When I Read About the Murders in Moscow By Megan E. O'Laughlin

      Tim Sackton CC



When I Read About the Murders in Moscow…


…I remembered The Blue House porch, where I smoked endless cigarettes and watched the frat boys play frisbee. We were an odd mix in that house: partiers and homebodies with disparate majors like pre-med, engineering, history, and business. I was an art student, the basement stoner. My roommates didn't seem to mind when I impulsively adopted an iguana at a party and set his huge glass tank in the middle of the living room. Then Brutus the Iguana stared with his pinprick eye as we watched South Park on the second-hand sofa at night. 

…Time's relentless flow slapped my face; more than twenty years since college! The late 90s of low-rise pants and post-grunge boredom. Everyone told me I looked like Lisa Loeb. Back then, we worried about school projects and silly romances; I assumed that's what college students still worry about. There is no key to the front door or any door in my Blue House memories— I don't believe I had one. We never locked it.

…I recalled that afternoon when we watched the frat boys from the porch and my worn-out joke of counting them in the voice of Count Dracula from Sesame Street: "One frat boy, ah ah ah! Two frat boys! Ah ah ah!" Assembled in a circular shape, the boys tossed the frisbee back and forth. One boy whipped out a violin and played in the middle of their circle; wooly sound floated across the green field to mix with our cigarette smoke. Then that bird of joy in my chest: you know when you laugh so hard you can't breathe? We must have told the story hundreds of times. And did the fraternity violinist perform for us, the non-Greek independents, perpetually on the Blue House porch? Did we realize we'd someday grow old? Did we ever consider the possibility that we wouldn't grow old? 

…I looked at the house in the news photograph and tried to place its location in my mind. I know Moscow like I know my body: every part is familiar, except what changes unexpectedly. I adjust to those changes too, like the field at the end of my parents' road now dotted with the new homes of a subdivision, or when I find a new wrinkle, another white hair. I sigh and shrug at such inevitability; this is how it is to watch time. But time can't steal the details of Moscow in my mind and memory, or my years there as a teen and young adult, a dull sense of safety wrapped around my restless self.

…I used Google maps to find the house and place it within the map in my mind. This was before Google blurred out the house, which I learned they do after something terrible like the Texas Killing Fields. (Moscow can't be a place like that, can it?) Google maps showed me the house where the murders occurred, mere feet away from the Blue House. It's just at the end of the block, where four college kids were killed in their sleep in this quiet town where students stir up parties for entertainment because what else do you do when you go to school in the middle of the farmland in North Idaho? Three of the students who were killed lived in the house, and one of them was from the fraternity where we once watched the boys play frisbee (and once, a violin). 

…I called my parents and told them to lock their doors. They never locked their doors. 

…I joined a web forum where regular people try to help solve real crimes. After a few days, I stopped checking the forum. It felt too close to home. It is home. 

…I tried to include the four students in my morning meditation, but my chest heaved with horrified gasps; it was too awful to think of what happened to them. I’d read about how bright they were, their extra jobs, and their everyday lives of bars, snacks, and parties. Those smiles sparkling from the news pictures! I think we all smiled like that once. 

…I asked my husband if we should still go to Moscow for Christmas, where we’d bake in the kitchen and sled down the steep backyard hill. My daughter asked for a slumber party with my best friend Natalie and me. In college, Natalie and I would giggle as we stumbled home from the bars to eat reheated pizza from the fridge. Natalie slept in my bed on the coldest nights, just like the two girls who were murdered. Sleeping in a bed with a friend on a winter night is a warm comfort. Natalie and I have a friendship of so many years and a thousand slumber parties, just like those girls should have had. 
 
*
My family did go home for Christmas. I drove alone to see the Blue House and saw the police tape around the crime scene at the end of the block. I listened for the cry of that old violin or the shrieks of laughter from the Blue House, but it was quiet all around. I said a prayer and a wish for those four University of Idaho students. That they could have had this same privilege to look back and remember. 


              In memory of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin.



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Megan E. O'Laughlin (she/her) is a psychotherapist, emerging writer, and MFA candidate at Ashland University. Her essays have appeared in The Black Fork Review, Bright Flash Literary Journal, Defunct Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, and others. She lives by the sea in Washington state.