When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me—
Fitting for what we were about to see. Redmond stopped at a door and took a key out of his pocket. “I didn’t know what else I should do, so I locked it.”
“Good idea. Let’s have a look.”
Pushing it open, he held it for us to go first. The light, that false, bright, terrible light of a public toilet, made everything grimmer. Nothing could hide here—no place for shadows, everything was on display. There were six stalls but only one of the doors was open.
For her last day on earth Antonya Corando wore a gray Skidmore College short-sleeved sweatshirt, a black skirt, and a pair of Doc Martens shoes. That made me wince because they were the brand hip kids wore. Pauline said dismissively that anyone who wore Docs was only trying to be cool. Poor square Antonya who always did her homework—buying a pair of those shoes had probably been a very large gesture for her. And it must have taken courage for her to wear them when she knew how closely kids check out each other’s clothing. Maybe she first put them on in the secrecy of her bedroom and walked around checking herself in the mirror to see how they looked, how she walked in them, how she came across as a Doc Martens girl.
But the worst part was her socks. They were fire-engine red with little white hearts all over them. Her skin above the socks was a different white and so transparent you could see a swarm of fine blue veins just below the surface.
I am only a policeman in a small town. But over the years have seen enough violence and death both here and in Vietnam, where I was a medic to vouch for this—most times it is the small, irrelevant things that burn the horror into your heart. The dead are only that—finished. But what surrounds them afterward, or what they brought with them to their final minute, survives. A teenage girl overdoses on heroin but what flattens you are her socks with white hearts on them. A man wraps his silver car around a tree killing him and his whole family, but what makes it unforgettable is that that song you love, “Sally Go Round the Roses,” is still playing on the radio in the wreck when you get to it. A blue New York Mets baseball cap spotted with blood on a living room floor, the scorched family cat in the yard of the burnt house, the Bible the suicide left opened to Song of Solomon on the bed next to him. These are what you remember because they are the last scraps of their last day, their last moments with a heartbeat. And those things remain after they’re gone, the final snapshots in their album. Antonya went to her drawer that morning and specifically chose the red socks with the white hearts. How could that image not crush you, knowing where she would end up three hours later?
Redmond began to cry. Bill and I looked at each other. I motioned him to take the principal out. There was no reason for him to be in the bathroom anymore.
“I’m sorry. I just can’t believe it.”
My assistant Bill Pegg is a good man. A few years ago he lost his daughter to cystic fibrosis and that ordeal turned him into a different person. He now has a special manner with the shocked or grieving; a way to keep them balanced in the first unbearable minutes after real horror has entered their lives. When they’re trying to understand the new language of grief, as well as cope with the loss of gravity, the weightlessness that comes with desolation or great suffering. When I asked Bill how he did it he said, “I just go there with them and tell them what I know about it. That’s all you can do.”
After they left and the door hissed shut I went over to Antonya. I got down on one knee in front of her. If someone had come in then how silly it would have looked—like I was proposing to a sleeping girl sitting on the toilet.
One arm hung straight down at her side. The other lay across her leg. I assumed she had been right-handed, so I looked at her left arm to see if I could find the needle mark. Her head rested against the white tile wall, eyes closed. The needle mark was a small red welt just below the crease lines in her left elbow. I unconsciously felt for a pulse. Of course there wasn’t one. Then I reached up and touched that mark.
“This is where you died, stupid kid.” Holding her elbow in my hand, I ran my thumb tenderly over the mark and whispered to her, “Right here.”
“I’m not stupid.”
Empty-headed, refusing to believe, I automatically looked up from her arm upon hearing the soft, slurry voice.
Antonya’s head rolled slowly from left to right until it faced me. She opened her eyes and spoke again in that same, not-quite-there voice. “I wasn’t supposed to die.”
“You’re alive!”
“No. But I can still feel your hand. I feel your warmth.” Her voice was a halting whisper, a trickle. Her tap had been turned off but some water was still left in the pipe, a dribble. “Tell my mother I didn’t do this. Tell her they did it to me.”
“Who did it? Who’s they!”
“Find the dog.” Her eyes stayed open but emptied. Every trace of life oozed out, into the air, back into life. I saw it go. Nothing specifically happened, but I knew exactly what was going on. Life left her and then she was gone.
Still on one knee I stared, willing her back, willing her to come back and help me understand.
“Frannie?” Bill stood in the doorway, holding it open with an arm. “The ambulance is here and I’ve called the girl’s mother. I’m going over there now. Is that okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Fran, you okay?”
“Yeah. Listen, tell Redmond I want to look in her locker. And if she had a gym locker, in there too.”
I waited there while they got the body ready to move. They took their time. I was making notes when one of the ambulance guys said, “Whoa! Check this out!”
Looking up, I saw him holding a feather—the feather I had already seen too many times. I took it out of his hand and had a closer look to make sure. “Where’d this come from?”
He gave a dirty chuckle and raised his eyebrows. “Fell out from under her skirt! Do you believe that? What’s she doing with a feather up her dress?” he leered.
“I’ll keep this.” I put the feather between the pages of my notebook and closed it.
From the expression on his face the guy thought I was joking. He whined, “Aw come on, Chief, I want it.”
“Finish up and stop fuckin’ around!”
Smiles fell off their faces and they were done in five minutes.
I followed the gurney as they rolled it down the hall. Classes were still in session, so luckily we didn’t have to go by a slew of gawking kids.
Passing the principal’s office, I stopped and went in. His secretary immediately handed me a slip of paper with Antonya’s locker number and combination written on it. The woman said none of the kids were given permanent gym lockers anymore because the school was too overcrowded now and there weren’t enough to go around.
At the top of the paper, a bright pink Post-it note, was written number 622. An instant later it hit me like a stubbed toe: the same locker number I’d had as a senior at Crane’s View High School. The number below it, the lock combination, was also the same as thirty years ago.
“This is right? This is correct?” My voice bounced all over the place.
Puzzled, she nodded. “Yes. I just copied it out of her file ten minutes ago.”
“Son of a bitch!” I’d planned to ask Redmond more questions but not anymore. I had to look inside that locker now. I was no longer confused, no longer at a loss. My wife says watch out for Frannie when he knows who the enemy is. Antonya said she was murdered. Rushing out of the office, the horrible thought struck me that she might have been killed for no other reason than she had the same school locker as I once did. Old Vertue, teenage me, the Schiavo house, Antonya. Who was doing all this and what did they want from me?