The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (21 page)

BY WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, MAUREEN SEEMED
better. Shaken, still, but functioning. Putting one foot in front of the other. She braided her hair, put on makeup, folded some laundry. The dogs were a comfort to her. Sophie, in particular, seemed to sense she was needed. She stuck close, following Mo from room to room. As for me, I watched.

She kept looking at the phone, wandering over to the windows. When she asked if I thought we should file a missing person report on Velvet, I shook my head. “Give her time,” I said. “She’ll surface as soon as she’s ready.”

“Maybe she thinks I’m dead.”

I tried to stifle the shudder that passed through me. “Well, you’re not, Mo. You survived. And Velvet’s a survivor, too. Look at everything that kid’s lived through already. Wherever she is, she’s okay.”

When she turned from the window to face me, her body was outlined in daylight, her face in shadow. “You weren’t there,” she said.

THE SIX P.M. NEWS SHOWED
people gathering, impromptu, at Clement Park. “There is a need for this Columbine community to grieve together, to be there for one another,” the sober young reporter said. “This is Rob Gagnon, Eyewitness News.”

Maureen went to the closet and got our jackets. “We need to go over there,” she said.

“Mo, I think you need to stay home. Rest. Absorb the shock of what you’ve been through.”

“But what if she’s over there? What if she’s wandering around, looking for me?”

I shook my head. “She’d call you. She wouldn’t—”

“She writes phone numbers down on her hand, okay? And even if she
does
have our number, she might not be anywhere near a phone. She might not even be thinking straight.” She punched her fists into the sleeves of her jacket. “You don’t want to go? Fine, Caelum. Don’t go. But don’t you tell me what
I
need. Because what
I
need is to find that kid and make sure she’s okay.”

And so we went.

Mercifully, the cops had established a boundary for the media. I took hold of Maureen’s arm and walked her past the satellite trucks and TV crews. “Sir? Ma’am?” someone behind us called. “Can we talk to you for a minute?”

“No, thank you,” I called back over my shoulder. If they got wind of Mo’s ordeal, it’d be like dogs on raw meat. I could at least spare her that much. I took hold of her hand, gave it a squeeze. “The less you say about what happened to you yesterday, the better,” I said.

A COUPLE HUNDRED MOURNERS HAD
come students, teachers, ashen-faced moms and dads. I spotted Jon and Jay, the custodians who’d heard the gunfire outside and helped Dave Sanders hustle kids out of the cafeteria. I saw Mrs. Jett, the detention room monitor, in the crowd, and Henry Blakely, the history teacher who’d walked out in a huff during our meeting about Velvet. Passing behind Henry, I heard him tell someone he’d planned to retire a few years down the line but, after this, he might just “pack it in.”

Mo and I spoke with Jennifer Kirby, Andy’s wife. Andy was home
with a migraine, she said; it had started that morning and lasted all day. “And, oh my God, Maureen, I heard about what happened to
you.
How are you
doing?”

Mo’s eyes jumped from face to face in the crowd. She didn’t seem to hear the question.

“Maureen?” I said.

“What?”

“Jen just asked you how you were doing.”

“Me?” She looked from me to Jennifer. “I’m okay. Why?”

Someone had nailed a homemade poster to a tree—multicolored block letters that insisted “Columbine Is LOVE !!” At the base of the tree, kids had placed their tributes: cellophane-wrapped supermarket bouquets, handwritten poems torn from spiral notebooks, sports jerseys, teddy bears, snapshots in Ziploc bags. Photocopied pictures of the dead, tacked to the tree, fluttered in a damp, chilly wind. The day before had been springlike, they said. Go-outside-without-a-jacket weather. But here, again, was winter.

Maureen exchanged bear hugs with several of her health clinic regulars. The needy ones would be needier now than ever—oblivious to what
she’d
gone through. They’d use her up if she let them. To my surprise, I got hugged, too—approached and embraced by kids who’d earned A’s in my classes, kids who’d flunked, kids whose names I couldn’t even remember.
Long
hugs, these were—longer than felt comfortable. Okay, that’s enough, my body kept trying to say to them, but no one seemed to want to let go.

As dusk turned to dark, a white-haired woman, too old to be the parent of high school kids, circulated through the crowd, passing out candles from a cardboard box. Thin white tapers, these were, with little cardboard skirts to catch the drips. “Get yours lit, then light someone else’s!” she called. “Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ wants us to lead each other out of the darkness!”

I watched Maureen and the three or four kids huddled around her
take candles. A tall, skinny boy in baggy jeans produced a lighter, and the flame passed from wick to wick. Maybe there was something to this “power of prayer” stuff, and maybe there wasn’t. It wasn’t like
I
had any of the answers. But I resented the white-haired woman, shilling for God among the walking wounded. And when she approached me, candle in hand, I shook my head.

“You sure?” she said. “Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” Her demeanor was grandmotherly, but her eyes were my mother’s eyes that Sunday morning when I’d refused to get in the car and go to mass with her. I was fourteen, fed up with her Holy Roller bit. “Because I’m an
atheist,
that’s why,” I’d said, though I wasn’t, and she’d reared back and delivered a slap across my face that still stung, years later, in Littleton. The candle floated between the woman and me. I held her gaze.

“Well, suit yourself,” she said, and moved on. I looked back at Mo. At the center of her little group of students, she seemed to be someplace else.

It began to sleet. Umbrellas popped open, sweatshirt hoods came up. “It’s awful, isn’t it, Mr. Quirk?” someone said.

I turned to face a gray-bearded guy in a warmup jacket and a Rockies cap. As we shook hands, he reminded me we’d met a few years back, at parent-teacher conferences. His daughter, Megan, had been in my class. “Megan Kromie?” he said. “Tall redhead?”

“Oh, yes, Megan,” I said. There’d been so many Megans. “How is she?”

“Fine. Great. Loves UC Santa Cruz. Of course, she’s heartbroken about what’s happened here. She played for Coach Sanders.” I nodded, blinking back sudden tears.

“Were you anywhere near the line of fire yesterday?” he asked.

I shook my head. “My wife was, though. She was in the library, helping a student, when it started.” Belatedly, I remembered my advice to Mo not to mention her ordeal, lest the media get ahold of her.

“But she got out okay?” Megan’s father asked.

“She hid.”

He winced, shook his head. When he asked how she was holding up, I looked over at her. She’d forgotten to hold her candle upright; cocked at a diagonal, its wax drip-drip-dripped onto the ground. Why was she staring up at the trees?”She’ll be okay,” I said.

He nodded. “And how are
you
doing?”

“Me? I’m all right.”

“Really?”

I looked away from him, then looked back. When I opened my mouth, it was to tell him about Velvet’s disappearance. But instead, I began speaking about Eric and Dylan. “I was waiting for my pizza, and the three of us were talking about mundane, everyday things: the prom, their plans after graduation, Dylan’s fantasy baseball picks. I mean, how can they work their shift on a Friday night, sit in class on Monday, and, the next day, bring shotguns to school and murder thirteen people?”

“The banality of evil,” Megan’s father said.

“What?”

“I’m sorry. You made me think about something I read once, about the Nazis who ran the death camps. The way they could dissociate: sip wine with dinner, chuckle at radio comedies, tuck their kids into bed, and kiss their wives good night. Then get up in the morning and murder thousands more Jews.”

I flashed on Eric and Dylan at the after-prom party,
Sieg Reifing
in celebration of the free passes they’d won to Rock’n’Bowl. Had they realized they were never going to use them?

“I suppose it doesn’t even apply, really: the ‘banality of evil’ principle. Those boys were obviously sick—psychopathic or sociopathic, I’d venture to say, although it’s not really fair of me to diagnose them. Eichmann and the others were … well, good bureaucrats.”

“Are you a psychiatrist or something?” I asked.

“A psychologist,” he said. “And a minister.”

“So you see it as evil, what they did?”

“Mr. Quirk, I’m as rocked off course and confused by all this as everyone else. I don’t know
what
to think.” Sleet spattered the brim of his Rockies cap and the back of the hand he held up to protect his candle flame. “Anyway, several of us are putting together a grief counseling session for tomorrow afternoon. It’s at the Community Church on West Bowles, one p.m. We have guidance people from several of the schools coming, and someone from the university who’s going to talk about posttraumatic stress. But the main purpose is to just get people talking about what they went through, and how they’re feeling. The worst thing we can do at this point is isolate ourselves from each other. Why don’t you come and bring your wife?”

I told him I’d see if I could get her there.

“Good. Great. Hey, could you use a hug?” He took a step forward, his arms parentheses spread wide, but he seemed to read my hesitation and squeezed my shoulder instead. “Okay, then. Hope to see you there tomorrow, Mr. Quirk. God bless.”

“Say hello to Megan,” I said.

“She learned a lot from you, you know.”

Doubtful, I thought. But I wished to Christ I could remember her face.

Maureen was standing alone now, looking forlorn. Looking up, still, from tree to tree. What did she think: that Velvet was hiding in one of them?”Hey,” I said, approaching her. When I put my arm around her, I felt how badly she was trembling.

“We’re not safe,” she whispered.

“What?”

“They’re here.”

They? “Velvet, you mean?”

She shook her head. “Their accomplices.”

“Babe, the police said there
might
have been accomplices, but probably not. They’re trying to rule that out.”

“They’re here,” she repeated. “They’re getting ready to finish the job.” By the time I got her back to the car, the sleet had turned to snow.

THE DOGS GREETED
us
AT
the door with swishing tails and swaying behinds. The light on our machine blinked red. I took a breath, hit the button.

“She’ll call, Maureen,” I said. “I bet we hear from her tomorrow.”

“I’m going to bed,” she said.

I got the dogs in, poured her a good-sized glass of red wine, and brought it up to her. Handed her a pair of Tylenol PMs. She took them, took a sip of her wine. She’d gotten into bed without undressing.

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep tonight,” she said.

“You want another Tylenol?”

“I shouldn’t take three,” she said. She took another gulp of wine. “Yeah, all right. I guess it wouldn’t hurt.”

Ten minutes later, she was out.

Unable to sleep myself, I went back downstairs. I poured myself a glass of wine and walked, in the dark, from room to room. At the doorway to my study, I flipped on the light and stared at the stuff spread out on my work table—a set of
Hamlet
tests from my seniors,
an American lit anthology opened to Robert Frost, a stack of ungraded research papers from my second-hour sophomores. It seemed inconsequential and beside-the-fact now: all this busy work the kids and I had generated in the days before they opened fire.

I flipped through the research papers. Some were laser-printed, spiffed up with colorful plastic covers; others were stapled, unadorned. I’d let them choose their own subjects, and they’d gone every which way. “Wiccan Beliefs and Practices,” “Anorexia Nervosa in Adolescent Girls,” “Bill Gates,” “Black Holes.” I picked up the latter paper and read the first sentence: “A black hole is a concentrated region of space-time with a gravitational pull so intense that nothing can escape from it, not even light.”

I killed the rest of the wine and teetered back upstairs, somewhere between two and three. The dogs were asleep on the floor on Maureen’s side. I took a piss, crawled under the covers, and realized I’d forgotten to turn off the bathroom light. But instead of getting up and turning it off, I started thinking about that woman at Clement Park—her and her candles. I’d already forgotten her face—had turned her into Barbara Bush. If my mother had lived, she’d be white-haired by now, too.

“You weren’t there,” Maureen had said to me, and it was true. As scared as I’d been for her safety—as much of a nightmare as that endless trip back from Connecticut had been—it was
she
who’d had to hide for hours in the pitch-blackness of that cabinet, listening to the death screams, waiting for them to find and kill her, too. And I
didn’t
know what that felt like. Didn’t want to. She’d recited the Hail Mary, over and over in the dark, she said—
Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death
—and, later, had crawled out of that cabinet like a newborn, into the light and the chaos they’d made. But she’d lived. Here she was, next to me, breathing in, breathing out.

My sobs came out of nowhere, and I clenched my body, as best I could, to squelch them. Shaking the bed would wake her up, and there was nothing she needed more than sleep. After I got hold of
myself again, I leaned on my elbow and shifted toward her. By the bathroom light, I watched her sleep.