The Never List

lemon ginger tea, any and all my favorite childhood desserts.
    But my favorites weren’t my favorites anymore. My very taste buds had been transformed from the experience. In fact, I began to wonder if my mother suspected I wasn’t really her daughter at all afterward, I was so changed. She wanted to know everything that had happened to us, but I told her only the most carefully edited bits and pieces. I doled it out in small measured doses, hoping never to let her feel the full impact of the truth. I believed that only I could gauge how much she could take, and I needed to protect her from what I knew she would be unable to live with.
    When I returned, the whole world seemed hazy and bright and unreal. I had been living only in my own head for so long, pushing everything else out, that I found it hard to be present. So despite my mother’s best efforts, we were still separated.
    It was a gap I would never figure out how to bridge. My mother’s deepest sadness was that I could hardly bear to have her cradle me in her arms, when all she wanted to do was hold me. But for me, all my circuits were cut. I had lost all connections except to a dead girl in the ground somewhere in Oregon.
    My mother was sad, of course, about Jennifer, but her happiness to have me alive and with her again dwarfed her grief for this other lost child. I thought—I knew —that Jennifer deserved more. She deserved a real grief, all her own, and even then I felt I was the only one who could adequately provide it.
    We were still in high school when Jennifer had finally stopped speaking to her father, and he never made much of an attempt to connect with her again. He left that part out when he spoke to the press about his deep and abiding loss, of course. I watched him warily when he came to visit me, and I saw behind his eyes that all he really wanted was attention. To me, his tears didn’t really count.
    So here I was, in this comfortable kitchen in Keeler, with the smell of our after-dinner coffee lingering in the air, poring over the press clippings of another lifetime. I looked them over, reading a few paragraphs here and there, noticing the shift in tone as the story developed, day by day. I detected in those words the familiar aura of professional excitement, this time from the journalists realizing the thrill factor of the unfolding story.
    Then I noticed that the byline on most of the articles was the same: Scott Weber. That must be the journalist David Stiller had mentioned, the one who had been mooning away over Adele. I wondered aloud to Tracy whether we should meet with him, and she replied, “Definitely,” without looking up from the articles. Her eyes glistened. Even for her this was hard. Even for her.
    “Ray,” asked Tracy, without looking up from the pages, “why did you take such an interest in this particular case?”
    Ray smiled broadly. “Oh, not just this particular case, though this was definitely one of the more dramatic stories. And then when Sylvia moved to the area, it did become a bit of an obsession.”
    I looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
    “Well, girls, come with me.” We followed him down the hall to a door at the rear of the house. I hung back, suddenly feeling closed in, too close to other people’s bodies. I didn’t like going down narrow hallways, even in cheerful homes like this one.
    I was a couple of steps behind them as we went into Ray’s small study, and I gasped when I turned the corner. The walls were covered in sheets of newsprint, filled with headlines and photographs of the most gruesome crimes. Framed copies of historic documents, all relating to famous murders, were set up on the desk, balanced against the wall. He’d obviously gone to great lengths creating this elaborate and macabre gallery of horrors, dug deep into the past to accumulate an archive of the ways human beings make other human beings suffer.
    A long shelf along one wall was filled with photo albums, nearly identical to the one he’d shown us, each labeled with a different proper name. I didn’t know if they were those of the victims or the perpetrators, though, I thought bitterly, usually it was the perpetrators’ names everyone remembered.
    I looked back at Ray and saw him beaming with pride. He felt no shame about his obsession. And why should he? These were just stories to him. Did he even think of the victims as real people? Did he understand the tragedy, the horror those volumes contained? People’s