-
Why I Read True Crime Books
- Dartmouth College Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
DIANE LOCKWARD Why I Read True Crime Books It always happens in someone else’s house, the silence, the window lifted, lock broken, children asleep, mother and father in bed, a stranger mounting the stairs, a gun, a baseball bat, an axe in hand, someone else’s final hour. It’s always someone else’s family, not ours. It’s down the street, across town, not in our house. I’m merely pushing off my father’s hand. I’m still intact, unbroken. It’s not my crackhead boyfriend creeping up the stairs to slaughter my parents in their bed. In the book it’s always someone else’s bed, someone else’s dreams fractured, someone else’s horror. That’s not me flying down the stairs. The ghosts that live forever live in that other house. It’s their bones, their lives, their illusions broken. In my house it’s just pages turned by hand. It’s not my father’s hands lifting the sleeping child out of bed, not my family left behind forever broken, no complicated ligatures to unravel in the morning hours, no blood spatter on the walls of my house, not my name wailed by the mother crumpled on the stairs, not my mother, her eyes raw and glazed, who stares into the camera, covers her face with both hands, thinks of nothing but her child locked in a pervert’s house, locked in a closet with a makeshift bed. It’s them, not me counting down the first 48 hours, terrified this case won’t ever be broken I’m neither the mother nor the child who’s broken. My father wears a suit, carries a briefcase down the stairs, doesn’t dig in the desert for hours, doesn’t bury bodies in acres of sand. He kisses me good-night and goes back to his bed. He plants red tulips and yellow daffodils behind our house. I won’t be broken by the book in my hands. That vacant stare, the mayhem, the empty bed, all theirs, not ours the grief in that flowerless house. LOVE AND SEX ...