The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

by Laura Tillman

  Suddenly, an extension curved out of the back, like an unknown limb. I’d noticed this one-story house that shared a wall with the building on East Tyler Street, but I’d always assumed they would stand side by side in back, the small house dwarfed by its big brother. But instead of going proportionally back, the little house narrowed into a series of small, linear rooms. In this way it resembled an arm—conjoined to the building at the pit in front, but then moving back skinny and independent into the lot behind. An alcove formed between the appendage of the little house and the body of the building, and everywhere along the border were doors; doors to the little rooms of the house, doors into the conjoined armpit between them, and then doors from all the first-floor apartments of the building opening out into the peninsula of grass. There, the white porcelain of a forlorn toilet lay on its side, and a square of carpet marked the entrance to one of the first-floor apartments.

  The city workers explained that they were closing off the building, but first they had to go inside to make sure they didn’t shut in any squatters. One man had already started sealing up some rooms.

  With the doors flung open and the insistent squeal of the drill boring unnaturally through metal, the building seemed like a surgical patient: it lay helplessly as it was unhinged and put back together, with a mix of new and borrowed parts.

  The city worker said I could look inside if I wanted to, and I walked in through an open doorway to my right. It didn’t take me long to realize where I was. Though the shape and size resembled a hallway, the lumps of clothes on the floor, dirty and shapeless as if they’d been through a flood, told the story. I’d seen it in pictures, though the mess looked fresher nine years ago when it was documented as evidence. I was standing in the crime scene. The doorway I’d stepped through was the same one nailed shut by John.

  It was too dark. I couldn’t be sure where my feet were taking me. All the court testimony made sense: the apartment was shaped like a hallway, witnesses had said. The rooms ran from one end of the building to the other with a door on either end. I could see the cracks of sunshine leaching through the doorframe, but not enough light came from any direction for me to know precisely what I was looking at. I feared I’d step on something in advanced decay.

  Here was the heart of dread. It was not fearsome. It was fetid, noxious, hopeless. A deep and exhausting misery, a crevasse so bottomless that, in the blackness, all one could make out were the contours of despair.

  I took photographs, using the flash to illuminate the room. But the bursts were momentary. I saw only glimpses:

  The concrete floor. The kitchen sink filled with plastic bags, dirty bowls. The ladle hanging from a nail, waiting to be used again. A container of lard on the counter, a box of oatmeal. An upended mattress pressed against the wall. Red and purple artificial flowers forever vibrant in a plastic vase.

  The contents of the apartment were preserved. Perhaps there had been squatters, vandals, addicts. But because the family had cobbled together the items they could find to make a home, it was hard to tell what was new and what was old. Later I learned that the brown stains on some of the items were dried blood.

  When I got outside, I felt like running. The wet air was clean and I gulped it in, realizing I’d been trying to hold my breath, trying not to inhale the smells of the apartment.

  They’re going to seal up the door, I thought. They’re going to close it up with their tools and I never have to go back inside again.

  The city worker invited me to look inside the attached house. Not much was left there. Dirt caked the floors, and the long body of a garden hose was coiled like a snake. Light filtered through the windows in the small rooms, and brilliant green leaves could be seen between the metal bars on the windows. The light and the leaves evoked the peace of one of my favorite paintings, Shadow Decoration. The 1887 oil on canvas work by Charles Courtney Curran shows a woman in a simple brown dress and apron hanging laundry from a line. Through the white sheets the viewer can see the dark shadows of exotic leaves, revealed as verdant green in the corner of the painting. She sees the laundry, the pins, and the line, but she’s surrounded by the friendly shadow-ghosts of leaves, representing an unseen paradise. In that portrait exists the possibility that you could be going through the mundane actions of your life—doing laundry or the dishes, say—but living in a different landscape.

  Inside the apartment the possibility of escape shrank down in the darkness. I had looked at the building from the outside so many times. I’d watched and cataloged it, contemplated its codes and scars and memories. But the essence lay inside, sealed up beyond the doors of people’s homes, where families’ lives are privately kept. There lay the love that John and Angela showed the children when they were alive, the laughter. There, too, was the hunger and the drugs and the blood.

  • • •

  I called Brad, the photographer, and he came by to take some pictures before they shuttered the apartment. As soon as he was finished, I thanked the city worker and walked down the block to Minerva Perez’s house. Minerva had lived in the neighborhood all of her sixty-nine years, always in the same house, two doors down from the building.

  That day she was inside with her cousin, who had also grown up here. Minerva was warm, her eyes always focused on yours, with a face that invited you to smile whenever she did. She may have been the first advocate of the building’s demolition; the children’s deaths had never stopped haunting her. The children had been a fixture in the neighborhood, and she’d seen them daily when they passed by her house on the way to their meals at Good Neighbor. But years had passed since the city had started to discuss the demolition of the building, and Minerva was still in its shadow. It could be there for the rest of her life.

  I asked Minerva what the neighborhood was like when she was growing up.

  “You better believe it—it was real nice here. We didn’t have cement. We used to walk. The blocks were dirt. Remember? And we had good neighbors. Los Chapas.”

  “All of those houses were neighbors,” her cousin cut in. “The Benevidez, aquí [here]. Now, no hay nadie [there’s no one]. Everybody’s dead.”

  I asked them what they meant by “better.”

  “Now, horita, you cannot trust anybody, mama!” said the cousin. “It was a beautiful neighborhood, we grew up here! No había gangas.”

  “There weren’t gangs,” Minerva reiterated.

  They remembered that the building used to be a gasoline station, something I’d learned from the fire insurance maps from the thirties. Later, they said, it was called the Imperial. After that it was derisively called El Hotel de los Chiflados, the Hotel of the Stooges, for the elderly people who lived inside. The nickname might have come from a 1939 Mexican comedy. Minerva and her cousin told me that men used to drive up in taxis around the corner and whistle to the prostitutes on the second floor just a few years before the murders.

  Minerva and her cousin talked about the old neighborhood with reverence: the families, the neighbors, the nuns at the Catholic school, the dirt roads. In Minerva’s memory, all of it was better than what was there now.

  “All the houses were beautiful houses,” the cousin said. “But now there’s puro ratones, there’s rats and everything.” The cousin, skeptical of me, told Minerva, “Es muy grande la history para ella.” The history is very big for her.

  The cousin said she used to live at the Imperial. She remembered the wives of shrimpers who lived there at the time. “They used to help us. The ladies, they were clean people, clean ladies! But ever since they killed these little kiddos there—did you get the story about the kiddos?”

  I had.

  I asked Minerva and her cousin when the building started to change, transforming from the nice place they lovingly remembered to the one they derided, that they wanted destroyed.

  “When people moved, it started changing because people from across started to live there,” Miner
va said, referring to Mexico. “It’s been more than thirty years.”

  “Thirty-five years,” the cousin chimed in.

  “They let it go, they let it go down,” Minerva said. “But still people live there. They don’t pay rent, they just go in there. Smoke pot and everything.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “I’ve been after the mayor so he can destroy it, do something, but they say they don’t have the money. And now the city, the city, now they’re saying the city bought it and it’s the city’s property. You can see I’m not lying, you can see lights at night in those windows, all those windows that are broken, I can see light. Me and Mr. Mendoza, we were outside and we can hear voices from inside.”

  “Como [like], right here, the Garzas were here,” the cousin said. “They had the kids, the sons, they grow up here. We all grow up here. It’s nice. Ahorita, now vive una Mexican lady she rented, she’s not supposed to have ladies from Mexico hiding in there or whatever. It’s not the same, mama.”

  “What I mean, it’s not the same,” Minerva started. “Sometimes I sit down outside and I figure out all the things that were my mom’s friends, my neighbors here . . .” She closed her eyes, imagining.

  “You close your eyes and you think about how it used to be?” I asked.

  She nodded. “It used to be real nice, you know. But when everything happened . . . I’m not saying this whole neighborhood . . . just this side here.”

  Minerva said that the vacant lot next door had, at one time, been the site of a beautiful house. The woman who lived there had killed herself. Felix Sauceda had also mentioned this death.

  “What happened to the house?” I asked.

  “They destroyed it.”

  “Who did?”

  “The owners,” she said. “Because it was so old and they didn’t want to fix it up and they destroyed it,” Minerva said. “After ten, fifteen years.”

  “You have a lot of stories here, in this neighborhood,” the cousin said. “I’m telling you the truth. You have a lot of stories. Then right over there in the corner, his name was Tony Rodriguez. Tony. La pichona.” The pigeon.

  “They killed him right there, too.”

  “They killed him over there with a machete. He used to have a store.”

  Minerva and her cousin recounted some of this story and some of that about the neighborhood. In their voices I could hear the pangs of nostalgia for a childhood that no longer existed. Even pleasant memories were tinged with violence, with suicides and murders and prostitution. Though Minerva and her cousin spoke a combination of Spanish and English, they both talked of the threat of people from “across,” moving in and destroying the neighborhood.

  “I wish you could go inside there and take pictures with somebody, mama,” said the cousin.

  “Well, I just did actually.”

  “You went by yourself?!” the cousin yelled, even louder than her normal loudspeaker pitch.

  “You went inside?” Minerva asked, shaken.

  “Into the apartment where they killed the kids,” I said.

  “You went inside? Mama, don’t go in there,” Minerva said. “It’s bad. I’m gonna tell you why: there’s some evil spirits in there. Better go to a church and get holy water because I’m gonna tell you why. The guy in the back, they went over there to that place at four o’clock in the morning, they saw a lot of things and they came out screaming.”

  Minerva looked at me warily, almost as if she were afraid to touch me again, lest she contract whatever I was now carrying. I listened to her admonitions, but I still hadn’t processed all I’d seen inside the apartment. Something powerful resided there. Was it a bad spirit, as Minerva said? Is a spirit the same as a memory so visceral it makes a terrestrial home, nesting between the walls of its setting?

  “The thing is, they should tear it down! That’s what I want, but there’s no one who will help me.” Minerva was frustrated. The other neighbors weren’t doing enough to rally to get the ­building demolished: the venom they had once felt had ­diminished, and she alone held on to it with the same ­intensity of years ago.

  Too many people had died at 805 East Tyler Street, and Minerva worried that in its current condition, there would only be more death to come. Some vandals could start a fire. Her house could also go up in flames.

  “Go to the church and get the holy water,” Minerva urged. “Se metió allí. Está malo,” she said to her cousin—she got in there. It’s bad.

  At the end of the afternoon, Minerva’s voice got quieter and formality wilted away. She was too upset to play the hostess anymore and spoke to me like a confidante.

  “You think this neighborhood has something?” she said.

  We could hear her cousin on the phone with her daughter, telling her that a reporter had gone into the building where the kids were killed.

  “She’s going to tell the whole neighborhood,” I said to Minerva, and a laugh came out of her, full and vibrant, like a sigh of relief.

  When I left Minerva’s house, I thought for a moment about going to the Immaculate Conception Cathedral, five or six blocks away. Minerva was sure the holy water would provide an antidote to my actions. I nearly went, if only to be respectful of her wishes. Instead I drove home and took a shower.

  • • •

  In the district clerk’s office I sorted through a box filled with folders and papers and unearthed a stack of photographs, eight-by-ten, glossy color images that had been printed with an abundance of ink. I paged through them one by one. Here was John, young with a week’s worth of facial hair, a plaid shirt with a dark collar, standing against a wood background. He was looking just beyond the camera. He appeared to be around twenty-two, his age when arrested, but it didn’t quite look like a mug shot, too informal. Another picture showed a happy Julissa. I recognized the image from the newspaper archive—she was smiling so widely that it almost looked as if she were baring her teeth. But unlike the picture I’d seen at the Herald, this photo wasn’t cropped. She was sitting on a bare, dirty mattress and seemed to be holding an empty videocassette box, though I couldn’t make out the title. In front of her, in the corner of the photo, was a little boy, his face turned away from the camera. John Stephan was in a third photo. He was sitting in a yellow-and-blue plastic swing, the kind with a secure bar for little children, suspended by ropes. He wore only a diaper. He was pale and his eyes were angled down toward the ground.

  The next set of images seemed to rise up suddenly, like an external force, though I was showing them to myself with the flipping motion of my hand. A child’s face was on an appendage divorced from its body. Little bodies of children, headless, were covered in puncture wounds from knives. And then, close-ups, in glossy ink that felt almost thick on the paper, of the wounds where heads were torn from bodies. On those wounds, the blood washed away, were flaps of skin I’d never seen on a human body, never imagined. Thinking of them now as I type this makes me tremble. I raced through the stack of photos, trying to see as many as I could as quickly as I could, until I felt that I might black out or throw up or fall to the carpet in tears.

  The first time I was told about the murder case, when I came across the documents in the filing cabinet near my desk, the cops reporter told me he’d seen the crime-scene photos. Something in the way he said it indicated a superior level of knowledge. I could read the file all I wanted, he subliminally told me, but until I saw the photos, there was something I just wouldn’t understand. Since I’d been researching the case, I’d rationalized many times why I did not, in fact, need to see the photos. The same information could be found in the coroner’s report. Maybe I was in denial. I wanted to understand the case, but some part of me was holding back, afraid of what might happen if those images were imprinted on my mind.

  Once I saw the autopsy photographs, the equation changed. If before John’s letters to me, filled with generosity and childli
ke curiosity, had weighed on one side of my conscience, the photos fell like an anvil on the other, shaping my understanding of the crime like a putty of flesh and clotted blood into living nightmare.

  When I heard what went on inside the apartment, I knew it was a different kind of crime from any a town typically experiences. But the crime itself wasn’t unique. It’s happened—infrequently—all over the world: parents killing their children. Less than two years before, Andrea Yates had drowned her five children in a bathtub in Houston. In 2009, a San Antonio woman killed her infant son and ate part of his brain. There are too many of these horror stories to enumerate. They happen, and then they happen again. I didn’t pick the story of Julissa and John Stephan and Mary Jane because it was necessarily any worse than the rest, but being in my backyard, it exerted an unusual pull, one that didn’t seem to let go, more than a decade later.

  I eventually took a breath and returned the stack of photographs. One of the members of the office staff pulled down an unassuming cardboard box that contained the bloodstained knives that had been used in the murders and informed me that if I wanted to peruse its contents, I’d need a mask and some gloves. I declined.

  Instead I went home and took another shower. I had nightmares that night, and every night for a week. Before I’d go to sleep, I’d start telling myself not to think of the photographs, and soon I could think of nothing else. They’d come at me in fragments and I’d try to blot them out, to invent another image that would collapse them into nothingness. But no image was powerful enough to supplant them.

  Even after the nightmares subsided, I couldn’t wear the shoes I’d worn when I walked around the apartment. They stayed in my home for weeks, sitting near the front door. I’d tie the laces, willing myself to leave with them on, then replace them at the last second. Then I gave up putting them on at all. I left home for a few months on a temporary assignment and took all of my clothes with me, except that dark gray pair of tennis shoes. I told my boyfriend I didn’t need them anymore. When I returned to the apartment and unpacked my things, I noticed the shoes, waiting for me in the back of the closet, defiant.