Long-simmering, partially formed ideas I had held on to about Ashley and me—did she have life all figured out, or did I?—boiled up to the surface, and suddenly there was a whole new opening in which to sort them out. If this had been a magazine story, the “news hook” or the “why now?” was here, and it would be unfolding across the country whether I chose to follow it or not.
But of course I couldn’t leave it alone. I needed to find out as much as I could about what happened at the end, and who Ashley was in the year leading up to her death that I didn’t get to see. I knew I would ultimately need to go to Los Angeles and sit in the courtroom as Ashley’s trial played out. I needed to listen to judges, lawyers, and witnesses talk about the girl I’d once considered an extension of myself and see if I still recognized her.
Maybe after all of that went down I’d have that exceedingly valuable thing called closure, that cheesy, floaty concept that up until this point I had associated only with romantic breakups. But maybe there was a deeper version of it, too? I felt mystified, inspired, terrified, pushed forward by something I couldn’t yet explain. And the real part of my journey hadn’t even started yet.
6
210 GRAMS
I STARTED BY getting her coroner’s report FedExed to me overnight at New York magazine. It was a bit of an ordeal, involving a bunch of phone calls, back-and-forths, and painstakingly worded requests to various county offices. I nearly gave up a couple of times, but then after a few hours or days, or however long I tried to put it aside, something within me wouldn’t let it drop. At first I was shown only an abridged version and made to think that that was it, just a tiny dispatch emailed by the chief coroner of LA County, whose signature line included a curious, slightly misquoted line from E. B. White: “People are more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.”
What did that mean? And why would a coroner connect with that idea? The guy dealt in death all day. Did people actually find him silly? Did he wish they did? Was his job a constant battle to not lose faith in humanity? This was the first coroner I had ever interacted with, and it seemed to make a strange sort of sense that he’d have some quirks. I had interviewed a forensic scientist for a story a few years earlier, and she had been intense and pointed. I pictured this guy with a shaved head and silver wire-rimmed glasses, wearing a white lab coat and having an exacting, somber demeanor. He’d move into and out of chilled morgues and operating theaters and eat the same lunch every day: tuna salad on wheat with just a thin layer of Dijon.
• • •
What preceded the quote was Ashley’s life, reduced to just a few lines:
From: LA County Coroner
To: Carolyn Murnick
Subject: Ashley Ellerin
Name: ELLERIN, Ashley Lauren, age 22, DOB 07/16/1978, LKA: Hollywood Hills, CA
DOD: 02/22/2001 at 0928 hours
COD: Sharp Force Trauma
How Injury Occurred: Assault
Manner: Homicide
Date of birth. Date of death. Cause of death. No mention of anything that came in between.
• • •
I sometimes noticed women who reminded me of Ashley, and sometimes they’d just be girls. Was Ashley twenty-two, the age she was when she died? Or was she twenty-one, the age she was when I last saw her? Or was she thirty, like me? I had to remind myself frequently that she hadn’t grown up along with me. She wasn’t across the country in the same stage of life that I was. She hadn’t actually gotten older. Or changed. Wherever she was, she’d probably look closer to the last-night’s-party-style hipster kids with skinny thighs and smudged eye makeup whom I passed on Bedford Avenue while biking to work, rather than me: a woman (!) in heels going to a full-time job in the other direction. But that didn’t exactly make sense, because it was now 2009 and she was still in 2001, and I didn’t live in Brooklyn in 2001, and the hipsters—who weren’t even called that yet—had looked different back then.
It was easier just to think of her as here, though. Now. Back. In the same time period and on the same page. To not really dig too hard into the explanation for how we’d gotten from point A to point B. Or even whether or not we’d still be in each other’s lives—we just were. She’d be sitting around my dining room table at one of the dinner parties I had in Brooklyn with the rest of my friends, some new, some older, and some people I’d just met. It was the same table my parents had in New Jersey when we were kids, so maybe she’d even remember it.
There would be plenty of wine and tall candles dripping wax, and the time back at Columbia would feel like forever ago, because it was. That part of Ashley’s life would be well in her past, and who knows how it would fit in with whoever she had become. Maybe she would have a lot of the same friends she’d had back then, or maybe she’d have totally new ones. Maybe she’d be married to Ashton Kutcher and the two of them would have left Hollywood and bought a farm back in Iowa, where he’s from. (That one, I knew, was a long shot.) She might tell a few stories of those days from time to time, or she might keep silent when the conversation edged that way. But she would be vivacious and humble and mellow, and she would be my oldest friend. How incredible it would feel to catch her eye across the table, no longer girls, all of the years and our former selves between us like guests at the party.
• • •
I understood there was a version of me that had died along with Ashley back in 2001—the girl coming into her identity alongside her first best friend, whom only Ashley got to see. No one else was around to tell that story. That girl was like a nesting doll inside the woman I had become, but it wasn’t until Ashley’s death that I’d stopped to consider how things had gotten that way.
Perhaps there was some part of me that hoped learning more about what had happened to Ashley would explain what had happened to me, too. How did who she was at the end connect to who she was at the beginning, when I knew her? In what ways did the person I was now have its roots in who we were together? If I didn’t take this chance to try to figure it out, I felt I’d be missing out on some fundamental self-knowledge I might never find my way back to.
• • •
The real thing came in a thick cardboard envelope and was waiting for me on my desk when I got into work one cloudy Thursday, two days after the coroner’s email. Looking at it made me feel fuzzy. Had the mail room guys noticed the return address? Did they have to copy it down in a log somewhere in case one day someone came asking? What did they think? How long had this been sitting here, and had any of my coworkers seen it?
I wanted to open it right way, but I was scared. I had no concept of what would be inside, except from those scenes in television cop dramas. Would there be pictures? Would they become burned in my brain? The detectives on television who looked at those files were (fake) professionals, inured to it, but I wouldn’t be. Sometimes, in the movies, when a family ID’d a corpse or saw a crime scene photo, their bodies would react in spontaneous, unfettered grief. They would vomit instantly or fall to the ground. I had never had any physical reactions to anything that were as dramatic, but I wondered if I just hadn’t encountered the right stimulus thus far.
Should I wait until I got home? What was the correct setting for this kind of thing, anyway? I put the envelope aside and tried to answer a few emails. I couldn’t concentrate. I sent an instant message to a friend across the office, a former police reporter turned food blogger. I told him it had arrived.
He wrote back immediately: “Awesome! Can I have a copy?”
I didn’t know him well enough to say that I wished he could open it first and tell me it was okay, maybe remove a few pages if he needed to or sit by me if I grew faint while we both looked at it. I didn’t know him well enough to say I wished I didn’t have to be the chick about to open her dead childhood best friend’s coroner’s report in her cubicle at New York magazine. Could he do it instead? Better yet, how about I just give him the original and never look at it at all? To him, it would just be this strang
e artifact attached to a dead girl in LA he’d never known who was murdered in a brutal way. How crazy and macabre. Like in The Black Dahlia. That would be way more interesting to leaf through for a few minutes than writing about bitters and pork buns and whatever else he was being paid to care about.
“Um. Yeah, I guess so” I wrote back. “Will swing by later.”
Time to pull it together. I had gotten this far, and it was only the beginning. I got up from my desk and headed to the kitchen to grab some water and then on down the hall to a small interview room where I could lock the door behind me. I pulled the string tab across the FedEx envelope and let the paper curl drop to the floor. There were about fifty white pages inside. Loose. No envelope, no cover letter.
I was slightly light-headed, out of my body. The first page was her toxicology report. There was a lot of white space. I took it in with squinty eyes before I gathered that nothing there would freak me out too badly. Alcohol, barbiturates, cocaine: she tested negative for all. I was surprised.
Wasn’t Ashley a party girl? Wasn’t her life just one big stretch of VIP rooms and designer drugs? Hell, even I had at least a glass of wine most nights. Didn’t something like marijuana stay in your system for weeks? She hadn’t had at least one drink waiting for Ashton to pick her up or a bump the night before?
I had felt certain that there would be at least some information in the report, something about her insides that I didn’t know, that you couldn’t tell just by looking at her. Something tiny that might make me think Aha or Yes, of course; she’d had all these experiences that I couldn’t relate to; I could emotionally distance myself a bit. Wouldn’t it all just make sense now? But it didn’t. I felt sad in a new way.
• • •
What if I had gone to see her that New Year’s Eve 2000, as she’d wanted me to, and then the next chapter of our friendship might have begun? What if I had just chilled out and sat next to her at some loud club and been there when the ball dropped and the glitter fell and I watched as she flirted, drank, and laughed? Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad a time after all. Perhaps I would have made out with someone adorable and random or spilled champagne all over my dress, and the next morning I’d still be able to smell it and it would make me smile.
Maybe after that Ashley and I would have gotten a ride from someone cute who was hitting on her and then we would have stopped at some all-night diner and eaten pancakes and grilled cheese and things might have started to seem familiar again. And what if I had visited LA just one time after that, perhaps then the conversations would have started. The late-night ones, after a bit of vodka or wine or maybe pot. Yes, I did enjoy it when I could get it, but I didn’t have a hookup or anything. She’d laugh at that, and I wouldn’t care. She’d say that she was lonely and I’d say that I was, too, and she’d say that she was angry sometimes and wondered when the real part of life was going to begin. I’d tell her that I wasn’t sure Nick would ever love me in the way I wanted him to, and I wouldn’t feel afraid at all. I would have wanted to pick up the phone when she called later on, and if I’d missed it I would have dialed back right away. That week in New York had to have happened the way it did, I’d think; it was just something like growing pains between us.
• • •
The next section was called “Investigator’s Narrative.” It was two pages of print with the LA County seals at the top. Single-spaced. The who-what-when-where but not, of course, the why. There would never be a clear answer for the why, I knew, and even if there was, it wouldn’t be something that could be typed out succinctly on a keyboard in a musty city office building.
Most of the form was written in a detached first-person voice by a detective named Small. There were also references to a Lieutenant Smith. Such storybook names these people had, they seemed almost made up. The descriptions of the scene and the evidence were vague and brief, as the investigation was still ongoing, it was noted. I could read all those lines numerous times and feel nothing—“No suspect in custody . . . a hair and fingernail kit were collected.” Hard-boiled language that I’d heard a million times in voice-over.
The “Body Examination” part was a little more detailed, and that was what started to make my pulse pick up in a queasy way. “Decedent was observed lying in a supine position, leaning toward her left.” The use of the word decedent paired with the feminine pronoun caught me. “Decedent” was so clinical, like you were just talking about a thing or even an animal, whereas “her” was a person. “Her” was Ashley. Was I reading about an object or a human life, or something else in between?
“She was dressed in a light green bathrobe, a blue tank top, and blue shorts.” If you had just seen that sentence, you wouldn’t have guessed it was from a coroner’s report describing a murder scene. It could have come from anywhere, even a wedding announcement, describing what the bride had worn while getting her hair and makeup done and sipping a flute of champagne. What kind of wedding would Ashley have wanted? I couldn’t remember if it was something we had ever talked about or even if she saw herself eventually in a settled-down life at all. I wondered if the tank top and shorts matched, like was it a cotton camisole set? I typically wore just yoga pants and a bra around the house, but I pictured Ashley in only matching lingerie sets and slips from France or Italy that maybe a man had bought her. This outfit sounded as if it could have been one I might have had, like many-times-washed high school stuff from the Gap.
I drank some water and kept reading. I had been away from my desk for only a few minutes, but I suddenly felt acutely aware of time. “Several stab and cut-type wounds were noted, particularly to the head, neck, the front and back torso, and the left leg. Apparent defense wounds were noted as well.” Defense wounds. The phrase gave me chills. The first reference to her body as animated—clawing, desperate, alone. Stabbed in the fucking head. The words made my scalp ache. I didn’t know if I could process the rest of the section, to take it in and not just let it skim the surface. Somehow I still felt it was my obligation to properly bear witness to it all—her wounds, her suffering—and to do that I had to picture each and every phrase as it might have happened to her, or to me. “An obvious skull fracture was also observed to the back area of the head.” It wasn’t just a random skull that was broken like a vase that had fallen off the shelf. I thought of Ashley’s head, with shiny hair that used to be brown but then became blond. The amount of force it would take to break a skull. The rage and the animalism of the person who had done this to her. Who was it? Why did he do it? I skipped ahead, vowing to come back later after I had given the entire thing a once-over.
The following page had only a line for the next-of-kin notification, which had occurred around midnight, about an hour after Ashley’s identity was confirmed from her fingerprints. The information was redacted; all of the words and the entire address line were obscured, but I could just make out the edges of a few letters at the beginning of the name: M-I-C-H. I knew what was under there, in the part that the coroner didn’t want me to see.
Michael. Ashley’s dad.
He picked us up from piano lessons, sometimes dropping us off, too, and later he began staying through the entire hour, sitting on the couch against the wall and writing notes on a narrow reporter’s pad. The following year, he started taking lessons himself from our teacher, Ms. V., a young, athletic-looking woman with close-cropped hair who wore overalls and cardigans and had a couple of cats who would wind themselves around the piano legs as we played. I thought it odd that a guy in middle age would be taking piano lessons from his daughter’s teacher, spending all that time around her house when he didn’t have to. Both the paternal attentiveness and an adult spontaneously coming up with a newfound hobby felt unfamiliar to me.
Years later, when I’d watched my own mother sign up for lessons with Ms. V. at the age of seventy after losing her own mother, I’d come to understand it differently. Adulthood was complex and demanding; aging, irreversible. It was easy to see the appeal of traveling back in
time, carving out an hour when your greatest concern could simply be to master the fingering of “Minuet in G.”
• • •
I stopped reading there, for the time being, and went back to my desk to edit a restaurant review.
• • •
For lunch, I walked outside to grab a salad and ate it while sitting on a stoop on West Broadway, just a few doors down from where Ashley had led me into Dolce & Gabbana all those years back. It felt funny and odd and perhaps important that my office, years later, had ended up being just blocks away from some of the locations I most associated with our last week together in New York. There were multiple pins on my emotional map of Manhattan related to her that I now had to pass every day. New York magazine’s offices were downtown in a formerly industrial section on the waterfront that developers were trying to rebrand as Hudson Square. I now worked in a hulking seventeen-story converted printing building right atop the Holland Tunnel that sat at the intersection of Chinatown, SoHo, and Tribeca. Street vendors hawked fake Fendi bags and blown-glass hookahs along Canal Street, and across the street was the former Screening Room—now called Tribeca Cinemas—the movie theater where Oliver and Ashley had had their seventies porn-in-3D date ten years earlier. I could almost picture them on the sidewalk together like ghosts as I walked to the A train in the evenings. They were playful and buzzed and the night was just beginning, and I saw them holding hands, even though I’m nearly positive that never occurred.
The Hot One Page 7