Nobody's Property: Living on the Remains of a Life in Calfornia

The sound of pistons pumping, a lawn-mower pulse and wheeze, comes up behind her, and she looks over her shoulder to see the VW coming up fast: black and chrome, some of the shine worn off and anyway looking duller in this flat November light. She keeps her thumbs hooked under the leather of her backpack straps,  walks backward and keeps her gaze straight and sober toward the driver of the car. It pulls over a few paces ahead and s...

"I serve with the German Armed Forces. My garrison is Hardheim, where I am stationed at Carl-Schurz-Kaserne. At present, I attend the Bundeswehrfachschule in Tauberbischofsheim.

"On Friday, 5 November 1971, I was driving in my VW...from Tauberbischofsheim to Hardheim between 12.20 and 12.30 o'clock. About 200 meters past the stone works on the B 27 I saw a young woman walk on the right-hand side of the road. She did not use the usu...

Terminal burrowing can be identified in reports of hypothermia deaths, but has only recently been given a name. It is a behavior pattern observed in the last stages of hypothermia whereby the afflicted will enter small, enclosed spaces, such as wardrobes, cupboards, and closets.

Outdoors, the victim may burrow into piles of leaves, the crevices between rocks or fallen trees, or into culverts. Searchers must be aware of the possibil...

In Tübingen the houses sit along the River Neckar like nineteenth-century ladies on lounge chairs with flowing skirts and big hats: they look comfortable and bourgeois and unassailable. Like most of Germany. From the bridge over the river you can see a tower, painted yellow now, where the poet Hölderlin went crazy for 36 years: a long, slow burn that might, in other circumstances, be called life. This is where he wrote these words,...

Charles had given us maps and a police report when we visited him in Oklahoma City. He pulled out one map, of Hardheim and its surroundings, and pointed. “This is where Jennifer was…uh…murdered,” he told us. At the time, I wondered if his hesitancy over the word indicated uncertainty. But later I found that I, too, was reluctant to say i...

We had our money out to pay the Lufthansa flight attendant for our drinks—my no-name red wine and Dad’s Glenlivet—and when she moved on without even looking at the fold of bills in Dad’s hand we were practically giddy. Free drinks! It made being stuck in a metal and plastic capsule for eleven hours see...

“I’ve been thinking about a trip to Germany,” my father says on the phone one day. “I’m thinking I need to start thinking about Jenny in a new way.”

I’ve been thinking that too. And my father: the first thirty years of our time together are over; what are the next thirty going to be like?

What will we do in Germany? I’ve thought of going by myself, trying to find some things out. I see myself in a room with a man who was the last ...

Do you think you are free to live your life? We try to tell ourselves that the worst won’t happen, that we can leave the doors of our lives unlocked and the crazies won’t come through them, or if they do we can talk them down. We search the papers for the reasons behind the senseless murder—the plot. How can we still be doing this?

I grew up with the plot in my head: Jenny died hitchhiking. That was the “reason.” That was the “plo...

A few years ago, my father told me the story of how my Aunt Jenny's remains were shipped back to be put into different ground. Dad called me from Oklahoma to describe how my grandmother Edith stood by while workers dug up the urn from under the small brass marker that barely wrinkled the surface of the grass in Oak Park Cemetery. They opened the urn; Edith looked inside. I could see her standing there, in a tasteful suit and stoc...

After my father stopped living with Mom and me, he spent his nights in his woodshop, in the lemon packing house that my grandfather Charles owned. The remains of the citrus groves still grew all around us in Claremont, and an old guy sold wooden crates of local lemons off the loading dock of the packing house: the sole survivor. When I visited my dad's shop there, I was afraid to go to the bathroom, because it was all the way on th...

For a few years while I was growing up, a book called How to Do Your Own Divorce sat undisturbed on a bookshelf by our living-room fireplace. It just sat there, its paper spine facing out, between Passages and Last Things. This was in Southern California, on an alluvial fan of the San Gabriels, in a little falling-down house on Twelfth Street in Claremont. We moved there when I was five years old. My father’s parents, Charles and E...

When I was two years old, my parents and I lived for a while in a cottage up Laurel Canyon. There is a picture of me from this time: I'm wearing toddler-sized cowgirl buckskins, my red hair is in high pigtails poking out each side of my head, I'm smiling, and I'm holding a toothbrush. Remember, this was less than two years after the Manson Family came down from the Ranch and murdered Sharon Tate and her guests up on Cielo Drive. T...

I’m on the middle road from San Francisco to L.A., the 101, doing seventy behind a Chevy Chevelle past open-bed trucks hauling vegetables and buses hauling field workers, twin port-a-potties towed behind them. I noticed the Chevelle pulling out from the center divider outside Salinas—the gray dust it kicked up matched the primer that coated its aging body. Now every bus and truck it passes I blow by moments later, easing back into...