Morgan's Shoes

Birkenstocks and leopard-patterned high heels. Red Converse and fluffy padded bedroom shoes, which, as a child, Morgan named mipmops.

In the early days of Morgan Harrington being missing, her mother Gil invited reporters into their home and into Morgan's bedroom. "You can see from Morgan's shoes that she loves it all--dancing, being outdoors, helping the kids at Camp Easter Seals, going out with friends, working at the medical school. Morgan is all of this joy. We've got to find her."

Morgan had turned 20 three months before her murder on October 17, 2009.

Her shoes, like everything else in her room, stopped moving that autumn night.

There is a scene five minutes and 40 seconds into William Peter Blatty's 1973 horror film, The Exorcist, when the old Catholic priest, Father Merrin, reacts to a small grotesque statue unearthed at an archaeological dig in Iraq. Merrin's ashen face registers that some unfathomable supernatural enemy is now unleashed. Dogs begin to attack one another, carriages nearly careen into people, and then, in the quiet of his office, where Merrin is cataloging the stone fragments recovered that day, and he picks up the snarling demonic figurine, suddenly the clock--ticking high on the wall over his shoulder--inexplicably, utterly stops.

These are Morgan's sneakers. They were in her gym bag, where she would have found them and laced them again the next time she worked out or jogged. But they had stopped.

Her perfume had also stopped.

Her CD player was silent.

Her hairbrush didn't move.

Her guitar and oil pastels, her bathing suit and computer, ink pens and toothbrush, and the cheese and salsa in her apartment refrigerator, like Morgan's shoes, all remained motionless.

I looked down today when I was doing my cardio work on the Alpine Climber. Gil gave me Morgan's shoes, and I've worn them whenever I've gone to the gym. You can see that I've mown my grass in them, too. They are not as young as they were five years ago.

I never put them on that I am not conscious that they are Morgan's shoes. She wore them in my Virginia Tech classroom, when I was her professor.

Now, sweat dripping off my nose, working out at my gym, I am in Morgan's shoes. A perfect fit.

Perspiration is mostly water, but it also contains four trace minerals, sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium, and six trace metals, zinc, copper, iron, chromium, nickel, and lead.

Surely, on a microscopic level, when I'm at the gym, some nano-measurement of Morgan-copper clinks some new arrival of Jane-zinc. I like to think so.

Because I can't be where Morgan moves in the old familiar way, I'll take an imagined microscopic elemental cheers with Morgan. I'll take whatever proximity I can think of.

All of us, hundreds of thousands of us, invested in the Help Save the Next Girl movement--Morgan's online warriors, her friends, her former teachers--all of us who feel connected to her and to her family and who grieve the immeasurable horror that caused not just her sweaters, necklaces, and handwriting, but her heart and her eyelids, to STOP, on October 17, 2009, will take any television coverage, any conversation, any photograph we can get, to feel like we are walking close, accompanying Morgan, continually supporting her family, in whatever ways we can.

I was not in Morgan's shoes in those last hours. I know some devastating details about why she should have been safe that night. I know some heartbreaking details about her fight to live. She fought well, and no wonder.

No one has ever had a more incredible family to return home to. No one would ever have been such a dazzling elementary school teacher. Thousands of children in her classroom would have fallen in love with Miss Harrington. No one could have given birth to more beautiful babies.

But these classrooms, that wedding dress, and those grandchildren--stopped.

In Ndola, Zambia, though, over 200 poor orphans are now being fed and educated in The Morgan Dana Harrington Educational Wing at OMNI Village.

Before I traveled to your school in Africa, I had never heard the categories: single- or double-orphans. One or both parents dead. But in Zambia, the tug of diseases and poverty, despair and disenfranchisement, leave hundreds, thousands of children, single- or double-orphaned. They are such pretty children. Morgan. You would have hugged and loved them all.

So I wear Morgan's shoes, and rage at the gym, rage when I'm teaching my students, and in my painting room, at my easel. I rage, not in anger but in sweet energetic solidarity with Morgan, a positive, productive, hopeful rage called legacy.

I can not bring her home. God, if I could!

But when I alert young people to predatory danger, or design a new Help Save the Next Girl shirt, or make a blueberry pie for Morgan's daddy or a plate of blue cheese crackers for Morgan's mama, God knows I'm walking with Morgan, going where I know she would go.

Morgan, I still can not fathom that you were murdered. I can not comprehend that his killing hands could not feel your meaning. I feel your beauty, years after your murder.

We are going to keep moving.

I am in your shoes.

I know you ended, but here you are.

I promise you, we will move.

Morgan, you are our map.

I know there is treasure at the end of you.

Don't worry.

We will find it.

We will treasure.

We've come a long way, and Jesse Matthew's Fairfax trial is about to begin.

Remember Morgan this week, the Fairfax victim, and Hannah.

Let's push forward, and walk together. We are on the move.

We move for Justice.

Jane Lillian Vance