Vengeance. Zachary Lazar

while when she started dialysis treatments. He lived in New York, and she knew he couldn’t stay forever, but she didn’t know what else to do. She told me then that Kendrick had been difficult before the play, that he had somehow gotten it into his mind that his twelve-year-old daughter, Aysha, might be able to come to the prison to see him perform, though neither he nor Sonia had had any contact with Aysha in many years. She said she’d stayed in touch with Aysha’s mother, Janelle, for a short time after Kendrick went to prison, but after Katrina everyone had scattered, and now she didn’t even know where they lived. One of the last times she’d seen Aysha was at the trial, she said—Aysha crying for her father, Sonia and Janelle telling her he would come home soon, lying to her in that way because that was the only thing one could do.

      “She was finally getting to be a talker,” she said. “She’d been slow learning how to talk before, but she had it by then. With her, it was like silence, silence, silence, then all the sudden—full sentences.”

      She was three, the last time she’d seen her father, I thought. Kendrick was twenty-two—a part of him was still twenty-two, it occurred to me, still referring when we met nine years later to rappers and basketball stars that no one had talked about much in those nine years.

      I asked her if Kendrick had ever had any trouble with the law before he was arrested that summer, and she said no, that in fact he’d had “a lot of friends who were police.” I didn’t know what to say to that. It was the first time I doubted anything she’d told me, though I believed she believed it herself. She went on to tell me that the summer Kendrick was arrested he was planning to become an EMT, because he wanted to “help people.” He’d gone back to community college and was planning to transfer to a four-year school, because that was “the caliber of person” he intended to be. I’d told her on the phone that I had no plans to write about any of this, though I’d also said that I never knew what I was going to write until I was actually writing it. Deborah made images—their value was obvious. The value of writing seemed far less obvious to me, just a groping around in the unknowable. As Sonia told me a story now about Kendrick learning to speak Spanish as a child, so that he could make friends with some neighborhood kids who only spoke Spanish, I thought that at least some of this had to be just sentimental exaggeration, but I didn’t press her. I remembered that day at the prison when Kendrick had told me that he knew who really committed the murder but that he would never divulge the other man’s name. I remembered the way he’d tried not to cry without trying too hard—the embarrassment of the effort, his fear of seeming too performative.

      The night of his arrest, Sonia told me now, two detectives from the sheriff’s office had come by her house—they were looking for Kendrick as a potential witness, they said, and they left her their business card. When Kendrick came home a few hours later, he went to the detective bureau to clear things up, but he was gone a long time—it was four or five the next morning when the police car returned, pulling into Sonia’s driveway in the dark. It was summertime, hot, but she remembered that her hands went numb, she got so cold. They had come to pick up a pair of Kendrick’s basketball shoes, the detective said. They were bright green, she remembered—like all his shoes they were immaculately clean. A forensics team later tested the shoes for bloodstains but found no bloodstains. She said that not long before all this, she happened to have served on a jury in the same courthouse in which Kendrick would eventually face trial, and she remembered how the sight of all those young men in handcuffs had affected her. It was disorienting to remember now, like déjà vu, as if everything since had been just an illusion, or some sort of amnesia. They wouldn’t let Kendrick out of the car that night. They wouldn’t let her speak to him. It was the last time she ever saw him outside a courtroom or a prison, standing there shivering in the heat, looking at him through the window of the police car.

      “I thought about calling ‘On Your Side,’” she said, referring to a public advocacy segment on the local TV news. She looked at me as if to see if I thought this was a good idea, something to pursue possibly even now. She told me then that a friend of hers had been at a beauty parlor recently, and there she had come across a woman who had made a statement to the police about Kendrick all those years ago, though she never testified at his trial. This woman had been a suspect in the murder herself, but she negotiated a plea deal and so she was free. Sonia’s friend had overheard this woman saying that there was a man in Angola doing time for a murder he’d had nothing to do with.

      I brought up the Innocence Project of New Orleans, which offers free legal assistance to inmates who are serving life sentences or death sentences and who claim to have been falsely convicted. But as I wrote down the information and tore the sheet out of my notebook, I also remembered the caveats on IPNO’s website:

      Please understand that we receive a large number of letters every week and it will take some time for us to respond to the application or inquiry.

      Please tell your loved one to be patient. It often takes years before we can begin to review a case.

      We do not have the staff to handle phone calls and they only slow down our review of applications.

      “I brought you all the way out here on a Sunday,” she said, after dabbing at her eyes with another tissue, for she’d started crying again. I didn’t know what she meant at first, and she just shook her head, not telling me, as if resigned to the idea that I wouldn’t accept her meaning anyway. Sunday, I realized—the day of prayer. She was not at church but in Carville, in this house that wasn’t hers, microwaving meals she stockpiled at the dollar store, she’d told me earlier, between shifts at the lab. Her tears were tears of near hopelessness, made bearable by faith. Perhaps it was in some way a relief for her to talk to someone, as she’d said, but I couldn’t know. She thanked me in any case. She said the next time we’d have to meet at her “real house,” back in New Orleans, the house she’d bought several years ago that would one day go to her sons, including Kendrick, “as soon as he comes home.”

      I picked up my bag to leave and we hugged and I said I’d stay in touch. She stood at the opened door as I walked down the driveway toward my car—I looked back, more than once, and saw that she was still standing there before the empty house, watching as I got into the driver’s seat. I waved at her a last time before I started the engine, then backed down the driveway. She didn’t stop looking until I was gone.

      When I got home, I went online and printed out the long summary of Kendrick’s hearing before the U.S. District Court of Appeals, which was the most complete account of his case I could find at that point. The document was so confusing that I made a diagram of all the names of the people involved. I still couldn’t quite figure out how Kendrick fit into the mosaic of names. I looked them all up on the Internet, hoping for more clues, but almost none of them had a profile beyond some street addresses and phone numbers. Nothing on Janelle Bryers, the mother of Kendrick’s daughter, Aysha—not even an address. Nothing on his father, Donovan King, who Kendrick had told me now lived in Maryland.

      Later, Sonia texted me a photo, a copy of the Polaroid of her and Kendrick posed before that painted backdrop of the waterfall and mountains. It occurred to me then that I didn’t know what the murder victim, Damien Martin, looked like. I only knew what Kendrick looked like, Kendrick and his mother, Sonia. I realized that this in itself was an enormous distortion in the way I was perceiving this story.

      3

      When I got out of bed, my wife, Sarah, was sleeping. I could see even in the darkness the pair of barrettes, covered in gold glitter and shaped like butterflies, that she kept fixed to the shade of her bedside lamp. She was an obstetrician and gynecologist, and sometimes I dreamed about having to do her job, standing in the delivery room with mask and gloves on and no idea of how to proceed. Every time I saw those barrettes on her lamp, I remembered a trip we’d made to Costa Rica where we’d seen enormous butterflies six inches wide, their wings an implausibly brilliant blue. At one point during that trip, we’d taken a six-hour horseback ride over mountains and across rivers. There was a steep rocky gorge that the horses plunged down at full speed, and I remember looking back, seeing my wife assume an instinctive pose of balance, one hand holding the reins while the other extended