Six Useless Pieces

Six Useless Pieces

The police didn't care what it was called. They needed me to open it. So they kept me 29 days.

To them I was an adopted kid with a bad file, an impossible survivor, and the first suspect. An adopted child with no blood tie to the house. Two respected academics murdered in it. Doors locked from the inside. No pry marks anywhere.

My clothes were soaked with blood and I didn't have a scratch on me, and there was an unreleased compound in my blood. Every finger in town and every line in the file pointed the same direction: He did it. Or he let somebody in.

On paper the 29 days were a witness protection and memory recovery program. What actually happened in that room was 29 days of psychological work on a 15-year-old.

None of it was legal. New York had no statute that let anyone hold a 15-year-old for 29 days without charging him, and the people in that building knew it. What they had instead was a signature, and they took it on the second day.

My aunt Marion, who was 26 then, signed it standing up in a hallway outside the squad room, the folder held flat against the wall. Her sister had been dead two days, and the man holding the folder told her the paper was a consent to treatment and the fastest way to keep me out of a county facility. She signed both copies. Years later I wrote the state for the program file and got a letter back saying no such program appeared in any record they held.

They kept me in a room with no window and the fluorescent tubes running around the clock, so I lost track of day and night. Two officers stood outside the door at all times. Every day they took turns coming in and putting the same questions into my face, the way you wring a rag to get the last of the water out.

The room was 10 feet by 12, with a gray steel table bolted to the floor and a radiator painted to match that never came on. It smelled like floor wax, and under that like the inside of a thermos. The tube over the door buzzed at one pitch through the day and dropped to a lower one at some point every night. For 29 days that pitch was the only clock I had.

They tried everything to break me.

They made me look at hundreds of crime scene photographs, pictures of my adoptive parents lying in dried blood. They papered all four walls of the room with them and sat me facing them for three weeks, hoping the horror would collapse me into talking. By the end my nerves had gone so flat that a photograph of my own dining room looked as foreign to me as a corner of a stage set.

They killed the lights and left me in the dark for hours, playing me a tape of footsteps and of something heavy being dragged. They brought a hypnotist up from Poughkeepsie. In two sessions he pushed a long needle into my fingertips and said things into my ear: "What did you do to them? Say it and you get to sleep."

The worst of it was the third week. They drove me back to the white house in Milton. They put cuffs on my wrists, walked me through rooms that still had dried blood on the floor, and stood me at the bottom of the staircase for exactly 10 minutes. Ten minutes with a ring of investigators around me, waiting for a crack. I counted my own heartbeat and asked the floor to open up and take me.

In 29 days of that, everything my cornered brain gave up came to six pieces. Six silent pieces, always in the same order, never once in a different one:

One, the yellow light coming down from the hallway bulb. That bulb was weak. My mother kept asking my father to change it and he never did.

Two, the edge of the runner turned up, folded into a long ragged crease.

Three, the sound out of the dining room. Something heavy, meat and bone, moving slowly across a wood floor.

Four, the bitter taste of blood in my mouth. They worked out later that I had chewed my own tongue apart while it was happening. I didn't feel any of it at the time.

Five, my mother's hand on the far side of the doorframe. White, the fingers curled a little.

Six, I was sitting down. Both knees of my pants were soaked through.

That's all of it. No face. No voice. No weapon. Nothing in there that let them charge me, and nothing that led them to the man who did it.

Six useless pieces. That was everything I could give back to the two people who took me in and gave me a home.

In those 29 days the man I saw most was a detective named Deakins. He was about 30, young for the work, with gray already coming into his hair, and he always carried the fake mint smell of a man three weeks off cigarettes.

Deakins never shouted at me. He never hit the table or threatened to put me in cuffs the way the others did. He played the father. Now and then he brought in a can of soda, pushed it across the table, and sat there watching me with a sympathy he had rehearsed.

The can was always the same brand and always cold, which meant somebody kept a supply for him somewhere in the building. He set it down with the tab turned toward me and never opened one himself. I drank four in 29 days and left the rest on the table, and he carried those out without a word.

On day 24, when I was finished physically and every other way, he made his move. He pulled his chair in close, put a big warm hand on my shoulder, and dropped his voice.

"I know you didn't mean to. I think you're a good kid."

He let a beat go by, squeezed my shoulder, and looked into me like a razor.

"But you have to understand something. Those people took you in. They fed you, they put you through school. And out there right now, the man who killed them, or the man who did it with you, is living a normal life. Going to work. Eating dinner. Sleeping fine. All because your head is choosing to stay shut to protect you."

I was 15. I understood exactly what was underneath that warm smile. He didn't want to save me. He was walking a small animal into a snare so he could close a file.

On day 29, with nothing solid enough to charge a 15-year-old, they did the paperwork and handed me over to my aunt Marion, my adoptive mother's sister, who lived in Albany, 80 miles from Milton. The morning I came out of the station, the people from town standing at the gate weren't looking at me with pity.

It was the look you give a small devil who got away with it.

The file went cold. Nobody was arrested. Nobody was charged. Thirty-one years later the man who did it is still out there somewhere, and the quiet verdict about the boy who killed his adoptive parents is still hanging over my head.

Marion took me in anyway. She had a one-bedroom on Delaware Avenue and slept on the couch the first two years. Nobody had ever left a child with her before. She learned to cook four things, cooked them on a rotation, and never once asked me about that night.

I finished high school in a district where the name meant less. Nights I stocked shelves at a grocery on Central Avenue, 4:00 to 9:00, four shifts a week, and I kept the job two years because the aisles were bright and there was always something for my hands to do. In the first week Marion put a bolt on the inside of my bedroom door. She never brought it up and neither did I.

The dream stayed with me for eight years after that. About twice a week, thicker in October, thinning out toward summer. Always the same six pieces, in the same order, cutting off at the same second.

All through high school I practiced something I never told anyone about. I practiced staying awake inside my own dream.

They call it lucid dreaming. You know you're dreaming, and you can steer yourself around in there. I read everything I could find about it and worked at it for three years.

The idea behind it was simple. If I could stay awake in there, I would get up off the stairs. I would turn around, walk to the dining room doorway, and look inside.

And I would see the face of the man who killed my parents.

A few times I actually managed it. I knew I was dreaming. I could feel the edge of the step under my thigh and the cold on my two wet knees.

But whatever I did in there, whether I tried to stand or turn or shout, at that exact second everything shut off. I wasn't being woken up. It cut. Like the film only ran that far, and behind it there was blank tape.

I gave up at 20.

Then one night in September, when I was 23, the dream didn't come. I was in my second year of college by then, renting a room in Albany. Pale yellow walls, a ceiling fan that rattled.

It didn't come the next night either. Or the night after that.

I didn't notice right away. People rarely notice a thing that has stopped happening. Months went by before I sat down, counted back, and understood that I had slept through an entire fall.

I was free of it. But the thing that moved in to take its place is what made the rest of my life.