Son of a Gun (24 page)

“Has your case gone to trial?”

The mother at my table is staring at me, waiting for an answer. This is how you make small talk here.

“No. He killed himself.”

“Oh. We’re still waiting for the trial.” Her face is pretty, or once was—high cheekbones and smooth skin and long eyelashes—but whatever medication she’s taking for the grief makes her eyes dull and vacant, her voice slow and disconcertingly calm. I still haven’t seen her blink.

“I hope he fries.”

“Thanks.”

I assumed the killer was male, and later, when we tell our stories, I’ll learn that I was right: everyone in this room lost their loved one to an angry man.

The meeting is supposed to start at 8:00. At 8:05 I’m planning my escape. I ask the pest control lady if there’s a soda machine around. She says she doesn’t know. I say I’ll take a look and rise to leave, figuring I’m home free, until the father
pipes up and says there’s a soda machine at the far end of the building.

“I’ll show you,” he says. “C’mon.”

As he leads me through the labyrinth of the hospital, he says he works in facilities maintenance for the HMO that runs this place. I tell him that’s what my father does. He says he doesn’t do it anymore, actually—he got laid off last month. “Forced retirement,” he says, shaking his head. “Worked here for thirty years. They said it was the economy.” He pauses. His face is florid, his upper lip curled. He’s seething; of course he feels it too, that all-consuming rage. “The economy,” he says again.

He shows me the soda machine. I buy a Coke. On the way back to the meeting, we talk about real estate prices and the Cardinals’ chances of making it to the Super Bowl again, anything other than the fact that in the last year he’s lost his job and his son, both for reasons he can’t understand.

Back in Conference Room B, the chapter leader—the sensible housewife, whose name is Kate—explains today’s activity. We’re scrapbooking. She’s brought boxes and bins and bags full of supplies, stickers and scissors and glue, construction paper in every conceivable color. She spreads the supplies on a table and tells us to take what we want. We were supposed to bring pictures of our loved ones; she mentioned that at the last meeting. Everyone but me is holding a picture of a victim, and I realize for the first time that they all know one another. They come here every month. I’m the outsider, the new guy, and I didn’t bring any pictures.

Kate sees me still standing by the door.

“If you don’t have a picture, that’s OK,” she says, smiling gently and waving toward my seat. “You can make the page and bring it next time.”

Few things make me as uncomfortable as organized classroom activities, arts and crafts, skits, that sort of thing, and
apparently I’m not the only one. The sedated woman mutters that she doesn’t think she wants to do this, but sifts through the box in front of her anyway and picks a pink background. The others begin to leaf through paper scraps and make desultory attempts to settle on a color palette. Kate tells us that the pages we make will go into a big scrapbook at headquarters, a scrapbook that only other survivors will see. I try to imagine it, a white three-ring binder sitting in a storeroom in some strip mall in Mesa, the book of Arizona murder victims. I’m not putting my mother in that book.

But I can’t just leave. I can make it through one meeting. So I sit and pick a few pieces of paper in earth tones, brown and green and tan, thinking I’ll do something subtle. Kate comes over to my table carrying a bag of stickers.

“Who was your loved one?”

“My mother.”

She leans over my shoulder and touches the pieces of paper on the table in front of me, arranging them into a pattern. She shows me where the pictures could go, and points to a spot above them. “You could put her name here, or ‘Mom.’ ”

I grab a sheet of letters from the bag.

“And then you can put other things on the sides here, give it some color.” She dumps the bag on the table, spreads the packages of stickers and looks through them. It’s a lot of stickers. I ask her if she bought them all herself, and she quietly says yes, but not to worry about it, she has more than she needs. “What did she like?” she asks.

The question takes me by surprise, forces me to think about my mother as a person, as something other than the reason for my grief. Maybe scrapbooking serves a purpose after all. What
did
she like?

“Horses. She liked horses.”

“That’s a good start. I’ve got horses in here somewhere. What else?”

I take a slow and deliberate breath. She means well. She wants to help me remember my mother in a positive way, as a person who liked things. I don’t know why that pisses me off, if it’s because I can’t even think of another thing she liked, or if it’s because naming a couple of things a dead person liked is an easy way to seal them off from the complex world of the living, for whom likes and dislikes can still change. She liked horses and men, but that’s not who she was.

“She really liked horses.” I spot a sheet of horse-head stickers in the heap and pluck it out. Satisfied, Kate moves on to the next person.

The other night I took one of the unmarked tapes from my mother’s camera bag, put it in the VCR, and saw her with her horses. It begins as she’s feeding one from a bucket. Behind her looms the peak of Sheep’s Head Mountain. The date in the bottom left corner is December 28, 1999. That was before she and Ray set out on their Adventure, when they were still testing out the idea by spending two weeks at a time camping and riding horses in remote parts of Arizona.

Ray filmed it. At first, she doesn’t know she’s on camera. A black baseball cap casts shade across her face. She looks younger than I remember her, but that might be because the tape is old, the image grainy. As the horse feeds, she leans forward and whispers in its ear, but her words are inaudible. She turns and sees the camera, and a smile breaks across her face. I pressed rewind and watched the smile spread again.

Hi, everybody!

She introduces the horse, Crook, and kisses it between its
eyes. Ray hands her the camera and she films him as he gives a tour of their campground. Mom was no auteur: the picture is shaky and zooms in and out randomly. Chance darts around the bottom of the frame as Ray leads the camera through their tent, a three-room nylon dome in peach and blue and green that casts colored spots onto his face and makes him look, in his jeans and boots and undershirt, like a rodeo clown. He carries a flashlight in one pocket and a pair of gloves in the other, and a key ring and a Leatherman dangle from his belt. He’s not wearing a gun.

Mom talks to the camera as if it were her mother. This tape was intended for Grandma, to show her what her daughter’s life was like. My mother points to objects and identifies them in a shrill lilt; she did that often, affecting a girlish tone, and I never understood why, if she thought it was endearing, if she thought it was expected. She must have meant her voice to sound peppy, but instead it just sounds strained, and her observations are bizarrely literal.
This is the horse’s butt. There are the mountains. Here is our truck
. She films the propane stove they cook on, the campfire where they burn their trash, the bucket they use as a toilet.

I thought I’d be riveted by the tape, and for the first few minutes I was: seeing her face, hearing her voice again. But soon I couldn’t avoid the thought: this is boring. I fast-forwarded, looking for clues, finding none. Did she really think Grandma would care about the spice rack? Who gives a shit about their coolers? Didn’t she understand that nobody else was fascinated by her harebrained horse-trailer lifestyle?

Hi, everybody!
Who’s everybody? Who did she expect to see this? She had almost two years left to live, but never sent the tape to Grandma. It sat in its bag for years. I’m probably the only person who’s ever watched it; I’m the only one who wants to remember. And even though I knew better, watching
it made me wonder if it was really made for me, if somehow she knew I would need it.

I’m arranging stickers around phantom photos of my mother when the girl with the tattoos sits at my table and starts to sift through the supplies. She looks over at my page and gets up. A minute later she returns and slides two pictures across the table. One is a teenage girl with her boyfriend. The other is the same girl petting a black lab.

“Here, use mine.” She gives a little smile. “Until you have your own.”

I look at the pictures again. Her sister, I guess. Somebody killed this girl. I thank her and ask about her sister. She tells me the story, bluntly and briefly. Like most of the stories I’ll hear today, it’s worse than mine. For her, it’s only been six months, and most of the rest lost their loved ones in the last year. They have a name for it: the zombie phase. Like any group of experts, these people have an entire jargon all their own, acronyms and legal terminology, cities where retreats and conferences are held—
Kate’s going to Kansas City this year
, someone says—police officials they refer to by their first names. They don’t discuss the phases after the zombie phase: the denial phase, the rage phase, the writing-a-book-about-it phase.

Pictures of a murdered stranger rest on my mother’s scrapbook page. The meeting isn’t over for another hour, so I start decorating. First, her name goes in the top corner, just Debbie, because nobody ever called her Deborah, and she had too many last names to choose from—there aren’t enough letters in the sheet. Beneath her name I put her dates of birth and death. A string of horses down the right side of the page as an accent, a few gold-foil leaves in one corner. Near the bottom
of the sticker bag I find a quote from Thoreau:
There is no remedy for love but to love more
. She probably never read him; I never finished
Walden
myself. But the sentiment seems fitting for my mother, so I test it out in a few different locations, and settle on an open space across the bottom. By the time Kate tells us to take a break, my fingers are sticky with purple glue and the page in front of me looks like a lunatic’s bumper.

I look around at the others. Most of them are done, and a few are working through the break to finish. We’re naturals. It makes sense. We all do this every day: focus on a series of small and meaningless tasks to pass the time, try to preserve our memories without wallowing in grief, and hope our lives will add up to some kind of tribute. Of course we’re good at scrapbooking. Scraps are all we have.

Kate comes around collecting our pages. She stops next to me and puts her hand on my shoulder. “It’s nice,” she says. “She would have liked it.”

I suppress a flash of anger as she walks away. This happens a lot when women old enough to be my mother hear that I lost mine: they dote on me. Sometimes it’s nice, but mostly it reminds me that if my real mother were still alive, I’d still be squirming out of hugs and wiping kisses off my cheek.

A clipboard stacked with petitions makes its way around. When it gets to me, I start to read the first page—something about denying parole to a murderer—before realizing that I’m not going to sit in this room, with these people, and debate whether the punishments are fitting, whether they really do anything to address the violence. I sign them all.

The break ends. Kate says it’s time to introduce ourselves. “Most of us know each other’s stories,” she says, taking care not to look at me, “but we have new people today.”

And so, before most of them even know my name, they tell me how their loved ones died. The only rule of POMC meetings
is that what’s said in the room stays there, but I don’t need to tell their stories. Watch the news. So many people are murdered in America with such inconceivable frequency that the stories and statistics have lost their impact. Every victim has parents, spouses, siblings, kids. If all the relatives of murder victims in Arizona showed up to this meeting, this room wouldn’t be big enough. This hospital wouldn’t be big enough.

But the rest are somewhere else tonight. Only ten of us are here. And what I’ll remember from their stories, even more than the sheer arbitrary horror of the events, is the rage they feel. They dream aloud of retribution, ghastly forms of torture. Like all rage, theirs dehumanizes: their faces twist, their eyes flare like a villain’s, crazed voices come out of their mouths. I recognize their rage, share it, and know why it exists. They want impossible things, justice and revenge, resurrections and reunions, their old lives back. But all they get is pity, even from me, and soon I’ll probably forget their stories, like the rest of the world already has.

My turn comes. I don’t know what to say. I’ve been listening so intently that I haven’t rehearsed.

“I’m Justin. This is my first time here.” They welcome me, and I thank them. I breathe deeply and stare at the acoustic tile above our heads. “In September of 2001 my mother was killed by her husband. Shot. He was a cop. He disappeared and was found three months later, dead, in New Mexico. He’d killed himself.”

When I’m done, their faces haven’t changed. Kate thanks me for sharing. “Everybody here understands.” She waves at the windows, the dark world outside. “Nobody out there understands, but we do.”

Another story, a few announcements, and the meeting ends. Everyone stands and says goodbye. A few people ask if I’m coming back next month, and I say sure. Kate gives me a
hug. On the way out I notice that someone has brought baked goods, a tray of brownies sprinkled with sugar and layered with fudge. The pest control lady says she baked them herself and offers me one. I eat it in one bite. She smiles and says to have another, so I do. Only willpower and a vague sense of propriety keep me from taking a third. I’m suddenly ravenous: I want to eat a steak, drink whiskey, fuck a stranger. And I want to get out of here.

I rush down the halls and out the automatic door, across the parking lot to my car, where I sit in the driver’s seat with the keys shaking in my hands until the dome light goes off. I watch the others shuffle out in a group, clinging to one another, saying goodbye a half-dozen times, hesitant to leave because they know what waits at home. I want them to heal, to live again, but most of all I want to believe that I’m not one of them.