How Will I Know You?

Tom kept the sound on the TV muted because next to him Alison was asleep when the news came on. In the middle of the top story (BREAKING was all the crawl said, as if the item were so momentous it defied detail, which, as it turned out, it was), he made a sharp movement in the bed and Alison woke up murmuring, “What?”

She was already agitated because it was Sunday night, and though she’d been teaching for three years now—not to mention in the same classroom she and Tom had shared for homeroom all through high school—the beginning of a new week always made her nervous. She just wanted to stay home and bake holiday cookies, she said. (“What the hell is a holiday cookie?” her father had asked, and Alison told him it was more politically correct than Christmas. “Oh, for sweet Christ’s sake,” Doug groaned, giving her remark a dismissive wave, and Alison laughed with affection.)

“Hold on,” Tom told her, turning up the volume.

“What is it?” She struggled to raise herself, her flannel nightgown bunching around her chest above the growing moon-bump of her belly. Squinting at the screen, too lazy to grab her glasses from the nightstand, she said, “What is that?”

He shushed her, and they both listened to the end of the report. “That’s not Joy they’re talking about though, right?” Alison asked.

But it was. The girl everyone assumed drowned on Friday the 13th of last month had, in fact, been murdered. The victim of a homicide: autopsy results showed she’d actually died of strangulation, after which the killer dumped her body in the woods.

Tom had almost recovered from the first surprise—where she’d been found. If Joy Enright had never been under the ice, as they’d first thought, what was it that had grabbed him when he went diving for her that night? They’d called it a rescue mission, though on the boat, they all knew the goal was to bring up a body. The ambulance standing by was ready to pull out under Condition White (meaning no need to hurry), not toward the emergency room but the morgue.

But he’d failed at the job, panicking when he thought he felt a hand closing around his wrist. Abandoning the search and telling them all he’d found nothing down there.

By the time he got home that night after finishing all the paperwork, Alison had already heard. “I have her. She’s one of mine,” she whispered, as if she could somehow soften the truth by not giving full voice to the words.

Tom loved how much his wife cared about her students, referring to them as if they belonged to her. Her devotion extended beyond the classroom. Once a week during her lunch hour, she ran an informal discussion group for kids whose parents drank too much or in some other way were falling down on the job. She attended their pep rallies, their field hockey and soccer games. It was not lost on Tom that the compliment Alison seemed to value most was any variation on “I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” How often had he heard her say that her own mother was her role model? He always did his best to look pleased rather than dismayed.

“She’s the smartest kid in school,” Alison added, the night they all thought Joy drowned.

Was she the type who would run away? Tom asked.

“Run away?” Though it was close to midnight, Alison had pulled ice cream from the freezer and started eating it straight out of the container as they turned on the little TV in the kitchen to watch the rerun of the late news. Ice cream was her treat to herself when she was pregnant, and it was sometimes hard for Tom to believe how fast she could go through a carton. “I thought they said she was in the water. And they found her scarf.”

“That’s what they thought, because of the ice break. But maybe she fell through and then managed to pull herself out. Maybe she’s hiding somewhere—embarrassed, scared, I don’t know. It’s possible.” How much he would have liked to believe this, that Joy had never actually been under the ice, and that what he’d felt gripping him around the wrist was a vine or a strong slug of mud.

“She didn’t run away,” Alison had said. “I get why her mother wants to think that, though.” She nodded toward the screen, which showed Susanne Enright, her face contorted in tears, issuing an appeal to anyone who knew anything about what could have happened to Joy. “Let’s face it—she’s a floater.” A cop’s kid, Alison used the cop’s term for a body that rose on its own gases or surfaced in a thaw. And as with a cop, Tom knew, something allowed her to separate the lingo she used from the person she was applying it to.

He’d thought Joy was a floater, too. But three weeks later, here were the news people, telling him that his wishful thinking might have been right: the police now believed that after being murdered, the girl had been in the woods the whole time, despite the fact that the ground had been searched. Instead of hidden under the surface, she’d been right in plain sight, or what should have been plain sight. It happened: sometimes what people were looking for was right in front of them, and they missed it because they were paying attention to something else. In this case, it could have been because the original reports put her under the water, and most people—even the searchers—assumed she was there.

“No.” Alison was watching through her glasses now, her hand pressed to her heart as she spoke directly to the TV. “She wasn’t murdered; she drowned.”

He’d always loved this, too, about his wife: her knack for feeling what it was like to be inside other people. Sometimes she couldn’t shake what took hold of her when she observed or heard about someone suffering, even if she didn’t know the person and even if it was far away in the world.

Tom knew that as she listened to the news report, she did not want to have to imagine her student enduring an assault before dying. In the old days, she would have told him this; she would have wanted to talk about it. But with each miscarriage she’d begun saying less and less, and though he’d done his best to put off realizing it as long as he could, he’d understood for a while now (even before what she did to him at the end of October) that if something didn’t change—and soon—they might never find their way out of the trouble they were in.

He decided not to correct her about the manner of Joy’s death. What was the point? Watching the familiar footage of Susanne Enright begging the public for information about her missing daughter, he recalled the day he’d gone to the family’s house, at Susanne’s request, two days after Joy had last been seen. Susanne appeared not to have slept at all, and her speech came out slow and uncertain, as if she were trying to find the right words in a language she’d only just learned. How would she absorb the shocks she was suffering now? The first had been the discovery of the body two days ago—a blow in itself, of course, because it was obvious that she’d been trying her best to believe that her daughter was still alive. Now that she knew Joy was not only dead, but murdered, how would she react?

Beyond that, who could have done it? Who would have strangled a teenager in a random encounter, after she stalked away from her friends in a fit of fury? No one could have anticipated her behavior that day, or where she’d end up at the moment she encountered whoever killed her.

No, it was more likely that someone had been following her, watching. Waiting for the right moment to pounce and grab. Maybe he (it was always a he) hadn’t meant for her to die. Maybe he just wanted to scare her for some reason. But why?

The anchorwoman reported that Interim Chief Douglas Armstrong had begun a preliminary investigation, and it showed him speaking at a news conference from the six o’clock broadcast. Even though Doug had been in the position for five months, Tom found himself still doing double takes when he saw his father-in-law on TV; the dark cloth of his uniform showed up his blue eyes brighter than in real life, even on the small screen. “Police are looking for a black man seen in the vicinity of Elbow Pond the day Joy Enright disappeared,” the anchorwoman said, her face and voice containing that solemnly ominous tone they all used when they wanted to make it seem they felt personally affected by the stories they read from their scripts. “The man is not being sought as a suspect at this time but as a person of interest.”

A black man seen in the vicinity of Elbow Pond. The words rose to jab Tom under the ribs, and he shoved the covers aside.

“What?” Alison murmured.

“Nothing. You should get some sleep.”

“How can I do that?” She gestured at the TV.

“Just try.” He came back toward the bed and tried to speak in as calm a tone as possible, with all the movement inside his chest.

His impulse was to call Doug right away, but he remembered the first rule he’d been taught in the rescue-dive class: Stop, think, and breathe. Everything he hadn’t done the night the call came in and he was sent down to find the girl. Acting on instinct could lead to freezing, or “passive panic,” if a diver fixated on a single, ineffective plan while overlooking the obvious better ones. He stood in the kitchen, gripping the counter, and after a few minutes, he realized his training had paid off. Instead of picking up the phone, he went out to the truck, where he’d left his notebook in the glove box. Then he headed to wake up his father-in-law, whom he knew would be happy to see him—for once—when he saw what Tom had to offer.

I know I shouldn’t care, especially given where I’m sitting, but it matters to me. They keep calling it a journal, smirking as if I’m some teenage girl mooning over a crush. A commonplace book is what my notebook would have been called in the old days. A commonplace book is what I keep.

But it has been confiscated. They’ve given me this pad and a cheap, blunt-pointed pen (Liberty Mutual/We’ve Got You Covered) to use while I’m confined here. I am not technically allowed a writing instrument, the guard told me—I might use it as a weapon on him, my lawyer, or myself—but he is kinder than some of the others, and the fact that I’m an art student (which probably means to him that I am gay) seems to make me less of a threat, despite the reason I’m here.

In my own book, the one they took, I write something every day, even if it’s as mundane as the words Nothing to note. I like the discipline of it, which I know can only help me in my work. Then there are the events I want to remember, and I might spend an hour recording those. Don’t skip the details, Grandee told me when she gave me that first notebook right after my father died, containing my first homemade bookmark. Don’t just write this happened today, or that happened. You think you’ll remember, but trust me, you won’t.

I also use the book to make notes about things I read and to copy down quotes from the great artists (my favorite being Alberti’s assertion that painting makes the absent present and the dead almost alive). It contains the draft of my Artist’s Statement for Souls on Board. I can’t afford to lose anything in there; I want my own book back.

The pad they gave me is a poor substitute for the quality Leuchtturm notebooks I choose for myself. But since I have nothing to do but sit in this holding cell with the man introduced to me as Drunk Dave, who is using a coverless paperback copy of The Clan of the Cave Bear as a pillow, I might as well document the events of today. For all I know, these notes will be confiscated, too, but if they’re not, I’ll have them to look back on. Not that I can imagine wanting to anytime soon, but I might as well, in case.

This morning after my swim, I went up to my attic studio and tuned the radio to Rochester’s classical station. Though we are a hundred miles northeast of the city here, I can usually get it to come in. Someone told me once that hearing a good performance of classical music should make you feel like the top of your head is coming off, and that is how I judge what I listen to. Sometimes I picture the woman who is my mother—Linda Martin—playing the piano at the Eastman School of Music, where my father met her, with the expression of intense absorption I feel in my own face when I’m painting. In front of my easel, I might look up and find that three hours have passed, without my being aware of the world. The space I occupy in that time is reflected in the canvas; my thoughts are shapes and colors, instead of words. I don’t feel hunger, thirst, or any other biological needs; I don’t, with my brush in hand, inhabit a body. Especially this past summer, in the days after Grandee died, I was so grateful to know I could achieve such a state that I almost wept.

In the past few months, since Susanne put an end to things for good, I’ve felt desperate to find that internal place again. But the desperation gets in the way of my simply being able to settle in. (“Desperation is the worst perfume,” Grandee used to tell her single friends who were looking for husbands, and though I have heard the phrase many times in my life and recorded it in my commonplace book, only now do I understand from the inside what it means.)

This morning I had not even had a chance to open my paints when I heard the knock downstairs at the front door, which I mistook at first for the sound of my landlady’s son loading lumber into his truck. When the knock turned into a bang, I went downstairs, pulling a sweatshirt around my GOT ART? tee-shirt, and saw two police officers standing on the stoop. I knew they were officers not because they wore uniforms but because of the smug set of the men’s mouths, which caused my throat to clench. When I opened the door and the younger, Hispanic-looking one spoke my name, I felt the room close in.

“We have a warrant,” added the older of the two, whom I recognized from his constant appearance on the news since Joy’s disappearance and especially since her body was found over the weekend.