and emptying my burden of worry and suspicion, no draining of the pain of not knowing. I made my way into another room and shut the door.
I crumpled onto myself on the floor, shaking. Decades of pain came back to me. I was scared and alone again, afraid of what might become of my life, afraid of my kids disappearing from my arms that had held them so tightly for so long.
By December, my neighbor and my wife were hanging Christmas lights together at her rented house a few miles away, and I’d put a “For Sale” sign in the front yard of the home we’d built from the concrete up.
THE BERKLEY WITNESS
A few weeks after my meltdown, I get a return call from the Berkley Witness, Sebastian. Most of my house is packed up in boxes, so I sit on the floor in an empty room and set up my recorder. We speak for two hours.
It was Christmas Break, 1977, Sebastian tells me. He was nine years old.
The snow was falling, he says. He wanted to ride the new bicycle he’d gotten for Christmas, but his mom wouldn’t allow it. Sebastian’s mom was single and worked hard to provide for him, but she had a week off and they’d been looking forward to spending time together.
She worked at a bar on 6 Mile in Detroit. During a snowfall one afternoon, Sebastian’s mom got called in to work and Sebastian used her absence from the home as an opportunity to take off on his new bike to a vacant lot where he cruised around in the snow.
Afterward, he rode down 12 Mile to the 7-Eleven store. As he pulled up, a young girl holding a bag containing what he could see was a magazine and a candy bar was walking toward a car.
Sebastian caught the girl’s eye. Showing off for her on his new bike, he did a spinout in the snow. When he looked back at the girl, a cop was walking out of the 7-Eleven in full uniform behind her. Sebastian recognized the cop from the neighborhood.
Sebastian got worried that the cop, whom he assumed had recognized him, too, might rat on Sebastian for riding his new bicycle against his mother’s wishes. Sebastian went home, cleaned off his bike, and hoped for the best.
A couple of days later Sebastian saw the girl’s picture in the newspaper saying she’d been kidnapped. Her name was listed as Kristine Mihelich.
Sebastian, still afraid of getting into trouble for riding his new bicycle through the snow, said nothing to his mother about seeing the girl at the 7-Eleven. He did, however, tell me that he’d telephoned the OCCK hotline listed in the newspaper. The woman who took Sebastian’s call mistook him as a prankster. She threatened to come to his house. Sebastian did not call again.
At school, after Christmas break was over, Sebastian told his art teacher what he’d seen at the 7-Eleven, the girl from the news getting into a cop car before disappearing. The art teacher thought Sebastian was making things up. After Timothy King went missing, Sebastian reiterated his story at school, saying, “I swear I saw that girl Kristine.” The next morning Timothy King turned up dead, and Sebastian’s story was reported up the chain. A day later, Sebastian says, two cops showed up at his school.
The two cops, Sebastian said, terrified him. They took Sebastian into a vacant classroom and accused him of lying. When Sebastian persisted, one responded by forcing Sebastian’s head onto a desk and telling him, “Change your story.”
Sebastian says that the second cop got close to his face, within inches, and added, “Those guys are killers. Forget you saw anything. They will cut down your whole family tree.” The cops left Sebastian in the empty classroom, shaken. For a while after that, Sebastian slept under his bed.
During that following year, Sebastian met a girl and became close to her. Her dad was a cop. Sebastian and the girl were hanging out together when a police cruiser rolled by and Sebastian hid behind a tree. When the girl asked him why he seemed afraid, Sebastian asked if he could speak privately with her father. Curious about what was going on, the girl arranged a meeting.
That evening, Sebastian told the girl’s father the story of his sighting of Kristine. He also told the girl’s father about the cops scaring the shit out of him. The girl’s father listened carefully, then gave Sebastian his business card.
He told Sebastian, “You stay home. Keep your doors locked.”
Five days later the girl’s father was shot twice in the chest with two different guns. It was labeled a suicide.
The girl’s father was Flynn.
SAME NAME, SAME HOOD
In Sebastian’s story, the deaths continue to pile up. In high school, Sebastian told a friend the story of seeing Kristine with a cop outside that 7-Eleven. He spoke of the school visit by the two cops, then
of the later death of Flynn. This high school friend of Sebastian’s called the state police and made a statement. It was a Wednesday when he made the call. By the weekend, he was found dead of an apparent suicide, having reportedly gassed himself in his parents’ garage.
A year after that, Sebastian told the story to another friend. A day later, that boy got busted in school for marijuana possession. The cop who came to the school to investigate the incident was the same cop Sebastian had seen at the 7-Eleven with Kristine. One day later, Sebastian said, the boy who’d been busted for weed was found dead of a suicide, having also allegedly gassed himself in a car in the family garage.
When Sebastian was twenty-one and still living at home after years of depression, he confided in his mother about the threat level he’d felt from the cops that day at his school. His mother’s response was that Sebastian should mind his own business, but to placate him she called the police and reported it. One of the cops who had come to Sebastian’s school came with another to Sebastian’s home intent on arresting him for harassment. With them was the cop Sebastian had seen with Kristine.
When he saw them in the driveway, Sebastian hid in the garage and locked the door. The cops pushed through the interior door somehow. They cornered Sebastian in his garage. They insisted on Sebastian leaving in a car with them, but Sebastian refused.
When they put their hands on Sebastian, a struggle ensued and they busted his face against a few cylinder heads that were lying on the garage floor.
The cop that’d been with Kristine, Sebastian says, kicked him in the face and then leaned down and grabbed his hair. “I saw you take that girl,” Sebastian says he told the cop.
He could feel handcuffs tightening his arms behind his back. He could see his mother trying to dial for help from the doorway but somebody grabbed the phone from her hands, and then somebody else put a knee in Sebastian’s back and pulled his head up, suffocating him with a hand until he was unconscious.
The Kill Jar Page 17