Twenty-some years ago today, I wrote this op ed piece for the Times
about a
Valentine's eve murder. The city was different then—scarier. It seems like
Keri, my friend who found the dying man, is usually here in New York at this time. In fact, she's sitting in the kitchen right now. I would tell her/my
story differently now. But here
it is as it was then.
The white breast of snow was splotched with blood, and my daughter had
to step around iced red pools on the concrete as she walked, alone, to
the school bus.
The evening before, Keri arrived, breathless,
at the door of our New York City apartment. On the street outside she
had seen a man who had just been attacked. Police were taking
descriptions of a white male in a black baseball cap who had run away.
The man who had been hurt lay there in a pool of blood. "I should have
comforted him," Keri said. "The police were so cold. I should have
knelt in the snow and just patted him or something."
My daughter ran over to the window and looked down to the street she walked every
day. The blue lights circled, the ambulances waited. "He's gone," she
heard someone say. She turned to me. "I think he's dead," she said.
"This is my street. I thought it was safe here."
"Nowhere is really safe," I said.
This
was a year ago, when Hannah was 12, the year she was beginning to
realize that her parents were not all powerful, that we could not
protect her from all harm. From stories about people with grave
illnesses in the copies of the
Reader's Digest she brought home from
school she was learning that not all stories end happily, that people
die no matter how much they are loved, indeed, sometimes because of how
much they are loved.
She did not remember the incident when she
woke up the next morning, nor did I, or perhaps I would not have let her
walk by that place alone. Her fears were all for the Valentine's Day
dance that evening. "You don't have to go," I said. "You are only twelve."
Her fears were about sex, not death; both are part of growing up.
But I would have spared her the blood.
The
man had lived in our building; I had stood on the elevator with him
many times. On Valentine's Day his door five floors below ours was
sealed with white police tape. He lay in a white hospital bed in a coma,
dying.
Later that day my daughter called me from school. She had
decided, after all, to attend the dance. Perhaps her "boyfriend" had
come through with an invitation for the first dance, or perhaps her
girlfriends, whom I could hear in the background, had talked her into
it.
"Did you see the blood on the snow?" I asked.
"It was
horrible," she said. "I almost threw up. The elevator man told me the
man was dead. I called Dad to tell him I was going to the dance after
all, but Dad wasn't home."
"Do you know where he was?" I asked. "He was here, at the office, delivering a valentine to me."
"Oooh," she said. "What was it?"
"Candies. In a heart-shaped box. Red velvet."
"Hey,
everybody." I could hear her tell her school friends. "My dad went to
the office to give my mom a valentine. Isn't that cool?"
Hearts. Blood. Love. Death. Splotches on a snowbank.
It
was dark by the time she walked home again, after the dance, her father
by her side. Too dark to see the salt soaking up the red to a fainter
pink. A sketch of a man's face was taped to the door outside the
elevator. The suspect glared menacingly under the words "Wanted for
Murder."
A year has passed. My daughter is 13, and tall. She
takes two city buses to get to school. The last snowfall is melting and
gray. There hasn't been much snow in New York this year, not like last
year or when I was young. The murderer hasn't been caught, despite the
fact that a detective from the 20th Precinct papered the area with
posters asking for information.
Neighbors speculated that the
killing was a hit -- it had been too efficient, and the victim hadn't
been robbed. It made all of us feel safer, to think that it was a
personal matter, that the murderer wasn't lurking on the street. But I
still don't like to think of the white male, 19-24 years, 5 feet 10
inches, 175 pounds, riding the bus with my daughter.
She
remembers the murder when she walks down the street alone at night. But
these days she is thinking more about love than death, though sex and
drugs are on the short list as well. There was a seventh grade dance
last night, "the Decade Dance," and her only concern was whether her
make-up really looked like it was from the 60's. "My friends say I look
too 90's," she said. In the year 2000, she will graduate from high
school.
Childhood ends. No place is really safe. But we gird up
and go out. We dance and dare to hope for days at a stretch that we, at
least, are protected from terrible messages in the cold white snow.
