Like Your Life Depends On It

When I read Paulette Perhach’s “A Story of a Fuck Off Fund” sitting on a CTA bus that was crawling through Chicago’s morning traffic, my first thought was of Savannah.

My mom’s childhood friend Jewel had twin daughters a few years older than me, named Hannah and Savannah. We always said their names in that order. “We’re going to see Hannah and Savannah!” or “Look at this old picture of you and Hannah and Savannah!” we would say, showing one of the few photos from my mom’s wedding, where the four-year-old twins walked a barely toddling baby me down the aisle — flower girls all three of us. We would never say “Savannah and Hannah.” It just didn’t have the same well-worn flow.

The Johnsons were close. Hannah, Savannah, their younger siblings, and their mom all lived together or close by, and my family had been entwined with theirs since before I was born. My mom dated her Jewel’s brother when she was a teenager, and when I was little, my brother and I played with her kids, gave them hand-me-downs. Savannah’s family was close in a way ours wasn’t, in a way that low-income families in Rockford, Illinois are close by necessity: there’s no money to stray far from home.

I hadn’t seen Savannah since before I went to college when my mom called me early one morning of my junior year. It was the end of the spring semester — I remember because I was taking Medieval Poetry and Astronomy. My mom always kept me in the loop about her life, about her boyfriend that no one liked much, and her two little kids, a boy who loves superheroes and a baby girl.

My mom’s voice peeled through the grog: “Savannah’s been murdered.”

Savannah Johnson died when she was 24, shot and stabbed in her East Rockford apartment by her boyfriend in front of their two children. She was just getting started.

It was like being struck by lightning, hearing it seemed so impossible. We didn’t know she was being abused. She hadn’t reached out. I hadn’t left my cushy college campus, hadn’t ventured back to my birth city, hadn’t taken the time to see her or see she was being hurt. I would find out later, during the trial, that she had been threatened for a long time; that he had threatened her family and her children.

With our ears still ringing, my mom and I spent weeks asking every “what if.” What if she had told someone? Would she have gotten away or would he have killed someone in her family like he promised? What if she gone to a shelter? Would that have saved her? What if she moved? Her family would have had to move, too. What if she had told the police? What if we had laws that made it so domestic abusers couldn’t buy guns? Would she have died from the stab wound anyways? What if she had gotten a gun first? What would happen to her kids if she fought back and ended up in jail? Where would she go if she had managed to escape? Would she have to hide the rest of her life?

But all of those questions, every “what if” came back to one question: with what money? What could a 24-year-old woman working at a café with two tiny kids in Rockford, Illinois do once she fell in love and had children with a manipulative, violent, abusive man?

Nothing.

I sat in my Astronomy class, perched on top a manicured hill of a public university, which I had the luck to be at because I had been born into a family that made more money than Savannah’s, that got out of Rockford and fled to the safety of rural Wisconsin, that made sure I went to college, and made sure I had a safety net; sat next to my friend who had split Girl Scout cookies with me and joked with me the whole semester that our professor looked kind of like a lizard; sat and I realized that she could have done nothing.

Last spring, in the week before my graduation from college, my mom called again — this time from outside the courthouse, where a jury convicted Savannah’s boyfriend a beautiful “guilty on all counts.” But still, when my mom and I talk about our family friends in Rockford, we are forced to just say “Hannah” and swallow back another name.

You should have a Fuck Off Fund. You should have enough money to run like your life depends on it.