Under the Bridge (5 page)

•   •   •

In the months before the murder, Reena did not yet know that her name meant “the mirror,” nor did she know that in ancient languages, Reena also meant “the queen.”

Later, words like
misfit
and
outcast
would be used to describe Reena, but these words don't capture her as she was at fourteen, a girl with the rare combination of boldness and innocence.

Reena attended Colquitz Junior Secondary, so she did not know Syreeta or Warren G. She had never met Marissa or Dimitri. Often, at her school, she was teased and ignored, for she was an uneasy loner, with her broad hips and nervous eyes. She was dark skinned and heavy in a town and time that valued the thin and the blonde. Taunted, left out, she started to skip classes. Starla, her neighbor, recalls that one day Reena said in her giddy and sudden way, “All your problems go away when you die.”

And then, just before Halloween, a momentous event occurred. Reena found a place where she wanted to be. She'd been wandering to a site near her home on Irma Place. Irma Place was around the corner from Brady's Fish and Chips, but Reena did not find herself in that part of View Royal. Instead she found a park where unloved and unwanted kids smoked cigarettes and talked of dangers and sin. Reena began to smoke. She fought with her parents and missed family dinners and sermons and ultimately left her house for, as Suman recalls, “she would not abide by the rules of the home.”

A girl from the park told her about the Kiwanis group home, and it was there she met Dusty and Josephine. Her adoration for these two girls was instant, if not mutual, an adoration both fierce and doomed. Leaves fell from the sturdy trees. The fog became constant. Eerie Halloween decorations were placed on windows and walls. And Reena, seeing her possible self reflected in the badass girls, emerged and no longer wanted to die.

In Kiwanis, Dusty was called “Miss Tough Girl” and Josephine was called “Princess,” but Reena was called nothing, for other girls did not notice her and she was only in the lonely home for a few days before she went to stay at her grandparents'. But, in the few days of her residency, she heard talk of Crips and gangsters and crazy basement parties. She watched Josephine moving through the halls, elevated by her black platform shoes, seemingly never nervous, only delicate and sure. Josephine boasted of becoming a hit man. She stole Reena's hairdryer. She might have stolen Reena's mascara, but Reena was too afraid to confront her,
and instead hovered nervously near the entrance to Josephine's room. After a few minutes, maybe hours, Josephine and Dusty said to their desperate and hopeful admirer, “Okay, Reena, you can come in.”

•   •   •

Reena's grandmother, Tarsem, a woman with white hair and a soft, warm body, noticed Reena's blue nail polish.

“Why are your nails that color?” she asked her granddaughter.

Reena was cuddling next to her grandmother, and they were watching Bollywood movies. On the screen, the girl was running from pursuers, and she ran and ran until she reached a park where a chorus of adoring men broke into song, dancing behind her. Reena sang along with the chorus:
Mainay Pyor Kiya.

She did not answer her grandmother about the blue nails, or tell her grandmother that Josephine's nails were blue and Josephine was her new friend. On the screen, the girl was on a mountaintop and there seemed to be stars on her sari; she shimmered and shone, and then Reena's favorite part of the movie took place. The girl was hoisted up by a magical presence. She appeared to float on the clouds, and beneath her, a group of girls in white dresses sang:
Mainay Pyor Kiya.
The girl sang: “I am in love.”

Though Reena's grandmother had once believed in the Hindu faith, she'd spent the past thirty years as a believer in the prophet Jehovah. Soon after her arrival in Canada, two smiling visitors had knocked on her door and greeted her warmly, and did not look, as others often did, with discomfort or disdain at her sari. She invited the strangers into her home, brought them tea and cookies. Her English was faltering, but they did not mind. They told her about the Watchtower. They spoke slowly and left her books with pictures of the world in flames. She phoned them and asked them to come over for tea again next Sunday. And they came, unlike the neighbors, who declined her invitations because they said they were going camping or were working on Sunday. The ladies were very friendly to her, and she enjoyed their stories, and slowly learned to read English through warnings and promises contained in their brochures.

When the movie was over, Reena went down to the basement where Raj was living. Raj was her uncle, and he was young and handsome, at loose
ends, having graduated from college and gone into real estate development. But real estate was tricky. You could never predict the desires of newcomers. Reena woke him up and begged him for a ride.

“Come on,” he said, though he had this sudden pain in his left leg. He wasn't sure why. It shot through his knee and up to his hip. He drove a yellow Karmann Ghia, one of a kind. Reena asked him if he would mind driving through View Royal, because she was hoping Josephine Bell would see her in this amazing sports car. There was no one in View Royal with a Karmann Ghia. The little car was like a rare bird, and they moved from a suburb high on the green hills. They drove past the highway and the hospital and the railroad tracks and then drove down. There is a noticeable and sudden descent on entering the community of View Royal. The town, built around the Gorge, is on a lower level. They drove past the Fort Victoria trailer park, past Syreeta's house, past the home of Colin Jones.

“That's where Colin Jones lives,” Reena said. “He's friends with Josephine.”

Raj noticed Reena's blue nails and asked her why she had painted them that color. She waved her fingers; she said, “I like blue,” and as he often did since her brief stay in Kiwanis, he worried about her. So much, he thought his worry might be causing the tremor in his leg.

“Reena,” he said, but she did not hear him because she had unrolled her window and her head was turned, hopefully, to the streets.

“Why do you listen to Bryan Adams?” Reena said, laughing. “He's so lame.”

“You used to like it.”

“No, I didn't! I never did!”

He'd bought the CDs she had asked for. Puff Daddy and the Notorious B.I.G. He just bought them last week, and the purchase was one he regretted. The Notorious B.I.G. CD was called
Life After Death.
On the cover, an obese man posed beside a hearse. Gunshots were interspersed with the obscene chants.

Reena leaned forward, pressed Eject, inserted the Puff Daddy CD. She found a song, and began singing along, as she had sung earlier to the Bollywood film.

Raj recognized the song, as one Sting used to sing, only now sung by some low-voiced guy mumbling unintelligibly.

“Do you like this song?” Reena said. “It's my favorite.” She sang
along with the sweet-voiced girl, who was now singing a new chorus that wasn't in the Sting song. She was singing, “Come back, baby, come back.”

Reena explained to Raj how the girl singing was Biggie's wife, and she sounded so sad because she missed Biggie so much. Biggie had been murdered! “Someone capped his ass,” Reena said.

“Sting sang this better,” Raj said, and he laughed, because he did not want her to think he was critical of her. He knew Reena had run away because her mother, Raj's sister, wouldn't let her smoke or wear makeup or tight clothes. Even worse, Reena had announced that she did not want to be a Jehovah's Witness any longer. “I'm tired of this JW shit,” Reena said. She wanted a birthday party. She wanted to celebrate, and JWs believed celebrations should be subdued, if not obliterated. There'd been some talk of excommunication. Raj himself was not a JW, and he tried to be a kind of haven for his niece.

“Sting's version is not better!” Reena said. She leaned forward to turn up the volume. They drove past Shoreline School and over a bridge that crossed the Gorge. There was the white schoolhouse called the Craig-flower Colonial school, which was now a museum. Raj wondered what the schools were like in Canada in colonial times, in the year the schoolhouse was built: 1845. Surely the kids did not walk around talking of guns and murder. Even when he was a kid, he didn't hear about such nihilistic things, though high school was far from idyllic for him. He was skinny and quiet, and almost every day some athlete would bump into him and say, “Get the fuck out of my way, Paki.” He felt the tremor through his leg again. He wanted to ask Reena how Colquitz was because he hoped she'd returned to the unfriendly classrooms. The tremor moved to his heart, he could feel it, so tangible now, there was no doubt: something was wrong with his body.

“Reena,” he said, “can we listen to some other song? How about a compromise? R. Kelly.”

She had put on some song called “Return of the Mack.” This too was nihilistic, he thought, listening to the lyrics. “You lied to me.” A fourteen-year-old girl should not know of these things.

“Please,” Reena said, “If we bump into my friends, I'll be embarrassed if we're listening to R. Kelly.”

He thought then that he was too hard on her. He knew what it was like being fourteen, and caring so much about what your friends
thought. He knew that when you were that age, acceptance was everything. And how could a girl like Reena be accepted? She could try to be like the others, paint her nails blue, listen to the same songs as her friends, stop with the “JW shit,” and after a few years, she'd move on and fall in love and find her own family.

He reached over to put his arm around her, and as he did so, he noticed the word on her skin.

Crip.

“Reena,” he said suddenly, though he tried to be gentle and never criticize her, as so many did, constantly.

“Reena, what is that on your hand?”

She smiled. “It's a gang,” she said.

“I know what it is,” he said. “Why are you even writing that word down?”

“I think they want me to be in the gang,” she said. “My new friends …”

“Look,” he said sternly. “You get involved with that, you're either going to end up dead or in jail.”

She didn't seem to hear him, for she was staring so intently at the homes of View Royal. They drove past the homes where the killers still slept, their plan for murder neither conceived nor yet acted on, and Josephine was not anywhere to be seen, though Reena wished she could see her because Josephine was her new friend now. Josephine Bell, a girl so slim and mercurial, so blonde and white and heartless, though of the last quality, Reena was not yet fully apprised.

J
OSEPHINE'S NAILS
were blue as well, but unlike Reena, she drove herself through View Royal in a brand-new white Neon.

Josephine may have lacked empathy and a pure heart, but she was possessed of a certain drive and ambition. She had so many goals. She was listening to a song called “Somebody's Gotta Die.” She sang along, then switched to the Seattle hip-hop station where they would soon play the song about how “mothafuckin' power” meant “mothafuckin' respect.”

And as she drove in her new car, she reflected on her progress. Truth be told, and she would tell it, immodestly yet constantly: she was becoming legendary! Colin Jones may have thought of her as a “twisted little troublemaker,” but who was he? A white guy with long hair (very uncool) in a ponytail (even uncooler) in straight jeans (uncoolest) and a dull suburban life (uncool, obviously). By the time she was in New York and working for John Gotti, Colin Jones would merely be a mechanic or a sales clerk. If he was lucky, he'd become floor manager at Wal-Mart.

As she drove by the field behind Shoreline School, Josephine recalled a recent event of which she was most proud. The conversation went like this:

Warren, a curly-haired boy, with eyes rapt and wet: “I've heard so much about you.”

Josephine Bell: “Yeah, what did you hear?”

Warren: “All the guys said you were good looking. It's so cool that I finally get to meet you.”

Josephine Bell: “Yeah, whatever. That's nice.”

She'd taken a cigarette some girl handed to her. She tilted her dimpled chin. Everybody was talking to her.

Everybody: “I can't believe you're back! It's so cool! Where have you been?”

And she'd smiled mysteriously, not revealing the grim fact that she'd
been on a tour of foster homes, dull, stupid homes with dull, stupid people, who asked her to leave after they found new children, better children, their own children. Warren asked her if she'd like to go to a party with him. He said something about his girlfriend, Syreeta. She sunned in the words of praise.
Oh my God, that's Josephine Bell! Josephine Bell!!! I can't believe I finally get to meet you.

“I felt like a celebrity,” she would later recall. “I thought somebody was gonna ask me for my autograph.”

•   •   •

Had Josephine known Reena was hoping to find her, she would not have cared. She would not have driven in search of the besotted girl in the Karmann Ghia. Josephine would not have been impressed by the cars subtle elegance. The loving uncle would have seemed too protective and his concerns about nihilism in contemporary culture not worthy of a debate. She had no desire to meet Reena's father, for his knowledge of Chaucerian motifs was, to her, utterly irrelevant.

She drove toward the home of Kelly Ellard. She wasn't sure if Kelly would be able to hang out tonight, for Kelly was “actually a pretty good girl.” (“Like if I go and hang out with her, and stuff, she'd say, ‘Oh shit. I've got to call my parents.' She'd always be worried about that, whereas, me, I don't care. I'd say, ‘Let's skip our curfew. Let's be badasses.' But Kelly would say, ‘Oh no, I'll be grounded.'”) Josephine thought it was “kind of funny” the way Kelly would “actually listen to her parents and stuff.”