The Hot One

by Carolyn Murnick

  “I don’t think so,” I say gently. I don’t want to hurt Marisa’s feelings. Internally, I’m less ambivalent. Of course I don’t feel Ashley’s spirit. Of course I don’t feel bathed in golden light or sense the benign presence of a loving old friend. Is that really even a thing? How nice and pat that would be. How magical and healing and oh, so totally obvious. Why did I spend the past five years traveling cross-country and going to court and making people cry searching for answers if all I had to do was come here all along? Ashley and I could have been catching up all this time? Whoops!

  And why would Ashley’s spirit be here for me, anyway? If it were anywhere, it would be in New Jersey, in the woods, in my childhood bedroom or in hers, or at our school. In places we had been together and lived in and grown up in, not in this house that I had never seen before, where she spent the last and most painful night of her life. Not in Hollywood, not here, not on this street of agony and despair and injustice.

  I take a deep breath. We are standing on the opposite side of the street from the house, staring at it as if we were expecting the crime to re-create itself in front of our eyes so we’ll have something to watch. Nothing is happening.

  “Ashley is here,” Marisa says, sounding pretty sure of things. “She’s saying it’s OK.” Oh, good. How lovely for us, and how cooperative of her. How fortunate for Marisa, as well. She should market her services as a medium.

  I’m a little turned off by my own internal snark, but I can’t help it.

  The dog park is behind us, about a half-acre fenced-in lot with some palm trees and a little picnic table and chairs. It’s locked, and there’s no one inside. It seems unlikely that anyone will appear to let us in, and for that I am disappointed. I’d heard that if you stood in the very back, on a raised knoll near the fence, you could see directly into what would have been Ashley’s bedroom and bathroom, just like the killer did all those years ago. We came at around the same time the murder took place—9 p.m.—so we would have that point of reference, as well. How dark was it, really? How many people were on the street? How many people had their lights on at home?

  “It’s welcoming,” Marisa continues, outlining the energy she senses like one might describe a new neighborhood restaurant, all terra-cotta tiles and votive candles and house-made pasta specials each night. Of course my instinct is to brattily challenge her, like what if I told her, “Oh, wait, I made a mistake, it was actually that house up the road”—would she still say she felt Ashley there? Would Ashley still be welcoming us? What if I said, “Oh, yeah? What’s it like? No, really, tell me everything. Has this ever happened to you before? Is it scary? Are you ever afraid the spirit won’t leave you alone? What if you’ll need to get an exorcism after this? How much would that cost? Could Rainn do it?”

  But I say none of that. Instead, I let Marisa go on, just like I let Rainn go on, just like I’ll let anyone go on who is feeling connected to this. I can use all the support I can get, really. Who am I to judge? Hell, maybe it’s even all true. Maybe Marisa’s time with Rainn has put her in touch with the spiritual realm, whatever that is, or perhaps she was a bit of a clairvoyant all along. Maybe I’m the only one cynical enough to want to cut people down who are feeling moved from the beyond. Maybe anyone else here would feel the same as she’s feeling and look at me as the asshole.

  I case the dog park fence. It’s wrought iron and about four feet high, with spiky spires on top. Could we climb it? Would I rip my pants? Would it be worth it?

  Marisa is across the street at the mailbox now. She’s contemplating whether or not she should walk up the path, the same one Mark Durbin, Ashton Kutcher, and probably the killer walked the evening of February 21, 2001. She looks back at me, her friend of thirteen years, her friend who is trying to make sense of something, she’s not quite sure what, her friend who has led her here. I wonder what she sees.

  “Ashley is saying go forward,” she says quietly. “She’s saying this story should be told.” She turns back to the door and falls silent. For the first time since we got here I feel a chill, starting in my shoulders and moving around down my legs and out across my knees. I look up at the sky. Muted music from the Hollywood Bowl is somewhere in the distance. We can almost see our breath against the streetlight. Is this what the spirit feels like? Do I feel it the way Marisa feels it? Whatever she just said, this message from the afterlife or from Marisa’s subconscious gets to me as none of the others have. This is the one I want, the one I can’t say out loud because it feels too selfish. Maybe this is what my kind of closure might look like—just as Chris knew he would give anything to hear from her parents, this is what I know I’d give anything to have. This is what I want to be true more than anything. I want to feel that I’m not trespassing. I want to feel that she knows I am honoring her, tonight and always. I want what can only be called her blessing.

  • • •

  A woman about our age or a little bit older appears, coming down the hill from up the street. She’s with a dog, a big fluffy one that she holds on a leash. She is a benign presence coming toward us from the spirit realm, or else the cul-de-sac at the other end of Pinehurst. She is heading for the dog park.

  Marisa is back next to me now, and we’re both near the gate. Without exchanging glances we wordlessly shift our energy into mission mode. Our objective is clear: gain entry without arousing suspicion. The woman is next to us now, and she’s pulling out a key.

  “What a beautiful dog,” Marisa says. “What kind is it?”

  “Oh, thank you,” says the woman. “She’s a mix. Her name is Zooey.”

  Marisa bends down in front of Zooey, one knee on the sidewalk. “What a good girl you are, Zooey, what a good girl,” she’s saying, ruffling up her fur behind her head and on her belly. I’ve always felt a bit awkward around dogs, and for not the first time I feel grateful to Marisa for taking the reins. She knows what needs to be done, and she is saving me from my own overthinking.

  “What kind of park is this?” Marisa asks, and just like that they’re chatting like friends. I smile and nod and try to look like I’m with them, but inside I’m amazed at what’s happening. In minutes we have gone from outsiders to almost insiders—our goal is within reach. Are there small dogs that come here? Marisa’s asking. I’m not paying attention to details, but it sounds as though Marisa has invented a small dog waiting at home and an urgent need to find a new dog park for him since they’re about to move to this neighborhood. Does the woman like this place? Is there a fee? It was the woman’s husband that arranged their membership, so she’s not quite sure who you call, but sure, yeah, come on in.

  And just like that, the gates open before us. The door clanks as we step in and another chill sets upon me, but this one isn’t about the spirit. It’s about retracing the steps of the killer and the weight of being in the exact place to do just that. It’s about mimicking the path that he took with sinister intent and wondering what that might confer upon me. Should I be carrying a talisman? Should I recite a mantra? I pause with Marisa and the woman and Zooey for a few moments along the center path, and then, after I decide that I’ve waited the requisite amount of time to look normal, I break away with a slow turn that I hope appears aimless. In reality, it is anything but.

  I am heading to the upper-left corner of the park, that raised area. “What a good girl, Zooey, what a pretty girl you are,” I can hear Marisa say in the distance as I walk uphill. I wonder if Zooey can sense what we’re really doing here, that Marisa and I are both hiding something or that an alleged killer has been right where she’s sniffing the ground. We know that dogs perceive things humans can’t—that’s why cops and detectives take them to crime scenes. What does Zooey feel underneath all that fluff? What sort of messages does the spirit send to a being with fur?

  The grassy little hump at the top of the park does give you a vantage point clear across the street. Clear across the street into what would have been Ashley’s bedroom. Depending on how the trees were trimmed, you might h
ave even been able to see her showering. The killer and likely the investigators and cops and attorneys did this before me, and here I am standing in all of their footprints. The view from up there is a straight shot into 1911 Pinehurst. You don’t even have to be much of an experienced voyeur to see inside. Am I seeing what they saw? There doesn’t appear to be anyone home, but I stare nonetheless. I stare at what looks like a shower stall and imagine the killer standing in the same place, gaining “real-time intelligence” about Ashley as his body coursed with excitement. I think of how the people inside must have looked like dolls in a dollhouse to him and how that might have made him feel powerful. I stare at the lights on inside and think of all the conversations, fights, and mundane things that must have gone on in those rooms, then and now. Eggs, bacon, parking tickets, and water bills. Tears, shaving, watching the Thanksgiving Day parade, and years ago, a young woman was murdered. The house lives on. We live on. Or some of us do.

  I feel something in between all that—in between banality and a sense of occasion, strength and resentment, inspiration and apathy. There is no power in standing across the street from where Ashley was murdered, envisioning and retracing the puppet mastering that led up to it all with no way to change the outcome. There is no power in being a woman whose first best friend was murdered. There is no power in embodying the male gaze that fixed on Ashley all those years ago in this space, a perverted version of the gaze she had probably felt for most of her life. But perhaps there is power in standing in all of that and realizing that I am here, bearing witness, and that I am not alone. The DA was here, detectives were here, Marisa is here—maybe Ashley is somewhere here, too.

  I can turn my gaze away from this house. I can turn my gaze inward. I can turn my gaze up to the sky.

  EPILOGUE

  IN A LETTER to me dated October 27, 1998, Ashley wrote:

  How strange it is to think about the two of us living in great cities on opposite coasts. And also that what seems to be only yesterday we were digging through the swamp in your backyard determined to find buried treasure. I often think about how much I loved to be at your house, it was always quite an enigma to me. Nevertheless, remembering those times brings back a lot of innocence I know I have lost.

  She was only twenty when she wrote that, and at the time I wasn’t quite sure what she meant. Not yet of legal drinking age, and already such nostalgia. That was nearly a year before she came to see me in New York, and I didn’t yet know the details of the parties and the men and the things perhaps I might associate with a loss of innocence in the practical sense. Now I wonder if Ashley might have had something far less literal in mind. I wish I could ask her.

  • • •

  What keeps me up at night isn’t the guilt or the what-ifs anymore. It isn’t the whys or the hows that come upon me suddenly like an ambulance screaming down a quiet street. It isn’t the unanswered questions about Ashley’s final moments, either, or the fact that I never got to say good-bye.

  It’s all the years that have passed without her.

  It’s all the unlived lives that she didn’t get to have. It’s all the space between then and now that never belonged to her and all the things I got to do that she didn’t. How would she have spent the last fifteen years? What kind of woman might that twenty-two-year-old girl have become? How would she tell her story?

  • • •

  It’s 2016, and Ashley’s been dead now for more years than I ever knew her to begin with. When I’m forty-three—which will come soon enough—she will have been dead for longer than she was ever alive. The absurdity of this thought never seems to fade.

  What might have happened to our friendship? What might have happened after that fade to black on the train platform the last time I saw her? Would we have made our way back together by our midtwenties? Would Ashley be happy now? Would Ashley be at peace? Would she have her first gray hair by now? Her first child? Would everything have turned out the way we hoped it would as little girls?

  I think of all the ways I’ve grown up since she died, all the ways I’ve been lucky, all the milestones I’ve reached that she never will: I’ve graduated from college; I’ve fallen in love; I’ve had my heart broken; I’ve made adult friends; I’ve become an aunt; I’ve felt loss; I’ve built a career; I’ve bought a home; I’ve fallen in love again. And all the while, Ashley is still dead, frozen in time just a short while after the turn of the millennium.

  She’s a Peter Pan in the worst way—the girl who never got to grow up. Her life belongs to the people who remember her now, the people who loved her, and the people who are fighting for justice in her name. We are the ones to tell her story. We are the ones who describe her and characterize her and look at her photographs and hold her in our hearts and minds as a symbol or a beacon or a parable as we move forward without her.

  • • •

  This past summer that truth couldn’t have been clearer.

  I went to LA with my new boyfriend in July. It was meant to be a pleasure trip. I’d see friends and go to the beach and show my boyfriend some of the places there that had become important to me: the streets and the hotels and the canyons and the bars I had traveled through on my way to learning more about Ashley. I connected with the current DA on the Gargiulo case, and we set a time to speak on the first Monday morning after I got to town. As soon as I got there and saw that picture on the table, I knew something was up.

  My father had taken the photo with his old Canon from about five feet behind the piano at our first recital together; I recognized it immediately. It was Ashley and me from the back, sitting side by side in matching dresses the color of a pale pink rose in the Bernards High School auditorium in New Jersey. This copy was a bit grainy, given that the Kodak original from 1988 had been scanned and digitally transmitted and enlarged and printed out on paper and was now plopped down on a conference table at the Los Angeles County Hall of Records in the summer of 2015.

  I had sent it to Deputy District Attorney Dan Akemon with some other pictures three years earlier by way of introduction—he had taken on the Gargiulo case after DDA Marna Miller had left in 2012—but it still came as something of a shock to see it again in that context. There were other artifacts spread out on the table as well: a printed-out map of Somerset County, New Jersey, where we had lived, with my town and Ashley’s town highlighted in yellow. There was our fifth-grade class picture, too, with our faces circled in black pen. Emails the DA and I had exchanged from 2012 to 2015 were printed out, all of it sitting next to a file folder with my name written on the tab.

  There were three other people around the table, too: Detective Small, from the preliminary hearing, and another attorney and another detective I had never met. Even before anyone started speaking, I knew what was happening: the Gargiulo case was gearing up for trial, and it was time for me to tell my story on the record. “You are an important link toward getting at the truth,” Akemon said. “The stakes couldn’t be higher.” I nodded and I said I understood, and I did. I felt scared and accepting at once, a sensation I’ve been told is not unlike childbirth: you are experiencing a new kind of pain different from anything you’ve felt before, but part of you recognizes that what you’re going through is natural. It is the appropriate next step in this course of events, and there’s no way to fast-forward through it. All that’s left to do is breathe.

  I had the chance to help this legal team, and eventually a jury, learn more about the person Ashley had been, and my voice mattered, they told me. They asked me to speak during the penalty phase of Ashley’s trial and said I could help them paint a picture of the life that had been lost and the way that loss had affected me. I would be a voluntary witness, not a subpoenaed one, but I was the only one who could tell the story, and suddenly it had great value to people other than me. With the memories I would share and the stories I would tell, I could bring her back to life.

  Of course, of course, I said, even before they finished. I had plenty to say, plenty to contribute. I had b
een preparing for this moment for the past fifteen years, in a sense, and nothing they might ask me at this point could shake me, I thought.

  They began to rattle off questions, the two attorneys taking notes as I spoke. They would be the kinds of questions I might be asked on the stand when the time came, I was told.

  I didn’t cry when they asked me about the first time we’d met, and the things we’d liked to do together. What her childhood bedroom had looked like and what movies we had seen.

  I didn’t get choked up when they asked me about my last conversation with her, either, or the things we had done that week in New York.

  I stayed composed when they asked about what pieces we had played in our piano recitals and if we had ever talked about what we wanted to be when we grew up.

  But when they got to “What would you say to her now if you could?” I started to break down, perhaps because all the synapses in my brain were firing at once. What did they mean? Is she dead? Is she alive? Is it now? Is it then? I covered my face with my hands as I felt myself scrunch up into tears. I babbled something about how complicated female friendship can be, how your identity is shaped in reference to each other, and how growing apart can ache like the worst heartbreak. The three men stared at me and nodded in what looked like empathy. Inside I felt a gnarled jumble. We are all our experiences and all the losses and all the people we’ve ever loved rolled into one every day, I wanted to say. I would want to tell Ashley that she lives on inside of me and she will always be my nine-year-old best friend and I will always be hers even if no one else can ever see it.

  I wanted to tell them how I think of that last moment I saw her on the subway—how I still think of it all the time—and how it contained everything. I wanted to show them how she looked when she walked away after we hugged and the doors closed behind her and I slumped back into my seat. I wanted them to see her walking toward the exit as my train began to move, how she had blended into the groups of people who had gotten off from the other cars and the ones who were still waiting there on the benches. I wanted them to picture the next moments I had never seen, just as I do, the ones I couldn’t see as my train picked up speed and entered the tunnel: Ashley is heading for the stairs and then climbing up them to disappear into the crowds waiting for their bus inside Port Authority. If you were one of the people who had noticed her then—a beautiful young world-weary girl carrying a bag on her way to somewhere—you’d never be able to guess what had come before or what might come after. You’d never be able to tell that just a minute ago, she was sitting right beside me. You’d never be able to tell that we had started in the same place.