Life, Near Death and the Girl Up the Street

We never heard the shot fired inside the house two doors up the street from ours. It was a Saturday afternoon. And while my husband and I were in the dining room enjoying a leisurely lunch with two friends, our neighbors’ 15-year-old daughter lay near their front flowerbed, bleeding from a bullet wound in her chest.

“Help me,” she whispered. Todd, who lives next door to us on the other side, was the one who heard her, but he nearly didn’t. He and his two children had been out in their frontyard playing soccer. Todd had just dashed across the street to retrieve an errant ball. If it hadn’t bounced where it had, he never would have heard the girl, or seen her stagger into the yard.

When he did, he yelled to his kids and anyone else who might hear, “Call 911. Go! NOW!”

“Who did this to you?” he asked the girl, his eyes darting toward the house, the bushes, and up and down the street. “I did,” she told him.

The next day, in an e-mail from another neighbor, I learned some of the details of what had happened, along with the girl’s first name. I’ll call her Sarah. I have no idea how long she and her parents had lived in that two-story house with its three-car garage and flower bed. Unlike most of the homes in this upscale suburb, that one’s been a rental for years, and my contact with various tenants has been limited to glimpses of them at the mailbox.

That Saturday morning, Sarah had a soccer game. Her parents had been there, cheering from the sidelines. With another game scheduled later in the afternoon, Sarah’s mom and dad planned to spend part of that in-between time at the fitness center. Sarah said she would bring a book to read in the car. (She’d always been a good student, according to a neighbor). The family had planned to eat together on the way to the next match.

But that’s not the way things played out. While her mother and father exercised, Sarah, who didn’t have her driver’s license yet, snatched the car keys and drove herself home. There she hunted for the handgun she once overheard her parents say was hidden in the rafters. After she knocked off its safety lock with a hammer, Sarah sat down in an easy chair, angled the gun toward her chest and pulled the trigger. Then she somehow managed to make her way into the yard.

Whether it was regret that moved her or reflex, only Sarah knows. She is still hospitalized and initially was on a ventilator and in a drug-induced coma, but now she is conscious and can talk and walk.

The reasons Sarah did what she did can only be guessed at -- by people like me who didn’t know her, but more desperately by those who thought they did. Even as someone on the periphery of this tragedy, I can’t help but replay the events of that afternoon and think about the bonds I believe all of us under this same sun share. Our lives are connected in ways none of us will ever completely understand.

Most likely Sarah never imagined that some woman two doors down would continue to hear her whispered “Help me.” In feeling that way, I’m sure I’m not alone. And I hope with all my heart that Sarah has come to know -- and accept -- that neither is she.

Sue Diaz is a writer in San Diego.