While the City Slept (8 page)

T
he line to view Teresa’s coffin stretched down the block, some people waiting quietly for over three hours, many of them never seen by the Butz family before. Strangers had been calling the family home, too. People who’d lost children of their own. People who knew Teresa and wanted to connect. People who simply wanted to offer condolences.

Later, at the funeral service, the ten remaining Butz siblings stood and sang Amy Grant for their sister, all of them back at St. Stephen Protomartyr Catholic Church, the place where Teresa first met Jean and Rachel, both friends now there as well, to say good-bye. Norbert senior and Dolly sat in the pews, and Jennifer sat in the pews, too, held and supported but not spoken of in prayers and eulogies as the woman Teresa had been planning to marry in two months. “It’s just not what that was about,” Jennifer said. “I know people who were in the seats—that were there from Seattle—they were upset about it. I wasn’t upset about it, because part of loving and accepting Teresa was loving and accepting the constraints of her family. And they were good people, and they are good people, and they loved me.”

—

After the funeral was over, Norbert junior said, “I got on a plane.” He was headed back to Seattle, to the dark theater, “because there were a lot of people that were relying on me.” That, and he needed to give some structure
to his day, needed to do something familiar, purposeful. “When your world explodes,” Norbert said, “and nothing makes sense, and reality is not real, you do begin to feel like the world is spinning and you’re going to be flung off it. I think a human instinct is to do something that feels really natural, and really, really safe, or you feel like you’re going to die. You’re not going to make it through. You know, people say ‘Breathe, take a breath’ when someone is in distress. ‘Breathe, take a breath.’ Well, you know, singing is breath. It’s breath. It’s taking breath after breath after breath after breath. You can’t sing unless there’s been a breath taken, and that feels—for me, that was a natural—is a natural way to get back into my body. I have not died. I have not been flung off the face of the earth. The universe is not crashing.”

Performing made him feel more sane, and it was not enough. He had a rule about not drinking during shows, and now the rule was suspended. “A bit,” he said. “Not a lot. It was just a few shots here and there. And I wasn’t sleeping. I didn’t sleep for a long, long time. So I got sleep medication. And sleep medication is always enhanced; there’s always a little high to get before you fall asleep if you mix it with Ketel One, or Maker’s Mark, or something. And so, before I knew it, I had really sort of painted myself into a bad corner.”

—

Jennifer and some of the Butz family went, after the funeral, to Sundecker’s, a bar in the old part of town, the part of town you can still get your arms around. Not the sprawling neighborhoods that ring St. Louis and stretch beyond comprehension toward plains stretching beyond comprehension. Not the big, hulking rest of downtown, with its mammoth stone buildings inscribed with ambitious intentions, where the etching on the municipal auditorium declares, “A temple on whose altar is everglowing the flame at which patriotism may be rekindled,” and where “To our soldier dead” is engraved atop a giant memorial commissioned as a necessary reminder at the close of World War I and then finished, on the eve of World War II, as B-17s were already rolling off the Duwamish assembly line.

This bar in the old part of town was a favorite place for Teresa, tucked in a two-story brick building just below the Martin Luther King Bridge, where a neon Budweiser sign sits above the front door, an old-school sign bearing the Anheuser-Busch logo from back before the company sold out and Teresa took—and then let go of—great umbrage. The Budweiser comes in bottles, six for the price of five if you buy the metal bucket full of them, and the claim to culinary fame is humble: great, house-made ranch dressing. The view from the wooden deck out back is of railway tracks and the Mississippi River and, on the other side of the river, power lines and grain silos. On the Sundecker’s side, ivy grows up the iron Martin Luther King Bridge supports, and the bridge rattles as cars and trucks race over, and classic rock rattles out of the Sundecker’s speakers. On the afternoon of Friday, July 24, 2009, Jennifer was there, seated at a big table of family and friends. “I remember we laughed more than we cried,” she said. “And that was good.” Her cell phone rang, unnoticed, and went to voice mail. It was Detective Duffy, who’d been the one to go back inside the red house and gather Teresa’s wedding dress and wedding ring for Jennifer and who now had a message she’d been itching to leave. “I can’t tell you that feeling,” Detective Duffy said. “That’s why I do this job.”

Later, Jennifer checked messages. “And I got up,” Jennifer said, “and I hear her voice on the phone, and she says, ‘We have him.’”

Jennifer told the people at Sundecker’s.

“Joy,” she said. “People were just so happy.”

She watched, took in the scene.

“It was a good moment,” she said. “Because I knew I could go back home.”

—

Two weeks later, Isaiah pleaded not guilty and was held, pending trial, on $10 million bail. A month after that, on September 12, 2009, the day Teresa and Jennifer were to be married, another memorial. This one was private, in Seattle, at the venue the couple had booked for their wedding,
the Tyee Yacht Club on Lake Union, a place where Teresa once worked as a caterer and where Carley and Carmen had shown up some evenings to help her clean so they could all go out and party sooner.

The centerpieces on the tables would have worked for a wedding but now did a different duty, treelike metal stands holding photographs of Jennifer and Teresa together, smiling hugely, arms around each other. Sun poured through the windows as it set over the hills of the city and, beyond the hills, to the west, the Olympic Mountains. People milled about with bottles of Bud. A friend shot video. Expressions were pained, dazed, angry, unsure of how to be, and the same range of emotions crossed Jennifer’s face as she helped with final preparations. A breeze billowed curtains that had been pulled aside. A guitar strummed, warming up. Sunflowers sat in glass vases. This was to be a celebration and a farewell. Jennifer’s mother was there, along with her grandmother, now ninety-three. So were Jean and Rachel. Jennifer’s vocal jazz teacher from Roosevelt High School, Susan Bardsley, came too, but left after about forty-five minutes. “It was too painful,” she said.

Teresa’s pastor spoke, acknowledging at the start a room filled with questions. He asked that the evening become “a fun and holy journey of remembrance, and gratefulness, and thankfulness, and celebration.” A gospel choir had been invited, the Total Experience Gospel Choir, the best-known choir in Seattle. They sang about sharing the weight of a burden, and then Pastor Patrinell Wright, the choir leader, told the people at the memorial, “I know more than most of you think I know about this whole situation.”

People laughed at first, not knowing what she meant, not knowing how to react. “Because,” Pastor Wright continued, “we had already experienced this. My friend, in Tacoma, was one of the victims too.”

—

Ten days before Teresa and Jennifer were attacked, Isaiah’s aunt, Rachel Kalebu, died in an arson at her home near Tacoma, just south of Seattle.
Also killed in the fire: J. J. Jones, a former quarterback for the New York Jets who had fallen on hard times, lost his home in foreclosure, moved to the Pacific Northwest, and then moved in with Rachel to help her care for two sick and elderly family members. “That’s the type of person she was,” Jones’s son told detectives. “She cared for those that somebody may not wanna care for.” After the elderly relatives had passed away, JJ stayed on, living in Rachel’s basement as a boarder. Detectives didn’t have conclusive evidence, but they now suspected Isaiah in the deaths of Rachel and JJ, too, all of it suggesting a terrible, unchecked deterioration in a young man who’d never before been convicted of a felony.

“So,” Pastor Wright said, “we’re all in this together. But we shall overcome together . . . So we’re just gonna turn the Tyee Yacht Club into a synagogue, sanctuary, church—” She was interrupted by cheers. The choir jumped back into a song.

Tony Butz stood next, one of only two of Teresa’s siblings who had chosen to attend. Norbert Leo Butz was the other. Dolly and Norbert senior did not come to this memorial. “To know my sister is to know that she was born in 1969,” Tony began, and then he told an abbreviated version of her childhood. Her nicknames. The scissors she took to her already-boyish hair. Next, Rachel rose and spoke directly to Teresa about how she was going to miss her. The outfielders backing up when Teresa got up to bat. How inside she was all goo. How this day had been circled on Rachel’s calendar for some time, and inside the circle the words “Butz Getting Hitched.” Jean talked about “Teree.” Her swagger. Her laugh. Her clap. The way her heart seemed “a little homeless” before she met Jennifer, and how, after she met Jennifer, “everything was different, Teresa was different . . . I heard in her a hard-won sense of finally being worthy of receiving love.”

Norbert Leo Butz stood, guitar strapped to shoulder, and as he strummed talked about how he and Tony were “the lone representatives of the Butz family,” how he was struggling to keep it together. With Jennifer backing him up, they sang a favorite song of Teresa’s, about the crooked
road to love. Then, because it came to him, Norbert sang another one, “It’s a Hard Life Wherever You Go,” by the folksinger Nanci Griffith. “Teresa always loved this song,” Norbert said. “And I didn’t know that I was going to sing this, but I just feel like I want to. So here goes.”

The song is a tour of intergenerational violence, learned hatreds, limited possibilities. In Belfast. In Chicago. In the writer’s own soul and psyche. Norbert sang it steely, angrily, sorrowfully, clear. “If we poison our children with hatred, then the hard life is all that they’ll know.”

Jenni Butz, Tony’s wife, talked about how into dreams Teresa had been. How she once asked, “What does it mean when your father turns into a braunschweiger and you bury him on the beach?” How she bought Teresa a dream interpretation book to help. Carley read from the letter Teresa sent her from her trip across the country, and then a blind woman who worked in the same building as Teresa talked about their friendship, built partly around love of rival baseball teams.

A player from Teresa’s softball team talked about the game they’d played in Teresa’s honor after she died. “We got ten-runned and the game ended early, so, you know, we didn’t win that night,” she said. “But it wasn’t the end of the season. A couple weeks later, we actually had our softball tournament, and goddamn it”—and here she appeared to give a glance, concerned and then instantly unconcerned, at the pastor—“we won the whole thing.” The win was for Teresa. They established an award in her honor. “It’s a little, tiny league,” the woman said, “but it’s our league.”

—

Jennifer sang “Heavenly Day” by Patty Griffin, the song she and Teresa realized they both loved before they realized much else. As she sang, scars were clear on her neck, raised red welts still healing. Then Jennifer said she wanted to speak to Teresa. She thanked her. She was supposed to be doing vows with her on this day, Teresa standing there in the simple, lace-edged, cream-colored dress she’d bought on sale for $70, including tax. In Teresa’s ears would have been two pearl drop earrings the couple had
been given for free when, after finding the dress, they’d wandered through the jewelry store where Jennifer’s grandfather once worked. “I can’t let the fiancée of Sid Leavitt’s granddaughter walk out of here without something,” a salesperson told them. Back at the red house, Teresa had worn the earrings with shorts and a T-shirt, flipping them around, admiring them in a mirror.

Jennifer offered a new vow. “I promise to live,” she said, and people stood, cried, cheered. “I promise to love. I promise to give. I promise to laugh. I promise to sing. I promise to dream. And I promise to forgive. Teresa Butz, you were the best thing that ever, ever happened to me. And you once told me that you were lovable but you were leavable. And so I want you to look around this room right now. We will never leave you. None of us.”

—

She then told two stories about Teresa. One was from two months before Teresa was killed. In a dream, Jennifer saw Teresa wearing a little black cocktail dress with sequins on top, along with a pair of three-inch heels that she could somehow dance in all night. Teresa was on a stage, holding a microphone and singing—which was not her usual, the singing—and then she began dancing, mostly with her shoulders, a move Jennifer used to tease her about. She was swinging the microphone from its cord while she danced, and Jennifer woke up laughing and told Teresa the dream. “Oh, I love that,” Teresa said. “I am gonna do that. I am gonna swing that microphone.” Jennifer loved this response.

The other story was from about two weeks before Teresa was killed. Jennifer got a call from Teresa, who wanted to know, “Where are you?” There was a mouse in the house on Rose Street, and Teresa was terrified. Jennifer was at her grandmother’s, but she came right over. With Teresa standing on the couch, and later atop the coffee table, Jennifer chased the mouse around and finally caught it in a Tupperware container. “Jen, what are you gonna do?” Teresa asked. “Are you gonna kill it?” Jennifer said, “It
breathes, can’t kill it, so we’re gonna get it outside.” Together, they slid a piece of wood under the overturned Tupperware, carried the animal out of the house, took it some distance away, let it go, and then went back inside, where Teresa said to her, “Jen, you’re the bravest person I know.”

“I might have been able to save her from a little mouse,” Jennifer told the people at the memorial. “But I am standing here today because of bravery that I can’t even describe to you, and I will forever be grateful. Teresa Butz, you are the bravest person I know.”

L
ater, Teresa’s pastor announced, “We’ve got the holiest of all music coming up, ’80s and ’90s!” Soon there would be dancing. But before the dancing, a prayer.

In the prayer, in passing, Teresa’s pastor mentioned evil. That evil happens, and when it does, it mars beauty.

It was, in a way, the continuation of a discussion begun many weeks before that night, when Jennifer had gone for a walk with him along Alki Beach, not far from a brunch place Teresa loved, not far from where the Duwamish enters Elliott Bay.

Teresa’s death was even more recent then, and Jennifer had asked the pastor searching, basic questions. She wondered, “Why do these things happen?”

Just asking that particular question was a new step for her. “It was my first conversation where I started to talk about some of the empathy I had for Kalebu,” Jennifer said.

She wasn’t so interested in answers that involved evil or original sin.

What she wanted to know was this: “What happened to him? How does somebody become this
guy?”