Chapter 39
BLAIR
For two weeks she sits in front of a blank piece of paper at the library.
Her first attempt, when she can put a pen to the page without her hands shaking, is a little more than a desperate howl.
Please don’t take her. We need her. I need her.
Please please please. She has a flashback to her first week of preschool, clinging to her mother’s waist, convinced that if she let go, if her mother retreated through the door papered over with cutouts of orange-and-red leaves, she would not see Iris ever again, that she would be left in a world that felt like her classroom, unfamiliar and sterile, without her mother’s presence to help her make sense of it.
The world drained of color and meaning, a blur of faces but none of them the one she wanted.
She feels that way, still.
At the trial Blair does not speak about the stones in the woods or the duffel bag in the corner of the closet. She does not mention the way she dug up the box and the evidence she destroyed in the cover of night.
Instead, she talks about her mother’s volunteer work.
About the apple slices drizzled with honey she came home to after school.
About the meals they made for the senior citizens in the public housing complex two towns over.
About the sense of safety she has always felt in her mother’s presence, the bright sweaters her mother wore so Blair could pick her out easily on the soccer field, so that she could always know she was there.
Her mother, a flare shot up through the dark.
The paper rattles in her hands as she finishes.
The judge thanks her, but she hardly hears him.
Blair’s eyes are on Iris. Her mother has aged, over the months of the trial preparation, and over these past few weeks, and from the distance of the witness stand to the defendant’s chair, Blair can see what she’ll look like as an old woman.
The purple-hued bags under her eyes. Her cheekbones hard, startling out from her face, her skin splotched and creased.
Her statement might be in vain. The lawyers debated about letting her speak.
The prosecution used Iris’s leadership in the Westchester community, her devotion to her children, as proof of all she denied Baby Doe.
They even dug up her high school report cards, a testament to her essential sense of responsibility, her conscientiousness.
So, what she did all those years ago could only have been done in cold blood.
With an utter disregard for life. A paradox unlike any Blair has heard before: that her mother’s goodness, her abilities in school, are an argument that she is evil, that she acted with intent. Meaning, murder, first degree.
As she walks back to her seat Blair feels the gaze of someone in the back of the room.
A woman with her gray hair long and loose about her shoulders.
For a second she thinks it is a trick of the light, her mind scattered and her eyes seeing what’s not there.
Her mother’s worn face transposed onto another woman’s body.
But she stares and it doesn’t resolve into meaning.
This woman with her mother’s mouth and eyes.
She sees Blair looking back and there is something in her expression, intimate—an apology.
They watch one another for what feels like a minute, but in reality is only a few seconds, before the woman rises, turns her back, and slips through the doors at the back of the court room.
Blair knows that she will never see her again, and while she’ll never be able to know for sure, she thinks she’s just looked into the eyes of her grandmother.
Which is what she wanted when she spit into the tube.
Family. Connections restored. A story that wasn’t broken into fragments, but part of a whole she could understand.
This is what adulthood means, she has come to realize.
Understanding that there are stories that are easy, moments strung together like beads on a necklace, fixed in place according to a certain design, and truth; those same beads rattling around in a box, shifting into unresolvable arrangements.
Spit in a tube and discover the story of who you are.
Write a college admissions essay with a beginning, middle, and an end.
Tell a room full of strangers what it was like to be someone’s daughter.
Convince a grand jury that because a girl earned straight A’s she must have harbored an intent to kill.
We form stories about everything. But how rarely we ever know the truth, even about our own lives.