See How Small

“It should be a reminder,” he said, and thought of her plunging headfirst through the windshield, hair and blood. His legs weakened.

“Is that what you tell burned people? This should be a reminder?”

“If they’re the ones who started the fire, sure.”

She was suddenly silent, and he knew she was thinking of the ice cream shop. He leaned forward and kissed the top of Sam’s head. She’d always been lucky. Always favored. Which made him worry all the more.

8 (#ulink_fe317aea-1d27-56f4-8837-6d2324fc3f4d)

THIS IS WHAT Rosa Heller, a reporter covering the murders for the Chronicle, remembers: She’s seven years old, walking hand in hand with her dad toward the Lab School on the South Side of Chicago. She’s tall for her age, and in fifth grade she’ll begin to slouch to hide it. It’s early morning, still, and a fog off Lake Michigan clings to the yards and stoops. They stop at a corner grocery that sells the Wacky Packages stickers that she’s obsessed with, and her father gives her money to buy some because she loves him so much. When they turn the corner they walk alongside a vacant lot with a billboard for NuGrape soda and beneath it there’s a large blackened oval in the grass where someone set a fire. She wonders who would do something like that and decides that boys would, just to see what happened. She sees something shiny in the grass that she thinks is a bottle cap for her collection, and so pulls away from her dad and scuffs the dirt and grass with her shoe. She finds a half-dollar-size hoop earring. In the weeds near a metal fence, not twenty feet away, she sees a mustard-colored jacket. Then a brown leather purse, a string of toiletries, a pair of panties, a hair pick, and a compact mirror. Near the compact mirror, a brown hand that once held it. At first Rosa thinks the face staring back from a clump of weeds is a Halloween mask. She looks at her dad to be in on the joke, but he just stares. She can feel her skin prickle, but it takes a while for her to realize that it’s a woman’s face, missing nose and ears.

Rosa’s dad, Peter, was a politics reporter for the Chicago Tribune. They lived with her mother in a partly rehabbed two-flat surrounded by run-down rentals, used car lots, and liquor stores. The area was segregated, but a number of liberal white families, like hers, had moved into it in the late sixties, even given all the turbulence. Even partly because of it. Her parents had participated in freedom marches and seen violence up close. Her dad had had his nose broken. Someone had hit her mother in the head with a D-cell battery. On her dad’s desk at the Tribune she remembered a photo of him between the writer Alex Haley and the actor and activist Ossie Davis, smiling broadly.

Occasionally in their neighborhood someone would overturn a car and set it on fire, which secretly thrilled Rosa — she could often see the glow from her upstairs bedroom window. Her dad took great pains to explain to her that this was a symptom of an illness. Like the chicken pox or a rash? she asked. That’s right, her dad said, a warning on the surface about what was going on inside. There was so much anger that maybe it couldn’t be contained. Better a car than a passerby, he said. Better things than a person.

She doesn’t think it happened that way. Her dad wouldn’t have allowed her to get so close to the dead woman. She would have heard about the nose and ears most likely from someone at school, or maybe her dad talking to one of the local politicos on the phone. Or possibly she’d imagined it. She’d even looked in the Tribune archives to find the story, but couldn’t find any mention of mutilation. She wondered if this was like her memory of her dad one day cutting the TV power cord with a pair of gleaming shears while she was watching it, or the time she was forced to leave for summer camp while her Labrador, Ali, was dying on the living room floor — memories she suspected she made up to confirm what she already believed about her dad. Some lack in him. What had she believed? That he was high-principled but cruel. A gifted journalist who abused his talent. A secret racist who helped black people so that he could feel better about bitter feelings he harbored against them. He was guileless to a fault. He’d eventually driven off Rosa’s mother with his various lost causes and under-the-table funding of his younger brother, Bill, who was constantly strung out on back pain medicine and running from creditors. Much of what she’d accepted about her dad when she was younger she was unsure about now, which had both helped and hurt their relationship, she suspected. She can see her dad’s hands, their neatly trimmed, milky nails, the lump on the outside of his left hand where a benign tumor made the bone brittle and caused him to break the hand half a dozen times. How could the tumor be benign, she wondered, if it ate away the bone? On a recent visit to Chicago, she’d asked him if he’d had his checkup, his scheduled colonoscopy and PSA blood work. He said to be honest, he couldn’t remember when he’d last seen a doctor. He smiled a little boy’s smile that pretended not to know. On the table in front of her, his left hand seemed frail, the lump more pronounced. She loved his guileless eyes, the way they took in everything and denied it all.

It would have happened this way: Her dad takes her hand, leads her away from the vacant lot and the dead woman. Rosa never sees what she thinks she did — holes where the woman’s nose and ears should be. Voids. The woman’s skirt hiked up, the greenish glass of the Coke bottle stuck between her legs. When Rosa begins pointing near the fence, her dad makes light of what they see there, someone asleep in the weeds. Siesta time, he’d say, then make a snoring sound and pull Rosa away. The woman’s body sprawled languidly on the ground as if she were in her own bed and not a vacant lot. Her compact mirror open beside her, a quick powder touch-up when she wakes. Lazy bones, Rosa’s dad would say. Get up and get on your way. Don’t stray from the path. Don’t tarry.

He would have protected her.

9 (#ulink_4e9154de-0dc8-5556-8e99-d65cdf6cda15)

HOLLIS OFTEN CONFUSES what’s already happened with what’s to come. He knows this. Still, they feel the same.

The light was like a sudden blow to the head. It filled the interior of Hollis’s art car, made night into day. He could make out the titles of his books stacked between the seats, the three-legged metal horse with its Civil War rider and the shellacked horned frog perched on the front dash. Along the ceiling of the car, his pale green topographic maps of Austin with their concentric patterns. Blown-up photos of the three murdered girls, their faces so exaggerated in scale and singularly focused on one element — the convolutions of an ear, a forest of lash reflected in a green iris, a knuckle against the sly corner of a mouth — that they might be mistaken for abstract paintings.

His dazed first thought was that his mother had come for one of her rare visits, her headlights leaping against the back wall of their father’s den, and he felt alone and spiteful. He would not go with her, he decided. He would punish her. Every other Saturday, Hollis and his brother, Blake, would call their mother in Corpus Christi on the free long-distance line in his father’s downtown feed and grain brokerage firm, their father sitting in his swivel desk chair near the window, looking out at the tops of buildings along Congress Avenue, his face plowing a dark field. Blake, who would always talk first, told their mother how he’d gone over his handlebars on a bike ramp and knocked out a front tooth, and that Peter Parker knew he wasn’t a clone because he still loved Gwen Stacy even though she was dead and clones could never feel that kind of love, now, could they? Blake’s face shone with a need that made Hollis want to punch him. Their father handed Hollis the phone, and Hollis let the receiver drop and dangle by its cord at his feet. His father’s face crumbled like a dirt clod. He could hear their mother’s tinny voice down there calling his name. When he finally lifted the receiver to his ear, their mother asked if he’d forgotten about her visit. She exhaled and smoke rose into the ocean-blue sky of an open window somewhere. In his imaginings their mother looked like Gwen Stacy and he dressed her in Gwen Stacy’s black hair band, dark top, and purple skirt. The sun was unbearably bright against her bare legs. She pinned the phone between her chin and shoulder and painted her toenails pink, like seashells. Gwen Stacy had their mother’s crooked pinkie toes. Her body glistened and made him wince. On the phone, his mother told Hollis she was taking them to Six Flags on Saturday. His mother said, “You remember that crooked house?” She waited for Hollis to remember. “Casa Magnetica,” he said, grudgingly. A whole house tilted crazily so that water flowed backwards and oranges rolled uphill. She mentioned a few other exhibits and rides and got the names wrong and he corrected her. She said, “You were always better than me with names.” He was quiet. “We’ll have ourselves a time,” she said. Then that Saturday, their mother, who was so, so very late, stood in the driveway eclipsed in the Monte Carlo’s headlights, afraid to turn off the engine because it had died on her so many times on the way. Smoke rose above her head and at first Hollis thought her hair was on fire but then he could smell burnt oil and plastic and their father said, Carole, we better have a look at that, but when he opened the hood, fire rose up and burned the hair off his father’s forearm. His mother made a low, animal sound deep in her throat and held Hollis and his brother against her, and Hollis wanted to pull away because she smelled different and her breasts were larger and she had colored her hair ( frosted, she’d said) and he hated his brother, who touched strands of it with a kind of reverence. And the fire melted all the engine wires and blackened the hood, and their mother had to stay two extra days at a motel, where he and Blake swam in the pool and got sunburned and Hollis prayed for the Monte Carlo never to be fixed.

There was a banging on the driver’s window. “Mr. Finger?” a man’s voice said. Hollis didn’t say anything, lying very still under a blanket in the backseat, his body intensely aware of the coarseness of the weave, hoping the voice would just go away. He thought of the boy who’d busted his lip and committed the egregious theft of the conch. And he thought of Truck pulling his brother Trailer alongside Barton Springs Road, and the ways people were linked to one another in time and space by something just outside it, hidden from them always but intuited like the stars in the daytime. Or made into a likeness so that you saw differently. How could he string the everyday beads of his life from this? He didn’t know. But the voice outside wanted him to. “I don’t have anything you want!” he screamed, and realized it was true but also that he’d never be able to convince them of it. And a terrible light shone down and revealed his nakedness and shame.

10 (#ulink_b16eb551-1ef6-5966-99f2-2c204d69f200)

A YEAR AFTER THE murders, Kate puts the house up for sale. Friends nod sympathetically, say they understand, all those memories. The girls. The marriage to Ray. A few mention different neighborhoods she might consider, a deal on a condo downtown. A new beginning, they say. But, of course, they don’t understand. How do you start over with the future gouged out? Margo Farbrother, her friend from the book group, had come by with food all that first week. Margo, with her dark skin like polished wood, high cheekbones. Unlike the others, she didn’t veer away from mentioning the girls, asking what the police knew, what they didn’t. One night, on the couch, Margo held Kate’s head in her lap and stroked her hair with her long fingers. Margo had her own problems. Her stepson, Michael, was in trouble. He’d dropped out of school, gotten arrested for several DWIs, was fucked up on drugs half the time. He and his father, Darnell, fighting constantly. On top of it all, Margo, with endometriosis, suddenly inexplicably pregnant for the first time. She will lose the baby within a month, though nobody knows that now.

On the couch, Kate shook as if she had a fever. Her teeth chattered. Margo seemed to know there was nothing to say. She bent over Kate like a bough, her cheek pressed to Kate’s ear. Kate could feel the rise of Margo’s belly against her back.

Some mornings Kate stands in front of the bathroom mirror and takes a measure of her body as if for the first time. Her areolas have grown darker with age and remind her of when she was pregnant with the girls. Faint stretch marks still pearl her hips and breasts. The pale fault line of a C-section scar just above her pubic bone, which divides her into before and after.

The Realtor, a squatty salt-and-pepper-haired woman from the suburbs — Kate’s consciously avoided the city ones friends recommend; she can’t stand the sympathetic stares — comes by the house and, among other things, wants Kate to remove the growing collage of framed photos of the girls from the living room wall. “Everyone wants to imagine their own brood up there,” the Realtor says, smiling in a disapproving, hands-on-hips way that reminds Kate of her mother. Kate still expects the Realtor to know their story — as if life didn’t go on elsewhere, as if people didn’t continue to show up for work, squabble with teenage children, slog through mediocre marriages. For a few seconds they stand in silence in front of the photos. Zadie and Elizabeth in their bikinis at the beach on Galveston Island; Zadie with her first boyfriend, Marcus, at the prom. An empty space next to it where a photo once hung of the girls and Ray, looking sheepish and gangly in his shorts, waving from the deck of his houseboat. Kate removed the photo after she’d found out the detectives had questioned him. He’d grown paler and paler in her mind until he’d become a space on the wall.

“A couple of head-turners,” the Realtor says, looking at the photos of the girls. “Who’d want to compete with that?” The Realtor smiles, fiddles with a wall dimmer switch. The Realtor looks out at the living room, says that Kate might want to remove the bead board paneling, go with a neutral color on the walls instead of the sea green, mentions a range of hours they might have showings, dates to host an open house. The ceiling fan makes a ticka ticka ticka sound.

Kate readjusts one of the larger studio portraits of the girls from the year before. Cheesy, they’d called it. Staged. Both their heads tilted awkwardly to one side as if listening to an invisible radio.

The detectives surprised Ray on his houseboat. This was three weeks after the murders, two weeks after Kate had told him to leave. Ray didn’t have a phone.

This is how Kate imagines it: Ray, shirtless and barefoot, hobbles to the cabin door on his bad ankles, both of which he shattered falling off the ice cream shop roof while repairing the rain gutters three years before. They ache in the mornings and he has to do exercises to keep them from stiffening up. Because of his ankles, Ray has had to give up his one-weekend-a-month Army Reserve stints in San Antonio. He has a ragged look. Needs a haircut, his beard trimmed, which Kate has done for him for years. Before he opens the door, the urge to talk to Kate seizes him. He wants her there to explain, in her controlled, adult way, to the detectives — one of whom clearly thinks Ray’s hiding something by the way he says “discrepancies” — that Ray loved the girls as his own, that he couldn’t have ever harmed them, that he wants to kill the men who did, even though he isn’t capable of violence, except for the one instance after a friend’s wedding reception when he’d drunkenly struck one of the groomsmen after an insult, bloodying his lip.

They take him to the station, put him in a little room with a table and cold plastic chairs. Can you tell us what happened that night? the detectives ask again. When you went by to get the deposit? There are forty-seven minutes he can’t explain. The money was never picked up, the deposit never made. He feels his blood quicken as if he’d risen up out of bed too fast. He’s dizzy. His ankles throb. He can still feel the houseboat rocking unsteadily on the water beneath him. He grabs the table leg for ballast. Oh my sweet Lord, he says, and puts his hands to his face as if they hold water. There are two things he eventually confesses: first, months before, without Kate’s knowledge, he’d raised the value of the fire insurance policies on the ice cream shop. A terrible coincidence, he admits. Terrible. But the building had old wiring, he says; he needed to protect them all from ruin. And two: from time to time — including that night — he’d been fucking Sarah Haven, the insurance agent who sold him the policy.

The Ray in Kate’s head will not stop talking. All his words the shapes of things he would have done.

I will go away, Kate thinks. When the girls finally leave home, I will leave home too.

11 (#ulink_62c37e4a-8341-5d2f-b451-686a317dea29)

MICHAEL SOMETIMES REIMAGINES his brother Andrew’s last conscious minutes. He conjures up a single, wavering moment among many now inevitable ones that gives Andrew pause. Saves him from bad luck. Instead of coming through the house’s side door, where he’ll be surprised by the owner, Andrew works his way through the gate and around to the back of the house and hears, through an open window, the murmuring of a baseball game on the radio. The veteran announcer’s soothing voice is one Andrew has heard for years. Never impatient or hurried. Even on bad days — a blown save or key dropped ball — there is always some possibility of redemption in it. Andrew, standing there in front of the den window with his duffel bag of tools that says simpatico appliance repair, can see a fish tank in the corner of the den, its bluish light undulating on the ceiling above. Though there aren’t any other lights on in the house and the radio announcer seems to be talking to himself, Andrew thinks: Not today. This one doesn’t feel quite right. And he makes his way back to his car parked down the street, drives on home, his face intact.

But sometimes it seemed to Michael that it wasn’t chance or luck. That there were no decisive moments that could have tipped things one way or another. Sometimes it seemed as if an invisible cord threaded through them all, pulling them along. When he was eleven, his dad showed him a glossy magazine photo of a group of Hindu men on a religious pilgrimage. A dozen hooks pierced the skin of their chests and attached to the hooks were taut colorful ropes being pulled by someone outside the photo. “Whenever you think someone has you by the short hairs, remember this,” his dad had said, tapping the photo and laughing. But as a kid, the photo had fascinated and terrified Michael. The men’s faces knotted in pain that was also a kind of ecstasy. Their bodies leaning forward, as if into a strong wind.

“But where are they going?” he’d asked his dad.

“Up the mountain,” his dad said, leaving it at that.

Later, he’d taken the photo from his dad’s dresser and tried to duplicate the hooks and ropes in the bathroom with some safety pins and kite string. But when his chest started bleeding he’d passed out and hit his head on the toilet seat.

Michael was living in an apartment on the east side when the detectives found him, five years after the murders. First, there were the bad portents: the series of odd phone calls with nothing but buzzing on the line, two strange men asking about him at his daughter’s preschool, then the carefully handwritten note in green ink under his car wiper blade: Are you the do-right man?

He hadn’t been hard to find, he supposed, considering the detectives had talked to his wife, Lucinda, who’d abandoned them two months before. For the first month of their trial separation — as Michael still called it — Lucinda would call in the evening and they’d plod through Alice’s bedtime routine with exaggerated goodwill. He’d bribed Alice with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and sodas so she’d speak to Lucinda. Sometimes there would be long silences on the other end and he suspected Lucinda of falling asleep with her mouth open like she did after too much wine. Then something changed. Lucinda’s calls took on a manic edge — she phoned at all hours, sometimes claiming he’d stolen Alice from her and threatening to get her back. She said he’d better be careful. She said she had him figured out. Michael began to worry about her abducting Alice from school at recess or lunch, and so he sometimes made impromptu visits to the school office around these times — claiming he needed to drop off a jacket or Alice’s left-behind chocolate milk — to quiet his anxiety.

A few times on the phone Lucinda had prompted him with people’s names, places in Austin where they used to live or hang out years before. She even mentioned the murders, saying she’d seen one of the girls’ parents on the news leading up to the fifth anniversary. Something about a memorial fund. “Can you imagine?” Lucinda had said. He asked her why the fuck was she bringing all this up now? Often during these conversations, Alice, as if on cue, would begin calling him from her room: Could he turn the closet light on? Flip her pillow over? Brush her teeth again because she didn’t want a gold tooth like his? On the phone, Lucinda would pivot suddenly, confess that she made a mistake, that she missed the old days. She needed Alice back in her life. She was sorry for accusing him of stealing Alice. Sorry for the way she’d acted. She had a sponsor at AA now, she said. He should go too. Then he’d hear her inhale softly — almost mournfully — on her cigarette and could see her lying in some stranger’s bed (her sponsor’s, probably), the ashtray balanced on her bare belly, the shadowed curve of her breast. He’d say it all would be okay, they’d come through this, if they just learned to trust each other. This was their job now, he said, rebuilding that trust. Part of him actually believed it.

For the past few months, Michael had worked at straddling the gaping hole Lucinda had left in their heads. Sometimes he did this by taking Alice to a kid matinee at the Paramount Theater. Sometimes by picking up Lucinda’s slack at the YMCA Preschool parents’ day or taking on extra hours working at the men’s residence while Alice was there. Sometimes he and Alice would make space ships and submarines from duct tape and discarded boxes they found in the alley behind the apartment. But most of the time Michael spanned Lucinda’s absence by levitating on vodka tonics and her left-behind anxiety pills. They’d watch too much bad TV and laugh too loudly and long at his downstairs Korean neighbor’s jokes, which Alice didn’t understand but laughed at anyway, like the one about a Korean restaurant manager and the missing neighborhood dog.