Memories a Lane

Temperature, animal predation, microorganisms, water currents, and saturation of tissue will all cause varying changes in appearance. Clothing alters buoyancy, and therefore, the advancement of decomposition. Adipocere formation is caused by long-chain hydrocarbons. Oleic, palmitic, and stearic acids concentrate into a khaki-colored wax. Enzymes in the body, and bacteria from the water, contribute to the conversion of neutral lipids during putrefaction.

You nod, reading this.

An unnatural end made natural through the unintelligible austerity of science. The threads of comforting familiarity are a nice touch. Temperature. Current. Buoyancy. A relaxing day at the river like any other, a boy playing away his Sunday. Khakis: the most mundane thing. But he was wearing jeans, Lee jeans. And a yellow shirt. You told the police a thousand times. Wax: like Thanksgiving candles unpacked a month early, softening in your fist, joining a row of tiny orange flares meant to light his way home. You’ll set the transistor in the window tonight. Let the wind carry Gunsmoke to his hiding place and remind him there are still comforts at home. Maybe it would come true if you willed it. 

“It’s okay,” you yelled into the elms, red leaves scattered like shards of toys and dishes. “You’re not in trouble.” You sent your voice across the water until it vanished into darkness. “I’m not mad.” 

I, not we. 

Whenever Ed returned from a stint he brought promises in with his laundry but disappeared at dawn, leaving red handprints on the faces of his two pestering burdens. If you were a little boy wouldn’t you lash out too?

A month later and you stand quiet at the soil’s edge, a baby smile crooked on your lips. Yellow shirt. Lee jeans. A rhythm to lull yourself to sleep. Proof the red-swaddled shape they found bobbing among the reeds never belonged to you. Its latex skin stretched like a nylon stocking rearranging the face of a robber, hands wrinkled and misshapen like gloves made of tripe. But dental records are all they had, so you bury this unrecognizable thing. 

Your mind is too full of white noise to remember to whimper or speak, or wither and sway or weep, along with the mourners, the fools.

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Although the main instigator of decomposition on land or in water is temperature, a number of factors unique to the water in question may influence the appearance of the remains, such as obstructions that may snare the epidermis and attract marine scavengers. Submerged bodies frequently endure laundress-like extremities with degloving and a distinct disarticulation sequence.

Four months ago you’d stood on the back porch, feeding the rollers of the washing machine in the fading summer light. You didn’t watch what you were doing as much as you watched the tree line, looking for blond hair and a springing step. What’d the boy get up to so late? Must have fallen asleep, gone to a friend’s, lost track of time. His dinner had grown cold on the plate, ham congealing, biscuit hardening, grits thickening to a paste thick as mortar. 

When he didn’t come home that night you went to the police. The sheriff waved you off with twenty-four hours in an endless refrain, drowning you out, another pesty woman insisting she’s right. Again, that description is pinned on you, and you wonder if he also thinks that way about your son. If he’s siding with your husband in his mind, telepathically. If he didn’t help Ed kidnap the child and that’s why he’s dusting his hands of you. 

You fought the urge to stomp that load of clothes in the mud, only for the excuse to run back to the river to scrub them out, duck into the rushes and play make-believe. Maybe you’d come across his secret spot, and you’d stare at him squatting on the opposite bank, like looking into a mirror. 

But then the deputy came up the porch steps, sheriff behind with his hat brim crumpled in all directions, and you listened to the story of their most revelatory day. The mealy-mouthed descriptions of what they’d found in the river, the same river dripping over your knuckles and onto your shoes. You’d rolled your fingertips through the wringers on purpose so you could focus your pain on the spot of your choosing.

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Fingerprints and radiographs are the two most common forms of positive identification. However, fingerprinting presents a certain quantity of limitations. For instance, digits must be intact, with a printable epidermal layer, in order to obtain quality samples. Morphological reconstruction—even of progressively decayed bodies—can be achieved from the study of various anthropometric landmarks.

“All boys that age have missing front teeth,” you’d argued. “All of them have cavities in back. All of them have a chip from a fight, or falling off some high place.” All of them clumsy and adventurous. “Just look at your own boys.” Even some of the girls. 

So you upend the house to find something you missed. A note, a torn treasure map, some remnant left behind. You get lost in a pile of photographs until the images come to life. If nothing else, the place would be clean when he returned. Wouldn’t everyone like crisp sheets after a long journey? Favorite comfort food warming on the stove? 

Until you pull out the laundry basket and see a crumpled mound in the corner of the closet. A pile in the shape of a small body kneeling in the dark, the faint scent of sweat and pine. You could almost see it rise, hear it announce your turn to hide.

But it’s just a blue shirt speckled with blood and a denim leg dangling from a rip. He tried to toss them into the basket and missed. 

Levis. 

You tear through the closet, the drawers. Every pair Levis. He only owned one red shirt, the one his dad gave him and was too tight now, but he wore every chance he got. Yellow shirt, Lee jeans, a string of meaningless nouns. The last true thing never existed. 

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Facial and corporeal reconstruction are specialized skills with the primary objective of rebuilding expired remains into three-dimensional, identifiable sculptures of deceased subjects. Corollary disciplines include recreation from photographs and a cognitive interview with one or more relations or close acquaintances of a living subject.

For a minute, television provided a nice distraction. Eight channels all playing something different. But you understood everything it was saying, forcing concentration on little boys’ voices that seemed to be calling you, little boys’ faces that were real if you looked out the corner of your eye. Until those blissful nonsense hours before dawn, when all the stations screamed with static and sometimes you joined in.

One Sunday you couldn’t take any more televangelists’ hope and you grabbed a book off the shelf to hurl through the screen. An old medical text from decades ago, some aunt’s dusty vocation kept around for first aid advice. You immersed yourself in a language at first only recognizable in dribbles. You closed your eyes and pictured it, anatomy built piece by piece from cells up to the skin. Drizzling water between the two-dimensional visions of crayon-colored organs until you feel you could beat Frankenstein if you tried.

As a year approaches you’re leaning against a porch column, submerged in a hypnagogic state when you hear the scuffs in the scorched late-summer dirt.

Your boy stands at the steps. Red shirt clean and unwrinkled and not a hair out of place. 

He’s exactly what you remembered but different in ways you can’t explain. A little too much paint lifted off the canvas. A little dullness in the eyes. You forgot the hazel specks. He totters up the creaking boards, the spring in his step like a note off key.

You sit in front of him and run your hands down his arms as he holds his sleeves tight in his fists. You’re exactly the right height to see the freckles on the left side of his nose that you gave him, the crooked baby grin, and you grab him close. Neither of you speak. You squeeze and breathe his river-wood scent and never acknowledge the green ooze at the edge of his cuffs, the trickle of water sluicing through your fingers and onto your shoes.