Under the Bridge (46 page)

“Don't apologize for anything,” he wrote. “I have so much respect for you and your mother.” Then he wasn't sure what else to say. He wrote down one of his favorite sayings, a quote from Gandhi: “If you want
change, you have to be the change.” He wasn't sure if he should include the saying, and he thought about erasing it, but left it there, on the edge of the white paper.

There was something else: he wondered if he should include it, but did not have time to decide for he had to return to his cell. In his room, on the wall, there was no longer the photo of Syreeta beside him, with her eyes closed and her smile and her braces, and his arm on her shoulder. A hole from a pin remained under a piece of tape, for in all his different cells, when he was young, he'd kept the photo up high so he could look at her when he needed to remember the time he had loved and been loved. He did not retrieve the photo from a box, but instead took a certain piece of paper from a file on his desk. The sounds of the jail could be so constant and metallic, the clanging of keys and doors. He was silent but could hear the noise clamoring closer with the routine of incarceration. Head count. Every night at 10:00, the guard would say, “Name,” and he would answer, with little enthusiasm, “Glowatski.”

He took the Visiting Application and Information Form—composed of boxes for “information on applicant” such as given name, relation to inmate (“specify type and length of relationship”), and questions: “Are there at present any outstanding charges against you?”— and folded it into a neat square, then placed it in the envelope with his letter.

Maybe,
he thought. Maybe Syreeta would walk in here, past the herons and convicts and slow, aging days, past the barbed wire, and locks, and grim and steady routine.

Head count. Name?
Glowatski.

•   •   •

“You got a letter from Warren,” Syreeta's mother said, and Syreeta nodded, reaching into the refrigerator for some apple juice. Syreeta did not have a boyfriend in her new home. In high school, she had always had a boyfriend. Now, after her classes at community college, she would work at Brady's or another restaurant, and nights, she would sometimes go dancing with Diana, to “the club”—a dark place downtown near a wharf. (“Yeah, it's a dirty club, but it plays good music, and we see people we know and have a good time.”) Syreeta would twirl around,
laughing, her hands on her hips, her body raised by a pair of stilettos. She and Diana had even gone to Vancouver for a Christina Aguilera concert. Men would often hit on her, but Syreeta was indifferent to the attentions and desires of strangers. (“I can go out and I can get hit on, but who can't? That means absolutely nothing to me.”)

When she met someone new, she felt obligated to reveal her past, for what if the person discovered it later and felt she'd been keeping it a secret? With her blunt and self-possessed manner, she would assert, “My boyfriend killed Reena Virk, and I'm the one who sent him to jail.” Then, seeing their startled gaze, their disbelief, she would change the subject.

After dinner, she and her mother settled on the couch. In his letter, Warren had sent a DVD entitled
The Healing River.
She knew little about restorative justice, and she watched the film because he had asked her to, and he'd said he worked on it, helping to edit and file footage. After some of the experts spoke (“We need to see crime not as merely a broken law, but as harm done to people, and we need to ask, ‘Who was harmed?'”), Warren appeared on her television screen.

He looked the same, only his hair was now cropped short, and there were circles under his eyes, which looked slightly startled, as if he'd witnessed something he had never wanted to see. His eyes seemed tearful, and yet he was not crying.

“That's Warren,” Syreeta said to her mother, with some astonishment. “Wow. That's exactly him.”

After the film ended, she and her mother remained curled up on the couch. Syreeta held a pillow on her lap and touched the embroidered threads.

“Would you see him again?” her mother wondered, for she knew Warren had sent Syreeta a visitor's form.

“I guess so,” Syreeta said. “I'm not angry at him. A lot of people think I should be, but I'm not. That would be kind of a selfish thing, to be angry at him. I mean, obviously, he's going through a lot worse.”

“Where is Ferndale?” she asked her mother.

“I think it's near Mission, about an hour or two from Vancouver. You'd have to drive.”

“I'd probably get lost.” Syreeta said, thinking of the towns and valleys that were across the water, not on her island. “I wouldn't mind seeing
him though,” she continued. “I don't need him in my life as a constant person, but I guess. …”

Her voice trailed off. She was thinking about the young man in the film, how he was now and how he had been. “It was so weird seeing that film,” she thought to herself, “especially hearing his voice. Just to hear his voice,” because of course, “I hadn't heard him talk in so long.”

I
SAW
S
YREETA
the other night at the club,” Marissa says. “She looks great. We all kind of went our own ways after we graduated, but I still see her now and then, and we always have a blast.”

Marissa is seated at the Starbucks in the Hillside Mall, dressed in a navy pea coat. Her hair, which has been blue, gold, red, black, and blonde, is now cut in a bob and tucked behind her ears.

When she thinks of her role in the tragedy and trials, she believes: “It made me grow up really fast.” The girls of View Royal often say this. They say they don't like fights because they know where fights can go. They say they leave if trouble starts because they never want to be a witness again. And they say they don't stress over small stuff, like a car breaking down or a botched job interview, because they know “worse things can happen.” Far worse. “Someone can lose their life for no reason at all.”

At thirteen, Marissa had been the youngest girl under the bridge. (“I was just a baby!”) She had fled from the fight and later provided some of the most crucial evidence at the trials of Warren and Kelly. (“I saw Reena on the bridge. She was staggering. She looked really lightheaded. I saw Warren and Kelly follow her.”) And yet she wonders why “the media portrayed us as the bad ones when we were the innocent ones.” The “media pissed me off a lot,” she says now, with a sanguine giggle. “I've had a lot of times where I've had my little breakdowns, where I'm freaking out, thinking,
Oh God, I've done something so wrong.
The media said, ‘You girls were there. You didn't do anything to help Reena Virk.'” But, she says, sighing, “People can all say what they want. I know what happened.”

Sometimes Warren calls her home. He wants to hear where she went
last night, who she saw. He wants to hear the names, the familiar names of The Five: Syreeta, Tara, Felicity, Diana. … Of their new loves, of their lives, for it's as if he can still live in View Royal, still be part of that world, if she evokes it for him.

“When I talk to him, he wants things to be the same as they were when he was out, but it's just so hard to explain to him that it's not the same anymore. The Five of us don't talk anymore. We've all grown up. He still calls me his little munchkin. I'm not that little girl anymore! I still love him, though. My parents pay for his calls, but I'm not home very much, so usually when he calls, I'm not there and I haven't talked to him for a while.”

Despite her sweet nature and delicate features, Marissa has often had to reflect on the moment after she left, a moment so gruesome and terrible, the moment a girl was brought to a dark place and pushed into the water until her breath was no more. She can't see anything, though, when she tries to imagine this, for how could she know what truly occurred below the white schoolhouse?

“Obviously Warren had something to do with it if he is where he is. But for the most part, I don't think he did.” She avoids the use of words like
prison,
like
murder.
“And he promised us that once he gets out, he'll tell us what happened, once it's all over with, but to this day, I don't believe that….” Her voice stops. She still cannot say the word and laughs softly, as if willing some moment of joy, or hopefulness, back into the sentence she cannot complete.

•   •   •

The youth of View Royal do not know the facts of the Karmann Ghia. Never had they noticed the yellow car, such a rare and treasured thing, speeding through their streets. Never had they seen Reena Virk in the passenger seat, laughing, with her hand out the window, the blue nail polish and black platforms, the new accoutrements of belonging, singing about every breath you take. Teasing her uncle Raj about his affection for Bryan Adams, asking him to take her down streets where she might see her new friend, her glorious friend, a blonde, slim, white girl with the name of Josephine.

The tremors and pains in Raj's body only intensified after Reena's murder. The doctors diagnosed him with MS, and soon after Warren's
trial (“I don't care what happens. He'll get more justice than Reena got, that's all I know.”), he'd found his limbs like stones, useless, offering only betrayal. It was not the MS that caused him to park his car in the garage where it began to rust and decay. He'd loved it so much, painted the once-cherry-red car a brilliant yellow. Yet he could not drive the car, for it was too full of memories. The car had taken him through View Royal, those days when he'd been searching for Reena, hoping to find her hiding out at a friend's, hoping she'd emerge laughing, and say, “Raj, I'm sorry. Let's go get that teddy bear.” He told his parents he would
never
again drive the Karmann Ghia.

Almost eight years later, nobody wonders who is driving the car, weaving through the streets of falling petals.

•   •   •

The driver might have noticed the silver cross was gone. A mysterious stranger one night, soon after the murder, mounted a metal cross on the railing of the bridge. For a while, near the bouquets, a tiny cross of sticks rose up, with the backdrop of the Gorge, the watery grave. Tiny and makeshift, the cross was precarious and resembled something one might find in a pueblo. Handwritten were the words:
the Reena Virk bridge.
Rain washed away the words; wind tossed the cross to the site where Reena's diary page had been discovered so unexpectedly. But the second cross would not be lifted and would not fall, for the anonymous builder had constructed it with a view of stability. “It was welded on to the railing,” Reena's grandfather, Mukand, explains, with astonishment. “Someone put a lot of work into it. It was about four feet tall, and silver.”

A year or so after the murder, Mukand had received a call in regard to the second cross.

“Do you mind if we take it down?” the police officer asked him. “We want your permission. You can be there when we remove it.” Mukand agreed, though he did not attend to see the officers take the cross from where it stood as a makeshift memorial.

“Kids were scared to cross the bridge,” Mayor Bob Camden explains. “We had to take it down.” Camden, a former accountant and volunteer fireman, did not want a permanent memorial on the bridge, as, “The problem with memorials is once you start putting them up, everybody wants one.”

Understandably, the mayor was concerned about the tarnishing of his town's image. Around the world, the town was now associated with violence, death, gangs, cruelty. Yet the town was full of hard-working families, of close friends, of good, normal folks.

“The school felt unfairly tarred,” he says. “It wasn't a Shoreline issue. It was a foster care issue. It was really unfortunate, really sad, but most people in View Royal do feel it was an isolated incident. This may sound callous, but I don't think too many people in the town think about it too much anymore.”

Had there been calls for renewed youth programs, for better schools, for a community center? Yes, some antiviolence programs and antibullying measures had been put in place, but for the most part, the mayor observed, “as long as people's toilets flush when they want them to flush, they don't complain.”

After all, the murder was an isolated incident. It revealed nothing about the mores or manners of an average Canadian town. “Kids have been partying and hanging out since the dawn of time. There's no way you could predict a gathering of girls would turn out so ugly. Most police would see a group of girls and think nothing of it.” How could anyone have known such Furies would arise?

Mayor Camden was, in the years after the murder, concerned with improving the civic life and value of View Royal, and to this end, he considered applications from Home Depot and The Great Canadian Casino. The latter promised a great source of revenue. “Ten percent of the casino's gross revenue would go to the town, and so if they earn $2 to $3 million a year, that would double our revenue and we could spend it on capital projects. That could be spent on things like a youth center or sidewalks. Sidewalks are expensive.”

The driver of the Karmann Ghia would, by 2005, have noticed the 35,000-square-foot casino not far from the Gorge. Inside are state-ofthe-art slot machines with names like “Big Bang Piggy Bankin” and “Mermaid's Gold Magic Lamp.” By 2005, the casino had provided over $7 million to the town of View Royal, but no plans for a youth center currently exist.

The detectives still drive through the town in their unmarked cars. Not far from the pay phone at the Mac's, where Reena had last called home,
Sergeant John Bond, now head of the Strikeforce, apprehended a murder suspect. The victim was a fifty-four-year-old barber. (“Nice guy,” Bond says. “Just couldn't beat the dope. Years ago he cut my hair.”) Krista Hobday dealt with a man who beat his girlfriend to death—beat her so badly her face was unrecognizable. Sergeant Ross Poulton apprehended an arsonist who'd torched buildings and watched the flames rise, proud of his handiwork. Bruce “Brownie” Brown retired and was feted for his long-term career as “an officer and a gentleman.” Sergeant Gosling returned to the Dive Unit, searching for marijuana or missing fishermen, not for the body of a missing girl.