It is the summer of 2013. I get a voice mail from a California number that is not Marilyn’s: “Hi, Kelly, this is Detective Estupinian, well, Camacho now. I was wanting to talk to you about your mother’s case, Michele Grey?”
I had always imagined that if they ever solved my mother’s case, I’d find out with a call like this one. I call her back, but her voice mail picks up. I leave a long, confused message. I email her too, just in case. And then I wait.
It is a busy day. Tonight, Ben and I are going to buy a car to replace the twenty-five-year-old hand-me-down Nissan Stanza that has seen us through college, grad school, our lives in Tennessee, Nebraska, Iowa, and now Texas. I get caught up with last-minute financing details, online transfers of money, two-year-old Milly, who wants me to play dress-up with her. Just as we are about to leave for the dealership at 4:00 p.m., my phone rings.
“It’s the detective,” I tell Ben. “I have to take this.” The car will have to wait.
Milly plays in my office as I talk to Detective Camacho. My hands are shaking. I cannot find a pen. I take notes on an envelope with a stubby, blue crayon.
She wasn’t calling to tell me they’d solved the case, not really. Instead she was calling to say that the results had come back from when she’d sent my mother’s effects to the lab again. There was blood, but only my mother’s. There was DNA, but in fragments too small to produce a match.
But she’d spent a good amount of time reviewing the file: “The original detectives on the case, Detective Varney and Detective Orozco, thought it was the Hillside Stranglers. You know who they were, right? In fact, Detective Varney was one of the investigators on those slayings, so he probably had a good idea. They were excellent detectives. Legendary, really. And now, when I look at it—the MO, the details of her body—it fits. They might have worked together, or Bianchi may have worked on his own, trying to impress Buono, before they got together. But neither of them mentioned her, and, of course, Buono’s dead now. If I had more funding, I could go up and interview Bianchi. He’s still alive, up in Washington, but I can’t, not without more evidence. And right now we don’t have any.”
“My digger is broken!” Milly interrupts to tell me. My hands tremble as I snap the truck’s plastic cab back into place.
Detective Camacho doesn’t say it, but I understand. This is my answer. She sounds as certain as she can be, with no evidence and no confession and no way of finding either. This is the best we can do with what we have, and I trust her and Detective Flores and Detective Varney and Detective Orozco. She cannot tell me, but I tell myself: my mother was an early victim of one or both of the Hillside Stranglers. Their names were Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono. They weren’t prosecuted for my mother’s death, but they were prosecuted for the deaths of ten others. One is in prison; one is dead. It is okay, I tell myself, to hate them. But at the moment, I feel nothing. The hate will come later, in flashes, for weeks and months. It is not a burning hate or an angry one, as I expect it to be; it is cold and hard when it comes, sharp and fleeting.
Later on, I will look at their pictures online. Buono’s curly hair, his insouciant stare as if he’d just told someone to go fuck themselves; Bianchi with his thick mustache, looking for all the world like a used-car salesman. But you can’t do a Google search for their pictures without also coming upon crime-scene photos of young women, their legs splayed—a pulp novel with a soft-porn cover, things that make my insides lurch. I will think back to the Darcy O’Brien book I’d read on those sleepless nights as a teenager, how Buono almost seemed to be teaching Bianchi how to strangle a woman and dispose of her body, as if he’d killed before. Had he? Had my mom been his practice?
That afternoon, Detective Camacho continues, “I also thought you might want to know more about your dad. He was in the Navy from 1960 to 1963, and he was honorably discharged. It looks like he only went to school up to eighth grade, but he was really smart. You can see that in the letter I sent you. Really articulate. And he was with your mother until he got put into jail. Anyway, I have a picture of him. Would you want to see it? I can try and email it before I leave today.”
Would I want to see it? I don’t know how I keep talking, but I find the words.
“Yes,” I say. “I really would. I’ve never seen him. I have no idea what he looks like.”
I can’t stop pacing. Milly amuses herself by tangling herself between my legs. “Shh,” I whisper to her, even though she isn’t making a sound.
Before we hang up, I tell Detective Camacho, “I don’t know how I’ll tell my little girl all this. You know, like—just. About everything.”
“You’ll tell her when the time is right,” she says, calmly and professionally, and in her calm professionalism, she is comforting. “And you’ll tell her the best way you know how.”
At the car dealership, I cannot think straight. I sign forms I do not understand, because I cannot parse the words that come from the salesman’s mouth. I want to answer every question the financing lady asks us with “I don’t care. I want to see my father.” Milly squirms on my lap; I shift under her weight. On the financing lady’s desk are family photos: dark eyes stare out at me, their white ceramic frames gathering dust.
And when we get home after dinner, it is there, waiting for me in my email. In the photo, from 1993, my father is in his fifties and wears the cheap, oversized eyeglasses you probably get in prison. His hair is thinning and his skin is orange from the lights at the DMV. He is completely ordinary looking. I search his face for signs of my own. The eyes, perhaps? The nose. It’s hard to tell, because his face is too old compared to mine. I cannot imagine him as a young man, the street kid who loved my mother. I was a senior in high school when that photo was taken. If things had been different, he could have come to my graduation.
I hear a creak behind me, and before I can close the photo, Milly asks, “What is that?”—because that is how she asks, “Who is that?”
“Oh, he’s just a man,” I say.
When she catches me looking at it again, just before bedtime, she reassures me, “He’s just a man, Mommy.”
“Yes,” I say. I touch the screen, run my finger along his pixilated face. “Just a man.” I sigh. “Let’s go to bed, Babycakes.”
After Milly has finally fallen asleep—tucked safely into bed and provisioned with water, her stuffed lobster, Freddie the Dinosaur, and Applesauce the Bear—I lie in my own bed and listen to the sounds of the night. Ben is asleep next to me, and I slide my hand between his arm and shirtless side so that I can feel the gentle motion of his warm chest, the filling and emptying of his rib cage, the steady pulse of his heart. The fan whirs gently over our heads. Crickets chirp outside, a rhythm section for the high-pitched songs of frogs. A bird cries, disturbed from its sleep, then quiets. I can’t sleep.
I can stop wondering who killed my mother; I know my father’s face.
I think of how today I lied to Milly about the picture—her family—something I’d promised myself I would never do. I don’t want to lie to her again. I want her to know where she comes from.
From across the hall, I can hear her rhythmic breathing. My husband turns in his sleep. The dog, curled into my side, twitches. The coolness of the sheets, the whirl of the fan, my daughter’s breath from the other room. My sweet family, the family I dreamt of when I was young, here in our peaceful home. Everything I care most about in the world.
I think again of what the detective told me: “You’ll tell her when the time is right, and you’ll tell her the best way you know how.”