for Lacey Fletcher
Online I find only two pictures of her. In one her smile is too big to be real. A black and white picture that somehow doesn’t seem black and white. I am here, her smile says. I am more than a picture.
The other picture I do not want to see. It is what she became. Or what became of her. The second picture is blurred in the center and this often annoys me but not here. Not with her.
In Larkspur, Mississippi, where she is from, a man in black Cadillac was traveling west when another man, in another car, tried to pass on the curve. The man who was driving the Cadillac swerved, struck a guardrail and went over the side. He died at the scene, and because the car that he drove was a hearse, and because people like to see patterns in things, when she was found in her home two days later, in Larkspur they said the black hearse was a sign.
I was here.
I was more than a picture.
At the last census taken, the population of Larkspur was just under 5,000. The town still has a law on the books that prohibits parishioners from whispering in church. There are five-and-dime stores. A Woolworth’s complete with a chrome soda fountain, and her story now taints Larkspur forever like the scare of a contaminated water supply still leaves a bad taste even after it’s gone.
Diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, she was thirty years old. She lived with her parents in a Tudor style house with a pretty green lawn and a lake nearby they could see from their window. In junior high she played volleyball and soccer, but injured her ankle badly enough once she had to use crutches. Her parents set up the spindly card table next to the brown leather chair in the den, and propped her foot on the matching brown ottoman.
She rested her ankle and watched it change color along with the leaves. Her parents were “never enough hours in the day” sort of people. Her mother had real estate clients to tend to, and twice a week, her father chaired the Southern Knights meetings. The Southern Knights were a group of old white men who met and drank coffee and complained black and brown men were ruining the country.
But they both liked the sun and they both liked to travel, and her parents found time for trips here and there. Mexico City. Acapulco, Cancun. She was perfectly happy, they would say later, at home by herself in the brown leather chair. Content, at least. How happy is any girl her age.
How happy am I, at my age, for that matter. I sit and watch movies I’ve seen all too often, or re-read a book I’ve read ten times before, and with every re-reading and every new viewing, and though I know better, I still hope the story ends differently somehow.
The guy gets the girl. Or the girl gets away. I will tell you something of which I am deeply ashamed. In their hearts I believe most people are good.
Her black and white picture doesn’t seem black and white.
I am here, it says.
Do you see me now.
When she was questioned, her mother explained, I loved my daughter, but what could I do. She wouldn’t leave the house, wouldn’t go to school. Even long after her ankle had healed. I heard her one day, talking to someone. I thought, good, she’s talking to a friend on the phone. I peeked in the den, and her socks were on the floor. She was talking to her toes as if they were children. Giving each one a good what for. That’s when I knew. I think that’s when I died. The last fifteen years, I’ve just been walking around in my bones.
A white horse in a dream means someone is coming. A black hearse on the road means someone has gone. I wanted to re-write the story for her and make it mean something. To end it this time where the girl gets away.
She was covered in sores, feces and urine. Her brown leather chair was shot through with maggots. The medical examiner described her condition as “soup.” After fifteen years she had atrophied so, she could not lift herself.
In Larkspur, her name is whispered in church; nothing is pure or has ever been clean. But I have to believe we are good in our hearts. Or else we’re just walking around our bones, and I want to tell her, I know you were here. I see you now.
You are more than a picture.