Under the Bridge Read Online Free PDF Page B

and magazines, spoken by judges, cops, and attorneys. And yet she never thought much about her personality. She really had no idea what she was like. Naive, she guessed. “I was probably like any other teenager. I was carefree. For us, life was great,” she recalls, not using the word
murder
or
death,
because these words still seem almost impossible to say, as if they don’t belong to her life, which was wonderful when she was loved and fourteen. “Life was great,” she says, “but then it all just changed in a flash, without any control over it.”

Slivers and Sawdust

    A T P UNJAB U NIVERSITY in India, Manjit Virk spent the late 1970s studying for his master’s degree in English literature. He read the Romantic poets—Lord Byron, Wordsworth. He specialized in Shakespearean drama. “I liked the tragedies best,” he would later recall, without irony.
    His older sister had moved to Victoria, and she mailed him a magazine called
Beautiful British Columbia.
He looked at the photos of the West Coast landscape. “I couldn’t believe a place like Vancouver Island really exists with all the rocks, the trees, and the mountains. Everything looked freshly washed. There was no dirt.” He teased his sister. “No way,” he said. “That’s not a real place! I can’t believe it’s real.” She invited him to visit, and in 1979, when he was twenty-three, he took Pan Am Airlines to Delhi and then to England and then to Seattle. And hesaw the real town of Victoria was even more wondrous, “very beautiful,
so
green.” On this trip, he met his future wife, a young woman named Suman Pallan. “She had a very calm composure. She was polite, soft—a good listener.” Falling in love was unexpected. He had never foreseen that he would stay forever in the place of photographs.
    After they married, there were some “hurt feelings,” for the marriage had not been arranged, and there was some concern among their elders that an unarranged marriage would not last. He looked into teaching, but found out his MA was not recognized as complete. His credits from India could not be transferred, and, to become a professor, he would have to spend another four years in college. He considered becoming a pharmaceutical salesman, but this meant he would have to travel, and his wife was pregnant, and he did not want her to be alone. “And so, I became a lumberjack,” he says, rather surprised at the strange fate. “You have to survive.” He worked at the local mill, and earned $4.50 an hour, and he missed the heat and religion of his home. He learned first aid. In the mills, the workers found slivers in their fingers or pieces of sawdust in their throat, and he became skilled at taking away the slivers and the sawdust.
    When his daughter was born, he became revived, grateful, full of joy. She was named Reena, which is the Punjabi word for mirror, “like a looking glass.”
    Soon after Reena was born, the family moved to View Royal for the parks and the schools that were near their new home. After they bought the house, “we realized it was not a high-end area, that there were a lot of rentals and single mothers, but I never felt we needed to stay in the top neighborhood, like Oak Bay. We are humble. We don’t need to be proud, and say, ‘We’re stuck-up and better than other people.’” Later, it would seem to him as though the presence of evil was in the neighborhood, in the most unlikely shapes and forms. Yet for many years, he was not aware of the dangers, and he would watch
The Muppet Show
with Reena, and then put her on his shoulders and walk with her to Gorge Park, where white lilies and bluebells bloomed. Gorge Park looked like the places he had seen in the magazines his sister sent to India. The places he once believed too clean to exist. Gorge Park was his firstborn daughter’s favorite place to