To Selena, With Love (27 page)

Selena nailed that song the first time through from beginning to end, exactly the way I’d been describing it to the other singer. At the end of the song, she added even more to it.

I was in shock. How was it possible that I could be so lucky? Selena had been supportive enough to stick around to see how this thing would turn out, and then she took that song from zero to one hundred in about one second.

The fact that Selena would sing my demo with the same kind of heart and talent she put into singing any song our band did meant a lot to me. That recording was a source of comfort to me for a long time after Selena was murdered, because it was something of hers that I could hold on to as my very own.

For our second wedding anniversary, I decided that the gift Selena needed more than anything else was a romantic getaway—a retreat from music, the fashion boutiques, housework, and even the dogs. I wanted to take her somewhere beautiful, a place we had never been to before, a location far enough from her family and work that
Selena and I could just be together and completely relax. We’d taken that trip to Acapulco at the start of our relationship, of course, but even that had been in the company of her brother and sister. This was going to be our trip alone.

After talking to a few people, I decided on Ocho Rios, Jamaica. This was the first time I had ever planned a trip on such a grand scale, so I had a travel agent help me choose the resort and make the arrangements. I then hid the package with the tickets and brochures in my bedside table underneath some other reading materials, praying that Selena wouldn’t look there.

I had expected to meet some resistance from Selena’s family. To my surprise, though, when I told them the plan, even Abraham didn’t say anything negative. They kept my secret, too, so Selena was shocked when we arrived in the San Antonio airport after a concert and I told her we weren’t going home with the rest of the family because we had a connecting flight to Miami.

Selena was all excited, thinking that Miami would be our final destination. She loved to shop in Miami. All I had told her in advance was that she was going to need a bathing suit because we were going somewhere tropical.

I can’t remember now what it was, but Selena said something to me as we were boarding the flight to Miami that made me say, “What are you talking about? You don’t do that in Jamaica!”

Selena started jumping up and down and laughing. “I got you to tell me! I got you to tell me!” she teased.

“Just for that little trick, maybe I ought to take you home,” I said.

“No, come on, tell me, are we really going to Jamaica? All by ourselves?” she said.

“We are,” I told her, and she put her arms around me.

I might have felt worse about Selena guessing our destination, except that I had another surprise for her as well: a ring that I’d had made by a jeweler friend back in San Antonio. It was just a simple white gold band, but I’d had the jeweler add a row of small diamonds. I was sure that Selena would love that bit of flash combined with the ring’s simple elegance.

Once we landed in Jamaica, I started having doubts about my choice, because outside the airport shuttle windows the scenery looked so much like many of the smaller towns in Mexico we’d already visited. It was dark because there were no streetlights, and I was growing increasingly nervous—how much could I trust that travel agent, really?—but Selena was still having a great time, chattering away and fully enjoying herself.

I wasn’t going to ruin the moment for her. Besides, the farther we got from the airport, the more aware I was of the fact that we were finally alone.

All of a sudden, the airport shuttle started slowing down. I heard the strains of a reggae band through the open windows, so I thought that we must be getting closer to the resort. Then I saw a single light with a bunch of people beneath it.

“What’s going on?” Selena asked. “It looks like a party. Those people are all dancing.”

Sure enough, we were still in the middle of nowhere, but these Jamaicans were having a blast beneath the single streetlight of their small town, dancing to reggae music issuing from one big speaker and drinking Red Stripe beer out of brown bottles. They were having such a good time that Selena couldn’t resist standing up right in the middle of the shuttle bus and dancing.

“Sit down!” I told her as the bus lurched over yet another
pothole in the road. “I don’t want you to get hurt before we even get to the resort!”

The bus turned onto another road, a long driveway, and then suddenly we were at the resort. Everything was brightly lit and looked beautiful. I relaxed completely then, knowing that I’d picked a good place for us after all.

“I can’t wait to check things out,” Selena said.

“Okay. Here you go.” I started pulling out the brochures I’d brought with me then, and laying them on the bed.

Selena said, “Oh, man, look at this!” and “Wow, they’ve got this, too!” as she read about everything from horseback riding on the beach to rafting river rapids nearby. “This is paradise!”

I was laughing, but I was also thinking about how to give Selena the special ring I’d bought her for an anniversary gift. Finally I hit upon the perfect surprise. Whenever Selena went to sleep, she had this funny little habit of sometimes tucking her hand inside her pillowcase. So, while she was in the bathroom cleaning up after the trip, I slipped the ring in its little blue box into one of the pillowcases on the right side—the side Selena always slept on.

I thought that Selena would want to chill out in the room and take a nap; that way she’d find the ring immediately. Instead, she wanted to go exploring right away because she was so excited. We had a little argument about it.

“Really?” I said. “You want to do all that stuff right now, without resting first?” I tried not to stare too hard at the lump in the pillowcase.

“Yeah, I really want to see everything,” she said.

Finally I said, “Okay, whatever you want to do,” because of course the last thing I wanted was to ruin our special trip.

We went out, and had dinner and some drinks. Then we walked around the resort and checked out the beach at night. It was a clear night and we had a good view of the moon and the stars. We had such a good time that I completely forgot about the ring as we walked on the beach under the moonlight, where we started to talk again about starting a family.

“I can’t believe you did this for me,” Selena said. “Things are so perfect. Nobody has ever been as good to me as you are, Chris.”

That’s when it hit me, bam! I’d left the ring in the pillowcase! Now I started to sweat, sure that the maids had come in and tidied up the room while we were out, and worrying that the ring might have been stolen.

I started acting like I was really tired. “Yeah, it’s been a great night, and this is a beautiful spot,” I said with a big yawn. “I’m glad you like it. Let’s go on back to the room and rest, okay? Tomorrow we can try those river rapids or whatever you want to do.”

We started walking back to the room then, with me trying not to break into a run. To my relief, I could see that the ring was still there.

Sure enough, that night Selena lay on the right side of the bed like she always did. I sat up and turned the TV on, which Selena never minded as she was going to sleep.

All of a sudden, I heard her say, “Huh? What’s this?” as she reached her hand into the pillowcase.

“What’s what?” I said, grinning down at her beautiful face.

Selena pulled the ring box out and opened it. She jumped out of bed and put the ring on, her lip trembling a little. “Oh, Chris,” she said. “You didn’t.”

“I did,” I said. “Happy anniversary.”

She started crying then, really sobbing. She climbed back into bed with me and I held her until she was smiling again. We fell asleep that way, wrapped in each other’s arms.

That trip to Jamaica only confirmed what I’d always known about Selena: my wife was an adventuress. She wasn’t the sort of woman who was going to just lie around the beach if she could go exploring.

We could have stayed at our all-inclusive resort and done nothing more than lounge by the pool or dip ourselves in the warm surf, but Selena was determined to make the most of our precious free time together. One of the things she had never tried was riding river rapids, so off we went on a tour that included not only shooting the rapids on a wild green river, but also hiking and climbing up steep rocky trails. Selena was physically fit—not from going to the gym, but because she was always dancing—so she had no trouble on those climbs. I just made sure that I was the one behind her while she climbed them in her bikini!

At one point, we were given the option of taking a shuttle bus home from whatever remote place in the jungle we were, but Selena and I chose to extend our excursion. We rented a boat, almost like a canoe, and paddled upriver. It was as if we were the only people in a new world, surrounded as we were by tropical plants, insects, and animals we’d never seen before. There were even monkeys in the trees.

It was our own special Eden, and whenever things got hectic for us after that—as they were destined to be, given Selena’s rapid rise to fame—I would remember the dreamy look on Selena’s face in our private paradise.

Courtesy of Everett Collection

T
he band was conducting a sound check with Selena onstage when one of her biggest hits of all time was born.

We were fiddling with the equipment and tuning our instruments when Selena just started spontaneously singing the words to “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom.” I had never seen these lyrics lying around the house, despite the fact that Selena was always writing in notebooks and on little scraps of paper and leaving them wherever she happened to be sitting or standing when she got an idea for a song.

To this day, I can’t remember what stage we were on when we created “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” together. Many of the events during 1993 and 1994 are a blur because we were keeping up such a frantic professional pace. Selena y Los Dinos had been riding high since winning the Grammy for
Selena Live!
Ever since the concert at the Memorial Coliseum in Corpus Christi, Texas, we had been performing constantly, hitting both our usual venues and commanding many larger ones.