Under the Bridge Read online

  When his dad left for California, he said to Warren what he always said when he left.

  “See you in the movies.” That’s what he always said.

  Syreeta

  SYREETA WAS BORN blind in her right eye, but the doctors didn’t notice right away. Her mother named her after Stevie Wonder’s wife. There was no correlation there, in the way her mother named her after a blind man’s wife. Syreeta’s mother owned an album by Stevie Wonder’s wife in 1982, and she just really liked the name. She found it romantic.

  By the time the doctor noticed her eye’s flaw, Syreeta was used to seeing the world differently from others. Her vision could be brighter, clearer, depending on the tilt of her head. Her eye wandered too. They called it a lazy eye. But this too, the wandering of her pupil, she was not bothered by, and the truth was, by the time she was a young woman, she was so startling to strangers, with her full lips and dark hair, the Spanish blood, that no one teased her, or even noticed her different eye, and she sometimes even forgot that she did not see the world as others did.

  The “Spanish blood” came from her father, who now lived not in View Royal, but in a town named Squamish where he raced Monster Trucks. He married her mother too young. In their wedding picture, they looked as if they were just kids. Syreeta screamed in surprise when her mother showed her the photo. My God, she thought, my mother looks so much like me, with her rippling black hair and her brown eyes and her dimpled chin. But her mother resembled a child bride, just nineteen, in her white dress with lace trim on the neck. No way I’m marrying that young, Syreeta thought, though her boyfriend, Warren, he had asked her several times to marry him, and though she was only fourteen, she imagined they would be together always.

  Her mother and she often looked at pictures together. This wasn’t vanity so much as the photos were pleasing, and captured all the beauty that surrounded them: their own, their friends’, the island where they lived. Syreeta and her mother kept their photos in boxes rather than albums. Syreeta had started a new box for photos of her boyfriend, and on the top of the box, she wrote in her schoolgirl hand, Warren G.

  On the days when she picked up new photos from the shop beside Brady’s Fish and Chips (where she worked after school), she would wait eagerly for her mother to get home from work. While her mother cooked their dinner, she would spread her photographs over the kitchen table so her mother could see. The snapshots weren’t careful portraits, just these fleeting moments that she wanted her mother to be part of, to know. A new photo: Diana, Tara, Marissa, Felicity, and her at a sleepover, all in their pajamas. Another one: her and Marissa in the back of a blue pickup truck. “Look at Diana,” her mom would say. “She’s so cute!”

  “I know. She looks like a little bunny or something,” Syreeta said. A third new photo: the boys. “Here, that’s Erik Cash. Remember I told you about him? I want him and Diana to get together.”

  “What a baby face.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s got his father’s eyes. His dad looked just like that, exactly.”

  “Really?” Syreeta would always listen carefully to her mother’s observations, as she had found her mother’s observations precise, though never judgmental or cruel. It pleased her that her mother liked Warren. “He’s so polite and well spoken,” her mother observed. Syreeta knew Warren wanted to make a good impression, but his politeness was not forced or false. He was besotted with her mother, in an innocent way, and whenever he came to her house, he would be sure to take off his Crip baseball cap and he would never swear. Always, he would always greet her mother warmly, shaking her hand, and asking her about her day, and once she found him sweeping the leaves off the driveway.

  She could understand why Warren always wanted to come over to her place, especially after she saw the trailer where he lived, and his “mean” dad who just seemed “so angry.”

  “I just feel really comfortable here,” Warren would say, and Syreeta would nod her head, because that’s what others said as well. Her mother’s competence was comforting, and the house revealed a quiet instinct for order and beauty. They hadn’t always lived so well. When Syreeta was a little girl, after the divorce, she and her mother lived in rentals, in basement rooms. But her mother soon became manager at Pacific Coast Savings and brought them to a better home. Sometimes her mother would hug her out of the blue. “Rita,” she’d say, tousling her hair. And sometimes when they were shopping together in the mall, the salesgirls asked if they were sisters.

  Though she loved her mother, she loved her friends as well. The Five. “There was always us five,” she’d later recall. She could see her life as before and after. Before was the year when she got braces, when she met Warren, when there were always “us five.” She could almost rhyme the names off, for each name was melodic and sweet. Syreeta, Tara, Marissa, Diana, and Felicity. The Five were the prettiest girls at Shoreline, though they did not see themselves as possessed of the greatest beauty or perched atop a hierarchy. (“We were friends with everybody,” they’d insist. “If I can show someone that I’m a good-looking person on the inside, it’s more important than showing it on the outside,” Syreeta would say.) Still, the boys at Shoreline marked them in a certain way. In their yearbooks, around Syreeta and Tara and Marissa and Diana and Felicity, boys drew rays like those that surround children’s drawings of the sun, and above each girl’s photo, they wrote HOTTIE.

  Of the five, there was no leader. When they were all in grade 5, Tara had been the leader of one clique, Syreeta the leader of the other. At some point, Syreeta wasn’t even sure when, the two leaders had formed an alliance, a slightly uneasy friendship. But in the fall, when neighborhood girls were bothering Colin Jones and Warren was looking for a new place to live, Syreeta and Tara were growing suddenly close and loyal. They worked together at Brady’s Fish and Chips after school. Brady’s was owned by Diana’s parents and was in a little strip mall just off the highway, next to a store that sold saris, and a street named Earl Grey. Marissa was the smallest of the group. She was born in December, born later, and was barely five feet tall, barely one hundred pounds. Her smallness suited her, for she giggled constantly and was neither rude nor hard, just possessed of a childlike giddiness. Warren nicknamed her “the little munchkin.”

  Marissa had cried the night Warren asked Syreeta out. (“She just started bawling her face off because she had such a crush on Warren.”) Now Marissa was going out with the basketball player Dimitri. She still loved Warren, but “like a big brother.” Felicity was the “rowdy” one. Tara had the assured manner of the leader, for she was very tall, and like a Seventeen cover girl, with lovely bright eyes and straight blonde hair. The Five were together for sleepovers, shopping on Saturdays, reading fashion magazines. What were their interests? “Laughing,” Syreeta would later say. “I was always interested in just laughing and having fun.”

  Her real dad wasn’t around much because he lived up in Squamish and really didn’t have much to do with her life. When she was a little girl, they had spent more time together. He used to ask her to sit in the front seat when he drove his truck at the Monster Races. When she started talking of a boyfriend, he seemed to change toward her and became unnecessarily stern and wary. As in the time he saw the red marks on her neck left there by kisses from Warren. Her father said: “You tell that boy to watch out, or I’ll skin him like a raccoon.”

  She told Warren this, and Warren looked quite frightened, and then slowly appreciated the humor of it, because she was laughing and she wished she could be a mimic, and imitate her gruff and burly father, saying: “I’ll skin him like a raccoon.”

  Gregory Green, her stepfather, wasn’t around so much because he was a logger, and so he was in the forests for weeks at a time. But when he came back from the forests, her mother would sing to herself and wear her nicest dress, with a silk belt around the waist, and white flowers on the burgundy.

  Warren was always over for dinner, and after they’d eaten, he would sit out on the porch with G
regory Green. Syreeta noticed the way Warren’s face just lit up when Gregory asked him to come out on the porch, and she knew he wasn’t used to spending time with an older man who was good-natured and not so angry all the time. Gregory kicked his feet up onto the porch railing, and Warren did the same. Gregory lit a cigarette by flicking a match on his zipper, and Warren did the same. Warren smiled at Gregory, hopefully, and then said, “Well, I guess I should go help Wendy with the dishes.”

  “Oh, let the women do the dishes,” Gregory said. “That’s what women are for.”

  Warren was kind of surprised to hear that, but it made him feel good, a little, like when a rapper asserted his challenge to a foe. Warren stayed on the porch and did not move when Syreeta’s mom came out with one hand on her hip, the other on a dishrag. Although he didn’t really have a crush on Syreeta’s mom, Warren, nonetheless, thought she was beautiful and glamorous and out of reach and shimmering. Standing there, long legged, her black hair loose on her shoulders, she said, not cruelly, but surely, as if there were to be no dispute—“If you want to eat another meal here, Greg, don’t talk like that in my house.”

  When she was back inside, Warren thought Gregory might offer up a retort, but he only looked a little stunned and chagrined. Warren couldn’t help but smile. He thought to himself, So that’s where Syreeta gets her spark. (Syreeta’s “cheeky,” he often said, admiringly.)

  But later, when she would reflect upon the girl she’d been, Syreeta wouldn’t describe herself as cheeky or sassy or bold. Harsh words would soon be used about her, published in newspapers and magazines, spoken by judges, cops, and attorneys. And yet she never thought much about her personality. She really had no idea what she was like. Naive, she guessed. “I was probably like any other teenager. I was carefree. For us, life was great,” she recalls, not using the word murder or death, because these words still seem almost impossible to say, as if they don’t belong to her life, which was wonderful when she was loved and fourteen. “Life was great,” she says, “but then it all just changed in a flash, without any control over it.”

  Slivers and Sawdust

  AT PUNJAB UNIVERSITY in India, Manjit Virk spent the late 1970s studying for his master’s degree in English literature. He read the Romantic poets—Lord Byron, Wordsworth. He specialized in Shakespearean drama. “I liked the tragedies best,” he would later recall, without irony.

  His older sister had moved to Victoria, and she mailed him a magazine called Beautiful British Columbia. He looked at the photos of the West Coast landscape. “I couldn’t believe a place like Vancouver Island really exists with all the rocks, the trees, and the mountains. Everything looked freshly washed. There was no dirt.” He teased his sister. “No way,” he said. “That’s not a real place! I can’t believe it’s real.” She invited him to visit, and in 1979, when he was twenty-three, he took Pan Am Airlines to Delhi and then to England and then to Seattle. And he saw the real town of Victoria was even more wondrous, “very beautiful, so green.” On this trip, he met his future wife, a young woman named Suman Pallan. “She had a very calm composure. She was polite, soft—a good listener.” Falling in love was unexpected. He had never foreseen that he would stay forever in the place of photographs.

  After they married, there were some “hurt feelings,” for the marriage had not been arranged, and there was some concern among their elders that an unarranged marriage would not last. He looked into teaching, but found out his MA was not recognized as complete. His credits from India could not be transferred, and, to become a professor, he would have to spend another four years in college. He considered becoming a pharmaceutical salesman, but this meant he would have to travel, and his wife was pregnant, and he did not want her to be alone. “And so, I became a lumberjack,” he says, rather surprised at the strange fate. “You have to survive.” He worked at the local mill, and earned $4.50 an hour, and he missed the heat and religion of his home. He learned first aid. In the mills, the workers found slivers in their fingers or pieces of sawdust in their throat, and he became skilled at taking away the slivers and the sawdust.

  When his daughter was born, he became revived, grateful, full of joy. She was named Reena, which is the Punjabi word for mirror, “like a looking glass.”

  Soon after Reena was born, the family moved to View Royal for the parks and the schools that were near their new home. After they bought the house, “we realized it was not a high-end area, that there were a lot of rentals and single mothers, but I never felt we needed to stay in the top neighborhood, like Oak Bay. We are humble. We don’t need to be proud, and say, ‘We’re stuck-up and better than other people.’” Later, it would seem to him as though the presence of evil was in the neighborhood, in the most unlikely shapes and forms. Yet for many years, he was not aware of the dangers, and he would watch The Muppet Show with Reena, and then put her on his shoulders and walk with her to Gorge Park, where white lilies and bluebells bloomed. Gorge Park looked like the places he had seen in the magazines his sister sent to India. The places he once believed too clean to exist. Gorge Park was his firstborn daughter’s favorite place to play.

  • • •

  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 th
e 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.