The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

“I’ve decided to think of myself as someone who wasn’t abused.”

But I can’t bring myself to write a narrative that puts my experience alone in my family again. I won’t do on the page what was done in life.

As a child I never thought about my sister’s having had a body. I never wondered where she was buried. She wasn’t a baby to me. She was absence.

That would get worse, later, when I was angry and the others either weren’t or couldn’t show it, while I was always, helplessly, loud as a spouting fountain with my feelings.

It never quite worked. I could never get hold of the idea of her. She was gone, unimaginably gone. I was alone in my family. I couldn’t imagine myself being otherwise.

It was too much to hear all our voices piled on top of one another, all crammed into the same spaces we’d occupied as children. For how many more years could we gather this way? For how many more years would we be able to find a house that held us all? Would we never talk about everything that had happened? I waited until just before I had to leave or I would miss my ferry.