The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (32 page)

THE OTHER DAY, WHILE CLEANING
out a bureau drawer, I found the pocket calendar I had kept and carried back in 1999. I’ve learned to do that now, in the aftermath of everything that’s happened: assign myself small tasks that I’m likely to finish before the feeling of futility overtakes me. These days, I’ll tackle a drawer, not a whole bureau. Call back a creditor, and let the rest of them take a number. When that little calendar presented itself, I sat back on the bed and leafed through it to the April pages. Saturday the seventeenth: the day Ulysses Pappanikou had found Lolly wandering in the yard, talking gibberish. But what I’d written was “Change oil and filter” and “post-prom party—be there @ 11:00 p.m.” Tuesday, April twentieth—the day that changed our lives—is blank. So are most of the pages after it. One exception is July the twenty-first.

She and I were on the road that day, heading back to Connecticut with the dogs. We’d gotten an early start, then stopped midmorning for breakfast at a Cracker Barrel restaurant in upstate New York. I’d parked at the edge of the lot so the dogs could do their business. Thrown a tennis ball a dozen or so times, so they could chase after it, get a little exercise. (Watching Sophie run in that parking lot—that was the first time I noticed the weakness in her back legs.) Inside, I’d ordered eggs and grits. “This wallpaper paste’s not half bad,” I’d told
Mo, shoveling in a forkful of grits. “Of course, you could ladle gravy over boiled sneakers and they’d taste good.”

I can still see her, sitting across from me in that booth, poking at her poached egg. She had no idea I’d just spoken. Psychic numbness, it’s called. Wherever she was, it wasn’t at the Cracker Barrel.

Later, waiting in line at the register, I watched her wander, disengaged, among the normal gift-shop customers—all those folks who had the luxury of not being able to recall what they’d been doing back on April the twentieth. “You ready?” I asked, itchy to make more miles. She said she’d better use the rest room first. Glancing over at the line of ten or eleven women she could have already been in the middle of, I nodded. Managed a smile. I told her I’d wait for her outside.

The porch had for-sale rocking chairs. I sat on one and pulled out my pocket calendar. Rocked and wrote.

W
EDNESDAY,
J
ULY
21, 1999

———————————

Game plan for August:

1. Get moved in
   

2. Get her a shrink
   

3. Look for teaching job
   

4. See financial planner about house sale $—maybe beef up our IRAs?
   

5. Tear down apple house
   

6. Scrape, paint farmhouse (maybe)
   

7. See lawyer about probate stuff
   

8. Set up home office—maybe sunporch upstairs? If so, figure out what to do with Great Grandma’s boxes, papers, etc. Dump or donate??
   

That was seven years ago. I had Sophie put to sleep in 2002; her hip dysplasia had gotten so bad, she couldn’t even walk across the kitchen floor. The following year, Chet had barreled down the driveway in pursuit of a squirrel and gotten himself killed by a passing oil truck. Today, the apple house is still standing, although it’s listing badly to one side, and most of the roof’s fallen in. The farmhouse’s exterior remains unscraped, unpainted. Inside, on the upstairs sunporch, Great-Grandma Lydia’s boxes, ledgers, and filing cabinets full of prison business still occupy the space. The Connecticut State Library didn’t want them, and the Three Rivers Historical Society said they didn’t have the room. I quit calling places after that, but I could never quite haul it all to the dump. Like I said, I can handle small projects. The bigger ones overwhelm me….

The closest thing I have to a home office is the dining room. My books are stuffed to overflowing in the china closet and stacked in columns on the mahogany buffet. There are plastic bins on the floor marked “Teaching Stuff,” “Colorado,” “Farm,” “Financial.” I use Great-Grandma’s dining room table for a desk; its surface is littered with bills, office supplies, reams of computer paper. One cardboard carton brims with Columbine articles and printouts, another is marked “Maureen—Legal.” Over the years, rather than go through stuff and throw out what I might not need, I’ve added table leaves. My computer sits on the dining room table, too. I set it up there the week we moved back—temporarily, I’d thought, but that’s where it’s stayed. Sometime during our first year back, I pushed the table up against the wall so we wouldn’t keep tripping on the wires and cords, or that cinder-block-sized backup battery. The dining room’s overhead fixture is ugly, but it sheds some decent light, and, hey, it wasn’t like she and I were going to be throwing any dinner parties. Outside of Alphonse and the occasional duos of Jehovah’s Witnesses or Latter-Day Saints, I can’t remember us ever having company.

The money we got from the sale of our Colorado house is gone
now. Capital gains tax took a chunk of it, and Mo’s medical bills and lawyers’ fees ate up the rest. The farm property’s assessed at a million six, but because of an agreement Lolly signed with the Farm Bureau back in 1987, we can’t sell it to anyone who’s not going to farm it. And these days, small dairy farms have gone the way of the dodo bird and the eight-track tape player. Everything’s geared to the big guys now—the agribusinesses. So, like Caelum MacQuirk’s widow, the infamous Addie, we’re land rich but cash poor. And if the Sea-berrys go through with the civil suit they’ve threatened, we could lose the property, too. “Be optimistic,” our attorney says. “People’s anger subsides after a while, and threats about lawsuits fade away.” He means well, but it’s painful to have to listen to a lecture about human nature from someone who was born during the disco era. His name’s Brandon, for Christ’s sake. Looks like he started shaving the day before yesterday. But anyway, if they do go forward with it and win, they could take the house, the farm, basically everything we’ve got left. The problem is, when Lolly was making out her will, she called and asked me if I wanted the farm put in just my name, or both our names. “Both,” I’d said. It was an act of faith, you know? Maureen and I had just reconciled. But that’s the problem. Maureen’s name on Lolly’s will makes us vulnerable.

But anyway, I sat on our bed that day and tried to decide whether to keep that 1999 pocket calendar or toss it. Then, without seeming to direct the operation, I watched my hands pull it apart, tear up the pages, and throw those torn bits of paper into the toilet. Watched my piss hit them. Watched them swirl down the hole.

APRIL
20, 1999. I
N THE
days, weeks, months, and years, now, since they opened fire, I have searched wherever I could for the whys, hows, and whether-or-nots of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s rampage. They had been my students first, but I became theirs, stalking them so that I might rescue my wife from the aftermath of what
they’d done. On that day, Maureen had escaped execution by opening a cabinet door and entering a maze—a many-corridored prison whose four outer walls were fear, anger, guilt, and grief. And because I was powerless to retrieve her—because I, too, entered the labyrinth and became lost—my only option was to find its center, confront the two-headed monster who waited for me there, and murder it. Murder the murderers, who had already murdered themselves. You see what a puzzler it was? What a network of dead ends? Like I said, I was lost.

On what they called their “little Judgment Day,” Dylan had armed himself with a TEC–9 nine-millimeter semi-automatic handgun with shoulder strap and a Stevens twelve-gauge shotgun, its double barrel cut down to twenty-three inches. Eric’s weapons of choice were a Hi-Point nine-millimeter carbine rifle on a strap and a Savage Springfield twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. Because he had stunted its barrel, the kickback when he fired it at his victims in the library had been powerful enough to break his nose. He didn’t seem to be in pain, one eyewitness noted; he had kept smiling, and the gush from his nostrils made it look as if he’d been drinking his victims’ blood. By the time it was over, Eric had fired the nine-millimeter rifle ninety-six times—thirteen shots in the library, thirty-six inside the rest of the school, and forty-seven outside. Dylan had fired the TEC–9 fifty-five times: twenty-one inside the library, thirty-one inside the rest of the school, and three times outside.

They had taped match-strikers to their arms for quicker lighting of the bombs they carried. Dylan wore a black glove on his left hand; Eric wore its twin on his right. Both wore utility belts, their pouches filled with shotgun shells. They’d tucked the legs of their cargo pants into their boots, Nazi-style, and had stuffed their pockets with CO2 bombs and clips of nine-millimeter bullets. Both boys were armed with knives, but neither used them. They carried their bombs in a duffel bag and a backpack. Thirty of these exploded: thirteen outside, five in the library, six in classrooms and hallways where the boys
wandered, and six in the cafeteria. Forty-six bombs did not explode: two outside, twenty-six in the library, fourteen in the hallways and classrooms, and four in the cafeteria. Twelve unexploded bombs, in-eluding the components for a car bomb, were found in Dylan’s black BMW. One unexploded bomb was discovered in Eric’s gray Honda Prelude. The bombs in the cafeteria included two twenty-pound propane tank bombs, which failed to detonate.

They had planned for a much higher body count—higher, they hoped, than Oklahoma City. Their goal was two hundred and fifty casualties—the number they’d need to out-McVeigh McVeigh. Having studied the traffic flow in the cafeteria, they’d set the timers on the propane bombs for 11:16, when the maximum number of students would be gathered: five hundred or more, at the tables, in the lines. The fireball would race through the room, eating oxygen. They’d be waiting, geared up outside on the hill, and would pick off the ones who got out alive. Some of their friends would have to die, but war was war. Sorry, guys. Nothing personal.

For a while, I clung to the editorialists’ oversimplifications: the cause-and-effect of school bullying, violent video games, nihilistic song lyrics. Maybe overly permissive parenting was to blame. Or America’s rampant, godless consumerism. Or the kickback effect that anti-depressants can have on children. Or the sorry fact that an eighteen-year-old girl, accompanied by her underage friends, could stroll into a weekend gun show and buy two shotguns and a nine-millimeter carbine rifle without a permit or a background check. The problem was, I couldn’t follow the thread between those causes, alone or in concert, and the grim realities of Maureen’s post-Columbine existence. Back in Connecticut, her weight dropped to a dangerous eighty-six pounds. Her hair fell out in clumps. She couldn’t work, couldn’t complete household chores, couldn’t remember where she’d put things. She complained incessantly about the chronic pain in her back and knees, and at the top of her head. In one of Mo’s nightmares, Dylan and Eric took turns shooting me in the head, splattering
her with my blood and brains. In another—a dream she dreamed twice—she was trapped in the backseat of a black car. Dylan was at the wheel, taking the hairpin turns of a narrow mountain road at suicidal speeds.

I’ve searched for answers in churches, and in the offices of my wife’s psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric social workers. I’ve stalked the monster during long, meditative runs on country roads, at the bottoms of wine and scotch bottles, and over the Internet, that labyrinth inside the labyrinth.

Google “Klebold Harris,” and you get 135,700 hits. From there, you can lose yourself in the hundreds of pages of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department’s report, or among the myriad criticisms of those official findings. You can listen to the 911 calls, print out the autopsy pictures, take a virtual tour of what the library looked like after the shootings. You can click on the killers’ school essays and journal entries, Dylan’s elementary school pictures, Eric’s Web-site spewings, his pencil sketches of superheroes and minotaurs. You can visit the site where bloggers conjecture about whether Dylan put the gun to his own head or Eric killed him, and whether or not the boys—ridiculed at school as “fags” and “homos”—were, in fact, lovers. And if you have a particularly strong stomach, you can check out the “tribute” Web sites. Built by romantic young women and men who seem to have crushes on the killers, these recast them as misunderstood tragic heroes whose smiling, soft-focus studio portraits stare back at you while sappy pop songs play through your computer speakers.

Because they’d been vicious videographers, Eric and Dylan bequeathed to the police, their parents, and the rest of us several hours’ worth of VHS evidence that they’d been hiding in plain sight all along—that we might have stopped them if we hadn’t all been so blind. And because individuals and organizations went to court to ensure your right to see it, you can download and watch some of this in-your-face evidence. You can view, for instance, their performances as “Trenchcoat Mafia Protection Services” hit men. Produced for a
class assignment, the video shows them first intimidating and then executing unsuspecting bullies. You can watch their shooting practice out at Rampart Range. In that one, they get acquainted with the TEC–9 pistol, the carbine rifle, and the sawed-off shotguns they’ve gotten hold of with the help of Robyn Anderson and Mark Manes. Manes practice-shoots in this video, too—he, and his girlfriend, and Phil Duran, Eric and Dylan’s Blackjack Pizza coworker. It was Duran who introduced them to Manes, and Manes who, for five hundred dollars, sold them the TEC–9 Dylan later used during the massacre. While examining a bowling pin they’ve just shot up, Dylan muses about the damage a shotgun shell will do to someone’s brain.

My pattern was to get Maureen up to bed first, then come back downstairs, pour myself a couple of inches of scotch, and go online—cybersearch for an hour or two, often longer, sometimes
much
longer. Occasionally, I’d be on that thing until the sun came up. On the night I downloaded the Rampart Ridge video, I watched it twice, then got up, went outside, and stared up at the indifferent moon, the clouds drifting in front of it. Stared for a while at the halogen glow from the women’s prison. I recalled the sight of Lolly, in her uniform, walking down Bride Lake Road on her way to work. That purposeful gait of hers, her arms swinging at her sides. She’d been the most reliable person of my whole life—just about the
only
reliable person—and, once again, I felt the sharp pang of having lost her at the point I needed her most. Then I went back inside and poured myself another drink. Googled “chaos theory” and got fifteen million hits. I clicked on a random one and scrolled down.
Explosive bifurcation is the sudden transition that wrenches the system out of one order, and into another.
Well, they had that right: there was our life before April the twentieth, and our life after it.