Riverine (10 page)

When I dropped him off at his house, I had no idea it would be the last time I saw him. If I could have done it differently, I would have put my hand on his knee and kissed him. I would have cracked a window and let the air out. I would have gone upstairs with him, closed his door behind us, and stayed.

Bifurcation comes to mind when I think of Corey. As in the division of the common carotid artery. As in the shape made by the branching of the Kankakee River and the Illinois River. As in me going one way and Corey going another. As in the way people lose themselves, splitting further and further from their origins. As in the roots of hosta shoots, separated by mutation or by force. As in young flower buds arrested in early development that never bloom. What confluence of time and geography can split roots?

I didn’t hear from Corey for a few months after that visit at the new house. He could have called, but didn’t, and he had no phone at the new place he was staying. By then he’d been in enough trouble that dating him would have been out of the question—my parents wouldn’t have allowed it. When it became clear that nothing would happen with Corey, I dated the first boy I came across. I’d been hanging out with a girl named Kelly, and Trevor was her boyfriend’s best friend. It was a convenient match. He was cute and nice, so sure. Fine by me. I would project all that Corey love onto him. He even looked a little like Corey. I still wasn’t allowed to really date, but I could hang out with him in groups or when parents were present.

Four months went by. I heard nothing about Corey or from Corey until I heard the news of the murders. Our old neighbors had been stabbed and everyone thought that he might have done it. When I heard this, I felt myself divide further. That part of me that had held fast to my idea of him—so much better than he really was, so out of touch with who he was becoming—split and split again. I was at work, back at the River, so hysterical that my mother had to pick me up and take me home. Then I ran. I had no heart, no head. The horizon tore, directing me away from my home, away from the river, only to be met with mile after mile of land that was indifferent to me. The land was so flat that when I stopped running, standing in a field, I could still make out our house as a blip of color on the horizon. It seemed the world would have its way with me no matter which direction I fled.
Stabbed? Like with a knife? How could that be true?
I’d hopped an irrigation creek and my ankle bled, cut open by barbed wire. I didn’t care. I wanted it to bleed out, run the whole river red in protest against what was happening. I wanted to stay in that field until he was home, cleared of all accusations.

I had to bring myself back from the field, eventually, and give in to the truth. I was unable to look my parents in the eye as they hugged my shaking shoulders, because they had known, all along in their heavy hearts they would tell me later, that it was so. He had done it. He had been on a bad path for a while, and now he’d made his own dead end. But by then, Corey was in another cornfield, four towns away, throwing gasoline on the sedan owned by the couple he’d killed in an attempt to erase what he’d done. He had stolen their car afterward and set it on fire in the field, like some bad television crime show. It made no sense to me why he would do this, except as an act of panic, indicating to me that whatever had happened in that house had not been planned. They sent dogs after his scent: spearmint gum, shampoo, cigarettes, and sunshine. Corey was fast, but the dogs were better runners.

People all around me, at work and at school, discussed motives and the possibility of drugs playing a role in Corey’s actions. Was it a drug-fueled robbery gone bad? Did he have an unchecked mental illness? Was he involved in a gang? Or was he just a thug, some punk who’d lost all respect for life? Everyone had a theory, the small town shaken by the crime. I had no answers and no guesses. I found myself hiding in bathroom stalls, compressing all the noise into my clenched fists. Today, when kids experience trauma or violence in their towns or schools, adults thrust grief counselors on them. There are vigils and public attempts at closure. But not then. For us, there was crime scene tape, a double funeral, and the front page of the weekly newspaper. Nobody asked if I was all right. My government teacher used Corey’s case as a conduit for discussing opposing views on the death penalty. I excused myself and threw up in the bathroom.

The worst I had heard before the murders was that Corey had been huffing gasoline, and that was a far cry from murder. At work, I tried to catch bits of information when the regulars talked about it, but they all hush-hushed when they noticed me listening and smiled at me, shielding me from whatever news they had uncovered. I internalized a new label for myself: girl who had kissed a murderer. Or, worse, girl who had possibly loved a murderer. And what did that make me?

. . .

The most mundane of all that happened that week stuck with me: The sting of the dry corn leaf fibers that had rubbed against my calves as I ran. The rash that stippled the skin of my shins the morning after they arrested him, right after I’d said, “He’d never do this. Not possible.” Not someone I’d kissed with my own mouth. I remembered that itch, how it hung around for days.

I didn’t see the slit carotid arteries, the open necks of our two elderly neighbors or the blood that must have poured from their severed viscous tissues. I didn’t see how it must have spread, thick and terrible, across their linoleum floor, where I’d stood on half a dozen Halloween nights and held out my pail in hopes of full-sized candy bars. I saw, instead, only two purple lines that had been fashioned across their necks by a mortician in an attempt to blur the evidence of their deaths. To conceal the aftermath of a vicious death, for the deceased and all who mourned them.

I’d been forced to go to the funeral so that I would know it had happened. That my beloved boy was in fact a killer. Capital K, facing the death penalty. My refusal to believe it would have to end. My belief in his inherent goodness would have to end. I could not recreate the violence in my mind or reconcile the facts.
But they had always given out such good candy
, I thought stupidly as I stood at their caskets.
And Corey had always been so gentle
. I looked in shock upon the lifeless faces of our neighbors, even as I mourned the loss of their murderer, who had been some part of the blurry future I saw for myself. How had I lost him, exactly? How had he lost himself? Leaving the riverbed was supposed to be a good thing, but so far, it hadn’t proven so. How had I clung to this illusion of him for so long?

Everyone else immediately reduced him to his rap sheet. The list of reasons I had that explained his behavior was longer than the rap sheet. Nothing could justify or explain away that level of violence, but I was certain his life leading up to that point was a factor in the life of crime he had sunk into. Standing there, I tried to feel something pure, find something in my bones that I could believe. But instead, there was only the sense that everyone still living knew I had loved him, that it existed outside me now like an extra appendage, and that I loved him
still
even though he had done what he’d done. Had he known it? I’d never said so. Not even to myself. But there it was. I stood there among the grieving, struck dumb with my own selfish loss.

Generally, the town newspaper was a thing you decidedly wanted your name in or out of, depending on your status. If you were Bridget Trotsma with the brownest eyes and leanest thighs and eagerest stage mother, you wanted to be in. You said, “Look at that. I can’t believe I made front page. Again.” You smiled to yourself knowing full well you’d be on the front page but not knowing that your life would never be better than it was in that moment. If you were Corey, on the other hand, and you had killed two elderly, innocent persons and torched their car in a cornfield, you wanted to be out. You said nothing, if you were smart. But Corey wasn’t that smart. He talked to someone who talked to someone else who talked to the police.

Or, he was smart once, but only had a makeshift upbringing as the fifth of five children, one dead too young, to guide him. This is what I remembered him being told:
get out, shut up, go away, your sister is dead, your father is a lie
. Growing children, like transplanting spliced plants, is a delicate endeavor. “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men,” Frederick Douglass wrote in the nineteenth century. It is still true. Thugs are made, not born.

I walked the aisles of the grocery story—a mistake, in retrospect. In the bread aisle at the IGA, I heard a man say, “I hope he fries.” Firing squad, another said. In the frozen section: “Those people living in the old riverbed ought to be self-incorporated, if you ask me. Those people ain’t never been fit for this town. Draw a line between the northern farms and the river and be done with them.” Some folks are born evil, someone said. “Ain’t nothin’ you can do about it.” But that wasn’t true, was it? Hadn’t lots of kids from more well-to-do families smoked weed, stolen, and joyridden in their parents’ cars? I was a regular reader of the police blotter, and it almost never contained the name of a Dutch teenager. If Corey hadn’t spent four of his formative years in juvenile detention centers for crimes that rich kids had been let off for, would it have gone this far?

His case never went to trial. His attorney, I learned later, advised him to plea-bargain to avoid a jury trial for the death penalty. So Corey confessed and pleaded guilty. He confessed, too, because he was not at heart a person who would do what he had done. He would not sit in front of a judge, the room full of the victims’ family members, and disgrace them by pretending he was innocent. I was sure of that, no matter what anyone else hypothesized. It was true that his actions were horrifying. But somehow I held out hope against hope in Corey’s civility, in his true self before he shattered, over time, into other broken versions of himself. I knew his soft lips and lean body, those tender hazel eyes, his childlike laugh, his kind heart, his benign presence in my own bedroom on countless occasions. There was light and love at his core, and I had known it as my own. It had corrupted, somehow, dividing and dividing, rooting low, far from the sun.

A prison would take his body, and my parents would take his name. “You’ll never say that name again in this house,” my father said. It was if he’d never existed at all. As if he hadn’t stayed over, eaten meals with us, laughed with us. Loved us. Loved anywhere but his own home. I didn’t even talk about it with Marcus, not for years. They could not take everything from me, though. Hidden in my closet I kept:

I could not reclaim my own innocence, bodily or otherwise, to add to the collection, but in my mind I returned to the night we’d gone to the county fair two summers before the murders. Around and around on the Ferris wheel we went, teenagers a little bit in love, our faces alight under fluorescent bulbs and our bellies aching with laughter. I wanted to stay there with him, looping that moment forever to keep him from all the wreckage that was to come. We had stayed at the fair that night until we puked, sick on too much sugar and grease. We two never knew when to quit.

Corey was sentenced in winter, at the end of February. A leap year. The newspaper showed the judge, a middle-aged white man, grimly doling out his sentence. I couldn’t look at his picture in the paper. I already knew the last of the light in him had faded. I convinced myself that whatever I thought I knew about him, whatever closeness we had shared, had been one-sided. Contrived from my loneliness, made of my girlish fantasies. The night at the fair. The almost night in bed. So many moments before those. I smeared the parts of the newsprint where my tears had landed with my thumb, then with two fingers, then my whole palm, until I’d botched up every word they had.

I drove to the field, four towns away, where he’d spent some of the last free moments of his life. The soil was frozen, charred. A petrified crime scene. I said his name over and over, calling him back to ground he’d never set foot on again. I wondered if life would ever grow there again, what corn or wheat could sustain itself in his waste, what mutations would fester as consequence after a plow turned the black dirt brown again.

I
n 1997, before Monica Lewinsky was the punch line of jokes, before zooming was a thing you could do on a phone with two fingers, before
organic
was a word in my daily vocabulary that referred to my groceries, I was living in the middle of a test field of genetically modified corn. I had no idea what this meant, other than the fact that seed alterations of both a chemical and a physical nature were involved. We had moved three miles down the road from my first home, and flat farmland replaced our view of the Kankakee River. The river was still near—half a mile due north, beyond a row of trees at the end of a field. We were out of the floodplain, but barely.

Life along the riverbanks would not shake off so easily. Corey’s life had already been cut short, but mine extended into a horizon that I couldn’t see. It was strange leaving a place where I’d lived for fourteen years—where virtually everything I knew about life had happened. We’d moved from the swamp to the fields, which was the equivalent of up, according to my parents. Only poor people lived by the river, and my dad was climbing the economic ladder of the construction industry. This was a symbolic move as much as a practical one. Flood insurance had been pricey. My parents could now actively save for my college education, which would commence, somewhere, in a few years. But it seemed like too much work for such a short distance because not a lot was different at the new house, except for an increased isolation and the view from my window. Corey was gone—from my window and from my life. Falling asleep became more difficult. I had gone to sleep watching his window for ten years. I was like a baby who’d lost her security blanket. That was the worst of it. There was nothing but stars and silos outside my new window. I interpreted the stars and silos as possibility, as an uncertain future.