The Red Parts Read online

  One too many coincidences, Leiterman’s lawyer will say.

  All spring I meticulously cut out articles from the New York Times about DNA lab scandals in Houston, in Maryland. In the Houston lab some evidence was stored so poorly that one observer saw blood leaking out of a cardboard evidence box after a heavy rain. Laboratory contamination seems a more likely—not to mention a more wholesome—scenario than any of the others I can imagine.

  The boy was forced to watch. The boy witnessed it, inadvertently. Somehow the boy was forced to take part in it. He was forced to cause harm. The boy shed blood; maybe there was a fight. Maybe the boy was hurt and bleeding before he arrived at the scene. Leiterman knew his family, and he killed her at their house. For some reason the boy was in his car. The boy was wandering, on his own, and came across Jane’s body in the cemetery. The boy stood above her dead or dying body, horrified, confused, uncomprehending, as a single drop of blood dripped from his nose onto her hand.

  Eventually I make a rule that I can only think about “the Ruelas question”—sometimes referred to as the “lost boy theory”—while swimming laps in the university pool. It seems right to think about it underwater.

  Here’s the scenario, what is each writer’s solution?

  Something does not seem right in this reopening of her murder.

  Red House

  At my mother’s and stepfather’s, up the dark hill. Emily and her much-older boyfriend are making out in the basement. He yells upstairs to my mother, “I’m finger-fucking your daughter”—my mother doesn’t make him leave. I yell something about there being more discipline in the home. But I yell too loudly, and Mom is frail—she has a heart attack in Emily’s room. I yell to Emily, “Call 911.” Mom’s on the floor now, I’m cradling her. Instead of calling 911, Emily asks her, “Do you want to go out to a club?” She thinks this is hilarious; I’m furious that she isn’t helping. I know her boyfriend is violent, I know he’s hit my sister, so I let him punch me in the face, just to prove I’m not afraid. “You don’t scare me,” I say, then do some aikido on him, which shrinks him into a little boy.

  EMILY LEFT FOR her freshman year of boarding school pregnant. Our mother did not know this, nor did Emily herself, until she was throwing up with regularity in her morning chemistry class. We discussed the situation on the phone—she from the pay phone in her new dorm, me still in the basement.

  Imagine how surprised Mom would be if the baby came out white instead of black, she laughed roughly. Her nineteen-year-old boyfriend was black, but she figured that the responsible party was more likely the oldest son of a (white) friend of our mother’s—a good-looking, skinny kid who had purportedly punched his equally skinny, glassine mother in the stomach on more than one occasion. One night over at their house for dinner, while my mother and her friend exchanged confidences over wine upstairs, Emily had sex with the boy on the lower bunk bed in his bedroom while, in the adjacent room, his younger, much less good-looking brother threw frogs from his frog collection at my legs in an attempt to stun them.

  That means he likes you, their mother winked at me when the four of us finally surfaced for dinner, Emily rumpled, me with mud-spattered calves.

  I found the secret of Emily’s pregnancy hard to keep. She seemed to be hoping that within time the problem would just go away. She was also dropping a lot of acid, and I worried that the fetus was becoming a kind of spangled, brain-damaged alien.

  Eventually she told our mother; eventually there was an abortion. I don’t remember anything about that weekend except that when they got home from the doctor Emily bolted out of the car holding her stomach, ran into the house and straight to her bedroom, her face red and bloated from tears.

  By the spring she had been expelled, having racked up three “major incidents” at a school with a three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy.

  It turned out that my mother and her husband could also keep a secret, for just a few months later, they ambushed Emily and sent her to a “lockdown” institution in Utah called the Provo Heritage School for Girls. It was a decision my mother now admits may have been a mistake. PHS was a Mormon outfit, replete with surveillance cameras and forlorn inmates who were disallowed forks and knives at mealtimes but permitted to spend hours teasing one another’s hair and corrupting one another with outlandish stories of what they’d done to land themselves there. We visited Emily there once, and I came home thoroughly spooked by the image of a tribe of girls in garish makeup and pajamas trotting around the parking circle for exercise under the shadow of the pink and blue Rockies, which stood in a ring around the school like a final, majestic corroboration of their imprisonment.

  Emily spent two years at PHS, came home “reformed,” enrolled in a local high school, and got a job scooping ice cream. All the while she was making plans to run away with two bad-seed girls she’d hooked up with in Provo. One afternoon about two months later, when Emily was sixteen, they stole my mother’s light blue Honda Accord, spray-painted TO HELL OR BUST in black on its side, shaved their heads bald, and hit the road.

  First they made a failed, halfhearted attempt to liberate the other girls at PHS, which mostly involved driving around the parking circle, honking in celebration of their freedom. Then they pushed east, hoping to make it as far as the East Village in New York. But they ran out of money in Chicago and had to hole up there for some time, living as skinheads out of my mother’s car and on the streets. Eventually a private investigator named “Hal” my mother hired to track them down apprehended them at a Chicago Dunkin’ Donuts popular with runaways. “Hal” accompanied them in handcuffs on the plane back to California and delivered them straight to juvenile hall.

  While driving to see Emily in juvenile hall at Christmastime, I felt anxious but excited. I hadn’t seen her for months, and I had desperately missed our camaraderie, our alliance against our mother’s new marriage, our sworn fidelity to our dead father.

  There was a lot I didn’t miss too. The slammed doors, the covert washing of sex-stained sheets, the get-away-from-me-you’re-not-my-fucking-father scenes. And while there were certain movies Emily and I both loved and watched obsessively together—Liquid Sky, Suburbia, Repo Man—she also had a taste for darker things. For a time she and her friends were into a series of snuff/pseudo-snuff films called Faces of Death, which played in the TV room in our shared basement whenever she passed through the house. Just one frame of a Faces of Death film was enough to turn my stomach and rot my mind for weeks.

  One might think that as fledgling teenagers we would have found ourselves more interested in sex than in death. But we had—or at least Emily had—seemingly exhausted of sex movies, probably from a year or so of unlimited softcore on Showtime at our father’s house. Those movies didn’t rot my mind, but they still made me feel guilty and scared. I would crawl to the bottom of Emily’s bed while she watched them with friends or babysitters, becoming a small lump under enough covers to ensure that I wouldn’t be able to see any of the action or hear any of the cries, even though I knew, or at least suspected, that they were cries of pleasure. It felt important to be there, to be in the room. I guess I didn’t want to be alone.

  In juvenile hall I first saw Emily behind glass, playing pool with a red bandanna wrapped around her bald head. Her eyes looked bombed-out and vacant. I barely recognized her. After we were buzzed in, she pretended not to see me.

  This moment inaugurated a sea change. I came home that night and made my own promise, which I recorded in my diary: I would never care about my sister again. I would never care where she was, if she was lost or found, if she lived or if she died.

  I remained grateful, however, for some simple, practical things that she had taught me. How to French-inhale, where to buy bidis, the thin, eucalyptus-leaf cigarettes that I loved, how to draw eyeliner along your inner lids. Emily had told me that all you had to do to get on the pill was complain to a gynecologist that your periods were “irregular,” so I did that. I liked my freedom and my anonymity. I had
no interest in being shipped away. I got good grades and flew under the radar. Eventually I thought my sister was crazy, or just stupid, to have done so many bad things in plain sight. Even stealing my mother’s car seemed too close to home.

  Shortly after my sister’s release from juvenile hall, my mother and her husband ambushed her again, this time forcibly shipping her off to a “hoods in the woods” school in the deep, Aryan boondocks of Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho. Faced with the prospect of chopping wood, solo wilderness-survival expeditions, and an elaborate structure of experimental group and individual therapies with names like “Discovery” and “Summit,” Emily quickly split. She made it several miles into the disorienting, frigid forest and encountered the frozen corpse of a horse before she was picked up by the local sheriff and returned to the school, where she stayed for the next two years.

  With Emily gone I no longer lay awake at night in my basement room listening to her come and go out her bedroom window. Instead I listened to my mother’s husband come and go, either on his motorcycle, or in his painting-company van—a white van with the words FRESH PAINT emblazoned on its side. He played the guitar, although not as well as my father had, and when he was feeling friendly he’d invite me into his “office” to teach me Jimi Hendrix songs. He loved “Red House” in particular.

  I never really liked going into his “office,” because it was Emily’s room, which he had cannibalized in her absence. He had replaced her spiraling collages of rock stars and fashion models with blueprints of houses he was working on and enormous color photographs of a strip of beachfront in Belize that he had purchased with some “business partners.” The nature of this business shifted regularly, as did the lineup of partners. He had lived in Belize for a few years in the early ‘70s with his first wife and his daughter, and now dreamed endlessly of returning there to live off the land. When he felt particularly nostalgic he would pull out his slides from Belize and project them on the wall of the living room. Of these I remember only a group of pale Mennonites who had been his neighbors in the jungle. I knew he kept his machete from those years under his and my mother’s bed.

  After my stepfather left his “office” at night, I would wander into Emily’s dark and abandoned room. I listened to her records. More than once I guiltily jimmied open a desk drawer. Sometimes I found little plastic baggies, empty but cloudy with the residue of white powder. Other drawers yielded stacks of photographs of her mohawked friends flipping the camera the bird. I rifled through the books she had left behind on her bookshelf, many of which I had given her as gifts. I was happy to see that she had dog-eared several pages in Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, which I had given her for her eighth-grade graduation.

  That same year, when I was twelve, I submitted a poem to a contest sponsored by our favorite band, The Cure. It was a terrible, melodramatic poem called “Shame.” (The band had provided the title; you had to provide the poem to match.) The poem was primarily a collage of Cure lyrics and lines lifted from Plath, and offered an imaginative reconstruction of Emily’s experience of losing her virginity.

  Miraculously, the poem won the contest. I thought Emily might be furiously jealous, but instead she was incredibly proud, and showed off “Shame” and the letter I received from the band to everyone at school. It was one of the best moments of my life, hands down.

  Another book I had lent her was Rubyfruit Jungle, the classic lesbian bildungsroman by Rita Mae Brown. Later I reluctantly handed this book over to “Hal” in his search for potential leads in tracking Emily down. I was torn up about it; I knew it was a betrayal. It came from the sycophantic part of me, the part that has always wanted to impress “the adults” with how smart and helpful I could be. It also came from the fact that I was pissed off at her for running away without telling me. It was the first time she hadn’t trusted me with a secret, and I wanted to see her punished for it.

  But another part of me cheered her on. I wanted her to keep going, to keep pulling one over on our mother and stepfather, to keep saying the big Fuck You to everyone and everything, the big Fuck You I did not say. I wanted her to keep running, to make it, at long last, to wherever it was that she so desperately wanted to go.

  MY MOTHER had always told us that Jane had been the rebellious, outspoken daughter, while she had remained the dutiful one. Jane was going to change the world by becoming a fierce civil rights lawyer; my mother was going to get married, put our father through law school by teaching high school English, then stop working and raise two kids. Jane had said all the things to their parents that my mother couldn’t or didn’t say—the big Fuck You (or, in 1969, You racist pigs). As a result, Jane was no longer welcome in their home. If Jane hadn’t been estranged from her parents, if she hadn’t been worried that they wouldn’t accept her decision to marry a leftist Jew and move to New York City, she wouldn’t have been coming home alone on March 20, 1969. She wouldn’t have advertised for a ride on the ride board, and she wouldn’t have ended up with two bullets in her head, stretched out “puffy and lifeless” on a stranger’s grave in Denton Cemetery the following morning, her bare ass against the frozen earth, a stranger’s stocking buried in her neck.

  Dear Jane,

  It makes little difference whether it is two nations or two people with conflicting opinions, not much can be done to settle the dispute unless some form of communication is established. It is in this hope that I am writing this letter. I’m sure there is no question in your mind (and in mine) that the contacts we have had in the past year or so have been very disturbing and anything but pleasant. I also recognize the fact that differences in opinion between daughter and parent is a normal situation and fortunately time reduces most of those mountains into mole hills. I’m sure that will be true in our case. But the last few times we have been together have been traumatic emotional experiences that have accomplished absolutely nothing. I have no intention of maintaining that kind of relationship.

  So wrote my grandfather on March 4, 1968. But things between them did not improve—indeed, as Jane’s relationship with Phil deepened, and as she elaborated her plan to elope and move to New York, things worsened. A year later she was dead. Time did not get its chance to reduce “mountains into mole hills.” Instead her death froze these mountains into mountains, and froze her father into a state of perpetual incomprehension about her, and about their relationship.

  RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE turned out to be a helpful lead. Emily had, in fact, loosely based her travel plans around Brown’s book, which details how one might make money in the East Village by performing relatively painless sexual stunts, such as throwing grapefruits at a guy’s balls.

  DURING THESE years my mother and I went to the movies together quite often. It was an easy way to spend time together, sitting in dark places, staring in the same direction. On weekend days we would drive across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, find a good art-house theater, pay one round of admission, and then sneak from film to film: her trick. But a problem recurred—she couldn’t tolerate scenes that involved the abduction of women, especially into cars, and she couldn’t watch women be threatened with guns, especially guns pointed at their heads.

  Try going to the movies with this rule, and you will be surprised at how often such scenes crop up.

  I left home at seventeen, for college, and for New York, where I soon discovered the deep pleasure of going to the movies by myself. Yet whenever such a scene arose I immediately felt my mother close beside me in the dark theater. Her hands spread across her face, her pinkies pushing down on her eyelids so she can’t see, her index fingers pushing down on her ears so she can’t hear.

  I felt her this way acutely when I went to see Taxi Driver at the Film Forum in Greenwich Village several years ago. I was excited—it was the first screening of a new print, and a classic I’d never seen. Waiting in line my excitement dampened a little upon noticing that I was one of the only women, and certainly one of the only solo women, at the theater. The crowd was solid boy film geeks, p
robably NYU film students, who had apparently come prepared to treat the screening like a performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, screaming out in chorus the movie’s many famous lines seconds before the characters spoke them. This was tolerable, sometimes even amusing, until a passenger in Travis Bickle’s taxicab embarked upon the following monologue, which the passenger—played by Scorsese himself—delivers while watching his wife through the window of another man’s house:

  I’m gonna kill her. I’m gonna kill her with a .44 Magnum pistol. I have a .44 Magnum pistol. I’m gonna kill her with that gun. Did you ever see what a .44 Magnum pistol can do to a woman’s face? I mean it’ll fuckin’ destroy it. Just blow her right apart. That’s what it can do to her face. Now, did you ever see what it can do to a woman’s pussy? That you should see. You should see what a .44 Magnum’s gonna do to a woman’s pussy you should see.

  Sitting alone in a sea of young men hollering, Did you ever see what a .44 can do to a woman’s pussy? was not amusing. Perhaps it was not tolerable, or perhaps I should not have tolerated it. I sat through the rest of the movie, but as I walked slowly home down the dark cobblestone streets of Soho toward my apartment on Orchard Street I found myself thinking about my mother, and about Jane, and about Emily, with tears streaming down my cheeks. That you should see.

  ON ONE VISIT back to San Francisco in 1996, my mother and I returned to one of our old haunts, the Opera Plaza Cinema on Van Ness, to see a movie we knew virtually nothing about, save that it was a “dark comedy” titled Freeway. In its opening scenes a wayward teen played by Reese Witherspoon steals a car and runs away from her truly screwed-up family. Her car then breaks down on a California freeway, and a seemingly well-meaning yuppie, played by Kiefer Sutherland, pulls over to help. In his car they have a wide-ranging conversation, which takes a turn for the worse when he starts talking about wanting to rape her dead body. She then realizes that he is the so-called “I-5 Killer,” and he intends to make her his next victim.