by Elle Johnson
The secretary for Ramirez’s officer wanted to know if I was having trouble with the parolee. I assured her I was not and left a message for the officer to call me back.
I wasn’t able to speak directly to Alemar’s parole officer, either. His secretary told me that Alemar was no longer on parole. He had been released a year earlier and now was truly free. The secretary asked if I was okay leaving my phone number so that Alemar could contact me—if he wanted. I was thrown. I hadn’t thought through how any of this would work. Under normal circumstances I might have been nervous about giving my personal information to a convicted murderer. I imagined her trying to fit all this onto the space of a pink message slip for the parole officer to explain to Alemar and suggested it would be better if I wrote it in a letter that could be passed on. The words came quickly and easily. “Dear Mr. Alemar,” I began. I said I was Karen Marsh’s cousin and that he shouldn’t be anxious, I bore him no ill will. I explained that I had read in his parole board hearing transcripts that he had been discouraged from reaching out to Karen’s family. If he was still willing, I wanted to meet him in person. I gave my phone number and email address and asked him to contact me. Unlike with writing a letter to the parole board about Ramirez, I didn’t procrastinate. I mailed the letter that day.
I called to find out about Luis Torres. Unlike Alemar, Torres was still under parole supervision. That was not a good sign. He might have had a difficult time adjusting to life outside and gotten into trouble. I didn’t know what to make of the fact that he was still in the town where he had been in prison. Perhaps he was in a halfway house, transitioning to life on the outside. I was curious about what had happened to him. But I didn’t feel compelled to meet with him. I put the information about his parole officer aside.
Two weeks later I still hadn’t heard back from Ramirez’s parole officer. But I received an email from Frank Alemar. His thoughts were deeply personal. Once again, I was moved by his sincerity, how genuine his remorse was. He said he was living his life in memory of Karen Marsh. Overwhelmed by emotion, I shared what he had written with my sister but no one else in the family. I didn’t want to violate his trust. I realized I didn’t need to sit across from him. I didn’t want to dredge up painful old feelings. I didn’t need to ask what happened or have him tell me what I already knew from reading the transcripts. As I mulled over the idea of meeting with Alemar, the unexpected happened—the tension inside me came undone. It loosened, then dissipated. I felt something that up until then I wasn’t sure really existed: closure. I had the sense that my journey to understand the boys, now men, who had killed Karen was complete. Emailing Alemar was oddly soothing. His words comforted me. I felt satisfied and uplifted in a way I hadn’t expected. He was a successful ex-convict. I was gratified that he had made it. It gave me hope to know that we could overcome the worst moments of our lives. Emailing Mr. Alemar also strengthened the connection I had to Karen and brought her to life in a way I hadn’t felt before—because he and I didn’t connect over her death, but what her memory, the fact of her existence, had sparked in our lives. Knowing that someone else was thinking about her warmed my heart and helped heal the wound.
My brief email exchange with Mr. Alemar made me question whether I really wanted to meet with Ramirez after all. Why did I want to sit across from him? What did I think I would get out of seeing him in the flesh? What did I want to ask? What did I have to say? Would meeting him make me change my mind and feel better about his being out on parole? What if meeting him only confirmed what I already suspected, that he should not be free? That he should die in prison? And now that he was free, why would he agree to meet with me, to be judged by me? What lies would I have to tell to convince him to meet with me? Would I have to say I wanted him to make something of his life, like Mr. Alemar, even though I didn’t really care? I hoped he wouldn’t hurt anyone else. He seemed troubled, but now he was on his own. Set adrift with his remorse and regret. Flotsam.
I was angry. And disappointed in myself for feeling that way. I knew my anger would not go away easily. Maybe I did need to meet Ramirez. If I didn’t, I would always wonder if meeting him could have helped me, made me feel better. At least if I met him I could say I tried everything to find forgiveness—the way Ramirez had forgiven himself. I realized that was the one question I wanted to ask: How? How had Ramirez overcome the shame, the guilt, of killing Karen?
How could I overcome the shame, the guilt, of beating up my father?
It’s hard to forgive others when we don’t forgive ourselves. When we can’t admit that we have hurt others as badly as we have been hurt. So strong is our desire to think we are better that we don’t admit when we are wrong, and therefore we deny ourselves the chance to actually become better.
When I attacked my father, I wasn’t defending my mother, I was unleashing my own pent-up anger, rage even, at how he had controlled me. I wasn’t a hero, I was an angry teenage girl lashing out. I had blocked the memory because I couldn’t face what had happened. Defending my mother against a physical attack was a good thing. But using violence, especially against my father, went against everything I seemed to hold dear about myself as a good girl, a good student, a good daughter.
I had to take responsibility for my actions. To acknowledge and accept what I had done. I did what I had to do—seemed like a good idea at the time. I beat up my father. I felt remorse. I had regret. But I wasn’t sorry. I forgave myself.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I wondered what my father would have thought about all this. I think he would have been proud that I’d looked deeper into parole and tried to follow his wishes. Although he might just as easily have chastised me for making contact with parolees. I still wanted his approval, even though he had been dead for over a decade. Thinking about parole for Karen’s killers unearthed the unresolved anger I had buried about my father. I was unsettled that my enduring impression of him was framed by the worst of his actions—the physical abuse of my mother. But a person’s true character is revealed during a crisis. I thought about the months leading up to my father’s death.
I heard about how he acted up from my mother and sister. No doctor would see my father twice. He showed up to appointments loaded for bear. The doctors told him to stop smoking, that the cancer was progressing. My father disagreed, suggested they try again. Then he would reach into his jacket and pull out a gun, the old snub-nosed .38 with the homemade grip he’d fashioned out of rubber bands and duct tape.
Curbside at the airport, after a visit, I told him he couldn’t keep threatening doctors because he didn’t like the diagnosis. He looked annoyed, then his face darkened until I started to cry. He pulled me into a bear hug. Get your house in order, said the voice inside my head. Instead I pulled my bags behind me into the terminal, wiping away the tears. I flew back to LA and drank glasses of bad airplane red wine, looked out the window, and watched movies in the sky.
My mother and sister bore the brunt of his caregiving. I heard about it on the phone, long-distance in California. He pulled IVs out of his arms, cracked his head scrambling to climb out of the coffin-like MRI. He lunged at my sister in a crowded waiting room full of bald and dying cancer patients traumatized enough already by chemo. He raised a limp fist and threw punches that didn’t land but hurt worse than if they had.
A few weeks earlier, another retired parole officer had died. He had cancer, too. So he took his old service revolver and stuck it into his mouth. His wife had cleaned his blood and brains off the wall. My sister made the trek out to Queens from Manhattan and helped my mother gather up my father’s guns. My mother said she wouldn’t let him be a family annihilator. He wasn’t going to take her out, too. They found revolvers and automatics in shoeboxes, behind the World Book Encyclopedias, underneath the false bottom in a drawer. His weapons were hidden everywhere. When I got there, I found three more under the eaves in the attic next to bags full of our old stuffed animal toys—he couldn’t bring himself to throw them away. We turned in th
e two guns that had paperwork, and I lingered over the third, hidden at the back of a closet that smelled like cedar, mothballs, and plastic-covered wool. It was a Smith & Wesson matte-black-handled .45 with a long silver barrel. It was handsome and dangerous, dark and shiny all at once. I shifted it back and forth in my palms, considering the weight, how it was both heavy and light. And until it was shot, unknowable.
My father was six feet, three inches tall. The next time I got out to Queens, he had shrunk to five foot eleven, 135 pounds.
When I walked into the bedroom, he sat up and reached for me. I could have wrapped my arms around him twice. I can’t remember if he said my name or just the exhale of relief like an explosion from his diseased lungs. Then he sank down into the bed, exhausted from the effort. The rest of the day I expected him to sit up, to talk, to ask for a cigarette, but he didn’t. He nodded or shook his head but never said another word. He winced when the nurse lifted him for a sponge bath and pulled his pajama bottoms down unceremoniously. He tried to cover himself with the sheet but she fussed his shaky hand away. I turned my head.
My father wouldn’t eat. My mother said he was starving himself, taking control of his death the way he tried to control everything in life. I watched her hold up a cup of water with a straw to his lips but at an angle so awkward he could neither sip nor drink. She’s killing him, I thought, snatching the cup away and giving him the first taste of water he might have had in days.
That night I sat with him. Holding his hand, stroking his arm. His breathing was labored. He wheezed in and out like a broken bagpipe. I considered the torturous road that lay ahead. I wanted to leave. To pat his hand three times reassuringly, then run. I couldn’t take another minute, let alone another day, another week, another month.
I left and went downstairs. My mother sat in the living room with a distant cousin and her husband, who had come to visit. I spread out with supplies at the dining room table and wrote my father a note in big block letters with a black felt-tipped pen on a white sheet of paper—I LOVE YOU DADDY.. I went upstairs to tape my message to the wall where he could see it. But he wasn’t breathing anymore.
I stood over his birdlike body, back arched, hands curled like claws, mouth pulled into a rictus. He was so small. I wanted to cradle him in my arms, like a pietà. I felt his skin but he wasn’t cold. Maybe he wasn’t dead. I went downstairs and told my cousin’s husband but not my mother, not yet. But the distant cousin wanted to be helpful and called 911. Next thing I knew, flashing lights were on the walls; I heard three steady, hard raps on the door.
The paramedics were first, then two cops in uniform who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. Seasoned detectives followed. They crossed the threshold, but I held them all at bay in the foyer. I didn’t want them to go upstairs, to find him alive or, worse, to revive him. I was writing for Law & Order, stories about my father, I knew what would happen next. I thought of the mess: the broken ribs, the scattered latex gloves and bloody gauze. I knew my rights and I refused to let them see him. I said he was under hospice care, he had a DNR. They said that didn’t matter, the call had been made and they needed to check on him. I knew that, too. I asked my mother for the DNR. She hemmed and hawed. I told her to hurry. She peeked inside a few drawers, then said she couldn’t find it. But she pulled me aside and confessed—Daddy didn’t have one. My father hadn’t signed one. He wouldn’t sign a paper that put control of his life in someone else’s hands. But without that piece of paper they were going to go upstairs and bring my father back to life. If there was any life left in him. But I knew he wouldn’t have wanted to live that way—brain-dead, most likely, broken ribs and broken spirit.
I called the technical consultant on the show, an assistant medical examiner for the City of New York. He called his boss. His boss called the police station. Within minutes everyone was gone. As they were leaving, I heard one of the young cops turn to his partner and ask, “Who was that old guy?”
He was a father, a husband, a son of a bitch—a man. Neither bad nor good, capable of both bad and good deeds.
My mother and I sat on both sides of him, telling stories over his dead body. Stories of the way he swam the butterfly in the ocean and that summer in Spain. Making my sister bedsheet fortresses in the backyard and sneaking me sips of whiskey sour at a bar. Stories of the way he always said “Love you, baby.” The times he told me, “You did good.” We didn’t talk about when he hit her. Or when we’d hit him back.
“He was a good man.” My mother kept saying it: “He was a good man.”
He was a good man.
He was.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The boys, now men, who had killed Karen were out of prison—on parole or free. I had made peace with that. I thought about going to visit Karen’s grave at Valhalla. I had never been. But I realized I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to see her final resting place, to acknowledge the end. Karen had been killed, but she had not died. She would always be alive inside me. Just like my father.
We buried his ashes at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. The first time I visited with my mother and sister, we couldn’t find the plot. Woodlawn was more like a park than a graveyard. We wandered through the bucolic setting over green rolling hills on tree-lined paths, winding past the graves and grand mausoleums of American leaders, titans of industry, musicians, authors, and the humble headstones of everyday people. My father’s grave was unmarked. The absence of a tombstone didn’t signal neglect so much as indecision. We couldn’t decide: Black marble or white stone? Chiseled with a lily of the valley or a weeping angel? Should we quote his favorite poem? Was he missed, devoted, or beloved? I was in no rush to complete this task. One more thing left to do meant there was one more reason to interact with his memory and temporarily bring him back to life.
When we found the plot, my sister and I sat in the overgrown grass on top of where we thought my father was buried. Cross-legged, smiling in our sunglasses, we felt comforted to know where he was. My mother took a picture.
My father had never said he was sorry or asked for forgiveness for what he had done to my mother, for the trauma he had caused. I never asked or expected him to. My feelings about forgiving him were complicated. I was ashamed and embarrassed to admit this had happened in my family. I felt guilty, like I was somehow betraying him to even acknowledge what he had done. I knew my father would not have forgiven me for talking about it. I found myself wanting to mitigate and making excuses—like my mother when she would remind me it had happened only six times. But it had happened. Still, I couldn’t reconcile the way my father had acted with my desire to protect his memory and reputation.
If I forgave him, it would be because I didn’t want to dwell on the fact that he had done something wrong. I didn’t know if forgiveness was even possible, since he was dead and couldn’t ask for it himself. And it would have been hard for my father to admit what he had done, to acknowledge that he was someone who needed forgiveness, to put himself in the same category as parolees who had committed crimes like Alemar, Torres, and Ramirez. I was grateful to my cousin Warren for asking me to write a letter, for the process I’d gone through while considering their paroles. It wasn’t lost on me that my father had forgiven them, too. Surely I could forgive my father. Then I realized that somehow, somewhere along the way, I already had.
Acknowledgments
I started writing prose because I had grown weary of the scripts I wrote for television needing to be interpreted by other artists before the words could come to life. I wanted to create the product that in the end was completely mine. I have since learned that no creative endeavor is ever a completely solitary process—and actually the better for it. So I need to thank the many people who helped me start, muddle through the middle, and finish this book.
In the beginning there was Eric Simonoff, who, with Margaret Riley King, encouraged me to put pen to paper when this book was just an idea. Then Eric agreed to be my literary agent and made space for me on h
is roster when he wasn’t taking on new clients. Eric’s confidence in me and this work has meant everything.
I am so thankful to have found Sara Nelson, who has proved to be incisive, insightful, and everything I hoped for, wanted, and needed in an editor.
I would like to thank all the teachers I have had at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. First and foremost Erika Schickel, who taught me not only what a memoir was but also how to write one. This book would not exist without her. Thank you, Erika, from the bottom of my heart for all that you taught me in service of this craft.
I am indebted to the wisdom of Samantha Dunn, whom I first met at Cheryl Strayed’s Esalen workshop, followed to classes at UCLA, and then to Boot Camp at Pam Houston’s nonprofit Writing By Writers. Sam taught me how to write an essay as well as how to embrace the true meaning of the word “essay,” from the French essayer, defined as “to try.” The idea of trying, with its inherent permission to fail, was a freeing notion as I learned to write memoir.
Thank you to the Allegra Johnson Prize at UCLA for selecting me as a 2015 finalist for their very first memoir award. This bit of encouragement gave me the confidence to continue, and also introduced me to Jennie Nash, whose brutally honest critique of my early pages was just what I needed to drill down on what this memoir was really about.
I am forever grateful to the workshops that accepted me and helped me generate pages and further chapters: Sirenland, where I worked with Dani Shapiro, whose suggestion of reportage added a whole other dimension to the book; and the Cuba Writers Program, where I learned to keep the flame alive from the quiet passion of Tim Weed and Alden Jones. And thanks to fellow Sirenlander Katrina Woznicki, who introduced me to CWP and whose no-nonsense notes and attitude inspired me to keep going.
To Michael Connelly, Eric Overmyer, and Dan Pyne for running a tight enough ship on Bosch so that I could take time off to attend the writing workshops that became essential to my process.