In the aftermath of any murder, every community is in shock, especially when the victims are innocent and young. The clamor for justice — and for its attendant consolations, resolution and closure — is immediate, loud and vociferous. But what happens when there is no justice, no resolution, no closure? How does a community, in particular the parents of the slain youngsters, move on? That’s the ambitious premise of “See How Small” by author Scott Blackwood.
In this heart-wrenching literary novel, three teenage girls working in an ice cream shop in a Texas city are tortured, killed and set on fire by two strangers for reasons unknown. In the days, months and years that follow, the implications of the tragedy ripple through the lives of those the girls left behind, including Kate, their mother; Jack, the fireman who finds their bodies; and Hollis, a homeless war veteran who saw one of the killers.
In a touch that may remind some readers of Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones,” the spirits of the girls hover over the city, though with different purposes in mind.
Printers Row Journal caught up with Blackwood, 49, who moved with his family from Austin, Texas, to Evanston in 2009. Blackwood, whose previous books include the novel “We Agreed to Meet Just Here” (2009) and the short story collection “In the Shadow of Our House” (2001), has taught writing at Roosevelt University and now teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Here’s an edited transcript of our chat.
Q: How did the novel get started?
A: It was one of those things that gestated for a long time. I was living in Austin and teaching at-risk youth in a high school in 1991, and my wife had just had my oldest daughter, Ellie. On Dec. 6, 1991, the event that inspired the novel occurred. There were four girls, actually, who were killed at an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt shop. The girls were 13 to 17. It was a real shocker for Austin, which was a relatively small city at the time — about 500,000 people — though it’s almost doubled in size since then. There was this thinking that the city was a suburban enclave, in a way, and it really wasn’t. The city was gripped by the murders, which remain unsolved today. The girls were essentially tortured, then killed and set on fire.
Q: Horrible.
A: Yes, and what struck me was that the girls’ lives sort of got lost in the city’s own trauma and self-absorption, in a way. It stirred up everyone’s fears to a degree that the city began to take over the story: the media, the police and so on. I was haunted by the fact that this hit so close to home. I had a months-old daughter and was teaching a lot of kids who were the same age as the girls who were killed. And I was increasingly aware of how their story was being told. Their essence was being sort of lost in the whole thing. The same was true for their parents.
Q: What happened then?
A: About eight years later, in ’99, four boys — at least they were boys at the time of the crime — were arrested and prosecuted for the murders. Two of them confessed and were convicted based on confessions that were suspicious to begin with. By 2009, there was evidence that the boys couldn’t have committed the crimes. The DNA found in the girls was someone else’s — two men, still unknown. So it was a travesty of justice, too, because of that and because most of the evidence had been washed away by the fire and by people traipsing through the crime scene. For nine years, the police told the girls’ parents that they’d solved the case, but they hadn’t. Interestingly, they didn’t exonerate the two men who’d been in prison for years, including one on death row. So you can see why the case haunted me and why it became the basis for my novel. But I had to figure out a way to tell it that wasn’t sensational, that somehow got at the essence of who these people were, at the essence of what it’s like to live without resolution after an atrocity like this. It became about the ripple effect of the murders on everyone involved over the years — 24 years, in the real case.
Q: There are several scenes in the book that take place in Chicago.
A: That’s right. In 2012, I was 50, 60 pages into the novel and something else happened here that affected the story. My wife went to pick up our youngest daughter, Ava, from school — she was 6 at the time — and she wasn’t there. No one knew where she was. It seemed inexplicable. How do you let a 6-year-old wander off from school? I was teaching downtown at Roosevelt and got a call that our daughter was missing. Police were called out, they had helicopters overhead in the neighborhood. I’m trying to rush to Evanston from downtown at 4:15 by cab, the cab driver is trying to calm me down. We’re making calls to everyone we can think of. And everything takes on a different look then. All the images that come into your mind in situations like that came into my mind.
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Q: Where was she?
A: Ava had a friend at another school and showed up on the friend’s doorstep at 3:45 and said she had a play date with Emily. They had a new nanny at the house, and she didn’t have our phone number and just accepted Ava’s explanation about the play date. She didn’t call anyone or question anything about this kid showing up unannounced. So Ava was safe, but we didn’t know that for an hour. And, in a way, that turned out to be important for the novel. It gave me that empathetic reach where your life starts projecting out from that loss, and I could at least imagine what that might be like. It was at a point in the book where I was having trouble imagining that, but, afterward, the event informed the book a lot. How do you move forward when the future is blacked out? There is no imagined future anymore; it just all collapses. So even though I had to deal with only one one-thousandth of what that might feel like, it was enough to get me over that hump and invest myself in the characters in a different way, a more precise way.
Q: The characters are in a kind of holding pattern. The tragedy has left them with no closure, no resolution. That’s what the book is about, really — the way trauma stops people from moving forward.
A: That’s exactly it. They’re just orbiting the same planet. The grief doesn’t ever resolve itself; it just circles. That kind of stasis is miserable.
Q: A lot of the scenes in the book are dreams, or maybe daydreams, in which the characters fall into reveries.
A: Yes, the characters all reach a point where their conscious life and their normal sense of telling their own stories don’t work anymore. Cause-and-effect doesn’t work anymore, their lives don’t make any practical sense. So everything goes interior, and the only sense you can make of things is emotional — you’re telling an emotional story that’s completely unbounded from time and plot, in the normal sense of the way we tell stories to ourselves. And that’s what dreams are: connecting things that are maybe associational and getting solace from that. And so the book is about coming to grips with the fact that you can’t resolve things, but you move on anyway. Most of the characters kind of grapple with a new vision of what going on, going forward is. It’s a very different thing than what they thought it was before. And their dreams essentially help them connect with that.
Q: Early on in the book, we have a sense, or maybe just a hope, that the mystery — of who killed the girls and why — will be resolved. We won’t say here whether the mystery is resolved or not, but certainly this was a major storytelling issue you faced.
A: Yeah. It interested me, as a reader and writer: What happens when your expectations built up by the culture, by previous stories, can’t be met? It’s an interesting question, because I don’t know what I would do under those circumstances. We want resolution because it gives us a sense of control. But what if that sense of control is an illusion? In this case, I’m asking a different kind of question, which is: What do you need to go forward? Is it, in Kate’s case, the revenge scenario that she plays in her head, over and over? That’s one story in the culture — that if you can’t get justice one way, you’ll get it another. But that seems inadequate. So yeah, I wanted to take chances with the story, push the normal range of storytelling as far as it would go while maintaining it as something readers could connect with. These people are disconnected a lot, so they stay connected in a different way — through dreams or through feelings they can’t fully understand.
Q: Very early on, in fact in the first pages of the novel, you seem to introduce some supernatural elements, perhaps similar to “The Lovely Bones,” which inevitably will be mentioned in connection with yours. That’s not a prospect you want, I assume, but there it is.
A: Yeah, it’s already started. There are some superficial points of similarity, but, in a way, this is the anti-“Lovely Bones.” (Laughs.) Editors and marketing people, you know, they don’t like to hear me say that. (Laughs.) The whole idea of the “aevum” — a liminal space between space and time, but isn’t of it, and shares space with eternity, but isn’t of it — has interested me for a long time. I’ve been writing about the aevum since 1998, and it appears in my previous novel and my early stories. It’s the space of the unconscious, a space where connections are made that we can’t make otherwise.
Q: But we can say, without revealing too much, that this is not a novel in which the ghosts of the murdered girls help to solve the mystery. That’s what might occur to readers in relation to “Lovely Bones.”
A: Yeah, there are people on Goodreads who got an advance copy and said, “I expected the girls to solve the murders.” (Laughs.) But I’m trying to do something entirely different from that. The girls’ impulse is not to solve the murders at all. They’re the ones nudging people along to do something, but not necessarily what the reader expects. Because as the other characters start to realize, even if you could solve it, it wouldn’t solve other things.
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Follow him on Twitter @KevinNance1.
“See How Small”
By Scott Blackwood, Little, Brown, 211 pages, $25