On the Line (22 page)

We used to make so much fun of her, with all her orange clothes and furnishings, but now it’s my favorite color, too. Now,
whenever I see a nice, bright orange, it puts me in mind of Tunde. It’s such a bright, happy color, don’t you think?

S
eptember 14, 2003. I was in Toronto, shooting a television show. Lyn was along for the ride, staying with me in my hotel room.
Isha was out in San Francisco, visiting friends. Venus was at the house we shared in Florida, with my mom nearby at her house.
Daddy was in Florida, too. It had been a long, long time since all seven of us had lived under the same roof—and yet during
that same long, long time, I continued to picture us as a family. That was my family snapshot. Yeah, we’d each moved on (my
parents, too!), but I could close my eyes and remember those days like they were with me still.

I’d been on the set all day, filming. I’d had to withdraw from the U.S. Open that year because of a knee injury, and I figured
I’d fill in some of the downtime with an acting gig. In fact, I hadn’t played since winning Wimbledon that July, beating Venus
for the fifth straight time in a major final. (Sorry, V!) I’d been playing great tennis, but then I busted up my knee and
ended up having to have surgery. That was a giant disappointment, to be sure, but I chose to see the positives in it. For
one thing, it helped me reconnect with Tunde. She visited me almost every day when I was in the hospital, and after that she
came to the apartment when I was stuck there.

For another, the long layoff allowed me to pursue some other career opportunities. On the professional tour, there’s not a
whole lot of downtime, so if I wanted to try on this acting thing I figured I had to grab whatever time came my way—even if
it meant I’d have to do it on one good knee. Lyn came up to join me and make an adventure out of it, and we loved hanging
out on the set, pretending like we were real movie stars. It was so exciting! We went to bed each night exhausted because
we were out and about all day, and on top of whatever they had me doing for the show I was also rehabbing my knee, so sleep
was a welcome thing.

When the phone rang at about four o’clock in the morning, it was like a bad dream. It was my mom, calling from Florida. Her
voice was calm but confused. She said, “Have you heard from Tunde? I can’t reach her. I think maybe something’s happened.
Maybe she’s been involved in a car accident, or a shooting.”

The call didn’t make a whole lot of sense. It wasn’t
that
late out in California. Tunde had a sitter at home for the kids—that I knew. My first thought was that maybe she’d put the
kids to bed and gone out to a late dinner or something, or maybe out with some friends. I didn’t get how my mom made the leap
from not being able to reach Tunde to thinking she’d been involved in an accident or a shooting, so I shrugged her off. I
said, “Mom, I’ve got a shoot tomorrow morning. I’m sure Tunde’s fine. Get some sleep.”

Of course, I couldn’t fall back asleep after that. It wasn’t that I was too terribly worried, but there was something about
my mom’s incongruous thinking that kept me awake. I learned later that someone had called my mom and suggested she check in
with Tunde, so that was what had her on edge. I guess that’s how it goes sometimes, when someone close to you (but not quite
close enough!) wants to alert you that something terrible has happened but doesn’t want to be the one to actually deliver
the news. Of course, I didn’t know this at the time, so I just thought Mom was being a little dramatic.

Still, I couldn’t help thinking that something was going on. Lyn was asleep in the bed next to mine, but I didn’t want to
wake her over this, so I called Tunde’s house. One of my cousins answered the phone. I thought,
That’s strange.
But at the same time I didn’t really think anything of it, so I just said, “Hey, it’s Serena, is Tunde around?”

That’s when I heard. That she’d been involved in an accident. That she’d been shot. My cousin wasn’t really making a whole
lot of sense, and of course it was late and I was tired and probably half-asleep. Everything just sort of half-registered,
but all those halves added up soon enough, and then the whole dark truth took shape in my head. Finally, I heard the words
I’d been subconsciously dreading since my mom put out all those negative thoughts: “She’s gone, Serena. I’m so sorry.”

I thought,
Gone? Tunde?
It didn’t make sense. I’d just spoken to her earlier in the day. She was so excited about this show I was working on, and
the progress I was making on my knee, how well Venus had played that summer, how beautifully her children were growing, and
on and on. She’d just opened her own beauty salon and was finally starting to do well with it. She was only thirty-one years
old, and I know it’s a cliché but she really did have her whole life ahead of her. Gone? My sister? There was just no way.
It was too crazy. Too impossible. Too sad. Her children needed her. Her parents needed her. Her sisters needed her. Her baby
baby baby baby sister needed her.

I pushed the thought right out of my head. I said, “What do you mean, gone? Is she out or something? Did I just miss her?”

“No, Serena,” my cousin said. “There’s been a terrible accident. Tunde’s been shot. I’m afraid she’s passed.”

By this point, Lyn was wide awake, after listening to my end of the phone call, and we were screaming and crying and consoling
each other. Underneath all that screaming and crying, though, we were also confused. I remember saying to my cousin, “For
real?” Over and over. “For real?” Like someone would really joke about something like this.

“For real? For real?”

At some point, I just dropped the phone. I couldn’t think what to do with my hands. It was awful, just awful. All that time
in Kingdom Hall, all that time praying to Jehovah and trying to live a good, purposeful life, and there are no words of comfort,
no pieces of scripture, no amount of faith that can swallow up the hurt of something like this, no comfort to help you absorb
the news. You just don’t see it coming, and when it hits you it doesn’t fully register. It’s like a glancing blow. You feel
it, and you don’t; you understand it on one level, and on another it’s just impossible to comprehend. For the next day or
two, even, a part of me thought there must have been a horrible mistake, that Tunde hadn’t passed, after all. Maybe they’d
gotten her mixed up with someone else. Or maybe by some miracle she rallied and was okay. Something. Anything but this awful,
lurking, dark truth.

Lyn was just a wreck. She had been superclose to Tunde. Like me, Lyn had also recently moved back to California, only she
didn’t have to do all the traveling I did on the tour, so they were together constantly. Lyn babysat Tunde’s kids all the
time, or just came around to hang out. She was shaking when I dropped the phone, and she crawled onto the bed and leaned into
me and wanted me to tell her what had happened, but I didn’t know anything. I just said, “Something’s happened to Tunde. It’s
bad. I think she’s been shot.”

What happened was Tunde had been out for a late dinner with friends, just like I thought. But then she drove over to Compton,
our old neighborhood, with this guy she’d just started seeing. It was just after midnight, and some kind of argument or confrontation
took place. I can’t imagine Tunde arguing with anyone over anything, so I’m guessing the guy she was with was doing the talking.
Anyway, somebody pulled out a gun, and shots were fired into the SUV Tunde was riding in. According to the police report,
Tunde was hit by the shots that were meant for her boyfriend.

Just like that, she was gone. Just like that, my great, big sister was taken from us—just when we needed her the most. Her
three young children needed her most of all, this was true, but her baby sister needed her, too. And just then, I didn’t see
how I could ever step down from that bed in my Toronto hotel room and do whatever needed doing.

For real
.

Somehow, Lyn and I shifted into emotional autopilot and started making phone calls. I think some of the strength and willpower
I needed to push my game to such a high level was also at play here. That strength you develop as a serious athlete isn’t
just physical; it’s emotional, and it courses through you like a giant force. Without even thinking about it, I must have
put on that superhero cape I’d fashioned for myself on the court, and here it helped me through these next agonizing paces.
God knows, I couldn’t have made it through on my own.

First call I made was to my mom. She picked up the phone and before I could even say anything she said, “My baby’s gone, isn’t
she?”

The calls just got harder after that.

And the flight back to Los Angeles the next morning? Man, that had to be the worst flight ever—and the longest! We were so
upset! The whole way, Lyn and I were in this weird state of denial. They say that’s the first stage of grieving, and here
we were, right in the middle of it. When you’re up in the air like that, literally, you allow yourself to think all kinds
of illogical thoughts. You think, deep down, maybe you’ll land at the airport and learn this wasn’t what really happened.
Maybe the guy who was driving the car was the one who was shot, and Tunde was just grazed in the crossfire. Maybe they did
some kind of operation, and because we were on the plane and away from a phone nobody’d been able to contact us to tell us
Tunde was going to be okay. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It’s a whole lot of maybes, and you hang your every last hope on each and
every one of them and hope
something
catches.

But, of course,
maybe
doesn’t help. You touch down and the truth takes hold and doesn’t let go.

T
he next days and weeks were a blur, and I didn’t want to bother my parents or sisters to help jog my memory on this because
it was such a private, painful time. By the grace of our God, Jehovah, we managed to slog through it. We held on to each other
for dear life.

Tennis was about the last thing on my mind, just then. Forget that I wasn’t physically ready to pick up a racquet. It just
didn’t seem all that important. A lot of people ask me if maybe tennis would have been a good way to power through all this
grieving, but that never occurred to me. When I get angry or hurt or frustrated, I don’t go out and play tennis. I reach for
my family, for my friends, for whatever love and support I can find, and here I had all of that going on in a big-time way.
That’s what helped me power through. I had my sisters. I had my friends. I even had a long, meaningful visit with So-and-So,
who came out to offer whatever comfort he could—so I guess maybe he wasn’t such a terrible guy, after all.

The most difficult piece was helping Tunde’s kids. My mom took the lead on this one. She moved right in to Tunde’s house and
set about raising those kids as her own. Wasn’t any discussion about this, as I recall. Wasn’t ever an issue. It was just
what happened next—only here, too, I have no real memory of this new setup taking hold. I looked up one day, and there it
was.

One specific memory comes back to me, though, from those first days and weeks after Tunde’s death. We played a lot of UNO,
just like we used to do when we were kids. Me, V, Lyn, and Isha. Jeffrey and Justus, too. It turned out Justus was really
good at it. She was smart, like her mom. And fearless. For hours and hours, we’d play UNO. At Tunde’s house. At my apartment,
or Lyn’s. Wherever we happened to be—and for the most part, we happened to be together. None of us could sleep, so it was
a way to pass the time, a way to keep Tunde close, a way to refocus that picture we all carried of our time together as little
girls, sharing that one small bedroom in our house in Compton, talking all night about anything and everything. Here we didn’t
talk all that much, but we were together, going through the same motions we did as kids. Late at night, in the middle of the
afternoon… whenever. Yeah, there was a piece of us missing, but in some ways we were still whole.

I look back now and catch the symbolism in the game itself. I mean, UNO is all about being number one, being the first to
announce yourself and claim the top spot, and as kids it served to reinforce the competitive streak our parents hoped to instill
in us on the tennis court. Here, it seemed to mean something else. Tunde was the oldest, our number one. She was the first
to announce herself, and spread her wings, and move on toward a life of her own. No, she wasn’t a gifted athlete, but she
was strong, focused, driven. We all cheered her on, same as she cheered us on. And now she was gone, and the four of us would
have to take turns in her number one spot, filling the spaces where she had been.

Your destiny has just begun. Remember your people. Remember your sister. I’m proud of U. Your people are proud of U. Tunde
is proud of U. Always, always, always. Keep it up. Play for the moment. Play for yourself. Play for your people. Play for
Tunde. U are capable of anything.

—
MATCH BOOK ENTRY

L
ike I said, tennis was about the last thing on my mind after Tunde died—although to be honest it wasn’t exactly front and
center before she died, either. Keep in mind, I’d hurt my left knee just after that great Grand Slam tournament run that started
in 2002. I hurt it in a foolish way, and I’ll offer those details here, to help me make the all-important point that sometimes
a rash or stupid act can derail your plans in a big-time way. All that sweat and effort I put in on the court went out the
door right after I beat Venus to win the 2003 Wimbledon title. It was the last tournament I played that year, because I was
such a dancing fool. That’s what it came down to: a dancing injury. The first major injury of my career, and it happened on
the dance floor.

I was out at a club in Los Angeles, dancing and partying and having a grand old time, but the foolish part was that I was
doing it in heels. Everything had been going so well on the court, so there was every reason to celebrate, but then at some
point I went into this little spin move out there on the floor and I could feel something go in my knee. I did my move and
thought,
Oh, no, Serena. This can’t be good.