THEN
My trial was nothing like you see on TV. It happened in a small room with wood paneling and a stern-looking judge with a crew cut who sat behind a large oak desk on a raised platform. There were several rows of folding chairs for family and friends but nobody sat in them. It was just me and my lawyer and the prosecutor, who wore a dark suit and pointed at me a lot, even though the judge hardly looked up from reading whatever was on the desk in front of him. The prosecutor called witnesses who described my mother’s wounds, the blood they’d found on my sneakers, my hair clip next to her body. He even called the youth pastor at the church, who said I’d come to him before my mother died and complained about her anger and how she treated me.
“She recounted that she was upset because her mother made her do chores and slapped her once when she didn’t say, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ after being asked to take out the trash,” the youth pastor testified. He was a slender thirty-year-old with soulful brown eyes. “She also said she thought her mother was addicted to diet pills, which was why she was always angry. I told her that I knew Helen, Mrs. Crocker, to be a lovely, upright woman who walked in the path of the Lord and that I’m sure she was only trying to make sure her daughter walked the identical path. In the same way, I knew Mrs. Crocker would never abuse her God-given body with pills.”
He stared at me. My lawyer had made me wear this collared blue dress that made me look like one of those Jehovah Witnesses who come to your front door; it made me feel as if everything were happening to someone else. “I also reminded Miss Crocker that the Bible commanded children to be obedient and respectful of their parents but she remained defiant. She said that if that’s what God said, He didn’t have a mother like hers and that she hated her mother and would do anything to get away from her. I’m not surprised by what she did.”
The youth pastor made it sound like I was happy to have helped my father bury my mother in a dung pile after he killed her. And yet I could remember almost none of that night.
More than once I tried to get my memory to come alive. There’s nothing worse than having a blank space where a period of time should be. I lay in bed, closed my eyes and tried to replay that night in my head: my boyfriend, Matt McCauley, and me in his pickup. Him saying he was thinking of moving to Nevada, where his mother lived and where he could be on a better football team and practice motocross, and me saying I didn’t care, even though I did, and him giving me a sloppy kiss and saying maybe I could come and visit him. Both of us were drunk. Him more than me.
I pictured myself sliding out of his pickup, which idled at the end of our long driveway, since I’d told my parents I was going to study at my friend Carol’s house instead of going with Matt to the reservoir to drink beer, which was what we had done. I remembered feeling the cold air on my cheeks and knowing it was over between Matt and me and thinking our ending had always seemed inevitable, even when we’d started dating the year before. I pictured myself weaving up the rutted driveway, knowing that I’d drunk more than I’d planned to and, if I went into the house, my mother would know I was drunk, and deciding that I would go to the barn, where there was a sink, and splash cold water on my face, and then the next memory was of seeing my mother’s body lying on the barn’s concrete floor.
Then nothing again until the plate of eggs the next morning.
My attorney called to the stand the psychiatrist who’d diagnosed me with dissociative amnesia. She told of patients she’d examined who had lost whole years of their lives: one a woman whose boyfriend had tried to strangle her, and another an old man who, after seeing his beloved dog beaten with a baseball bat by his neighbor, had shot the neighbor but couldn’t remember doing so. She said I had a classic case of dissociative amnesia brought on by the sight of my mother dead on the barn floor.
I could tell the judge didn’t believe her, especially after the prosecution called their own expert, who said that, after interviewing me, he determined that I was emotionally unstable and prone to fabrication, which meant, basically, he was calling me a liar. I watched the judge roll his eyes when my psychiatrist testified, and I knew I was in trouble.
If my lawyer had called me to the stand, which he hadn’t, I would have told the judge that I was telling the truth and how it was like somebody had taken a big eraser to those hours. Also, if I had taken a shower after the crime to destroy evidence (which is what the prosecution said I did), why hadn’t I also thrown my bloody, manure-streaked shoes into the burn barrel and lit them on fire? Or how had I managed to go to all my classes the next day and even pass a history test if I had known what I’d done? Most important, why had I helped my dad bury my mother, like the prosecution said I had? All I could think was that when I showed up in the barn, my father had decided to make sure I was ensnared in his crime so I would keep quiet about what I’d seen. It sounded so diabolical, and as I listened to the witnesses, I thought that my father must have hated me too because you wouldn’t do that to someone you cared about.
I wasn’t surprised when the judge found me guilty. My lawyer’s defense wasn’t that I was innocent but rather that I’d been so afraid of my father killing me too that I’d done what he said and helped him get rid of my mother’s body. Even I could see the weakness in that argument. All I would have had to do was outrun my father—which I could have easily managed, since he suffered from a bad hip—and make my way to a neighbor’s house to call the cops, or run and wake up Slim in his bunkhouse.
Even now I would sometimes try to think back and figure out the reasons for my father’s hatred toward me, and the thoughts that I must have been thinking as the manure fell on my mother’s face, and the motive a child could have had for doing that to their mother. Even if I didn’t remember what had happened, I thought, I probably deserved what I got.