We are all detectives walking around with our flashlights and notepads. We all feel that there is more going on than meets the eye.
—David Lynch
November 3, 2008
Final Assignment:
Write about your victim.
The dead girl never gets to write her own story. She never gets to shake her cramped hand after falling into the words for too long, like I get to do. The dead girl never gets to take a creative writing class taught by an instructor from the local college who is nervous and excited about being in a prison for the first time. The dead girl doesn’t get to put up her bloody, leaf-encrusted hand when the teacher asks, “Does anyone know what epiphany means?” Her side of the story is always unwritten, and that becomes the secondary tragedy. She’s the only one who knows what went down. Everyone else is a tourist in her resting place, even me.
This is what I know, and what I keep on imagining, happened.
In the woods she looked battered and sunken, like a tossed-aside doll. At first I thought it must be a game, an act. But Haley remained still where she lay with her legs in the creek and the rest of her on the sand. An Ophelia in Doc Martens. “Haley,” I said, kneeling beside her. “Your mom is going to freak out.”
I saw that blood filled Haley’s transparent blouse. I tried to stand but my legs were shaky and my velvet skirt was heavy with water. Even then, I wasn’t sure this was happening. The sand beneath the girl was dark, like an oil stain. I was coming down from the acid trip, and the air still felt scratchy as yarn and the trees waved in time like music. I reached out and pushed Haley’s shoulder and thick blood poured out of her like she was a tipped cup. I sat back, trying to breathe.
Haley was my friend and now she was falling apart, becoming part of the ground. I couldn’t leave her like this. I leaned forward and hurriedly rearranged her, crossing her hands over the wounds to hide them. There was dirt beneath the nails, as if she’d gripped the ground at some point. One hand had a wound through it, a place where the skin gave way. Under the swaying trees of Blueheart Woods, I fanned out Haley’s hair, brushed it back with my fingers, trying to make her beautiful. The curls felt the way they always did, but why wouldn’t they? Giving way to frizz, this reddish bush of it around Haley’s face.
I thought about the boy, Berk—there is always a living boy to go with a dead girl. I did not remember anything between getting out of his car the night before and this moment now. I thought he could never have done this. I’d seen him care about her, sometimes I thought more than he cared about me. Berk had left us by the woods, angry at me. Then I was angry at Haley, because she left me alone on acid. I remember seeing her walk into the dark woods, singing “Feed the Tree” as the night lowered on her like a sheet. Silver baby come to me. I’ll only hurt you in my dreams.
Then nothing, until I was in my room after the sun came up. I said, “Haley,” and jumped out of bed, knowing that I needed to find her. And I did.
This would be Haley’s burial, I reasoned, so I arrayed several twigs and branches around my friend’s head, like a Renaissance halo.
I dug into my purse and found a pair of fold-up nail scissors. I reached out and took a lock of Haley’s hair between my fingers. I apologized even as I snipped away a curl—as if I could apologize for the future, that it was no longer her story.
I tucked the trimmed hair into a side pocket in my purse, where it settled next to a tampon.
My sister, Carter, had always said that when something happened to me, it was like it had happened to her. Just one of those twin things. I knew she would call the police so I tried not to tell her about Haley. I was afraid that if someone could do this to her, he could do it to me. But then more terrible thoughts came, and really, never stopped coming. What happened? Who did this? In the end I wasn’t good at secrets, not at that age anyway. I went back to the woods, and after I got home, I managed to keep my silence about half an hour.
Before I confided in Carter, I stashed the orange curl in between the pages of Jane Eyre. The strands became flattened and dull inside the book, like the hair a child might unthinkingly cut off a doll. It didn’t stay together, pretty, the way I had hoped it would.
—Kennedy Wynn
Heron Valley Correctional Facility
Chapter 1
Gerry Wynn had chosen his daughters’ names after presidents, so they would know anything was possible. If they’d been boys they would have been Jack and Jimmy, or more formally John and James. But thirty-one years ago they had been handed to him screaming, pink, and female.
The afternoon before his daughter’s release from prison, Gerry finished preparing things for Kennedy’s arrival. He walked out to his SUV and placed her old army jacket in the front seat so she would have something to wear when she came out of the Heron Valley Correctional Facility. He had commissioned Carter to arrange for a new wardrobe for her, but she had forgotten to buy her sister a coat. Already blouses, pants, belts, and boots were stashed in an upstairs bedroom. And it was Carter’s job to bring the cake to the party, although she hadn’t said yet whether she would come with him to the prison to fetch her twin.
Gerry thought that strange—Carter had dutifully visited her sister every week throughout her sentence but had stopped as the release date came closer. He had never understood daughters, much less twins. After he finished making up the room, he would call Carter, he thought, try again to convince her what a momentous occasion this was. With the exception of their mother, Laine, the family was going to be together again.
He was excited to show Kennedy the renovated house. Hers was the only room he hadn’t redone. He stood in the doorway often but didn’t cross into the space, as if it were still hers. Now it would be. As he went in, he discovered the bedroom had gathered dust. He remembered changing the sheets before her first parole hearing five years ago. She should have been let out then, given that the evidence in the case had been purely circumstantial. No weapon. No blood anywhere in the Wynn home. Only that goddamn lock of hair forced her into a plea. The Kimbersons had protested the release at a press conference that time, trotting out their living child, a boy. Everett was hardly old enough to shave then, let alone read a victim impact statement about what it had been like to lose his big sister when he was just nine. Distasteful, Gerry thought, to use a child that way. Kennedy had been denied that time. This time, they hadn’t shown and Kennedy had been given the release date of November 7, 2008.
Gerry gripped the new set of sheets against his leg. He stared at the contents of the shelves: books, perfume bottles, and banners, ribbons she’d won, tennis trophies. Kennedy and Carter had played doubles until they were fourteen; on the tennis court, they’d moved like music. His favorite memories of Kennedy involved driving long-distance to sporting events—she and Carter were twelve, then thirteen, that little window of time before he would lose them. Even then, he’d known they would go: it was just that he’d thought it would be to school dances and sleepover parties.