The Red Parts Read Online Free PDF Page B

feet, paralyzed with horror. She can’t recall how long she stood there, staring. She kept thinking, Maybe it’s a dummy, maybe it’s a dummy. At some point she walked a few feet into the cemetery, past the fence, to get a better view. Then, wearing just her nightgown and loafers, she ran to her car and drove to her sister’s house a few blocks away. She began screaming uncontrollably as soon as she got there.
    Grow didn’t think she absorbed anything at all about Jane’s specific features at the time, but surprised herself later by being able to pick Jane’s face out of a yearbook. Her face stayed with me , she says.
    Grow admits that she never told the police that she crossed the fence and went into the cemetery. When an attorney asks her why, she says she felt too ashamed. She can’t say why, but she felt ashamed.
    Watching this soft-spoken, traumatized woman on the stand, who steadfastly avoids looking at my family and instead stares down at her hands for the majority of her testimony, I begin to feel ashamed, too.
    Grow felt ashamed then for stepping in to take a closer look. Perhaps she feels ashamed now because it can feel hard and wrong to talk about the suffering of a stranger in the presence of those who knew and loved her.
    I know both of these feelings well. I have been taking a closer look for some time. And although Jane and I are connected by blood, she remains as much of a stranger to me as she was to Grow. The story of her death may have affected both of our lives and brought us into the same room, but that doesn’t mean that either of us feels that it’s ours to tell.
    Grow’s shame at the January hearing will set her apart from almost everyone else at the July trial. No one else will seem to have any—not the medical examiner who compares the body temperature taken in Jane’s rectum at the crime scene against that taken from the center of her liver during her autopsy; not the middle-aged true-crime writer from Australia who sits on the bench in front of ours every day, taking notes for a book; not the dowdy journalist from the local paper who lurks in a bathroom stall in the ladies’ room to eavesdrop on my mother’s and my conversations; none of the cameramen who film us walking in and out of the courthouse day after day, our faces wrinkled with sleep in the morning, then tear-stained and haggard by evening; none of the producers from 48 Hours , who will make heavy use of the crime scene photos in their show, and who had planned to use the autopsy photos as well until Hiller stepped in to say absolutely not; none of the Court TV correspondents, who will stream the autopsy photos live on the Web, then keep them available to the public in an online archive.
    Perhaps the shame I feel is a stand-in for the shame I think someone ought to feel.
    Or perhaps it’s due to the fact that during Leiterman’s trial, I sat in the courtroom every day with a legal pad and pen, jotting down all the gory details, no different or better than anyone else. Details which I’m reassembling here—a live stream—for reasons that are not yet clear or justifiable to me, and may never be.
    But as I told my mother after her tumble in the kitchen, some things might be worth telling simply because they happened.

The Red Parts
    I N THE YEARS after my father died, I often found myself alone, or alone with my mother. Just us chickens , she’d say. Emily left for boarding school when she was thirteen and I was eleven, a departure that marked the start of a series of adventures and incarcerations from which she would never return home. My mother had a new husband, but his presence felt alien, intermittent. He appeared sporadically at the dinner table with hands darkened by paint and oil. He was a housepainter and carpenter several years her junior whom she and my father had hired years ago to paint our family home in San Rafael, the only house I remember living in with both my parents. My father was a lawyer who was out