What to Say to a Murdered Girl

As I was walking into the shop this morning, a customer who lives two houses down stopped me, to chat and also to ask, whether I'd known the 18-year-old who lived next door to him, a girl with red bangs from whom he'd once bought girl scout cookies. I told him, I didn't.

"She was murdered two weeks ago," he said. "They found her body downtown."

I tried to absorb this, which took the form of my asking more about what the girl: what she looked like; did I know her; do I know her parents, who live sixty yards from the shop. Beaumont is a small neighborhood. Who was she?

He told me what he knew; that he played basketball with the dad and the little brother in their driveway. That the girl, in the past year, had gotten into online modeling that turned or was always nude, and that the 37-year-old man who ran the site on which the photos appeared had already been charged and sentenced; he'd strangled the girl. That she had red hair, and was...

Wait, I said. Did she dress sort of, provocatively, and more lately? He considered, and said, maybe; she'd been wearing a lot of sundresses, sort of revealing, but I could see he was having a hard time knowing whether this girl to whom he'd lived next door for eight years had in fact changed so very much; she was just the kid next door...

And I knew, then, who it was. Early in the summer, there had been a girl we'd see walking up the street. Sometimes, she did not have on shoes, not in a forgetful way, or as some sort of hippie statement, but because, maybe, she had come to a point in her adolescence where, if she didn't want to wear shoes, she didn't have to, and see, she didn't want to. She moved languidly, sleepily. This languidness extended to her clothes; they seemed to be falling off, crawling up her legs, sliding down her shoulders. She sometimes seemed high, which was pointed out to me by two of my daughter's friends, boys of eighteen, who sit in front of the shop to have their coffee, one of  my buddy Ryan, who manages the nearby Pizzicato, who nodded at the girl last May in a way that made him seem like a father.

"She's trouble," he said. He did not mean, to himself, or to the world, but to herself. She wasn't paying attention. She would sit on the sidewalk as she waited for the bus, looking dreamy and asking you to watch her dream. She was, if you'll pardon the expression, in full sexual bloom, and she knew it, but only by half. I recognized this because I've been there; I've been the teenage girl who sees how men are looking at her, and liking it, and sometimes playing it. But not playing as this girl did; she did not see that she needed to take more care.

The neighbor told me, he'd gone to her funeral; he'd brought flowers to her doorstep. He didn't know what else to do -- what should he do? I told him, as I've gotten older, I learned it's good to acknowledge people's pain, or illness, or tragedy. Not to impose yourself, but to ask, how are you? What can I do? I remembered, too, that today is September 11th, and the debate I had with my father, after three people we knew were killed in the Trade Centers, about how he had to, was obligated to contact the widows, and he said he would, but did not, because he felt inadequate to the task. But we're all inadequate; we just have to do it anyway. And I am wondering, today, what I should have said months ago to that girl.

Comments

[eric]

How very sad. When I was a teenager, a young woman in our neighborhood killed herself over an affair with a married man. I never met het, but remember seeing her around, and the photo in the newspaper really put a hook in me. It was weeks before I could go an hour without thinking of this stranger, and the tragic circumstance in which she killed herself.

[nancy]

I found it incredible that it happened two weeks ago and I was just hearing of it today. As for the girl: I have thought of her many times this summer, recalling how she carried herself. She was a beautiful girl who looked, when you saw her, as though she were spilling beyond her borders. Driving just now, it hit me that her life had ended in some shitty apartment. How is it possible that she was here and now, is not? Was her spill really so bad? Haven't we all made wrong moves, and here we are still.

[Michael J. Totten]

It's eerie when this sort of thing happens in Portland, and to people we know.

A convenience store clerk in my neighborhood was shot in the head at work, but I went to Iraq to do my job and nothing happened to me, or to anyone anywhere near me.

[Brett King]

Nancy -- You are very wise in realizing that although we may feel embarrassed or inadequate we must overcome our discomfort and reach out to comfort another. I lost my parents and little brother in a car accident in high school. Many people at school avoided me and I heard whisperings as I am sure the kids felt bad but did not know what to say. Those few who reached out to simply say they were so sorry helped me heal. We are selfish when we worry about our own uncomfortable feelings instead of overcoming fear to comfort others in pain.

[nancy]

Thank you, Brett. I am so sorry for your loss. And you have made me firmer my resolve to not stand by and do nothing. It does always surprise me: why so hard to say, I'm sorry; can I help? How can this be taken as aggressive, or selfish, or misguided? And if it, so what? It's not meant that way, and we are always, I trust, sensitive enough to pick up what is okay, what might be needed, and when.

[Curtis]

I am trying to compose something (gathering many thoughts) addressing all this, but it's a nearly overwhelming enterprise. I'll never offer an eloquent response to such sadness.

For right now, if I had a way of letting her family know of my sorrow, given a link, I would do so.

[Vicky]

Nancy - I was looking for things on girls that have been harmed ... my daughter could very easily be your young red-haired girl. We are working diligently to prevent anything from happening to her, to make her more aware. Thank you for such a nice writing piece that, perhaps, help her on her path.