The Officer's Daughter

by Elle Johnson

  The article said the gunman called the Daily News just before noon on Saturday to say it had been an accident. He wanted the world to know that he hadn’t meant to kill the officer’s daughter. He must have known the only thing worse than killing a cop was killing a cop’s child. That meant that while my father and Uncle Warren were planning how to find and kill the gunman, the gunman was taking steps to make sure that he lived. I was chilled by the idea of either outcome.

  I heard my mother moving around upstairs and put the paper away. I wanted to get out before she came downstairs and started asking questions I couldn’t answer. Questions like “How are you?” The initial shock and adrenaline rush of Karen’s murder had ebbed, leaving me suspended. Poised like an intake of breath waiting to be expelled. I quickly left the house to go to school.

  The bus ride was a blur. When I stepped off onto Hillside Avenue, I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there or what I’d been thinking about as I made my way. I walked all the way up the hill without noticing the steep incline or the weight of my book bag. I ambled past the rock ’n’ rollers hugging the fence and the disco dancers perched on cars. Christine Sixteen tossed me a head nod with a crooked little smile. I tossed one back and slipped into a corner behind a concrete balustrade near the front entrance. I hid from Lisa and turned away from the other kids in my classes. I repeated the order of my schedule in my head—science, math, social studies, Spanish, English, band, gym.

  I looked down and fixed my gaze on the top of my reddish-brown book bag. For the first time in my life I had not done my homework. I didn’t know what happened when you didn’t do the work. It occurred to me that I should have been worried or panicked, full of regret or dread, but I wasn’t. The rules I normally adhered to, the code of conduct I lived by, didn’t apply anymore.

  I opened my science text and tried to read about blast waves, bursts of energy that pulled fire and oxygen away from a fuel source and created a negative space, a stillness, a vacuum, that was destined to explode. Karen’s sudden, violent departure from this world had left a negative space inside me. I knew nature abhorred a vacuum and that this space was likely to be filled by something. I didn’t know what.

  I got away with sitting quietly and saying nothing through science and math. I was surprised by how easy it was. With two periods down and five to go, I walked into social studies and saw Mrs. Riger writing questions on the blackboard. I took my seat and sat back as students streamed in, flooding the aisles with laughter and conversation. Someone opened a window, and a light breeze kissed cool air across my cheek. I turned my head and breathed it in. What I needed was a daydream—about a boy, about the summer, about going to college. I closed my eyes, but there was nothing behind my lids. No pictures, no images. No light at all. A murky nothingness was before me.

  “Open your textbooks,” Mrs. Riger said. We were studying World War II and the rise of the Nazi Party. I buried my gaze in the textbook’s shiny pages, bright with reflected light. I didn’t want to be called on to talk about pogroms, the invasion of Poland, or the Warsaw Ghetto. I didn’t know how to make sense of events I hadn’t witnessed. I tried to grasp the cumulative effect of individual incidents. How, one by one, each added up to a groundswell of change that led to a war. My head couldn’t comprehend, but I had a visceral reaction to the black-and-white pictures in the textbook.

  Travelers in winter coats with suitcases lined up against a brick wall. Confusion on their faces, they looked into the camera, haunted. Armed soldiers dotted the near distance. I felt a lump in my throat, then turned the page. Skeletal bodies with bulbous shaved heads, naked in a waterless shower. Bones jutted out of saggy, wrinkled skin—knobby knees and rows of ribs. Then gaunt faces with sunken cheeks, swallowed by oversize black-striped pajamas. Some leaned propped up on elbows in wooden summer camp–like bunk beds except without the sleeping bags or care packages from home. They had rictus smiles and dead black eyes, hollowed from desperation and despair. Innocence lost and murder on display. My stomach turned. Anger flared. Who was taking these pictures? The body destroyed. Whole lives reduced to parts; rooms piled full of human bones, teeth, or hair.

  Mrs. Riger said, “We’re going to go over last night’s reading. Then we’ll answer the homework questions from the end of the chapter together. This is too important to miss.”

  I suspected the mostly Jewish kids in my class already knew this history. A usual topic of discussion at family gatherings and Friday-night Shabbat. Where personal histories intertwined with world events and were passed down from generation to generation, to be absorbed into the psyche of each soul. As familiar to them as stories about the Tuskegee Airmen, Malcolm X, and the Black Wall Street of Tulsa, Oklahoma, were to me.

  “How does something like this happen? Hmmm? How does a man like Hitler come to power?” Mrs. Riger looked out over the classroom. Half a dozen kids waved their hands in the air, desperate to be the first to say out loud the answers they all already knew.

  Mrs. Riger called on a boy with nerdy glasses, long, shaggy hippie hair, and a jock’s physique. He twisted his body open to the rest of the room so everyone could hear. “They were swept up in the tide. They believed they belonged to the master race. Because they were blond-haired, blue-eyed—like Carter,” he said and smiled, and everybody laughed.

  “Me?” Carter raised his eyebrows, grinned with mock horror at the joking suggestion that he was a Nazi. “What about Betsy?” Carter pointed to the prettiest silken-blond-haired, sky-blue-eyed girl in the class. Her fair-skinned chin and cheek propped up on her index finger and thumb like a decorative plate on display. She twirled a pen around the fingers on her other hand and said, “I’m a good Jewish girl.” The class laughed approvingly.

  “And what about the soldiers?” Mrs. Riger asked. “How could they do this? How did they justify such behavior?”

  Mrs. Riger called on me when I raised my hand. “Maybe they didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know what?” Mrs. Riger asked. She cocked her head to the side with the hint of a challenge in her voice.

  I felt a flush of heat rise from my chest to my cheeks. My breath shortened slightly at having to explain. “Maybe the soldiers didn’t know people were being killed.”

  The room got very still.

  “All right.” Mrs. Riger hesitated, considering how to proceed. “How could they not know?”

  “They were young. They were teenagers, right? The soldiers. Just boys.”

  “But soldiers. Still.”

  I felt the invisible weight of thirty pairs of eyes pressing down on me. I tried to explain.

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean they wanted to kill people. I mean, yes, they killed people. But I don’t think they meant to kill people. That’s all.”

  “So,” she said, “you’re saying they were just following orders?”

  I didn’t know what I was saying. I needed to believe that the Nazi soldiers didn’t know what they were doing. That the world was safe and the Holocaust was just one big accident that wasn’t supposed to happen.

  “Yes,” I said, hoping to stop Mrs. Riger from asking me more questions. “The soldiers were just following orders.”

  “I don’t believe what I’m hearing.” A voice was raised from the back of the room. Seats creaked as bodies shifted for a better look at Ben. He was practically standing on his desk in the last row, he was so agitated. In the very last seat, sitting on the back of his chair.

  “Seriously. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” A derisive laugh caught at the back of the throat; his voice cracked. “Those soldiers knew what they were doing. Of course they knew.”

  I couldn’t look at him, but I couldn’t stop explaining. “No, they didn’t. They couldn’t have known what they were doing. They were young, just teenage boys—”

  He laughed, incredulous. “Oh my God—”

  I shook my head no, insisted, “They didn’t know.”

  “Look,” Ben said, pointing a finger at me from across
the room. “My grandmother was in Dachau. She has a tattoo on her arm. Her brother and mother and father were all killed. She’s the only one who survived. She had to watch as her whole family was marched to their death inside a train car. So don’t sit there and tell me that the Nazis didn’t know what they were doing. They knew. They knew.”

  “They didn’t know. They didn’t.” It was an accident. I felt dizzy and cold. My stomach clenched. I doubled over. “I’m sorry.” I grabbed the handle of my book bag and bounded out of my seat. I careened clumsily down the aisle, pawed the back door open, and ran out into the empty hallway. I stopped to catch my breath, then burst into tears. I had to keep moving. Instead of heading to Spanish, my next class, I darted into the first stairwell I saw. I dashed down the steps, past the cafeteria landing to a subbasement floor that dead-ended at a wooden double door, chained closed with a padlock. I eased down on the bottom step and looked out the small windowpanes in the door. Outside was a city park beyond the school gate. It was wooded, unkempt, and overgrown. Dangerous, with a crooked, broken path and busted-up, graffiti-covered benches. I caught my breath and let the tears flow freely. Then the bell rang. Kids thundered down the stairs, stomped into the cafeteria behind me. One of the rock ’n’ roll boys walked past me, removed the opened padlock from the chain, pushed open the wooden doors, and, to my surprise, strode outside, past the gates, like it was nothing. The chain clanked off the metal door handle and coiled onto the floor like a snake. A handful of other kids soon followed him out. I watched them drift down the sidewalk into the adjoining neighborhood and disappear into the park.

  I thought about walking out with them. And I didn’t know where I would go. I didn’t know the world beyond the school grounds. I had been told not to leave, and so I never had. But that day, the black gate surrounding the building was less like a barrier and more like the border to an unexplored world. I didn’t leave. I wasn’t free—I still had Spanish, English, band, and gym. I picked up the metal chain and dragged it around the door handle, then snapped the padlock closed. Rules. Order. Safety. I went to the rest of my classes.

  Ben was waiting for me after school.

  I saw him standing by the flagpole, sweatshirt draped limply over the crook of his arm, small duffel collapsed in a puddle at his feet. He was watching kids come out of the building. I was worried he was looking for me, so I walked quickly toward the gate.

  “Hey—” Ben called out and came after me. I walked faster, determined to get away, yet steeling myself for a lecture, another round of being called stupid that I decided was best to endure without responding, to save face and dignity.

  “Wait—” Ben yelled. “Stop.” He caught up to me and tugged my elbow. “I want to talk to you.” I turned slowly to face him.

  “Mrs. Riger told us. About your cousin.” I was surprised Mrs. Riger knew. I realized my parents must have told the school. That my classmates knew made me want to run and hide. “I read about the murder in the paper. I didn’t realize that was your cousin.” He looked at me with pity in his eyes. I put a smile on my face and held it there like a mask.

  “I’m sorry. And I’m sorry I yelled at you. I didn’t know. Why didn’t you say something?” Tears pushed into the corners of my eyes. I shrugged and shook my head.

  “Come on, I’ll walk with you.”

  Ben put his hand on my back to reassure me. The warmth of his touch made me uncomfortable. I was glad that he knew, even though I felt embarrassed and exposed. I didn’t want to be pitied. I didn’t know what to say. We walked down the hill in silence. I kept my eyes on the gray sidewalk as I walked. I could feel Ben looking over at me.

  “You know, you and I have known each other since freshman year. There are only a few of us like that.” He meant the kids who’d started at Jamaica in the ninth grade instead of the tenth.

  “I know.”

  He counted them off on his fingers. “David, Dorothy, Karen. Stephen. Barbara. You should come hang out with us.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. I could tell Ben had more on his mind.

  “I just want you to know, I think of you as a friend. I mean, we’re friends. And you can talk to me. Any time. Whenever you want. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, more because I knew he wanted me to than because I agreed.

  “And we should do something. You know, hang out after school sometime.”

  I stopped at the bus stop.

  “This you?” he said, checking the signpost. “Q2?”

  “Q2. That’s me.”

  “Cool. Okay, well . . . I’m sorry about today. I really am. And I’m sorry about your cousin.”

  “Thanks,” I said, not sure what I was thanking him for exactly.

  “I want you and me to be better friends.” He smiled. Uncertain, I smiled back.

  “Talk to you tomorrow?” He raised his eyebrows and pointed at me, his index finger frozen in place, waiting for an answer.

  “Yes. Tomorrow.”

  “Okay, then.” He nodded as if something had been decided between us. “See you later.”

  “Bye, Ben.” I watched him walk back up the hill. My stomach churned.

  From then on I would have to avoid Ben. I would have to skate around his invitations and come up with excuses. I would have to pretend we were going to hang out, knowing we never would. We never could. I couldn’t be friends with Ben.

  My parents would never let me hang out with Ben. They’d make it difficult. I wouldn’t be allowed to take public transportation to his house. They’d have to drive me there. Then find something to do nearby while they waited to bring me home. They would be annoyed at having to make small talk, at being forced to interact with his folks. I knew what they would say. “We don’t have time for this nonsense. Can’t you see him at school?”

  It wouldn’t have been any easier for Ben to come over to my house, either. My parents didn’t like company. Especially strangers. They didn’t want people “knowing our business.” There were sensitive papers—bank statements and bills—all over the house that would have to be put away before anyone could come over. My mother would feel compelled to clean—straighten, dust, vacuum, and polish—every room, on every floor, even though we probably wouldn’t be allowed to leave the living room. She wouldn’t let us use the basement, where all her school stuff was and where my father had a workbench with expensive and dangerous tools that he didn’t want anyone “messing around with.” But my father wouldn’t want us in the living room, either, where he had guns hidden in the bookshelf behind the World Book Encyclopedias and the hardbound book of poetry. “Why does he want to be friends with you, anyway?” my father would ask. He would say there was only one thing a little white boy, a Jewish boy from Jamaica Estates, could want from a sixteen-year-old Black girl, and it wasn’t friendship.

  But the main reason I couldn’t be friends with Ben was because I didn’t know how. Controlled and sheltered by my parents, I didn’t want Ben to know all the things I knew nothing about: music, politics, parties, dating, sex, drugs, the world. Life. I felt nauseated. This was my father’s fault. He said that people lie. He said “Better safe than sorry.” He said I was a Black girl in a white world, and I had to be careful always. No one would understand my father’s mistrust and paranoia. And I couldn’t explain, didn’t want to explain. The only person who would have understood was Karen. Karen was like me, raised like me, looked like me. It would have been easy to hang out with Karen. I could have been friends with Karen. I would have been friends with Karen. But Karen was gone and I was on my own.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Santiago Ramirez’s parole board hearing had been postponed. I was still waiting for copies of his hearing transcripts. I wanted more information before I wrote a letter to the parole board. It occurred to me that the transcript from the criminal trial would also contain details about what had happened the night of the robbery. I would be able to find out if the shooting had been an accident. And if Ramirez really had fired twice.

  It w
as still too early to call the Bronx courthouse. I tried to write. I had a script due. I was staffed on an MTV show about teenagers, tasked with telling stories about prom dates and pregnancy scares. My bread and butter was writing for cop shows and crime procedurals, so writing a soapy teen drama was a departure for me. But I wanted the challenge. As luck would have it, I was assigned the episode in which one of the beloved recurring characters would be accidentally killed in a robbery gone awry at the convenience store where he worked. I knew exactly how to write this. I sat with the details of how the character would be killed. Staging the stunt, and, more important, unraveling the emotions behind every moment, every terrifying second of that unfortunate event. I’d had to write scenes like this before, about victims of violent crime and the criminals who commit them. I found I could always picture the incidents clearly and would play them out in my mind’s eye. Not just the external staging and required stunts, but the internal emotion—the panic, turmoil, and adrenaline rush. The ensuing trauma. For me, the emotion of these scenes was always just beneath the surface, readily accessible, though not cathartic. I got lost in the retelling. When I looked up, I saw the blue blush of first light. It was well past nine on the East Coast.

  I called the Bronx County Hall of Justice and spoke with one of the court reporters. The woman was abrupt. She gave clipped, one-word answers to my rambling questions. Once she realized I was a relative of the victim, her tone softened. She apologized when she cautioned that it might cost as much as five hundred dollars for a copy of the trial transcript. I told her I was willing to pay and waited while she searched a database on her computer. Her acrylic nails clacked softly on the keys as she typed. “Humph,” she said, before delivering the bad news. There was a flood in the eighties, many courthouse records were destroyed. She doubted a transcript from 1981 . . . “Oh, wait,” she said, “I found something.” Seconds later, a document appeared in my email inbox. A transcript of the sentencing hearing for Santiago Ramirez.