Shotline

Uncrossing the Silence My Family Long Carried

2007 was the year Nana began speaking in futures she wouldn’t live to see.

She never said she was dying—not directly—but she started giving things away, which is its own language.

One afternoon she pressed a small velvet pouch into my hand, soft as breath. Inside were the remnants of a life: a wedding band, a high school ring, an ID bracelet. My father’s things. Her son’s things. Artifacts she had guarded like forbidden scripture.

Two years later, she was gone.

Her funeral was enormous. The church was packed. Every detail unfolded according to her design: the music—chosen by her; the fifteen grandchildren walking in pairs, in order of birth—placing me at the front; all of us arranged in the first row because she said that was how it should be. She left it in writing. She arranged her own symmetry.

After the funeral, I stayed in her house—one of the upstairs rooms. Pop was still alive then, though only barely. The house was full of uncles, aunts, cousins.

I’m an introvert. Crowds unsettle me.

So I slipped upstairs and wandered.

That’s when I found more of my father’s things, tossed carelessly into drawers decades earlier: his passport, stamped once—for a trip to Croatia (Yugoslavia, at the time)—a journey no one living had any memory of.

April 2013. Pop died.

And once again, I was in the house.

This time, the silence didn’t hold. This time, the truth found its way into words.

A cause of death recorded in March 1981 was a lie.

More pieces surfaced in the house: a folder of his papers, a few letters from friends. One letter said he cried at church when they played the Ava Maria. There was a postcard of him at a bistro in Fort Lauderdale. Basketball schedules. Notes for bets—high-dollar bets.

The kind that must be paid.

On the plane back home—I lived in California then—I wrote a story about him. I called it “Luke’s Troubles” and submitted it to Argus 2014. I wrote it the way a wound bleeds: fast, unstoppable. I finished before the plane touched down.

The editors made a change without asking—small to them, but devastating. A correction they assumed necessary in an ordinary narrative.

But nothing about my father’s death belonged to ordinary circumstances.

The change sanitized the story.

It made the impossible seem plausible.

And in doing so, it made the true version unrecognizable.

I’m republishing my story now to restore the truth.

This is the version I wrote then—and the version I couldn’t write until now.

Desanitized, narratively refined.

A story of silence, inheritance, and the wound left behind.

The story of Louis in Riverton: truth refracted into fiction—an invented parish, a renamed bayou, and a silence that kept its shape.

Epigraph

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

— Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Author’s Note

This narrative emerged from fragments—partial recollections, inherited silences, contradictory accounts, and the official language of institutions that insist on closure where there is none. In assembling these pieces, I became increasingly aware that the structure of the story could never mirror the structure of the event. What it could mirror, instead, was the scaffolding around the event: the ways families remember, the ways communities conceal, and the ways archives—formal and informal—crack open under scrutiny.

The objects that recur throughout this piece—the shotgun wrapped in a towel, the suicide note that warns more than it surrenders, the parish envelope with its blunt handwriting—function as narrative hinges. They are tangible artifacts that reveal the mechanics of a lie: not through what they say, but through what they obscure. In this sense, they act as both evidence and erasure, implicated in the construction of a truth that was never examined.

Silence, too, becomes an artifact. A place where narrative collapses and memory takes over. The bayou in this story—its reeds, its waterline, its persistent animal chorus—serves not as a backdrop but as a repository of the unresolved. Landscapes remember differently than people do. They hold without naming, witness without testifying.

This piece does not claim to restore the truth. Rather, it offers a structure attentive to the wound: a space where the official story and the lived story can be held in tension. If there is an intention here, it is to acknowledge the fracture lines—to recognize the silence around the bayou not as emptiness, but as an index of what has been withheld.

Inherited Silence

I used to think the silence surrounding my father’s death was accidental — a gap, a missing page. Something people forgot to tell me.

Now I know better.

Silence is a structure.

A scaffold.

A thing built with purpose.

Louis Tellier died on the banks of River Bayou in Rivermarch Parish in March 1981.

The autopsy was rushed.

The scene was staged.

The note was addressed to a first name.

And the official line — repeated like a catechism — was that he “killed himself.”

But it wasn’t the lies that shaped my family.

It was everything we never said.

What survives isn’t the wound.

It’s the hush built around it.

It’s the way generations learn to speak in half-truths without realizing they’re doing it.

Some families inherit houses.

Mine inherited a story no one would tell.

Years later, I tried to write my way into the space where the truth might live. I changed names. Changed places. Changed details. Fiction didn’t free me, but it offered a different door into the silence.

This is my father’s story in fiction’s clothing — the version that tells the truth the original could not.

After it comes a coda from Les Dossiers Blackthorn, the crime-fiction series written in-universe by Jeff Griffin, the fictional father at the center of The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story. Detective Jeremy Blackthorn is his creation — but the silence Blackthorn circles is uncomfortably close to the one I grew up inside.

The Story in Seven Parts / Blackthorn Excerpt: 💰