It's always something with memoirists

I'm waiting on a scary phone call, can you hold my clammy hand?

The last time I saw her—let’s call her Suzie—was at the trial, nearly 20 years ago. Jesus, where does the time go? I still feel the stale courthouse air conditioning on my shoulder, hear the clacking of the Deputy District Attorney’s heels on the polished tiles, smell the vodka and cigarette smoke on my grandpa’s neck when I half-hugged him.

Suzie met us in the hallway, all of us grinning the way nervous dogs grin. I’ve always hated when people post videos of their dogs grinning and wagging their tails in tight, short jabs, and commenters are like LUV HIS SMILEEE! and the ones who actually know something about dogs will say, Your dog is anxious, you idiot, stop looming over him with a goddamned strange object. You don’t have to be a dog expert to recognize the kind of grin on our faces that day—not relaxed and happy, but baring our teeth to say to the darkness, please go easy.

That day at the courthouse was the first time I’d seen her in 3 years, since my mom’s funeral. I hadn’t seen her husband—I’ll call him Gary—since he appeared out of the darkness of their complex’s parking lot, barrel-torsoed and lit to the gills, to say he was sorry. Sorry for not busting in on them when he heard their fighting, sorry that he didn’t realize something was different this time, as walked past her unit and heard, through the open windows, my mom going, Help, it hurts.

I had come back with my dad, my brother, and some friends, after the police tape was removed. We needed things for the service: music and photos, a dress, if we were lucky. I was functional from the quarter-millie of Xanax someone had given me, but far from easygoing. And here comes Gary into my peripheral view, a wet-gravel voice saying something that took me a little while to realize was, Hey, are you Debbie’s family?

I told him, Yeah, Gary, it’s me. Three nights ago, I had asked his help removing my mother’s sliding glass door from its hinges. Thank the gods he hadn’t been able to, that he wasn’t the one with me when I found her body, found what her boyfriend had done to her the night she said, Help, it hurts.

As he stood there in his flip flops and board shorts, swaying and apologizing, a meaty paw on my shoulder, I patted him on the back and tried not to do my old thing, which was to comfort him while no one comforted me. But I was looking for redemption everywhere, in every moment. It had to mean something, right? This unbearable thing had to come to some good. And I felt sorry for the poor bastard—I would have, even if he weren’t living with the guilt of turning his back on his friend and neighbor, thinking it was none of his business, thinking it was just what they did, fighting on a Saturday night. She must have been okay with it, or she wouldn’t have stayed with him, right?

I could feel the worldview this man carried with him—a worldview that had kept him safe in the quiet of his beach town life, in the America where he was safe, a middle-aged white male who might get thrown in the drunk tank or have his license revoked, but could always find a good time somewhere. (No bad days, say the bumper stickers in those Orange County beach towns. No bad days for some, anyway.)—I could feel that worldview in ruins, nuked to hell, and here he was staggering through the debris in shock and mourning. So I tried to find him in that place and redeem him, give him somewhere to go from here.

You will probably… never do that again, I told him. And neither will I. We will never ignore the signs again. We will never think that she’s okay, that we should stay out of it. Right? We’ll barge in and make sure. We’ll watch out for one another.

And you know what? I really believed he might. I never saw him again. Later, another of my mom’s neighbors, a sweet, jumpy string bean of a man, told me that as they wheeled my mother’s body out of her place, long after I’d left for the police station to be interviewed, Gary stood there drinking beer after beer, toasting her and singing some song. I’d heard him sing once when he was very drunk, working on something in his garage in the complex’s parking lot, it sounded like an old pirate zombie chanting in another language. What was he singing to my mother, I wanted to know. The jumpy neighbor couldn’t say.

And then it was three years later, at the trial, in the hallway outside the courtroom, and Suzie was handing me a CD. Bad Company. Gary had been singing “Seagull,” she told me. I knew Bad Company, of course, from their excellent dive bar jukebox song, “Bad Company.” But I didn’t know this one. When I opened the case, I found the lyrics inside:

Seagull, you must have known for a long time

the shape of things to come

Now you fly through the sky, never asking why

And you fly all around ‘til somebody shoots you down

I couldn’t decide if my mom would have been touched by this dirge, or if she would have hated it. What kind of asshole would shoot a seagull out of the sky, she’d say.

Man, I love a synchronicity. Here’s one: I did Chekhov’s The Seagull in college, when I still wanted to be an actress. I played the ingenue, Nina, who also wanted to be an actress but then hitched her wagon to an older famous man, who left her with a baby and a broken heart. She shows up at the end of the play to do a monologue about how it all went down and destroyed her, and she’s fine, no really, fine. But even at 20, I knew she was bullshitting and I played it like she was la la bonkers, but now I know: I should have played her adamant. It’s the ones who are adamant about being okay that you shouldn’t believe.

Anyway seagulls show up a few times in my book, which is a shame, because as a birder, I could think of a dozen cooler birds, but I’m from the beach and survived on scraps and express my feelings loudly—okay, goddamn it, I’m a seagull and so was my mother.

No that’s not it, I’m an actress.*

After the trial, I promised Suzie I’d keep in touch, but I didn’t, for reasons that have to do with needing to take small sips of information, and then needing to sit with that information for a really long time until I knew what I wanted to say about it. And Suzie wasn’t integral to this process. I was not writing a journalistic, reported true crime book; I was writing a literary memoir, sorting through overwhelming (and semi-buried) memories to find the meaning of my life with my mother, and of her death and what I did about it. And to answer for myself whether or not I survived it. What does survival even look like?

I didn’t need Suzie for that.

But now I’m closing in on revisions and about to call it finished, and I suddenly have this need to talk to her. To see what else was there that I’ve buried or misunderstood. To see what other people experienced about my mother’s murder. The people I’ve asked—my brother, my father, my grandmother, my uncle—they’re not as able or as willing as I am to poke around in the wound. They’re not writers for one thing, and for another, they’re each barely hanging on. They need me to stop coming around and prodding their scar tissue, asking them about something that happened 20 years ago.

I found a few possible addresses and emails for Suzie, thanks to those free internet searches that make it pretty clear—and unnerving—how findable each of us is now. One of those emails worked, and she wrote me back with her phone number and said to call her any time.

That was two months ago. I was afraid to follow up, but then a small bird crashed loudly into the window screen beside my desk, hopping around and eyeing me with this gigantic dove feather in its beak and making a fuss, and I thought: Fine, I’ll text her.

I don’t have high expectations for our call—normal folks don’t love revisiting the same territories I do. And maybe it’s a sign how much I’ve grown up and healed, but I don’t really need her to. I hope she will, yes. She was my mother’s closest friend those last few fucked-up years. The next door neighbors they partied with. Same ages, same unemployed, license-revoked partners; same grown, disapproving children. I hope she will share some memories of my mother, can give me new moments with her that I didn’t have and never will. I’d just be happy to know what her life has become. She’s in Hawaii now. I’ve never been, but it sounds like a nice place to end up.

I’m nervous, and I don’t know if this is a great time for me to prod my own wounds. The anniversary of finding her body is just over a week away, and already I feel the cortisol flush, the tight stomach, the tendency to grin too quickly and widely.

And I’m a little ashamed I didn’t connect with Suzie sooner, didn’t pursue my own story with the rigor of a journalist. To be fair, I took copious notes during the trial and pursued an MFA for the sole purpose of being properly equipped to write about what happened. And then I was trying to chew myself free from love addiction for three years, then just trying to enjoy my new sweet and fun life for several more years, and then I was working my ass off to pay those student loans for that MFA, and then I was working to feel accepted and safe and grown up in a way I never had before, and then—only then—was I ready to begin seriously writing the story from beginning to end. By then it had been about 12 years. And it’s taken 10 more to write my life, delete and rewrite, over and over, getting it true. Sharpening the point.

Hey—others have said it to me and it meant the world, so I’ll say it here: It takes as long as it takes.

I’m relieved Suzie’s still alive and that she wants to talk. And I’m scared of what she’ll say, what it will re-open, what new knowledge it will give me. There’s a strong possibility I will take too personally whatever her life has become.

Maybe she’s in a cult. You know the one. Maybe what she has to say about my mother will be dismissive and cruel, a way to distance herself from a fate she once might have shared.

Or maybe she will describe a long-forgotten moment between me and my mother, a time when I was visiting, and I will feel her bare, sun-warmed arms around me again. She will tell me something my mother once told her. It will be something I heard in a dream. And then I’ll know the bird at the window for what it was.

*Inside joke for the Chekhov scholars and theater kids.