 Requiem for the LostbyKatherine HauswirthWhat will the long-range aftermath of the heated Casey Anthony murder trial, in which Casey was acquitted of murder, manslaughter, and child abuse, be? There’s a movement to establish Caylee’s Law, named for her slain daughter, which could make it a felony to fail to report a child missing within twenty-four hours. But by and large the murder case, perhaps forever officially unsolved, will retreat to the haunted but more distant corners of most of our minds, along with the names of other proved or accused filicidal murderers and serial killers who’ve been immortalized in appalling headlines over the years. Two fiction books I’ve just read, however, underscore how vast and oppressive a shadow can hover over those close to a murder or disappearance, particularly children who witness or even simply hear about such unfathomably dark events. In the Woods, a debut novel by Tana French, has an intense, lyrical start in which two wild and free children own the magical-seeming woods before they are consumed by it. Their disappearance leaves ominous traces but remains unexplained. The narrator Rob Ryan, an Irish police detective working a child murder case, has a powerful connection to those children who vanished from the forest decades ago. He was the child found alone at the scene, blood in his shoes, unable to recall or explain the fate of his friends. Afterwards he moves away with his family and adopts a different name, a successful effort to avoid a lifetime dominated by probing stares and an undertone of murmurs from the bereft community. French seamlessly takes on a convincing male voice and a believable beleaguered mindset in the persona of Rob Ryan, who’s maturing toward a meaningful relationship but is fragmented, seemingly irrevocably, by the unhappy turning point of his childhood. His recollections are bisected into “before” and “after” that day in the woods, and the flashbacks from his scorched and partially obliterated memory bank comingle with the details of the current case to create compelling psychodrama. Like In the Woods, Between Here and April by Deborah Copaken Kogan introduces an adult who’s just coming to recognize the full effects of an incomprehensible childhood loss. But protagonist Elizabeth Burns’ circumstances are quite different from Rob Ryan’s—she knows exactly what happened to her friend April and can remember every detail of the day she discovered the truth. After growing an innocent and tender kindergarten friendship with April, Elizabeth suddenly hears April won’t be returning to school. She is puzzled by her teacher’s unwillingness to explain where April’s gone, and later learns that her friend was the victim of a filicide-suicide. To exacerbate Elizabeth’s already overwhelmed mindset, the loss seems barely acknowledged and is never discussed by the adults in her life. As Elizabeth encounters some very real challenges in her role as a wife and mother, the memory of April’s murder comes to occupy the axis of her thoughts. She uses her journalist skills to reexamine the mystery of how and why this could happen and discovers how fragile the human psyche, as it turns out especially her own, can be. The book shows the complex interplay between logic and emotion in the mind of a mother who struggles with the age-old quest to balance self and responsibility, desire and stability in the wake of both childhood and adult trauma. Each book in its own way successfully illuminates the most sacred, unmarred moments of childhood, which perhaps shine even brighter in contrast with the tragedy at hand. Take this snapshot of the last summer of the soon-to-be lost children from In the Woods: “This summer . . . tingles on your skin with BMX wind in your face, ladybug feet up your arm; it packs every breath full of mown grass and billowing wash lines; it chimes and fountains with birdcalls, bees, leaves and football-bounces and skipping chants . . .. This summer will never end. It starts every day with a shower of Mr. Whippy notes and your best friend’s knock at the door, finishes it with long slow twilight and mothers silhouetted in doorways calling you to come in . . .” In Between Here and April, Kogan frames the perfection of new friendship: “By the end of that first week of school, we had already fallen into a comfortable twosome, having chicken fights on the monkey bars, playing ring around the rosie in the rain until we were mud-caked and dizzy, searching for four-leafed clovers for April’s massive (so she claimed) collection. April was the first person to show me that a worm, unlike us, could be cut in half and still survive. I showed her how to capture a frog, by cupping your hands over him like a dome. We created our own friendship oath and secret handshake, whose motions I can no longer recall, aside from a fluttering up of fingers, like birds, at the end.” What struck me about both books was how well their authors captured the inner lives and friendships of children and the exquisite wound that can result when these shoots of trust and connection are desecrated. But while the loss of innocence begets a profound sadness that keeps the wound from completely healing, each book also allows a glimpse of how the human spirit and mind can still find its way, however clumsily, to the remnants of the holy that, remarkably, live alongside the memory of devastation. Books mentioned in this column:
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