Telling Lies

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AFTER the third firebomb smashed through the front windows of my parents’ Berkeley house, I was parked in a walled convent school sixty miles down the Peninsula. Other than swimming and nuns in black habits, there wasn’t much worth remembering about St. Catherine’s Academy for Young Ladies. At least, nothing in relation to what was happening at home. I was still doing time there on December 20, 1969.

It was cold on December 20. That I recall clearly, though most of the details of the day have been either lost to me or distorted by the lies memory plays. Oddly, an anomaly of memory, a few of the ordinary events of the morning have attached themselves to my keener recollection of that evening, little shards of trivia that spill out whenever the horror comes to mind.

If I’d had my cameras then, I might have been able to keep the pieces together more coherently. But I didn’t. The few photographs and bits of film footage I have managed to scrounge all came from sources alien to my point of view. I don’t trust them. Especially where Emily is concerned. And if there is connective tissue in this flawed history, it is Emily.

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