40

Magnolia Thrush lived in Rogers Park, a neighborhood on the northeast side of Chicago. Her building was jammed into a long row of brown and red brick apartments about a half mile from Lake Michigan and a quarter mile from a cemetery. By the time the cab pulled up to the building, the sun had moved to an early afternoon position and some kids were heaving a football on the street. She buzzed me in and I plodded up the stair’s threadbare carpet to the third floor.

Even stooped, Magnolia was tall—nearly six feet. Her hair was blonde, like her brother’s, but streaked with gray. It hung past shoulders that were broad, like her brother’s and mine. She seemed both older and younger than her late sixties. I gave her the bouquet of lilies and took her hand in both of mine. It was large like my father’s, the skin cracked and dry.

“I can’t remember the last time someone gave me flowers,” she said.

Magnolia motioned me inside. She might have bought her faded nylon pants from a secondhand store years before. Our shoes squeaked across the old wooden floor of the front room. I sat on a brown upholstered couch in front of a warped wooden coffee table. Framed needlepoint pictures decorated the walls. Who did needlepoint anymore? It seemed like something from the seventies. She sat in an armchair across from me. My father’s square chin stood out in her long face. But her eyes, soft and milky blue, were nothing like his.

“I hope you like chamomile,” she said. A teapot steeped beside two unmatched ceramic mugs.

She poured and handed me a mug. Individual packets of sugar and expired creamer sat in a basket on the table. A practical woman, I decided, one who had very few guests.

I produced an envelope from my pocket. “Pictures,” I said. “Mine, not his.” When she still didn’t open it, I said, “Of your niece and my family. Maybe someday you can meet them.”

Her long fingers slipped the photos out. She examined them away from her body, as if she were farsighted or not sure if she should look too closely. It must have been strange for her to be presented with a family that she’d never thought she’d be a part of. When she saw Garth’s picture, she broke into a grin. She too had a gap between her front teeth. As I talked about our kids, she turned the photos and ran her clipped nails over the shiny surfaces as if touching their faces.

“They’re beautiful,” she whispered. She picked up the mug and breathed in the chamomile.

Already I was drawn to her gentle restraint. “My sister drinks coffee the way you drink tea,” I said. “The first taste is always the best.”

She smiled shyly. “Your eyes are round like Harvey’s. You’re not as tall, of course. He was a giant.”

Like Mama, she referred to him as just Harvey. They were the only two people in the world who saw him as a large and awkward boy.

I began with a soft question to draw her out. I didn’t want to scare her and risk that she would shut down. “What have you been up to all these years?”

She pointed to the needlepointed birds, flowers, and butterflies on the walls. “Just my hobby and doing people’s books.”

I wondered how many hours of solitude those images contained. An old computer sat in the corner, but no TV. She must have cut herself off from the news. Still, she had known about my arrest.

“Well, I don’t think you came all this way just to give me flowers and pictures.” Both kindness and dread filled her eyes.

“I know this is probably hard,” I said. “But I want to talk to you about your brother.”

“My brother.”

“What was he like?”

She set down the mug as if it were fragile. She sighed. After fleeing her past for so many years, I wondered if she was reconsidering her talk with me.

“I’m sorry this is so difficult,” I said. “But I really need to know.”

A telephone rang in another apartment. Someone pounded on the floor overhead.

“Harvey wasn’t … he wasn’t at all like the newspapers told. Just … a normal boy.” She fished out the words as if dragging them from some hidden place. “That child’s mind—” She shook her head and smiled. “He was just full of stories. Elves and dragons and talking skunks, even dolls.”

After thirty-one years of serial killer accounts, it was hard to imagine Kogan as a child inventing stories. But he’d told me some of those tales. Owls that only ate wayward mice and cats that understood the world better than we did. The key was the woman who raised him.

“What was your mother like?”

Magnolia sipped the chamomile tea and pinched her eyes shut. “The first thing you have to know is that Mother had three pairs of shoes. And she liked to use them all to whip us. Especially Harvey. Sometimes she’d be pounding him and I’d hear the train whistle over the bridge at Wilson’s Creek. Harvey said he used to imagine he was inside that train, chugging over the trestle bridge. He’d get so far away from Mother he didn’t even cry.”

I remembered his photo: the bridge’s skeleton shadow rippling over a river’s swirling water, water that was gray in the black-and-white photo. None of the experts at Landscape Photography or the Institute of Art had connected its sad isolation to those beatings and the train.

“He had a dog named Lucky. He loved that mutt.”

I drew back. Why had I never known? “My dog was named Lucky.”

She nodded. “One day his dog got into the garbage and Mother killed it with a shovel. Harvey had to watch.”

I heard the shovel clang like a bell. It was so brutal it made me shiver. “I see why you had to get away from that mother,” I said.

She nodded slowly, sadly. She stared at her needlepoint on the wall. “Mother wouldn’t tolerate a boy like Harvey. Do you know what she said to him? ‘You’re not only a bed wetter, but you’re stupid.’ When he had his accidents, she locked him in the metal tool shed for the whole night. And that was after she scrubbed his privates with a Brillo pad.”

I tried to push the thought of Garth out of my mind. “She was …” I stopped. “Monster” was what everyone called her brother.

“Mother destroyed us all in different ways. Harvey was lucky he never had to stay in that shed when it was really hot. Not like his brother.”

His brother? Scores of writers had excavated Harvey Dean Kogan’s past and no one had ever mentioned a brother. A brother changed everything.

The killer had claimed to be my brother.

Magnolia wrapped her long fingers around the warm mug and stared into the amber tea. Even now she could barely bring herself to speak of him. “Jonas Mark Kogan. None of us knew who his father was.”

I needed to be gentle and patient. I needed to coax out the story. “What a pretty name,” I said. “A Biblical name.”

She nodded. “Even at five years old, Jonas had spirit. He loved to roam the woods around our house and search for buried treasure.” She sipped on the tea as if drawing strength from it. “One night he stole Mother’s chocolate chip cookie. When she found out, she slapped and poked and cussed. She tore the aerial off the TV to whip him. By the time she dragged him to the shed, his face was full of bruises. ‘This is nothing next to what your daddy done to me,’ she yelled. She locked Jonas in there with only a Bible.”

Tears had pooled in her eyes. It seemed too cruel to be possible. “For eating her cookie,” I said.

“There was no way to reason what Mother did. She wouldn’t even let us bring him water.” Magnolia swallowed and wiped her eyes with her broad, creviced hands. “At midnight I tried to go to him and she whipped me with that TV wire. ‘Don’t you dare mess with God’s justice.’”

I already knew the end of this story. Magnolia couldn’t possibly have foreseen what would happen to her little brother, but the guilt was carved into her face. You could push that self-recrimination under your skin, but it would never go away. I touched her arm and she stared at my hand.

“How old was Harvey?” I asked.

“Fourteen. Mother didn’t even reach his shoulder, but she had all the power of the devil. Harvey just curled up around himself in that little bed of his. He didn’t say a word or cry or even plug his ears. Jonas bawled and screamed most of the night.”

I could hear those screams. They were the wails of my own children. “And then his voice stopped,” I said.

Her face trembled as she held back a sob. “It was so hot … as hot as it gets in Illinois. And that shed, it was all metal. I thought Jonas had fallen asleep.” Magnolia covered her face with her big hands, hands that, if she’d had a mother like Jill, could have played piano. She took a great, shuddering breath. “Jonas had never even been to school.”

Why hadn’t she gone to someone for help? But I knew the answer. She couldn’t imagine a life outside the spell of that leviathan. Just as Mama couldn’t imagine a life outside of her husband and our Redman doublewide.

Magnolia straightened her shoulders. She took a sip of the chamomile. She stared down at the table as if parts of her past were scratched into that dried-up and faded wood. “Mother was afraid of the police. If they found out, they’d throw her in jail. She said they’d throw Harvey and me in a different jail for helping her.” She shook her head. “I didn’t know anything.”

I wanted to whisper that it wasn’t her fault. I wanted to say that my children would help her recover, just as they’d helped me. But I couldn’t say a word.

She continued, the words coming faster as if she were trying to get them out and behind her. “Mother made Harvey carry Jonas to the graveyard. She’d wrapped him up in a trash bag. A trash bag! It was the middle of the night and they’d just filled in a fresh hole over someone’s body. Mother gave Harvey a shovel and told him to dig. Then she made me dig. After an hour, she decided we’d gotten far enough. I set my own little brother inside that hole. ‘Pray for this child of Adam,’ Mother said. I never even knew whose gravestone covered him. She told us we never had a brother. That’s what we were supposed to say. And you know what she did that night? She bleached the gray out of her hair, bleached it as blonde as the angels.”

The woman in the soybean field photo with Polly and me was also blonde. It seemed too depraved. But no more so than what that mother had done to her child. Could Harvey Dean Kogan possibly have preserved his own mother’s head? Then put it in a picture with his children?

The bright afternoon light from the back window lit up the smoky blue of Magnolia’s eyes. She gave me a sad, hopeless smile. “Jonas had never been anywhere in this world but that falling-down shack and the woods around it. He was a boy who liked sticks and throwing rocks. He liked to search for buried tin cans.” She took a slow, labored breath, as if even the air ripped and clawed at what was inside her. “Two weeks later I ran away forever.”

I walked around the table to hug my aunt. Her hands, so big and yet light as paper, barely touched my back.

“The world would have been different if I’d taken Harvey with me,” she said.