by Elle Johnson
Karen was killed in an instant.
The two boys scrambled out the doors and sped off with a third assailant in a car that had been idling at the curb.
My mother drew her head down to her chest. Her thumb and index finger rubbed the wrinkled creases of her forehead as if trying to coax out a rational explanation for what had happened.
“But she gave them the money. Why did they have to shoot her?” my mother asked. As if the “why” mattered. As if an answer could make this right.
I had questions of my own.
I tried to picture where Karen worked. A city block, lined with storefront businesses, most of them closed at that hour. The street empty. The air chilly, the concrete cold and hard. An el train rumbling overhead, stopping with the screech and spark of metal on metal. Doors sliding open; a garbled voice filling the open-air platform and announcing the station. Electronic bells chiming as the doors tapped closed. The train chugging away. And then an old American-made car with three hard-faced boys pulling up underneath the tracks and parking at the curb.
I tried to picture Karen inside, working. Wearing a brightly colored uniform with a matching baseball cap. Her long, curly hair trapped beneath a net. Standing behind the counter, taking care of the last customer with a smile on her face.
One maybe two people sitting in the two-toned hard plastic seats made to look like they were cushioned so you’d sit and eat, but not stay too long.
It was late, almost midnight, when the world feels shrouded in deep, plum darkness. Music from the radio playing in the background, to help pass the time, to keep the kids company as they cleaned up under the sting of fluorescent lights. Wiping down the kitchen, emptying the garbage, before the glass double doors with the silver handles pushed open and two young men strode up to the counter.
Did Karen see the robbers coming? Or did she turn to face them, with a ready smile and the words “May I take your order?” on her lips? What did they say? “Give us the money”? “Hand it over”? Did they need to say anything? When did she notice the sawed-off shotgun being lifted and pointed at her face?
I tried to picture Karen looking down the barrel of the shotgun. Was she scared? Surprised? Confused? How long did she stare into that abyss of the barrel before turning her eyes down to the register? Fumbling over the keys to open the drawer. To scoop up the cash. Two hundred and forty-one dollars. Was it fifties, twenties, or tens? A one-dollar bill or a handful of change? When she gave it to the robber, did her shaky hand touch his sweaty palm? Or did she set it all down on the counter for him to pick up?
However it happened, he took the money and started to leave. Karen stayed. She waited for him to go. Karen, the good girl, stood there. Like a target. Paralyzed by fear. Or maybe flooded with relief that it was almost over. Staying perfectly still until it was safe to move again, to breathe. I imagined that she held her breath. But I wondered if, when the shotgun went off, she gasped, took one last inhale of life. Did she know that was what she was doing?
“I’M GOING TO THE BRONX,” my father announced as he rushed back into my parents’ bedroom. He fished around in the drawer where he kept his monogrammed money clip and keys, the leftover coins from our vacations abroad and souvenir pendants from around the world, his cuff links and tie clips, and a box of bullets. He stepped back empty-handed, peered into the closet where he kept two of his guns—one in a shoebox on the floor, the other in an unlocked lockbox on the shelf. He didn’t kneel down or reach up; he stood still—staring. After a moment, he ran his hand over the sleeves of his dark suits and the arms of his crisp white shirts. He seemed lost, trapped on the small square of rug between the dark closet and the bulky heaviness of the wood dresser.
“We’ll go with you,” my mother said. Her words jarred my father into action. He nodded, then pulled a pair of trousers off a hanger.
I rushed into my room and unpacked my book bag. I took out my dog-eared SAT study guide and let the fibrous pages flip over my thumb before sliding it under a stack of books on my shelf for what I was sure would be the last time. I couldn’t imagine going back to SAT class now that Karen had been murdered. I was weighed down with a crushing disappointment. There was nothing left to look forward to, so why even try? Learning SAT words felt pointless.
I sat in the living room in a wingback chair across from my mother slouched behind the clunky Ethan Allen pinewood desk. We both looked off into space, transfixed by the nothingness in the middle distance—the thousand-yard stare; in World War II, that’s what they called the traumatized look in the eyes of some soldiers who survived the battlefield.
I tried to picture a sawed-off shotgun, but I didn’t know what one looked like. I’d seen plenty of handguns. Held them. Shot them. Even taken one apart, with my father’s help, to clean it. I watched, awed, as he reassembled it with grace and ease. My father had 9-millimeters, .28-calibers, a .45, and that snub-nosed .38 with the taped-up grip. Made by Smith & Wesson, Remington, and Colt. He had revolvers and semiautomatics.
He didn’t have shotguns or rifles. He wasn’t a hunter. He didn’t shoot things for sport.
Those types of guns were scary to me. Those were guns meant to kill, not protect, like my father’s guns. A sawed-off shotgun sounded even scarier. I imagined the jagged teeth of a saw jutting out around the barrel, pointed at Karen’s face.
Point-blank range.
I’d heard that term but never had to consider it before. But there it was. “Point blank” as in zero, no distance at all.
I heard my father’s footsteps pound heavily into the plush carpeting upstairs. He moved in quick, purposeful bursts, then stopped for long pauses, then stomped and stopped again. The bathroom door slammed, water ran, an electric razor hummed. He came down the stairs clean shaven, smelling of bay rum cologne, wearing custom-made wool trousers with a sharp crease down the front, and a suit jacket over a starched white long-sleeve shirt with cuff links and no tie. The .38 nestled in his ankle holster.
My father looked like he was going to work.
He headed into the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee, then sat in the front room at the telephone table. He lit a cigarette and picked up the phone.
He called the “guys from the job”—that was how my father referred to the core group of parole officers he worked with, the ones he partnered with and trusted with his life when he made home visits or tracked down absconders to make an arrest. Joe Isherwood, Calvin Moy, and Ernie Hobson, who was nicknamed “the Dove” for his accommodating personality—in contrast to my father, nicknamed “the Hawk” for doing home visits on parolees at three o’clock in the morning. According to my father, “Most law-abiding citizens are supposed to be home in bed at three a.m.”
I saw the “guys from the job” only on special occasions—Moy’s twentieth anniversary, Isherwood’s book signing, a restaurant opening for one of Ernie’s friends—but I heard stories about them, their girlfriends, and their families around my family’s dinner table. I didn’t know why my father felt the urgent need to consult with them now, when we were waiting to go to the Bronx to find out what had happened to Karen.
“Cal, it’s Richie,” my father said into the phone. “Yeah, not so good. My niece was murdered in a robbery last night . . . Yeah . . . Thank you . . . Warren’s little girl . . . Yeah, yeah, Karen. Out at that Burger King on White Plains Road . . . You heard about that? Ain’t that something . . . You damn right. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Who do we know out there? . . . Could you? That would be great. Yeah, yeah. Hold on a minute.”
My father glanced over his shoulder at me, then lowered his voice. He repeated the phone call several more times. I couldn’t hear what he was saying anymore.
My mother emerged from the fog of her thoughts. “Dear sweet Jesus,” she said. “They blew her face off.” It was as if the words were just starting to make sense. My mother looked at me. “There but for the grace of God.”
“Yeah, right.” My father, an atheist, spat out a laugh. He was
standing over us now, fingers twitching impatiently against his leg as if we had been the ones keeping him waiting. “Let’s go.”
I slid into the back seat of my parents’ dingy maroon Camry. My father always drove with the window cracked open. He flicked the smoldering ash from his cigarette out through the opening, but the wind knocked the little gray flecks back onto me. I inched over to sit behind my mother, out of range of my father’s ashes. Usually I liked being in the car, looking out the window, watching the world pass by. That day I barely lifted my head. The news station rebroadcast the story about Karen’s murder. My father turned off the radio. We drove in silence to Karen’s house.
I remembered it as a pretty little street crammed with two-family houses made of red brick or painted clapboard with wide wooden porches. Karen lived there, in a cluster of homes owned by my aunts, uncles, and grandmother on my father’s side of the family. People sat out in wicker rockers during the spring and summer months, and made leaf piles or built snowmen in the fall and winter. The front yards were full of flower gardens and protected by galvanized steel fences that doubled as playground equipment for climbing on, jumping over, and sticking tennis balls inside the diamond-shaped chain links.
I understood why some people mistook this for a bad neighborhood. It was off White Plains Road down the block from the el train and an avenue full of sketchy storefront shops and cheap clothing stores that looked like fronts for less legitimate businesses. As was often the case, good lived side by side with bad.
The only thing scary about the street to me was how steep it was. The street was a hill with the sharpest drop I’d ever seen. The grade of it took a physical toll. Pedestrians held their bodies at near 45-degree angles to avoid tumbling over. The house foundations were fortified on top of triangles of cement and brick just to be level. The descent made me lurch forward in the car; my hands would fly up involuntarily to brace against the back of the front seat. I worried that the car would pitch forward and send us vaulting end over end. Even my father steeled himself. He would clench his jaw and grip the steering wheel with both hands, then snap at my mother to either sit back or look out and tell him how much room he had left to maneuver into a parking spot. He’d work the steering wheel with the flat of his left palm, whipping it this way and that. Right arm lying across the back of the front seat to steady him. His head swiveling back and forth, to and fro among windshields, windows, and mirrors.
This street was not to be trifled with.
And yet my father always managed to take control.
When there was no street parking, my father would drive around the corner to an alley hidden behind the homes where all the detached garages were. We’d park behind Uncle Charles’s house. The broken city pavement of the alley gave way to a flat gravel driveway that crackled and popped beneath the wheels like an old country road. Uncle Charles had a garden of vegetables and fruits with plenty of flowering plants to lure in bees. In the summer the adults would sit on the back porch with glasses of lemonade and iced tea while us kids ran around catching fireflies in jelly jars. Uncle Charles poked holes in the lids with an ice pick and sent us back to Queens, where it seemed to me our fireflies didn’t burn as bright and our lemonade wasn’t as sweet. That is, until I got older and a visiting relative cornered me in a back bedroom.
He slid his hands underneath my shirt. He felt my fourteen-year-old breasts through my new training bra. The heel of his palm was soft and cool even as it pressed hard into my lower ribs, holding me in place. I stood still, stunned, with my back against an ornate wooden chest of drawers, my hands held up in a gesture of surrender.
“Thank you,” he said, then moaned. “Oh, you make an old man feel so good. And you filled out so nicely. Why don’t you let me see how nicely you’ve grown in?”
Before he could go any further, I pushed past him and skittered out the doorway.
I slipped into the living room, where Karen was sitting with the rest of the family, visiting with my parents. She was midstory about the goings-on at her Catholic girls’ school. Everybody laughed. Burning with shame, I sank into a corner of the couch. Disgust tickled the back of my throat. As soon as we got home that night, I told my mother what had happened. Her mouth dropped open in disbelief, then closed tightly, lips pursed together. She said, “I’ll take care of it.” Then she leveled her gaze at me. “But don’t you go telling your father about this. He’ll kill that man and I don’t need your father going to prison.”
I knew my mother was right. I didn’t tell my father. And it never happened again.
The hood of my parents’ Camry crested the hill, then took a nosedive. We inched down the street. The sidewalk on both sides was dotted with clusters of people talking, whispering, nodding guiltily at Karen’s house. Some were neighbors, some were neighborhood friends, most were strangers, I could tell. Not close enough to the family to go inside, they rubbernecked the true mourners who came and went through the front door, uncharacteristically left open.
The already-narrow street was reduced to one lane by a long line of double-parked cars. Unmarked police vehicles. I could tell by the red cherry lights in the windshield and the official police business placards displayed on the dash. My father pulled up to the end of the line and parked. He put his parole office sign under the windshield, then got out without so much as a glance back. I jumped out to open my mother’s door and helped her onto the sidewalk.
As usual, my father stopped at Grandmother’s house first. Grandma had been mugged twice when she lived in the projects. She was attacked in the elevator, then the stairwell. Frightened but still angry the first time, she refused to move. The second mugging put her in the hospital, where she refused to die. That’s when my father moved her onto the block with the rest of the family. She lived in a duplex, on the first floor of a house, in an apartment that smelled of cedar and musty lace. When my family came to visit we’d sit in the front parlor room with the bay window. I would eat candy from the glass jars sitting on every flat surface. Soft caramel chews, peppermint swirls, and tiny fruit-flavored logs. One after another until my mother said enough.
We always sat in the same seats. My parents side by side on the Queen Anne love seat, my sister in the wingback chair, and me moving slowly back and forth in the wooden rocker next to the end table with the music box of hymns from the Christian Science Reading Room.
Grandma would bring out fresh coffee with half-and-half for my father, tea with lemon for my mother. My sister and I would drink grape or apple juice and listen to the adults talk. I played the music box, winding it up again and again until someone stopped me—usually my mother, blurting out my name in a high-pitched voice of both annoyance and warning. Grandma would chuckle, brush the air with her fingertips, delicately but definitively waving away my mother’s admonishments, saying, “Let the child play.”
Grandma was small and seemingly delicate, like a statue carved of alabaster marble. Her skin was white, almost translucent in places, showing blue veins and chalky bone just beneath the surface. She was light enough to pass but never would have. She was proud to be the great-great-granddaughter of a Bermudian slave who’d earned his freedom by navigating a British ship safely through the treacherous coral reefs surrounding the island. Grandma inherited the slave’s mettle; she came to America on her own at eighteen—but she seemed undone by Karen’s murder.
My father rang the bell, then pounded on the front door until Grandma let us into the house.
“What’s the matter? You hear me knocking out here.”
Grandma sighed, pulled the ends of her sweater closer over her shriveled chest. She shuffled into the front parlor and eased herself into a chair far away from the bay window and the view of people on the street. She didn’t offer us seats or anything to drink. I stood back with my mother. My father hovered over Grandma.
“We’re going up to see Barbara and Warren now.”
Grandma nodded. “Okay.”
“You, too, Mother. Come on.”
“Everyone is there now.”
“I know, Richard. It’s too many people.” Grandma leaned her head back and winced. She brushed us away. “Go on without me.”
“All right, then, let’s leave her alone,” my mother offered.
“What the fuck kind of nonsense is this? She’s the child’s grandmother.”
“Ricky, don’t,” my mother said.
“People are counting on you. Get up. I said get up, Mother. I don’t have time for this shit.”
My grandmother was a church lady, a sergeant in the Salvation Army; she didn’t tolerate foul language. That day she just closed her eyes. I saw tears seep through her lids, soak the creases of her crow’s-feet.
“Don’t talk to her like that,” I said.
“What did you say?” My father wheeled around on me. I felt the heat of his gaze on my face and looked down at the floor.
My mother intervened. “All right, Ricky. We’re all upset.”
My father stomped out. The room shook, then went quiet.
“It’s okay, Mother. You stay here,” my mother said, then left.
I followed her, chasing after my father as he strode up the street to Karen’s house. Uncle Charles, Karen’s grandfather, paced on the sidewalk. His eyes scanned the block, head shook back and forth, lips moved as he mumbled to himself.
Uncle Charles was one of those exhaustingly jovial, outgoing men who always had a smile on his face and a joke on deck. Never in a bad mood, he made everyone call him “Pal”—probably because he’d been a Pullman porter and didn’t want anyone to make the mistake of ever calling him “boy.” “Come talk to your old Uncle Pal,” he’d say and pat me reassuringly on the shoulder. Then he’d fix me with those rheumy hound-dog eyes and listen as though what my six-year-old self had to say was the most important thing in the world.
Uncle Charles had a bald head. He was the color and shape of a yellow sweet potato. His trousers were always ironed with a crease, and pulled slightly higher than his waist by suspenders over a short-sleeve button-down cotton shirt, open at the neck, revealing silver-gray hairs growing like weeds out of his chest. He liked to amble up and down the block with a brown bag of store-bought sweet treats that he’d pass out to the neighborhood kids. He’d lean against a neighbor’s chain link fence, arms draped over the top, “conversating” and cracking jokes that were groaningly amusing but made funnier by his good intentions and eagerness to please. Pal was everybody’s friend.