Beth Chacey DeBoom

[In the summer of 1991 Beth's mother, Jackie, was killed by a stalker in front of a TV news crew and a police officer in downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The following spring the state of Iowa passed its stalking law, prompted by Jackie's death.]

The sheriff’s deputy turned onto my lane just after midnight, rubber tires crunching over loose powdery gravel as the car crept forward, hunting dutifully for the needle in the haystack that was my tiny house in the farm-country blackness. The approach was so stealthy that I never heard it coming, and neither did the neighboring dogs that usually stood firm guard over the four houses scattered along Holman’s Road. I was asleep with my boyfriend in the attic bedroom, tucked in and so soundly in slumber that even when the deputy knocked on the weathered front door I missed his insistent rap ripple through the country calm. The deputy tried another tact to rouse me. He radioed a dispatcher and asked her to call, so that I awoke to the shrill ring of a call in the middle of the night, from a woman asking me gently to go to my front door, because, she said, a deputy was waiting for me.

There were no streetlights or porch light, so when I opened the door the man outside was a gray blur of face and uniform, his waist bulky with gun and holster. He told me little, stood straight and stiff on the stoop as he doled out enigmatic news. My mom was at St. Luke’s Hospital, he told me, and I was supposed to go there. That was all he knew, he said, when I asked him for more, my palms turned upward, my brow narrowed into a zigzag of furrows. Something about me must have already looked frenzied because he turned away then turned back to add, “Drive carefully, OK?” To which I said OK, and thank you. Then he was gone, swallowed again by the night.

I couldn’t dress fast enough, couldn’t bother turning lights on, didn’t bother to change out of the sweatshirt I had worn to bed. I jabbed limbs into a pair of cutoff shorts and tackled my dirty canvas sneakers, not bothering to untie the laces, feeling the backs of the shoes cutting into my heels as I wedged them onto my feet.

My boyfriend was dressing too, knowing exactly why this was urgent. We bumped into each other as we bolted for the stairway. Our feet thundered on the wood steps as we headed downstairs, and we shot through the front door and across the stepping stones of front path, and leapt into the cab of the truck. We were on our way, already forgetting to drive carefully.

It was 12 miles to town. Adrenaline pumped my heart the entire way, making my body buzz with electrical current and my thoughts dash in scattered, disjointed, desperate tangents that led everywhere and nowhere.

Please God, let her be alive. Please God, please let her be OK. Please God, at least don’t let her be blown up. Please, please God, don’t let her be in tiny pieces.

I thought, as always, of Terry Muzingo, the woman in a neighboring town whose ex-husband had stalked her then planted a bomb in her car. Terry, whose hands were torn off and whose face was mutilated.

My mom spoke with her hands, in dramatic gestures that flashed jewelry and manicured nails.

I reviewed the facts, an abacus in my mind clicking counters this way and that, calculating odds.

My mom’s life had been threatened, her moves watched covertly for months. And this, I wondered, could this be some end to that unnerving road? I analyzed the deputy’s evasive words, his stiff posture, his gentle brevity. Nothing. He had told me nothing. Which meant something, didn’t it God?

I knew if my mom was conscious she would have called me herself. If she was conscious she would have asked to go to Mercy Hospital, the city’s competing hospital, the hospital where she was born 47 years ago, and gave birth to me 23 years ago, where after I was born she had hungrily nibbled on yellow rose petals in her private room because her doctor told her she needed to loose the baby weight and that she would have to be content with the salad he prescribed.

And John Khouri had a gun. John Khouri had that god damn gun, and he had threatened to use it, and the police couldn’t help, and now maybe it was too late.

These thoughts tangled inside the slow rhythmic loop of my repeated prayer. The combination did not extend much hope, but instead lowered a great burden of grim reality.

My boyfriend drove, hunched over the steering wheel with hands clenched at 10 and 2, his foot pressed to the accelerator so that the engine roared. We didn’t say a word out loud. We cut through the pitch dark countryside, past my best friend’s childhood home, past my sprawling elementary school, a square island of building surrounded by playground asphalt in the middle of perfectly spaced rows of tall July corn. I knew this corn’s growth by heart. I had gauged the start and finish of each school year by these fields, planted each spring, chopped down each fall, leaving sharp stalks of stubble that became like little knives when frozen by winter. Across the street from the school was the horse barn, where spring was heralded by urgent horse mating, teaching us wide eyed and giggling school kids the birds and the bees long before the Disney sex ed movie was rolled into our classroom on the AV cart in fourth grade.

This world, my world, the childhood I now left behind mile marker by mile marker, was nearly invisible in the country night, but I knew these rural Iowa scenes even when the dark cloaked them. I still knew them by the dark shapes, by the humid summer smells -- of manure and damp pasture grass and waxy stalks -- that gusted through my open passenger side window. I kept the window down. I gulped that country air.

Then we were in town, zipping through empty streets. We came within a block of my mom’s house and I squeezed my eyes closed, not ready to see the squad cars and flashing lights around her house, marking the new territory with yellow tape and chalk outlines and nosey rubbernecking neighbors. But when I couldn’t help but peek I saw nothing, which gave me hope that no crime had been committed, that maybe we would be all right. The abacus shifted in our favor. Thank you God.

We were at the E.R., under a canopy, by automatic doors that swooshed when cued. My boyfriend dropped me off there and leaned over to the passenger side to ask me through the window to please, please Liz, wait for him there while he parked. He looked sick, pale, gray. His face was stubbly with red beard, but it was the face of a scared little boy. He made me promise to stay, and I did promise, with a dazed nod, because I honestly thought I would stay right there. But when he hit the gas I bolted inside, running on the tiptoes of my sneakers, with small steps, planted lightly in my sprint, making tiny squeaks along the waxed floor. Wild-eyed, I moved past the hushed waiting room, across polished squares of tile and to a nurses’ station, where I looked for someone behind that tall counter to meet my eyes. They did. They were waiting for me. Every nurse turned to me and stared.

Breathlessly I said, “My mother was brought here tonight. I was told to come here?” They looked at me in unison, then after the briefest of hesitations, detectible to me only because the scene evolved in slow motion, they turned to each other. One nurse stepped forward from the pack. Still, they remained quiet. Their tiny sliver of silence pained me. I wanted to hear them say what I had already figured out. But then, I wanted to prolong the last few seconds I would have of thinking of my mom as intact.

That was when I saw a glowing set of chest X-Rays on a wall behind the white row of nurses. I looked up, past them. That was my mom on the wall, I realized. Her wounds. My mom turned inside out. The abacus broke. It’s tiles clattered to the ground.

I looked down, and my head fell, my shoulders going with it, until my chin rested on my chest. A light burst inside me, an explosion of chaos in my head, and then there was darkness. My youth fled into the shadow. The person I had been was gone.

A blond nurse with a dark blue cardigan draped over the shoulders of her white dress stepped from behind the counter and wrapped an arm around me, gripping my right shoulder tight. My boyfriend appeared and the three of us began a slow walk down a hallway, twisting deeper and deeper into the hospital, and closer to my mom.

I stared at my cheap shoes padding across the floor. Out of childhood habit, I tried not to step on the cracks.

Sometimes, toward the end of the stalking, I’d stand in a window of my mom’s house, a disguised silhouette behind a veil of sheer white curtains, daring the invisible hit man to shoot me, to mistake me for his beloved. I would be sacrificial. My death would save a more important life.

But I didn’t really want to die. I was young and immortal. So more often I imagined killing him. It would happen this way:

He would open his apartment door and be surprised to find me, the daughter of his obsession. I would transform my baby face into an expression so cold-steely terrifying that it would make his gaunt face twitchy and his body language cocky in defense. Eliz-a-beth, he would huff haughtily in his Syrian accent, what do you want, why are you here? I would not answer, but glare for just a few seconds longer, for dramatic effect, to paralyze him with fright, playing chicken with my eyes.

That’s when I would pull the gun from behind my back, raise it to his chest, watch with satisfaction as he fluttered his hands in surrender. My mind would shoot red arcs of rage that would blind me and empower me. I would fire. Then I would flee. He would be dead. This would be over. It was the only way this would be over.

My mother would visit me in prison, her lined face now a map of guilt for her daughter’s wasted life, and for the sacrifice made in her honor. A jury would ponder if my act was justified. But in the end, they would have to lean on the law, because it is clear. Killing was killing. They would have to send me away.

In movies and books these were the summoned acts of selfless courage that made heroes of average people. I remained average, a coward in wartime. I hated myself for my weakness.

But killing was wrong. Taking a life was a sin. So I hesitated, and he struck first.

The nurse talked as we walked, her voice soothing, even as she said these words.

My boyfriend groaned, exhaling his misery. I turned away from him, inhaling my grief where I could guard it and corral it until I decided if, if, I wanted to free it.

“I know who did it,” I blurted, my fists clenched in front of me. “It was John Khouri.”

“It didn’t happened at her house,” the nurse told me when I asked. It had happened downtown, she offered, “but that’s all I know.”

The thin sheet showed tiny dots of splattered blood, already dried brown. The woman tucked underneath was not my mother. It was a body. My mother was gone now. The mouth was frozen half open, in a dollish pout, and the tongue poked from just behind parted lips. She had died gagging on her own blood. Her death was painful, I suspected, and I believed this even later, when I would read about theories that God takes people away before the pain sets in. My mom died in agony and panic, fighting for air and salvation. And then she left her body, discarding it like a shell, because she didn’t need it anymore.

I was flooded with revelation and peace. With a swift punch of acumen I knew something more clearly than I have ever known anything in my life. I saw that it was just a body I was seeing in front of me, that a soul was what had filled my mom’s body with life and made her who she was and what I loved. I knew that this body, this thing I was seeing, had only been a vehicle that carried her through life. Her soul was somewhere, maybe in that room with me, maybe not gone yet from my side. I blinked. I looked up, I looked around, not seeing the machines and the sterile tiles and the cold stainless steel of countertops and garbage cans. I looked past and beyond. Somewhere couldn’t be defined. She was just elsewhere.

I touched one curl hesitantly between a thumb and forefinger. It pulled and sprang back into its red coil. When she was a little girl Grandpa used to twist her ringlets around his stubby fingers and let them bounce back, while his baby girl cooed in delight over her daddy’s doting. I said a silent prayer, because at that moment I knew there was an afterlife and that I was talking to God.

“I love you Mom,” I whispered in my head, from one crushed spirit to another. “Be at peace."

My mom was now past tense. Forever more a was, used to, remember when, didn’t she once? Her photos that hung on the walls of our homes would someday look dated, freezing her in a specific era, showing that decades had passed between then and now, leaving a physical gap between her and us.

She had changed grammatically. I realized this instantly. How to describe her now, what tense to use, I wondered, before I called family and friends as the courier of the news that our Jackie was gone.

Sitting in a padded chair in the private hospital lounge that was reserved for lost souls like me, I assembled and rehearsed what I would say. My mother was shot and killed, I would say, because murder and homicide didn’t seem like something that would happen to us. There was a phone in front of me that linked this event with the lives of people connected to my mom. I would use that phone to call them all, to interrupt peaceful slumber and tranquil lives, to tell them my mom had been downtown in the same car with a crazy killer. Beyond that? How to explain? I didn’t know where to begin or end. I realized I didn’t know much in between, either.

I could not explain to them the complexity of this man, or his connection to the woman he killed, the woman I thought I knew inside and out, because she made me who I was, and taught me all I knew. I trusted her completely, and built my life around her life. And when she died, I went with her to the place that was neither here nor there, but everywhere, 12 miles back with no turnaround.