The Beginning of the Journey

There is a window in my loft that looks down on a carriage house.

White siding. Dark trim. A back door that nobody uses anymore and a side door that everyone does. Some nights the streetlight at the alley catches the carriage house just right and the whole building goes pale, like a spotlight shining a hole through me. Other nights it's just a building.

A girl was murdered there in the spring of 1992. Ten years ago, ten long years of nothing.
I did not know that when I signed the lease. I learned it the way you learn most things in Athens — from a bartender, sideways, like he was telling me the building had termites. That little place down there, he said. The carriage house. You know what happened in there, right. He said it like a statement. He said it the way men in this town say a lot of things — already assuming you know, already daring you to ask.
I asked.

He told me a name. Then he told me to forget I'd asked.

That was twenty-some years ago from the time I stumbled. I have not forgotten. I have, in a manner of speaking, made a life out of not forgetting. The window above the carriage house has been my thinking spot, my drinking spot, my one o'clock in the morning what-am-I-doing-with-my-life spot, and the spotlight has not stopped shining through me in any of those years.

The bar is a blocks east. Pressed-tin ceiling, leather booths going soft at the edges, the same regulars on the same stools for so long the wood has started to take their shape. Professor Abbe sits at the back. Always the back. Bourbon neat, one ice cube he doesn't drink around. He's a professor at the university and he has been one longer than I have been alive, and when I started asking questions about the carriage house, he was the first man in Athens who didn't tell me to stop.

He didn't help, either. Not at first. Abbe is the kind of source who teaches you how to listen before he gives you anything to listen to. The first year, he told me jokes. The second year, he told me about other cases, ones I didn't care about, ones he was teaching me to care about so I'd understand the shape of the thing I was actually chasing. By the third year, he was letting things slip. A name. A date. You should look at who was on the task force then. Twenty-two years in, I have a notebook full of his slips, and I still cannot tell you whether the slips were accidents.

Tonight Elton is the topic. Elton used to write for a paper. He does not write for it anymore — there's a story there, and it's not mine to tell, and the part of it that matters is that he has a memory like a court transcript and a grudge like a pilot light. He is the man who feeds me what Abbe will not say out loud. They have an arrangement. I am the third party to the arrangement. None of us has ever said this.
Abbe takes a sip. Looks at the door. Says, without looking at me:
"She used to come in here, you know. Before."
He has never said this before. years and he has never once put her in this room.
Our friend that joins us does not look up from his beer. He already knew.
I do not say anything because I am afraid that if I say anything, Abe will remember he is not supposed to be telling me this, and the door will close again. I have watched the door close in this town more times than I can count. I have watched men remember, mid-sentence, that there are reasons not to remember.

Abbe does not close the door tonight.

He sets the bourbon down and tells me a story about a girl with a camera around her neck who came into the Globe in the fall of 1990 and asked the bartender if it was true that R.E.M. used to play upstairs. He tells me what she was wearing. He tells me she had pearls on under a flannel shirt and he remembers thinking that is a girl from somewhere, the way a professor at a state university gets good at clocking the kids who come from somewhere. He tells me she ordered a Gin and Tonic. He tells me she stayed two hours. He tells me he never spoke to her, never learned her name, never thought about her again until the spring, when her name was in the paper, and then for thirty-four years.
He does not say her name now. He does not have to. We all know whose name it is.
After a while our friend says, to nobody: the file on her is still sealed, you know.

I know.

I walk home alone. Up the stairs. To the window. The carriage house is dark tonight, which means the streetlight is working but the alley is empty, which means I can see the whole shape of the building, the side door she used, the window the cops photographed in 1992, the room where the last hour of her life happened.

There is a girl in that building who did not finish dying. Not the way the file says she did. Not the way the town agreed she did.
I have spent twenty-two years standing at this window, listening for her, and tonight, for the first time, in a bar two blocks east, somebody finally said her name out loud.

This is what I have learned since.

Not from the cold. From need.

She had promised herself she would not do this. Not today. Not before the interview. She would get clean after Christmas; she had told herself last week. After New Year’s. After she figured out what came next. The promises stacked up like unpaid bills, each one a small lie she told herself to get through another day.

Just this once. Just to get through it. Just to be able to smile and shake hands and pretend to be the girl my father thinks he raised.
The kit was already in her lap from her hidden spot underneath the passenger’s seat. She did not remember taking it out of her jacket.
Eight floors up, the Atlanta skyline pressed against the gray December sky, all those glass towers full of people who had their lives figured out. People who woke up in the morning knowing who they were. People who did not sit on parking decks bargaining with themselves, making deals they knew they’d break.

When did I become this person?

The question surfaced like a body from deep water. She pushed it down, focused on the ritual instead. Spoon. Lighter. The powder dissolved into something that looked almost innocent, just amber liquid, just medicine for whatever was broken inside her.
Her hands steadied as she worked. Muscle memory. The body knew what the mind could not admit.
You are in trouble, a voice whispered. It sounded like her mother. Like sorority friends. Like the girl she had been years ago, the one who thought hiding Doc Martens under a Laura Ashley dress was the height of rebellion. You are in real trouble and you know it.
She knew it.

That was the thing nobody told you about falling—you watched yourself the whole way down. You saw every branch you could have grabbed, every moment you could have stopped, and you just . . . kept falling. Like your own life was a movie you could not pause, could not rewind, could only watch with mounting horror as the girl on screen made choice after choice after choice, each one smaller than the last, each one leading somewhere darker.

The needle found the spot between her big toe on the first try. She had gotten good at this. Too good. The kind of good that meant something. She had gotten clever, between the toes to hide the track marks.

Remember when your biggest problem was rush week?

The thought came with the rush, that warm golden flood that started in her arm and spread through her chest, dissolving the parking deck, the interview, her father’s voice at the dinner table last night: “This is an opportunity, Jennifer. Richard went out on a limb for you. Do not dare embarrass this family.” For a moment, everything was okay. Everything was soft and far away and manageable.

Then the softness cracked, and she was crying.

The pain in this truth is unbearable in a harsh undertone that is unspeakable out loud. This story is that story, burning in the mind of you conscience.