A Kris Medford Mystery: Two Sides Of The Same Face

PART I

Saturday, 3:30 AM - Scott Draper It all began about a week ago when the house in Santa Fe, which had been vacant for a number of years, came back online. The bugs Scott Draper had placed around the Medford house were all designed to detect and transmit information when anything was different. He first became aware that something was happening when the utilities were turned on. When that happened, he quickly did the research confirming that the house had not been sold and Kris Medford still owned it. For a long time, he was unaware that the previous owner, Ruth Medford, had children. Yet when he did the research, all he could conclude was that Kris had to be the daughter of Ruth. Old Mrs. Medford died a few years before, and apparently, she had left everything to her closest living relative.

He checked all the county records and legal documents that he could find. Recently, he hacked into Ruth Medford’s attorney’s office to get copies of her legal documents. His initial failure on that front only spurred him to try harder. Finally, he managed to find his way in through the various security encryptions and accessed everything the attorney had in his electronic files. Scott was able to get copies and scans of hundreds of documents. He stayed up late last night plowing through the documents, and he found Ruth Medford's will. He also found bank account statements, property records, and everything else private and personal that Ruth had shared with her attorney. He gathered information that lit a new fire under him, and he was anxious to move things along as quickly as possible.

As these thoughts danced in his head, he pushed himself off the couch and wandered into his home office, which was whirring and buzzing with the sound of the small fans inside his electronics keeping everything cool. It was the home office of a computer geek extraordinaire, and it had servers, monitors, and keyboards on various desks. He went to the center desk and rolled the chair under it. He tapped on the keyboard and the screen came alive. He clicked on the tracking app he was using and began to review the data log for today. It was the same as the last few days, little or no activity. There was the regular online browsing, innocuous texting, and music streaming but aside from that there was very little activity. He did see that an email notification arrived on Friday morning verifying delivery of furniture, which, interestingly enough would be arriving from Tucson. He wondered about that and felt a little exposed. He had been careful to cover all his tracks, so it had to be coincidence, but it felt like something different.

So, this Kris Medford was moving into the home. He was unsure until today what was going on, and his first thought was that the house was going up for sale. But that changed. Would this mysterious Kris know anything? He pulled up a picture he found of her as the new executive director of the Sandoval Family Foundation. He read the short bio again, searching for any clue that he might have missed.

Santa Fe, NM ­ The Foundation is pleased to announce the hiring of our new Executive Director, Kris Medford. Ms. Medford comes to us from Tucson, Arizona where she was actively involved in social justice work and where she completed her Master’s in Nonprofit Business Administration. She has spent much of her professional and work-life developing new initiatives and creating social business ventures for nonprofits. Ms. Medford is keenly excited about the Foundation’s incubator program and the Foundation’s ongoing support of small business development in Santa Fe. Ms. Medford will begin her work with us on Monday, October 7, 2013. Please join us in extending a warm welcome to Ms. Medford.

He had searched every database he could find, but he couldn’t locate any record for Kris Medford prior to last year. As far as he could tell, she didn’t exist before that. Anything he could find was inconclusive and vague. He stared at her picture on his screen, as he tried to figure out why she seemed so familiar. He felt as if he should know her, yet he was sure he had not met her before. He had found some information in the University’s database including the degree she’d earned, but prior to last year she simply did not exist.

He considered the situation and decided that because Kris Medford would be staying, there was enough activity to warrant closer scrutiny. He decided that taking some action was important, so he began by texting his contact and initiating increased surveillance. In a couple of days, everything would start to fall into place and maybe his waiting would pay off. He yawned a deep yawn and checked the time. It was only 9:30 PM but he decided that he was tired enough for sleep. He clicked the computer into sleep mode then slowly stood and padded down the hall. He completed his bedtime ritual of brushing his teeth and washing his face, then he crawled into his unmade bed and quickly found himself falling into the warm folds of sleep, as his brain continued to repeat the same question, “Who is Kris Medford, and does she know?”

SUNDAY

Sunday, 1:00 PM - Aunt Ruth’s Place This afternoon I am unpacking boxes so I can get the moving pod out of my driveway. From where I stand on the front porch, I can see the Sangre de Cristo Mountains looming to the north. The yellow of the aspen trees is barely visible, and the mountain peaks have just received their first dusting of snow. I have never been in Santa Fe in the fall, and so far, I am feeling like this is heaven. My name is Kris Medford and I have just moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and into the house that my Aunt Ruth left me.

Aunt Ruth moved to Santa Fe after Uncle Woodard died. When I was a really little kid, I heard that Aunt Ruth took her husband, ‘Woody's,’ money and decided she was an artist, so she moved to the art capital of the Southwest. At first, she came with big-eyed excitement about the art world, and of course, Santa Fe was filled with inspiration and hope along with real, professional confrontations and challenges to her limits and talents. Over the years, she settled into her creative exploration, but I don’t think she ever sold a painting because I found them all in the guest room when I got here.

There are hundreds of them stacked front to back, with some on canvas, plywood, plastic, and even a couple on bed sheets and one on an old window. I haven’t seen Aunt Ruth in years, so I just didn’t know that she became this strange, isolated, uncertain genius. While I don't think Aunt Ruth was the next Grandma Moses, she was pretty amazing, and the stories that most likely are hidden in that room have created a craving in me. I can’t stop thinking about her paintings, but I have so many other things to take care of that they just sit there, waiting for me. I can’t wait to get to them!

Yesterday, I went into the small 1950’s guest bedroom to empty the closet of Aunt Ruth’s paint supplies, so I could pay respectful homage to my love affair with Jimmy Choo, the god of amazing shoes. The room has one small window, covered by a pull-down shade and heavy curtains. A small glass light fixture hugs the ceiling. It is filled with dust and bugs so that light barely filters through, and the worst part is that there are so many paintings in the room I can't even open the window until I clear the room out! So, I went in there to make room for my shoes in the paint supply closet and while I was in there, against the far wall at the very front, I saw a beautiful painting. As I stared at the image, I felt as if Aunt Ruth made this just for me and that she sent me a message with the painting. It wasn't the first time that I wondered if I had seriously underestimated my Aunt Ruth.

The painting depicts a person, sitting in the middle of a room against a soft yellow background, naked and curled up, sitting awkwardly on a wooden chair. When you look at it you want to reach out and to keep them from falling. That’s the thing about this painting; it’s not a man or a woman, yet it could be both at the same time. The person is thin, smooth, well-defined, lithe; and either sitting on a chair appearing to fall forward, or they could be settling into the chair and not falling at all. This is the painting that will hang in my foyer, so it will be the first thing everyone will see when they come into my house. I've come to believe, because I want to, that the painting is me.

Aunt Ruth’s house, or rather, my house is an eighteen-hundred square foot bungalow nestled in an old nineteen fifties neighborhood, where suburbia meets Pueblo-style architecture. The houses are all wood framed homes with some shade or other of brown stucco. An adventurous sort might decide that the old traditional pink stucco is more apricot, or that the white has dirtied to tan. In this neighborhood the streets are gently curving with sloping sidewalks those planned community kind of streets that reflect the dissonance of the strange little city of Santa Fe. I arrived about two weeks ago, and I slept on a mattress on the floor until my furniture arrived the day before yesterday. While I waited for the furniture, I basically stripped the house, cleaned, and painted.

Overall, the house is really a sweet three-bedroom. Under Aunt Ruth's turquoise green carpet, which I'm sure I remember from when I was a kid back in the seventies, I found a beautiful, thin-planked pine floor, in near perfect condition. Aunt Ruth had recently updated the kitchen, so it was clean and usable, and I am grateful not to have much to do. The yard is very plain and bare, but that will have to wait until spring. Today I am focusing on getting the rest of the house unpacked. Boxes are everywhere . . . fucking boxes!

Sunday, 1:15 PM – Leakage I’m sitting staring off into space on the front porch with a cup of coffee, remembering Aunt Ruth, this house, and my awakening. I knew fairly early on that I was different, and I was the epitome of confused. I was really attracted to men, but I wasn’t that attracted to gay men. I could and still can tell the difference. And when I was young, I couldn’t relate to either. So, I was confused. On top of that was the unspoken self-subjugation weighed down by my acceptance of the ‘bad’ in my secret; so, I kept it a secret – even - from myself. And that's where it stayed with my limp little dick and ugly ball sack for, oh, so very long. But I had leakage. Leakage is when those really hidden, very far away secrets that we do everything to keep down, start to seep out; that’s what I call leakage.

My first leakage was here in Aunt Ruth’s house when she left me alone. It was more of a major plumbing emergency rather than a simple, everyday leak and it never really totally got plugged again. But that day, I sat on a kitchen chair in front of her bedroom mirror and talked to myself. I tried on my twelve-year-old fabulous falsetto voice, and I walked around in her heels. I crossed my legs and pointed my toes and felt like a beautiful woman. I couldn’t believe how right it felt, and how warm and safe it was. It was then that I started creating the fantasies about the man I would marry. I would dream about him holding me as I fell asleep and making love to me. And then I would wake up with a hard­on and suffer through my homosexual tendencies and move right back into denial. It was like this with me—leaking everywhere, in silence and shame, until I was fifteen and I met him.

It was love at first sight, I’m sure. He was a freckle-faced, brown-haired boy with brains and a smile, and he liked me. He was the one who came to me when I was at the park across the street from his house. I would go there to smoke and be alone and one day, he wandered over and said, “Can I bum one of those?”

We sat and smoked and didn’t say another word until he said, “See you later,” as he got up to walk away. Then he turned back and for what seemed like the first time, he really looked at me through his squinted eyes, his face towards the setting sun, before he asked, “Tomorrow?”

“Sure, tomorrow.”

The next day, we sat and smoked and talked for hours. Then days. Then weeks. We slowly began to find a path to friendship. It was three or four weeks later, as we sat sharing a soda that he first got my heart racing.

He said, verbatim, “I’ve been thinking about you all the time, and it doesn’t make sense. Is that weird?” That was it. That was all it took. It was just a small nick in the armor, but I saw a flicker of light and a glimmer of possibility. After his vague confession I jumped on my opportunity and followed up with my earth-shattering, “I know . . . me too.” Then we smoked through the month of May. This was the first time a boy liked me, and I felt like a beautiful girl—so pretty and wanted. I remember that I felt freedom for a little while.

How it all affected him, I may never know. Today, I can look back and see a young boy who was struggling with a ton of stuff, and I want to believe I helped him. And I do believe that we cared for one another as well as two fifteen-year-olds could. In fact, I would be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that I have searched for that connection ever since. It’s why I’m alone, I think, because who could ever be my ideal? Only he could.

That was the first day of summer vacation and I was on my own for the first time; almost sixteen, with a full summer of him ahead. So, I called him, and he came over. As expected, our teenage hormones took charge and one thing led to another and we both came to believe that we were gay. It was all I could think about, and it made me so horny that my head buzzed. And the elation when I said in my head, “I think I have a boyfriend,” still thrills me. Everything was great until it came time to do the ‘do.’ This so did not work for me, and we tried . . . a lot. I wanted to like it so bad because it felt right having him on top of me, and inside me; it felt almost right, almost. I just didn’t know yet that I wanted to be a girl. So, when I tried on top, we were both confused because I just couldn’t make it work. I think the fact that we tried, we talked, and we still wanted to be with each other, made things even more confusing. Over time I have come to understand that he loved me for me. It’s that simple, and honestly, how can anyone compete?

The Past Four Years – Transition Aunt Ruth died nearly four years ago to the day. It was the twenty-sixth of October when I got the call from my mom letting me know. I couldn’t even go to the funeral. Four years ago, I was already living as me, Kris, not Chris. Thinking about going to Aunt Ruth’s funeral felt oppressive and nauseating, so I didn’t go. Instead, I did that scary thing that I do, and I simply turned it off. I ignored it. My mother called, and I listened and didn’t say much. Then I just hung up and cried.

I came back to myself a few minutes later, my face on the cold wood floor, and I remember shaking in sobs- convulsions really. But no more than an hour later, I had my makeup done, was in a new dress, and I was throwing back plenty of cheap red wine. And that’s how I was, on the sidewalk waiting for my ride; I had turned it off, I was in ignoring mode. Just like that. Click. Off.

For a week, maybe a little longer, I just wandered around and did my job, planned for the future, and focused on my little selfish self and my hated little dick, feeling trapped, and I turned off all that grief about my Aunt Ruth. Then about a week later, I get another phone call from my mother and she’s lunatic mad. She screams and rants and raves on the phone that if anyone gives me that much money, they are crazy! So, I decided they were crazy, and I took Aunt Ruth’s money and found my real skin, along with her house, and a place to be. I haven’t connected with anyone in my family since then and I very rarely look back.

If only I could wrap up four years into that short little tale; it wasn’t that simple though. What I did know then was that when I showed up…