My father and I told a woman with a clipboard what we remembered. I described my mother’s shoes, black suede wedges with an ankle strap, a style that has circled back twice since then, and her pink scarf, lightweight, not a scarf to keep you warm, I told her, but a dress-up scarf to keep your hair from blowing, or what a dancer might tuck into her waistband. Her earrings were rhinestones, small circle clusters with screw backs, and she wore a red bangle bracelet that went with the pink and red rosebuds embroidered along the neckline of her dress. The kind woman with a clipboard wrote it all down; she took in a deep breath when I stopped talking and then asked if there was anything else we could think of. My father shook his head and then at the last minute called her back over. “She has a birthmark,” he said. “A dark mole about the size of your little fingernail, way up on her thigh.” He felt his own legs, maybe determining right from left. “Left, the left side,” he added, and then shook his head as if to dispel whatever thought had flown in. “She hates that.”

His use of present tense in that moment lifted my hopes. It’s strange how that can happen, but it can. Over the years, I have read all the books, all the accounts. People either turn away and close the door on the catastrophic thing, or they turn and embrace it as I did, knowledge and understanding feeling like the rope that can pull you up and out of the pain. I felt any knowledge would inform my own life, and thus yours. I wanted to know who she was with and why she’d called her friend from the Cocoanut Grove that night a little after nine. I wanted to know why she didn’t tell us where she was going. But those were things I would never know, and so I filled the void with other information—the play-by-play of how it happened, the accusations and lengthy trial, the stories of those who survived.