While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family by Kathryn Harrison

save himself from drowning.
    Not that this excuses a sadistic transaction whose emotional impact grew only larger as time passed, the memory of it having become, for Billy, an internal monument to his father’s cruelty. Nine years after he prepared the account in his affidavit and twenty-one years after the murders, when Billy and I talk about the diving board incident, Billy tells me his grandmother threatened his father with a baseball bat belonging to his grandfather and, further, that this was the same bat with which he later beat his father to death.
    Rather than Betty having made so menacing and inflammatory a gesture at her volatile son-in-law, it seems likely to me that Billy’s memory is inspired by his wish for a grandmother who was powerful enough to save him—a woman with a weapon she was willing to use. That the weapon would change over time from a nondescript piece of wood to the same bat that ended his father’s life speaks not only to the vengeful quality of Billy’s rage at having been abused by his father when he was too young to defend himself but also to his need to create a coherent narrative for a life that was severed—rendered incoherent—both by what he had done and by what had been done to him.
    In the years after the 1984 murders, both Billy and Jody would continue to be preoccupied by what was, for each, a profoundly important work in their now separate lives: creating a coherent narrative. To preserve himself from psychic disintegration, Billy had to tell himself the story of the murders—their antecedents, accomplishment, and effects—in a way that allowed him to understand and live with himself: a story that made sense to him. And, if his appeal were to succeed, granting him a retrial, the version of the story in his affidavit needed to make sense to other people, too, explaining the murders as a response to brutality. In this context, to
make sense
is a process not only of discovering but also of inventing meaning, creating what was
not
there all along. In terms of narrative’s ability to knit and hold a life together, it may not be factually true that Billy murdered his father with the same baseball bat that his grandmother threatened to strike Bill with, but to Billy it makes perfect sense. A legal lie and a narrative truth, it draws a line of causation that connects the murders directly to the abuse he suffered.
    Jody, who escaped being murdered, was left with a narrative task as daunting and necessary as her brother’s. The law would punish Billy for what he’d done, relieving him of that burden. Jody, however, would have to live with what she failed to do. Even had she not been unconsciously complicit in the murders, still she had to manage the guilt she felt for having failed to anticipate and prevent her brother’s killing their family. To this end, she, too, needed to review years of domestic blight in order to understand what provoked her brother’s violence. She had to discover how she could go on to have a life that wasn’t ultimately overwhelmed by the fact of the murders.
    At the beginning of our relationship, I could tell Jody that I was compelled by her story and that I had some sense of why I was. Both of us were people who had endured a moment or a period of psychic violence—Jody’s far more dangerous and traumatic than mine—that required us either to reattach the amputated past to the future or to embrace what felt truer, and more possible: the idea that a previous self had perished and a new one had invented herself in the dead girl’s place. The more I learned about Jody’s life, the more of myself I recognized in Jody. Though I hadn’t suffered the kind of abuse or deprivation she had endured as a child, I did have parents who were young and damaged, both of whom had abandoned me. My mother had been cold, withholding, and often cruel; the father I embraced as a savior manipulated me into sex. Like Jody, I used books to enter alternate worlds in which I