Theresa
In the Lindens’ garage there were plastic bins containing Christmas decorations, stockings and garland and the delicate papier-mâché angels and bells Cece Linden made in school that Theresa Linden wrapped in newspaper and sealed in bags, only to see that they’d flattened and crumpled as she unwrapped them every December. There were lawn tools, bicycles, old paint cans. High on the three inner walls were bare planks bracketed eighteen inches apart, shelves Adam Linden made himself shortly after the family moved in. They were too high up and the upper shelf remained empty. Lined up on the lower shelf were large plastic soda cups Adam used to store nails in every size, screws, washers, and bolts—things he’d bought in bulk over the years so he’d have something to put on the shelves. When the winter sun began to set, light streamed in through the wide, squat windows at the side of the garage that faced the Stinsons’ and showed spiderwebs as thick in the corners as the whorls of hair Theresa pulled from her daughter’s brush. Cece had never liked the garage. Later it would seem like a sign, something she should have paid attention to.
In the summer the air inside the garage turned thick, scented heavily with the smell of the Lindens’ cars and the wood walls and dust and faintly with the evergreen-scented candles Theresa used in her Christmas Eve centerpiece. On the bare concrete floor there was an oil stain in the shape of a hand, its fingers splayed wide. It was a late summer morning the day Theresa Linden’s body was found there, her face in the hand, her body curled as if it were in sleep, her hair blooming petals of blood and bone.
Theresa is seven years old, watching her sister use a rope to swing way out over the lake. Carissa lets go, falls, the water exploding around her, but it’s Theresa who gasps just before Carissa goes in. Like she can hold Carissa’s breath for her. Carissa surfaces, coughing, raking her hand down her face and over her hair. “Come on,” she calls to Theresa. But the rope is too far away to reach, dangling into the mucky water. “I think the hot dogs are ready,” she yells back. It seems like a sure way to distract her sister, but Carissa doesn’t go for it. “Oh my God, Rese,” she laughs. “You’re just afraid you’ll break your vagina.” This is how Theresa comes to be seen, in the way that family lore clings to stories that are illustrative but unfair, as someone who is afraid to take risks. “Forget it,” her sister will say any time she refuses to try a cartwheel, or a cigarette is offered, or someone holds a car door open, offering to whisk her away from school. “She’s afraid she’ll break her vag.”
Theresa is eighteen, and Carissa is twenty and pregnant, and the sisters are walking through Sears pointing at clothes and toys and soft, fluffy blankets the baby will need. They’ve named him Roy, a joke name Theresa came up with to cheer Carissa up, but now the name has stuck, the baby is Roy. Roy will have ears that stick out and scrawny legs like Carissa. “Thank God I don’t have to buy any of this crap,” Carissa says, looking away. Theresa knows she’s trying not to cry. Roy is being adopted by a couple they’re not allowed to meet. The day he’s born, Theresa’s mother has to ask the doctor to sedate Carissa so they can take the baby from her. “Don’t let them take him,” she says to Theresa. Her hair is sweaty on her forehead, her face pale. She’s whispering, but everyone can hear her. They all nod, of course, of course, no one will take him. Finally, she falls asleep, and Theresa watches Roy as they change his diaper, swaddle him in a new blanket, and wheel him out of the room in his bassinet. When Carissa wakes, it’s only Theresa in the room. Carissa sits up, looks around, knows. “I knew you’d be useless,” she says, and puts her hands over her face. They watch Ricki Lake on mute. At the commercial breaks, Theresa hands Carissa a new Kleenex.
Theresa is twenty-two, lying on the futon in her apartment, its broken spring knuckling her shoulder. She’s just had an abortion. She holds the remote but the TV is dark. She turns and vomits into the trash can she’d placed there just in case. She traded shifts so she could have this and the next day off. Her boyfriend thinks she’s cramming for a final. She’s told no one, only written a few lines of it in her diary. She longs to call Carissa, but imagining what her sister will say is enough to stop her. Carissa has two children now, goes to church every Sunday, works as the supervisor at a landscaping company, celebrates Roy’s birthday every year. Ungrateful is maybe something she would say to Theresa. Evil. Careless. None of it is louder than the relief Theresa feels.
Theresa is twenty-six, working in customer relations at the corporate offices of a national bank. She hasn’t had sex in three years. She has a brief, intense friendship with Samantha, a coworker. They take long walks at lunch and feed each other from paper sacks and spend every evening at Theresa’s, legs over each other’s laps, watching talk shows. Samantha is gone one day, fired, and it turns out she’s been forging Theresa’s signature on withdrawal papers.
Theresa is twenty-nine on a date with a man who says he plays semi-professional rugby. One of his eyes is swollen shut and he angles that side of his face away from her. Out of tenderness for his injury, she goes to bed with him but they can’t kiss because her brow might bump into his wound. He has stiff sheets and a lamp on the floor and a bare window she looks out of after they’re finished. “It’s hard to tell how high up we are,” she says. “The window is just a square of sky.” He pats her shoulder. After some silence, he says, “I actually have a girlfriend.” When Theresa gets home, she sees there is some blood on the shoulder of her favorite blouse, and she drops it into the trash can. “It’s time to grow up,” Carissa tells her. Carissa is pregnant again, and has to go, bath time is the worst. “Just pick someone and stick with them.” She hasn’t said the thing about Theresa’s vag in years, but it’s there in the subtext. Stop being so choosy, so scared. Start your life already.
Theresa is thirty-one when she meets Adam. She’s at a bar with her manager, a new low, and he’s just excused himself to go to the bathroom. All night, he’s found ways to rub himself against her, standing at the bar waiting for drinks or holding her chair out for her, and it’s clear he’d like her to come to the bathroom with him. But she’s already seen Adam. He’s with someone, a very pretty woman with a girlish headband in her hair. It’s that headband that clears the way for Theresa, that lets her walk up to the bar and pretend to ask for a drink, elbowing Adam as she does. Up close, he’s familiar. He has kind brown eyes, broad shoulders that curve slightly inward. He smiles at her; she sees that one of his front teeth crowds the other. “I think I know you,” she says. “Don’t I?” His date looks back and forth between them, the straw from her drink clamped tight in her mouth. “Remind me,” he says. She wants to collapse into his arms. Finally, she thinks. Carissa was right.
Theresa is thirty-two at the wedding. She wears an off-the-rack dress that is two hundred dollars more than she wants to spend and too tight across the chest. Carissa, her matron of honor, weeps loudly through the ceremony. “My sister always seemed like the lonely type,” she’ll say in her speech later that evening, using the back of her wrist to dab at her eyes. She’ll raise her glass and Theresa will see how happy Carissa is for her. She’ll hug Carissa, thank her for seeing what Theresa couldn’t see, but Theresa is uncomfortable that her family sees her that way, a lonely woman, nearly a lost cause. She’s lonely then and there, with everyone toasting her and Adam, with him bending to kiss her neck and whisper that her boobs in her dress are making him hard.
Theresa gets pregnant. It’s exactly like in the commercials, with the test that shows two pink lines and the husband who comes home and sees it and doesn’t know what it means, then grabs her and hugs her tight. The calls to family, Carissa shrieking and dropping the phone, the standing in what will be the baby’s room and imagining the stuffed giraffe, the comfy rocker, the diapers stored neatly on shelves. “This baby is so lucky,” Adam will say, resting his hand on her still-flat stomach. “You are going to be an amazing mom.” She drives by the abortion clinic only once. That she doesn’t get out of the car, doesn’t want to get out of the car, is enough for Theresa. Soon enough, the baby kicks, turns its whole body. “Do you ever think about Roy?” she asks Carissa on the phone. It’s been years since they’ve said his name, Carissa the mom of four now. All those years ago, just twenty years old, Carissa had felt those same jabs, flops, kicks. “Roy?” Carissa says. “Oh, Roy.” They are silent, listening to each other breathe, and then Theresa changes the subject to diaper pails.
Theresa is thirty-three when she gives birth to Cece. She won’t let them take her, won’t let them wheel the baby out to be weighed or bathed. The baby stays with her, in that room. “You’re being silly,” Carissa says. “The baby still has afterbirth in her hair. Let them take the poor thing.” Theresa struggles out of bed, wets a soft blue washcloth, and washes Cece’s head as best she can. Her scalp feels like velvet and Theresa is positive she sees the baby smile.
And here, the day Theresa meets Jackie Stinson, is where the story—the one neighbors and acquaintances and reporters and true crime enthusiasts love to tell and retell—here is where that story begins.
There’s something familiar in Jackie, too. She’s brash like Carissa, and funny like her too. But unlike Carissa, Jackie seems to find something she needs in Theresa. A stasis, a peace, some quiet. It’s easy to look back, after everything that will happen, and assume that there was some deeper meaning behind their friendship. More likely, it was a simple transaction—each woman needed a friend. New moms struggle to make friends, everyone knows that. Best to find someone equally in the thrall of infanthood, equally unable to talk about anything outside of diaper rash and feeding schedules and exhaustion, someone who can laugh about the disgusting state of their nipples and sit patiently during a bout of weeping.
The story ends this way: Several years from that day in the maternity ward, Theresa will find out Adam and Jackie are fucking. She’ll walk in on her husband with his head between Jackie’s legs, crouching the same way he does when they’ve lost something under the couch, his legs tucked under his ass and his weight in his hands, fingers splayed. He’ll be moving his head rapidly and Theresa will want to laugh. He never was good at finding anything.
The next day, Theresa will be murdered in her own garage. They’ll find her murderer with blood in his hair, on his face, in his nail beds, even some inside his socks. He’ll still be holding the crowbar. “I wasn’t sure where to put it,” he’ll tell the officer.
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