The Fact of a Body Read online

  Later she won’t be able to say how long passes before he coughs, a polite sound as if he’s afraid to disturb her. “Well,” he says then, “I’d better be going back in. I really hope they find him.”

  Four

  New Jersey, 1983

  After we’re settled into the new house, my father leaves his job as a government lawyer and opens a solo law practice in the nearby town of Teaneck, finding another gray Victorian and renting the first floor as his office. He buys a piece of black lacquer sixteen inches long and eight inches wide and has ANDREW ROBERT LESNEVICH etched into it, followed by the word he worked for: ESQUIRE. The sign will be the first of many. He hangs it over his door and waits for cases to arrive.

  Come they eventually do, the parade of the unlucky and unwise that make up any small-town lawyer’s work. There’s the housewife with the secret fondness for drink who gets behind the wheel and won’t admit that her head isn’t bobbing only from fatigue. There’s the old man who slips on the shopkeeper’s icy walk downtown, and the teenage shoplifter whose hands, always so quick, finally fail her. My father’s not a gossip; he can be trusted and he likes it this way, one foot in the web of everyone’s lives. He is needed, but not too closely. Best of all, he is admired. Years in the Air Force have given him a straight-backed public bearing that allows him to take on others’ stories with ease and authority.

  Law wasn’t his first choice. My father dreamt of flying fighter planes as a boy. His father had been lost at sea in World War II. His mother never went on another date, and his father’s naval legacy made a military career feel like a birthright. He had flat feet, he was color-blind, he was six feet four—he would never, after all, be a fighter pilot. But he could play tennis. He joined the Air Force and sat out the Vietnam War at a wooden desk in the tropics, stamping papers over and over and then signing them in triplicate, giving his wrist a workout on the courts beating Army and Navy. When he finished active duty, the question of his future loomed. He had studied geology in college, psychology for a master’s. He could resume his studies. Maybe he could become a scientist. Maybe a teacher.

  But he didn’t want to sit behind a lab bench any more than he wanted to sit behind a desk. If he couldn’t be a hotshot pilot he wanted a political stage. He wanted to stand in front of people and have them know that little fatherless Andrew from Cliffside Park, New Jersey, had made it.

  * * *

  When my father reaches this part of the story, one I listen to him tell often, his deep voice grows more insistent, its cadence more punctuated. My father is a storyteller. He tells stories to juries for a living, and he tells them to us around a thick white Formica table so big he found it for a discount; no other family wanted it, he says. We fit perfectly. My father sits on one side of the table, flanked by two of us, my mother on the other side, flanked by two more. The table’s edges are curved so Elize, the youngest, just learning to walk, doesn’t hurt herself when she bumps into it. Around the table we are his audience and his life is the text. Listening as a child I always imagine that the fork he describes in the road is literal: a one-lane highway somewhere in eastern Missouri, no cars on the road except for his, the yellow cut of headlights through the dark his only guide. It is night, the time for dreams and big decisions, and the velvet sky above is pinpricked with light. From behind the wheel my father sees the road ahead of him split. To his left, the West. A left turn will free him from his mother’s clutch. It will save him the depression that has started to haunt him as surely as it does her, from the way his father’s death made his tie to her seem fated, his life cast when he was still a baby. Out West is California, where he will have a life as solid and stable as the rocks he once studied. He will be a teacher, yes, but maybe a politician, too. He will feel beloved. He will be happy.

  “But instead”—he always comes to this point in the story—“I knew my mother needed me. I took a right turn. I came back to New Jersey. And then I met your mother.”

  * * *

  All this from a single turn: his mother, our mother, the four of us children, and now this gray office of his own, where he works in the light of a long metal desk lamp that was once his uncle’s. A large bay window looks out onto the porch. Nights that he fails to close the slat blinds, we can stand on that porch and make out the silhouette of his head bent low in the light of the metal lamp. One night, my mother calls the office again and again and, getting no answer, packs us into the car and drives over—a sure sign she’s nervous, as my mother, the born-and-bred New Yorker from Astoria, Queens, didn’t consent to learn to drive until she was thirty-eight and will never lose the stiffness in her hold on the wheel, her hands locked into the ten o’clock and two o’clock positions as she was taught. Someday, when they have money, she’ll use a car service to take her where she needs to go. But now driving at night is even worse than during the day, and she folds her body to clutch the wheel to her chest as if it were a life preserver.

  When we arrive at the office, every window is dark, no sign of my father. “Stay here,” my mother says to me and Andy and my sisters. “Stay right here.” This is unusual. My parents almost never leave us in the car. Unless my grandparents come and babysit, they almost never leave us anywhere. We have been everywhere with them: into the backs of courtrooms, into fancy restaurants. There’s a picture of Andy and me at three years old standing hand in hand on the red velvet steps of the Metropolitan Opera House, me in a white frilly dress and Andy’s curls backlit over his pale blue suit. But tonight we stay in the car. It’s a warm early fall night and the windows are down. The air’s a little sticky, the leaves heavily soft around us. In the glow of a nearby streetlamp, we watch our mother climb the porch steps and press the doorbell. She waits. There’s no response. She presses it again. Nothing. She raps on the bay window and calls in—“Drew! Drew!”—her voice growing higher and louder as she repeats his name.

  When I am closer to the age at which she stands on the porch than the age at which I sit in the car watching, I’ll come back to this moment. Then I’ll understand what fears the night held for her. Perhaps he’d finally left the way he threatened to some dark nights, nights that he raged at the choice he’d made on a lonely Missouri road, the choice that had trapped him in this story with us. Nights he sat alone at the white Formica table, drinking off the remainder of the dinner wine he and my mother had opened together, and then opening his own. Those nights he swore we’d be better off without him. Those nights he swore we’d be better off if he were dead.

  But this night, as I watch my mother on the porch, and I listen to her call his name and listen to the silence in response, I know only to be afraid that he’s dead not by his hand but by fate. He lost his father when he was a baby. He lost the uncle who helped raise him to an early heart attack. Every March, when we kiss his cheek and tell him happy birthday, if he’s had some wine he shakes his head and says how surprised he is to still be alive. He repeats this sentence year after year until some part of me, I suppose, grows surprised right along with him.

  On this night he finally emerges from the door, and in the light of the streetlamp I watch my mother’s face relax into a mix of joy and relief, thankful that they’re still in this together. They walk back to the car hand in hand. She’s beaming. “Hey, kids,” he says. “I fell asleep at my desk.” His tie hangs loosened around his neck. He rubs his eyes with his fingers, then he smiles, too. My mother kisses him, presses the keys into his hand. He’ll drive us home now. They’ll figure out how to get the other car back in the morning.

  * * *

  Grief takes root inside people. But I don’t see its mark on my parents at first, not until a bleach-bright summer day nine months later. I am reading my way through my mother’s old Nancy Drew hardbacks, proud to have moved on from the picture books she still reads to my little sisters. Today is The Secret in the Old Attic. I have climbed the swing set at the bottom of the yard and am lying across the top flat ladder with the book cracked open on my chest, one hand shielding
the page from the sun’s glare. This position is an experiment. I’m still getting to know our new house, all the nooks I’ll read in. But the ladder rungs dig into my back, splinters press through my T-shirt, and I can’t get comfortable. We should be done polyurethaning the swing set by now, but we’re not. Instead, every Sunday afternoon that my father decides the swing set will be our chore for the day, and my mother dresses us in old OshKosh overalls and gives me, my brother Andy, and my sister Nicola little buckets and brushes of our own, we kids paint the clear gel over our hands instead of the railings. When the gel gets tacky, we press our hands together. Stuck! Then my father marches us into the closet-size bathroom off the kitchen, where I stick my hands under the faucet and wait as he pours from a can of paint thinner. “Rub,” he says, and I do, and slowly through the heat and scratch and wet I feel my hands start to unglue, and my skin comes back to me.

  That’s pleasure, that moment. I keep painting my hands together for the pleasure of his standing behind me, his arms on mine. Even years from now I’ll love the metallic smell of paint thinner. And he must love those moments the way I do, because though we make no progress on the swing set, my father doesn’t yell. This will be his dearest summer, all of us building this house together.

  The lowest rungs already have a coat of shellac, and as I lie up top, their vinegar-sharp smell wafts up to me. The sun burns my legs below my shorts. I scratch at a mosquito bite on my thigh and turn the page. Below me, the yard swells, then dips. It looks nearly flat from up here, but in the distance the gray house rises upward on the hill, its paint still shiny and new. We have the longest yard in the neighborhood. Behind the swing set is an undeveloped patch, sixty feet square, with crab apple trees and a mountain of rotting grass clippings that sweetly stink. Sometimes I dive on top of it and feel my face hit the dead grass and the earth give way beneath me like a cloud. We call the area “the woods,” and all our childhoods, we will conspire to build forts there and hideaways, though we never will. When my parents get low on cash, they’ll sit around the kitchen table and scheme how they can sell the woods, but a buyer will never materialize.

  As I read, trying to keep the words in focus on the page—I need glasses, but no one knows this yet—my father mows the lawn with a red riding mower we call his tractor. He loves the yard almost as much as he loves the house, and since we moved here he’s started wearing Wrangler jeans that flare out at the bottoms with boots and a wide-brimmed suede cowboy hat that shields him from the sun as he cuts neat rows in the grass. A New Jersey cowboy, at least for now. All my childhood he’ll reinvent himself, wriggling out of a new identity every few years: the opera years, the plaid golf years, the years when Cole Porter’s voice swings through the house and a white dinner jacket appears. For now, a boom box on the lawn blares twanging guitars. My brother, Andy, climbs onto the tire that hangs by a rope from the big oak tree. Though we’re twins, he’s a head shorter than me and twenty pounds lighter, so skinny that strangers gape at him in the supermarket. Now he flings himself through the center of the swing into a belly flop.

  My mother comes running from the house, wailing.

  She must have looked out the picture window in her bedroom just at the moment my brother hit the tire and watched his limbs drop. She tears across the lawn, barefoot and hysterical, the ties of her pink bathrobe trailing behind her. She runs for my brother, who’s started to sit up now, not knowing what the problem is yet understanding he must move his body, but my father catches her first. He grabs her, stopping her body’s tumult, and pins her arms to her sides. His lips are moving, he’s wiping her tears, but I’m too far away to hear.

  I just stare.

  I put down my book and sit upright on the swing set. My brother pulls his body out of the tire, stands stock-still beneath the tree, and stares, too.

  The scene is wrong. We have never seen my mother cry. My father is the one who sometimes calls us into the bedroom, where we find him lying belly down on my parents’ vast bed. He is the one who tells us then that we don’t love him, that we want him gone. That we’d be better off if he were dead.

  She holds him then, and holds us together. But now she’s sobbing.

  Eventually she looks up and notices us there, staring. She wipes her eyes. “I’m fine,” she calls to us. “I just thought—”

  My father cuts her off. “She’s fine.”

  His arm around her shoulder, hers around his waist, they walk back to the house, together.

  Five

  Louisiana, 1992

  As February 8 dawns in Louisiana, a single patrol car sits parked in front of the weathered white house in the town of Iowa. The car belongs to Officer Calton Pitre. A fifteen-year veteran of the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office who’ll stay on ten years more, all told serving a quarter of a century as a deputy sheriff in the same clot of southwestern towns where he grew up, Pitre had been sitting in his office in Lake Charles when the call came about the missing boy. Even ten years from now he won’t be able to say why the call scared him so much. But he has a little boy himself, Jeremy’s age. And those ten years later, when his boy is a teenager, and the lawyers call him up to ask him to testify again, he’ll remember Jeremy’s name without any prompting. When they found the child he was wearing a little white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt, he’ll tell the lawyers. They cut rings out of that shirt to test for semen stains.

  His son wore Fruit of the Loom T-shirts, too.

  Though his shift was just about to end when the call came, he took it anyway, arriving in Iowa just as the sun set. There were dozens of people in the street. Local parents, but also the fire department from neighboring LeBleu. Fifty or sixty people, and Pitre could see no one was in charge. They didn’t have much time. Whatever search they got under way would have to be called off when the sky was fully dark.

  The fire department men went into the woods. Pitre went to the white house where the 911 calls had come from—there had been two: the boy’s mother, crying, and then, minutes later, a young man who identified himself as a lodger in the house calling back to make sure the dispatcher knew how to find the right street—and asked if he could use the phone.

  A woman let him in. It was her house, she said. She showed him where the telephone was and went right back to watching television, half a dozen children sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room, and in the armchair a young man with brown hair and glasses who turned his head and nodded at him once. They were watching some kind of crime show; Pitre couldn’t make it out. He told his supervisor that the search required a command center, a phone line; someone was going to have to take charge. They needed more men. But the supervisor wouldn’t commit to anything—wasn’t it LeBleu’s responsibility out that way? Or Iowa’s? Frustrated, Pitre went back out to the street.

  Soon he returned and called a second time. The woods were hard terrain. Along the north side of the house was a ravine and what looked like a canal. They needed four-wheelers. Maybe a boat.

  The third time Calton Pitre went back to the white house to call his supervisor, he saw the brown-haired man sitting in a recliner, still watching television, and had an idea. “You know the area?” he asked.

  “Sure do,” the man said.

  “Draw me a map?”

  The man took the three-by-five spiral pad Pitre offered and carefully penned in the areas around the white house, laying out hash marks for the woods. He made a web of the small backstreets. Drew the route out to Highway 90. “Let me know if you have any trouble with it,” the man said.

  “Thanks,” said Pitre.

  TRIAL TRANSCRIPT, 2003

  Q: And how did the young man seem to you?

  A: He was very calm, he was real calm.

  Q: Do you see him in the courtroom?

  A: Yes, I do.

  Q: Would you point him out and describe what he’s wearing?

  A: Wearing a pair of glasses, light blue shirt with a necktie.

  Q: Your Honor, let the record indicate that the witne
ss has identified the defendant.

  The search teams and the cops on the four-wheelers and the fire department found nothing. They needed a dredger for the canal, but that would have to wait until morning. The parents had collected their children and gone home, using the flashlights they’d trained on the woods before to pick their way back across the dark streets, holding each other closer now, even just going through somebody’s yard.

  Pitre stayed. He kept thinking about the little boy. He had the child’s school photograph attached to his clipboard—blond hair, blue eyes, a gap-toothed grin. The uncle, a man named Richard, had given it to him. He sat behind the wheel of his car and flashed the high beams into the woods. Once, twice, three times. Then he stopped and waited. Once, twice, three times again. Wait. The woods were dark, the only movement the ripple of black leaves in the wind. He flashed the beams again. Again. Whenever he thought it was time to go home and get some sleep, he’d imagine the boy’s blond head from the photograph against the leaves, the child just starting to awaken from sleep, opening his eyes slowly the way Pitre’s son did. That’s when the boy would see the flashing lights. That’s how he’d know to go toward them. What if Pitre stopped before the boy finally woke up?

  But eventually he started nodding off himself. The next day would be a long one. Pitre drove home, kissed his sleeping son, kissed his sleeping wife. Slept.

  Now he’s back at first light. He sits behind the wheel of the cruiser and sips from his coffee, watching the neighborhood mothers return to help with the search.

  The mothers look exhausted, some of them still with their bathrobes on. One woman wears a winter coat buttoned fully over pajama pants and slippers. Word spreads quickly: No news, the Guillory boy is still missing. Fast as an echo comes the answer: He’s only lost; he must only be lost. They’ll find him. A woman stands where the road meets the grass—where in another part of town, the part with street names, there would be a curb—and shouts to organize the mothers into search teams. Someone else thinks to knock on the door of the white house to find out if there’s any coffee left from what the Fuel Stop out on the highway sent over the night before.