My Murder Suicide
*
I pull into my driveway and glance at my phone. Messages from other bandmates line my screen.
I’m in shock.
This is awful.
I’m so sorry.
I pretend it’s not happening so that I can eat my sushi, even though my stomach is tied in knots. I sit down at my computer and Google, first her name, then his. Then murder-suicide Richmond Virginia. There are multiple results, mainly from the past. Murder-suicide is a fertile field of misery and loss. An everyday epidemic of gun violence and emotional anguish peeking out from behind the shiny new pandemic. I add today’s date to my search. Still nothing. The next morning, I Google again. A few stories about an investigation.
Is this my murder-suicide or someone else’s?
Part of me hopes that it was a desperate pact. That they were in it together, even though the idea that my friend was so despairing she asked to be killed is not a comfort. I read one story then watch a newscast blankly recount the same spare outline. I read another story. Shrill screams and then gunshots, a witness says. Then silence. “Shrill” cuts me. In her final moments, my friend was described with a loaded word used to disparage women and our voices. I can hear her voice. I remember the night our band broke up and she howled in pain and rage on the front step of our house.
After I read the article, I know for certain she wasn’t in on it. She didn’t want to die. Her last moments were a blur of terror and misery. I can’t stop imagining possibilities, constructing my murder-suicide story from bystander scraps and sober newscaster reports.
I close the window on my computer and wait for the moment when the news will start to spread, for the word of her death to become public knowledge. I wait for the obituary and the Facebook posts, for the blurry pictures and tributes. I wait for the college boyfriend who dumped her for being difficult, for being too much, to expound on how she was such a beautiful soul beneath a picture he took of her standing alone on the beach, the tide pooling around her ankles. She looks over her shoulder at the camera. I imagine myself on the beach beside her, curled in a tight ball on the wet sand, the churn of the waves roars in my ears. I look up at her silhouetted against the sun, squinting. I wait for the next wave to crest, to crash over us and send me bobbing on the tide, gasping for air. I sit, squeeze my eyes shut, and wait for it to become real.