I don’t know why I woke up this morning remembering a Saturday
night in 1998, when my boss telephoned me at 10pm and asked if I was sitting
down. My co-worker was murdered. I didn’t know her very
well; we had marketing territories in neighboring states. Every summer, we’d both visit the head
office in Arizona for training, where people pronounced our names the same.
Only hers was spelled Karen. I remember
when my name was called and we’d both turn around to respond, only to realize
my or her mistake and laugh.
The story goes she and her fiancée were sound asleep in bed. In the middle of the night, two suspects
broke in, held them at gunpoint. Stole their engagement rings, a laptop, a few
hundred in cash. They were found with their hands duct-taped behind their
backs. Garbage bags over their heads, plastic handles tightened and tied-off
around their necks. Faces blown off. Afterwards, the suspects took Karen’s company car for a joy-ride. The police found
the vehicle abandoned in the Sonoran desert.
After hearing the news, I remember not wanting to sleep
alone, so I invited Billy, the driver I had dated a few times, to spend the
night. He came over after his last airport pickup. Billy had a few false teeth on account of a bar fight which you couldn't tell by looking at him but he felt obligated to inform you of anyway. He used my
bedroom to change out of his black suit with the matching pilot cap and into a loud Hawaiian
tourist shirt, khaki shorts and flip-flops. He surfed during the day, drove limos by night. When I told him
everything that happened, he licked his lips and looked in my eyes like I was a fifty-foot wave and said Far Out. I
wasn’t looking for comfort or conversation. I just wanted to wake up beside a body, warm to the touch.
I flew out to Arizona one month later. It was summer. 112 in the shade. Took a taxi
to the hotel, where I was staying for the next two months for work. I inquired about a rent-a-car for getting to
and fro but my boss mentioned that the police were discharging Karen’s company
car as evidence. Apparently, the
detectives had extracted all the clues they could gather. They had a few suspects but no one in
custody. No random act of violence, it
was a contract killing. Her fiancée ran with the wrong crowd; owed some thugs
in the Midwest, money.
My boss didn’t come right out and say we can save the
company some expense when she handed me the keys to the gold four-door
Buick on a Friday afternoon and indicated the numbered space it occupied in the
office parking lot. It stuck me as
unprofessional to disagree and so I spent the summer of 1998 driving a
dead-woman’s car.
I remember my hands shaking as I drove the car home, taking the shortest
route from the office to the hotel. Too paralyzed to move it from
its parking space all weekend, I ordered in room-service three meals a day. Entertaining viable transportation alternatives, I studied public bus schedules. I even tried to
take my mind off her murder by reading books poolside. But, the pool had a view of the
parking lot and I'd occasionally spot her car like a mirage among a sea of cars- sun-baked and shimmering.
Early Monday morning, I gathered up courage. Stuck my hand inside the glove compartment,
under the shadowy space under the seats unearthing tiny things that my
co-worked once owned- now oblivion. A
Janis Ian tape. Penciled notes from a
sales speech among a stack of 3 x 5 index cards. A pack of pink post-it notes still inside cellophane. Half pack of Juicy Fruit. Before, I unwrapped a stick and put it in my
mouth, I apologized to Karen (wherever she was) for the way I reacted to her
death- guilty for feeling fearful in lieu of grief. I chewed that piece of
gum for hours, punishing myself with the loss of every taste imaginable. Later
that afternoon, staying true to everything I felt, I wrote a sympathy letter to Karen’s family. Words as compact
and dense as the gum hardening to a small stone at the back of my
mouth.
While death waits in secret for each
of us; life doesn’t stop. I don't know if coming to terms with Karen's murder, was a single point of transformation, but a braver, bolder me emerged sometime during the summer of 1998. I began driving the getaway car to a mall two miles away. A cocktail birthday party twenty miles away. A road trip to Sedona one hundred and twenty miles away, where I
pulled onto a dirt road with my old college crush and we sat without words on
the front hood while the engine ticked slowly and I strained to listen for the
sound of stars dying out, coyotes- a sign of something human. Later, we checked into a motel, where our
bodies collided like wrecking balls and we ripped the headboard right off of the
wall.