by M. O. Walsh
What does a boy say?
But on Wednesday nights my mom would order pizza that came to us in one large greasy box at seven forty-five p.m. The cash would be sitting on the planter by the front door, and I would hand it to a guy with long hair and a skull-and-crossbones earring in his left ear. He wore a Sony Discman attached to his belt, and I would often recognize the song blasting through the headphones around his neck. Each week he would take the money and flip through the bills and say, “Thanks, bro,” and I would walk the pizza into the den, where my mother had set up trays. We’d lay our slices on paper plates and turn down the lights as my mom sat next to me on the couch to watch TV. Our entire house would then be transformed as the dark and eerie theme song for the show Unsolved Mysteries came on. The host, the actor Robert Stack, would then step out of a shadow on-screen and talk directly to us.
This hour was like a vacation.
At the height of its popularity, each episode of this show consisted of several retellings of “true” events both realistic and supernatural that even the most decorated detectives were unable to puzzle. The scenes would be dramatized by unknown actors and occasionally made use of special effects, all of which were narrated in voice-over by Stack.
If you don’t know, Robert Stack’s voice was a human miracle. His deep baritone had a strange influence on everything he said, and this, along with his good looks, sustained him through a long and varied Hollywood career at the back half of the twentieth century. It wasn’t that his voice merely made things sound frightening or dangerous. It was that he made them sound important. The disappearance of a small-town girl from Utah, the abduction of a businessman from Des Moines, these sounded from Stack like a global crisis. So you couldn’t help but listen when he explained the details of a case. You couldn’t help but agree when he told you how necessary it was to come forward if you knew anything. And you couldn’t help but legitimately wonder about the topics he pursued that no one else seemed willing to talk about, even when he began the show with impossible questions, such as, “Are we alone in the universe?”
This hour of the week became a true pleasure for both my mother and I, one of the few a teenager can share with a parent at that age, and our shadows sat like hills on the wall behind the couch as we watched. I remember it so well, and yet it is easy to underestimate moments like this when we’re in them. It’s easy to take life for granted. Everybody knows that.
But here’s the thing.
It is also easy to dismiss the random ways in which these memories return to us, often in dreams or strange flashes, as merely the unpredictable shuffling of our human mind that is, in itself, an unsolvable mystery. How does it even work? Brain clouds? Electrical currents? Associative recall? Ask a doctor. They don’t seem too sure. In fact, even some of our brightest psychologists and surgeons will tell you that the human memory, in its true intricacy, may never be parsed. But, I’ve come to think it’s much simpler than that.
I believe the reasons we hang on to seemingly insignificant snippets of conversation, the smell of a particular pizza delivered by a particular guy, the shape of certain shadows on a particular wall, is that there may come a day when we are sitting in a hospital room visiting our mother as she lies on an uncomfortable bed, still recovering. And we are asking her questions and feeling nervous about what the doctor has said could be permanent damage caused by a blood clot the size of a pinpoint and we don’t know if the way she is struggling to find the right words is a temporary exhaustion or the new reality and all we want to do is tell her we love her in a language no one has used before because we mean it in a way that no one has meant it before. And this will be a difficult time for us.
But then, in a break between the words, a commercial may come on the small television hung up in the corner of the room that we did not even know was playing. It may advertise some new drug, some insurance plan, and our mother will smile at the voice of the handsome actor standing in front of a green screen. She will then close her eyes and squeeze our hand, the one that she has been holding since we walked in, and say, “Oh, I used to have such a crush on him.”
When she does this, our memory will be waiting.
As soon as we look at the actor, as soon as we recognize him, memory will gladly rebuild for us the flickering den, place again the taste of pizza on our tongues, and even fill the hospital room with the smell of acetone that clung to our mother’s hair those decades ago. It will then perform other invisible miracles as well, allowing us to travel back in time to once again look at the woman sitting on the couch next to us watching TV, where she is now a much different person than the one we saw as a teenager. She is much more complicated, as with memory we are able to consider her life as a whole. We are able to consider both of our lives together. The sacrifices she made for us. The pain we went through. The trouble we caused her. The way she raised us. Yes yes yes. It is love that we feel here.
This is the purpose of memory.
But where memory fails is in touch.
We cannot physically go back to that dimly lit den and push aside the television trays to lie down and rest our head in that woman’s lap. We cannot feel her fingers in our hair, her hand on our shoulder. We can try if we want to, sure. We can close our eyes. We can imagine as hard as we like. It doesn’t matter. The touch is gone. Memory understands this.
So it enables the voice of Robert Stack or someone else like him to do for us what it needs to, which is remind us that every moment of our lives is plugged in. Every moment is crucial. And if we recognize this and embrace it, we will one day be able to look back and understand and feel and regret and reminisce and, if we are lucky, cherish. The way our sister tapped the top of a door frame. The way our father danced in the den. The way a grown man cried in the grass. The way Lindy, or at least some stolen version of her, once raced to a tree in the schoolyard. This is the best we can do.
And this is not so bad.
33.
Unfortunately, some things are so bad.
The inside of Jacques P. Landry’s private room was fifteen by twelve feet and stank of cigar smoke. The carpet was thick and brown and felt dirty beneath my palms as I trespassed across it that night, scared thoughtless on my hands and knees. To my left was a table stacked with files and envelopes. On the wall above it, a dry-erase board scrawled with symbols I could not discern. Next to this stood three filing cabinets, the middle of which was topped with a television and other electronic devices, and the digital clocks of these machines provided one of my only two sources of light. The other came in a sliver from beneath the locked door and made the doorway look like the entrance to another dimension. It reminded me immediately of something in my past that I could not place. Then the hair on my arms stood up like an animal’s.
I got the feeling I was not alone.
I stopped and listened for someone else in the room but heard only the soft whir of electronics. The place was so dark that I could barely make out even the largest objects and so I held my breath and scanned the wall to my right, making guesses as to what was there, and then my body went cold all over. In the far corner of the room I saw the outline of a head, what could be hair. It was hard not to scream. The shadow was so still, though, that I couldn’t be sure. This made me doubt everything else in my vision, as well. Is that a lamp or a shotgun? A table or a cage?
I did not know the answers to these simple questions, and the shape I saw against the wall could have been a potted plant. It could have been the smiling face of Jacques Landry. Yet it remained freakishly still. So I sunk closer to the floor and invented simple rules for myself. If it moves, I fly out of the open window. If I hear breathing, I crawl backward and try not to wake it. Is that a chin or a handle? I wondered. A shoulder or a drawer? I pressed my belly to the ground to get a different vantage point and soon felt something cold beneath my forearm, a light square on the dark carpet. Once I noticed this one I saw others as well, spread
across the room as if spilled or dealt out like cards. They were made of photographic paper, I could tell, the same size and shape as my picture of Lindy, and I carefully slid the nearest one toward me and turned it over. It was a close-up of male genitalia.
The image was so unexpected that I almost didn’t recognize it. The picture looked posed and clinical, and yet this was not from a medical book. It was black and white and poorly lit, like pornography from a bygone era, and I immediately knew whose body it was. The thick mat of pubic hair, the sturdy thighs from which the organ stood erect all repulsed me. A trio of dark moles dotted the pelvis. The testicles hung like weights. It looked, to me, just like him.
When I glanced back up, I saw a person sitting in the corner. Her cheeks were thin and her neck long and I wondered wildly if some foster child had been tied to a chair and left for dead in this room. I worried too, even though it was irrational, that it could have been Lindy tied up in that chair because this is the nature of worry. Yet my fear of this was enough to motivate me to stand up and, once I moved toward her, I saw that this was not a person at all, but rather a life-sized female doll. She was stiff and naked and plastic, and the blank of her openmouthed gaze horrified me. I then saw another one, a male counterpart, crumpled to the floor beside her. He was facedown and undressed and the way his arms folded over his head made him look like a guilty penitent. I became clumsy with fear. I backed away and knocked an ashtray off an end table. I bumped against a video camera perched on a tripod. I tripped over cords that ran across the carpet to the far wall, and when I followed them to the filing cabinets I saw that they were plugged into the electronic devices stacked on top of the television. Once I got close enough, I could see that these devices were Betamax machines, outdated versions of the VCR. There were three of them, all plugged into one another, and I carefully ran my hands across their fronts. I flipped open their small viewing windows and, inside the middle machine, I saw a tape. I couldn’t help myself.
I made sure the volume was off. I pressed play.
I expected the worst. Some part of me hoped for it. I knew that if I could find evidence of obvious atrocity then I could just grab this tape and go. This was my idea, I suppose, of being a hero. Instead, what materialized on the television was not immediately obvious. It was a series of pictures laid out like a grid and, in the eight or so squares that made a border around the screen, I saw the faces of foster children. The kids were thin and shirtless and stared blankly at something off camera like a Third World version of The Brady Bunch. I recognized the face of Tyler Bannister, the tattoo of a bird with one wing visible on his neck every time he looked away from the camera. The tattoos on his wrists visible when he covered his eyes. I also recognized Tin Tin and, in the other frames, saw kids from around eight to twelve years old that did not last long at the Landrys’. I did not see Jason at all. Every so often, one of these children would gaze into the camera and speak, but I could not hear what they were saying. For this, all these years later, I remain thankful.
In the middle of this grid—what the children were watching while being taped, I suppose—were two separate frames of black-and-white images from our neighborhood. One frame was comprised entirely of video footage and, in it, familiar cars pulled out of driveways, neighbors watered their lawns, we played football in the street. It was the ordinary stuff of our suburban lives in those days. The other frame shuffled through a collection of still photos, much like the close-ups scattered all over the floor. My mother at the mailbox. Bo Kern’s harelip. A woman’s vagina. Duke Kern’s sculpted stomach. And then Lindy, one summer day before it all happened, I knew, with her hair fallen across her tanned shoulders. With her smile so innocent that I’d almost forgotten it.
Then everything changed.
I noticed a light on the walls, and its flicker was unmistakable. I ran over and peeked through the side of the curtains and it took me a long time to process what I saw. There was a police car on Piney Creek Road, parked two doors down at my house. The vehicle sat in our driveway, its lights spinning without sound, and in front of that, I saw my father’s Mercedes. I watched two officers get out of their car as my father walked up our driveway to meet them and I’d no idea what to make of it. I remembered my mother calling him after Jacques Landry came to our door, telling us that he would stop by, but to show up in the middle of the night? How desperate must her voice have sounded? How long had he been at my house? Did I leave my window open? Were Mom and Rachel awake? Or was the reason he had shown up not because of that cur at all, not because of Jacques Landry, but rather because my mother had woken up to find me missing? Had she called him again? Had she also, this time, called the police? At what point did my decisions begin to hurt the people I loved?
I didn’t have time to think.
Behind me, the Landrys’ telephone rang. I nearly jumped through the window. The clang of the bell filled the house so aggressively that it was hard to recall the silence that preceded it. By the second ring, I heard Mr. Landry moving around in the den. It sounded like someone was rousing a bear. I heard a glass break, a piece of furniture fall over. I then heard him calling out for Louise to answer the phone and I knew I had to get out of there. I took another quick glance around the room for the safe, for the entire reason I came, and I spotted it, the size of a dormitory refrigerator, sitting beneath the desk.
Before I could get to it, three more patrol cars came screaming down Piney Creek Road. They had their sirens on, their lights flashing, and I turned to watch through the side of the curtains as they stopped in front of the Landrys’, maybe thirty yards from where I hid. I shut the curtains and heard the heavy sound of Jacques Landry running down the hallway toward me. I couldn’t move. This was it. I was sure of it. He was going to open the door and find me and he was going to kill me. If a person could shoot an innocent dog, why not shoot a meddlesome boy? I found no logical reason. So I put my back to the wall and stared at the door and in this almost ecstatic fear realized what the sliver of light beneath it reminded me of.
It reminded me of Christmas Eve, every year but that last one.
It reminded me of the way my sisters would return home from college for this holiday or, back when we all lived together, simply play along with the idea of Santa Claus because I was their brother and I was younger than them and I had rushed through supper to take my bath and put on my pajamas so that I could sleep where I always slept on Christmas Eve, which was on the pullout trundle of my sister Hannah’s bed. She and Rachel would turn in early that night, as well, to share the bed above me as they did only that one time per year where they would tease me by wondering aloud if we had forgotten to put out food for the reindeer, cookies for the big guy. And even after they eventually told me the truth, which they claimed it their big-sisterly duty to do, we continued to sleep in Hannah’s room on Christmas Eve for what we said was our mother’s sake, and I would have sold my soul, at that moment, to do it again.
But the reason I was reminded of this was that in those youngest years, when I still believed in nearly everything a child is supposed to believe in, I would stare at the sliver of light beneath Hannah’s door long after she and Rachel had fallen asleep and want desperately to be the one boy on Earth who saw Santa’s feet and could testify to it, as he stopped outside of our room to give my sisters and I a quiet blessing. Yet when I finally did see a pair of feet stop at a door exactly like Hannah’s, in a room the exact shape of Hannah’s, it did little but confirm to me that Hannah was dead and my childhood was over and that blessings are as easily taken away as they are given.
So I dove beneath his desk to hide. I had no real plan. When Mr. Landry rattled the doorknob I closed my eyes and clenched my body and prayed like a coward for help from the same God I’d so often dismissed. And yet he did not open the door. He instead began securing the locks outside of it and the rattling noise of this endeavor traveled up the door frame like it was being zipped. In the street, the police cut of
f their sirens. I heard their footsteps on the sidewalk outside. Inside the house, I could hear Mr. Landry and Louise bickering with each other as they both moved toward the front door. When they opened it, Mr. Landry said, “What is the meaning of this?”
A policeman said, “Are you the parents of Jason Landry?”
I knew we were going down after this.
So I did what Jason suggested I do and opened the safe beneath the desk. If I was going to be arrested for breaking and entering, I at least wanted my hands full of evidence. Who knows what I expected to find. Lindy’s underwear? A signed confession? The entire enterprise suddenly seemed ridiculous. Still, I twisted the key and opened the safe and there was not much inside of it: six Betamax tapes with the word “Master” written on the labels, a few documents that looked official and scientific but were incomprehensible, and a medical case full of glass vials. In a cardboard box next to this sat a pile of syringes still in their plastic. I carefully removed the case and pulled a vial from its package. I did not recognize the name of this drug but recalled the pained face Tyler Bannister had made those years back upon the mention of this room and understood that no matter what Jacques Landry was up to with those children, it was abominable. I’ve never gone back to research this. I’ve never had the stomach. Call me what you will. Yet on that night I took this vial and grabbed as many photos from the floor as I could. I thought about grabbing the tapes, the camera, the spent cigars that were as round as dimes, and then I heard my father’s voice.
