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But you don’t do it, not then. You wait, and you hope that with the waiting will come the proof or the confession, and the first steps can be taken toward restoring a moral order, a balance between the needs of the living and the demands of the dead. But still, those images will come back to you later, unbidden, and if you’re with someone whom you trust, you may say: “I remember. I remember what happened. I was there. I was a witness and, later, I tried to become more than that. I tried to achieve a measure of justice.”
And if you succeeded, if punishment was meted out and the file marked accordingly, you may feel a twinge of-not pleasure, not that, but of…peace? Relief? Maybe what you feel doesn’t have a name, shouldn’t have a name. Maybe it is only the silence of your conscience, because this time it isn’t screaming out a name in your head and you won’t have to go back and pull the file to remind yourself again of that suffering, that death, and your failure to maintain the balance that is required if life and time are not to cease forever.
Case closed: isn’t that the phrase? It’s been so long, it seems, since you’ve had call to use it, to taste the falsity of the words even as they are forming on your tongue and passing through your lips. Case closed. Except it isn’t closed, for the absence continues to be felt in the lives of those left behind, in the hundred thousand tiny adjustments required to account for that absence, for the life, acknowledged or unacknowledged, that should be impacting on other lives. Irv Blythe, for all his faults, understood that. There is no closure. There are only lives continued or lives ended, with attendant consequences in each case. At least the living are no longer your concern. It is the dead that stay with you.
And maybe you spread the photos and think: I remember.
I remember you.
I have not forgotten.
You will not be forgotten.
She was lying on her back on a bed of crushed spider lilies, the dying white blooms of the plants like starburst flaws upon the print, as if the negative itself had been sullied by its exposure to this act. Maria
I flipped forward to the autopsy report. There were no bite marks, bruises or abrasions to Maria
Tests showed fibers matching Maria
The evidence still didn’t convince me that Maria
What could not be denied was that Maria
According to Jones’s statement, he and Maria
Jones told police that he then proceeded to have sexual intercourse with Maria
And that was where I came in.
I ran my fingers gently across her face, the indentations in the photographic paper like the pores on her skin. I’m sorry, I thought. I didn’t know you. I have no way of telling if you were a good person or a bad one. If I had met you, encountered you in a bar or sat beside you in a coffee shop, would we have got on together, even if only in that small, passing way in which two lives may briefly interlock before continuing, somehow both altered yet unchanged, on their own paths, one of those small, flickering moments of contact between strangers that make this life liveable? I suspect not. We were, I think, very different. But you did not deserve to end your life in this way and, if I could, I would have intervened to stop what occurred, even at the risk of my own life, because I could not have stood by and allowed even you, a stranger, to suffer. Now I will try to retrace your steps, to understand what led you to this place, to rest at last among crushed lilies, the night insects drowning in your blood.