J is for Judgment (Kinsey Millhone 10)

I showered, dressed, and ate a bowl of cereal while I scanned the paper. I drove into the office and spent a frustrating twenty minutes hunting for a parking space that wouldn’t generate a ticket. I nearly had to break down and try the public lot, but I was saved at the last minute by a woman in a pickup who vacated a spot just across the street.

I went through the mail from the day before. Nothing much of interest, except the notification that I’d won a million dollars. Well, either me or the two other people mentioned. In fine print, it said that Minnie and Steve were actually already collecting their millions in $40,000 installments. I got busy and tore out perforated stamps, which I licked and pasted in various squares. I studied the material, seriously worried I might win the third prize jet ski. What the hell was I going to do with that? Maybe I’d give it to Henry for his birthday. I went ahead and balanced my checkbook, just to clear the decks. While I was eliminating some of those pesky excess dollars, I picked up the receiver and tried Renata Huff’s unlisted number, without results.

Something was nagging at me, and it had nothing to do with Wendell Jaffe or Renata Huff. It was Lena Irwin’s reference yesterday to the Burton Kinsey family up in Lompoc. Despite my denials, the name had set up a low hum in my memory, like the nearly inaudible buzz of power lines overhead. In many ways, my whole sense of myself was embedded in the fact of my parents’ death in an automobile wreck when I was five. I knew my father had lost control of the car when a rock tumbled down a steep hill and crashed into the windshield. I was on the backseat, flung against the front seat on impact, wedged there for hours while the fire department worked to extract me from the wreckage. I remember my mother’s hopeless crying and the silence that came afterward. I remember slipping a hand around the edge of the driver’s seat, slipping a finger into my father’s hand, not realizing he was dead. I remember going to live with the aunt who raised me after that, my mother’s sister, whose name was Virginia. I called her Gin Gin or Aunt Gin. She had told me little, if anything, about the family history before or after that event. I knew, because the fact was embedded in the tale, that my parents were on their way up to Lompoc the day they were killed, but I never thought about the reason for the trip. My aunt had never told me the nature of the journey, and I’d never asked. Given my insatiable curiosity and my natural inclination to poke my nose in where it doesn’t belong, it was odd to realize how little attention I’d paid to my own past. I’d simply accepted what I was told, constructing my personal mythology on the flimsiest of facts. Why had I never pushed aside that veil?

I thought about myself, about the kind of child I was when I was five and six, isolated, insular. After their deaths, I created a little world for myself in a cardboard box, filled with blankets and pillows, lighted by a table lamp with a sixty-watt bulb. I was very particular about what I ate. I would make sandwiches for myself, cheese and pickle, or Kraft olive pimento cheese, cut in four equal fingers, which I would arrange on a plate. I had to do everything myself, and it all had to be just so. Dimly, I remember my aunt hovering nearby. I wasn’t aware of her worry at the time, but now when I see the image, I know she must have been deeply concerned about me. I would take my food and crawl into my container, where I would look at picture books and nibble, stare at the cardboard ceiling, hum to myself, and sleep. For four months, maybe five, I withdrew into that ecosphere of artificial warmth, that cocoon of grief. I taught myself how to read. I drew pictures, made shadow creatures with my fingers against the walls of my den. I taught myself how to tie my shoes. Perhaps I thought they’d come back for me, that mother, that father, whose faces I could project, home cinema for the orphaned, a girl child who until lately had been safely ensconced in that little family. I can still remember how cold the trailer felt whenever I crawled out. My aunt never interfered with me. When school started in the fall, I emerged like a little animal coming out of its lair. Kindergarten was fearful. I wasn’t used to other children. I wasn’t accustomed to noise or to regimentation. I didn’t like Mrs. Bowman, the teacher, in whose eyes I could read both pity and disapproval, that judgment. I was an odd child. I was timid. I was anxious all the time. Nothing I’ve faced since has even come close to the horrors of grade school. I can see now how the story, whatever it was, must have followed me like a specter from level to level: penned in my record, appended to my file, from teacher to teacher, through conferences with the principal…what shall we do with her? How shall we cope with her tears and her stoniness? So bright, so fragile, stubborn, introverted, asocial, easily upset…