Excerpt from Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The last time I was at the apartment complex, the morning after her death, I could see the faded chalk outline of her body on the pavement, the yellow police tape still stuck to the door, the small, round hole in the wall beside her bed where a single bullet—a missed shot—had lodged. Nothing in the landscape today bears evidence to any of that, though everything seems to carry the imprint of loss. Row after row of rusted stair rails and window screens mark the shabby buildings—just a decade old when we moved in—and a lighter shade of paint coats the walls, as if to hide the dark history beneath it.

Standing under the window to what had been my mother's bedroom, I thought of the bullet hole: so small an imprint of the event that changed forever our lives. It would have been repaired soon after, filled and painted over, and I wondered now if the building had settled more with age, the walls shifting. I've seen the depression a once covered nail head can leave when a house settles, a pock in the drywall like a wound opening from beneath the surface. That's what's drawn me back: the hidden, covered over, nearly erased. I need now to make sense of our history, to understand the tragic course upon which my mother's life was set and the way my own life has been shaped by that legacy.

* * *

I KEEP AN IMAGE IN MY HEAD OF MYSELF FROM that first day after her death, at the apartment. There's a video recording of my arrival, made by a local news station, and so the image is not only of those few moments, but of watching myself—from a distance—entering my former life for what I thought to be the last time. In the footage I walk up the stairs to the door and step in, shutting it behind me. When I think of it now I don't hear any words, the volume on mute. Perhaps the reporter spoke our names; or perhaps she did not, calling my mother victim instead. And in my mind's eye a caption fills the bottom of the screen: it identifies me as daughter of the murdered woman. Even then I felt as though I were watching someone else—a young woman on the cusp of her life, adulthood and bereavement gripping her at once.

The young woman I'd become, walking out of that apartment hours later, was not the same one who went into it. It's as if she's still there, that girl I was, behind the closed door, locked in the footage where it ends. Often, I have seen that doorway in my dreams. Only now is it a threshold I can cross.

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime

Excerpted from Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey. Copyright © 2020 by Natasha Trethewey. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.