The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

This is the logic I will never find an answer to, the way in my family a hurt will always be your hurt or my hurt, one to be set against the other and weighed, never the family’s hurt. Is what happens in a family the problem of the family, or the problem of the one most harmed by it? There is a cost to this kind of adversarial individualism.

Who knows how those in a family find their roles, whether a role is assigned or chosen, whether it’s a function of the way that even siblings—even twins—grow up in different families? Have different pasts.

The boys’ attention frees me to feel loved. The boys are a threat. I don’t know how to recognize when love and hurt are mingled. It’s all I’ve known them to be. I can’t tell who’s safe and who’s not, can’t tell what safety even is. I only know I need someone to be.

And above all we are prisoners of the story we tell about ourselves, the story of the parents descended from poor immigrants who made it good and now have the Cadillacs and the beautiful, successful children and the most porch lights at Christmas. We are so determinedly fine it must be overwhelming for them to have a daughter who has suddenly shown up with the marks of all that is not fine so visibly on her. And a relief for all of us when I go back to school.

Now it was the victims whose names I noticed in cases, the victims I suddenly wondered about.

Your own son dies and it becomes the community’s tragedy, as though it’s the system’s tragedy. Public.

I feel for my mother. With her determination not to talk about the past, I must sometimes seem to her a walking time bomb. A bomb made of time.

The trial was about the murder, not the whole story. But is an act ever really only about itself? Does any element of this story occur in isolation?

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.

We are standing in a graveyard. But the past isn’t in the ground for me. The past is in my body.

I have come to believe that every family has its defining action, its defining belief. From childhood, I understood that my parents’ was this: Never look back.

What I fell in love with about the law so many years ago was the way that in making a story, in making a neat narrative of events, it finds a beginning, and therefore cause. But I didn’t understand then that the law doesn’t find the beginning any more than it finds the truth. It creates a story. That story has a beginning. That story simplifies, and we call it truth.

What happened next is a memory as vivid as anything imagined.