In the Wake of Wanting (11 page)

“But those two guys are really one person. And that one person is someone who will always remain faithful to that beautiful girlfriend, and that’s the guy that you’re going to be a partner with in this class, and hopefully friends with outside of class.”

She smiles up at me.

“Do you think we can make that work?”

“Maybe,” she says.

“Come on…” I nudge her with my shoulder, having to lean down to reach her.

“I’m thinking about it.”

I know she’s teasing me, but I get serious again. “I just met you four days ago, Coley. It’s easy to get swept up in something new–some
one
new–especially when that person readily admits that they like you. Of course I’m going to have some reaction to that. I won’t lie and say that I didn’t, but it’s not something I would ever act on. The fact of the matter is, I don’t know you at all.

“And, I mean, I’ll be honest, you were pretty spot on in your initial assessment of me, and you’ve had years to learn about me in the media, but there’s a lot more to me than that.”
She should know me better than that
. I want so badly to make that proposition to her, but it’s so wrong, what I’m suggesting. “I hope you can learn more about me as a person, too.” I decide to make it seem like a joke. “Then maybe you won’t like me so much.”

“Oh, get over yourself already,” she says with a lilt in her voice. “Friendship is fine.”

“Friendship is fine,” I repeat her. She stops in front of a large dormitory hall.

“Have a good weekend, Trey,” she says.

“You, too. Oh! I almost forgot.” I reach into my bag and pull out two rolls of red Duct tape. “I wasn’t sure which color matched your purse, so I just bought both.”

“That is so sweet, but I’m not putting Duct tape on my handbag.”

I compare the colors in the sun with her bag, seeing her keys hanging out over the side. I easily snatch them out of her purse playfully to make a point. “Wouldn’t you rather the thing shut so people couldn’t steal things from you?” I toss her keys high up into the air and catch them without even looking, my eyes still on the red tape. “Seriously, no one will ever know. This one here.”

She takes the darker roll from me, but shakes her head.

“I’m just trying to help stop the spills… I mean, what happens when, like, a lady product falls out?”

“Are you afraid of a little tampon, Trey?” She watches as my face turns the color of the tape I’m still holding. “Oh, you are! That’s so cute!”

“Shut up,” I warn her, embarrassed.

“You make it very difficult not to crush on you,” she says. “Blushing over a ‘lady product.’ Who calls it that, anyway?” She laughs harder.

“Okay, I’m leaving. Go write a sonnet about it,” I tell her.

“Don’t think I won’t!” she calls after me.

“Don’t make me edit it!” I holler back.

“Wait!” she says. “You have my keys!”

I look at my hands, so distracted that I honestly didn’t realize I still had them. I examine the keychain, a picture of her standing in between two guys about our age, all their arms around each other. She’s wearing shorts and a tank top. Her hair looks about the same length, even though it’s swept to the side in a low ponytail that’s pulled in front of her left shoulder. The picture has to be relatively recent. One of the guys
could
be her brother; the other must be her boyfriend.

“Was this on the pier?” I ask her, showing her the picture when she reaches me.

“Yeah, last year over spring break.” She takes the keys and studies the image, smiling wistfully. “It was a
good
day.”

“Hence why you’ve memorialized it in a keychain, right?” I remain focused on the ends of the tape roll in my hands, pretending not to show much interest in the picture. “Is one of those guys your twin brother?”

“Mmhmm,” she says. “That’s Joel.” She points out the guy on her right. He’s wearing a lime green Elvis shirt and a big smile. I’m more interested in the other one now. He’s smiling, too, sort of, wearing black jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt. “It’s killing you, isn’t it?”

“What? No,” I lie, looking up and shaking my head.

She rocks on the balls of her feet and stares. “Why does your skin do that?”

“Do what?” She doesn’t have to tell me. I feel the blush, my own personal lie detector going off for the world to see.

“Your fair skin is all…
mottled
… like you were standing under the sun too long, only some of your face was sheltered by trees or something.”

“Maybe I’ve just
been
in the sun too long.”

“No… there it is. Now your whole face is the same, red color. You’re blushing again.”

“Jesus Christ. Yes, I want to know who the other guy is. So what? I’m curious.”

“You should Google him.”

“What, is your boyfriend famous?”

“He’s not my boyfriend. I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Well, who is it?”

“Nyall. N-Y-A-L-L. Nyall Fitzsimmons.” I lift my brows curiously, unsure that I should be privy to this information now that I know he’s a relative.

“I didn’t mean to pry.”

“Well, fuck, Trey, now that I’ve told you his name, you’re either going to look him up now or later in the privacy of your apartment. You’ll want to talk to me about him.” She nods encouragingly. “Go on.”

I swallow and hand her the tape I was holding so I can get out my phone. She heads over to a short, protruding wall from the side of the building and takes a seat. After typing in his name and hitting the search button, I do the same.

A bunch of news articles come up, but I pick the one from the
Arlington Connection
. The date is a little over six years ago. I read it aloud.

Son of local cop and special agent holds teacher and classmates hostage for three hours

Yesterday, just after 3:30 p.m., Arlington police were called to West High School, where fifteen-year-old Nyall Fitzsimmons had locked himself, band director Farah Rogers, and two other classmates inside the teacher’s office. It was initially believed that Fitzsimmons, son of Washington, D.C. Police Lieutenant Beth Fitzsimmons and Martin Fitzsimmons, a special agent who also works in Washington, D.C., had obtained a weapon from the home of one of his parents.

After hours of talks, negotiators learned that the student was not armed, and they diffused what had begun as a tense situation. Fitzsimmons let his three hostages go; thirty minutes later, he also emerged from the classroom with no further resistance.

An investigation is still underway.

I look up at her, wondering if she expects me to keep searching for more articles. “So what happened?”

“To make him do that, or what happened to him after?” she asks.

“Whatever you’re comfortable telling me.
If
you’re comfortable telling me.”

“I figure I know everything about your family. You should know a little about mine,” she says with a small smile. “I’ll tell you what happened in those three hours first. He was asking them all to kill him. Pleading with them. He said no one was leaving the room until he was dead. He was out of his mind. Literally.” Her voice changes as she shakes her head and tears swell in her eyes. “My parents and Joel and I were outside of the school, waiting. We were listening to him over a speaker that the task force had set up. My mom is a trained negotiator, too, but Nyall had made it clear he didn’t want to talk to my parents. So we listened to him beg for someone to take his life. It was the scariest day of my life–up until that point, anyway.

“When he came out of the school, he was sobbing. They had him in handcuffs, and as they were putting him in the car, he was saying, ‘I don’t know why I did it. Mommy, Daddy, I don’t know why I did it.’ I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard him call them
Mommy
and
Daddy
. He’s two years older than us. And there was a crowd of hundreds of people there–so many of his friends and classmates and teachers.”

“Was he a troubled child?” I ask her.

“No,” she says. “Not at all. I mean, he wasn’t great in school. He was a little weird; had a weird sense of humor that leaned a little dark sometimes, but no one thought anything of it. That night, he was taken to a hospital for observation. We went to see him. He was handcuffed to the bed–it was awful. He couldn’t understand why he was there; why he was in handcuffs. He didn’t even remember what he’d done. He just wanted to go home. We all watched him cry himself to sleep. It was the saddest thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to curl up with him, but they wouldn’t let us touch him.”

Coley starts crying now, the emotions of that day still very clear and close to her heart. After scanning our surroundings and feeling certain no one is watching, I put my phone in my pocket and place my arm around her shoulders. She leans into me, but starts to take deep breaths in an effort to compose herself.

“I don’t talk about this often.”

“We don’t have to now, Coley. It seems very raw,
still
. But, I mean, he’s obviously free now, right? He was at the pier with you last year.”

She pulls away from me and shakes her head. “He’ll never be free.
Truly
free. He’s institutionalized in a private hospital. That wasn’t the only time there was trouble. He can’t control them. Violent, brief attacks of derangement. There are some moments when he wants to die and other moments when he wants to kill. There’s no sure sign of when one will strike, but he can’t be trusted to be alone or with anyone who’s defenseless.”

“Holy shit.” I allow that to sink in. “How often does it happen?”

“Maybe twenty or thirty times a year.”

“So how did he get to the pier?”

She sighs. “For one week, two times a year, my parents both take time off together and they invite him home. Dad moves in with Mom so they can both be there around the clock to watch him. We do it at spring break and Thanksgiving. The hospital only allows it because of my parents’ training. So last spring, we brought him to New York so he could see where we’d be going to school.”

“Joel goes to Columbia, too?”

“He goes to ICC.” I shrug my shoulders. “The International Culinary Center.”

“Cool. But Nyall… they don’t know what brought it on? Like, initially?”

“Well, after a year and a half in therapy, he opened up about something none of us knew. From the time when he was seven until he was twelve, he was sexually abused by his older best friend and his best friend’s father. He never told anyone. He was so embarrassed. That friend and his family moved away; that’s the only reason the abuse stopped.

“But we found out that the day he took that teacher and students hostage, his
ex
-friend had moved back and enrolled into his high school. So I think it’s safe to say that’s the impetus. That’s what brought it all out of him. But everything was boiling beneath the surface for years. It was just a matter of time before everything erupted.”

I’m still stunned by everything she’s told me. “So, did anything happen to the father and son that abused him?”

“The father is serving a twenty-year sentence. The son, they say, is a victim, just like Nyall. They say that he was only doing what his father taught him to do; what he thought was normal. But, I mean, he was fourteen when they moved away! He
had
to know better by then, right?”

“You’d think so,” I agree with her.

“He has to go to court-appointed counseling. That’s it. And they’ve ruined my brother’s life.”

“It doesn’t seem right.” She’s quiet. “Where is Nyall’s hospital? Can you visit him outside of those two weeks?”

“Yeah.” Her blue eyes regain a little of their shimmer. “It’s in Berryville. About an hour outside of DC. Joel and I go there at least one Sunday a month.”

“Are you going this weekend?” I ask.

“No. Probably not for another two weeks. I send him letters and silly poems. I don’t know if he likes getting any of it. He never says. He never writes back.”

“I bet he does. Deep down, I bet he feels loved. And who doesn’t like that feeling?”

“I don’t know that he
knows
that feeling. I think someone
confused
that feeling for him to the point that he doesn’t understand the definition–emotionally. He doesn’t
trust
the feeling.”

“That’s devastating.” The realization hits me hard, but I understand what she’s saying. She looks so small, slumped over in her sadness. “Come here,” I say, encouraging her with open arms. She accepts a hug willingly.

“Thank you.”

“So you live here at Carman Hall?” I ask her, standing up.