The Red Parts (19 page)

He says that he doesn’t want to spook me, but he wants me to know that on more than one occasion, Jane’s ghost has come to him in the middle of the night. He has heard her voice, clearly. He believes that her ghost has come back to transform—even to save—his life, in addition to guiding his investigation. In fact, he believes that all matters related to Jane’s case—including my book, and our sitting here together, right now, at this sticky pub table—are being directed by “the hand of God.”

I think back to an e-mail Schroeder once sent to my mother, which concluded:
We work for you. Well, actually we always say we work for God (really, just ask me to show you the tattoo on my right arm), but I think you get the point.

I listen to him and nod with interest as we eat our burgers, all the while feeling a little unnerved. I’m stuck on the image of the ghost of Jane—in her raincoat, her auburn hair held back by her baby-blue headband, her face stained with tracks of blood—whispering to this burly, ruddy-faced cop in the middle of the night. I’m tempted to reinforce my sanity by thinking that whatever voice of Jane’s he has heard or hears is whatever he needs to hear to spur him along, personally and professionally. But as he talks I am also remembering times, while working on
Jane
, particularly in the beginning, when I felt a presence with me, especially in my dreams—not something I would call a ghost
per se
, but certainly a presence, something that was very much “me” but also very much “not me.”

I’m still not sure, however, who Schroeder’s Jane is, or who my Jane is, or what, if anything, they have to do with each other. Whoever or whatever they are, I can’t imagine they bear much resemblance to Jane, herself, at all.

Once, after a reading from
Jane
, someone from the audience came up to me and said she thought it was cool that I’d changed my aunt’s name to Jane, so that she could become “Jane Doe,” plain Jane, an everywoman, a blank screen onto which one could project all one’s hopes and fears.

I was interested in what this woman was saying, intellectually, but the idea of taking a person and making her into a blank slate horrified me. It seemed like another form of violence. I hadn’t changed Jane’s name, but nonetheless I went home wondering if I’d still committed some inchoate but grievous wrong.

Shortly before the trial is set to begin, Schroeder will be hospitalized with a terrible ulcer, which will turn into a stomach-cancer scare. His superiors will take him off Jane’s case, citing his health troubles, but also saying that his “powers of objectivity” have come into question. My mother and I will be disappointed, but not surprised. When the trial is over, Schroeder will propose to Carol. They will invite us to the wedding, which will take place on the one-year anniversary of Leiterman’s conviction.

But that’s all to come. For now Schroeder walks me from the restaurant to my reading, which he had considered attending, but declines after seeing the quiet crowd on folding chairs in the well-lit bookstore. It’s just as well. The reading leaves me feeling bizarrely emotional and exposed, as readings can sometimes do. Afterward, as I drive to my dark motel, I feel a familiar species of post-reading loneliness creeping in upon me, amplified by the eeriness of being in the land of Jane’s life and death.

I get in bed and turn on the motel TV, hoping to fall asleep as quickly as possible and get out of Michigan first thing in the morning. Instead I find myself wide awake, sucked into a late-night episode of
Law & Order.
The principal story line involves a serial rapist whose trademark is strangulation; the women who have survived his attacks testify in court with reddish-purple rings around their necks, the bruises left over from the rapist’s cord.

When I fall asleep, predictably, promptly, I have a nightmare. It is a recurring nightmare that starts off, as many nightmares do, as a beautiful dream. In this dream I am swimming in a gorgeous, powerful, blue and gold ocean. My mother is standing back at the shore. The waves start out small, but quickly grow in size and take me out to sea. When I look back to the shore, my mother is but a black dot. Then she is gone. I realize at once that she cannot help me, and that I will die this way.

I know this dream well. Not only because it recurs, but because it is a restatement of a near-drowning episode from my childhood. My father had just died, and despite the fact that we were all in a state of shock, my mother and her husband decided that we should go ahead with a trip to Hawaii they’d planned months earlier. His six-year-old daughter from a previous marriage would come with us and spend the whole trip blotchy and ailing from a mysterious allergic reaction that my mother and her husband insisted on linking to a pineapple pizza we all shared our first night on the island.

One day on this excruciating trip we drove out to a remote black sand beach. Years of swimming in the Pacific had made me feel invincible, uncowed by any riptides Hawaiian waters might throw my way, and I swiftly charged into the water.

After swimming for just a few minutes I looked back at the shore, and found that my new “family unit” appeared as nothing more than specks in the offing. Then, within what felt like seconds, I found myself crashing up against some large, jagged rocks at the far end of the cove. Each enormous wave knocked me down and pinned me there. I couldn’t get a breath. Looking down, I noticed that my legs were running with blood.

Despite the chaos of this moment, it felt slow and elongated. And in it I realized, for the first time, that my father was dead. I also realized that my mother could not save me from dying—not now, not ever. I felt a calmness, heard a humming, and had the thought:
So this is how it will end.

I AWOKE FROM this nightmare into a freezing cold motel room: the heater had broken at some point during the night, and the fan was now blowing icy air into the room.

At first I tried to keep warm under the crappy motel bedspread by thinking about the man I loved. At the time he was traveling in Europe, and was thus unreachable. I didn’t know it yet, but as I lay there, he was traveling with another woman. Does it matter now? I tried hard to feel his body wrapped tightly around mine.

Next I tried to imagine everyone I had ever loved, and everyone who had ever loved me, wrapped around me. I tried to feel that I was the composite of all these people, instead of alone in a shitty motel room with a broken heater somewhere outside of Detroit, a few miles from where Jane’s body was dumped thirty-six years ago on a March night just like this one.

Need each other as much as you can bear
, writes Eileen Myles.
Everywhere you go in the world.

I felt the wild need for any or all of these people that night. Lying there alone, I began to feel—perhaps even to know—that I did not exist apart from my love and need of them, nor, perhaps, did they exist apart from their love and need of me.

Of this latter I felt less sure, but it seemed possible, if the equation worked both ways.

Falling asleep I thought,
Maybe this, for me, is the hand of God.

A
HUGE thunderstorm is rolling into town. My mother and I are sitting on Jill’s screened-in porch, sharing a cigarette, as the sky grows dark, the air starting to crack with thunder. The rain, when it comes, comes hard.

Maybe because I grew up in California, I get easily spooked by thunder-and-lightning. It always seems to me a sign that the apocalypse is nigh. But my mother loves big storms. We weather this one in our little mesh box of borrowed porch, as if lowered into the deep sea in a cage to protect us from whatever snub-nosed sharks might come banging at the bars.

We trade some observations about the day’s events in court, the orange cherries of our cigarettes bobbing in the darkness, my mother’s face intermittently illuminated by purple flashes of lightning. Then gingerly, warily, as if testing out a sore tooth with a darting tongue, we start to talk about the autopsy photos. Maybe talking about them casually on wicker furniture will tame their force. Their anarchy.

I bring up the first shot on the gurney, the one featuring Jane’s pale armpit.

She looks so beautiful in that one
, my mother says wistfully.

Instantly I want to disagree—partly out of habit, and partly because it sounds as if she’s trying to pick out the best of a roll of publicity head shots. But really there’s no point in arguing with her. The calm profile of Jane’s face, her mouth tipped slightly open, her young skin emanating light—probably a result of the bright flash of the medical examiner’s camera, but nonetheless making her skin radiate like the divine in a Renaissance painting—she looks beautiful in that one.

My mother goes on to say that by the time she saw her sister at the funeral home Jane didn’t look like herself. She had that strange, bloated, alien look of the several-days dead. But in this photo, taken within hours of her murder, she recognizes her. Even with the dark bullet holes, even with her hair matted with wet and dried blood, even with the stocking buried unutterably deeply in her neck, she recognizes her. She says she is glad to see her again. She says she is glad to see, finally, what was done.

Before we go to sleep, she will open all the windows of Jill’s house, so that we can really hear the rain.

I NEVER ENTERED my father’s bedroom on the night of his death, but my mother did ask if I wanted to see his body before it was cremated. I said I did. We drove to the funeral home in silence.

She led me into the room where his body was lying on a table, embalmed, wearing one of his business suits. She asked if I wanted a moment alone with him. I said yes, and she left, shutting the door behind her.

This was the moment I’d been waiting for, the moment that would deliver the solid fact of his absence, the moment that would reveal the secret, the secret that would allow me to let go, to say good-bye.

As soon as she shut the door I felt completely panicked. I scanned the room wildly, like a polar cub on the tundra suddenly separated, potentially fatally, from its pack. I searched the tastefully lit, elegantly furnished room for a place to hide. A red velvet divan seemed a possibility. No one would ever find me. Eventually I would just disappear.

But disappearing was not the task at hand. The task at hand was to approach my father’s body, which, sooner or later, I did. He was wearing his glasses, which seemed right but odd, as I knew he did not need them anymore. His hands were folded on his chest and his fingers were dark purple at the tips. He looked like he was trying to keep a straight face, but was about to jump up and call the whole thing off.
I am immortal until proven not!
I looked at him long enough to be sure that this was not the case. Then I told him I loved him, kissed his face, and walked out of the room.

Georges Bataille,
Erotism: Death and Sensuality
, trans. Mary Dalwood (SF: City Lights, 1986)

Samuel Beckett,
Endgame
(NY: Grove Press, 1958)

Anne Carson,
Autobiography of Red
(NY: Vintage, 1998)

Angela Carter,
The Bloody Chamber
(NY: Penguin, 1979)

Pema Chödrön,
The Places That Scare You
(Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2001)

Joan Didion,
The White Album
(NY: Simon & Schuster, 1979)

James Ellroy,
My Dark Places
(NY: Vintage, 1996)

John Felstiner,
Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)

Edward Keyes,
The Michigan Murders
(NY: Pocket Books, 1976)

Thomas Merton,
No Man Is an Island
(San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1955)

Joni Mitchell, “California,” from
Blue
(Reprise Records, 1971)

Michael S. Moore, “A Defense of the Retributivist View,” in
What Is Justice?
, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Mark C. Murphy (NY, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Eileen Myles, “To the Class of ‘92,” in
Maxfield Parrish: New and Selected Poems
(Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1995)

Bruce Nelson,
Papers
(printed by Charles M. Hobson III, 1984)

Adam Phillips,
Winnicott
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988)

Plato,
The Republic and Other Works
, trans. B. Jowett (NY: Anchor Books, 1989)

Arthur Schopenhauer,
Essays and Aphorisms
, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (NY: Penguin, 1970)

Paul Schrader, screenplay for
Taxi Driver
(1976)

Virginia Woolf,
Moments of Being
, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1985)

American Civil Liberties Union,
www.aclu.org

Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty,
www.cuadp.org

Combined DNA Index System,
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/lab/biometric-analysis/codis

Critical Resistance,
www.criticalresistance.org

Death Penalty Information Center,
www.deathpenaltyinfo.org

DNA Fingerprinting and Civil Liberties Project of the American Society of Law, Medicine, & Ethics,
http://www.aslme.org/DNA_ELSI_Grant

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting,
www.fair.org
INCITE!, Women of Color Against Violence,
www.incite-national.org