Little Lori Blue
Never felt at home
Thought she had to roam
Make her dreams come true
It would be well over a year before we learned anything at all about what happened to her; before forensics and coincidence joined forces to end the speculation about her disappearance and to validate the upright despair that consumed her family – especially her mother. But for her friends, those of us who had known her since high school and who had understood her insatiable craving to shine and witnessed the depths she would dive to summon awe to a glamour she did not naturally possess, there was no question that Lori would not be coming back.
“Lori was such a little scamp.” Her mother said with a smile to no one in particular as we moved toward our table in the noisy café, bustling with the impatient rumblings of midday hunger.
Tried to touch the sky
By a desperate leap
A height she could not keep
Still she had to try
Her mother had phoned me the day before asking if we could meet for lunch. “At a nice outdoor café. Someplace sunny and full of light.”
It had been more than six months since that day in late December when she watched her only daughter back her Toyota down the driveway and head toward Chicago to visit her cousin over winter break. Six months since that phone call from her panicked niece a week later telling her that Lori had not been seen or heard from in two days.
Too close to the flame
Always getting burned
Yet she never learned
On whom is laid the blame?
Although we were more than two years out of high school by then, even at twenty-years old, few of us were prepared for the burden of convention that comes with maturity. And for as much as some of us had been the law-breakers and the drug-takers and viewed ourselves as the exceptions to every rule we did not initiate, Lori had been so a hundred times more.
Lori and I became friends when we were both fourteen during the second semester of our Ninth grade year. She had just been returned to her parent’s after her third attempt at running away from home. Unlike the previous two, which took her no farther than the ladies room at the local mall, this time she left with a boy; a pimply-faced speed freak, AWOL from the Army and had hitchhiked as far as Colorado.
She said she loved him and proudly described to me how she watched him inscribe her initials in his arm with a shaving razor and a ballpoint pen“Practically like the professionals.”
“She was just such a little scamp”, her mother repeated, “a little daredevil and so restless. We’ll probably get a phone call from her any day telling us she’s joined the circus. Lori always loved the circus – the clowns, you know – and it would be just like her to up and take off with some carnival. Just like that! That’s the kind of scamp she was, always wanting to try something new.”
When we were in high school I envied Lori’s freedom. She had no curfew, there were no conditions or restrictions put upon the frequent visitors to her attic bedroom at all hours and there was never a shred of suspicion or alarm from her parents as we bundled our blue-jeaned, bedraggled and drug-addled bones up the stairs to see her; almost always to get high. Often her mother would offer up plates of homemade cookies from the bottom of the stairs, readily passing them into the spindly hands of whichever stringy-haired teen was straight and sober enough to retrieve them.
“I still have this little copper relief she made for me when she was in the second grade.” Her mother said as she looked at me across the refined chasm of table, her face blanched of all sorrow by the smile I rarely ever saw her without.
It was not the sort of smile that conveyed a joy that was lived in. It was the sort of smile that read “With every ounce of my being I am trying to believe what is on my face over what is in my heart.”
It was really not a smile at all. It was a fortress.
“Oh, it is just the sweetest little copper relief of The Big Top with a wide-mouthed clown and an animal I’ve always assumed was an elephant, but I never did ask her.” She continued. “I didn’t want to hurt her feelings if I had guessed wrong.”
She patted the cloth napkin on her lap, tenderly smoothing the creases, flattening the edges and tugging each end gently up towards her waist as though she were tucking a small child into bed for the night.
In those years there were many of us boldly crossing that tightrope of iniquity, climbing to drug-induced heights under a canopy of unrealistic expectations that rivaled any three-ring performance. That one of our numbers would go missing was not surprising; especially that it was Lori.
“I can’t imagine why she hasn’t called home, but I’m certain she’ll have an explanation. She has always been so very independent. Always.”
I smiled but didn’t know how to respond. What I knew of Lori, of her recklessness, her promiscuity and her lust for attention at any cost was not something I would ever share with her mother.
With that she looked past me while the silence between us continued to expand from our respective inabilities to be truthful until it was as though a third person had joined our sorry table.
Where were all of you?
Did you not hear her call?
Did you not know we all
Could have been Loris, too?
More than a year later we would learn that Lori was dead. She had left her cousin’s apartment alone one night to listen to a band at a local bar and never came home.
A week later a trout fisherman would discover the naked body of a young woman underneath a bridge in Sauk County, Wisconsin; her only distinguishing feature being a small mushroom tattoo on her hip. She had most likely been suffocated, her body put into the trunk of a car then dumped under the bridge in this rural and remote location so far from the city of Chicago.
Without any immediate means of identification, she was buried in the cemetery of a nearby town. Eventually, through dental records and detective work her identity was discovered.
It has been thirty-five years since her death but each year her parent’s still make the long drive from Kansas City to the town where she was laid to rest; the town of Baraboo, Wisconsin; formerly the winter headquarters of Ringling Brothers, and home to the Circus World Museum; a town that is also known by the name of Circus City.
Her murder remains unsolved.
Little Lori Blue
Finally climbed too high
And Little Lori died
As Little Lori’s do
