To Selena, With Love (33 page)

In my mind, of course, Selena was still alive. I was going to go into that hospital and see her and hold her in my arms. The thought never entered my mind that my wife might not make it—much less that Selena might pass away before I could see her again.

Robert, one of our sound guys on the road, was already there; I saw him standing outside the main door smoking a cigarette, but he didn’t say anything to me. My dad and I walked into the emergency room, and right away a bunch of doctors and nurses surrounded me. Somebody put a hand on my shoulder and said, “This way, son.”

I was led into a waiting room. Everyone was already there: Abraham, Marcella, Suzette, and many other family members. Only A.B. was missing; he had already slipped away to grieve on his own.

When I saw them, I kind of gave everybody a smile, even though my stomach started twisting into knots at the sight of their expressions.

“What’s going on?” I said. “Where’s Selena?”

Abraham looked at me with dull eyes and said, “Selena passed away, Chris. She’s dead. She was shot and she’s dead.”

For a moment, I stood there feeling stunned, absolutely numb from shock. How was it possible that I wasn’t ever going to see my wife alive again? Never to kiss her or feel her arms around me?

Then I started sobbing, knowing that Selena was gone, but not really grasping it. It takes a while to believe that somebody is gone. You understand it, but you don’t really believe it.

Abraham was crying, too, now. We didn’t know all of the details of the shooting—those came out much later. Then everybody else started weeping with us, and I suddenly had to get out of that room, escape that wall of grief.

Selena’s uncle Isaac, Abraham’s younger brother, was sitting in the crowded waiting room, too. He must have seen how I was, for he opened the door and walked with me out into the hospital hallway. Two doctors were standing there. One of them said to me, “We’re sorry for your loss. We did everything we could.”

I couldn’t speak. Then the doctors said, “We need you to come and identify the body.”

“What?” I said, disbelieving, still, that any of this was happening. “What do you mean? What do I have to do?”

Isaac said, “What are you talking about? Selena’s dead. Why does he have to look at her body?”

“Somebody needs to come and identify her,” one of the doctors said gently. “It’s standard procedure.”

“I can’t do that,” I gasped. I felt like I might pass out from grief; I could scarcely breathe. All I could think about was how Selena had looked when she turned and laughed this morning in the bedroom
and told me to go back to sleep. Selena was gone. How could she be gone?

“I’m sorry, but you have to come with us and identify her,” the doctor was repeating.

I had been barely holding myself together. Now I went completely out of control, yelling at the doctors. “I can’t do that right now, all right?” I shouted. “I told you that already. I just can’t!”

Isaac stepped between me and the doctors and said, “What about me? Can I do it for him?”

“Are you a family member?” the doctor said.

“I’m her uncle,” he said.

The doctors led him away, leaving me standing alone in the hallway, weeping.

My dad drove me home from the hospital. I don’t know what time we left, or in what order anything happened. I was there, but not there. It was like a nightmare. I walked around the rooms and saw Selena’s clothes on the bed and our paperwork still on the kitchen table from the night before. I walked into the bathroom, and there was Selena’s robe, still draped over the shower rod from this morning. It occurred to me then that of course Selena hadn’t known it would be her last day on this earth, either. I started to cry.

My family gathered at the house. Certain details were starting to emerge about the shooting and were slowly filtering into my numbed consciousness. I knew that Selena had gone to the Days Inn to meet Yolanda that morning, had taken her to the hospital and called me when they were on their way back to Yolanda’s room. There had apparently been some kind of confrontation in the
motel room—probably about the missing financial records—just before noon.

When Selena told Yolanda that she couldn’t trust her anymore, Yolanda had drawn the gun from her purse. As Selena turned to leave the room, Yolanda had fired once into my wife’s back, severing an artery to the heart.

Selena had managed to run across the parking lot toward the lobby, leaving a trail of blood and calling for help. She had collapsed on the lobby floor, soaked in blood, and begged the clerks to lock the door. She identified Yolanda as the shooter to one of the clerks, who then dialed an ambulance. The paramedics tried to stop Selena’s internal bleeding and performed CPR; Selena was still alive when they arrived at Memorial Hospital. She had apparently taken off the ring that Yolanda had given her, because when one of the paramedics tried to find a vein for the IV, Selena’s hand opened and the ring fell out.

In the hospital’s trauma room, doctors and surgeons had tried blood transfusions after opening up her chest and discovering massive internal bleeding. Selena died at just after one o’clock in the afternoon. It was two days before our third wedding anniversary.

After shooting Selena, Yolanda had run to her truck and tried to flee the hotel parking lot, but the police had seen her trying to escape. Now, as our family gathered in the living room of our house, Yolanda was parked in her truck with the same pistol aimed at her right temple. She was threatening to kill herself.

I couldn’t stay in the living room, watching the standoff as the police tried to negotiate and stop her from pulling the trigger. I didn’t think that Yolanda would shoot herself. But I didn’t really
care what she did. It was as if I had been swallowed by a black cloud and couldn’t see beyond my own grief.

I went into our bedroom to lie down. After a little while, I got up again and collected the clothes that Selena had been wearing the night before; she had left them on the floor beside the bed. My family was still watching the standoff with Yolanda on TV; in total, she would stay in that pickup truck outside the Days Inn for over nine hours before finally letting the police take her into custody.

Back in the bedroom, I sat on Selena’s side of the bed and held her clothes. I could smell her perfume on them, and suddenly what I wanted more than anything else was to save that smell forever.

I returned to the kitchen and put Selena’s clothes in a plastic bag so that I could seal in the smell. I had to walk by the living room; everyone looked up at me from the television where they were watching the standoff between the police and Yolanda.

“I don’t know why you all are watching that,” I told them. “She’s not going to kill herself.”

Yolanda kept saying that she was sorry for shooting Selena, but I didn’t believe it. I was sure that she only wished that she had the nerve to pull that trigger, but she knew that she didn’t, the same way that I knew it. This was all an act to show that she was feeling remorse. She wasn’t: Yolanda was just sorry that she was caught.

I went back into our bedroom with Selena’s clothes and held that bag in my arms, rocking a little on the edge of the bed.

For the longest time, I kept that bag of Selena’s clothes. I would poke a hole in it now and then and squeeze the bag so that I could smell her perfume. Then I’d seal up the hole again as quickly as I could. I knew that I only had a certain number of times that I could do that before there would be nothing left of Selena.

Courtesy of Everett Collection

R
adio station KEDA-AM broke the news of Selena’s death first. From there, the news traveled fast.

Mourners began arriving from all over. They drove, walked, and rode bicycles past our house on Bloomington Street, many stopping to create a shrine to Selena in front of our chain-link fence with balloons, colored ribbons, stuffed animals, drawings, photographs, scribbled notes, flowers, and flags from all over. At one point the line of cars wrapped around five blocks. Selena had been loved by everyone, from young children who loved to dance to “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” to elderly Tejano fans. Now they were pouring out their love and grief.

The boutiques in Corpus Christi and San Antonio were transformed into shrines as well, and anguished fans held candlelight vigils around the country. Most of the cars in Corpus Christi drove with their headlights on. Fans also left notes and messages on the door of Room 158 of the Days Inn, where Selena was killed.

Selena’s albums and cassettes rapidly disappeared from stores as Texas radio stations played her music nonstop. Grieving fans phoned the radio stations to read poetry for Selena on air, and other
Tejano artists shared their memories of her with the media. Mourners gathered in other cities around the world as well; in Los Angeles alone, four thousand people gathered at the Sports Arena Memorial to honor Selena.

The mourners continued to stand outside our house for months after Selena’s death, sometimes even at night. They were in the street all of the time. It didn’t matter. I didn’t want to go out anyway.

The night before Selena’s funeral, we held a viewing for family and close friends at the funeral home. I hadn’t yet seen Selena’s body. I sat in the front row maybe ten feet away from the casket, unable to look anywhere but at a spot on the floor maybe a foot in front of my feet. I sat there with her family, just staring at that spot, feeling Selena close but not able to look at her, much less approach the casket. I was paralyzed by grief.