A tribute to my friend, who disappeared 20 years ago today

1gobluedem

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Mon May-24-10 08:50 AM
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A tribute to my friend, who disappeared 20 years ago today

My friend, Paige Marie Renkoski, disappeared twenty years ago today. She was on her way back from taking her mother to Detroit Metro Airport, stopped at a park in Canton, MI, and then, for reasons we may never know, pulled her car to the side of an expressway and got out to talk to two men. That's the last we ever saw of her.

Her case has never gone cold and investigators are working afresh today. So much mystery surrounds this. There was nothing wrong with the car; it was running and her shoes and purse were inside it. Paige was the daughter of a state cop. She pulled off in sight of an exit she knew. She would never pull over for someone she didn't know. So why did she?

She was having problems in her relationship but her fiance had an alibi. Could he have engineered this through someone they both knew? He was upset that she had not put money she was awarded in a lawsuit into a joint account. Was he behind this?

So many unanswered questions. Paige did not deserve this.

I met Paige the summer before we began kindergarten. My family had just moved to that town and into the neighborhood. I was tiny and painfully shy. Paige was like a beam of light; always moving, always flashing. She didn't walk, she danced. She pulled me in. On the first day of kindergarten, my mother took me to my classroom and I didn't want her to leave. The room was filled with kids I didn't know and I was terrified. She was trying to disengage my hand when Paige, who was standing at the raised sandbox, noticed us, smiled, and stretched out her hand. From that moment, she lodged herself in my heart.

Ours were the two Catholic families in our immediate circle. Paige was always the center of a huge group of friends -- she never met a stranger -- but at CCD, it was just the two of us. We made our First Communions together. We, very self-importantly, left school early on Ash Wednesday and then returned for the Brownie meeting with our bangs deliberately brushed back from our foreheads so everyone could see our smudgy, ashy crosses and marvel at how holy we were. I felt so special because it was something shared by just the two of us.

We were a triumvirate, actually; the third is my best friend to this day. We each had an older sister; they were the same age and were known as the big girls. We were the little girls. We had a lot of battles; always Paige and R leading the way and me breathlessly trotting after them. Paige was the inventor, the creative one. Her schemes never came to fruition (like making a life-sized Catwoman to hang from their willow tree to scare the big girls) but that didn't stop her from thinking the next one up.

Paige was a kook. At church we would sit in the front pew so she could try to make the lector laugh or so she could check out the altar boys. She told me not to play with the doll my Presbyterian grandparents gave me for my First Communion "because it's a Protestant" and not, of course, because she only got religious presents. We worked in the church nursery together; I would sit in one corner and read stories and she would dance with the kids in the other. She loved Star Trek and Batman and dreamed up fantastic adventures which always ended with Captain Kirk rescuing her. She had a record of a gypsy song and would get us to dress up and dance to it in their basement. She put on a bikini, covered herself with Rub-Ons and pretended to be Goldie Hawn on Laugh In.

At the end of seventh grade, Paige's family moved to the next town. For kids our age, that was like moving to the next state. It was only four miles away but it might as well have been four hundred. She went to a different school and made different friends. R and I stayed in touch at the beginning, as did she, but, inevitably, we drifted apart and our lives became very different. R and I come from academic families; we were good students and knew we'd go on to college. When Paige hung out with us, she did what we did in school. But when she moved, school became more social for her. She was always so pretty -- and always so boy crazy (her first words to me were "I have a boyfriend, do you?" R and I always wonder if they had stayed in our town, would Paige have gone away to college? Would her life have been different enough that this would never have happened? We've both carried around that vague guilt of thinking if we'd only stayed in better touch, kept her more in our lives, things might have been different.

Paige drifted a little after high school. She went to community college but hadn't really settled on a career path until shortly before she disappeared. She wanted to be an elementary school teacher and was working toward that. No wonder, with her love of children. She could always make them laugh.

Our paths didn't cross often but, whenever they did, it was like we'd never been apart; we just picked up where we'd left off. I knew she'd had a lot of boyfriends and had also heard that she didn't always make the right choices. Paige had a great capacity to love and to help; she always thought she could make things better for her friends. She radiated joy even through the pain of her parents' divorce, being burned in a restaurant grease fire, and through the ups and downs of her love life. It was hard to keep her down.

Paige's disappearance hit me like a thunderbolt and that feeling has never left. For weeks afterward, I'd dream about her; she'd be screaming for me to help her and I couldn't find her. I would dream about when we were little. Then I would dream that she came back. Now I don't dream about her often but I think about her daily and I don't want her forgotten. I've stayed close with her mother who has begun giving me photos and small things that belonged to Paige (I'm wearing her rhinestone P pin in her honor today). That's why I'm sharing my memories with you today; so you can know Paige, know that she wasn't just some pretty, blonde, blue-eyed cold case but a real, vibrant, and joyful person whose loss has left a gap in all our lives. When I think of Paige, I think of the epitaph on Kathleen Kennedy's tombstone: Joy She Gave, Joy She Has Found.

Thanks for reading.

Paige and 1goblue in Kindergarten

1990, not long before she disappeared.