This is the body of Chris. Contrary to your beliefs, she’s not perfect. This is her neck. There’s a scar there from when she went to the beach and stayed too long and got a second-degree burn from the sun. This is her right foot. There’s a callus on her pinky toe that every once in a while she shaves down with a razor blade. This is her vagina. Between her labia there’s a brown beauty mark the size of a dime. She has had to explain the dime-sized brown beauty mark to all of the four men she has slept with in her life. This is her left breast. It’s smaller than her right. This is her left earlobe. There’s an indentation in it as if she were born with her ear half-pierced. This is her right knee. There’s a scar on it from having fallen off a high-powered moped on a rocky road on a Mediterranean island. Make that three men she has slept with that she had to explain the dime-sized brown beauty mark to. One was a one-night stand and they never turned the lights on and she left his house before daybreak.
This is her house. Nearby is a small town with a gas station and a convenience store that sells all the usual drinks and chips and gum, but also homemade chocolate cream pie by the slice. The house is on a main road twenty minutes away from the facility, but behind the house there is a winding trail where Chris and Cleo sometimes cross-country ski in the winter, and in the summer they ride their bikes on it or they run down it, chasing each other for fun, their bodies brushing up against the leaves and branches of the gooseberry bushes as they go. This is what they have seen on the trail—garter snakes, baby chipmunks in a group of three, a snowshoe rabbit who looked too skinny to survive winter, a deer with twin fawns, and a black bear with his nose to the ground.
This is her childhood. A mother and father who owned a general store up north. She did homework behind the counter, and whenever she was stuck for an answer to a question, she’d ask a customer rather than her parents, who never seemed to know the answer or who were too busy slicing cold cuts or restocking beer onto shelves. This is where she learned how to skip stones, in a wide stream where after she swam she would lie down on flat rocks warmed by the sun. This is the owl she heard every night from her bedroom window. It’s a barn owl with a white face that she liked to think of as being the ghost of her grandfather, who had a white beard and mustache. This is the length of her hair when she cut it for women who had cancer. Halfway down her back. This is her back. The shoulders are square and flat. She could rest a book on one of her shoulders and the book would not fall off. She has many muscles that can be seen on her back, even small ones that show up distinctly when she just raises her hair up to put it in a hair tie. This is her mouth. She has never had a cavity. This is the story you already know, the one of her babysitter named Beatrice and how she was raped. This is how Chris sometimes sleeps, with one arm rising in the air, and staying there as if she’s holding it up for someone to come and grab it and bring her up from the deep. This is her in her studio, painting over and over again the face of the killer she has never even seen, while thinking of Beatrice. If only those rapists had been stopped beforehand, then Beatrice would have been spared, she thinks.
This is the lawyer Paul knows he has to hire eventually, but cannot bring himself to meet because he knows it means a huge chunk of his life will be destroyed. Paul passes by the lawyer’s office, which looks like a bed and breakfast, and probably was at some point, and Paul thinks how could a lawyer who practices out of an office with lace curtains and window boxes be the lawyer who stands up in front of a jury and explains that even though Paul’s semen was inside the exhumed body of Bobby Chantal, and Paul never came forth in all these years to tell the police that he had been with her the night of the murder, he is still innocent? Paul stops in his tracks and sits on the rock wall outside the office with his back facing the lace curtains and the window boxes. He doesn’t believe in God, but he wants one to know, if one exists, that he prays it will never come to him sitting in a courtroom facing a jury. He prays that there’s no way to find out it’s his DNA. He prays that Chris doesn’t decide to report him to the police and tell them he was with Bobby Chantal the day she was murdered. He prays she understands how it would derail their lives forever.