Left Behind

I pressed on. "Schizophrenia?"

"Yes, but that doesn't mean she was schizophrenic," at least according to Grandma Bea, who died in 1989 and who had always told my father that the doctors didn't have a clue what was wrong.

I found my mother's name, again misspelled, in another book, Jeffrey Masson's Against Therapy. In it, I learned that after the two "therapists" held her down to get her to speak, they threw her into the swimming pool repeatedly. The last time, my mother got out barely able to breathe and had to be walked back to her room, where she died. That's where the coroner found her, not in the swimming pool. Masson also wrote that my mother had not spoken to the attendants for a year before that last day, which now struck me as proof of her sanity, given the "therapy" they were putting her through. There was so much I didn't know, but suddenly I was ready to find out.

My stepmother, Sue, was encouraging when I told her I was writing a story about my mother's death. "This is important for you," she said. My boyfriend, Jonathan, said it was the story I had been avoiding for my whole life and that I needed to face it to move on. Only my father was hesitant.

"You can't know your mother through her death," he cautioned me. He feared I would only find more questions, but never an answer to the "real question." I hated when he talked in riddles.

John Rosen was long dead, and so was my grandmother. The lawyers involved in the criminal and civil cases couldn't remember much about a 25-year-old murder. That left the two people who had killed my mother.

Until I read the transcript of their court cases, I'd assumed they were both men. To my surprise, one was a woman. What stunned me more was that they had received probation for the crime.

I thought they had gone to jail. (Rosen, who'd been out of town undergoing prostate surgery at the time of my mother's death, wasn't charged.) The woman who'd held my mother's legs down pleaded no contest to battery and got one year's probation. The man who punched my mother in the stomach was sentenced to eight years' probation after pleading guilty to manslaughter. The autopsy report said that my mother, who'd been found wearing a bloodied T-shirt, was bruised all over her face and neck. I felt furious reading the report, though my anger seemed disingenuous somehow, as if I were acting the part of the vengeful daughter.

I decided to confront both of the killers and ask them about my mother's final moments. I'd force the killers to speak, just as they had tried to force my mother to speak. As a journalist, I could approach them in a way I never could as a private person. From identity Web sites, I learned the killers were alive, each with an address history an arm long. "Like they're running from something," Jonathan observed.

Unable to find a phone number for the woman, I wrote her a letter asking for an interview and sent it to three addresses. I wasn't sure yet how to approach the man.

I dug into a box of photographs and papers that I kept deep in the back of a closet I never used, and I found my mother's last letter to me. It was undated, but I thought it had been written sometime in 1977, before my eighth birthday. It was well-worn from frequent handling when I was a little girl. I hadn't read it in years.

Dear Lynn,