The rain had stopped and sunshine blared through the slatted blinds, obscenely bright—the blazing lurid sunshine that suffocates with humidity, unwelcome after a storm. I was alone in the room, and I could hear people in the kitchen, recognize the voices of a few of my aunts. We had left the hospital at six thirty, in the gray light of a rainy dawn. It was still not yet noon.
I had spent three timeless hours in the hospital, moving through a thick, underwater terror, everything slow and unreal. I remember a pediatric examination room. I sat on a cushioned, paper-covered table while a nurse took my blood pressure, shone a light for my eyes to follow. The other lights were dim; no fluorescent to blare down on me. The nurse made some notes, told me to lie back on the reclined table and just breathe quietly for a few minutes. As I did, I pictured Mom, or Mom’s body—I wasn’t sure which—lying on another table somewhere in the building, doctors and nurses and beeping machines working frantically over it. Over her.
Then I let my mind empty out. I sat motionless and stared past the colorful mural painted on the cinder-block wall of the room. I do remember the mural, though: a cheerful tiger peering through wavy blades of jungle grass. I might have seen it before, that Christmas when I got the flu.
Moments later, Officer Kate Leonard, who had ridden with me in the ambulance, came into the room. She took my hand, and I knew that was bad. She had tears in her eyes, but she said, simply:
“She’s gone.”
I nodded once, and then I began to cry for the first time that night. Finally, there would be no more forward motion, and pain came out and over me like a wave. All the muscles in my body contracted, starting with the hand that Kate held, then my arms, chest, neck, torso. Legs. Feet. Face. My body writhed on the crinkly paper as pain rippled through me: hope I didn’t realize I had, flushed out by those two words.
What Kate didn’t mention was that Mom’s body had never reached the hospital. The ambulance that went to our house had been sent away immediately. Lights off. Empty. No use.
If I’d saved anyone, it was only myself.
Memory recedes here, falling into a hospital-white mist, an inconsistent curtain that rolls over the hours, obscuring some moments, parting to let others through. In the next clear shot, a woman—the nurse?—is leading me down a hallway, gently guiding me by the arm. We’re headed to the chaplain’s office, and I’m vaguely bothered by this, because Mom and I aren’t religious. No one seems to understand that this isn’t where we go in times of tragedy, but I don’t know where we do go, so I let them lead me.
The ceiling of the hallway is low, the floors thick with wax that pulls slightly at each step. I feel the nurse stiffen as we approach a couple of cops talking to a young man who stops talking, looks at me. It’s my mother’s fiancé, although the nurse doesn’t know that, or what that means. But she walks me past him and the cops urge him to walk in the other direction. As we pass each other, Dennis and I lock eyes; I can see how bloodshot and pink his are, how anguished he looks. He seems to tower over the cop holding his arm, and he shifts his weight from one foot to the other and back again, lifts a strong hand and runs it through his light brown hair, his long limbs in constant motion, full of that same agitated energy with which I’m all too familiar. The proximity of our bodies rings out at me, takes my breath away, strikes up a vibration that I try to read: Was he in my house a couple of hours ago? Or was he home sleeping?
His clothes and bare forearms are clean, but there would have been time to go home and shower. Just barely. I’m certain I see heartbreak on his face, but I don’t have time to look for anything else.
For years, I will think how strange it was, how inept the police were to let us get that close to each other when they already suspected him, when I wasn’t sure whether or not to. How in that moment, no one seemed to understand, yet, quite what had happened. What the possible stories were.
The nurse and I pass Dennis, and he fades from my mind; each new sensation overwrites what came before as I try to remain alert to my surroundings, deal with each moment as it comes. The chaplain’s room is tiny and bare, and there’s no chaplain. There’s a hard little couch. Simple chairs. Wood-laminate desk, gray metal filing cabinet. I’m left alone there for a few moments, moments I try to maintain in quiet emptiness. And then someone brings in my grandmother, sits her in a chair, goes back out the door. Leaves her there with me, just the two of us.
Grammy’s eyes are round, and I can hear the whispering shush of her dry skin as she works her hands over and around each other, her wedding ring on one clicking quietly against her mother’s ring on the other. Her purse sits like a comforting pet in her lap. She is seventy-five years old.
“Something happened to Crystal. Something happened, I don’t know, they won’t tell me anything. She’s been hurt and, oh, we don’t know what happened! The police came and got me, they didn’t tell me anything. There’s been an accident! Did somebody hurt her?”
She keeps talking and talking, and tremors are running through me. Grammy’s hysterical, talking and talking, and I’m the one who has to say:
“I don’t know, Grammy . . . Yes, I do think they should tell us something. Something happened, I’m—I’m not sure . . .”
She interrupts me with more questions, but I sense that since the cops and the nurses haven’t given her any answers, I’m not supposed to, either. They brought her here in an ambulance. They are being very careful with her.
The minutes stretch out while I’m alone in this tiny room with the swirling storm of Grammy’s confusion and fear. I am furious that I’m left to do this, that no one else is here, but I’m also ashamed, because the soothing words I offer her, my faltering half answers, are mostly attempts to maintain my own sanity. I must calm her down.
I must not scream at her: “She was stabbed to death! She was stabbed to death and I was there and no one is helping me and you have to shut up right now!”
And I don’t want to do this to my grandmother, not really. I don’t want to see Grammy’s face as I tell her this terrible thing, I don’t want to strike this blow. So the rage does come back around again, to love.
Then, finally, I’m rescued as aunts and uncles start to flow in: Gwen arrives from New Hampshire; Wendall and Carol from Oxford County, in the north. Glenice from Boston. She must have driven very, very fast.
I can’t remember my aunts’ and uncles’ faces; the remaining hours at the hospital recede behind that misty curtain. For the rest of my life, people will assume that my youth somehow wiped out the memory of the murder. It’s a thought they use to console themselves, not me. The thudding and the blood and the run along the road will always be sharp and clear. It’s the shock and confusion of family, the soothing words and hugs and questioning eyes, that have barely ever existed as memory.
5
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before