I somehow sleep through the midnight knock at the door and even the barking dogs barely get my attention — we get a lot of deer here on Monument Hill and the barking that accompanies their every visit to our yard. The strange man's voice in the foyer got me up and moving in an instant. The tone of the voice said "Cop."
My brain immediately flashes to my niece, Naomi. Aged 19 and certainly partying on New Year's, I picture a car wreck before I even quite know what I was thinking. As I'm pulling on my robe, Melissa steps into the bedroom and says, flat and hoarse, "Naomi is dead."
Not a car wreck. Murdered. Shot by her boyfriend Monday night and killed almost instantly, we learn early this morning, Tuesday.
There's an El Paso County Sheriff's deputy in my kitchen, telling me my niece is dead under "suspicious circumstances," and almost all the festive New Year's party decorations are still up. The juxtaposition is more than jarring. It seems almost cruel somehow. The deputy gives us contact information with the Austin police and a case number — the pain of a jagged cut reduced to a pair of names and some numbers.
The deputy leaves and Melissa immediately calls her baby brother, Naomi's father, Scott. She has him on speaker so she won't have to repeat to me what he says. "He shot her," he says with the anguish of a man who has just lost his only child. I recognize the sound at once. It's the same sound that was in my grandfather's voice 40 years ago when he had to tell me my father was dead.
Our sons, 13 and 18, are still on Christmas break and awake. They've gleaned nothing from the voices downstairs in the kitchen so we call them down and tell them the news. They revert immediately to type, my two so very different children. Preston, the big brother, is stiff and stoic. Nate is the gregarious one and his tears come at once as his arms fly around his mother.
After a while — I couldn't say how long — we send the boys back to bed. Melissa and I agree that since there's nothing left to be done, that we would try to get some sleep. In the morning we'll meet up with her middle brother, Rick, to inform their parents.
Neither of us slept much or maybe at all.
I sat down to write these words as soon as we got home from Dick and Paula's house. They are good people, decent and strong, and took the news about their granddaughter with dignity — and with grief that was painful to see.
Due to incorrect emergency contact information, the Austin police contacted our local sheriff to inform Melissa of Naomi's murder at the same time Austin PD told her father. It didn't occur to us until this morning that the El Paso deputy must have thought he was informing the mother. No wonder he looked as distraught as we felt.
But Naomi was more than our niece, more than our sons' cousin, more than my in-laws' granddaughter.
Naomi's mom took off when she was barely more than a baby, and everyone in the family stepped up to fill that void. Scott, of course. But also Melissa — "Missy Mommy," Naomi called her for years — and Melissa's folks, too, who found themselves serving as parents again in their 60s. Her doting uncles did what we could — Rick and myself. Naomi was a virtual big sister to my sons and for several years practically lived with us during her summer vacations.
She was just here for Christmas. I can't believe that's it.
"I love her like she's my own," I'd tell anyone who asked and even those who didn't — the closest thing to a daughter I'll ever know. Naomi was lovely, generous (to a fault with her dogs), and whip-smart. There was nothing she couldn't do that she chose to do except, it seems, sort out her troubled personal life.
Her teen years became increasingly difficult no matter what any of us said or did. Maybe that whip-smart brain made her even more headstrong than the typical teenage girl. She had all the love and help and good advice and even church but nothing seemed to stick.
Now she's gone and we'll have to learn to cope with that — and with the legal matters that I can't even begin to think about just yet. The arrest was made almost immediately last night so at least there's that. Minutes ago, we got news that he's in custody in an Austin hospital because he tried to kill himself after murdering my niece. The news inspires thoughts and wishes I can't afford to let myself think or wish.
All that is for later, however. Right now I have my family and our shared grief over our lovely Naomi.
Sitting at Dick and Paula's kitchen table this morning, with Scott again on the speaker phone, we reminded one another not to second-guess anything we ever did or didn't do to help her over the years. I can't speak for the others but I've been second-guessing myself all morning. But, as Dick reminded us, remember the good about Naomi, not the troubles — and there was so much good in her to go around to all those she loved. There were so many laughs and so many smiles.
It feels to me like Naomi might never have fully understood how loved she was. Is. We can only pray that somewhere, now, she does know.
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