Middle Rage

Oma -- Part 15

I am running at a good, hard pace, listening to a murder podcast. This one is the Delphi Murders — two girls, 13 and 14 years old, murdered in broad daylight this past Valentine's Day, in a woodland area in Delphi, Indiana. Whatever the killer did to them, it's so horrible and unique that authorities won't even say how the girls died. It would reveal too much about the killer's 'signature'.

One of those brilliant, gutsy, soon-to-be-dead girls took video of their killer. His voice, his full body as he walked towards them. Can you imagine the bravery of that child, to realize something was off, to get out her phone? She did everything right. In a world where women get blamed for their own assaults all the time — out too late, wearing a skirt, being drunk, not running, being alone, not fighting back, fighting back so they get killed instead of just raped — these girls were unimpeachable. One of them used that phone and caught her own killer red-handed in the act.

I think about that so completely, that when I look up, I'm at the end of my jog and I haven't thought a bit about how sweaty and out of breath I am, a blister rising on my big toe where the sneaker rubs.

Those two girls were on a hiking trail known mostly to locals, in a town nobody would visit unless they had reason to be there, on a day school should've been in session, but had been canceled. Their abductor made them cross a cold February river to the kill spot, secluded but close to a public path. Who but a local would know the river was shallow enough to cross, not so fast it would sweep them away? Who would know school was out, that kids would be out, but most parents still required to work?

In a town of less than 3,000 people, her video was all over the news: a sample of his voice, the movement of his body, surely recognizable to someone in a town so small. But it's been eight months, and no arrests.

It boils me, toughening my internal organs the way soft turkey innards go into a pot for Thanksgiving gravy, cooked until they become rubbery and unchewable for hours, until finally, they give up whatever held them so strong, and dissolve. That is me; I will never go back to being soft and silken. I will resist until the bonds that make me finally break down into nothingness.

Someone in that town must recognize his videoed face, his voice, his jacket, his familiar hunting ground. Same as I know my husband's gait from across the park — the way his head tilts slightly to the left as he walks, the shuffle of his legs.

My jog should be over — 4.5 miles is enough for one day — but I loop back, retracing my steps, running from facts I can't escape: Someone in that town recognizes their father, or their husband, or their son in that video. Perhaps their mind cannot turn to what he must've done to those girls. It is too horrible and their reasoning shorts out. And yet, they protect him.

Here is the thought I am running away from: not just one person. I bet several people know, in their secret hearts, the man on that video. They tell themselves John from the office couldn't be a killer. They couldn't even do John the disservice of saying it out loud. John would never escape the stigma of being falsely accused as a child killer.

You could ruin a man's reputation with stories like that.

My uncle is in every family Christmas picture from the time I was ten to the time I was 26, child molester's grin on his face, sitting thigh-to-thigh with my aunt, drinking eggnog with my father, all of us in our horrid, itchy Christmas sweaters.

My uncle was the first, but others came later — boys who knew exactly where the line lay, like that childhood game in the back seat of the car, where your brother would stick a finger so close to your eye it might brush your eyelashes if you blinked, but not, as the rules said, touching you.

And then of course, after endless complaints to the front seat, and the self-defense smacks that got you yelled at, and your tired mother telling you both to shut up... touching you, anyway.