Murky Waters
JUSTIN BAVELL LAST dreamed of one of his friends near the end of winter. The location and the time were vague, but that was not the point. Jamie had a message. "It’s not over," he told his friend before running off where Justin couldn’t catch him. "You’re gonna die.
On random telephone poles in the neighborhood, some of the remain, sun-bleached and tattered. They are re-minders of a mystery. Missing. And oddly enough, by pre-dating the discovery of the bodies, they capture something essential about the boys’ story-that it is, in the end, a vanishing. Police more or less see the recovery of the bodies as a period at the end of a sentence. But that is not how the community comprehends it. In the rowhouse neighborhoods surrounding South Lindenwood and 53rd, there is no period-only an ellipsis. There is no certainty that signifies the end of one thing and the beginning of another. For all intents and purposes, the bodies might as well never have been found. "What happened to us?" say the faded faces on the posters that remain.
A woman named Joyce Ruffin walks past those poles every day, goes to work, washes dishes, pays bills. She has to. But that is a ghost self. Joyce, as her family knew her, has been hijacked out of time. She stands frozen on the edge of a now more than half a year distant, that taught her all at once what it ordinarily takes years to learn: that the fate of our children is ultimately out of our hands. “ My heart," she says of her only son. "My life."
Sometimes she goes door to door through the neighborhood with a photo of Kenyattya. "This is my boy,” she says to her bewildered neighbors. "Have you seen him?" Sometimes she calls her sister Pearlie from she’ll be late. Keep an eye out for Kenny, will you?” she asks. "He’ll he home soon now."
