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I appreciate the sentiment. I really do. At the same time, and I hope you don’t mind me saying so, I don’t see how that could possibly happen. Not without your help. The cops gave up a long time ago. You’re the only person who can help me now. If I didn’t believe that then I wouldn’t have left you that letter at the rest stop. You looked flustered when you found it. I wasn’t sure whether you’d read it. But you did. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come to the jetty and you wouldn’t be reading this note.
I know that Jenny is just a name to you, so I want you to understand what she meant to me. Perhaps then you’ll reconsider.
Jenny had long blond hair the color of corn and the same pale blue eyes as our mother. Light freckles flecked her nose and cheekbones. She had a wide smile with a slight gap between her front teeth that she hated. I always thought it was her most beautiful feature.
Jenny was more than my big sister. She took care of me when our mother was at work, which was often, since Mom worked two jobs until her health waned. Jenny picked me up from school and took me to the supermarket, where we’d do homework in the staff room until Mom’s shift was over. Sometimes if Mom worked late, we’d take the bus home and Jenny would fix dinner. My sister’s loss left a gaping hole in my heart that has never healed.
After Jenny’s funeral, Mom’s decline was quick. Her complexion faded into the lifeless gray of a dying tree. Her eyes were flat. She moved slowly with the listlessness of an old woman. Most troubling of all, for the first time since she’d been diagnosed she made no effort to hide her suffering.
Before Jenny died, Mom would pick lemons from our tree and juice them by hand to make a pitcher of lemonade. All the while, she’d talk enthusiastically about plans for the summer and a promised road trip the following year. Though maybe even then she knew that it would never happen.
After Jenny died, there was nothing. No hope. No plans. No thoughts about the future. Mom stopped fighting. She capitulated. Without a will to live, those relentless invaders surged through her body, leaving devastation in their cancerous wake.
Day and night, she lay in bed facing the wall, staring at photos of Jenny. It was almost as if she turned her back on life. And me. Within weeks of Jenny’s death, my mother’s casket was lowered into the ground alongside Jenny’s grave. I wasn’t there for the funeral. I was in the hospital.
When I was feeling better, the psychologist, a pretty woman with a heart-shaped face and short dark hair whose name I havelong forgotten, offered to take me to the cemetery so I could lay flowers at their graves. She said it was important to say goodbye. I ignored her offer as I sat in my usual spot on the floor by the hospital windows, hugging my knees to my body as I looked through the glass panes at hedges clipped to rectangular perfection.
I haven’t told this to a living soul, but if I’d gone to the cemetery and stood by my mother’s and sister’s graves then I would have found a way to join them. For they were the only family that I had ever known and the pain at their loss sears my soul to this day.
I never returned home, though I remember every nook and cranny of our simple house. We lived south of town, inland from the beach. Mom called it no-man’s-land, because there was nothing much there except for us.
It was an old two-bedroom house with a rusty flat roof that leaked when it rained hard. We had an overgrown garden of fruit trees in the back. Hanging from an apple tree was a rope tied to an old tire that I’d swing on while Mom hung clothes on the washing line. That house and her beaten-up station wagon were about all we had in the world.
I don’t remember much about my time at the hospital. I sat by the bay window most days, thinking about home. It was from my usual perch that I saw a man and woman arrive one afternoon. He walked with a pronounced limp. She was soft and ached with a maternal need that I could sense as I watched them through the glass window.
They shuffled across the sloping lawn to the hospital entrance. Their pace was excruciatingly slow. I silently urged them on. She held his arm to support him as they climbed the stairs to the main doors, and then disappeared out of my line of sight.
I knew without having to be told that they were the couple who had offered to foster me. I’d already informed the psychologist inno uncertain terms that I would not live with strangers. She said that I needed a family that would love me as their own. I told her that no family would love me the way my real family had done.
It took time, but eventually I realized I couldn’t stay at the hospital forever. A foster family was my only option. I had no relatives that I knew of. I asked the psychologist if the couple she’d told me about had other children. She said they hadn’t been blessed in that way. I asked why and she told me that she guessed it was because he’d been hurt in a war and that it had taken a long time for him to heal.
I learned much later that Henry was injured five weeks into his first tour of Vietnam, when a grenade exploded in a ditch not far from where he lay. He spent more time in rehabilitation than he had on the battlefield.
A surgeon at a U.S. military hospital saved him by stopping the bleeding and removing whatever shrapnel he had time to pull out in the meatball surgery they did in those battlefield hospitals. The shards he left behind caused Henry terrible pain for the rest of his life. Henry was a kind man who spoke little and left it to his wife to run the household. Her name was Kate. Henry always called her Kitty.
On the day I first met them, they walked into the hospital recreation room, their eyes only on me as I stood uncertainly while introductions were made. Before I could say a word Kitty embraced me with plump arms and the scent of jasmine. It was probably only a second or two, but I could have stood like that for hours. In her arms. For the first time since Jenny died, I felt safe. When Jenny died, my mother surrendered to death. Now I embraced life. I cherished it and protected it as if it were the sputtering flame of a candle. I couldn’t look back. Only forward. Or my life would be unendurable.
In the months that followed I moved to Kitty and Henry’s graceful home across the state, near the Appalachian foothills. I wore pretty cotton clothes in shades of pastel and white. I slept in a cream four-poster bed in an upstairs bedroom. Henry painted the walls a dusty pink. Kitty plaited my hair and drove me to school and dance class and soccer practice. Nothing was too much for them.
When my art teacher told Kitty that I had talent, Kitty arranged extra classes with a private teacher. She covered her living room walls with my creations, even those that only a parent could love. Time passed and we blended into a family. I can’t remember exactly when the adoption went through. I must have been around thirteen.
During those first weeks, Kitty slept on an armchair in my room when I woke screaming during the night. Eventually they bought me a night-light. I used that night-light throughout my childhood out of politeness. It never stopped the nightmares. Not once.
My night terrors became so bad that when I went to college my roommate asked to be reassigned. She said that she couldn’t live with someone who screamed as if she were being murdered. I learned to stifle my screams by burying my head in my pillow.
I made an appointment at the college campus medical clinic and asked the doctor for a prescription for sleeping tablets. He suggested I consider therapy. I told him that I was just fine with the medication. I fooled him. I didn’t fool myself.
7
Guilty or Not Guilty
Season 3, Episode 2: The Shortcut
I’m starting to get a feel for Neapolis. The population here is just over ninety-six thousand. Around a quarter of that are the original townsfolk. The rest are imports, mostly military families—there are two military bases near town—and retirees. There’s a cottage industry of retirement homes for older folk drawn to this isolated but beautiful coastal strip by affordable beachfront property and the relaxed lifestyle of a sleepy seaside town.
Before the relatively recent population spike, Neapolis was your classic small town. Everyone knew everyone. In fact, it still has that small-town vibe. The town is on a weather-beaten stretch of North Carolina coast. It gets pummeled by storms, and occasionally by hurricanes. Cartographers can never properly chart the coastline. It changes every year.
The locals love their water sports: fishing, sailing, windsurfing, and sea kayaking. There are shipwrecks along the coast for scuba divers, and a golf course for those who prefer to keep their feet on dry land.
