In Tom’s life, that week had been a crucial bridge between adolescence and adulthood. It had been a continuation of his coming of age and coming to terms with himself as a person. Through Julie, his family had gained an importance that week that would stay with him and continue to grow. When he left for home, he felt like a grown-up, full of a refreshing maturity and perspective. But as his train headed north out of Florida, he looked south from his window seat and wept like a child.
What the cousins had built that week was a friendship that would remain a constant source of strength and rejuvenation for them both. They began to exchange letters and phone calls on a regular basis. Julie encouraged and calmed her panicky cousin during his struggle through the county fire department’s fiercely competitive application process and his subsequent hellish rookie year. They talked about all the problems of their young lives. And although the topics were common, these weren’t trivial discussions — these details were the only threads they had to work with, and they stitched their lives from them. In her cards and letters she sent him poetry and song lyrics:
. . . Today I was listening to ’Til Tuesday and couldn’t help thinking of you:
Well so long and sorry, darling
I was counting to forever
I never even got to ten
So long and sorry, darling
When we found a rip in heaven
We should have ascended then . . .
Tom’s birthday is November second, but Julie sent his card in early October with this note:
. . . I just listened to New Order the other day, for the first time in months, and it sounded just as sweet and good and real as it did on a warm June evening with a friend whom I miss very much. Write me.
Kisses and Revolution, Jules
P.S. I know it’s early for your birthday, but I usually procrastinate until it’s too late, so I decided to send it now while it was fresh on my mind.
So as Tom looked over at his cousin beside him in the Hornet that night, April 4, 1991, he felt an all-encompassing warmth and admiration for her. She was undoubtedly his favorite person in the world; he felt proud to know her. And he felt pleased with himself now too. Because thanks to Julie, he was learning to recognize the good traits in himself. He felt pride in his work. He no longer felt shy or silly about his intelligence — in fact he was beginning to actually like articulating his points and sounding clever. And to top it all off, despite all the years of bickering and the gulf of differing opinions that still existed between them, his parents were finally and utterly proud of him. He had an inkling that somehow, all was right in his world. His metamorphosis was nearing its completion. And if all went according to plan, it looked as if he would emerge from this formerly suffocating, uncomfortable cocoon of adolescence as a happy and healthy young man.
So far the week in St. Louis had been a wonderful vacation, and Julie was just the remedy Tom had needed to keep him going. One evening earlier in the week they had downed several cups of coffee and then, hyped up on caffeine, driven to Lacledes Landing within view of the Arch in downtown St. Louis, and perched themselves on the hood of the near-dead Chevy. They went there because it was the happening place in town — a row of bars where the young twenties set hung out. But they were too young to get in anywhere. So instead they just roosted on the hood of the car, feeling the warm engine through the seats of their blue jeans, and watching the glowing windows of the pubs enviously. Inevitably, Julie turned the topic of conversation to “the sociological ramifications of living in a country that will gladly send an eighteen-year-old off to war, but won’t serve him a parting glass on his way to the slaughter.” Perhaps it was their environment — the injustice of watching people just a couple of years older than they were drinking and being merry. Or maybe it was just Julie’s nature to take up everything around her and shape it into a lively, interesting, and important topic of serious discussion. Either way, these constant chats, these daily deep discussions were the lifeblood of their friendship. So the two friends buried themselves in dialogue while the Mississippi hummed its low song a hundred yards away, accompanied by the music of a hundred clinking glasses throughout Lacledes Landing.
At barely over five feet tall and 105 pounds of raw energy, Julie Kerry was busy unfolding into her adulthood alongside her cousin Tom. Her head was covered in a mass of dark, shiny ringlets that hung over her big hazel eyes. This was her trademark look and it hadn’t changed much in all the years since Ginna had given up wrestling it into pigtails. Julie had made a few brief childhood attempts at taming the unruly curls, but as she had grown up, she had learned to live with (and maybe even like) her floppy locks.
Julie was a natural leader, inspired even from childhood to seek out and create mischief. She had a strong sense of justice and was never shy about speaking her mind. But she was also prone to spells of pensive quiet. Julie was riddled with inherent contradictions, chock-full of anomalies. She often said, “If I don’t look in the mirror, I can go around thinking I’m gorgeous when I’m not.” It was that modesty that made her all the more electric.
As an English major at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, Julie was having a full-blown love affair with words. Her poetry was her passion; it helped her to interpret her life, to put things in perspective. She wrote this piece, “Selling Manhattan,” for her Native American literature class at UMSL, using what she had learned about the culture and incorporating her own wry wit:
sure we sold it to them
biggest scam of the century
imagine the fools
thinking they could contain
the earth
hold it in their hands
like gold coins
thinking they could engrave
their names across the land
they must have been new
in town
or tourists maybe
we laughed about it afterwards
surprised they didn’t ask
to buy the sky too
we would have sold it
to them
could have made a real
killing
Julie was serious about her poetry and her studies, but her friends, including Tom, were equally important to her. They were an outlet for her, an opportunity to put her seriousness and her studies aside and act like a goofy kid sometimes.
For lunch one day in St. Louis, she and Tom went to a shady little sidewalk cafe with plastic furniture, potted trees, and umbrellas over the tables. Tom ordered a triple club sandwich with extra mayo and french fries and Julie had the same. An impossibly Midwestern waitress served them with a smile and a “Y’all enjoy ’em now.” They ate and watched the people go by without a care in the world.
A few minutes passed at the table in relative silence, the smacking of lips and slurping of Cokes taking precedence. Julie looked at Tom, who sat with a french fry in one hand and his huge sandwich in the other, and failed to stifle a laugh.
“What?” Tom asked, only mildly defensive.
She covered her mouth with one hand, then thought better of it and showed him her chewed-up food. When she regained her composure, she sipped from her bendy-straw and cleared her throat.
“Our manners,” Julie laughed. “You’d think we were raised by wolves.”
Tom looked down at himself in his sweat-stained T-shirt and ratty sandals, posture that would make any schoolteacher cringe, mouth stuffed with food and still chewing while he talked. Julie for her part was slumped so far over her plate that her shoulders were almost touching the table. They had both devoured most of their food in under five minutes. And their two cigarettes burnt completely to soot in the little glass ashtray between them. They hadn’t even bothered putting them out when the food arrived. So Tom saw her point. And he showed her his own chewed-up food before he swallowed.
But of all of Julie’s most valued companions, there was no one whose friendship she treasured more than her sister Robin’s. According to Julie, she and Robin had thei
r fair share of typical sisterly aggravations — the odd argument over whose turn it was to do the dishes, or who had used the last square of toilet paper and hadn’t replaced the roll. But the outstanding feature of their relationship was that, even in their cantankerous late teens, they recognized and celebrated their similarities, their common interests. Robin shared Julie’s love of music and poetry, her sponge-like intellect, and her wit. But it was their shared sense of justice, their passionate activism, that distinguished their lives from the norm. Ginna’s friends always marveled at how well the two sisters got along, but Ginna couldn’t imagine them any other way. Julie and Robin were best friends, and they spent hours talking, hatching their plans to save the world.
At Christmastime the year before, Julie had read an article in The St. Louis-Post Dispatch about the one hundred neediest families in St. Louis and decided that they needed to adopt one of these families for the holidays.
“I’m sorry, honey, but we don’t have three cents to spare,” Ginna responded when Julie brought up the idea. “I think somebody needs to adopt us.”
But Julie and Robin wouldn’t let the idea drop. They persisted until their mom gave in, but even as Ginna agreed, she wondered how they would ever come up with the money. When Julie came home the next night and announced that she had adopted two families, Ginna threw up her hands in despair. But her anxiety was short-lived. Within days, Julie and Robin had petitioned everyone they knew and raised six hundred dollars. Ginna was absolutely overcome with pride as she helped her daughters deliver five carloads of necessities and Christmas gifts to their two adopted needy families.
Robin was tiny like her sisters, just clear of five feet and not more than a hundred pounds soaking wet. And she was strikingly pretty, but she rebelled violently against anything “cute.” She had beautiful high cheekbones and large, darting eyes. Despite her unaffected beauty, she always insisted that Julie was “the pretty one.” She had an infectious smile and her hair (at least for the first couple of months of 1991) was straight and shiny and hung in natural-colored chestnut wisps to her shoulders, with the exception of one long tiny braid which came from behind her right ear. It was no more than an eighth of an inch thick, the tip was dyed black, and it hung almost to her waist. That braid was the only section of her hair that remained constantly unchanged. To Robin it was not just a braid — it was an anchor that connected her to her past and her future.
Robin was a nineteen-year-old freshman at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. Just as she had done all her life, she was following in Julie’s footsteps — just close enough behind to adopt her sister’s good qualities and just far enough behind to command her own unique persona. Robin was bright and defiant. She watched everything Julie did, chose the qualities she liked best, and made them her own. Julie was her mentor, her muse, but Robin was one hundred percent her own person. She was the shier of the two sisters, but her quiet demeanor masked an ever-active wellspring of activity in the mind. She was witty, sarcastic, and passionate.
Her bedroom was a haven of self-expression and artistry. She proudly displayed her sculptures around her room, and sketches of dragons and fairies filled the margins of her notebooks and textbooks. She surrounded herself with things of beauty, things that reflected the abundant goodness she saw in the world. Robin was a believer in karma and in the inherent decency of humanity, and these beliefs outweighed her natural tendency toward cynicism. “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world” was one of the sayings she had adopted from her sister Julie. And that is precisely what both sisters spent their time and energy doing.
Like Julie, Robin was more than active in the community; she was hyperactive. Whenever the two sisters had time off from class, they trekked to the Salvation Army’s Family Haven in downtown St. Louis where they tutored first graders, helping them with their homework. They also did volunteer work with Amnesty International and Greenpeace.
One year, early in her elementary-school education, Robin participated in her first food drive, and the experience changed her. The concept of giving food to people who couldn’t afford to eat made perfect sense to her. So while the other kids went home to raid their parents’ pantries for old cans of beans and the soups they didn’t like, Robin went straight to her piggy bank. She cracked it open, took the seven dollars in nickels, dimes, and quarters to Ginna, and asked for a ride to the grocery store. On the way, Robin asked Ginna for advice about what foods to buy. Ginna thought it over and explained that tuna fish and peanut butter would be good choices because they were high in protein, and most people wouldn’t contribute these kinds of expensive items. When they arrived at the grocery store, Robin picked out as many cans of tuna fish and jars of peanut butter as her seven dollars would buy. From that year forward the annual food drive became a downright campaign with Robin.
But she wasn’t a blind idealist. On the contrary, her natural pessimism was what really triggered her activism. She believed she had a responsibility to make a difference. Her reasoning was: if she wasn’t going to make an effort to help, who else was going to do it? Robin was a natural fighter — fiercely protective of the things and people she loved — and nothing could dissuade her from standing up for a worthy cause. She believed she could do anything if she tried hard enough.
Robin was only fifteen years old when her parents divorced and Ginna headed back into the workforce after an eighteen-year stint as a stay-at-home mom. Money was tight and Robin was determined to contribute. So she started saving the money she made at her after-school job, and on Christmas morning she gave her mom a teddy bear with a note stuck to his paw that read “The Bearer of this note is entitled to the payment of any two bills of choice.” Robin knew that paying even one of those bills would wipe out her savings, but that wasn’t about to stop her.
So her battles weren’t strictly theoretical — Robin recognized the importance of action. One day, in between classes at Hazel-wood East High School, she overheard the six-foot-something school bully threaten the class runt. It was an exchange she had witnessed a hundred times, but today she decided that enough was enough. She simply could not stand by while this jerk tormented the little guy day after day. She slammed her locker, marched over to the bully, and punched him in the jaw. She probably didn’t do a lick of damage, but the bully straightened up, the runt got off the hook, and Robin earned herself a reputation for fearlessness.
Like Julie and their cousin Tom, Robin was at a crossroads in her life. She was maturing into a remarkable young woman of strong character and passion. Her life was a good and happy one and she valued her family. So when her Cummins cousins came to town for spring break, she spent as much time as she could with them. Julie and Tom were virtually inseparable that week, and she and Jamie had joined them whenever possible. She liked getting to know her cousins — they all got along so well. Tink had a sense of humor like Julie’s, and Robin found her easy to laugh with. Kathy admired Robin, which made it easy for Robin to talk to her about her passions and her plans.
So this week in St. Louis had been a good one all around. The Cummins kids were having a great time staying with their mom’s parents and catching up with their various cousins from both sides of the sprawling family. But most notably, Robin, Jamie, Tink, and Kathy had built their own friendships on the foundation of Tom’s and Julie’s. Tom even found his own sisters to be less irritating, almost interesting people when he saw them through the eyes of his cousins. So despite Tom’s reluctance for the vacation to come to an end, despite having to return to work and leave his friend behind, he still couldn’t stop smiling as he sat in the Hornet beside Julie that early April night. They talked about the things they had done and seen together that week. How they had meandered around downtown one evening and ended up sitting under the Arch looking at the riverboats on the Mississippi. Rush hour had passed and the damp air was cooling and darkening, the river breeze caressing their faces and moving Julie’s curls in little tornadoes. They had stretched their legs out under t
he Arch and plucked at blades of grass, wondering how tiny they appeared to the late-lingering tourists who were still up inside the Arch, peering down at them. It was one of those rare moments of enjoyment for the very here and now, and both friends had sensed that a lifelong memory was in the making.
Julie had smiled from pure contentedness and noticed that her cousin was smiling too. She had breathed deeply and, although the McDonald’s french-fry fumes overwhelmed the river’s natural scent, Julie had imagined that she was inhaling the very breath of her city, her home. This glorious river was the lifeblood of her town, the river of Mark Twain and William Faulkner and T. S. Eliot. Its currents ran like veins through her consciousness and like sparks through her poetry.
The two cousins had shared a cigarette and watched the smaller boats drift by on the river beyond. That night was April 1 — three days ago now — and Julie had drawn a card out of the inside of her black leather jacket and handed it to Tom, making him promise not to read it until she dropped him off at home. He was deeply touched but not surprised by the gesture. Julie was always doing thoughtful little things like that for her friends.
When Julie had given him the card, Tom had no way of knowing what the next few days had in store for him, or how beautiful and poignant it would seem when he read it again a few weeks later. But when he opened the card before he went to sleep that evening, this is what he found on the front:
We are not lovers
Because of the love we make
But the love we have
We are not friends
Because of the laughs we spend
But the tears we save
A Rip in Heaven: A Memoir of Murder And Its Aftermath Page 3
