The Best American Essays 2011 Read online

  At the hospital, my family gathered in the hall outside the emergency room. Every few minutes the door opened and a nurse came out, and when the door opened we could see my nephew laid out on the operating table, tubes down his throat, his pajamas open and his small chest, thin and frail as a bird’s, failing to rise and fall. He was eighteen months old. In a few hours he would be pronounced dead, and not long after that one of the nurses on duty would call the police to report that this was not an accident. There were bruises on his neck and shoulders, and before night fell again Keith’s stepfather was under investigation for murder.

  I have scans of the old newspaper articles saved on my computer now. My mother, at my request, found old microfilm reels at the library and e-mailed them to me. I read them sometimes, late at night, when my daughters are asleep, though when they first arrived in my in box, it took me months to open them.

  The first one is dated February 8, and is titled “Boy’s Death Investigated.” According to the article, the unnamed boy died of “severe head injuries,” and after his death his body was sent to the state medical examiner in Little Rock. The Logan County sheriff stated that police were waiting on an autopsy, but they suspected the boy’s death was related to child abuse.

  The next article is six months later. After three days of trial, and a jury deliberation of less than two hours, the stepfather was convicted of first-degree murder. In his testimony, he said that his stepson had wandered outside while he was on the phone. In the courtroom he was clean-shaven, his hair cut short, and he wore a long-sleeved blue shirt with a dark blue tie. His hands moved as he talked, and his eyes roamed about the courtroom, not landing on anyone. When he hung up the phone, the stepfather said, he saw the boy outside, by the woodpile. He lay on his back, not moving.

  At the hospital, the nurses first noticed, and later the medical examiner confirmed, four small bruises on Keith’s forehead. There were large pictures set up on exhibit stands in the courtroom, and the medical examiner pointed to each one with a pointer. He made a circling motion around the four bruises, spaced apart like knuckles. There were also deep bruises on Keith’s neck. In the courtroom the picture sat next to another picture of my nephew in overalls, holding a stuffed tiger. He was smiling then, laughing at whatever silly toy the cameraman was holding up. In the picture he had only a few teeth, and his blond hair was combed so fine you could hardly see it, like the way a baby’s hair will disappear in the bathtub. As he was shaken, his brain crashed around inside his skull. The blood vessels feeding his brain were torn. Blood pooled within his skull, creating pressure. His brain swelled. At some point he lost consciousness. He was not breathing when he arrived at the hospital. In the hours he lay on the emergency room table, he did not breathe on his own. In the parking lot my brother lit one cigarette from the butt of another. In the hallway outside the room, we all waited, impotent and raging. In the big corner mirrors the nurses came and went.

  I reconstruct the physical injuries from newspaper reports and courtroom testimony to cement the crime in my head. Years later I sometimes feel forgiveness creeping in, so I list in my head the bruises and choke marks. I think about time, how long this must have gone on, and some strange feeling builds up in me, though it is not sadness, or anger. Perhaps it is despair. But in the years since, most of the sadness has fled, and what remains exists only on an intellectual level. I have no visceral reaction, and I am surprised to find no emotion, only a place where that emotion used to be. I’d like to say sadness has replaced it, but in the time that has passed what is left is a feeling deeper than sadness. But it is less painful. It is like trees in November, or birdsong before first light; something intangible, full of memory and heartache: a child’s clean smell, a faint memory of your mother, a daughter’s first steps.

  If my nephew had lived he might have had physical and learning disabilities, seizures, behavioral disorders, cerebral palsy, and speech and hearing impairment. He might not have walked again, or spoken. He might not have ever learned his name, or his mother’s birthday. He might not have remembered what happened to him, and for some reason I cannot explain, though I am ashamed to say it, this seems unbearable to me—that he might have smiled when his stepfather came into the room, or reached up his arms for his stepfather to pick him up, or laid his head on his stepfather’s chest late at night on the couch, the TV the only light in the room, changing from light to dark.

  The last article is the shortest of all. It recounts the sentencing hearing, in which the stepfather was sentenced to life in prison. When the sentence was given, his attorney put a hand on his shoulder. He was not wearing a tie this time. He was in jailhouse orange sweats, with black numbers stenciled on them, and his hands were handcuffed in front of him. It is an image I will remember for a very long time, held up against the one of my nephew with tubes down his throat, but the two of them do not cancel one another out, just as rereading the newspaper articles does not cancel out the story inside my head.

  The funeral was in a church I had never been to before. The service exists now in a cloistral space—nothing before it or after it. It is an isolated incident, faint at the edges of memory. There was an easel set up with a picture of Keith on it, the same picture of over alls and a stuffed tiger that would sit in the courtroom when the trial started. The casket was closed. I suspect it would have been too hard any other way. I sat in a balcony of the church with my grandmother. I suspect it was a strategic positioning, that from the distance of the balcony her failing eyes could not make out the picture, the flowers, the casket.

  Two police officers sat near the stepfather, their uniforms crisply ironed. He sat near the front of the church and stared straight ahead. From the balcony I studied his profile—red hair that reached to the nape of his neck, a mustache not trimmed well. His face was red, with a pale blotch that crept higher up his neck and side of his face, and his jaw worked as the service went on.

  During the service my eyes wandered from the tiger to the stepfather to the state troopers, then made the loop again and again. My grandmother moaned beside me, a noise she did not know she was making, just as she didn’t know what had happened, or why, and I realized in a strange moment of clarity, one that announced my emergence into adulthood, that we would never understand, that for the rest of our lives when any of this was mentioned, we would shake our heads sadly and stare at the floor until the moment passed.

  After the funeral, while my family gathered in the living room of my grandmother’s house and some of the men stood on the front porch and talked of violence, I walked through the woods on my grandmother’s land. It was stifling inside the house, and loud with the sounds that accompany death, but outside it was cold and still. The air hovered right at freezing, and the light mist that fell could not decide whether it wanted to be snow or rain. Late in the afternoon, the dark came early, and by the time I turned around to walk back only the porch light was visible. The rain had finally made a decision, and the only sound around me was ice on frozen leaves.

  I have never been in the house where it happened. The house is turned sideways to the road. The front yard is thick with trees and shrubs, blocking a clear view, but what you can see is a small rock house huddled on a quiet street in what might be any town. The front yard needs mowing, and the gutters are filled with leaves.

  The inside of the house I must imagine, though in the years since the murder I have done the imagining enough times that the memories feel real. I start from the street, seeing the carport as it would have been that day—the stepfather’s brown Chevy truck idling in the drive, smoke leaking from the exhaust. Just off the carport is the woodpile, and past the carport is a chainlink fence separating the house from the one next door, only a few feet away.

  From the carport a door opens into the kitchen. The kitchen is narrow, with a green linoleum floor. Above the sink a window looks out on the backyard. Past the kitchen, moving farther into the house, is a small dining table, and past the dining table is the living room.
A short hall opens off the living room, and two bedrooms are tucked into the back. The phone hangs on the wall beside the sliding glass door, in the transitional space between the kitchen/ dining room and living room.

  Because I have so few memories of my nephew, I sometimes create false ones. I replace Keith with images stolen from my own life, put him in the place of my youngest daughter rubbing spaghetti into her hair or riding her tricycle in the driveway. I picture his walker rattling across the hardwood floor of my grandmother’s house as we sat at the table or watched TV, the same noise my oldest daughter made rattling across the linoleum of our kitchen. I see myself walking outside holding him sometime in the late fall, geese veering south overhead and the wind cold around us, Keith pointing at the geese much as my youngest daughter pointed years later, eyes wide with wonder. I see my sister holding him, rocking back and forth to coax him to sleep, the same as I did with my daughters night after night for years. And I see Keith falling and bumping his head on the coffee table once. It was a minor accident, the kind my daughters had many times, but when my sister picked him up, she cried longer than he did, though I had no idea why she was crying until many years later.

  If I can do it, if I can remember my nephew smiling or laughing or holding out his arms to be picked up, I can forget the cold morning, the truck idling outside, and something happening that caused the stepfather to open and close his hands as he moved toward Keith. Instead I can imagine my nephew standing at the sliding glass door in diapers, watching the dogs play in the backyard, or huddling scared from fireworks on the Fourth; I can imagine him with his mother in a plastic wading pool she bought at Walmart, one with ducks on it, her son splashing her as she sits on the edge of the pool laughing; as a young boy running through the sprinkler in the backyard.

  The last time I drove past, the house was empty. As far as I can remember it had always been rented, changing hands from one family to the next with the same regularity as the seasons. This was only a few years ago, and though I know the house hadn’t been empty long and would not remain that way, in my mind it stands empty now. There is no dining table, no phone hanging from the wall. There is no sprinkler in the backyard, and no one to run through it.

  My first daughter was born in the hospital where my nephew died. We lived in a small house at the time, on a small side street in a small town. When we brought my daughter home, my wife held her for days. At night we lay in bed together, the three of us, my daughter between us, her chest rising and falling rapidly, her lungs small and frail, and neither of us could sleep for fear of rolling over on her. Late at night I carried her to her crib, and my wife and I stood staring down at her. Later, when the house was quiet and everyone was asleep, I went out and stood in the backyard. It had snowed a few days earlier, and at some point I realized it was the anniversary of Keith’s death, but I don’t remember what I did there, or what I thought about, only that the stars were bright and the night was cold.

  I have never told my wife this story. Lying in bed late at night I open my mouth to speak, then close it again. On the second floor above us, our daughters sleep. I wonder what they dream, if, when they get older, they will know the kind of fear that sometimes creeps into my heart.

  When my first daughter was eighteen months old my wife came home from a routine doctor’s visit crying. Our daughter’s head was forming incorrectly, the doctors told her, the sutures misaligned. Her brain could be squeezed together, trapped between the bones of her skull. A few days later we took her for a CAT scan. My wife dug her fingernails into my arm as nurses slid our daughter, unconscious, into the machine. She was asleep for hours afterward. We sat in a little alcove, separated from the main room by a curtain. We could see the feet of nurses passing outside, and every few minutes one would stick her head through the curtain and check on us.

  I don’t remember the details of that little room, or what my daughter was wearing. I remember her waking, and smiling, and the nurse coming to tell us that the CAT scan showed nothing abnormal. Afterward, we drove home, though I have forgotten what time of year it was, or how bright the snow might have been or if the sun was shining or if it was night, and sometimes I wonder how, if there had been something wrong, it would feel twenty years later. Would I have to dredge up the memories or would they come to me at times unbidden, moving from one to the next: her riding her tricycle in the driveway; shying away from the neighbor’s dogs that barked at her; running through the sprinkler in the backyard?

  There was no picture of the stepfather in the paper, just as there was no picture of Keith. What I have, I have had to recreate from memory. I hold hard to my recreation of the little house because it is easier than understanding or forgiveness: the truck idling in the driveway, the stepfather’s hands opening and closing, the ice on the roads as I drove to the hospital.

  But sometimes a different memory creeps in, no matter what I do to keep it out. It is Thanksgiving, four months before Keith’s death. We have gathered at my grandmother’s house. We have eaten until we are sick with food and now we lie back and watch football on TV, or else walk slowly in the yard to work off the food we have eaten. It is damp, and cool. It has rained the night before.

  I am standing in the kitchen, looking out onto the backyard through the sliding glass door. The stepfather is playing with Keith. The stepfather holds his hands up and growls like a monster. Keith laughs and tries to get away but he totters and falls. He is fourteen months old and has just learned to walk and the world beneath him is still shaky and suspicious. But when he falls the stepfather scoops him up and holds Keith above his head and Keith squeals with delight as the stepfather laughs. The boy’s eyes are bright. When he laughs, I can see his front two teeth, just coming in.

  I wish I were more forgiving. I wish the world made more sense sometimes. I wish some memories did not drive wedges through others, that a moment could be defined in sharper terms—black or white, love or hate, good or bad. I watch the game of chase, laughing with them, until the stepfather turns and sees me. He offers a little wave, and I wave back.

  My father has not spoken his grandson’s name in twenty years. But sometimes, in the years after it happened, before I moved away and went to college and then started a family of my own, I’d come home late at night and find him smoking in the dark of the living room. He never spoke to me on these nights, just nodded his head as I passed, the smell of his cigarette following me to my bedroom, where I would try to sleep. In bed, I’d think of him in there, smoke curling above him, headlights from the road occasionally sweeping the wall. I knew he was thinking of something. Some nights I’d climb out of bed and join him. We’d sit until very late, until morning was coming outside, both of us staring into whatever thoughts occupied us, whatever dreams we could not handle while asleep. We’d both be very quiet, listening to the silence gathering around us.

  My family does not mention Keith’s name. I wonder who visits his grave. I do not even know where it is. There was no graveside service, not until weeks later, when the state medical examiner had outlined the history of violence on his body. I could find out, could make the long drive back to Arkansas and stand some November with the wind in the trees and the clouds racing above me and look down at his name. But I wonder if I would only be doing it for me—if whatever comfort provided by the act would be for me alone—and it saddens me to suspect this about myself.

  Six months after we moved to North Carolina I rose past midnight and dressed. It had been snowing all day, and earlier my wife and I had taken our daughters out to make snow angels and snowmen and chase each other with snowballs. Late that night it was still snowing, the roads blanked out, everything bright in the reflected light. I walked to the university where I took graduate classes. My youngest daughter was about the age Keith had been when he died. My oldest daughter was years older than he had ever been. On a small hill overlooking the soccer field, I knelt and watched the snow fall. There were no cars on the roads, no sounds passing in the night. The lights in t
he dorms and buildings were out, and it was easy to think I was alone in all the world. In the classes I teach, I have heard myself saying that winter often represents death, the world shriveling and dying, until spring comes and life bursts forth once again. When I get home I will lean over each of my daughters, my youngest still in her crib, and when my wife wakes and finds me there, I will not be able to explain any of it to her.

  The stepfather was sent to prison in December. I do not how it was arranged, if he was forced to turn himself in, if family members stood and watched him go, watched the handcuffs put on, watched him loaded into the back of the waiting car. He might have been forced to surrender himself the night before and to spend his last night in jail, but I know none of this. My imagining of how this occurred comes from prison movies, where white vans wired with steel mesh roll through gates topped with concertina wire, and the veteran prisoners whistle at the newcomers, who look around wild-eyed and frightened, while a burly guard with a shaved head slaps a nightstick into his palm.

  Nor can I imagine the inside of the prison without a movie or TV show creeping in: a stacked tier where burning paper rains down on the normally stoic guards, or a yard where every space belongs to one gang or another, and even standing in the wrong place can lead to a violent attack, and though I was raised by forgiving people there are times when I feel he deserves a violent place, that there should be no forgiveness.

  But at other times I can begin to find sympathy for him, if not exactly forgiveness. I see him sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows propped on his knees, staring at the wall. Or shuffling through the prison yard alone on a cold day in early February, or waking up in the middle of the night to a muffled sob, what might be a strange sound in a world of violent men, and wondering if he had made it.