I was getting my mail from the lobby. A neighbor saw me and sighed, "Bills."
"No,"I said. "All I get is love letters." (a quote)
I could have added, and dozens of roses. And books.
And thanks to Bill and Linda and Douglas, that's pretty much true.
Almost every year I post up this piece printed in the New York Times opinion page about an event in 1994. Yes, it's a bit gory. But love provides a hostage to fortune.
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, a friend 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," my friend 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 my daughter 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 12." 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.
