The Hot One

by Carolyn Murnick

  There were many more sessions, more tongue biting, some vegan cashew flan, and a wish sent out to the moon. There was writing in a small journal and staring off into the mountains and wondering what lay beyond. There was silence and a new recognition of a perpetually searching quality within me that I had never fully acknowledged. That was it, wasn’t it? The thing that made it so difficult for me not to pick at the edges, the inability to let things be, to replace one anxiety with a new one as soon as the first one abated, to resist comforting platitudes like “Everything happens for a reason,” to ask the unanswerable “What if?’ ” and ‘Why?’ over and over again, even on the sunniest of days. That was what made me not be able to let go of the unfairness of what had happened to Ashley. That was who I was, I had come to understand. Maybe it would have been how she grew up to be, too.

  Perhaps it didn’t have to be a thing I tamped down anymore. Perhaps I didn’t need to see it as a flaw, or something that would automatically get in the way of happiness. Perhaps I could learn to see it differently; maybe it wasn’t something that made me wrong. Maybe?

  It was also here that I started thinking a lot about closure. Almost everyone at the retreat seemed to be wrestling with it in some way or another. It was as if they were speaking my language. Closure around Ashley’s death had become my white whale. Maybe it would come if I just dug a little deeper, I sometimes thought. Maybe if I just read one more report, met one more friend of hers, saw one more site that was important to the case.

  But in my quieter moments, I was beginning to wonder if it were even possible at all. What would it look like? What would it feel like? Would I even recognize it if I got there?

  Over the years, I had gradually realized that the story of Ashley would never end. There would be no final note, no moment when things would be tied up in a neat little bow and stashed away in a drawer for safekeeping. There would be no time when I’d finally be sure I had learned everything or seen everything. There would be no startling epiphany, no lightning bolt to the head telling me “This is the ultimate truth about what happened to Ashley” or, for that matter, what it all meant to me.

  There would be no precise time of letting go, either, no time when I could say that I had finally stopped searching for answers. The letting go and the holding on were happening concurrently, and they would probably go on that way forever.

  What I had let go of, however, was the misplaced hope that closure could ever come from a trial or from Gargiulo’s conviction. Closure, if it existed at all, was a state I had decided I could choose to embody at any time, like forgiveness or grace. By the end of the retreat weekend, I came away with a glimmer of knowing that one day, eventually, this might all shape itself into some kind of manageable order—Ashley, my breakup, all losses—or at least I could see a model for how it could be done. It wouldn’t be final, and it wouldn’t mean it wouldn’t change, but it really seemed to be all about presence, as trite as that sounds. About facing my feelings and observing them without judgment, letting go of the wish for things to be a different way. Maybe it was the vegan flan talking. What might Ashley have made of all this Buddhist bunk?

  I did believe everyone with even a little self-awareness was holding on to some wound or another somewhere, be it physical or emotional or both, and the trick of adulthood was learning to live alongside all that. Sometimes that project alone required your entire life. Sometimes it was your life. That seemed to be closure, or the closest we could come to it on earth. Maybe? I wasn’t exactly sure how I would go about arriving at this peaceful living-alongside-my-wounds state or when it might happen, but I had unlocked some newly seeded faith—the closest thing I had to faith—that it would happen when the time was right.

  Closure couldn’t be based on anything outside myself, I knew that much. It wouldn’t come from a conversation or an act, and it definitely wouldn’t come from a legal proceeding. As I had learned more and more about the legal system—especially in a state that still had the death penalty, like California—I felt an incredible sympathy for the families and crime victims who were attaching their sense of resolution to a perceived finite ending that could be provided only by the courts. Trials were about the law, yes, but they were also about theater and gamesmanship and lots and lots of chance. What would your jury be like? How would they think? What sort of backstage dealings got crucial evidence withheld from proceedings that might have changed everything? What sort of police oversights could have colored the investigation? What witnesses might be lying on the stand? What tiny technicality or violation might result in calling the whole thing a mistrial? There was such a huge margin for error coming from all directions, and even after all that, a verdict was certainly not the same as the truth. At least for me it wasn’t. It was a ruling, a decision by a group, an agreement on one possible explanation for events that could subsequently have a variety of consequences. Even if I believed in the system, I wasn’t sure a verdict was the same thing as justice, either.

  • • •

  A footnote: Gargiulo’s pro per status turned out to be relatively short-lived, and when it ended, the clock was set back all over again. He was caught holding what was possibly a homemade handcuff key in his mouth at the jail sometime during the spring of 2014, and then he lost his pro per jail privileges that had allowed him access to the law library and private phone, and a few months later, he gave up representing himself. Apparently representing himself didn’t seem worth it without access to those extras, or maybe it hadn’t ever been worth it in the first place; maybe it was just about control. His old defense attorney, Lindner, had been on standby and went back in the fall of 2014, and then for some reason the judge dismissed him again in 2015. What outrageous plot twist would happen next? It was a circus of unlikely events building upon each other with no resolution in sight.

  Not to mention that Gargiulo will likely be in prison for the rest of his life even if he isn’t found guilty of killing Ashley; there are simply too many charges against him in California, plus an entire trial in Illinois for Tricia Pacaccio awaiting him. And even if he is convicted, then what? None of it would bring the women back or even restore order in the world. There would likely be appeals. And more appeals. And what if he was sentenced to death in California? (There go those what-ifs.) Would the closure goal line be pushed back even further to seeing him executed?

  That would be unlikely to ever happen, regardless. Besides, California has voted on propositions to eradicate the death penalty the past few election years, and since 1979, only 13 out of the more than 750 criminals on death row in the state have been executed, and the order of who’s next to go appears to be determined at random.

  When I broke it down like that, it all felt too unwieldy to get my head around, and I didn’t want to connect any more meaning to the trial than I already had. I had decided Ashley’s trial would be a reckoning, a coming together, and a milestone for everyone involved and everyone in attendance, regardless of the verdict. But it wouldn’t be the end or even the beginning of a next chapter; there had already been enough of those.

  • • •

  Later, Chris told me he would feel as though we had failed Ashley’s family if Gargiulo weren’t found guilty. It was Ashley’s birthday—what would have been her thirty-seventh—and we were toasting to her with prosecco and plates of pasta at a place in his neighborhood.

  “I can’t even imagine if that happens,” he said, his voice cracking. “If I were her father, I would come to court with a fucking gun and kill him—I want to do that now.” I moved my fork around nervously in my ravioli.

  But Chris also had a much clearer idea than I did of what closure would look like to him; he had obviously thought about it a lot over the years. I envied that, and I hoped he would achieve it. “It would be some sort of acknowledgment from her parents,” he said. “Like, ‘Thank you for being such a great friend to her.’ ” We paused at that moment, the restaurant’s up-tempo background music filling in the space between us. “I
was. I really was. I was a great friend to her,” he continued, stretching out the words for emphasis. “I can say that with all of my heart.”

  • • •

  My friendship with Chris had started out a little rocky, but over the years since the hearing it had deepened into something almost profound.

  When first I saw him testify, I wasn’t sure we had much in common. Chris’s grief over the loss of Ashley was still palpable—he put it in the room for us to witness and share, although really it didn’t seem like he had much of a choice in the matter. His emotions leaked out of him involuntarily, like a physical process, like painful withdrawal symptoms rolling through the body from an addiction that would never loosen its grip. The carnality of it spoke for itself: everyone was devastated and shaken up by the crime, but Chris was the one who was heartbroken.

  I was skeptical of his love for her and confused by its depth at first—he’s this devastated, and he knew her less than a year?—but as time went by that morphed into something else, something murkier and harder to describe. Empathy, certainly, and some envy, too—if only my feelings for Ashley were as uncomplicated as it seemed Chris’s were. If only my best memories of her were right at the end, instead of somewhere in the middle or closer to the beginning. It would be easier that way, wouldn’t it? More painful, perhaps? But more normal as well, easier to prepare and season and cook and digest.

  But there was also a vague competitiveness, a subtle tug to prove myself to him. After talking to him over a period of years, I would come to understand that we both craved a kind of recognition from the other. We were like war buddies, not from the same platoon but perhaps in the same region in different tours of duty. We needed a reference point in common to allow us to relax—“Was she like that with you, too?”—but before that came, there were other emotions at the forefront.

  I respected him, regardless. Who knows how I would have appeared on the stand? Years later, when I’d be sitting in a windowless conference room at a government building in LA around a table with two district attorneys and two detectives, childhood photos of Ashley and me spread out before us, being pressed to share secret memories from more than twenty-five years ago, I would have my first glimmer of what it might have been like for Chris. How you try to hold in the tears because it’s embarrassing to feel so vulnerable in front of passive strangers, but still they come. Not only for her but for yourself and for your frustration at having to express such delicate ideas about a person you loved to a bunch of men as they’re taking notes. How much on display you are, how much pressure is upon you, and how scared you are of fucking up even though you’re not quite sure what that would mean.

  I see now that my skepticism about Chris’s demeanor on the stand was about something else entirely. It was about different ways of grieving. Growing up into my thirties had shifted the direction of my grief: at the time of the hearing I was focused on myself and what it meant for me to be pursuing answers about my dead childhood best friend across the country in LA rather than staying the course with my life in New York. I understood now that the paths were intertwined all along.

  The impact Ashley’s loss had on Chris was commensurate with the feelings he shared with her—it didn’t matter how long they had been in each other’s lives or how I interpreted the way it looked on the outside. The outside stuff wasn’t up to us anyway. I came to accept that the loss of Ashley had affected us differently because we had known her differently and we were different from each other, but none of that made either of us less false or more correct than the other. Whether or not we had anything in common as people, we would always share one essential part of our identities: we had lost the same girl.

  18

  THE DOG PARK

  THERE WAS ONE thing I still wanted to see for myself, one place I hadn’t been, one major site I had seen only in pictures shrunken down on my computer or projected large in court: the place where it had all happened.

  Go to the dog park, everyone told me. The private one—though it was public back then—on Pinehurst across from Ashley’s house; that was where he had gone to watch her. It was a few blocks from Gargiulo’s apartment, an easy five-minute walk up Orchid, across Franklin, and around on Bonita Terrace. The pit bull he had paraded through the neighborhood was likely just used as a cover, a prop he could employ to pass as a normal man, when in reality—his own perverted reality—he was “gathering real-time intelligence” on his “target” and creating a plan. He wasn’t just another guy picking up shit with a plastic baggie, knotting it and tossing it into the trash. He wasn’t the same as that kind-looking balding single dad you saw from time to time with a husky and a flip phone from ten years ago. He was something much more insidious and much more terrifying to consider: a criminal mastermind walking among us. He was a Halloween costume, a horror movie franchise, a carnival ride with no brakes.

  The dog park was gated and you needed a key, but I made it my business to find a way in. I was staying with Marisa again, having taken another few days off work to come west and hopefully put something of a coda on the past few years. I might just have to leave things on a big ellipsis for now, and that would have to be okay.

  The trial was still ahead of me, whenever it would end up being. The years kept adding up, and new curveball delays kept presenting themselves, without a date even on the books.

  I had traveled to the West Coast eight times since that first trip to see Oliver, and I knew now that there would forever be another thing to look into. Each piece I learned gave me a slightly different perspective on things, but I would never have the full picture. I saw now that I could make a meaningful endpoint for myself whenever I wanted to. I could choose a moment to take what I knew and who I was and how those two things overlapped, and I could sit with it. I could be present with it, I could hold it in my lap. I could simply let it be.

  This trip would be my last one for a while, I resolved.

  • • •

  All of my research had served to give me a bit of a comfort level in LA, and for that I was grateful. Between visits to court and the sceney spots of Hollywood and the canyons I hiked while sorting everything out, I had developed an intro-level familiarity with and a twisted affection for the place. I had my favorite coffee place downtown and beach in Malibu. I had a modernist apartment I’d rent in Silver Lake with a deck where I’d eat avocado toast in the morning. I had a reason for being there again and again, and it wasn’t about trying to make deals or being a starfucker. Something and someone in this place had killed Ashley, true, but that didn’t prevent me from being drawn in, from being as captivated by its beauty and crassness as she might have been back when she had moved here at age eighteen.

  • • •

  Marisa offered to drive, and the two of us set off at dusk out of the hills on what felt like the beginning of a ghost story. We turned onto Hollywood Boulevard and then a jog over to Franklin, and within minutes we were there. Marisa was nervous with excitement—at having a new purpose, at the lurid unusualness of this errand. I was somewhat less so. I had been places like this before—I remembered standing in front of Tricia Pacaccio’s house in Glenview for more than an hour—and I understood that, for the most part, it was rarely the catharsis you’d think it would be.

  • • •

  Ashley’s house is a different sort of place entirely. A single-family bungalow set back from the sidewalk a bit, it sits atop a small, elevated lot with bushes and a few squares of front lawn scattered amid California native plants, green and burgundy. The paint job is pale yellow, and there’s a gently sloping roof and an exposed cinder-block foundation. There are steps going up the side and a covered porch and room to park a few cars in front of a low cement wall, and there are streetlights all around, blazing down on Marisa and me as we find a place to stop near the corner.

  It doesn’t look like a party house to me, which is how it was often characterized by the defense. At least, now there’s nothing flashy about the place, no bright colors o
r unkempt patches. No mangy dog chained to a fence, no motorcycle stickers next to the mailbox, no recycling bin overflowing with liquor bottles. “How many parties were thrown at the residence while you were living there?” I can still hear Miller asking Jen and her flat, exhausted response. How many people attended them? What were they drinking, and how did they move about in the world? It got so tiring to be typecast.

  It doesn’t necessarily look like a family house, either, whatever that means. The street does have a bit of a settled-down vibe. Could it have changed dramatically since 2001? Ashley was twenty-two when she lived in this house, and that’s also hard for me to get my head around. Twenty-two-year-olds in New York—unless they had family money—were living in grubby railroad apartments or fifth-floor walkups next to an alley filled with garbage. Five hundred square feet of your own was a prize. What kind of twenty-two-year-olds had an entire house on a prime Hollywood street? Ashley had had a roommate, true, but also a front yard and a leased BMW and a place to park it in front of that. It was a world away from what my life was at the time, all chipped parquet flooring and subways and Chinese takeout.

  “Do you feel her spirit?” Marisa asks almost immediately after we get out of the car. She’s energized, I can tell. She’s looking around excitedly, walking fast up the sidewalk and taking in everything around her with intensity. It’s sort of sweet, when you think about it. She wants to take pictures and has offered to knock on the front door. I nix this plan, but I am touched by her enthusiasm. She wants to feel something, badly. She wants to feel a part of this.