She brought sandwiches on trays for us to eat in the living room. My water was all ice cubes. I was done in two swallows.
“So, how is Ben, Libby?” she asked when she finally sat down. She kept her tray to her side though. Allowing for a quick retreat.
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have contact with him.”
She didn’t really seem to listen; she was tuned to her own inner radio station. Something light jazz.
“Obviously, Libby, I feel a lot of guilt over my part in this, although the book came out after the verdict, it had no bearing on that,” she said in a rush. “Still, I was part of that rush to judgment. It was the time period. You were so young, I know you don’t remember this, but the ’80s. I mean, it was called the Satanic Panic.”
“What was?” I wondered how many times she’d use my name in conversation. She seemed like one of those.
“The whole psychiatric community, the police, law enforcement, the whole shebang—they thought everyone was a Devil worshiper back then. It was … trendy.” She leaned toward me, her earrings bobbing, her hands kneading. “People really believed there was this vast network of Satanists, that it was a commonplace thing. A teenager starts acting strange: he’s a Satan worshiper. A preschooler comes home from school with a weird bruise or an odd comment about her privates: her teachers are Satan worshipers. I mean, remember the McMartin preschool trial? Those poor teachers suffered years before the charges were dropped. Satanic panic. It was a good story. I fell for it, Libby. We didn’t question enough.”
The dog sniffed over to me, and I tensed up, hoping Barb would call it away. She didn’t notice, though, her eyes on a dangling stained-glass sunflower casting golden light from the window above me.
“And, I mean, the story just worked,” Barb continued. “I will now admit, and it took me a good decade, Libby, that I breezed over a lot of evidence that didn’t fit this Ben-Satan theory, I ignored obvious red flags.”
“Like what?”
“Um, like the fact that you were clearly coached, that you were in no way a credible witness, that the shrink they had assigned to you, to quote ‘draw you out’ was just putting words into your head.”
“Dr. Brooner?” I remembered Dr. Brooner: A whiskery hippie dude with a big nose and small eyes—he looked like a friendly storybook animal. He was the only person besides my aunt Diane I liked that whole year, and the only person I talked to about that night, since Diane was unwilling. Dr. Brooner.
“Quack,” Barb said, and giggled. I was about to protest, feeling defensive—the woman had basically just called me a liar to my face, which was true, but still pissed me off—but she was going again. “And your dad’s alibi? That girlfriend of his? No way that should have held. That man had no real alibi, and he owed a lot of people a lot of money.”
“My mom didn’t have any money.”
“She had more than your dad did, believe me.” I did. My dad once sent me to a neighbor’s house for a free pity lunch, told me to look under their sofa cushions and bring him any change.
“And then there was a footprint of a men’s dress shoe in blood that no one ever traced. But then again, the entire crime scene was contaminated—that’s something else I skipped over in the book. There were people going in and out of that place all day. Your aunt came in and took out whole closets of junk, clothes and stuff for you. It was all against any rules of police procedure. But no one cared. People were freaking out. And they had a strange teenage boy that no one in the whole town liked that much, who had no money, who didn’t know how to look out for himself, and who happened to like heavy metal. It’s just embarrassing.” She checked herself. “It’s awful. Tragedy.”
“Can anything get Ben out?” I asked, my stomach gone eely. The fact that the definitive voice on Ben’s guilt had changed her mind was sickening me. As was meeting yet another person who was positive I’d committed perjury.
“Well, you’re trying to, right? I think it’s almost impossible to undo these things after all these years—his time for an appeal, per se, is up. He’d need to try for habeas corpus and that’s … you all would need some big new evidence at this point to get the ball rolling. Like some really compelling DNA evidence. Unfortunately, your family was cremated so—”
“Right, well, thank you,” I interrupted, needing to get home, right then.
“Again, I wrote the book after the verdict, but if I can do anything to help you, let me know, Libby. I do bear some culpability. I take that responsibility.”
“Have you made any statements, told the police you don’t think Ben did it?”
“Well, no. It seems like most people concluded a long time ago that Ben didn’t do it,” Barb said, her voice going shrill. “I assume you’ve officially recanted your testimony? I’d think that’d be a huge help.”
She was waiting for me to say more, to explain why I’d come to her now. To tell her, yeah, sure, Ben was innocent and I was going to fix all this. She sat eyeing me, eating her lunch, chewing each bite with excessive care. I picked up my sandwich—cucumber and hummus—and set it back down, leaving a thumbprint in the damp bread. The room was lined with bookshelves, but they contained only self-help books. Open the Sunshine!; Go, Go, Girl; Stop Punishing Yourself; Stand up—Stand Tall; Be Your Own Best Friend; Moving On, Moving Up! They went on, and on, the relentless, cheerful, buck-up titles. The more I read, the more miserable I felt. Herbal remedies, positive thinking, forgiveness of self, living with mistakes. She even had a book for beating tardiness. I don’t trust self-helpers. Years ago, I left a bar with a friend of a friend, a nice, cute, crew-necked, normal guy with an apartment nearby. After sex, after he fell asleep, I started nosing around his room, and found that his desk was covered with sticky notes:
Don’t sweat the small stuff, it’s all small stuff.
If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a
pretty good time.
Enjoy life—no one gets out of here alive.
Don’t worry, be happy.
To me, all that urgent hopefulness was more frightening than if I’d found a pile of skulls with hair still attached. I ran out in full panic, my underwear tucked up a sleeve.
I didn’t stay much longer with Barb. I left with promises to call her soon and a blue paperweight in the shape of a heart I stole from her sidetable.
Patty Day
JANUARY 2, 1985
9:42 A.M.
The sink was stained a sludgy purple from where Ben had dyed his hair. Sometime in the night, then, he’d locked himself in the bathroom, sat down on the closed toilet seat, and read through the instructions on the carton of hair color she’d found in the trash. The carton had a photograph of a woman with light pink lips and jet-black hair, worn in a pageboy. She wondered if he’d stolen it. She couldn’t imagine Ben, chin-to-chest Ben, setting a dye kit on the checkout counter. So he’d shoplifted it. Then in the middle of the night, her son, all by himself, had measured and combined and lathered. He’d sat with that mudpile of chemicals on his red hair and waited.
The whole idea made her incredibly sad. That in this house of women, her boy had colored his hair in the night by himself. Obviously, it was silly to think he’d have asked her for help, but to do such a thing without an accomplice seemed so lonely. Patty’s older sister, Diane, had pierced Patty’s ears in this bathroom two decades ago. Patty heated a safety pin with a cheap lighter and Diane sliced a potato in half and stuck its cold, wet face against the back of Patty’s ear. They froze her lobe with an ice cube, and Diane—hold still, hold stillllll—jabbed that pin into Patty’s rubbery flesh. Why did they need the potato? For aim or something. Patty had chickened out after the first ear, had plopped down on the side of the bathtub, the lancet of the pin still sticking out the lobe. Diane, intense and un-budging in a mountainous wool nightgown, closed in on her with another hot pin.
“It’ll be over in a second, you can’t do just one, P.”
Diane, the doer. Jobs were not to be abandoned
, not for weather, or laziness, or a throbbing ear, melted ice, and a scaredy kid sister.
Patty twirled her gold studs. The left one was off-center, her fault for squirming at the last minute. Still, there they were, twin markers of teenage brio, and she’d done it with her sister, just like she’d first applied lipstick or hooked elastic clips to sanitary napkins the size of a diaper, circa 1965. Some things were not meant to be done alone.
She poured Comet into the sink and started scrubbing, the water turning an inky green. Diane would be by soon. She always dropped in midweek if she was “in her car,” which was her way of making the thirty-mile drive out to the farm seem like just part of a day’s errands. Diane would make fun of this latest Ben saga. When Patty was worried about school, teachers, the farm, Ben, her marriage, the kids, the farm (after 1980, it was always, always, always the farm), it was Diane she craved, like a stiff drink. Diane, sitting in a lawn chair in their garage, smoking a series of cigarettes, would pronounce Patty a dope, would tell her to lighten up. Worries find you easily enough without inviting them. With Diane, worries were almost physical beings, leachy creatures with latchhooks for fingers, meant to be vanquished immediately. Diane didn’t worry, that was for less hearty women.
But Patty couldn’t lighten up. Ben had gone so remote this past year, turned himself into this strange, tense kid who walled himself into his room, kicking around to music that rattled the walls, the belchy, screaming words seeping out from under his door. Alarming words. She’d not bothered to listen at first, the music itself was so ugly, so frantic, but one day she’d come home early from town, Ben thinking no one was home, and she’d stood outside his door and heard the bellows:
I am no more,
I am undone,
the Devil took my soul,
now I’m Satan’s son.
The record skipped and again came the coarse chant: I am no more, I am undone, the Devil took my soul, now I’m Satan’s son.
And again. And then again. And Patty realized Ben was just standing over his record player, picking up the needle and playing the words over and over, like a prayer.
It was Diane she wanted here. Now. Diane, settled down on the couch like a friendly bear in one of her three old flannel shirts, now chewing a series of nicotine gums, would talk about the time Patty came home in a minidress and their folks actually gasped, as if she were a lost cause. “And you weren’t, were you? You were just a kid. So is he.” And Diane would snap her fingers like it was that simple.
The girls were hovering outside the bathroom door—they’d be out there when she emerged, waiting. They knew from Patty’s scrubbing and mutterings that something further had gone wrong, and they were trying to decide if this was a situation for tears or recrimination. When Patty cried, it invariably set off at least two of her girls, and if someone got in trouble, the house got windy with blame. The Day women were the definition of mob mentality. And here they were on a farm with plenty of pitchforks.
She rinsed her hands, chapped, red and hard, and glanced at herself in the mirror, making sure her eyes weren’t wet. She was thirty-two but looked a decade older. Her forehead was creased like a child’s paper fan, and crow’s feet rayed out from her eyes. Her red hair was shot with white, wiry threads, and she was unattractively thin, all bumps and points, like she’d swallowed a shelf’s worth of hardware: hammers and mothballs and a few old bottles. She did not look like the kind of person you’d want to hug, and, in fact, her children never snuggled into her. Michelle liked to brush her hair (impatiently and aggressively, the way Michelle did most things) and Debby leaned into her whenever they were both standing (loosely and distractedly, as was Debby’s way). Poor Libby tended not to touch her at all, unless she was really hurt, and that made sense, too. Patty’s body had been so used up that by her mid-twenties even her nipples were knobby; she’d bottle-fed Libby almost immediately.
There was no medicine cabinet in the cramped bathroom (what would she do when the girls hit high school, one bathroom for four women, and where would Ben be? She had a quick, miserable image of him in some motel room, all by himself in a boy-mess of stained towels and spoiled milk), so she kept a small cluster of toiletries stacked along the sink. Ben had shoved all the containers into one corner—aerosol deodorant and hairspray, a midget can of baby powder she didn’t remember buying. They were now splattered with the same violet stain that dirtied her sink. She wiped them down like they were china. Patty wasn’t ready for another trip to the department store. She’d driven to Salina a month ago in a positive, bright mood to pick up some prettifying items: cream rinse, face lotion, lipstick. She had folded a $20 bill in her front pocket just for the trip. A splurge. But the sheer amount of options in face cream alone— hydrating, wrinkle-fighting, sun-thwarting—had overwhelmed her. You could buy one moisturizer, but then you had to get a matching cleanser, too, and something called toner, and before you were even ready for the night cream, you’d have blown fifty bucks. She’d left the store with nothing, feeling chastened and foolish.
“You’ve got four kids—no one expects you to look like a daisy,” was Diane’s response.
But she wanted to look like a daisy every now and then. Months back, Runner had returned, just dropped out of the sky with a tan face and blue eyes and stories of fishing boats in Alaska and the race circuit in Florida. He’d stood on her doorstep, lanky in dirty jeans, with not even a wink about the fact they hadn’t heard from him in three years, hadn’t gotten any money from him. He asked if he could board with them til he got settled—naturally he was broke, although he handed Debby half a warm Coke he’d been drinking as if it were a wonderful gift. Runner swore he’d fix things up around the farm and keep it all platonic, if she wanted. It was summer then, and she let him sleep on the couch, where the girls would run to him in the morning as he lay sprawled and stinky in torn boxers, his balls half out.
He charmed the girls—he called them Baby Doll, Angelface— and even Ben watched him attentively, swooping in and out of interactions like a shark. Runner didn’t exactly engage Ben, but he tried to joke with him a little, be friendly. He’d include Ben as a male, which was good, he’d say things like, “That’s a man’s job,” and give Ben a wink. After the third week, Runner rolled up in his truck with an old fold-out sofa he’d found and suggested he camp out in the garage. It seemed OK. He helped her with dishes and he opened doors for her. He’d let Patty catch him looking at her butt, and then pretend to be embarrassed. They exchanged a smoky kiss one night as she was handing him clean bedsheets, and he’d immediately been on her— hands up her shirt, pressing her against the wall, pulling her head back by her hair. She pushed him off, told him she wasn’t ready, tried to smile. He sulked and shook his head, looking her up and down with pursed lips. When she undressed for bed, she could smell the nicotine from where he’d grabbed her just below the breasts.
He’d stayed another month, leering around, starting jobs and leaving them half done. When she asked him to leave during breakfast one morning, he called her a bitch, threw a glass at her, left juice stains on the ceiling. After he was gone, she discovered he’d stolen sixty bucks, two bottles of booze, and a jewelry box that he’d soon discover had nothing in it. He moved to a decrepit cabin a mile away—smoke came from the chimney at all times, the only form of heat. Sometimes she could hear gunfire in the distance, the sounds of bullets shot straight up in the air.
That would be her last romance with the man who fathered her children. And now, it was time for more reality. Patty tucked her hair, dry and unwieldy, behind her ears and opened the door. Michelle sat on the floor right in front of her, pretending to study the floorboard. She assessed Patty from behind gray-tinted glasses.
“’s Ben in trouble?” she asked. “Why’d he do that? With his hair?”
“Growing pains, I think,” Patty said, and just as Michelle took a deep breath—she always gulped air before she said something, her sentences were tight, fast links of words that just kept coming til sh
e had to breathe again—they heard a car coming up the driveway. The driveway was long, someone would pull onto it and they wouldn’t arrive for another minute. Somehow Patty knew it wasn’t her sister, even though the girls were shrieking Diane! Diane! already, running toward the window to look out. There’d be sad little sighs when it wasn’t Diane after all. Somehow she knew it was Len, her loan officer. Even his driving had a possessive sound to it. Len the Letchy Lender. She’d been wrangling with him since 1981. Runner had left by then, announcing this kind of life wasn’t for him, looking around like it was his place instead of hers, her parents’, her grandparents’.
All he’d done was marry her and ruin it. Poor, disappointed Runner, when his dreams had been so high in the ’70s, when people actually thought they could get rich from farming. (Ha! She snorted out loud, there in her kitchen, at the thought of it, imagine.) She and Runner had taken over the farm from her parents in ’74. It was a big deal, bigger even than her marriage or the birth of her firstborn. Neither of those had thrilled her sweet and quiet parents—Runner stank of trouble even then, but, bless them, they never said a thing against him. When, at age seventeen, she told them that she was knocked up and they were getting married, they just said: Oh. Like that. Which said enough.
Patty had a blurry photograph of the day they took on the farm: her parents, stiff and proud, smiling shyly at the camera, and her and Runner, triumphant grins, bountiful hair, incredibly young, holding champagne. Her parents had never had champagne before, but they drove to town and got a bottle for the occasion. They toasted out of old jelly jars.
It went wrong fast, and Patty couldn’t entirely blame Runner. Back then, everyone thought the value of land would keep skyrocketing—they’re not making any more of it!—and why not buy more, and better, all the time? Plant fencepost to fencepost—it was a rallying cry. Be aggressive, be brave. Runner with his big dreams and no knowledge had marched her down to the bank—he’d worn a tie the color of lime sherbet, thick as a quilt—and hemmed and hawed to get a loan. They ended up with double what they asked for. They shouldn’t have taken it, maybe, but their lender said don’t worry— boom times.