Let’s just say I looked at it until, at very least, I might be able to spot her on a busy street corner.
Or should I say a cell block in Monterrey, Mexico?
I laid the three photos out, side by side, and picked up the first of the written pieces. There was a fairly involved bio that told me she had been born upstate in Cairo, New York, a small town located just outside Catskill. There she had been reared and raised in the public school system. She went on to Vassar to major in journalism before blowing another two years on a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing at Vermont College. From there she did a stint as a reporter at The Times-Union in Albany and then on to a freelance career with Time, New York Newsday , and some other papers.
It was during this time that Renata began to publish some of her first fiction in a whole bunch of journals I’d never heard of before, nor ever would again. Soon came the marriage to Richard, a short-lived career in public relations and script writing for Barnes’s own Reel Productions. Then, curiously enough, back on the road as a freelancer, this time to some pretty far-off locales like Florence, Moscow, Beijing, and even Benin, West Africa.
She covered the Gulf War for Mademoiselle , reporting on Women in the Front Lines , which resulted in her nomination for the “prestigious” Polk Award for “accuracy and clarity in reporting while willingly placing her life at risk.” She’d later suffer a case of the bends while writing about vampire bats in the underground caves of Sri Lanka for National Geographic , come close to arrest in Kosovo during the Balkan wars, and nearly have her brains blown out by an irate mobster while preparing a feature on the emerging black market in Russia.
She stayed at home long enough to bear and, for a time, raise her little boy Charlie, until the child’s untimely death in 1995. After which she took off again, this time for the south of France where she wrote Godchild , her only novel to date.
I took a few more seconds to look through what remained of the publicity material, all of it either regarding Godchild or the actual writing of the story, all of it stressing the “fiction” as opposed to the “memoir.” Deciding to cut to the chase, I picked up the novel itself and glanced at the jacket copy.
Godchild is a psychological tour-de-force that exposes the madness behind a mother’s recounting of her child’s drowning… .
I stopped right there.
Not exactly light reading. No wonder Barnes looked as though he was about to cry when he handed me the copy. I knew that if the emotions he had for his son bore even a fleeting resemblance to the ones I still carried for Fran, then there would be no getting over his kid’s death. It just wasn’t possible. And then his wife has to go and write Godchild . A constant three-hundred-page reminder of the sadness.
I picked up the newspaper clipping. It came from the spring of l995.
BARNES CHILD DROWNED IN BATHTUB!
I read the article. In the end it offered not much more information than the headline itself. Only that the kid had been discovered by his mother after she left the room for two minutes, no more. And in that time — that space of one hundred twenty seconds — Charlie must have hit his head on the ceramic tub and drowned.
As of that writing, Renata had not been charged with negligence or murder. There was another short piece taken from two days later with the heading. AUTHOR BARNES DENIES KILLING CHILD. Under that clip was another, and it was this one that nearly made my heart stop.
It was an item taken from May 5, 1995, the day of Charlie Barnes’s funeral, almost an entire year to the day before Fran would be murdered. But it was not the article that got to me, or the description of the service and the moving eulogy given by Bishop Hubbard himself. It was the U.P. photo that went with it. The one conspicuously placed under the headline, BARNES CHILD BURIED! PARENTS IN
Or should I say a cell block in Monterrey, Mexico?
I laid the three photos out, side by side, and picked up the first of the written pieces. There was a fairly involved bio that told me she had been born upstate in Cairo, New York, a small town located just outside Catskill. There she had been reared and raised in the public school system. She went on to Vassar to major in journalism before blowing another two years on a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing at Vermont College. From there she did a stint as a reporter at The Times-Union in Albany and then on to a freelance career with Time, New York Newsday , and some other papers.
It was during this time that Renata began to publish some of her first fiction in a whole bunch of journals I’d never heard of before, nor ever would again. Soon came the marriage to Richard, a short-lived career in public relations and script writing for Barnes’s own Reel Productions. Then, curiously enough, back on the road as a freelancer, this time to some pretty far-off locales like Florence, Moscow, Beijing, and even Benin, West Africa.
She covered the Gulf War for Mademoiselle , reporting on Women in the Front Lines , which resulted in her nomination for the “prestigious” Polk Award for “accuracy and clarity in reporting while willingly placing her life at risk.” She’d later suffer a case of the bends while writing about vampire bats in the underground caves of Sri Lanka for National Geographic , come close to arrest in Kosovo during the Balkan wars, and nearly have her brains blown out by an irate mobster while preparing a feature on the emerging black market in Russia.
She stayed at home long enough to bear and, for a time, raise her little boy Charlie, until the child’s untimely death in 1995. After which she took off again, this time for the south of France where she wrote Godchild , her only novel to date.
I took a few more seconds to look through what remained of the publicity material, all of it either regarding Godchild or the actual writing of the story, all of it stressing the “fiction” as opposed to the “memoir.” Deciding to cut to the chase, I picked up the novel itself and glanced at the jacket copy.
Godchild is a psychological tour-de-force that exposes the madness behind a mother’s recounting of her child’s drowning… .
I stopped right there.
Not exactly light reading. No wonder Barnes looked as though he was about to cry when he handed me the copy. I knew that if the emotions he had for his son bore even a fleeting resemblance to the ones I still carried for Fran, then there would be no getting over his kid’s death. It just wasn’t possible. And then his wife has to go and write Godchild . A constant three-hundred-page reminder of the sadness.
I picked up the newspaper clipping. It came from the spring of l995.
BARNES CHILD DROWNED IN BATHTUB!
I read the article. In the end it offered not much more information than the headline itself. Only that the kid had been discovered by his mother after she left the room for two minutes, no more. And in that time — that space of one hundred twenty seconds — Charlie must have hit his head on the ceramic tub and drowned.
As of that writing, Renata had not been charged with negligence or murder. There was another short piece taken from two days later with the heading. AUTHOR BARNES DENIES KILLING CHILD. Under that clip was another, and it was this one that nearly made my heart stop.
It was an item taken from May 5, 1995, the day of Charlie Barnes’s funeral, almost an entire year to the day before Fran would be murdered. But it was not the article that got to me, or the description of the service and the moving eulogy given by Bishop Hubbard himself. It was the U.P. photo that went with it. The one conspicuously placed under the headline, BARNES CHILD BURIED! PARENTS IN
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