by Elle Johnson
Dedication
For my mother, who didn’t want me to write this.
Forgive me.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
When I was sixteen, my sixteen-year-old cousin, Karen, had her face blown off at point-blank range by a sawed-off shotgun in a robbery gone awry at a local Burger King in the Bronx. It was early Saturday morning, April 4, 1981. Karen’s father was a homicide detective. My father was a parole officer. They joined more than fifty NYPD officers and the FBI to help track down the killers in a cross-country manhunt that lasted two weeks. For two weeks Karen’s murder was covered by the local New York news. For two weeks I was spinning from the shock. This was my loss of innocence, the moment in my childhood when I understood that the world didn’t work the way my parents said it did. After Karen was killed, I questioned everything and everyone—especially my father.
More than three decades later, I hadn’t stopped thinking about Karen’s murder. Though I had left the middle-class Black enclave of Hollis, Queens, where I grew up and relocated to Los Angeles, the trauma of that event followed me. I thought about it on her birthday and mine. At Thanksgiving and Christmas. On the anniversaries of the day she was killed and the day the killers were finally caught. And on the day Karen was buried, which also happened to be my father’s birthday. The events of Karen’s murder played in my mind on an endless loop, like an old record on repeat. I retold the story so frequently that I had developed a script I could recite easily, without betraying the depth of emotion buried beneath the fluid, familiar phrasing: “When I was sixteen, my sixteen-year-old cousin, Karen, had her face blown off at point-blank range by a sawed-off shotgun in a robbery gone awry at a local Burger King in the Bronx.”
One morning in September 2014, I got up early to write. I was sitting in my house in LA, a cozy Spanish-style bungalow built in 1926, a time when my neighborhood was still orange groves connected by dirt roads. The front was all east-facing french doors and arched windows that let in brilliant morning light. I was reading emails. Procrastinating before getting to work, when I saw a message from my cousin Warren, Karen’s older brother.
Karen’s killer was up for parole.
Warren asked me to write a letter encouraging the parole board not to set his sister’s killer free. Warren had never asked me to do anything like this before, so his email took me by surprise.
I had seen Warren two months earlier at a family gathering back in New York. He hadn’t mentioned the upcoming parole hearing. I thought maybe the nature of the occasion had precluded such talk. It was a memorial service for my favorite uncle, who was eighty-two years old when he died. Rather than mourning a death, we were celebrating a full, complex, and rewarding life. Warren was at the memorial along with his younger brother, Geoffrey, and their mother, my aunt Barbara. Every time I saw the Marsh family I thought of Karen. The family resemblance was so strong—light skin, light eyes, bright, open faces—that I could easily imagine what Karen would have looked like today. But we never talked about Karen or her murder. It was as though she had never existed.
That night, as we caught up with small talk and told tall tales about our dearly departed uncle and the family, Karen’s absence lingered like a rainstorm. When I breathed in, misty images of Karen and me came to mind: whispering about boys; giggling as we sneaked extra sweets out of Grandma’s crystal candy dish; wearing the matching cartoon geisha nightgowns she’d given me at my birthday slumber party, then braiding our hair the same way to look like twins. But then I flashed on a photograph—the black-and-white close-up of a smiling Karen from her funeral program. I wanted to ask Warren and Aunt Barbara if they remembered it the way I did. I wanted to know how they had carried the weight of Karen’s murder through the years. I wanted to guess what Karen’s life would have been like had she lived: happily married with children, like her brothers; divorced and dating, following her dreams, like me. I wondered if Warren and Aunt Barbara knew that Karen’s murder was a pivotal event that had shaped my adolescent life and beyond.
Back home in Los Angeles, I pulled a box of keepsakes from the closet and shuffled through it, looking for mementos of Karen. There were only two. The first was a copy of her funeral program. The picture of Karen showed her younger than I remembered. Her hair was pulled back away from her face. She looked like she was in elementary school. The second memento was an eight-by-ten color photo of Karen and me at my sweet sixteen.
In the photograph, we are standing next to each other. Her arm is around my waist. My hand clutches her shoulder like a needy claw. She wears velvet pants in her favorite color—purple—a satiny cream-colored rodeo shirt, and a beige ten-gallon hat. Her curly dark bangs cover her forehead like wild mushrooms sprouting in a meadow. She has a tomboy’s cocky swagger.
My shoulders are stooped and remind me of how uncomfortable I was in my own skin back then. I wear a black polyester jumpsuit with a halter top held up by spaghetti straps. The satiny fabric drapes around my waist and tapers at the ankles. A turquoise sash hangs awkwardly from my hips. My face has the look of ecstatic exhaustion. I remember how happy I was that night.
I had never heard of a sweet sixteen before my junior year and didn’t know I wanted one until Karen and all the girls in my class started having them. My sweet sixteen was held in the community room of a church off Queens Boulevard and was catered by my father’s friend who was a fireman and knew that the least expensive way to feed a bunch of teenagers was with twelve-foot-long sub sandwiches and a vanilla sheet cake slathered with buttercream icing. My mother found a DJ, who played everything from Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” to “Rock Lobster” by the B-52’s. I invited everyone in my class and danced until my long, straightened hair frizzed up into loose curls and the turquoise sash around my waist darkened with sweat. I spent the evening with one eye on the door, waiting for Karen to show up.
I desperately wanted Karen to be there. I wanted everyone to see me with my beautiful, cool cousin, who would make me cooler by association. The party was almost over when she arrived with Aunt Barbara. Karen’s cowboy hat drew looks; the sparkle of her green eyes got people who were ready to leave back on the dance floor. When she stopped to take a break, I stood with her on the sidelines, talking and laughing, until Cameron sidled up to us. Cameron was the first boy in three years to have asked me on a date. He’d taken me out on the bus, made out with me behind a mortuary, then dumped me over the phone, all in the same weekend. In the ultimate show of teenage-girl insecurity, I’d invited him to my party. He flirted shamelessly with Karen, but Karen made a point of ignoring him to talk to me. Undeterred, Cameron whispered in my ear, “I’m in love with your cousin. You think she’d go out with me?” Instead of anger, disappointment, or envy, I felt pride. When I told Karen what Cameron had said, she said
, “Never,” threw her arm around my waist, and pulled me away. Then my mother took our picture.
We’re both smiling. Karen’s lips are pressed closed, her cheeks are rounded and high. She looks delighted with herself, mischievous—like she has a secret. Looking at the photo, I remember that I had a secret, too. I was sure that from then on Karen and I were going to be best friends.
That was the last time I saw her. She was killed three months later.
I TOOK THE PICTURE of Karen and me at my sweet sixteen and tacked it up next to the email from my cousin Warren on the bulletin board above my desk. Unsettled, I wandered to the front of my house. It was still dark out. The blue blush of first light had not yet edged out the darkness. Everything was black. Usually this stillness before dawn was my favorite time of day. My mind was open, my thoughts unburdened. I felt like I was stealing time. I took comfort in knowing that the world outside my windows was still shrouded by night. Growing up, I was afraid of the dark, but as I became an adult, it seemed the darkness protected me from a harsh light.
I sat down at the dining room table and opened my laptop to write. I couldn’t concentrate. I made my living writing police procedurals for television. My job was to tell stories about cops, crimes, and criminals. I had written television episodes loosely based on Karen’s murder: the shooting, the investigation afterward, and my father’s part in the manhunt that ensued. That morning, I realized I had never really looked closely at what Karen’s murder had done to my family, to me, to my relationship with my father—who had loomed large in my adolescent life.
I wanted to honor Warren’s request to write to the parole board, but I didn’t know where to begin. Or what I wanted to say. I would have asked my father, the former parole officer, for guidance, but he had died in 2005. Maybe my letter to the parole board should explain how Santiago Ramirez had deprived me of not just a cousin but also a best friend. I realized that all these years, whenever I thought about Karen, I focused only on her death and the events surrounding her murder. Before I could write anything, I had to throw away the script I’d come to rely on, unpack the memories I had neatly boxed up, and unwrap the emotions I kept under control. I needed to allow myself to feel everything again. I needed to remember how Karen had lived.
Chapter Two
October 16, 1980
Karen sauntered into her own sweet sixteen party a full hour and a half after her guests were told to arrive. There must have been three hundred people crammed into the community room in the basement of a Bronx apartment building.
Waiting.
Being from Queens, I didn’t know what to expect from a party in the “boogie down Bronx.” Not that I had been to so many parties in my own neighborhood. The invitation had been addressed to the whole family, but I’d assumed it was really meant for me. I didn’t know how to drive, and even if I could have figured out how to get there by subway or bus, my parents never would have let me make a trip to that neighborhood. Or any neighborhood. At night. On my own.
I was glad my parents were with me.
When we pulled up, my father leaned close to the steering wheel, then looked out the windshield and up at the twenty-story apartment building where Karen’s party was being held. He sucked his teeth, then laughed.
“Man, would you look at this,” he said.
An overflowing trash can sat next to the graffiti-covered walls of the building. Broken concrete walkways cut through islands of dirt and dead brown grass surrounded by stray garbage—trampled scraps of paper, ripped plastic wrappers, a used diaper.
He backed up into a red zone and parked the car illegally. Then he reached into the glove compartment and took out a placard from the parole department. It was supposed to be for official business, but he placed it on the dash.
“Ricky, do you think this neighborhood is safe?” my mother asked.
“No. But we’re here now.” My father chuckled, then walked around the car to open the door for my mother.
“I don’t understand. Why would they have it someplace like this?” My mother looked up at my father, then held his hand as she stepped out into the cool October night. She took a quick look up and down the street, then secured her purse strap over her arm and pulled the fur collar of her wool coat close around her neck.
“Well, Warren said it only cost him twenty dollars to reserve the room.”
I slid out across the back seat, holding the purple Macy’s sweater my mother had wrapped up as a gift. We started to walk toward the building when my father stopped us.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me put on my coat.”
My father adjusted the Windsor knot on his tie, buttoned his navy blue suit jacket, then reached across the front seat for his gunmetal gray wool coat. He unfolded it slowly, shaking it out like a matador might unfurl his cape to draw a bull out into the open.
I followed his gaze as his eyes shifted, scanning the block the way he was trained to as a parole officer, taking in the local characters—a homeless man lying on the bus bench, an older woman struggling under the weight of her grocery bags, a pack of boys roaming the streets, looking for trouble.
“Wait here.” My father walked across the street to a cluster of young Black men leaning against a parked car like crows on a wire. They smoked cigarettes and took swigs from the mouth of an open bottle hidden in a brown paper bag. They wore dark tracksuits and white sneakers, Kangol hats at an angle with gold chains dripping straight down their chests. One had on a pair of sunglasses. They stopped talking and turned to look at my father as he swaggered into their midst. The brown paper bag disappeared.
The young men stood up and leaned in to listen. They started laughing.
My father grinned, took out a cigarette, tapped it on the pack. Sunglasses stepped up with a match and lit it for him. He blew out the smoke right into their circle.
“Oh, come on, Ricky,” my mother said. “It’s cold out here.”
She’d seen my father’s act before—the Jedi mind trick of quiet coercion through charming intimidation. My father turned and pointed to our car, then watched the young men’s faces: not a one dared even glance at me or my mother. They nodded their acceptance of a very important mission—to make sure nothing happened to our car. My father put the cigarette between his teeth and shook Sunglasses’s hand before walking back toward us.
“It’s this way.” My father held my mother’s hand and led us to the dark back side of the building. I could hear Grandmaster Flash rapping “The Message.”
“Broken glass, everywhere / people pissing on the stairs, you know they just don’t care.”
We walked down a poorly lit concrete ramp to a door with a construction paper sign taped to it. KAREN’S SWEET 16 was written out in purple marker and outlined with glitter.
We stepped into a large open room. Inside, it was dark and hard to see, but it felt crowded. Clusters of people stood close to the walls, facing the empty middle of the floor, where red, blue, and yellow lights flashed to the beat from two vertical towers on both sides of the DJ’s table.
A cracked linoleum floor sprouted concrete pillars that held up a low chessboard-tiled ceiling with exposed fluorescent light bulbs. It was an ugly space that Karen and my aunt had tried to dress up. The decorations reminded me of Karen’s frilly bedroom. Purple and white crepe paper streamers hung like cumulus clouds from the ceiling. Hand-size purple and white balloons drifted like fog across the floor. Aunt Barbara was in a corner fussing with the tablecloth covering a folding card table full of gifts.
“Hi. Hi. Hello,” she said, kissing each of us on the cheek, her hand squeezing each shoulder.
I handed Aunt Barbara the gift.
“You look so pretty,” she said, holding my coat open to get a look at the dress.
“Lord and Taylor,” my mother said. “My friend Mrs. Wilson gave it to us. It used to be Valerie’s, her middle girl.” I wished my mother wouldn’t announce it every time our clothes were not our own. But I think she felt it was lying, l
ike we were trying to be something that we were not.
“Well, it certainly looks good on you,” Aunt Barbara said.
Aunt Barbara was one of my favorite relatives. Soft-spoken and kind. Dependable. She was small, with a child’s round, cookie dough–colored face, hidden by glasses, framed by curly hair. She smiled easily and often. It was hard to imagine her as a probation officer, carrying a gun, wearing a bulletproof vest to work. Or determining the fate of convicted criminals by reinvestigating their crimes after trial and writing the judges’ sentencing recommendations.
“This is some neighborhood you picked,” my father said.
“But it looks so nice down here,” my mother quickly countered. “I like the balloons. And the streamers. Very pretty.”
Aunt Barbara smiled and pointed behind the DJ table. “You see them?”
Two linebacker-size men in NYPD windbreakers stood against the wall with their arms at their sides. I recognized the bulge beneath their left armpits where their guns were holstered.
“I don’t think we’ll have any problems tonight,” she said.
My father clasped his hands behind his back. “No, no. I don’t expect that we will.”
I watched Aunt Barbara do a quick scan of my father’s upper body. Her eyes dropped down to his ankles and the brown leather holster holding a snub-nosed .38-caliber Colt beneath his left pant leg.
“Richard, did you bring a gun to my daughter’s sweet sixteen?” Aunt Barbara teased.
“Didn’t you?” my father shot back.
She shrugged. “Warren has his.”
My mother harrumphed. “With all these guns, I hope no one gets shot.”
The kitchen door swung open. A bright light cut across the room. Through a hazy white curtain of cigarette smoke I saw more adults—older relatives, Aunt Barbara’s neighbors and family friends—standing around, laughing and talking like it was Easter brunch or Christmas dinner.
“Go on in and make yourselves a plate,” Aunt Barbara said. “We’re not putting the food out until Karen gets here.”
