Everything was pink that day; even God’s own sky looked pink to me, except for the red of that girl’s hood. When I saw her I thought immediately how sad she looked, even though I couldn’t see her face. Now, of course, I understand that it was my own sadness I saw on her.
She was sitting against the wire fence that surrounds the school where I was taking my granddaughter to enroll her. Her arms opened out away from her body and her palms were up so that I almost expected to see stigmata. Both girls, my granddaughter and the dead girl, were dressed in pink. The dead girl was wearing a pink sweat suit, pants and shirt, a designer suit really, not made for running or gymnastics. Her feet were naked. If she had been wearing shoes, one of the neighborhood children wore them now. A paper bag was over her head. It was not pink but a deep reddish-brown. When I got closer I saw that it was not paper but a cloth handbag, one you could buy in a store that imports from Mexico or South America. Before it became reddish-brown it had been a cottony white. Maybe it was this girl’s. Maybe she had been shot by another girl who had put her own bag over this girl’s head. But probably not. Not that another girl might not have shot her, but she wouldn’t have ruined her own handbag. As I was reaching to pull it off, I suddenly felt overwhelmingly tired, but I wanted to close her eyes. I knew they would be open.
When I touched the bag it was hard and stiff, so I knew she had been dead for a while. When my granddaughter saw the girl’s face, she screamed and brought her little hands to her own face. I had forgotten she was with me. I told her to go back to the car and I watched her as she ran across the street, her pink skirt bouncing up off her little bottom. I felt so tired I could hardly bear it. And so I drew down the eyelids on that poor, destroyed face, as you would close the blinds in your living room against the bright sun, and they stayed closed, though I was afraid they wouldn’t.
Once when my son was in the war he and his friends—the other soldiers he was with—were ambushed. His best friend—another boy from the neighborhood, but who Junior knew only casually back home—got killed in the ambush. They had been through so much bad together and now he had got killed. And after he died, immediately after, and maybe some others had died too, Junior and the other soldiers who remained sat down to eat while they waited for the helicopter to come. And as Junior ate his lunch, his best friend watched him with his dead eyes. And my son said to me a year later, or maybe two, that he hadn’t felt a thing but tired as he ate his lunch. Not then, anyway. I do believe, I am absolutely certain, that my son took his own life because he couldn’t forgive himself for not closing his friend’s eyes, for not allowing him his earned peace.
Maybe that is why it was so important to me to close this poor girl’s eyes, so that no other child would have to see them, although it was not clear to me then why I needed to do this. But I wish I had been alone. I wish my granddaughter had not been with me. I wish this poor girl who could not have been fifteen years old had not died, nor my son, nor any other mother’s son or daughter.